Top Hat

My first Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, and according to the TCM commentary, their best. It really is everything you could hope of old, Depression-era Hollywood. In glamour and elegance - the clothes, music, dancing, interior design - it holds back nothing. The only thing I found really surprising was just how good the plot is. It's a very well constructed, tight, intricate comedy of errors, timed perfectly.

The whole Rogers/Astaire cult is slightly mysterious to me. Fred Astaire doesn't quite look like a leading man - he's short and skinny and looks a little weak in the face - and Ginger Rogers looks more like a leading lady than a dancer. She has a great figure and the Harlow hair and eyebrows, but her dancing is a little stooped (perhaps because Astaire is short?) and, though technically masterful, not as animated as Astaire's.

The funny thing is, I thought she was more convincing in her nonmusical comedy, Vivacious Lady, opposite Jimmy Stewart. There she plays a nightclub queen (= questionable reputation) who falls in love with an awkward young professor (= can't tell his family whom he married). She embraces the bad girl image that goes with the hair and brows, instead of trying to play the prim society girl, and even gets into a hair-pulling, first-throwing catfight with a romantic rival.

Happy New Year!

May 2008 be better than 2007! I would say 48 times better, but when you multiply a negative number you get an even bigger negative number, and the point is I hope 2008 DOESN'T suck.

Something People Wouldn't Guess About Me

One of the questions on a meetup group's questionnaire was: Tell us one thing most people wouldn't guess about you. I couldn't think of anything at the time, so I just put "?," but now, after catching the tail end of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, I came up with a good answer:

I have a weakness for patriotism. Even bare jingoism doesn't make me the least bit cynical, and in fact, I get all melty inside when I hear it.

Unsolved Mystery

A riddle I remembered randomly: how does Superman get his powers back in Superman 2? His mom was very clear on the point that the transformation is irreversible. At least, I would expect there to be an arduous trial of worthiness or sacrifice before he wins back what he threw away so lightly.

It's inexcusable, if you think about it, how the writers of Superman (Mario Puzo? et al?) neglected the perfect invitation to write about one of the most interesting things in the human experience: redemption. In fact it's a creative-writing felony. The only theme in literature that's possibly as interesting as redemption is betrayal, but even that's not nearly as powerful, I think, and it requires a lot more skillful buildup in order to be delivered effectively.

Current Audio

Rolling Stones
Love in Vain

www.meetup.com

Is this pathetic? Have I hit bottom? I discovered this site today while I was trying to research the surfing at Bolsa Chica; a woman at a surf shop last week said that it's a pretty good place for longboarding, but my usual source (surfline) didn't have any location info. Then a google search found that there's a surfing group in the OC that meets up at Bolsa Chica sometimes. Remembering my mom's advice about finding group activities (translation: husbands), I signed myself up for the surf meetup. And to obey my mom even further, I went ahead and signed up for an LA Korean culture and language group.

I'll let you know how it plays out. Assuming I don't end up in a body bag first. Just kidding.

Other activities I need to take up: Greek, Latin (maybe), Shakespeare or other book club, German, politics, cooking, sewing, and French. I may look into the community college for these last 3.

173 Bitches!

Here's the twist: ZERO wrong in reading comp. All 8 wrong answers in logical reasoning, with 6 from one section (section 3). Normally that I would consider that unacceptable, but I made it up in the other sections, and THANK GOD the one I fucked up didn't count!

The South

'Poetry is no less mysterious than the other elements of the orb. A lucky line here and there should not make us think any higher of ourselves, for such lines are the gift of Chance or the Spirit; only the errors are our own.' - JL Borges

'People in their right minds never take pride in their talents.' - Miss Maudie, To Kill a Mockingbird

I always loved that quote from To Kill a Mockingbird, mostly because I had no idea what it meant. What can you take pride in if not your talents? Wealth, birth, or connections? No, that's 500 times more retarded. I think as I get older, I'm starting to understand what it might mean, the foolishness of that vanity. There's something to be said about that divine element (as flimsy as it is in a strictly rational debate) which both Borges and Harper Lee seem to attribute to the thing loosely called "talent." If you abstract or replace "talent" for another virtue that is equally unearned - say, intelligence (or IQ) or good looks - it's very obvious that only an idiot would go around acting better than everyone else on that merit alone. And if talent really is a God-given thing, it's true that we have no right to take pride in them.

