Jonas David's Blog, page 5

do? do?

Daily writing promptWhat do you do to be involved in the community?View all responses

I do nothing in my community. I stay in my house and I don’t know the names of my neighbors. I sit in my room and only rarely glance out the window at the sun and the trees and the mountain as if they were decorations hanging from my wall. I do not talk to my friends or family and I do not make new friends. I crouch in the dark behind my doors like a spider, sitting in the silence and stillness and watching with eight glinting eyes the flashing lights that move unceasingly across my screens.

The Problem with Poker Face

As you may or may not know I am a huge Columbo fan. I’ve see every episode of the original 7 seasons 4 or 5 times each. I’d consider it one of the best shows of all time. You can read more of such gushing here. So when I heard that there was a new murder mystery show inspired by Columbo, I was hesitantly excited. Hesitant, because Hollywood is 99% certain to completely fuck up and ruin anything it ever touches.

But there was hope, because this is not a remake or reboot, this is a new idea that is simply inspired by the old show, and it seems to have been made from a place of passion instead of a nostalgia cash grab. So I watched it, and, you know, it’s pretty good.

Right from the opening it’s Columboesque. The font and color of the credits are exactly the same. See below:

And here from a Columbo episode:

And the entire show, in fact, has a very 70s vibe and look, despite being based in modern day with modern technology.

The similarities are not just in the design, either. The main character, Charlie, played perfectly by Natasha Lyonne, is a complete slob who drives a beat up junker yet is still somehow relentlessly charming, and is underestimated by everyone. She even speaks in a similar dialect and cadence as Columbo–granted, that’s just how she talks in real life, but it works.

Even the plotting and structure works the same as Columbo. Each episode opens up with the murder, and the audience is shown exactly how and why the murderer did it, from the murderer’s POV. Then Charlie shows up and solves the crime by hanging around and talking with the criminal until she realizes that they’re guilty through some clever clue or inconsistency.

And even though modern TV is completely and utterly incapable of being simply episodic, this one really tries. The first episode wastes a lot of time with stuff we don’t care about, like setting up Charlie’s origin story and giving her a reason to be on the run and thus in a different city each episode. It’s a bit forced, and parts of it are actually incredibly stupid and nearly ruin the show (more on that later) but, for the most part, once this pointless plot is set in place, the writers heave a sigh of relief and basically ignore it for the rest of the show. I sighed right along with them. In short: in the first episode Charlie pisses off some rich powerful criminal, and so a rich bad guy thug is chasing her from city to city for the rest of the show. But, we don’t have to see the bad guy but for a few seconds here and there, so thankfully we can forget about this choreography and just enjoy the dance.

Another thing we don’t have to worry or care about: Charlie’s personal life, and thank god for that! The most annoying part of any mystery show is the huge chunks of time spent on notmystery. I don’t care if the detective is going through a divorce, I don’t care if it’s his daughter’s birthday and he forgot to buy a gift, I don’t care if the in-laws are in town and causing difficulties at home, oh my god I just DO NOT CARE please go back to the crime. This is something that Columbo has held over almost every other mystery show that came after (with few exceptions like Murder She Wrote [same creators as Columbo] and Poirot): no time is wasted on Columbo’s personal life. We know zero details about Columbo other than stray facts he mentions in dialogue. We never see him at home, we never see him involved in anything personal, we never seen him outside the context of investigating the crime (except in some episodes from the 90s and on, but those episodes kind of start to stink), he mentions his wife constantly but we never see her, because none of that matters. All that matters is the crime, and the battle of wits between Columbo and the murderer.

And so it is with Charlie. Outside of a few scenes to establish her in the first episode there is no boring personal life stuff, just mystery. Great!

It sounds like a great successor to Columbo, like someone finally picked up the torch of real mystery-of-the-week episodic fun.

Except… just one more thing…

There’s just this little thing that’s been bothering me. You know, it’s just my brain, it won’t let go of these little things, I gotta keep poking at them until it makes sense. Did you know, there’s a logical explanation for everything? So, there’s gotta be some kind of explanation for this:

Who the hell and why, decided to give Charlie a literally magical power in this crime mystery show?

And I am only slightly exaggerating. In the first episode Charlie goes into a several minutes long explanation about how she ‘just always knows when someone is lying,’ and the accuracy of this lie-detection is at such a level that, although the show doesn’t describe it as such, it could only be supernatural. To demonstrate her powers, she has a virtual stranger pull random cards from a deck, look at the card without showing her, and then tell her what the card is, and she knows with 100% accuracy when he’s lying or telling the truth about the cards.

