no subject

Teared up watching Nancy Pelosi take her gavel this afternoon. So excited about having her back in the high seat -- go, go, go!

meeja consumed

Watched Roma with my family over the holiday. It was very beautiful, a very intense and high-detail sensory experience ... other parts, though, felt very inaccessible. I felt like I understood it better when I read that it was based on Cuaron's memories from his childhood, because it very much conveys the caring detachment of children toward their caregivers' griefs. The film loves Cleo, and cares about her, but it's a child and it does not understand; and Cleo, also, seems not to understand. I was somewhat frustrated, by the film's end, that clearer understanding did not come; but it was an obvious artistic choice not to give it, for sure.

I re-read the first half of Parable of the Sower, and then had to take the book back to the library -- and I'm not sure if I'm going to try again to make it through. This is my first return to Butler since I first read her as a college student. She's a figure that I have huge respect for, as a literary giant and a woman of genius. I didn't like PotS in college, because it was just so heavy. I went back to it now very deliberately, because for all that I didn't like it fannishly, as a work of predictive fiction it's continuing to be uncomfortably on point. If anything, my initial problems with the book are magnified -- it's so powerful and well-written and interesting and real, and it just drains away all my hope for human existence, and it gets hard to go on. I'm also not real into the religious angle, and that doesn't help. It makes me see life as so tissue-paper fragile, civilization as such a courtly lie -- and it's not wrong, not wrong at all, but a person can only bear so much looking directly into the sun. Maybe I need to try another starting point w Butler all together?