I tried to use my enclosure link to the website The Cunning Realist and made a mess of things. It has nothing to do with Steve Zissou ( and the life aquatic...), but that's the way I remember stuff: Bill Murray films as mnemonic devices.
(I watched Steve Zissou: The Life Aquatic again. I cannot really tell you why this is a significant event in my life. All of Bill Murray's films seem to be fine sandpapers that smooth out some existential rough edges... of which I have many.
I have spoken of Broken Flowers of 2005 frequently, a film whose first 15 to 20 minutes I missed and found the experience without the introduction and setting the scene to be a much more engaging experience than I usually have with films. I sort of became unusually involved as I had to figure out what was the story line, and as it became clear, it was as if I were walking through the film next to Bill Murray.)
So I hope all is back to normal, and here is the post: ( ...and may Steve be with you!)
http://cunningrealist.blogspot.com/2009/09/great-lull.html
Wednesday, September 02, 2009
The Great Lull
While Rod Dreher emphasized the "boredom" angle in his kind link to this post, I liked this observation by Haffner (my bolds):
A generation of young Germans had become accustomed to having the entire content of their lives delivered gratis, so to speak, by the public sphere, all the raw material for their deeper emotions, for love and hate, joy and sorrow, but also all their sensations and thrills -- accompanied though they might be by poverty, hunger, death, chaos, and peril. Now that these deliveries suddenly ceased, people were left helpless, impoverished, robbed, and disappointed. They had never learned to live from within themselves, how to make an ordinary private life great, beautiful, and worthwhile, how to enjoy it and make it interesting. So they regarded the end of the political tension and the return of private liberty not as a gift, but as a deprivation.
What is the state of Americans' interior lives right now? The past fifteen years have featured the following in rapid succession: a stock market bubble and crash, a bitterly contested presidential election, 9/11, anthrax attacks, the invasion of Afghanistan, war in Iraq, a housing bubble and national binge followed by economic collapse, and a historic presidential election. For a decade and a half there's been a series of national obsessions, an unprecedented, formative, near-constant stream of "raw material" from the "public sphere."
With the frenzy over the financial market collapse now fading, those deliveries, as Haffner put it, have suddenly ceased. Throw in a materialist culture and a consumer who can't afford toys anymore, and you've got a lot of people without an interior life to fall back on. Giddy chatter about revolution and fond memories of war and torture beat sitting quietly in a room wondering who you are.
(I watched Steve Zissou: The Life Aquatic again. I cannot really tell you why this is a significant event in my life. All of Bill Murray's films seem to be fine sandpapers that smooth out some existential rough edges... of which I have many.
I have spoken of Broken Flowers of 2005 frequently, a film whose first 15 to 20 minutes I missed and found the experience without the introduction and setting the scene to be a much more engaging experience than I usually have with films. I sort of became unusually involved as I had to figure out what was the story line, and as it became clear, it was as if I were walking through the film next to Bill Murray.)
So I hope all is back to normal, and here is the post: ( ...and may Steve be with you!)
http://cunningrealist.blogspot.com/2009/09/great-lull.html
Wednesday, September 02, 2009
The Great Lull
While Rod Dreher emphasized the "boredom" angle in his kind link to this post, I liked this observation by Haffner (my bolds):
A generation of young Germans had become accustomed to having the entire content of their lives delivered gratis, so to speak, by the public sphere, all the raw material for their deeper emotions, for love and hate, joy and sorrow, but also all their sensations and thrills -- accompanied though they might be by poverty, hunger, death, chaos, and peril. Now that these deliveries suddenly ceased, people were left helpless, impoverished, robbed, and disappointed. They had never learned to live from within themselves, how to make an ordinary private life great, beautiful, and worthwhile, how to enjoy it and make it interesting. So they regarded the end of the political tension and the return of private liberty not as a gift, but as a deprivation.
What is the state of Americans' interior lives right now? The past fifteen years have featured the following in rapid succession: a stock market bubble and crash, a bitterly contested presidential election, 9/11, anthrax attacks, the invasion of Afghanistan, war in Iraq, a housing bubble and national binge followed by economic collapse, and a historic presidential election. For a decade and a half there's been a series of national obsessions, an unprecedented, formative, near-constant stream of "raw material" from the "public sphere."
With the frenzy over the financial market collapse now fading, those deliveries, as Haffner put it, have suddenly ceased. Throw in a materialist culture and a consumer who can't afford toys anymore, and you've got a lot of people without an interior life to fall back on. Giddy chatter about revolution and fond memories of war and torture beat sitting quietly in a room wondering who you are.
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