And it’s not just that she’s good at reading people, which would have been fine. It’s not that she’s studied body language and facial tics and a million other things to learn how to read people, which also would be fine. The show actually goes out of its way to make it clear that she is a 100% accurate lie detector all the time, and she doesn’t know why or how. In probably half the episodes there is a scene where she is walking past a complete stranger, overhears them say some offhanded comment, and says ‘Ah, that was bullshit.’ She is able to instantly determine that this person who she’s never met (nor even seen, sometimes!) and who was not even talking directly to her, was lying. That is a superpower.

And it really sucks a lot of fun out of the show! It’s hard to be impressed with Charlie when she didn’t work for her skills. And besides that, it just feels extremely lazy. But I guess why come up with a reason that Charlie can tell someone is lying, why write a clever hint that makes her suspicious when you can just have a magical lie-detector ping in her ear…

In the end, it’s a really well made show with great acting and a ton of fun guest stars, and it really does seem to have a lot of genuine love for Columbo and Murder She Wrote and those style of mysteries. I just really wish they wouldn’t have made that bizarre choice…

i have already broken all my new years resolutions

i often imagine possessing a certain impossibility that i call the ‘time bubble’. this magical bubble would allow me to stop time everywhere except in some circumference around myself. with such a bubble i could pause at any point in the day and write for six hours, or read for 72 hours, or sleep for six weeks, and no one would know because the rest of the world would be frozen. i would buy months and months worth of canned goods so that i could feed myself in the bubble. i would eat and exercise and sit and stare at the wall for hours and days with no interruptions. what paradise, what delicious luxury, what addicting elixir is solitude. to the non-bubble world i would appear to be aging rapidly. i would lose touch with friends (haven’t i already?) and would forget things that happened only hours ago (don’t i already?) because weeks would have passed for me in my bubble, solid uninterrupted weeks of reading and writing and sleeping and silence and nothing, no schedule, no requirements, nothing, nothing, and would i use it to death? would i age to a desiccated corpse in a few weeks, would i shrivel before your eyes? death is the cost of living either way

nothing

has been done this year, it seems, but work. already the first month is ending and I have nothing to show for it but stress and distraction. we exist for a fraction of a second on this mote of dust and we spend that time doing nothing, sleeping, working, thinking about working, eating, driving, getting up, laying down, everything except thinking. living is thinking, thinking is living, the only thing that separates us from grass and we have no time for it. we’ve built our society into a machine that we use to torture ourselves. instead of exploring the world internal and external we’ve locked ourselves both body and mind in a cramped cage of hours and dollars and we jealously punish anyone of us who tries to break out. we all participate. we all guard and enforce the masochistic selftorture, the completely pointless shriveling of the mind, the worship of drudgery and toil. we have decided we are made for work, not living, not thinking, and we have built a world of work, which we ruthlessly enforce on ourselves

time

is not on my side, or your side, or anyone’s side. time time time, you trickster, you leech, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 2032 and oops i didn’t achieve my goals and dreams and now i’m fifty and i’m older than i’ve ever been and now i’m even older, and the sun is blasting like a rocketship across the sky over and again and trees burst out the soil in green explosions and fall in clouds of sawdust and houses slam themselves together and a hundred and ten million bloody babies scream their way into the world and seventy million corpses melt into dirt and i’m going to work and going to sleep and going to work and going to sleep and going to work and

the books i read this year

since i failed to blog about any of the books I read, here they are in reverse chronological order with a little snippet about each of them:

The Star by Yukio Mishima

A young, sexy actor at the peak of his career, followed everywhere by adoring fans, is carrying on a secret relationship with his ‘ugly’ assistant who is twice his age. They both get a thrill out of the fact that no one would ever imagine them together, that it is impossible, for both of them, that they should be together. Also featuring plenty of the fear of aging and obsession with youth and death/suicide that is signature Mishima. Love it, and have never not loved a Mishima novel.

Rock Crystal by Adalbert Stifter

Some children get lost in the snow in the mountains. This is extremely beautiful, but it felt empty to me. It’s just stuff happening with pretty descriptions. I wanted more.

El túnel by Ernesto Sabato

The first real literature book I’ve read entirely in Spanish. An obsessive painter sees a woman at his art gallery looking at one of his paintings in a certain way that makes him believe she truly understand the painting. Without knowing anything about her or even her name he decides she’s the one for him and tracks her down. Full of all kinds of insane obsessing which is nonetheless very identifiable. A great read.

Woodcutters by Thomas Bernhard

An old man sitting in a wing chair bitterly complains about a distasteful artistic party he is attending for 200 pages. Peak Bernhard. I love it

The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke by Rainer Maria Rilke

A collection of poetry that I read very slowly over the course of the whole year. Some very beautiful ones, especially the elegies. Increasingly Rilke is a favorite

Solenoid by Mircea Cărtărescu

Impossible to describe, really. From tesseracts to mites to the Voynich manuscript, this book goes everywhere and nowhere at once. I’ve you’ve read Blinding by the same author, multiply that by itself. It has altered the way I look at the world, art, and myself, and I’ll likely be thinking about it for the rest of my life.

