watched “Crazeologie” last night, which is a student film directed by Louis Malle, who most people know as the director of My Dinner With Andre. on a technical level the short was competent, demonstrating a natural feel for how to work the camera, how to pace dialogue and block actors. as an attempt at making Cinema of the Absurd, hey, Malle tried at least, but not everyone can be Samuel Beckett.
i’m discouragemaxxing. hackcore. totally impostorsyndromepilled. it’s giving failed novelist. big poseur vibes. this blog is boring-coded. in short, he’s NGMI.
up till today, I’ve been pretty good about working here and there on this and that. today I haven’t written anything and don’t feel much like writing anything. the things I’m reading all make me feel less-than-confident in my own ability to write eloquently or poetically. it’s part of the problem with writing, I guess, feeling like what you yourself write reads as too obvious or trite, because of course if you’re writing your own thoughts which are always buzzing in your own voice in your own head, then it’ll sound uninspired to you. (really need to stop publicizing my doubts; I’m fucking talented, & no one has my perspective, & all my opps [who live in my head] are bitchass chumps).
feeling like I shouldn’t only be writing “watched this, read this, listened to this,” or if I’m going to do that, do other kinds of writing (my coworker once complimented the writing I do here but also said he would like to see more “day-to-day” kind of writing, something I very much struggle with, and justify away via projected disdain for autobiographical writing, though that all probably suggests it’s what I need to lean into the most, the area of writing I find most daunting; on this note, I rather enjoyed my friend’s latest newsletter which he characterized as too “dear diary”) or else do more rigorous critical writing. to resurrect my dormant newsletter, I’m planning a big multi-part project that’s probably actually a bad idea because it will have me thinking too much about someone else’s art rather than making my own, but it’ll be a good excuse to do a bunch of research I’ve been meaning to do anyway.
reading The Phantom Empire: Movies in the Mind of the 20th Century, by Geoffrey O’Brien. some of the most poetic, elliptical and evocative critical writing I’ve ever read. this is one of the things that’s making me feel like my own writing is flat & boring. support-anons will say “it’s a published book, it’s not a first draft, O’Brien didn’t land on those images or ideas without working them over.” shut up.
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