too zero one won!

2011: reading list

mario vargos llosa - 'the notebooks of don rigoberto'

i loved this book. my notes were as follows:

erotic cat fantasy, skin dipped in honey crawling with kittens licking with rough tongue files. the stepson obsessed with egon schiele: his models; their poses; his ladder; his mirror; his dislike of his thumbs.

an amazing form of storytelling! provoked by a dream, a theme, a character, a reference, don rigoberto's wife lucrecia would recount a story, of fantasies and sexual encounters.. erotic and filled with quotes from his notebook, historical and magical characters alongside whom he is transported, into his wife's tales, into his own fantasies..

in reading this i found that a night's entertainment can very well be a book. pages post tea time, before bedtime, interspersed with bath time. in the mornings i think about the dreams i had. at night i can read.

Films

have just seen danny boyle's 127 hours at the cinema.

i liked: the canyons
the style: jumpy. feels like a number over 2000.
the drama made me cry, for 3 seconds, without my knowing

altogether more bizarre than seeing a man cut off his own arm with a pen knife, was burlesque. it was amusing to imagine the cast were all smoking crack throughout filming. particularly the scene where cher, upon returning from a meeting with her bank manager, spends what feels like a lifetime trying to articulate the word for 'name plate'.

'he spent the whole time playing with that little thing.. you know that little thing.. the thing on the desk.. the long thing on the desk, wooden...' 'name plate?' 'yeah.. name plate'

(would like to see this remade with jackie stallone.)