But mysticism aside, there's another perfectly good reason why people should not take pride in their talents: often, people are dead wrong about what their talents are, and perhaps their very pride in them blinds them from seeing what needs to be fixed. This is where the Borges quote is illuminating. In artistic endeavors, I have time and time again been completely nonplussed by the auteur's assesment of his or her own work. I think I've written about it before (like when Francis Ford Coppola thinks that "Life without Zoe" is an acceptable thing to spawn upon the world). It's almost like the worst pieces of garbage end up closest to the hearts of their otherwise genius creators.

Borges would say that it's because only are errors are our own.

I also recall a Woody Allen documentary I saw last year (which I may or may not have written about), that must have been made shortly after Hollywood Ending, and before Match Point or Scoop (which I consider a renaissance and a recovery from the stinky depths). Hollywood Ending is easily the WORST Woody Allen movie I've every seen. But in the documentary, Allen modestly talks about how he starts every screenplay thinking that it's going to be brilliant, the next Citizen Kane! - and somehow things take a wrong turn and he ends up somewhat disappointed with the final product. The one exception, he goes on to say, is his latest, Hollywood Ending; that movie translated pretty accurately the vision he had for it, and the jokes worked as he had planned.

!!!

If Woody Allen isn't bullshitting me with this claim, he'd better get on his knees in prayer, and sacrifice a bull in thanks that all his movies DO manage to get fucked up from the original idea.

Anyways. I think what Borges says about poetry is very insightful, and it's interesting to think of his quote in light of his own claim about what his best work is. In the foreword to his collection Artifices, Borges writes that the story called The South is the best in the bunch. To Borges' credit, the story isn't heinous. But it's not superbly remarkable either; it comes out more or less like the other stories in the collection. I was a little puzzled trying to see what it was that he loved so much about it. I didn't think that there was something big I wasn't getting, it just seemed that his ideas in a lot of other stories were far more interesting and novel, and not badly executed.

I did a sparse google search to see if anyone else could figure out why The South was the author's favorite. There's not much out there, but on the strength of what I read, I'm going to venture that Borges loved The South because of it's (faithful?) execution, rather than the concept. One article mentioned something about Borges' personal aesthetic:

'This theory [outlined in "Narrative Art and Magic"] demands symmetries in the storytelling; what Borges calls "inlaid" details ot the text correspond to other details and therefore, in a certain sense, predict or predetermine subsequent events—just as in Voodoo, as Borges says, a pin inserted into a doll in one location kills a person in another. Such plotting eliminates the vagaries of psychology, which Borges has always tried to suppress in his fiction, and calls into relief the premeditated quality of the fiction, emphasizing the author's patterning of events and objects. '

To me this theory says a lot about the basic idea of structure/formalism in the arts. The "vagaries of psychology" is a great way to describe the kind of things that go wrong when an artistic venture tries to escape altogether from the strictures of convention. Conventions are there for a reason; life is random (and meaningless), so art should not be. That doesn't mean that one shouldn't experiment with conventions, but it seems like it's a disastrous act of foolishness to think that one is too good to make use of them.

I think that that is one of the things that is severely wrong with my own creative work: I try to effect too much freedom. My stories (and blog) often do end up becoming this weird, solipsistic, arbitrary psychology warp, and that surely fails to speak to universal concerns. Note to self: less psychology.

