Felix and Me

From Thomas Mann’s The Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man:

“On the other hand, he was slowly forced to notice that in some mysterious way our friendship failed to advance, that no real intimacy sprang up between us. This was simply due to my natual inclination towards taciturnity and reserve, to my insistencce upon privacy and separateness. I have already mentioned this characteristic, which I consider one of the basic elements of my character, one which I could not have altered even had I wished to.

“It is always thus with men who feel, not so much with pride as with acquiescence, that fate has something special in store for them. This feeling creates around them an atmosphere or emanation of coolness which, almost to their own regret, foils and repels all honest offers of friendliness and companionship.”

I am almost done with the book and in a completely foolish, blundering act, I read a snippet online that stated that the novel was not finished at the time of Mann’s death. Up till then I was eagerly awaiting the fate of Felix, perhaps even with a prescience after noting all the foreshadowing and dangling carrots of what might lie in store. Now I am facing a dilemma I’ve faced before (Salmon of Doubt, though in that instance I went into the book knowing it was incomplete), but maybe it is not so bad; I’d hate to follow suit.

Impersonate

This morning it became clear to me that my alarm clock’s snooze button was actually part of an experiment. Everytime I acknowledged the buzzing by pressing the button I was rewarded with precious moments of sweet, deep sleep. This went on until the men in white coats peering into the roofless house I slept in got bored. They were trying to anthropomorphize me. Trying to uncover the human characteristic of self-motivation in me, the lowliest creature inhabiting this hurtling wandering star! Though I realize I am a product of the same Darwinian principles of evolution as they are, I still scoffed at them and their futile pursuits. But they could hardly hear my little voice.

Oh Blue

The sun peeked through my bedroom window and onto my sleepy eyelids. The warmth was incredible; it felt like summer. I was certain that it must have been 80 degrees outside. In time, the cold crept back with an even greater force and so I slept.

Thus was the morning. In the afternoon, near sunset, the sky was so blue I wanted to drink it.

Briefly, But Weightily

There are exacting similarities in scenes from Robert Bresson’s Lancelot Du Lac (1974), Micheal Haneke’s Le Temps Du Loup (2003), and Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of Men (2006) that I do not understand. Either it is a simple, yet subtle, homage, or a statement shrouded in secrecy from the respective filmmakers, or culmination of such a statement, or a emphatic restatement of the same thing, or there is nothing there at all… Maybe there are more films with these similarities. I need to watch more films.

Inundated With Me

If getting a Mac has done anything for me, it has given me a much deeper appreciation of myself, my tastes, and my panoply of skills. (As if I needed any more appreciation of such.) Irrespective of this, my latest project–a revamping of my fotos page–is giving me a sweet, solemn, and surprising bout of splendor.

I’ve written a new php script that populates the page with 5 of the latest entries into my fotos database and 15 random fotos from the +1000 fotos spanning 2004-today. (I am working out the kinks on the other new pages, (new group page with more themes than the old one, categories, colors, etc.), but the main page is available now for the viewing public.) I find the random selections are quite revealing. That is, I am learning about myself through this new format. Which is beautifully odd. I know the pictures, I took them all, and yet, seeing a spread of random pictures gives me a new sense of each one. I can also pick out patterns; sometimes it is uncanny, as if my random script was not randomly selecting the images, but rather, as if it was choosing images to form a spread that functions as a whole. Of course, it does no such thing. This is more a statement of my own redundancy and my eye for particular compositions. Splendid! or Static? Consider this: It was only in the randomness that I was able to find my visual aesthetic, that is powerfully beautiful.

Here are some examples–screen shots I’ve taken when a random arrangement struck me:

But there are the truly incoherent and random selections, pretty, nevertheless:

Go play with yourself–uh, I mean, go play with it yourself.