Come Writers & Critics Who Prophesize With Your Pen
“Buckets of rain, buckets of tears, got all them buckets comin’ out of my ears.” Listening to Bob Dylan on the subway into work this morning (as it appropriately was pouring buckets of rain), I was instantly transported back to fall 2004 when I first truly took the time to set aside Blonde on Blonde and listen. Music, like smells, seems so closely tied with memory. In my ears, I am 19 years old again and writing with Robin at the Grey Dog, believing we could take over the world with the combined power of our prose and charm, hearing “Sara” come in on over the loudspeakers and pretending I’m a “Scorpio sphinx in a calico dress”, forgetting for the moment that I hate my given name.
Such is the power of images and song. The opening credits of Watchmen are stuck in my brain. Tonight Sir Gay are going to try and catch a screening after work. He hasn’t read it but has been interested since I made him watch the trailer repeatedly at Bear’s shore house when it came out last summer and I would like to see the movie again from a more comfortable distance (that is, not 15 feet away). I also wonder if I’ll find the violence slightly more palatable when it’s not DIRECTLY IN MY FACE. I will admit that gore bothers me, but only on living people. Torture porn movies like the Saw series? Make me ill. (Over the top gore doesn’t bother me much in movies like Kill Bill Vol. I.) Hordes upon hordes of dead mutilated bodies? Totally chill. (Dead people don’t bother me.)
Gore in print mediums like comic books and prose novels is less bothersome to me (I am glad I read WATCHMEN before I saw it; I knew when to avert my eyes!) and I think it’s the dimension of sound in movies that grosses me out. Wet, meaty sounds? Crunchy, breaking noises? Ew. Ew. The human body aurally reduced to food makes me nauseated. My gore threshold has risen over the years; I can watch bodies explode, brains dribble out, heads get cut off, etc. but I still have an enormous problem with knives. Knives make me nervous. Even if knife-violence is not portrayed onscreen, I’ll still hide behind my eyes, cringing with sympathetic pain. Hitchcock’s shower scene in Psycho must have made a huge impression on me as a kid. Or it might come back to the human-body-as-meat thing.
Watched WALL·E with Sofa yesterday and sobbed like a baby in my shrimp lo-mein. Again. (Unlike other movies that make me cry, I seem to cry more when I rewatch this.) I am more easily moved to emotion in films than in books because of the sound dimension. Music combined with images will make me choke up without fail, even if the movie isn’t particularly good (I think WALL·E is excellent, of course). I am easily emotionally manipulated: put on a sentimental song and some heartwrenching images and like clockwork the tears will come. However, words are far less likely to induce the same reaction, so when a book does make me cry, it’s a big deal. Thus far the only books to make me cry have been Marcus Zusak’s THE BOOK THIEF and Beverly Cleary’s RAMONA AND HER MOTHER.
Back to reading this manuscript for El Jefe.