My Indie Press

For some reason my head just ran with that cockamamie idea of starting my own literary magazine. I started thinking about how I could secure a successful, if not profitable, circulation. The key seems to be instant accessibility; all popular publications have that "hook" that most higher literature slack, claiming to report things that everyone (or their niche demographic) knows about, is interested in, or in some way has a point of entry into the discussion. Newspapers report the news, and most people try to pretend to know what's going on in the world. Women's magazines report fashion, which all people who wear clothes have to engage in whether they like it or not - and for many, the practice of an activity leads to a presumption of expertise. Everyone knows who the celebrities are. Then there are the "how-to"-type publications, with niche marketing: how to be a parent, how to pick a car, how to invest, how to go on vacation, how to use technology, etc.

What are the popular publications with literary content? Two titles immediately come to mind: The New Yorker and Playboy. Both ride more on other vehicles than their artisticness: the former is popular for its cartoons, and the latter for its prurience. In fact, the New Yorker is hardly the creative publication it often gets credit for (and I can't speak for Playboy because I've never read it); it's true that there are some very high quality pieces in each issue, but most of the contents are essentially news pieces, and I've surely read similar works in other, more straightforwardly news magazines (like Time) in which the quality was just as high - on a creative standard as well as a journalistic standard.

Thus I submit that The New Yorker, the most successful of the literary magazines, owes its popularity and uniqueness to its cartoons. And cartoons, corresponding with what I was claiming above, are one of the easiest "ins" for a reader.

My indie publication likewise needs an easy in. First I'll publish lots of microfiction (200 words or less). Then I'll throw in some fictional news (like the Onion?), perhaps with a horror twist, and tasteful smut.

Unbelievable

I just hacked one version of my personal statement down to the required 500-word limit. Wow!

In other unbelievable news, what an anticlimax for Tila Tequila to pick Bobby over Dani. Bobby is so...blah; an obvious, boring choice. Dani was great: a sharp-dressed, fire-fighting butch lesbian who refuses to talk smack about anyone even when egged on. Plus, you'd never expect a trampy bisexual like Tila Tequila to go for a butch lesbian!

Current Audio

The Black and Whites
Pinball Queen

Sid and Nancy

What is it about fame that makes everyone (almost without exception) squander away its advantages and opportunities, like it was a sacred duty? Fame isn't easy to achieve, and it's often not even preferable to live with, but it does afford certain things that many reasonable people might consider selling out for: financial security, freedom from drudgery, and most of all, the ability to announce to the world "I have something to say!" and have people listen. I recently got my short story rejected from a lit mag, and that got me thinking that I should start up my own indie press, just so I could get my stuff out there and make my writing more than a loner activity. Imagine if I had fame: I wouldn't even have to write to become a writer! Presses would be lined up at my door, throwing ghostwriters at me, and all I'd have to do is talk and talk and slap my name on the cover, and instantly I'm an artiste.

Then I had this thought while watching Sid and Nancy on tv last night: maybe fame is always squandered because it's something that can only be attained by those who are so far gone that it's practically meaningless to them. The mystical interpretation would be that it's God's way of apologizing and making it up to those who will never achieve happiness. The choice between conventional happiness and unconventional glory is ancient and clearly recognized: Achilles is explicitly told, before he chooses to die, that he can have either a glorious death or a fulfilling old age, but not both. It seems to me that Sid Vicious likewise faced the same choice, though it wasn't spelled out to him as such. Let's assume (for argument's sake) that Vicious really WAS the Sex Pistols - nevermind that most of the recordings were done without him, let's say that it was the live spectacle, Vicious most of all, that really captured the imagination of the movement. What were the characteristics that made Vicious iconic? In a nutshell, it was that he sincerely didn't give a fuck. He was the dregs of society; he had no ambitions and hence no desire to ingratiate himself to bosses or clients or coworkers or managers, or even family and friends; he was perfectly content to starve in a gutter and be strung out 24/7 - which, I think it's not too bold to say, most of us would NOT be willing to do. In his case, that very attitude was capitalized upon as the spirit of punk, but I think it can also be generalized as the spirit of nonconformity that makes many of the artists and innovators of history so effective. Without that attitude, people (like me) would be too afraid to step out of the safety, respectability, and happiness of conventional life; the bad part of that is we'll never have anything extraordinary to say, while the good part of it is we also won't live in garbage, crawl around on broken glass, cut outselves with razors, or set ourselves on fire.

