Dec 15 2007
On having something to say
If you blog, at a minimum, you should have something to say. Right? If a reader reads the stuff, great. If not, at least you’ve practiced your sadly under-developed writing skills. Dear diary…
The third person thing is tough to sustain. “We do this, We think that.” Maybe we’ll ditch that affectation.
The temptation is strong to blog about other blogs. This isn’t a bad thing; the conversation is a big part of what makes blogging worthwhile. But it’s pretty easy to do the easy thing. I (there goes the we) have succumbed more than once here in Portlandville.
It’s also easy to simply read the news and point to articles, as if ten thousand readers look to you for your wise and witty ability to point out everything you deem interesting. Every blog in Portland has mentioned the recent frequency of coverage of Portland in the NY Times. For a while there, a dozen bloggers pointed to each NY Times reference like paparazzi announcing Brittany sightings. Yup, I did that too.
When all else fails, trot out the dry, witty, cryptic reference to a link.
As in:
“Speaking of links….”
I’ve only been doing this for a short while but the danger of the mundane looms large. It’s hard enough to write, much less say something someone might enjoy hearing.
So in November I/we shut it down this pop stand, read a book, went to a few movies, and followed those real- life links for a while.
While I was away, I had a great time on the weekends, away from the iMac, with these …
Into the wild. Beautifully filmed movie by Sean Penn, based on the book by John Krakauer (who grew up in Oregon). A couple of scenes filmed around here.
No country for old men. The Coen brothers’ latest film, based on Cormac McCarthy’s novel about why you shouldn’t pick up just any old bag of drug money that you stumble upon. Beautifully filmed and chilling.
I’m not there. Todd Haynes’ movie about Dylan. Beautifully filmed and dreamlike. I loved it.
Here’s a clip:
But hey, I’ve liked Dylan since high school:
Careful readers will note that a word has mysteriously disappeared from my caption. It should read, “get out of going through all these things twice.” I guess the proofreaders hadn’t memorized every epic-length Dylan song, so the omission slipped through. Apparently, God bless’m, they also missed an awkward line break in my neighbor’s caption.
Back to the movie. If you are Mr. Jones, or if you don’t know who he is, you may want to see Scorcese’s bio pic No Direction Home first, or D.A. Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back, or stay away altogether. You’ll be fine.
I’m not there soundtrack. Actually, it seems to me that hardly any of this is in the movie, but this collection of Dylan covers is excellent on its own. Nice to hear Tom Verlaine’s guitar in the rocking house band, the Million Dollar Bashers. Portland local Stephen Malkmus joins the bashers on Ballad of a Thin Man. Listen here.
The Road. Cormac McCarthy’s latest novel; a father and son make their way through a post-apocalypse southern landscape.
OK, I read this when it first came out, but it’s now out in paper and the Coen brothers movie reminded me to pick it up again. So what if Oprah likes it. It’s still good.
Tree of Smoke . Denis Johnson’s latest novel.
A few weeks ago I saw the trailer for Atonement, directed by Joe Wright, based on Ian McEwan’s novel. Wait…hadn’t I already seen this movie? Impossible. It hadn’t even opened in Portland yet. The trailer matched almost perfectly the images in my head from reading the book a couple of years ago. Turns out that others felt the same way, as we heard the other day in this report on NPR.
Here’s the trailer:
You may also note that the trailer pretty much tells the whole story, in case you want to save eight bucks.
Which brings us back to the theme of this post, having something to say.
In the NPR piece, Atonement director Wright says about his work,
“I always used to be terribly worried when I was a kid because you’d have these ’60s kind of guys talking and [saying], ‘Well, you gotta have something to say, man,’ and I’d worry that I didn’t have anything to say — you know, ‘What have I got to say?’”
“And then it was later that I realized that it was fine not to have anything to say as long as you realized you had everything to learn.”