Wuthering Heights

Last post, November 19, 2009. Hmm, it seems I do not have as much to say as I once thought. Ah well, at least this way, it will be easy to tell that I truly feel inspired to say something before I post, and that I'm not just putting words up into the internet out of guilt.

Speaking of the internet, I've always had a strange feeling when posting on the internet. Here I am, I've staked out my little corner of the internet where my words and thoughts can go. But I've never really had the expectation that some one will be interested in what I have to say, or even read it. Every internet blogger builds her own field of dreams, in the hopes that they will come. But with the internet rife with fields of dreams, not to mention hubs of legitimate activity, communication and networking, the expectation for anyone to actually read this is pure vanity. Yes, it is an act of ego to type a blog. But so satisfying.

Well, the point is, besides the tiny, vain bit of my mind that expects this blog to be read by anyone, I mostly feel like I'm sending off these words into a black hole, where they will be devoured and destroyed by obscurity, by the tiny bit of nothingness that is my corner of the internet. Then again, when one considers the vastness of the solar system, one solar system in the vastness of the galaxy, one galaxy in the vastness of the universe, one universe in the vastness of ... well, the point is, if we give into the crushing probable certainty of our own meaninglessness, then what do we have left? I prefer to delude myself that I matter, and, I believe, the more successful you are at self delusion, the more success you'll have in life.

So, just to be clear, I'm a billionaire adventurer who will live forever, has magic powers, is friends with Batman, Superman, Spiderman and Wolverine, has a unicorn friend who flies. I can eat as much junk as I want and remain the most beautiful woman in the entire world. I've also published several hugely popular and critically acclaimed novels, written, directed and starred in an Oscar-winning film, climbed Everest, won two Nobel prizes (one for literature and one for curing cancer, which I've also done), solved world hunger and achieved world peace, prevented a zombie apocalypse, made sure that the world is still an interesting place and achieved immortality.
I win.

Aaaaanyway...

I didn't just wake up one day and think to myself, Hey, I think I'm gonna write a blog post today. Nope. I read Wuthering Heights. And to all you fools who are thinking, She's an English major and she's never read Wuthering Heights? I can say, "Ha! You fools! I have read Wuthering Heights, so there, you sons of a silly person! Na na na na naaaa na!

Ahem, well, now that we got that cleared up...
I am so glad I finally got over my aversion to Victorian Literature. I'm going to attempt to avoid superlatives and give a sober and honest account of my opinions about this novel.
Being a lazy, no-account, good-for-nothing, I'm going to start by quoting a bit of a review Virginia Woolf wrote on WH

She could free life from its dependence of facts; with a few touches indicate the spirit of a face so that it needs no body; by speaking of the moor make the wind blow and the thunder roar.

While reading WH, I felt my blood turn electric. It was so vivid, so clear to me who these people are. First off, it simply felt like I was there in the moor. Somehow Wuthering Heights was always stormy and Thrushcross Grange was a disquieting calm, and the entire setting was sickly, as if the dampness in the air seeped into everything, seeped into the buildings and their inhabitants, allowing mold and rot to slowly set in. But you would only need to step outside, to let the sharp wind restore colour to your cheeks and vigour to your soul.

I've also noticed I've started talking and thinking the the Victorian style of speech, so forgive me if I sound anachronistic (ps, is it anachronistic if I'm going backwards? neo-anachronistic? me being a stupid loser like the people that think saying thee and thou and milady makes it sounds like they're talking like Shakespeare?)

Focus, Kori...

The characters. None of that heroic nonsense, not a moment of redemption. Just quasi-incestuous relationships (every single character, excluding the narrators, ends up related somehow), messy love-polygons, larger-than-life characters with larger-than-life personalities and passions ...

Bah, I can't do it justice. Look at me already falling into superlatives. NO SUPERLATIVES.

The emotion is intense. I caught myself wondering if this is what life really is, or if this is some hyperbole that none-the-less exactly emphasizes just how messed up this whole living business is.
Could someone really be a Heathcliff or a Catharine? More than real life, I am recalled to some of my studies in Classics (oh ho! aren't you a hoity-toity little miss name dropper I know this and I know that? Quiet, id). These days, we think about love as a wonderful thing, as the absolute raison d'etre. A wise man once said, "All you need is love." And isn't that a wonderful thing to believe? It sounds so easy, so magical. But the Greeks, they had a different opinion about love. To them, love was dangerous, deadly, destructive, and not in some cool, metaphysical way. No, love started wars.
Just ask Helen and Paris.
And then there's passion, passion, passion. One of those little things I learned in my Classics class. There were these girls called the Bacchae. They followed Dionysus around, mostly getting drunk and having wild orgies. But there was also this thing called sparagmos (crack of thunder). That's where these worshipers of Dionysus would get so worked up into a passion, that they would literally take a man alive and tear him limb from limb and devour him.
Passion, love and especially passionate love were dangerous if not downright deadly.

And that's pretty much what Wuthering Heights is. The force of passionate love between Cathy and Heathcliff becomes this uncontrollable force that destroys everything in its path.
At first it starts off like this sort of family train-wreck that you get a morbid pleasure from watching as the train veers off the tracks, but that slowly turns into outright horror at the overwhelming awfulness of it all.
Imagine you're in a thunderstorm, and one minute you're feeling this thrill from being out in the rain, soaking wet, feeling the wind and the air and the power of nature whirling around you. The next you're running for cover because a lightning bolt crashed only a few yards away and it knocked you right off your feet and now all you can do is fear for your life and hope to get out of the storm.
For me, that was Wuthering Heights.

I hate how many weather metaphors I used. Really? That's all I can come up with?
I guess I just feel stupid praising something that everyone already knows is awesome. There, I said it at last, awesome.
Brilliant, superb, extraordinary, wonderful, amazing, spectacular, fantastic.
Happy?

