Wednesday Morning Rain

Today is promising to be a truly rainy day and and not merely a few minutes of sprinkling. It started when I was taking the trash out to the curb and has built from there, still falling, looking to last for hours. We need this rain, even though I am afraid it will force me to take out the lawn mower, as our little green life begins to bloom.

Celebrities and Stuff

"Filth - Official Trailer" (Watch on YouTube)

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I Melt with You

They have raced to the top of the cliff. The policewoman says, “You don’t have to do this.”

He says, “I’d miss my friends too much.” Then he jumps.

-- The film “I Melt with You” (2011)

Four upper-middle-class, middle-aged white guys meet for the weekend at a coastal retreat for drugs and fun. They are old friends and lifelong pals. It is all good times at first, but the masks start falling, and they realize that in their boundless pursuit of selfish pleasure, they have come to lead empty lives, even intolerable lives. They start committing suicide, one by one, until the last suicide described above that closes the movie. The film does not seem to enjoy much critical acclaim, but it is a favorite of mine.

"Middlemarch" and Casaubon

We have some interesting discussion on George Eliot's "Middlemarch", specifically on the character Edward Casaubon and the waste of his lifetime's energy on his misguided and pointless "Key to All Mythologies". This theme of the novel is a sharp blow against those of us who spend our lives fancying ourselves to be serious thinkers but will never amount to the least significance. It is perhaps the most memorable meme that survives from the novel.

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[Some have speculated that Eliot's husband was the basis for Casaubon.]

“Impossible to conceive any creature less like Mr Casaubon than my warm, enthusiastic husband, who cares much more for my doing than his own, and is a miracle of freedom from all author’s jealousy and all suspicion. I fear that the Casaubon-tints are not quite foreign to my own mental complexion”.

[The essayist put forward the idea of where the name comes from, and since this real Mr. Casaubon was the opposite of Eliot's Casaubon, in that Isaac Casaubon was everything that Eliot's Casaubon wished to be, making for an interesting ironical play, if the essayist is right.]

The choice of the name Casaubon for her character is not commented on in her extant writings. Like her Mr Casaubon, the Elizabethan Isaac Casaubon was a theological and classical scholar; unlike his fictional namesake, Isaac published many scholarly works of exegesis and was what Middlemarch’s Mr Casaubon aspired in vain to be, namely an internationally acclaimed scholar (his contemporary Joseph Scaliger described him as “the most learned man alive”). A subtle and not completely unsympathetic irony is observable in George Eliot’s gift of the name to her troubled character.

-- Rosemary Ashton at The Times Literary Supplement

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Stray Cats

There’s Whitey. Out in the cold and wet. She still comes around. She does look a lot thinner.

What am I supposed to do about it?

I wonder if Orangey is still up and about. I haven’t seen her in a long time.

Midnight Snack

Pizza probably wasn't a good idea at eleven o'clock at night, even if it is only frozen pizza, that French bread pizza. But I was hunger, and nothing else remotely interested me. Well, that's not entirely true. I still have some of those white powdered donuts left, but I felt a little inundated by sweets. I am thinking about getting those donuts now, though, and maybe popping open a coke. I didn't have a coke with the pizza.

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I got the donuts and coke. How good are my chances not to throw up tonight, do you think?