hello darlings, hope all is well. i'm living deliciously, these days - i worked all morning grading and then came home and promptly took a two hour nap. last night i did my laundry and painted my nails and watched possession (1981), with isabelle adjani, possibly the most gorgeous woman ever to live on this green earth. movie was weird! i enjoyed it but i've been puzzling through it all day. extended divorce metaphor in which everyone is being surveilled right next to the berlin wall, no one acts reasonably, and the minds of others are ultimately unknowable. also your wife miscarries a demon egg thing in the berlin subway, creates a horrifical meat-creature out of the remains of several men that she's violently murdered, somehow duplicates herself into a gentle and submissive kindergarten teacher (male fantasies, male fantasies! she is gentle and eager and sexually available without presenting the kind of threat of the actual wife i.e. real life and the threat of being cuckolded), and eventually replaces you with said terrifying meat-creature, which has become a perfect replica of you (but, of course, more ruthless and decisive and violent). idk - i kind of read the movie as a very very male cry for help - it's a movie completely about the fear of emasculation at the hands of your wife. isabelle adjani delivers an insane performance, but i hesitate to consider it in any way feminist. it's a completely regressive text, i think. i do think it's incredibly funny that mark is a spy, though. and the pink socks! love heinrich, too. though i did watch it right before going to bed and then i had really upsetting dreams about being raped and woke up sweaty and freaked out. but that might have been the melatonin.
it's so confusing sometimes to be a girl
speaking of possession - over the late summer / early fall i read a.s. byatt's possession, which i adored. sex and obsession and a lot of time spent trawling through musty old archives in search of something that no one else really cares about or understands. the thing for me is the way byatt captures the complete hijacking of the soul -- when you find something interesting, some project or idea, and it takes you over completely for the love of the thing -- rather than some outside motive. also, i just love the victorians. not the poetry at all, ironically, but i read middlemarch and tess of the d'urbervilles and jude the obscure and north and south over the course of 2024 and just was captivated. (i hated middlemarch, which made my dad sad). maybe it's just that i've always found repression interesting, as someone who is not at all repressed (i can't shut the fuck up!). maybe it's why i keep going out with catholics. who knows! maybe i just want someone to have complicated feelings about me.
anyways: things i have been thinking about today.
i should probably write more fully about my year of victoriana at some point. maybe tomorrow's entry. i'm going to bed now. cheers and i love you. don't show this to my parents.
next.