Procrastination is the Name of the Game

So, I am procrastinating! I have a paper due on thursday, and then one on the ninth, and one on the tenth. On the bright side, I only have two finals.

So I bought even more films, really randomly, at a strange little store in my hometown. It was ostensibly a music store (instruments) but there were only a handful of cheap guitars, some percussion instruments and the rock band video game. In addition there was a tub of movies (quite a mixed bag) selling for three dollars a film. I went for the Dreamers, Gangs of New York, Dogville, Ghost World, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The Gondry/Kauffman collab was quite good, much better than I remembered it when I saw it in 2004. I think it may be Kauffman's best film, and it really whetted my appetite for Synecdoche, New York, which I've been putting off.

I've also been putting off my comp-lit paper. Really, it should be quite simple, 3 pages on the book of Job, 3 on Moby Dick and two pages of summing up. I haven't written a compare/contrast sice middle school. And what can I do- talk about how Biblical narrative is wonderfully compact and Melville is wonderfully discursive. Of course! The book of Job is mighty heavy on the lonnnnnng monologue poems (indeed there was an awfully pretentious Portuguese film I saw that staged it as such) likewise Moby Dick has similar long Shakespearean goings ons.

So perhaps I should write on the spoken words of the character taking precidence over the omniscient narrative voice. (Forgive my spelling but this computer has no spell check.) Of course, Melville's work throws the whole concept of a stable narrator into question, with Ishmael transforming himself from a jocular young intellectual cum semen (sorry, my spellcheck you know) into a philosopher, cetologist, and into other characters. (Oh my, I just put on a forty minute version of Terry Riley's "In C" I'm so excited,) Similarly the book of Job strains the limits of narrative voice by giving its god an extended monologue. Indeed, both works are focused upon a synthesis of the poetic with psychology of an individual. In both texts the individual is subsumed by the awesome and absurd might of reality and nature, in Job it is merely through description, and in Moby Dick it is through the course of the narrative. So there we go- both glorify and elevate the individual voice through poetry, and both quash this elevation by bringing in the stark and unfathomable terror of the world. I would then pursue how this gets done, how they manage to exalt, and then humble.

Forgive the diversity of these mental perambulations, you were warned by the magnificently apt and correct title.