… is the secret … the moment when everything happens … is the answer … the reason why everything happens.
Let’s make contact.
I.
Back to our regularly scheduled programming …
I hadn’t made tofu for a while; I got to again tonight. And carrots and broccoli … lentils! A great — albeit ‘incomplete’ (but easily ‘completed’) — protein source. Delicious simmer with paprika, cumin and salt, with a bay leaf, drained, and then tossed in a little oil.
I still have cowpeas in the fridge, but I’m taking a brief break from them.
Regularly-scheduled: a bit of rotation today, with some ‘Millennium’ and ‘X-Files’, the former finding Frank Black in Oklahoma tornado country tracking down seventeen kidnapped children, the perp being a gun-crazing end-of-times religious zealot who … wait for the obvious twist … was not trying to harm the children but save them. The biggest ‘issue’ here was the writing of Terry O’Quinn’s character, who was played as a close-minded fool this episode; I know they’re making the Millennium Group more sinister, but this isn’t the way to do it. Over in the other show, Scully deals with finding out that Emily is her biological daughter, the girls gets ill, we find a greenish clump/growth/tumor-ish thing on her neck, and it emits the expected gas when a nurse tries to pierce it with a needle.
Yes … more hybrid action!
And in more of our regular programming, the upstairs neighbor’s kids/guests/whatever-they-are are back to making stomping, banging noises throughout their apartment and into ours. Thus, alas, a trip to the main office is in order.
II.
If you’re going to die, leave the door open … you want your pets to get out:
- “Would Your Dog Eat Your Dead Body?” Absolutely
- “6 terrifying instances of pets eating their owners“
III.
Author of the day? Elfriede Jelinek.
I first read Jelinek my second semester in graduate school, where, in a seminar on the grotesque, we discussed “Krankheit oder moderne Frauen” (Illness or Modern Women, 1984). It was years later — though not many — that “The Piano Teacher” (“Die Klavierspielerin”) made the rounds and M. Haneke started to become, it seems, a regular fixture even in American film discussions. For a while one had to be careful when visiting the video store; one could rent “La Pianiste” and one could check out “Le Pianiste”; the latter is Polanski’s “The Pianist” whereas the former is Haneke’s film. And they say language doesn’t matter. I’ve since included that novel in the my 20th-century literature in translation seminar.
A while back I came across several copies of a Jelinek work at the local thrift store and I made a point of getting one to add to my collection; while I may want to read them in German, if I want friends/acquaintances to read her, it will have to be in translation, and lesser-known but significant authors, like Jelinek and Sebald, are those among whom I add to my library whenever possible.
Obviously her profile came into somewhat greater focus after she won the Nobel Prize in literature (2004).
Works catalogued today?
- “Greed”
- “Lust”
- “Women as Lovers”
- “Wonderful, Wonderful Times”
Links:
