The Persistence of Memory

With any luck—yeah, I know, who am I kidding?—my aged computer will soon be, well, not entirely obsolete. I just shelled out to improve my machine's memory resources ten-fold, and though that won't bring me into the modern age, much less the Vista one, it should make a huge difference. Maybe it'll even do for my sad & ever-so-clunky machine what Viagra did for Bob Dole and inspire a new lease on life. (In case you're wondering how bad things had become: it would regularly take minutes, literally, to switch between two open programs, say Firefox and OpenOffice, minutes in which I, of course, would end up rolling my eyes like Ajax, or uttering litanies of obscenity that would make George Carlin blush.) So, fingers crossed, however creakily and osteoperotically.

Not much to report here, save the same old doldrums— shouldn't that be doldra?—and shit. Except: received a gift yesterday of the old Richard Attenborough pic, Guns at Batasi, courtesy a too-too kind RK. (Wiki link here.) Still to watch it, but it has two of my favourite English actors in it, Jack Hawkins and the sadly under-remembered Dame Flora Robson. Hawkins is well-represented in my movie collection—The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, Theatre of Blood—but the only film in my DVD collection with Dame Flora is The Malta Story, also starring Hawkins, and that's hardly a stellar outing for anyone concerned. For you non-cinephiles, Dame Flora remains in many ways the film epitome of Elizabeth I: playing the Queen in Fire Over England and The Sea Hawk, she was terrific and steely, and more than able in both cases to upstage her co-stars, Laurence Olivier (with Vivien Leigh) and Errol Flynn, respectively. (No mean feats, those.) Some actors are welcome to be seen in anything. Flora's one of them-- moreso, in fact, now that older movies are so very, very rarely to be found on TV anymore. BTW, now you know against whom Cate Blanchett is daring to pit herself by playing Elizabeth again. It's like Eddie Murphy endlessly trying to outdo Alec Guinness: admirable to an extent, but entirely unnecessary.

And yes, once again the Not-So-Good, Not-So-Doctor ends up prattling on about an actor unfairly forgot. Please don't forgive me. Consider it an encitement to research.

Also, can't be bothered to give a damn about the Philip Glass setting of the Leonard Cohen pieces from The Book of Longing currently being performed in Toronto. I should be interested, very interested in fact, but The Book of Longing was such a piece of crap I decided it wasn't even worth writing about here. It also doesn't help that my initial response to Glass isn't much different than Springfield's. No one does Cohen well anymore, not even Cohen—or rather, especially not Cohen. Sigh.

On the other hand, there remains that Zelda is now dissertation-free, and now simply trudging through the last bits that will formalize her Piled Higher and Deeperness. (Don't make me drag Petey out again: I keep him retired for a reason.) Her success, well-earned but also inevitable, reminds me how little I ultimately have to say. Or, rather, how little I have to say in that form. I just don't give a damn about that audience anymore.

That realization, however, has led me to some much more awkward realizations, none of which I'll detail here. It's all so Henry James: And there we are….

Or maybe Leonard Cohen, fourteen years ago: Looks like freedom but it feels like death. Or maybe exactly the opposite. It's probably a paradox one has to be a Cavalier to understand, or a Yeats or a Vonnegut. G-d knows, I don't. Or even care. C'est la vie, c'est la guerre....