The currently page has been updated and is worth checking out not because my current interests are very interesting, but because Jim’s design skills are beautiful. He kicked it out in two hours, and it makes me feel like an art museum or something. I better work on producing content worthy of such display.
To films I would add Capturing the Friedmans, which I saw last night. Ever since my hours at work were cut, I like to find movies late on Sunday nights to check out, when the rest of the world is getting ready to go back to work on Monday. I like driving through the city at night, the half-empty streets, the parking spots, the quiet theaters.
The film, which documents the true story of a family’s destruction in the wake of sexual abuse allegations, is easily one of the best I’ve seen in the last couple of years. It explores notions of truth, and leaves no easy answers. It is heartbreaking and infuriating, and very funny.
I’ve been a little quiet around here lately. Maybe it’s the summer, maybe I am storing up all of my creative energy for the workshop next week. I’m excited and nervous, flying across the country to a school I’ve never seen, where I don’t know anybody, to work with a writer who is well known in the world of nonfiction, who edited an anthology I read for class last year. As I commit myself more to this, whatever it is, it feels as though the stakes are raised. The possibility of failure becomes more intense, more frightening. And two questions repeat ad infinitum through my neurotic skull; Who am I, and why would anyone care to read about me? I suppose these are the kinds of questions that I have no business asking, the point is to keep writing, and not look down. I mean really, it’s too late now, I won’t find happiness in a normal job. I have to do this.
I know I quoted her before, last year sometime, but because I am reading her again, and because it is so appropriate, I once again give you Joan Didion:
When I first saw New York I was twenty, and it was summertime, and I got off the DC-7 at the old Idlewild temporary terminal in a new dress which had seemed very smart in Sacramento but seemed less smart already, even in the old Idlewild temporary terminal, and the warm air smelled of mildew and some instinct, programmed by all the movies I had ever seen and all the songs I had ever heard sung and all the stories I had ever read about New York, informed me that it would never be quite the same again.
-“Goodby to All That”