Netochka Nezvanova by Fyodor Dostoevsky

An unfinished novel that I’d never heard of until it was referenced in Solenoid. A very enjoyable read, full of passion and emotions. I wish he’d managed to finish it, but instead he was arrested and sent to Siberia and never got back to it.

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

After reading this for a second time, 5 years after the first, I am even more aghast and baffled at the public’s reception of this book. Humbert is an obviously violent monster as early as page 30. The average person’s complete inability to see past the thinnest glittery skin into the deep, vile swamp, says a lot about the mind-numbed world we live in.

Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee

Like Lolita in a way, featuring an appalling narrator who pretends to be aware of his issues but in fact continues to be the same gross monster as always throughout the whole book and is incapable of change or remorse even after hurting people again and again.

Old Masters: A Comedy by Thomas Bernhard

An old man sits on a settee in the Kunsthistorisches museum and bitterly complains about the paintings (except for Tintoretto’s White-Bearded Man, which is the only good one) for 200 pages.

The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares

A man washes ashore a strange island, only to find it is populated with people who seemed to appear out of thin air. A plot driven story which seems like complete nonsense, only to make perfect sense in the end. A really fun, short read.

Forbidden Colors by Yukio Mishima

A bitter old writer befriends a beautiful youth one day, who he finds out is gay. He then uses the young man’s looks and charms as a way to break the hearts of all the women who have wronged him. Because Yuichi (the young man) is gay, the writer believes he will be incapable of having any feelings for a woman, and thus be immune to them. It turns out things are more complicated than that.

Requiem and Poem without a Hero by Anna Akhmatova

More poetry that I loved! I enjoyed her individual poems much more than the longer ‘Poem without a hero’ but still good.

Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse by Alexander Pushkin

A fun read about a Don Juan type character who gets his heart broken in turn. The version I read was translated by Nabokov, and he chose to try to capture the spirit of each line rather than try to force things into the rhyming scheme of the original. Many people were very upset by this, but I am so glad, because I hate rhyming poetry. A fun read.

An Iceland Fisherman by Pierre Loti

A cute romance between a fisherman who travels out into the icy arctic sea for months at a time, and the girl who waits for him in town. It did not end how I was expecting.

Five Modern Nō Plays by Yukio Mishima

No, or Noh theater is a traditional Japanese theatrical form and one of the oldest extant theatrical forms in the world. But the art, in Mishima’s day, had grown stale, with the same stories being repeated for hundreds of years. These plays were his attempt at modernizing the artform. Since it’s Mishima, they of course surround youth/age/death/suicide, and are generally pretty dark. But also humorous at times and over all enjoyable.

Correction by Thomas Bernhard

A man reads through the memoirs of a friend who has just committed suicide, and as the pages roll on the line between the narrators thoughts and the thoughts of the dead friend becomes increasingly unclear. Probably the darkest and strangest of the Bernhard’s I’ve read.

The Metamorphoses of Ovid by Ovid
I read the Allen Mandelbaum translation because it was the most beautiful of all that I looked at. So much good stuff in here, its not surprising at all this has lasted for so many hundreds of years.

Shores, Horizons, Voyages…: Selected Poems by Soph de Mello Breyner Andresen

I bought this based on the collection’s title alone when I was searching for Portuguese poets. I chose wisely, and loved the poem, all of which were about the sea. I’ll probably read it again at some point.

Several Short Sentences About Writing by Verlyn Klinkenborg

The best book about writing I’ve ever read. This was the second read for me and I still got a lot out of it. I recommend it to every writer I know.

Tao Te Ching: The New Translation from Tao Te Ching: The Definitive Edition by Lao Tzu

An ancient philosophy still relevant today. I really connected with a lot of this, and I think it is something I will be rereading often.

The Complete Works of Alberto Caeiro: Bilingual Edition by Fernando Pessoa

I absolutely love Pessoa, and Caeiro is, I think, his best poetic incarnation. This was a huge influence on how I write poetry, and I still love to open it at random and read a poem now and then. Just great stuff.

The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems by Pablo Neruda

My first experience with Neruda, and instantly captivated me. I was inspired to write my first long form poem this year by a poem in this collection. Another one that I open and peek through now and again.

By Night in Chile by Roberto Bolaño

The deathbed ramblings of an old man, the cadence of it and unending nature of the rant pull you in. The narrator knew a lot of poets and had connections throughout the literary society, and so the story includes Neruda as a character. This book has my favorite cover of any book I own.

