Thursday, January 24, 2013

NICE (NOT THE TOWN IN FRANCE)


I did not take this picture which is Paris, 1909. I filch it from a website though. I didn't take any good pictures today. I mostly worked on projects and did some cooking, of course.

Woke up not feeling well, again, and thought for sure I would find some nap time but did not.

It's not really the writing practice this blog is designed to engender, but I just don't feel I have anything to say, so I will give you a couple more tidbits from Tom Bissell's essay, Escanaba's Magic Hour: Movies, Robot Deer, and the American Small Town.

"Nice" is a surface with little relation to inner decency.

and unrelatedly

... I felt some dignity that I had come of age far beyond the fallout of the cultural atom smasher. The movies I saw or albums I bought or, later, books I read were not much colored by inducements of culture brokers. The pickings were slimmer, sometimes maddeningly so, and not always sophisticated, but I was never less than certain that I had picked them. This is what makes rural, small-town people so opinionated. Strong opinion is the necessary attendant of choice, however limited, while fashion of the bootlick of exacting coercion.

If I were growing up in Escanaba now, Amazon.com would  happily sugget which books or compact disks to buy. Over the Internet, I could chat with people as distant as Newark or Portland, erasing the demarcations of isolation, a visible suburbanite to a vast, invisible city. The Movie People have come to capture Escanaba's isolation, which exists, still, in every empty street and darkened storefront, but it is an isolation that is, increasingly, identical to that of a thousand towns just like it. All of them are attuned to the same cultural pulsar, as distant as it is familiar, as relentless as it is indifferent.

Interesting stuff, that.

Cooder is either begging for a Greenie or wanting me to head to bed. I have not yet acomplished my daily reading goal of an hour a day, so I will say good night.

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