Sunday, March 29, 2015

entertainments

I would watch any movie of any length in which any or all of the following occur: 1) Matthew McConaughey walks across a room (2) Benicio del Toro says "creepy" (3) Joaquin Phoenix.

(Inherent Vice has two of the three. You guys should go see it - so much fun! And it is a Paul Thomas Anderson movie, so every single frame looks gorgeous, not just the close-ups of Joaquin.)


The other day I started reading a biography of Margaret Fuller: A New American Life, by Megan Marshall. Fantastic so far, really vividly detailed and lively. Fuller strikes me as someone who should be a lot more famous than she is. I don't think we even studied her in j-school (part 1). She hung out with the Transcendentalists, edited the Dial, worked as a foreign correspondent, etc etc etc. She was ultra-brilliant, outspoken, stubborn and wild in an era when women were encouraged not to be any of those things (1810-1850, specifically). She had a kid with an Italian lover ten years younger, and they all died in a shipwreck when she was 40.

(She also had a fraught, complicated thing with Ralph Waldo Emerson, my boyfriend, but I forgive her because I was not born yet.)

(Plus I think she was the great-aunt of Buckminster Fuller, which is pretty cool.)

Are there any decent movies about the Transcendentalists? I can't think of any. Let's pretend somebody's making one and fan-cast it!






























Anyway. Margaret Fuller. Check her out.

Meanwhile, I've been plugging away at the eternal book project, about which I currently have nothing good to say, other than that it exists and has finally stopped shrinking. (For a while all I did was cross out the bad parts. That was discouraging.) Yesterday I cleaned the whole apartment just to avoid it. I would've done yardwork too but my weedeater blew up (again).

"I find the most difficult part of writing is to get it down initially because what you have written is usually so terrible that it’s disheartening, you don’t want to go on. That’s what I think is hard—the discouragement that comes from seeing what you have done. This is all you could manage?" 

-- James Salter, in this interview with the Paris Review

Yep. Heard that.

Even so. Sure beats working! : )



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