Juno – I’d say a Modern Classic, worthy of serious Academic Attentions.  But I come away from it with a sense of unease.  That kind of nebulous despair which leads people to various unapproachable Wars – on Terrorism, Crime, or anything which stands in for some sort of collection, any aggregation of concepts which exist only in language.  My war on the Po-Mo?  Perhaps, but if only it were that easy:

Juno seems to me to be that wasted blank page of potential scribbled upon by poor poets.  They reckon that the Stalin purges and genocides and gulags and et. al were all the end result of Communism;  to be just as sweeping, let’s say Juno is the end result of Democratic Principles.  “Poetry is made by all, not one” would be, as far as I know, currently the pervasive literary sentiment:  and implies the curiously unspoken corollary, that we are all free to talk, but few are worth listening to.  Poetry is made by an accumulation of breaths, syllables, expressions, sighs;  winds, currents, eddies; some baffling new hive mind muse.  Where are we now?  We have some new, external force which stands in for us.  God is Dead, perhaps, but has been instantly replaced by it’s shadow-form, a mirrored us, God not as flowing beard prophet, but fabulous androgynous metrosexual?  In that Scientific Rhetoric of Truth, we’re all essentially fragmented, borrowed and co-opted parts of everything else.  Our internal selves are essentially external.  We’re collaged, appropriated, counterfiet images.  Given that I can access anything constructed, thought, imagined, and commited to form at any point in time, from any other point in time, I’m not so much creating anew anymore but referencing anything that has ever been and re-assembling, my medium not necessary my hands or world rough hewn potentiality, but some external software filter.  My abstractions create abstractions.  There’s nothing created which stops still and stays itself;  everything morphs into everything else.  And outside ourselves, watching over it, that liquid form of ourselves which we borrow ourselves from.

So, this is who I reckon Juno is.  A complexity of competing, opposed parts.  A conversation about a subject in a language in which there are no words.  What the hell is she?  Feminist?  Hippie?  Girl?  She’s “different” – but from what?  All the people who can relate to her, being as they are, “different”?  She doesn’t refer to anything.  She’d probably like to be told that, but the edge to it is that she’s static.  She’s a neutral force, an oil upon water.  She may as well be nothing.

Good links from Ran Prieur this week.  Firstly a compelling essay by Naomi Wolf about the social implications of porn.  Here’s some good thought:

” But does all this sexual imagery in the air mean that sex has been liberated—or is it the case that the relationship between the multi-billion-dollar porn industry, compulsiveness, and sexual appetite has become like the relationship between agribusiness, processed foods, supersize portions, and obesity? If your appetite is stimulated and fed by poor-quality material, it takes more junk to fill you up. People are not closer because of porn but further apart; people are not more turned on in their daily lives but less so.”

Good shit.  Later on describes a process of isolation and alienation that I can only filter through the Modern Metaphor of Misunderstood Quantum Physics:  we all end up isolated and alone together, unto ourselves, drifting soundless and frictionlessly within voids.  I bring this up because it’s this Voice of the Vacuum that I hear when I read The Rainbow, and why that book excites me so much.  He got it;  he gets all this social fragmentation on a scientific level I’m so far ignorant of.

The other link is to an interesting review of The Dark Knight.  I am not allowed to watch these sorts of films.  Like the awful, awful Charlie Wilson’s War, such films are dangerous because they promote a shallow acceptance of terms, a general ignoring of fine print.  Oh, but it’s just a movie!  No.  It’s just a meme, a universally acceptable context.  We define ourselves on this sort of shit.  We shouldn’t promote bad politics and confused thought as entertainment.  But that ought be the end of my comments until I’ve actually seen it.