tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7030175198419285984.post6535976817327930142..comments2024-03-06T19:29:28.444-08:00Comments on Getting Oriented: A Novel about Japan: Unwilling Suspension of DisbeliefWally Woodhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17653591053915868274noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7030175198419285984.post-37155230775339606592012-02-08T11:30:20.210-08:002012-02-08T11:30:20.210-08:00Wally,
Having seen the delightful "Midnight ...Wally,<br /><br />Having seen the delightful "Midnight in Paris" many any months ago, now, I'm hazy about the details of which you speak, though I do recall the bit about his finding the memoir/diary in the left bank book stall. My own experience of traveling in France and Italy, with my feeble grasp of the romance languages, but an open heart, is that one can get along more or less, usually finding natives who speak perfect English, and so nothing about that scene struck me as unbelieavable. The Owen Wilson character is a writer, after all, and I find it at least credible that he might recognize his own name in a French text, and perhaps a few surronding words. The fact that he finds himself referred to in a memoir written in the 1920s, however, is a bit more challenging, yet, serves as just one more of Woody Allen's inumerable expressions in that film of the Modernist literary [and artistic] ethos, which plays with time, consciousness, history and impressions. That mode is found among all the great Modernists [Joyce, Woolf, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Stein, Eliot, etc.]. And that is really what I took the film to be about, both literally and metaphorically--that, and the insight Allen offers of artists and lovers [all people really] longing for the past and dreaming of the future, as they trudge through their troubled present. That scene of stepping back from the 1920s to the Belle Epoque was priceless about the common human dissatisfactions of "present time." The Owen Wilson character is changed forever by his sojourn in Paris, and so, his impressions afterward must be viewed through that prism of artistic change, the Modernist outlook of a flowing and boundaryless grasp of time and self.<br /><br /> "Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter---tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther....And one fine morning---<br /> So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." --The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzerald<br /><br /> -----<br /><br /> "If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast....<br /> There is never any ending to Paris, and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other."<br /> --A Moveable Feast, By Ernest HemingwayBob Crookehttp://www.robertcrooke.orgnoreply@blogger.com