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jaeleslie at 12:36pm on 04/07/2004
jaeleslie at 12:36pm on 04/07/2004There was something important. I was going to continue scribbling. But then we took the cat to the vet and etc and so on and I left the good idea in the car.
I had just finished reading Carmen Dog, a short (160-page) novel that took me far too long to read, what with one thing and another. It's written in the present tense, except for the epilogue in the future, which gives the impression that it's current comment, which of course it is, swiftian satire. I am trying to sort out why it reminded me of Paul Goodman's The Empire City, mostly a matter of style and tone I think. But Goodman's novel is likewise set in current time, and likewise third-person omniscient, and not a novel exactly but a tale, although historically it is a personal view from "Between Two Wars".
Yesterday. Eventually in the evening we watched Cold Mountain on DVD, and then some of the attached matter. Quite excellent, visually beautiful, truthful about how human beings are and probably were. Riled up all my own Civil War material (must actually plan visit to battlefields in Mississippi and Arkansas). It was shot mostly in Romania which was interesting, the landscape was a fooler, and all those soldiers hired cheap and milling about just like soldiers.
The good thing, or maybe the bad thing, it's a thing anyway, about writing anti-war poetry and stuff, is that it never goes out of style. Just when you're thinking it's hopelessly dustbin-of-history it can start to seem startlingly relevant again.
I had just finished reading Carmen Dog, a short (160-page) novel that took me far too long to read, what with one thing and another. It's written in the present tense, except for the epilogue in the future, which gives the impression that it's current comment, which of course it is, swiftian satire. I am trying to sort out why it reminded me of Paul Goodman's The Empire City, mostly a matter of style and tone I think. But Goodman's novel is likewise set in current time, and likewise third-person omniscient, and not a novel exactly but a tale, although historically it is a personal view from "Between Two Wars".
Yesterday. Eventually in the evening we watched Cold Mountain on DVD, and then some of the attached matter. Quite excellent, visually beautiful, truthful about how human beings are and probably were. Riled up all my own Civil War material (must actually plan visit to battlefields in Mississippi and Arkansas). It was shot mostly in Romania which was interesting, the landscape was a fooler, and all those soldiers hired cheap and milling about just like soldiers.
The good thing, or maybe the bad thing, it's a thing anyway, about writing anti-war poetry and stuff, is that it never goes out of style. Just when you're thinking it's hopelessly dustbin-of-history it can start to seem startlingly relevant again.