Bouquet of Splendour
— I’m not a major film buff or anything like that, but who doesn’t enjoy a good classic film? You might remember how I love the film Wings of Desire by Wim Wenders and how that led me to Perfect Days, which I also love. And because the universe is generous sometimes, I was led from these films to being asked to look at Young Ali. (Trailer). Anyway, we recently watched A Special Day, 1977, Criterion Collection.
— Deborah Young on the Criterion site says in an essay: “Though not quite a love story, it perversely plays on the auras of two long-standing icons of screen romance, Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni, turning the audience’s desire for cinematic passion upside down. Who could have imagined the glamorous Loren playing a mousy hausfrau in an old robe and slippers, or Mastroianni, the prototypical Latin lover, as a gay intellectual? Only in an Italian comedy, perhaps, is the combination thinkable—but A Special Day is no comedy.”
— Definitely not a comedy. The everyday activities, making coffee, reading a book, learning a dance step, doing laundry, are all set against the screeching backdrop of the meeting of Hitler and Mussolini, in actual footage and then the noise on the radio perpetually on in the background, brutally inescapable. The view from the apartments remind one of Hitchcock’s Rear Window, but instead of solving a crime the two protagonists have to live in the face of the Fascist regime. This made me think of now and how we go about our ordinary days, as we must, but if we turned on the radio or TV or glanced at the news on the internet, there it all is. We can of course turn that all off. Close the drapes, metaphorically. But in the movie the sound from the radio reaches a fever pitch. Sometimes I thought watching it, I can’t take it anymore, I need to turn the radio off! I need to turn off the movie, even. But something would keep me interested, the brutally poignant shabbiness of Antonietta’s slippers (Sophia Loren), or the dance moves of Gabriele (Marcello Mastroianni). The arrangement of the coffee cups on the table, the myna bird, the laundry on the line. Things that you think shouldn’t keep your attention but you can’t help but fixate on as you would fixate on some small bit of hope, some feather of possibility or change in the wind.
— We watched it in a dubbed version, which was well done, but I would have preferred it with subtitles as it is in the newer CC release. Still, it was a movie I’m so glad to have seen.
— Lately I’ve been remedying a gap in my reading and tackling a couple of Hannah Arendt books, starting with The Human Condition and The Life of the Mind. For obvious reasons her thinking has come up a lot the last many years and it must have been the work of Rebecca Solnit that spurred me on to finally dive in. But first, I thought, I’ll watch the film, Hannah Arendt. And it’s true what the critics have said, it’s so surprising how gripping a film can be about a thinker. (Pairs well with A Special Day, too).
— As a side note, the internet is now lousy with fake quotations. Of course it is. So I’m always heartened to see someone setting the record straight. Maybe one day this will be a full time job. Unentangling the fake from the real.
— Last week, I mentioned Franz Wright’s book Axe in Blossom. And since then I’ve been playing with the phrase “bouquet of splendour” in my doodles. Remembering Hélène Cixous saying that we have all lived one or two flowers, and thinking about how these days some people have lived a whole bouquet of flowers. And yet, still they shine, they glow, they arrange themselves, they are composed, they are colourful, and refreshing, and their perfume is glorious. So. Please remember you are a bouquet of splendour.
— Someone mentioned Nick Cave’s book on my socials, where he is in conversation with Seán Hagan. The book is Faith, Hope, and Carnage. As you know I’m not the coolest person in the world and I don’t get out much :) But I know from Nick Cave mainly because of the movie Wings of Desire. It all comes back to the angels for me somehow. You might know his music, or be a fan of his Red Hand Files. His compilation of joy is a gift. I can only take so much in at a time. I think that’s an okay way to accept such gifts.
— The book, anyway, is a small miracle, in turns harrowing and joyful, an open wound, a sliver of light, a hard punch to the gut, a soughing sorrow in the forest, a dream, a balm, a rock. I don’t know. Some books shouldn’t be talked about just read. This is one. But here’s a line on getting through life, grief, sorrow, that might let you know if it’s for you: “It seems to me that you just take the next least-wounding step.”
— And I’ve talked here before about taking the next most elegant step. And that’s also good. The important thing is to take steps of any kind, the least wounding, the elegant step, or like Marcello Mastroianni in A Special Day — we can mark it out to remember our steps.
— I subscribe to Peter Darbyshire’s Substack and I always enjoy a shout-out from him! Thanks mate! I’ve lately been thinking a lot about my early days of blogging and being on Flickr. So 16th century! As you know September is my 10 year mark of writing in this space. Before that I had a blog titled Capacious Hold-All. And as I have been writing into my desk which is my new era, I have been imagining the desk as a capacious hold-all. These things just circle back don’t they?
— I was thinking back to things I liked about blogging and why I began. Partly to take up space as we (in particular women) bloggers used to talk about. Partly to make it so that really horrible review I’d gotten would be at least partially buried. (And I think hilariously it does still come up in searches of moi, so that was for naught). But mainly because of the community that we built around blogging which had no monetizing about it at all, unless maybe the off chance that someone would go to an actual bookstore and support you by buying a copy of your latest book.
— There’s no going back, and we’re all going forward anyway, so all we can do is imagine how we might like things to be….and I’ve not come up with anything much, but have been considering bringing back the blogroll concept :) Thoughts?
