9/9/09
“I never saw a worse paper in my life.
One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin.
It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate, and provoke study, and when you follow the lame, uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide – plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard-of contradictions.”
- Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wall Paper”I’m reading The Haunted Omnibus, a compilation of “Great Ghost Stories of the World” that was first published in 1937. It includes “ghost” stories by M. R. James, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Algernon Blackwood, Guy de Maupassant, Pliny the Younger, Robert Louis Stevenson, Ambrose Bierce, Poe, and others. This is a 1941 copy. I love old books, and old things in general. I look at this book and I think, This is 68 years old. Isn’t that cool? And I have it right here, it’s so far and so close at the same time. I also like it when I find things left in books, tucked away and forgotten, like lovely cloth bookmarks, slips of paper with quotes on them, tickets to the ballet, or a decade-old article about Virginia Woolf in a Woolf book.
Oh, God, I was on the bus today, and I smelled something, like baking bread, as we went over the bridge to the U-District, and it plunged me into a memory of my childhood. Isn’t it weird how smell can carry you back to the past? It’s almost like deja vu, the strongest throwback of all your senses, to the actual experience of life. It’s beyond words. I’m not even sure what that scent is, or if I’ve ever really smelled it before or not, or my brain is just glitching, but that momentary sensation of actually being in the past that it triggers is so real. Smell has the strongest ability to get you back to the past, more than anything else.
I just got back from seeing 9. It was pretty good, not much worse or better than I was expecting it to be. If you haven’t heard about it for some reason, it’s a Tim Burton-produced (of course he always gets the credit!) CGI-animated film that takes place in a post-apocalyptic world. A scientist who unintentionally created a great evil through his technology invests nine cute little burlap figures with life and human souls, giving up his own life in the process, and leaving them to protect the future. The movie kind of presents an alternate history, in which the world seemed to end in the ’30s or so, but the technology is advanced in ways beyond our own – it’s as if we’re seeing the technology of the future FROM no later than the ’40s, so instead of camcorders there’s a little wooden box, like a music box, that projects a recorded image of the speaker when you open it, etc. It’s very steampunk/dustpunk. It’s visually very innovative. Each of these little “stitchpunks” has its own look and personality. I think I’m most like a combination of 7 (voiced by Jennifer Connelly), 3 and 4 (speechless twins who catalog things and have flickering eyes that act as film projectors), and 6 (the vague, crazy kind of guy who’s always drawing pictures of the “Source,” voiced by Crispin Glover).
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