in cold blood

that was miserable. what a beautiful, thrilling "true" book. the scenes of perry and dick on the highway were some of the most extraordinary -- trying to hitchhike, picking up the little boy and his grandpa and picking up the bottles with them.

as for "evil" in the book, reading it, i wonder if a lot of how perry and dick are painted is just how much they were willing to talk to capote. perry and capote got on great, probably, and dick and capote not so hot.

it's funny. the story's so specific, so exactingly told (invented), that i feel like i've got no way to bring it into the world i know. no metaphors present themselves. i don't know how to extrapolate from it. it's like capote brings one too deeply into the story to have any perspective. all i'm left to say is that the story's amazing, that the characters are heartbreaking and terrifying, and that capote writes crazy beautifully.

on evil

am reading lots of books about terrible things people have done. i'm interested in that sort of thing because i'm interested in pacifism, and pacifism as i understand it falls apart if violence and evil and that sort of thing exists in a vacuum, unprovoked. and so wherever people have done something awful, i'm trying to find the awfulness done to them that led to it.

justice these days is based on the idea of deterrence. there are lots of intrinsically bad people out there, goes the thinking, and if you don't threaten them with punishment, and punish them when they're bad, then they'll kill everyone. the contempt for so-called "appeasement" in the run-up to world war two is rooted in this stuff. it's why we "arm for peace."

i've got this pie in the sky idea that pacifist resistance destroys peoples' will to do bad things. that if many are willing to die, offering up no physical resistance, not even some righteous self defense, that violence and oppression of the baddies cannot but wilt and die, that the badness needs and feeds off of the threat of their violent deaths.

so this calls for an examination of somebody like adolf eichmann. i mean, he wasn't on the front lines of the war, but he did lots of terrible stuff as a bureaucrat. the guy believed he was doing the right thing. eichmann in jerusalem talks a lot about the collaborationist jewish councils, who were trying to minimize harm, but ultimately made things a lot worse.

random family

this book's important because it illuminates how all the seemingly crazy shit poor people do are grounded in rational reactions to crazy shitty circumstances. it says a lot about why people have babies. there's a huge amount about toxic, insane gender norms, about jail, about the unlikely, heartbreaking ways people pursue dignity, about cesar knowing to put on two pairs of underwear when he's carted off to jail so he can have one while he washes the other.

one striking, important thing is how even if you've done a heroic job of keeping your shit in order as a poor person, you've doubtless got a family and friends who don't. how you'll be the only thing keeping half a dozen people from being homeless, how rising in society means brutally casting off a lot of family and friends. which is a crazy weight. it reminded me of that fat history book about the balkans which described the refugees of conflicts would arrive elsewhere and proceed to foment unrest there because of their hard-won knowledge of evil, and their staid, ethnic counterparts'd get sucked in. analogous stuff.

just so many details. so much noble shit. i'd have a panic attack trying to turn 10 years into a book. am so glad she managed it. also, what a tour de force of facts. what a miracle of saying This happened and then that happened, of straightforwardness. it's like there's no interpretation, just searing thoroughness. that's a stylistic triumph, but also such an important thing for me to remember in trying to be a writer. how staggeringly better to just say what happened. don't foist meaning, just recite.

ferris bueller's day off

this movie's a hilarious bourgeois fantasy. the kid's idea of rebellion is eating at a stuffy french restaurant frequented by his father, looking at modern art, and getting married. that's his best day ever. also, it's entirely about rich white people.

forrest gump

Forrest Gump's a movie about the joys of obedience. It's a revisionist history of the United States told by Forrest Gump, an athletic, good natured, and mentally handicapped man.

Gump's a trojan horse, a set of guileless eyes through which his country looks guileless. Gump's Vietnam War consists of marching, friendship, and his uncomplicated heroism. And Gump doesn't read newspapers, so the Pentagon Papers don't come up. And when Gump, an Alabama boy, happens on a militarized school integration, he picks up a notebook a black girl dropped, and hands it to her. He doesn't know enough to be racist.

The conceit of the movie is that Gump's there at these historic American moments, that he meets Elvis and witnesses Watergate and plays football for the Crimson Tide, and always contributes his dose of childlike goodnesses. Gump's a game tour guide for this Potemkin village.