Alan Berliner has a better office than I, and when his wife gets upset with him, she calls him sweetie.
I'm watching his movie, Wide Awake. It's dense. It's personal. It's self-inventive. This is a guy I'm connected to because he buzzes in the same way that I do. He ought to find this blog and freak out, but chances are that he won't. I'll try not to care about that for the time being, but I'm thinking of two other people at once and that's problematic. The people are Spaulding Gray and Joe Frank.
At this very moment. The highlighted text flashed his name. Shit. Spaulding Gray. I had it on Wikipedia to make sure i spelled it right.
The difference between a filmmaker and a writer is that a filmmaker is more generous. He allows other people's images to talk. He allows other people to collaborate and work. He has to collaborate. Writers are more megalomaniacal. We're more hermetic. We don't. We don't have to sell, I suppose. We don't care if people get it. We have to own the worlds in the words, to suck them in, warp them around, decon, recon, craft it out. Can I do it without a cliche? Can I?
I'm watching HBO for the first time in about two years tonight. They are advertising their new dramatic season. It's a deep dark off balance world. It's artistic. It doesn't need to care because there are angles and reflections and splinters of interest. You can keep looking and keep asking questions. Its inventive design compels you to tilt your head and enjoy the mysterious quirks. It is therefore infinite. It can't be political. Politics has to make sense. Bill Maher never has to make sense, he has to make you laugh which means he has to invent. Good politics don't make you laugh. Good politics make you weep. Sound rhetoric is the reason. Sound rhetoric forms the partition between privacy and tragedy. Sound rhetoric makes discernible silhouettes of bloody bodies about to fall, outlining yet masking the gore. Sound rhetoric is the essential abstract central to good politics. It cannot afford to be inventive. Politics is finite because it is about men. It is therefore never funny. Yorick is dead.
Today while listening to the local Right Radio station announce its love for this book, I extended the lunch and found a Borders. So I bought it and while I was having dinner for the second night in a row at Houston's it occurred to me that I should give it to the father and son in the booth next to me. But I wanted to consume it even though it was mostly familiar and give it to my own son and nephews. That was the original purpose, though it is perhaps the fifth book I own which describes the battle of Hastings. Yet now I know it was October 14th, another 1A2D callsign (O14) that I could use in extending the brotherhood of English speakers around the world.
Like Berliner, I need black file cabinets, but with small drawers. That will be my birthday present to me. The question is where will I put them.
I've been thinking about my friend Larry. He pretends not to know me, and perhaps it is for my own good that he doesn't bother. He's the most powerful man I know and so I am rightly fascinated by him and scared to death of him. Still I know that he is just a man who is as frail as any man. I'm reading C.S. Lewis, you know, and I admire the way he speaks - for he was speaking what I'm reading - and he too is a man to be greatly feared. For he has been taken up as a prophet, and he speaks of the packages that God has left on our doorsteps, and he reads his own package, frail genius he is and he nails us all to the same cross. Because we are all men, and we know it. And we're all going to die and we weave strengths while we may.They fascinate. They frighten.
The truth of self is negotiable. Beware how many people you listen to. Try to find a politics or else you'll ask too many questions. You'll need to many bookshelves. You'll never get any sleep. Too many people are out there trying to be inventive and entertaining and they don't give us any sound rhetoric, they only give us sounds.
This Berliner. I like him because he is serious and frail. He asks questions of himself without being transparent. For all the faces he makes, he gives us a backlit screen. It is his eye staring into the camera at 4 in the morning feeling pain and negotiating between his own life and that of those he has pledged to protect. He knows to let his baby crumple the work of photojournalists because some questions need to end right there instead of in black boxes to be referred to at a time to be named later.
But that is the curse of the filmmaker. He must assemble his vocabulary from the public domain because he cannot turn the camera inside. Except Alan Berliner did, in that moment with images totally incoherent outside of his dilemma. That's good work.
The book is entitled 'The Dangerous Book for Boys'. It is dangerous because it contains facts which have survived for centuries. It stares directly at the reader and tells what is, and how to master some part of that. It could be massive but it is not. It needn't be. It is a good abstract, well told. That too is good work.
And now one more thing.
Along with C.S. Lewis, I am reading murder mysteries. I just came to realize why I allow it. Because I know there is a hero. The same is true of the books I've read by Marcinko, and Littel and others. They get deep into the brambles and thorns these writers. They come out OK because they accept some finality. Their acceptance of that finality makes their frailty disappear, it makes them eternal instead of eternally asking clever questions. Just to write the fiction is to accept that are times when questions must be settled and that we all know the right thing to do. To do it about self is even a greater undertaking, for even as we weave, we are frail in the telling, and sometimes the words never quite get out.
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