But Sid Vicious sacrificed all the benefits of a conventional life well before he could secure the compensations of fame. One only has to look at Nancy Spungen to see that for every one person who makes that sacrifice - that gamble - and wins the jackpot, there are hundreds more who gamble away everything and are left with less than zero. In fact, Nancy is even one of the lucky ones, because at least she could score her drugs, and food and lodgings, from Sid's earnings. The rest are just another of the unwashed homeless masses, another oxygen-wasting, goods-consuming, poo-producing, zombie-like failed experiment of humanity. And who wants to be that?

The other day I happened to catch a new Avril Lavigne video, and as always, I felt pissed as all hell at Avril Lavigne. I asked myself why; because she's a poser. But a lot of people are posers, and they don't piss me off as much. Avril Lavigne pisses me off because she's rich from her poserness. Moreover, she's rich via the same corporate-pandering, power-amassing, privileged route as, say, Beyonce Knowles or Justin Timberlake, except she doesn't have to work nearly as hard as they do because she can pretend to take the non-traditional (punk) route and, essentially, exploit those who identify with the weak, deprived, real dregs of society. IN DOING SO SHE TAKES AWAY AN IMPORTANT WEAPON THAT THE BOTTOM FEEDERS HAVE AGAINST A BYZANTINE SOCIAL STRUCTURE: rebellion. This weapon was forged by the sufferings and deprivations of the Sid Viciouses and Nancy Spungens of the world, and with one fell video Avril Lavigne blunts it into another corporate gimmick, for petty personal fleeting gain.

I started to think about these objections against Avril Lavigne, and the Colonel's impassioned speech about the "helots" in Meet John Doe was still resonating unforgettably in my head (helots: they're a lot of heels!). Suddenly I realized that I too, like Avril, was trying to exploit the best of both worlds, and my discontent was stemming from the result that I was acting the biggest helot of them all, and the least successful. I wanted to shrug off the burdens of submitting to corporate power (= acting like a tool) and think freely and unconventionally, but at the same time I wanted the accolades and reinforcement of the social order (money and prestige), not to mention the security - and the ordinary happiness - that comes with being a normal, average, unremarkable conformist. I wanted both glory (of a very modest scale) and happiness, and both are simply not possible. As the Colonel says, wanting the basics leads to wanting it all ("I've seen people with less than $50 wind up with a bank account, and once you have a bank account you've been got!"), and the only way to escape that scene altogether is to be satisfied with wanting and having NOTHING. That means that to be a sincere nonconformist, I'd have to sleep under a bridge, by the huge industrial sewers I used to see riding the Metrolink. I don't think I'll ever have the courage to do that. Watching Sid and Nancy wallow and wail like that for 2 hours was excruciating enough.

So now that I've admitted that I do want the basics, I also have to accept that I'll go for it all, to the frozen limit. It's inevitable, because I know that I want to be "good" at whatever I am, and I'll be better off being a fully realized helot rather than a half-assed, reluctant, failed helot. All this means that I'll have to learn to be okay with acting like a tool.

And there, my friends, you've witnessed the incremental dying of one soul. At least it's rationally consistent.

How Green Was My Valley

It was quite a coincidence that this was playing on TCM exactly when I got curious about it; this is the movie that kicked Citizen Kane butt at the Oscars that year. No less than 5 wins, including Best Picture. Needless to say, it was disappointing, because with a build-up like that, how could it deliver? Most interesting to me was its insight on socialism, unions, and the changing economy. The narrator, the youngest in his family, is the first that has a chance to go to school, which opens up the opportunities for continuing his education to become a doctor or lawyer in London. Instead, the boy chooses to be a coal-miner like his father. Haha! Good one.

