sympathy for the devil

11.20.02 @ 10:42 p.m.

Haaaaggghhhh, it's fucking COLD here. And my legs feel all funny and stiff and sore from sitting for two and a half hours in stupid wooden desk-chair thingies in a lecture hall.

In other words, I just had a Shakespeare class movie night.

Don't get me wrong, I'm psyched as all hell. It was cool, even though I've seen Fight Club half a dozen times and I started to get really really bored, but it was important for me to watch it again having just (almost, still about a scene left but I know generally what happens) read Coriolanus. All the stuff about homosocial bonds. It's great, there's such a great connection. There's this nonsexual male-male bond in Fight Club between Brad Pitt and Edward Norton that you rarely see in films, and yet there is a sexuality there.

What did we learn today? Violence is sexy. It is. Old school battle, swords and blood and mud and men grappling, there's a huge sexual undercurrent there. (Let alone my own ruminations that a lot of violence consists of sticking something long and firm into something squishy and wet.) I mean, there are two places where it's okay for men to touch, at least in today's society. The sports field and the battle field. Coriolanus is only happy on the battle field where he can get all slippery with blood and wrassle with the only man he esteems, his enemy Tullus Aufidius. Strong hate easily moves into strong love, at least in literature. Thus we get the most homoerotic scene in all of Shakespeare which probably tells you why you rarely see Coriolanus staged today. It's hard to do. You've got the crucial scene between Aufidius and Coriolanus which makes modern people vaguely uncomfortable (there was no concept of sexual orientation in Elizabethan society; there was no word for homosexual) and there's the scenes between Coriolanus and his wife, Virgilia, which people desperately want to be romantic but that's just not possible. They don't work, not at all.

Then there's this amazing closeness between Edward Norton and Brad Pitt in Fight Club. It's... amazing, really. I never saw it before, how hurt Norton's character is when Tyler betrays him; rather, when Tyler doesn't see the relationship the way Norton's character does. I am Jack's broken heart. That's actually a line in the movie. Coriolanus has a conspicuously absent father, and once you see that you start seeing substitute fathers everywhere (just as in Lear there is no mothers and yet there are potential mothers everywhere; a psychoanalyst's dream, most Shakespearean tragedy characters). I was struck by the scene after Pitt's character crashes the car over the rail and Norton's character is lying in bed listening to Tyler's dream of the world. Tyler stands, ruffles Norton's hair and says "Feel better, champ." If that's not a fatherly sentiment, I don't know what is. I'm just...

I think I know why I love this class so damn much. I always walk away feeling... enlightened. Like some brilliant beam of knowledge has been shot at me and suddenly everything makes so much sense. I've never ever had anyone be able to do this to me, which might explain why I sometimes feel half in love with my teacher. I just idolize him. That's what it is. I want to be that cool, that smart, to be able to make these connections all the time, maybe without his help. Holy fuck, I'm going to cry if I'm not careful. I'm just so full of I don't even know what. The warm glow of knowing something that's just fascinating, at least to me. A new and interesting perspective on things.

I laughed myself silly when I read Act 4 Scene 5 of Coriolanus although I saw it seriously enough in class. My natural melodrama made me play everything out in my head at it's most absurd extreme. That's partly colored by my views on the world. Everything is so absurd and odd in my mind that it's funny. This is really weird for me since I take everything that directly involves me so seriously. I'm so shy... maybe being aware of the folly in the world makes me scared to exhibit some of what I mock quietly all the time? Where does that get me? Nowhere fast, really. I never take risks and I always regret it.

I think I'm taking a big risk by throwing Journalism away. But, like my literary idol Elizabeth Bennet, I am determined to act in a manner that will constitute my own happiness. I might be thinking in the short term and that can't be good, but when I think rationally, I don't want to be a journalist. I don't like people, I don't like talking to people I don't know. What are the two things that make me inclined to journalism? Three things, actually? A) A love of writing. B) A love of radio. I've been on the radio twice, three times come December, and good god, it's so much fun. I harbor secret dreams of working as an NPR newsreader. Finally, there's C) my much neglected love of photography. I admire quality work, I fantasize about being a sixties rock photographer (I'd like to have been in Henry Diltz shoes), but I just don't get to take pictures very often. For one thing, I don't have a camera, but my dad is hinting around that I might get one for Christmas since my crappy APS camera just died on me last Spring Break (with forty fucking pictures of my best friends in the world lost irretreviabley in it. Fucking piece of shit) and I don't have any other camera.

