Goodbye, Philip Roth. Goodbye, Kinski. All of Me.

--Bought dvds:

Nostalgia value:
Mr Blandings Builds His Dream House, a film I watched several times with my father when I was young.

Arsenic and Old Lace. I played Mortimer in a HS production. What was that, fourteen years ago? And I remember so much of it clearly. The stage; the color of the set walls; the faces of performers, of the audience.

I can remember the way I felt, not just those nights, but the days and nights around them; I can put together almost my whole life through memories of feelings.

And is a memory of a feeling different than a feeling itself?

--And The Human Stain. I’ve never liked Nicole Kidman’s nose but she seems a good performer.

This is however not her finest hour and forty minutes. Her performance is overly mannered, completely intellectualized; she’s been lead to believe that if she talks in a low voice and blows cigarette smoke at fifteen second intervals, she’s acting.

Think again.

--A non-compelling film; a film full of heavy handed literary references; a reminder, like The Dying Animal, that Roth is dated, no matter how he tries to keep up; he has been dated for years, decades really.

--It has been a warm day. A butterfly flew alongside me for fifteen or twenty steps of my run.

It reminded me of the last scene of the Kinski documentary, a documentary which lays him open, a madman, a near monster, a spoiled genius, and yet he stands there in the jungle with a childish smile on his face, a butterfly floating around him, settling and lifting and settling again, as if it cannot leave him, as if it is drawn to some sweetness beneath the cracks in his flesh and the bile in his heart.

As if it means to tell us that he is good.

--Am I good?

If you saw me in the sun today, making long strides, the butterfly beside me, if you were witness to that illusion, you’d think: yes.

--And I recognize that I’ve made sort of screeching stop to the heavy dating.

I ask myself: why?
I ask myself: did you get tired?
Or was it because you found this new girl?
Or did you find this new girl because you were tired?

I tell myself: you did not invent the new girl.
She invented herself.
If you were set on such an invention, you would have used somebody else.

--And I think of how easy it is to focus on some part of the person and not the whole.

I recognize in most girls when they come at me that they are purposefully building blinds spots in their eyes, that there are scars about which she will not ask, histories she does not want to know.

I tell myself: She’ll fixate on and love some part of you.
I tell myself: But there is some part of you that she avoids which may eventually offset that love.

I don’t mean the new girl. Perhaps I’ve recognized something quite opposite in her. Maybe she seems to me unblinking. Maybe that's what I like.

But I just mean any girl. And her even, or one like her.

--And I think: if it is going to be proper, anything you are going to have with any girl, she must really see you first.

I must make her see me.
All of me.

Without the butterfly.