I confess: I'm having a hard time staying away from books.
Originally, the idea of taking a couple weeks off from books seemed a really good idea, after doing so much reading the past two months. But trying NOT to read books only highlights that my "habit-energy" (as buddhists say) is to read pretty much constantly. Starting with the newspaper in the morning, the Sun magazine while sitting on the john, and something with a good story at night to help me get to sleep--and that's when I'm not studying or doing research.
Do I get points for reading in conjunction with different kinds of media consumption? Last night I watched a great Lucchino Visconti film, The Damned, with Dirk Bogarde (one of my favs), about the machinations of various members of the Von Essenbeck family in Germany, trying to gain control of a steel works in the early days of the Nazi regime. Not as deliciously demented as The Night Porter (also with Bogarde), but still pretty good. A major character is Martin, a polymorphous perverse momma's boy who becomes a perfect little Nazi.
So what did I do after the film? I picked up William Beckford's Vathek, on my book list (pub. 1786), which features as a main character a powerful medieval Caliph, a polymorphous perverse momma's boy who becomes a perfect little reprobate. Like the characters in The Damned, he also ends up in hell, taking those he loves with him. This is one of the things I like to do: mix-and-match media, particularly if they're mediating the same work (Gurinder Chadha's Bride and Prejudice, matched with Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, for example).
The Damned and Vathek were a pretty good match, though not based on the same work. Vathek would make a good film, I think, if we could only find a reincarnated Fassbinder to make it, and a reincarnated Dirk Bogarde to star.
Posted by jeb at April 21, 2006 2:31 PM | TrackBack