it’s really sad that I find this as engrossing as I do
Saturday 27 March 2004 | someone left a cookie
but such is my state of mind that I spend twenty minutes reading about the five Latin declensions and the correct plural of penis and then writing a long reply to the Film Critic’s lengthy missive of the night before, him having effected some miraculous recovery of himself, whether through great gustation of chocolate or watching about six movies in the last forty-eight hours we do not know, yet we are skeptical and regard even his “mon ange” and his “toujours le tien” with some misgiving. Thus she sends forth into the aether her staggering, halting prose to him, for its delectation.
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Mon cher Monsieur Spottiswode—how crushed I was to hear of the woefulness of Les Hommes Qui Tueient La Femme [The Ladykillers]. If the Coen Brothers be not no more funny and brilliant; if they fall into La Brea Tar Baby pits of their own sad devising; if they really truly believe that large black women are inherently funny—then eloi eloi, lama sabachthani, what joy remains in the world? What comfort (besides Frances eating scrambled eggs in her pre-dawn kitchen in Fargo)? What beauty (other than Frances stabbing M. Emmet Walsh in the hand with a scissors in Blood Simple)? Like Goethe dying, psychically intuiting the grand-scale atrocities eventually to ensue from Weimer, I cry, “More light! More light!” But now we have only the Chronicles with which to solace ourselves, at least until we get it together enough to finish a screenplay. Which I suppose means we have to begin one at some point. Difficult because I can’t even imagine the pitch. “So there’s this guy, see, he’s a film critic, and he decides to climb this insane slippery thing without any gear….”
I couldn’t get hold of Candace last night so watched Captain Tylor (of whom more presently) until collapsing, probably the best way to imbibe his irresponsible essence [great awful Angrish hilarious anime insanity]. But the phone rang about an hour ago, and it was she, and Maman’s surgery went as well as one could hope (details follow which are no doubt dull as Quebecois documentarians to you); it took only three hours and not eight or ten—the recent colonoscopy found nothing, so the surgeons only had to remove these cancerous lymph nodes (still not so good) clustered somehow around her aortic artery against the back wall of her abdomen. But, the cancer was staged at 1-B, which is nice and early. She’ll need radiation therapy, as they couldn’t be sure they got it all because of the weird location, and then chemo, but things look cautiously good—and she’s okay after the surgery, just the usual weak and groggy thing. So now it looks like I will be headed out April 5 as planned, and wonder if my ain Principal Skinner [combination of Cold Mountain and The Simpsons] still would like a lift to the aeroporto, after which I pop in some tragiromantic CD of choice and, still sniffling, race down 285 to Vaughn, brightening as I think of the grilled cheese, milkshake, and cherry pie which lardily await me at Penny’s Diner. [Damn, I really am looking forward to that.]
What, you mean it’s not really called a magnetoscope?!? (Blenches in horror, understands in a swift rush of comprehension why the Hastings guys have been laughing at her all this time, swallows nervously, wondering what other modern devices she’s been misnomering—the water closet? the refrigerated air?) [French for VCR apparently is magnetoscope, anachronistically enough.]
No, I didn’t send you two pictures and can’t imagine what the little red X was about, unless maybe a furtive kiss from gtcinternet, whose female avatar is also falling for ton vocabulaire énorme (kind of like the simulated uptight spectacle-wearing chick who’s supposed to be testing proto-Tylor in the first episode, who then proceeds to blow all the cheeps [bad Julie Delpy-French accent joke] with her unrestrained passion). You know, you used some word like “contrapuntal” and she just probably lost her head, broke with programming, and slipped you some uncoded, undocumented tongue. Here’s a second one, however, just because it looks like a publicity still from an Out of Africa knockoff (in which I’m not the female lead, just her eccentric best friend, kind of like Cher in Silkwood, or maybe Carrie Fisher in When Harry Met Sally) but in reality I’m only glowing with sanity and happiness (and a slight sunburn) because I’ve just loaded all the boxes of files and stuff (Magic 8 Ball, geraniums, liberated stapler) from my tribal-college cubicle (pronounced briskly by les francais as “koobeekool” which is just too motherfucking charming, pace the Rooster and Samuel L. Jackson) into the Pontiac and am standing there in the parking lot dazed and bemused and flowing with sudden lavish goodwill toward all mankind, not to mention an abrupt desire for fish tacos.
[Now a section of our running Joe Pesci gag, I can’t even remember why or how this began] I’m funny how? I amuse you? I make you laugh? I’m here to fucking amuse you? What the fuck is so funny about me? (Continues agitating self in this vein before going utterly berserk and stabbing complete stranger in neck with ballpoint pen, also known to some cosmopolitan jetsetters as a Biro, or Bic) (dreamlike, early-morning pre-green-tea amalgam of Goodfellas and Casino) (though the former is far superior to the latter, which is just naffly violent for no cinematically justifiable reason) (though the long shot of the car blowing up at the beginning is great) (why is that so many films are brilliant just before or during the opening credits, and then the rest isn’t worth watching? it’s like the realisateur shot his whole wad composing the title frames, and then just didn’t have the next 120 minutes in him: To Kill a Mockingbird, From Dusk Till Dawn, in some sense The English Patient, I could go on and on and on…) (but also I think I just love opening credits, that sense of snuggling down in the theater seat and preparing yourself to be, as Auden said, altogether elsewhere for two whole hours, and perhaps nothing ever can live up to that, maybe it’s like checking your PO box and the little thrill as you insert the tarnished brass key and see a yellow slip that means you have a package) ((((tumbles in and is lost amid the heart of concentric, ranuncular, inflorescing petal-folds of recursive nesting parentheses)))))
Perhaps not unlike the dark roses you put in my cheeks a couple of days ago. [What the Republican used to call, The Look.] And similarly, I feel a certainty amounting to a conviction that if I do nothing else for you but drill into you the difference between its and it’s, I will have done good in this life. Next topic selected for the Parliament-funded Grammatical Improvement Territorial Scheme (GITS): subject and object pronouns (e.g. post-predicate, on dit Diana and me, not Diana and I…oh bollocks you’re going to hurt me aren’t you).
So how’s the damn Argentinians this morning? [film festival]
Se nichant (which bears some resemblance to holstering) dans la certitude bizarre que tu est la mienne [too many in here to explain, and they’re too uninteresting to boot—oh God I’m such a bore], the Unnarrator
PS—I realize belatedly that I promised a disquisition on the intricacies of the irresponsible Captain, and actually I do have observations, both pungent and affectionate (the songs! oh God the songs, and the little hip-gyrating smoking-jacket dance he does, inexplicably, during the closing credits over “Downtown Dream”—his eyes closed blissfully, his cognac sloshing but never quite spilling over) BUT it’s nearly ten and I need breakfast before I keel over, donc…at a later date, mon archangel (and yes I just looked it up, so that’s really what it is, not archange, which would make sense, but never mind) [this in reference to a UK trip-hop song called “Gabriel”].
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As I reread this I suddenly am mortified. Bad Unnarrator! Dull prose!
I suspect I just want to be a Film Critic myself.
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Reading this years later, one detail stands out to me limned in neon: HOW could I POSSIBLY have thought Maman’s cancer was in fact staged so early when they were removing LYMPH nodes?! Oh foolish, besotted Un. Oh.