----- Original Message -----
From: "Kenneth Wolman" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, July 18, 2008 5:45 PM
Subject: Re: "The Circuit Rider"
> Frederick Pollack wrote:
>> The Circuit Rider
>
> Once I finally launch myself into this, it's a grabber and actually fun of
> a sort. It has all these resonances: the poem could be a gloss on John
> Lennon's puerile "Imagine," and my head is dragged into the
> second-from-last movie I saw (the last was *The English Patient* so it
> doesn't count:-)), Herzog's *Aguirre, the Wrath of God*. The idea of
> being comforted by reason in "The Circuit Rider' strikes me as almost as
> funny as Klaus Kinski standing on the deck of the doomed expedition's
> raft, surrounded by monkeys in the Amazon jungle, yelling about he's the
> wrath of God. Two studies in a dying culture, then.
>
> Ken
>
> --
With all due respect, Ken, you don't see enough movies. Klaus K.
proclaiming the triumph of the will is no doubt one spiritual root of my
poem. But another is John Goodman in the Coen Bros. "Barton Fink." A big
jovial fellow, he is revealed in the course of the movie to be a
psychopathic killer, and is last seen chasing the hero (an intellectual)
down the hallway of a burning hotel, waving a Big Ax and yelling "I'LL SHOW
YOU THE LIFE OF THE MIND!"
My youth was warped by books from the 30s my parents still had lying around.
At an innocent age I read the original, Christopher Caudwell's, "Studies in
a Dying Culture." It left its mark.
|