I stayed up until 2A.M. watching Apocalypse Now Redux. The movie was very good, but took a serious wrong turn with the French Plantation scene. It seemed an ill attempt at adding discursive philosophy to the film. It was unnecessary and broke the spell of the river travel.
Apocalypse Now is very much a symbol-journey, such as Dante’s Commedia. Hellish and absurd. An insane carnival of what is commonly bad in men, and what is truly horrific. It made me want to read Conrad.
…for we all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them.
Middlemarch, I.x
Last night I watched a Ted presentation by a famous string-theory proponent, Brian Greene. He discussed, armed with the trappings of media savvy, the argument for the multiverse, how it’s the only idea which solves certain scientific problems.
To what ends? It is fascinating to contemplate, but mostly in a literary sense, wherein two universes interact and relate in some way. And yet scientific enquiry is important. I believe in curiosity and meditation on the baubles of possibility.
1st Gent: Our deeds are fetters that we forge ourselves. 2nd Gent: Ay, truly: but I think it is the world
That brings the iron.
Middlemarch, I.iv
I started reading Persepolis two days ago. In it Marjane Satrapi gives us a memoir and bildungsroman—she grew up during the Iran-Iraq War. It is an incredibly interesting look into another culture with different fundamental perspectives. (Although, truth be told, most of the perspectives illustrated are uncontroversial in their Western secularism.) The author’s family are mostly communist, which brings them into conflict with the post-Islamic Revoltion government.
Finished V for Vendetta last night. I still feel that Alan Moore tends to glorify perversity. However, his technique is effective, and literate—the layering of meaning through text that contrasts or mirrors the imagery while literally applying to something not pictured.
By the time I finished, I think the political aspect of the story, the themes of it, had grown larger than the specific perversities. It had meaning, or at the least implication. Next up from Moore will be From Hell.
