(Caveat: Self is not going to discuss yesterday’s excruciating US loss to Ghana in the World Cup knock-out round! Noooo!)
She saw a chees-y movie. This one was on the Syfy Channel and was called “Suprecroc vs. Dinogator.” Or was it “Dinogator vs. Supercroc”? Never mind. All dear blog readers need to know is that it was produced by Roger “King of the B Movies” Corman and that it featured a special guest appearance by the late David Carradine. Oh, and of course: there were gazillions of babes in neon-colored bikinis who were getting chomped up one by one. And a Crocodile Dundee-type of guy dressed in black leather and a black Cowboy hat.
Self also stood in the lobby of the Century 20 and looked at the advertisements for upcoming movies. “Predators” (with Adrian Brody and Laurence Fishburne) is coming July 4th weekend. “Resident Evil” with Milla Jovovich is likewise opening in July. And “Twilight: Eclipse” is showing next weekend. (Did anyone catch Taylor Lautner last night on SNL? He was hi-LA-rious!)
Made Kare-Kare (cheated: used Mama Sita’s Kare-Kare mix). The broth was rather watery, but the meat was falling off the bone, and hubby rated the dish A+. Self thinks the last time she made kari-kari was over 10 years ago.
Bought “Bavarian Emmentaler” cheese from German Haus on Broadway. The owner, an elderly but still quite hale-looking gent, was climbing over the upstairs balcony to fix a sign. His wife, at the cashier’s table, yelled but he paid no mind. She then turned to me and said, “Men!”
Self continued to read Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory, assigned reading almost 30 years ago in a class on the Literature of World War I. She has no memory of this book, at all. But she sees her own twenty-something notes scribbled on the margins. This, as self is sure she doesn’t need to inform dear blog readers, is a very eerie experience. Here is what she reads, on p. 131:
Ernest Parker, miraculously spared while his battalion was all but wiped out on September 16, 1916, says in 1964: “One day … I shall revisit that little undulation in the fields between Gueudecourt and Delville Wood on an early morning in mid-September. There I will give thanks for being spared another fifty years of happy and fruitful life … ” Such leanings towards ritual, such needs for significant journeys and divisions and returns and sacramental moments, must make us skeptical of Bernard Bergonzi’s conclusion: “The dominant movement in the literature of the Great War was … from a myth-dominated to a demythologized world.” No: almost the opposite. In one sense the movement was towards myth, towards a revival of the cultic, the mystical, the sacrificial, the prophetic, the sacramental, and the universally significant. In short, towards fiction.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