It's a bad idea to dwell on things like that right now. Everything is more right now. Lovely and brilliant. But also painful and angering. I don't know what's going on with me. That little shot of enlightenment, I don't know.

Just so you know, I'm not on anything. Except maybe a little caffeine. I drank a Pepsi and ate a king size bag of peanut M&Ms during the movie.

I'm a bit proud of myself. I gathered up enough courage to talk to a couple of guys from my class on the way out of the movie. Okay, so part of that was motivated by me not wanting to walk the entire way back to the dorms alone. Ha, the guy I walked with, he lives in the same building we have class in! Half the building is the Psych department, half is residence halls.

Jessica wrote me and asked why I never got together with S-. Haha. Well, let's see, we have nothing to talk about besides the Beatles, I'm painfully shy, and let's not even bring up self esteem issues with how I think I look. Admittedly, my haircut makes me feel extraordinarily better about myself. Long long hair was not quite as flattering as how I have it now, even if my friends don't see much difference. All that matters is that it makes me feel so much better about how I look.

Oh man, I need to use my big headphones. Sympathy for the Devil is a song I just have to play LOUD and it's after 11, quiet hours here. Not that anyone pays any fucking attention to that. It's nice to listen to songs that I love love love when I'm still a little on this weird emotional thing. Well, I'm starting to drift back down to my normal self, but I still feel so good when I have this class. No class has ever compared and I can't begin to imagine how one can in the future. Enough gushing, enough enough! I'm strongly tempted to type out Act 4, Scene 5 of Coriolanus... Well, I'll link to Yahoo's online version if anyone cares. Coriolanus, Act 4, Scene 5 Go down to where Aufidius enters.

A classmate of mine brought up the idea that the whole bit of "What is your name, sir?" could be played kind of flirty, considering the later speech by Aufidius. I wish I could get inflection through type. Imagine it as teasing. "Are you sure you don't know me?"

Then there's all this (keep in mind that up to this point they had been bitter enemies on the battlefield, where they got all slick with blood and wrassled around):

Aufidius:
O, Martius, Martius! [Saunders suggested it sounds almost like a verbal caress]
Each word thou hast spoke hath weeded from my heart
A root of ancient envy. [You had me at "Hello."] If Jupiter
Should from yond cloud speak divine things
And say ''Tis true', I'd not believe them more
Than thee, all-noble Martius. Let me twine
Mine arms around that body whereagainst
My grained ash an hundred times hath broke
And scarred the moon with splinters. [Let me put my arms around the body which I've broken my phallic symbol against so many times!]
[They embrace... but when do they separate?]
Here I clip [embrace]
The anvil of my sword, and do contest
As hotly and as nobly with thy love
As ever in ambitious strength I did
Contend against thy valour. Know thou first,
I loved the maid I married; never man
Sighed truer breath. But that I see thee here,
Thou noble thing, more dances my rapt heart
Than when I first my wedded mistress saw
Bestride my threshold. [Whoa nelly. See any reason why modern directors might be hesitant with this one?]...

...Thou hast beat me out
Twelve several times, and I have nightly since
Dreamt of encounters 'twixt thyself and me-
We have been down together in my sleep,
Unbuckling helms, fisting each other's throat-
And waked half dead with nothing. [Saunders suggested that 'waked half dead' suggests that Aufidius is having wet dreams about battle.]

So this made me all silly this afternoon until I deluded myself that I'd actually talk about it in class but I clammed up as usual. So I have to spout out here in what may be the LONGEST ENTRY EVER. Muahaha. More's the fool you if you read the whole thing. *grin*

PS--Isn't it interesting that sometime between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries that men lost the ability to say "Love" to each other? Hmmm.

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Previously

fuck it @ 08.01.05
fanciful imaginary sea voyages to come @ 07.20.05
*dies* @ 07.19.05
more ootp @ 07.17.05
harry potter: driving our children into devil worship @ 07.17.05