Writing I Like

Val Kilmer in The Thaw

I rarely read showbiz news. It can be very Dickensian and fascinating, but it usually begins to troll along the bottom of the sea of boredom, and all the breath-taking characters that one had fallen in love with at first sight begin to look like drudgery and resemble morning-after people that Jason Lee mused about in Dreamcatcher, as he posed the Meg Ryan question, "Where's the cat?"

I mean, really I try, but this Lamar Odom thing is an extremely tangled skein. No matter how much I read or listened to She-who-must-be-obeyed chatter on about it, I do not understand what's going on.
I mean, Chloe is not a licensed doctor, so what's is she trying to do with a fellow who - by some accounts - is brain dead?
Is there an inheritance at stake?

And Scientology truly baffles me. I mean, when I first heard the word "scientology" about 50 years ago, I thought "What a stupid name!"
I still do.
It brings to mind Aristotle puttering about with Dr. Praetorius in some quaint laboratory with sparking Van der Graff generators and vast distillation appartus filled with bubbling liquids and humors with a chorus line from The Producers, does it not? A mix of... well, I suppose "science" and "logy"...   or "logos", Ancient Greek and all that.
(Or a compact car version of Hugo Gernsback's  "scienti-fiction" and "logy".)


So I read The Guardian today.

 
I read about showbiz.
There was an article about Val Kilmer.
Who could resist?

I have not seen any bit of his oeuvre since The Thaw, so why not?

Well, there was much more.

Marina Hyde

Marina Hyde's Lost in showbiz: high fives all round as Val Kilmer whoops about his new Top Gun mission
http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/lostinshowbiz/2015/nov/20/lost-in-showbiz-val-kilmer-iceman-top-gun-2-daniel-radcliffe-kardashian#comment-63634401


There was a bit about Daniel Radcliffe's life choices, one of which may have been setting up as role-models the actors Oliver Reed and Peter O'Toole.
"Ten pints for Gryffendor!"

Then there was the Kardashian Xmas Kard, which has been around ever since "Anno Beast"...!
Anno Beast?
What is that?
I looked and looked, but it smelled to me strongly of Rapture Palooza (Anna Kendrick, Craig Robinson... a film which could have been great with just a little bit more work on the script...).

Who writing about showbiz would cite Rapture Palooza? About non-Rapture Palooza subject matter?

Then it ended with a conjuration around the Kardashian annual card with "annus" ( = "year" in Latin)
and a trilitteral texting vulgarism beginning with "WT_" which again pointed back to "Anno" (ablative case of "annus", don't you know), as well as a homonym reference to Beast and a line in Rapture Palooza...

...and all the puns that one might possibly derive from Schopenhauer's observation"

Obit anus, abit onus.

which I won't even translate, because there are too many levels of Swiftian puns here.

Tolle, lege

Pick up and read!

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Big Bill

William Faulkner wrote about the things which lay hidden under the materiality of the world, the spirit, the shadow, or - I should say - the shadows, for those evanescent entities are many - as the ancient Egyptians taught us: they had used all their hieroglyphs on spirit and soul, and when they had come to shadow, they had to turn to homely items, like umbrellas, pajamas, and tin cans in order to depict in writing the many kinds of shadows. But I digress from the object of my essay, which is Faulkner.

It is like the case of Dark Matter in the universe, things unseen and things undreamed, but must be there, and are inferred, just as in the Middle Ages the brighter minds of the Sorbonne inferred from the faint hints in Scripture to the large yet sober crowds of angels dancing on the ballroom heads of argentine pins.

Let us write today, then, about keys, house keys, car keys; being objects in the world, they must possess a hidden layer of meaning which supports form and shape, combatting the natural tendency of mass to collapse into a formless lump of quicksilver; keys with their fractal bodies, the large cuts into the metal substrate being replicated ad infinitum with smaller scale cuts, themselves being cut into bays and fjords on the nano scale: keys - the buck-toothed outline of the front door key, the descending escalator of cat's teeth on the club house door key, the two mirror-imaged, smoothly contoured ledges of the car keys.

The unseen nature - seen only by Faulkner - was the genesis of the ancient gods and powers, for was there not even a god of keys? or at least of the front and back door? Janus, looking-two-ways?

The souls of everything lie in an escape-time equation, pixel by pixel washed in a flow of color. The souls of the universe, this universe here, not some parallel offspring or avatar, lie in the keen gravitas of the shadow world which exists in the summer's day picnic between Mass and Synapse.

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