Hollow City/DyingModern/2001

Today I read the next fifty pages of Ransom Riggs’ Hollow City. The peculiar children escape their pursuers for the moment and find their way to a peculiar menagerie, where they learn that there are peculiar animals as well as peculiar people, although the former are scarce to the point of extinction. In the background of the story at the moment is the war being waged between the peculiars and their protectors on the one hand and the wights and hollowgasts on the other, but Riggs provides some interesting context for that war in this section of the novel by suggesting the necessity for bonding between humans and animals, rather than the one exploiting the other. Exploitation versus mutual aid is the most fundamental form of the conflict being explored in this thoughtful novel.

I also read the first fifty pages of Diana Fuss’ 2013 book Dying Modern: A Meditation on Elegy. Fuss describes the subject of the book as “modern poetry’s fascinating with premortem and postmortem speech.” Fuss emphasizes the variety of the elegy by discussing three variants—“the dying voice, the reviving voice, and the surviving voice”—and also stresses how, contrary to what we might expect, the elegy retains its currency and popularity in the contemporary moment. In particular, Fuss explores the complicated relationship between elegy and ethics, not only arguing for the ethical import and content of the elegy but also claiming an identity between the two terms: “in a very real sense, ethics is elegy, speaking, acting, and surviving in the face of loss, no matter how irretrievable these losses may be.” In this first section of the book, Fuss focuses on the genre of the “last words” elegy, emphasizing the variety of uses to which it’s put and arguing that one of the reasons for the persistence of this form of the elegy is the tendency to last words to “mimic poetry”: “Like any good poem, last words reflect a heightened awareness of audience, an acute concentration of language, and a profound intensification of meaning.”

Every so often, I watch Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey just to see if it’s still as overwhelming as it was when I first watched it 30+ years ago (!). It is. Like all great films, each time I watch it, I see something different in it, or perhaps I should say that a different aspect of its greatness strikes me with particular force. On this occasion, and quite unexpectedly, it was the acting of Keir Dullea. In any film so dominated by the presence of its director, any actor is going to get short shrift, but that’s especially the case in 2001 because of the way it relies on visuals rather than dialog, compounded by the fact that most of the dialog is so flat and banal (it’s often been said that HAL the computer is the most human character in the film). But that’s precisely where the power of Dullea’s performance lies. His calculated and incredibly restrained normality, a normality intensely banal without being cartoonishly so, perfectly complements the other elements of the film. So many other actors would have tried to inject more of their own personality into the film, but Dullea understands exactly what his role requires and plays it to perfection.