Meet John Doe

Barbara Stanwyck! Gary Cooper! What a phenomenal movie! This is the kind of screenplay I'd love to write. It's the story of a nobody who pretends to stand for an ideal, until he starts to believe in his fictional persona and becomes the last advocate for that ideal, against the overwhelming exploitation of unconscionable big wigs. I have a terrible weakness for idealists.

The only thing I'd tweak is the ending. John Doe should have jumped.

Meet John Doe got an Oscar nomination for one of the Best Writing categories. Imdb reveals that 1942 was truly a wacked-out year for the Oscars:

Best Picture
Winner: How Green Was My Valley (1941) - 20th Century-Fox
Other Nominees:
Blossoms in the Dust (1941) - M-G-M
Citizen Kane (1941) - Mercury
Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941) - Columbia
Hold Back the Dawn (1941) - Paramount
Little Foxes, The (1941) - Samuel Goldwyn Productions
Maltese Falcon, The (1941) - Warner Bros.
One Foot in Heaven (1941) - Warner Bros.
Sergeant York (1941) - Warner Bros.
Suspicion (1941) - RKO Radio

Best Actor in a Leading Role
Winner: Sergeant York (1941) - Gary Cooper (I)
Other Nominees:
Citizen Kane (1941) - Orson Welles
Devil and Daniel Webster, The (1941) - Walter Huston
Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941) - Robert Montgomery (I)
Penny Serenade (1941) - Cary Grant

Best Actress in a Leading Role
Winner: Suspicion (1941) - Joan Fontaine
Other Nominees:
Ball of Fire (1941) - Barbara Stanwyck
Blossoms in the Dust (1941) - Greer Garson
Hold Back the Dawn (1941) - Olivia de Havilland
Little Foxes, The (1941) - Bette Davis

Best Director
Winner: How Green Was My Valley (1941) - John Ford (I)
Other Nominees:
Citizen Kane (1941) - Orson Welles
Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941) - Alexander Hall (I)
Little Foxes, The (1941) - William Wyler
Sergeant York (1941) - Howard Hawks

Best Writing, Original Screenplay
Winner: Citizen Kane (1941) - Herman J. Mankiewicz; Orson Welles
Other Nominees:
Devil and Miss Jones, The (1941) - Norman Krasna
Sergeant York (1941) - Harry Chandlee; Abem Finkel; John Huston (I); Howard Koch
Tall, Dark and Handsome (1941) - Karl Tunberg; Darrell Ware
Tom Dick and Harry (1941) - Paul Jarrico

Best Writing, Original Story
Winner: Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941) - Harry Segall
Other Nominees:
Ball of Fire (1941) - Thomas Monroe; Billy Wilder
Lady Eve, The (1941) - Monckton Hoffe
Meet John Doe (1941) - Richard Connell (I); Robert Presnell Sr.
Night Train to Munich (1940) - Gordon Wellesley

Best Writing, Screenplay
Winner: Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941) - Sidney Buchman; Seton I. Miller
Other Nominees:
Hold Back the Dawn (1941) - Charles Brackett; Billy Wilder
How Green Was My Valley (1941) - Philip Dunne
Little Foxes, The (1941) - Lillian Hellman
Maltese Falcon, The (1941) - John Huston (I)

Andy, the Boy of My Dreams

Here's a tasty new morsel for the fans of my stand-up act - what's turning into a cycle tentatively called "Songs of Suffering." The whole thing is a bit of a blur, being as it was a marathon of unmitigated pain, but I'll try to capture it as faithfully as I can through a collage of quotations. I doubt any embellishment on my part could improve the story. I only add this one insight: from all the unmitigated pain, I was able to gain a strong renewal of conviction, and fresh ammo for the ongoing debate with my mom.

