Yes, the thought did occur to me to turn this into an April Fool’s joke. No, I did not succumb to temptation. Yes, I would like a gold star for my effort.
Books
I realise my father has never once held my hand, and some part of me wants Kinsella to let me go so I won’t have to feel this.
‘Come or don’t come’, the music seemed to say. ‘I love you and my love is enough.’
Your world’ll just eat her up.
Try I will; no harm in trying:
wonder ‘tis how little mirth
Keeps the bones of man from lying
On the bed of earth.
Enjoy the light, mourn the light, laugh the light, cry the light.
The century abandoned me at dusk.
loneliness collected me with such force I felt like I had been winded
I would not think to touch the sky with two arms
Returning the Sword to the Stone
reading the news
needing the ruse
…
buffering is seeing
suffering is being
…
numinous light
luminous night
Movies
[what an… experience.]
It’s that thing when you’re with someone, and you love them and they know it, and they love you and you know it… but it’s a party… and you’re both talking to other people, and you’re laughing and shining… and you look across the room and catch each other’s eyes… but – but not because you’re possessive, or it’s precisely sexual… but because… that is your person in this life. And it’s funny and sad, but only because this life will end, and it’s this secret world that exists right there in public, unnoticed, that no one else knows about.
Change moves in spirals, not circles. For example, the sun goes up and then it goes down. But everytime that happens, what do you get? You get a new day. You get a new one. When you breathe, you inhale and you exhale, but every single time that you do that you're a little bit different then the one before.
And memories. I have those too, you know. Even if it was a dream.
[I fully didn’t recognise Henry Cavill at all]
It’s strange because it doesn’t exist as a film, and yet it does. Right? It exists here for me and exists here. So what you’re doing is not bringing Shirkers back to life but giving it an afterlife and back to us.
My father told me we was all born of blood and tribulation, and so then too was our great city. But for those of us what lived and died in them furious days, it was like everything we knew was mightily swept away. And no matter what they did to build this city up again... for the rest of time... it would be like no one ever knew we was even here.
History
I’m still processing Gangs of New York, I think, but here’s an article for food for thought on the whitewashing of the Draft Riots. Interestingly, or tellingly, or thought emojily, most of the mainstream criticism of this film seems to come from ‘they do such bad accents’, even though it’s literally explained that some of the accents aren’t meant to be Irish but a historical mix.
Humour
In honour of the date, here’s my favourite April Fools joke - no, not the spaghetti trees (although that was a good ‘un) but San Serriffe, that semi-colonial (ha!) island nation northeast of the Seychelles.