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke

Rilke’s only novel, a faux journal full of hallucinatory descriptions and strange thoughts. Reading this I could see how big of an influence Rilke had on Cărtărescu. I guess it makes sense that I only read Rilke in the first place because one of his poems was quoted in Blinding…

White Flock: Poetry of Anna Akhmatova by Anna Akhmatova

More poems that I enjoyed. This was a while ago so I can’t remember much except that I enjoyed them.

El Asesino del Lago by Raúl * Garbantes

A murder mystery. Some people are being murdered, and then in the end we find out who murdered them. Not very enjoyable, but I was reading it in Spanish for practice and it was written at a YA level, and that’s all I could manage at the time.

Poems and Fragments by Sappho

A poet from ancient times, these were so great, it’s a shame that most of her work has been destroyed over the years because she was gay. Definitely read these if you have any interest in poetry (or history) at all.

The Wreath (Kristin Lavransdatter, #1) by Sigrid Undset

The first of the Scandinavian epic trilogy, written in the early 1900s and based in 14th century Norway. A family story that takes place over the lifetime of the main character, Kristin. I enjoyed this first book a lot but somehow never continued the series. I am easily distracted!

The Stones Cry Out by Hikaru Okuizumi

A book about a man that collects stones. He has a dark history that we eventually learn about, through how he feels about his stones and geology. However, to me this felt very rushed. I thought it could have easily been 200 pages instead of 140.

The Pastor by Hanne Ørstavik

The only book I blogged about this year, read here.

2023 Goals

I’ve not written one of these new year posts in a while. Covid canceled a lot of things, including this blog.

I have completed some previous goals, which I never mentioned before, so I’ll list some of them here:

I finally managed to read 40 books in a year, last year, after that being my yearly goal for some time. (i won’t reach it this year)I believe I can say i’ve reached ‘intermediate’ level Spanish, at least as far as reading goes. I have journaled (with a pen and paper) consistently (nearly daily, only forgetting here and there) for 2 years now. This is a habit I’ve been trying and failing to make for over a decade.

And here are some NEW goals for 2023:

Blog 3 times a week. I let this blog die recently, time to revive it, and also revive the idea of writing out any old thought that enters my head. because I’m always glad when I do, no matter how pointless it seems in the moment. Read three REAL books in Spanish. Only books I’d also want to read were they written in English! Write 60 poems. I want to reach 100 total poems so I can publish a collection. I expect with 100 poems to choose from, I should be almost guaranteed to have 40-50 ones that are okay to good. I have 40 total now, so I need + 60Sent 36 stories/poems to magazines. That is, 36 total submissions (its normal to send many poems per submission, but each ‘send’ only counts as 1). That is 3 per month. finish the current ‘long thing’ project I’m working on

There are some goals! Just writing them down always helps me a bit.

What are yours?

un libro real

I’ve been teaching myself spanish for 4 or 5 years. I have read several collections of stories written for language learners (not real) I’ve read a novel written for beginners (not real) I’ve read a novel written for children(not real) this year I read a terrible YA thriller (some would say real, but not me) –and as of yesterday, I have finally read a REAL book en español, one written for adults and considered to be a classic and an actually good book. The book was El Túnel by Ernesto Sabato, and I enjoyed it a lot. It even partly inspired the current thing I have been writing for the past few months.

Next year my goal is to read 3 real books in Spanish.

I wonder how long it will take, though, before I stop wondering what I’m missing. Even though I enjoyed the book, I feel that I certainly missed many subtleties, hints, tone, and etc. How long will it be before I can read fully fluently? and is that even possible without writing fluently, or speaking? Because, as confident as I feel reading, I can barely speak the language.

Though, reading is the main reason I want to learn languages anyway. If I can read Spanish fluently and never speak a word, I’ll be perfectly satisfied.

poems,

I have been writing them for maybe a year now, and I recently gathered them all from all the different documents and places where ive randomly typed them, and put them all in one folder and I have about 35 of them, but only perhaps 15 or so are good.

it is nice to have the option of a poem. many ideas do not fit in the shape of a story. and now i have some other shape that i can put things in, and one I am getting more familiar and confident with every day.

this, along with the seven poetry collections I’m reading at once, are all good ways to follow my rules: ABR, ABW, ABL

always be reading, writing, learning

i keep buying books

and they stack up faster than anyone could ever read them. i bought six or seven books just because they were referenced, by author or title, in another book. it happened because i knew if that particular author had mentioned them, that they must be very important for me to read. so far, it’s turned out to be true.

if there is an answer to life, if it exists anywhere in us, i believe it must be hidden in art. in the beautiful objects that we create with a secret, unconscious passion, there must be a residue of The Answer left behind. if every masterpiece, every soul rending novel or painting or piece of music, if they can all be added up, if the special piece of each one can connect with each other one, maybe, when mixed just right, the riddle will finally be answered…