thoughts/something/open thread

1. Phil wrote, quite a long time ago, but it's just appearing now, about Brandon Shimoda's Hydra Medusa: Dreaming the Living and the Dead: On Brandon Shimoda’s Hydra Medusa (poetrynw.org)

"It is as if the world were being fed into dreams or the dreams fed outward."

2. As a mini-project, I am watching some Eric Rohmer movies after my Tuesday night class (I can never go to sleep after those night classes!), and I don't know a thing:

What's the conversation around his work? Although I love Godard and anything I've seen of Varda, I really don't know Rohmer. The ones I have looked at so far are:

A Tale of Autumn 

&

A Tale of Springtime

I like the settings, of course; they even remind me of what may be one of the most wonderful movies of all time (thank you Andrea Rexilius for telling me to watch it): 

Céline and Julie Go Boating

and I like the clothes of the characters (btw: it's very French bougee, white mostly, cis-het, etc.)--

but I cannot figure out what the films are saying.

I might be watching out of order, right? Perhaps I should look at his early work. These are like 1989-92ish. They remind me of hanging with some of my mom's friends. They remind me of clothes from the Gap and people (not me) with fancy downtown-ish/Lincoln Park apartments. They remind me of how I had, in 1990, a British and an Italian penpal. So glamorous.

But that's just my own soup.

What's Rohmer doing? Is he commenting on rom-com as a space in which affect emerges, a set of rooms with irritations and furniture? Is rom-com just a matter of geometry? (A thought here for when della watson--are you reading this, della?--had a project that was sort of Conceptual and sort of Lyric and sort of Speculative: she'd mentally and linguistically "pair" people in her real observations by putting them on a page, in an imagined situation/in a "real" text . . . she read these aloud once at a coffee shop, probably around 2004; I think she also read aloud work from writers in spaces contained in Bush Jr.'s "axis of evil" . . .). Was that geometry? Is all rom-com just geometry?

Is comedy just a matter of geometry?

3. If you have Rohmer info (I'm lazy and drowning in school work; I didn't look him up at all!), tell me.

If you have news/writing/reading/music/movies info/whatever, comment here, or email me and I'll throw it in.

Let's feed it all into our dreams.