So my DVD of Until the End of the World has arrived.
Because of travel plans over the next two weeks, I’m saving my first viewing until the week between xmas and new year’s. I’ve waited this long, I can wait a little longer.
My excitement over this film’s re-release is in several parts.
1 / The circumstance of my first viewing
I saw it in a theater in Edinburgh the summer of 1992, when I was living in Scotland during a semester abroad in college. I was visiting an old friend who now lived there. We came out of the theater well after midnight. It had rained but now the sky was painfully clear, and shards of the Moon flickered in every stark puddle. But the real world was a dream and only the movie seemed real.
For the next few hours, beneath backlit castles, black towers, and a solstice sky that never quite got dark, we walked the city streets that bustled even in the middle of the crepuscular night, lost in our heated discussions and divagations. It possessed us both for days afterwards.
(And I instantly regretted not going back to see it again as soon as possible. By the time I returned to the States, it was no longer playing in the theaters there, and I had to wait what felt like a very long time for it to appear in the video stores.)
2 / The difficulty of finding it to rent, and its eventual, almost complete, vanishing act
I rented it on VHS many times over the next few years, but it rapidly grew more and more rare. And I never managed to buy a copy. So, soon, it became even more dreamlike than it already was.
3 / The soundtrack
I can’t even.
4 / The story itself
I instantly loved the rambling mystery of it, and how the story turned suddenly several times until I couldn’t quite classify it anymore. I found this sort of slightly surreal, polyphonic, even “slipstream,” storytelling extremely compelling. I still do, of course — but back then, I’d certainly never before seen a movie that was such a direct hit to so many of my preoccupations.
5 / The fact of not having seen it for a quarter century
I freely admit that the brute fact of its scarcity has caused its emotional value to skyrocket. Now that I’ve shelled out for the DVD, I have already been cautiously entertaining the grim possibility that the Suck Fairy will have visited its malign magic up on it, and after feverishly ripping open the case, I’ll find myself watching a rambling, messy piece of shit with mounting annoyance, irritation, betrayal, rage, nausea…
But sometimes, I still think I can play whole scenes in my head as if I had just watched it yesterday, and I really want to see how much of it is Wim Wender’s dream and how much of it is mine.
Last, next.
62: Shenandoah (Oak)
63: Shenandoah (Maple)
At more or less this moment, 30 years ago, I walked into Chris & Dave’s dorm room to see who was heading over to the Caf for dinner. They were the only ones on our floor with a TV in their room.
A crowd had gathered, watching the news.
The Berlin Wall.
While I’ve continued to move slowly through several collections, everything unfinished last month remains unfinished. My reading has been dominated by nonfiction, and some new work commitments have begun to take up much more of my time.
Both the nonfiction and the work will continue through the winter, so I’m putting this project on hold until the new year.
Last, next.
61: Shenandoah (Birch)
62: Shenandoah (Oak)
I didn’t finish anything in September, since most of my reading time was devoted to my (I think) 19th re-read of Lord of the Rings. As I have long known, autumn for me is often a time to revisit old texts, like having a familiar TV show or favorite album on in the background while you’re working.
I wrote a haiku, and twenty-eight years later, I finally published it.
(Thanks to @Patti for blowing her own horn, thereby drawing my attention to the publication.)
The Path to Nothing
Gilbert Seldes, The Stammering Century:
But it is almost impossible to believe that the wholly undisciplined followers of New Thought could understand or seriously practice the discipline of Yoga. […] For the most part, those who practiced it had not the faintest intention of giving up the world. Yoga was for them a mystic way of renouncing whatever was irritating and preserving whatever was pleasing. It was an elaborate game of pretense by which noisy people went into silence and distracted people imagined they were concentrating. The glamour of renunciation suffused the picture which they had of themselves. Actually nothing was renounced and whatever was desired was lifted to a transcendantal plane where it could be enjoyed a hundred-fold. No doubt the delusion was as effective as the actuality might have been. One fancies oneself becoming ageless and deathless, and full of perfection, sinking into eternal nothingness. And if, in fact, one was only resting a little and sinking into a perfumed bath the result was about the same. For Yoga had given a reason beyond reason. It had, in a strange way, transfigured the commonplaces of life. One was lifted successively to higher and higher planes of being, not knowing exactly where they were, but vaguely satisfied because they were higher. The little irritations of the world fell away. One was alone with the mysterious spirit and, breathing in a refined way, one returned to conquer the world.
I’ve been reassessing my “Finished” program, and I think it’s time to make a few changes.
First, I’ve long been aware that I tend to re-read books in the fall more than I read new books, so I am anticipating a decrease in my willingness to tackle new work. I’ll still be reading some new/unfinished things, but not at the expense of re-reads.
Also, I feel as though I have achieved the root reason for doing this: my poetry TBR shelf is now just over a third of what it was at the end of 2018.
And instead of weekly updates, I’ll be going back to a monthly update, like I did in April. So this will be the last update until the end of September.
Another week with nothing finished. I’m mired in several longer things, as well as the arrival of two new books, a Collected and a very large Selected.
Nothing. This has been a bad week — I had an allergic reaction to all of the poetry I was trying to read. Apparently there was a reason why they’d been lying around only partially-finished: I simply disliked them. Maybe next week will be better…
Last, next.
59: Mile Marker (Stars)
60: MN Yellow
I’m this close to finishing a few books, but I haven’t wanted to rush them, and I’ve had so many distractions…
Last, next.
58: Mile Marker (Arrow)
59: Mile Marker (Stars)
Nothing. I didn’t pick up a book of poetry except to move it out of the way as I reached for something else.
I started this “Finished” experiment on the last day of 2018, and I just realized we’re approaching halfway through the year, so it seems appropriate to have a midway check-in.
I have logged 41 poetry books since the week starting on the last day of 2018, and that number would be higher if I included the four or five books I abandoned. The initial “To Be Read” shelf held just under seventy books, so you’d be forgiven if you thought this meant I’d managed to complete well over half of all the books on my TBR shelf.
But these numbers don’t tell the whole story. I’ve bought 17 additional books of poetry this year, so I still have (consults a calculator…) almost 45 unfinished (or unstarted) books waiting for me to get around to them. I’ll never cross the finish line if it keeps receding before me (said every bookworm ever).
However, I consider this experiment a complete success so far. It has encouraged me to actively engage in reading poetry almost every day, and it’s also made me realize just how difficult it can be to do something you love. If I struggle to find time to read poetry, then how much harder is it for people with a far more casual relationship to it?
It’s much easier to find the time for things we’re addicted to rather than for the things we love.
For now, I will continue to post weekly updates, but I may choose to go monthly for August or September, and give myself a chance to focus on a few more longer books (like Laura Kasischke’s collected poems, or Geoffrey Hill and JH Prynne’s enormous collected doorstops).
And at this point, I’m definitely planning to take this through to the end of the year. And beyond? We’ll see.