I remain &tc.,
Kori

Apocalypse Now

So, I just watched Apocalypse Now. What is there to say about that?
As I was watching it, I started to get curious, extremely curious, not about how it would end (since I figured it out about halfway through), but about how other people responded to it.
The reason I was curious was simple: the movie wasn't obvious. I don't remember the last time I watched a movie like that. It was, not enigmatic, but, you had to look for the answers. I found myself listening so carefully to the dialogue that I paused when the phone rang. It was important not to be distracted for a minute.
Now, I have this little theory about literature, about what it is and why it lasts. I think that a part of what is literary is the fact that the text does not explain itself fully, it requires you to come to your own conclusions about what it means, if you are indeed curious to know what something means.

And who wouldn't be curious? If the text doesn't mean anything, what is the point of reading it? I think it's fair to expect a text to mean something. It's like an unspoken agreement between the author and the audience: I will make sure my text means something, but it's up to you to figure out what. It's actually kind of like a game.

Anyway, my weird theory has given me a rather detached perspective on texts. It's as if I rate the qualities of the text by examining whether they attempt to evoke a meaning, and whether they are too obvious about that meaning. I do this, and I don't attempt to extract the meaning myself. Or rather, I try not to try not to, if that makes sense. Because sometimes a text is so compelling, that it positively begs for me to dissect it. But in general, I hate tearing them apart, I hate looking inside to find the meaning of things, because that kills it. It's like catching a frog, and to find out how it lives, you tear it open, pull it apart. Only, that kills it and you are left without answers. You might ask how I enjoy texts without looking for their meaning. And I'd say it's like going to a magic show. Having my mind fooled into believing the illusions is the pleasure, as is acknowledging the skill of a master magician. It's like that.

So, with this weird theory in my mind, I watched Apocalypse Now. And it did all these things. As it progressed, it challenged your perspective on things, and it hinted at its meaning, without ever saying it. It's like a riddle, where the teller can name anything about the object to be guessed, except the object itself. And, when the solution to the riddle still eludes you, the clues seem impossible, contradictory, wrong, like they don't fit together. What we don't catch we keep, what we catch we throw away. It dries as it gets wetter. It gets bigger the more you take away.

So, after watching the movie, I got online, threw the title into google, and got pages and pages of reviews. I read four. They said things like "the pointlessness of war" and "a parallel to everyday life" and "Coppola couldn't have know what he was creating, couldn't have known what he meant," "hypocrisy and bureaucracy of war." All these readings, all these solutions to the riddle Coppola posed.

I'm not saying they're wrong. But they're vast. There are a million million readings of this film, which is why it was amazing. Well, that and the excellent cinematography, music, editing, production design, editing etc etc etc. It's difficult. It's beautiful. And that's why it's good.

And that... is all I have to say ... about that.

Best,
Kori

Cell Phone Hell

Who hasn't been pissed off by the cell phone companies? Am I alone in feeling trampled on by their giant ignorant boots in their stampede to get my money? What the hell is a system access fee anyway? I'll tell you. It's a, oh, so you've decided to get a cell phone and contract with our company, and we're about to ring all that through for you, but since you're clearly already stuck with paying for our stuff, we're gonna charge you an extra $30. Because we can. DEAL WITH IT.

And then there's the surprise policy change that takes effect halfway through your contract. Surprise! You're already trapped for another to years with us, unless you feel like paying exorbitant prices for dropping us altogether! And I guarantee that these "surprises" aren't fun for anyone. What, you mean we've been letting you receive text messages for free? Good lord, we'll have none of that. Surprise! What, you mean we told you that we'd let you upgrade your phone for a reduced price? Well, you see, we secretly changed our minds about that. You'll have to wait a year with your crap/broken/stolen phone, or you can buy a new one. Yes, I know we said you could have an iPhone for a fraction of the price. But, sweetie, you didn't honestly believe us, did you?

Or you can get a pay-as-you-go phone. Of course, you can't get a nice phone without a contract. No, we'll give you the shit that breaks, nothing special phones. And of course, you have to go out and buy vouchers for those. And, of course, if you don't use all the minutes, they just vanish at the end of the month. And no, you can't just buy a $5 voucher, because then you get the most viciously useless evil rates imaginable. I mean, who does the whole weekend and evening plan thing any more? Plans like that should have gone the way of the dodo a long time ago, but no, such fossils are still lurking in those useless pay-as-you-go phones.

It seems like, no matter where you turn, cell phone companies show you shiny objects, say words like "free" and "no hidden fees", and when you go all dewy-eyed, that's when they slap in the added fees, the surprise policy changes and the ball-and-chain till-death-do-us-part contracts and ridiculous rates that just slide right under your nose. And we put up with all this crap? Why?

Because we are addicted to cell phones. Because the words "I don't have a cell-phone" coming from anyone over the age of ten receive shock, then fear, then deference, as if said non-cell phone user was a sort of leper or freak, or else some sort of higher being that has achieved nirvana in life and has transcended beyond the earthly need of instant communication.

But, as most people can never hope to reach such a cellphoneless utopia, then perhaps we'd better start praying to the cell phone gods (or writing angry letters to the media, communications giants and our government) and hope for some reforms.
Or maybe we could take a ship full of cellphones and dump them in a harbour somewhere. It's worked in the past.

Best,
Kori

Welcome to my Blog

Hello

There are a million little things that annoy me. I think other people should be annoyed with me. Therefore I created this blog. Although I don't, in fact, have even the slightest belief that this will be read by a single other person in the entire world, I still want to write what 's on my mind.

So, here goes.

Best,
Kori