"When you get a chance, tell me what you think about Andy."
"I heard that! Are you trying to play match-maker?"
"Rex needs to meet a nice Korean boy, and Andy's the son of a pastor. I told Andy about Rex, and he already looked her up on facebook."
"Um. He's not very cute."
"Well, he helped me work the grill, so go flirt with him anyways."
"Oh, very well."

"I have another friend named Rex Bikini."
"It's a very common name. I went to high school with 3 other Rex Bikinis, college with 3 or 4, and grad school with 2."
"Andy's a common name too."
"Is it? I guess it's simple, like Rex. After the parents named my brother Moses, they decided it was better to go with a name that's easy to say."
"Is your family religious?"
"What?"
"They named your brother Moses."
"Oh. Yeah, the original inspiration was the biblical Moses. But then they got to me and preferred sound over meaning. Unfortunately every other parent in 19?? had the same idea. I recently learned that I actually have a second cousin named Rex Bikini, too."
"Really? I don't have any Rex Bikinis in my family...but I'm related to only one branch of Bikini, and that's by marriage. What about you? What are the other names in your family?"
"It's mostly the Bikinis, the [bleeps], and the Lees."
"Lees are good. They're the descendants of royalty, so you know they're rich. My great-grandfather was from the king's family."
"King? Oh come on. That was during the Japanese occupation!"
"Yeah, but they still had their land, so they were rich."

"My dream is to be like my mom: get rich by investing, and do nothing."

"I didn't know that V was one of those girls."
"What do you mean?"
"The kind of girls who are really into food and cooking. I have a lot of girlfriends who are like that. They grew up really rich, and ate out all the time at fancy restaurants."
"I would think those people know less about cooking, since they haven't had much chance to try it themselves."
"No, they're the ones who know food the best, because they ate nothing but the really expensive stuff."

"Where did your parents go to school? Did they go to college in Korea or here?"
[bleep]
"My dad went to Berkeley. He got a degree in electrical engineering there, but then he changed and got his MBA. Now he's a pastor. Ha-ha!"

"I want to go to law school someday too. My uncle went to Harvard law, and that's where I'd want to go. I don't like Boston the city, but the law school and business school campuses are pretty nice."
"If you want to go to law school, what's stopping you from shooting for it now?"
"A couple of things. First, it's taking me a long time to finish undergrad. I've been at UCLA for 7 years."
"Oh. Well I'm sure you're almost done by now. If you're serious about your goals, now is a great time to make it happen."
"That's the thing, I don't know if it's where I want to be right now. I'm thinking I'll go to law school after I get married. It'll be easier then to settle down and study."
"You think? I feel like most people have the opposite idea: you know, get your career stuff settled and done first, and then start thinking about marriage and family."
"I'm just too all over the place right now. I figure a wife will help me stay in one place. With her to support me, I'll be able to do my thing and go to school. She'll go to work every day, and I'll take classes and come home and watch the kids."
"Um, wow. Maybe this is a difference between boys and girls. Most girls I know would not feel ready to start a family while they're still in school."
"Well, the other thing is, my family will give me a lot of money after I get married, so I'll have more security then."

"I used to have a cool razor with all the special features, but it got stolen a few months ago. And the people who stole it were Mexican, because when my mom got the phone bill there were all these long-distance calls to Mexico. They called all their family, and the families called their families, on my phone, and they downloaded every ringtone. I emailed my mom to tell her that my phone was stolen, but she didn't get it until months later, because she was in Singapore, and by then they billed about $1200 in extra charges."

"My dream is to be like my mom: get rich by investing, and do nothing."

[Lecture to a larger group:]
"Korean society is not based on talent like it is here. It's all about connections, and who you know. That's why all Korean people are connected to gangsters. You should see the people at my church: on the outside they look like normal people and Christians, but all the men are into criminal stuff, or they're related to people in Korea who are part of these major gangs. My whole family, everyone's in a gang."

