pere goriot and jiro dreams of sushi

it's difficult to know what to think of pere goriot because i don't know if it's funny. it's an epic, absurd, exhaustingly moralizing melodrama, and i have no idea how seriously to take it. a pivotal thing, for example, is whether madame de beauseant's suicide is actually even a shred of a counterpart to pere goriot's demise.

more fundamental to the book is its ultimate fixation on money and characters that have or have had it. they're the only ones entitled to a story, to a tragedy. there's no drama or even interest in humdrum misery, only on the preposterous array of characters with a shred of a claim on millions. balzac's set up in some dumpy-ass boardinghouse is amazing—are there really going to be a solid 5 out of 12 boarders on the precipice of being maad rich?

it's also a story of spicy feudalism, of lords and serfs but mixed with passion and debt—for the serfs are sometimes really good looking and now there are pawn shops. AH gotta run to the movies, write more soon.

Jiro Dreams Of Sushi would be immaculately elegant if they weren't cooking fish; the politics of those sublime smorgasbords are iffy.

The idea of doing the same thing for 75 years is astonishing. The special thing about Jiro Dreams Of Sushi is that it does not make it look easy. The need for time is at the center of the movie, for the most meticulous drudgery. I guess I'm amazed to see something that says that one must practice. It's a very austere but entrancingly simple idea that practicing the same thing hundreds of thousands of times will produce extraordinary outcomes. There is nothing at all mystical or special in this movie, just a profound, life-defining reverence for practice and time. How EXHAUSTING.

The intensity of their practice breeds exquisite mania in these Shikonin. They whittle away relentlessly at themselves, at their imperfections, and so the immutable parts of them become outsize. Jiro is left handed; his younger son is right handed. Because of this handedness the younger son's sushi restaurant is a perfect mirror image of his father's restaurant.
 
The Japanese food critc in the movie has THE silliest mustache I have ever seen.



but back to pere goriot. it's odd how for a writer renowned for biting political commentary and social awareness how little he writes about the mechanics of money. this book's really operatic, really emotional, really personal. i mean, it spends plenty of time indicting the rich, but really just because they're assholes, which is a pretty weak condemnation of the furred and cigared ones. there's certainly no "system" being critiqued here.

fascinating historical bits include: the filthiness of walking (it's nearly pointless for poor rastignac to get dolled up if he doesn't have a carriage to shelter him from the muck of paris's streets); how a foggy morning means people don't get up en masse. that weather was a force in the intimate lives of millions of people is stupendous. it was important and universal and bigger than small talk.