Novel Eye

Facebook is a conversation. Twitter is an exciting but crowded cocktail party of which you catch the pieces of conversations.

It has been a good two days. Although it's still crisp/cold for me, the sun is shining and it's still light when I drive home (even better with Daylight Savings coming). I was productive at home and feel energetic about projects for the first time in ages. But here's the dilemma--I have been here (that sense of a real space again) before. Where I clean and begin projects and feel good and optimistic and the real problems I have seem smaller and beyond my control so I worry less. And it always ends. Am I mildly bi-polar? Is it possible to be mildly bi-polar? Bi-polar seems so much the diagnosis of the moment that I am wary of using it. And each time I think, how can I cling to this and make it last and is that even under my control.

Watched Before Night Falls, always wanted to see it, partially because it garnered so much praise, and partially because I had heard about Johnny Depp's daring performance in it, and I wanted to see that. But it is Javier Bardem's movie--every second, from the young student with high hopes for Castro's revolution who is quickly disillusioned by the brutal crack downs (just as in Persepolis) for both his writing and his homosexuality. Are all revolutions doomed to betray themselves? It is a harrowing and beautiful film with Bardem reading Arenas own words in the original language. I cannot now remember how much of the film was in Spanish and how much in English, it flowed so beautifully together. It made me want to read the writer--what more can a film do for a writer?

I recently watched Persepolis, The Reader, and Hotel Rwanda, each in their own way about living through war and the things we do to survive. How much would you do, what would you do, most importantly, what would you do to survive. Persepolis is the story of a girl/young woman, growing up in the aftermath of the fall of the Shah. At the beginning her liberal parents are full of hope for the new regime, but it is soon clear that the western freedoms enjoyed under the Shah are gone. They fear for their daughter's outspoken protest, and yet, it is at their knee that she has learned to speak up. Our heroine is packed off to Vienna where she gets into the kind of troubles that a young woman alone in a strange city might be prone to--fights with landlords, as she puts them, banal love affairs. Hers is an easy war, even when she returns, until one of her friends is killed running from a mixed ( illegal ) party. The war is a background to them until it collides with them and they live as i...