New Lease on Life

"What was the deal with the reading comp without the double-passage? Does it mean that was the experimental section, or does it mean they've stopped doing the double-passages?"
"That's a good question. What part of the test did it come up in?"
"The one without the double-passage was section 1. The other reading comp was section 4."
"Okay, then section 1 was experimental. The experimental section almost always appears within the first 3 sections."

WHEW! Section 1 was one I fucked up.

Death and the Compass

This is one of Borges' more willfully banal short stories. I've been reading his collected stories all week (awesome) and have gotten a pretty good idea of the themes that usually occupy him: labyrinths, libraries, God, chance, time, repetition, and infinity. The stories are an obsessive-compulsive's anguished plea that there be some secret order to chaos, some meaning or consequence to our actions, no matter how dire the repercussions are. As such, the stories often end with some hilarious and/or cruel magical element that makes us reflect on the presence or absence of a God or divine design, and whether the presence or absence is preferable.

"Death and the Compass," in Borges' usual way, begins with thick suggestions of that magical element. The plot is a kind of scavenger hunt that a detective embarks upon in order to solve a murder. Each of the clues unveils a letter of the name of God - and each clue is a new murder, or "sacrifice," as an informant calls it. The detective solves the riddle and arrives preemptively to the scene of the last murder/final unveiling of God's name. He learns then that the entire scavenger hunt was an elaborate hoax, a trap set for him by a personal enemy who capitalized on the detective's desperate insistence that the first murder was not an ordinary wrong-place-wrong-time accident, but rather a mystical event that would reveal to him the proof of God's existence, and thus the proof that nothing is an accident.

Of course the joke is that the pseudo-riddle was not an accident, since it was self-fulfilling prophesy of the detective's own unjustified faith - and yet it is what proves definitively the absence of a God, at least in those events. The detective's final words before he is killed by his enemy is a request that in their next life, the enemy set the trap for him within the infinity of time. Certainly this is ironic because we have no reason to believe in infinity or the transmogrification of souls, in light of plot, and yet the detective persists in his delusion that there was a mystical cause and effect, rather than a common, unremarkable revenge.

I call this story willfully banal because it frustrates a lot of the expectations the reader forms when reading Borges in series, as I did. Borges usually prefers the opposite conclusion, namely that what appears to be banal and ordinary is in fact the workings of an unfathomable order. The reverse of that is funny to read, but at the same time it's a little disappointing. The feeling I got at the end of "Death and the Compass" was similar to that feeling I get with stories that employ the "so it was all a dream!" resolution. That is, instead of supplying a real resolution to a complex set of problems that have been painstakingly developed, the author simply decides that everything was an artifical machination with no consequence.

But even though I found the end of "Death and the Compass" to be rather deflating, I was quite intrigued by the story because of that very fact. The detective's attitude makes the banality interesting: essentially he declares, in the face of contrary evidence, that there is God and order. I thought that was a fascinating insight into human desires: believers would choose to get fucked over by their beliefs, a hundred times over, rather than stop believing.

This morning I found myself making the same choice as the detective. Yesterday I took the LSAT and fucked up one section in the most devastating way: I accidentally skipped a question and ended up shifting down the answers for 3 questions. The knowledge that I did that is CRIPPLING. I worked so hard for so long and gave up so much for this, my last chance, and in the end I'll always know that it was not the best I could do, and that I was screwed by the stupidest of all oversights, rather than a lack of ability or effort or something else within my control.

Then this morning, as I was laying in bed crippled with disappointment and regret, I had a thought: maybe that oversight was some divine retribution I got for trying to sneak myself an advantage. Without going into too much detail, I remembered that there were 3 other questions that I should have missed, but I managed to correct them. 3 and 3. This was the first thought I had that was comforting. Instead of a meaningless, chaotic, and cruel accident, my mistake was an act of justice, and the belief in that was so much easier to face. I've had the thought before, that even if I had to burn in a lake of fire for a thousand years, I'd still have an immense sense of relief knowing that God does indeed exist. The LSAT was a little like that.