Books and Films

Films watched in this month:

Hugo

The Descendants

Jackie and Hillary

Stealing Beauty

Short Stories read in this month:

Fever by Raymond Carver

Where Are You Going, WHere Have You Been? by Joyce Carol Oates

The Wedding by Joy Williams

A God Man is Hard to Find by Flanner O'Connor

Akhnilo by James Salter

The Christian Roommates by John Updike

The Liar by Tobias Wolff

Books read in this month:

Discomfort Zone by Jonathan Franzen

The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis (revisited)

The Old Testament - Daniel, Hosea, Joel, Amos

The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton

캐릭터들로부터 짜증이 밀려와서 The Custom of the Country를 의외로 지지부진하게 며칠간 들고다녔다. 많이 사거나 더 많이 사거나 사달라고 조르거나. 남 흉내내거나 남 흉보는 여자들. 이쁜 언니들에게 속거나 이쁜 언니들에게 더 많이 속거나, 속아주고 이쁘면 좋대거나, 이뻐서 다 용서했더니 또 뒤통수 맞거나하는 남자들. 음, but I, too, fancy there's one who sees through the humbug.

Raymond says:

You come among us speaking our language and not knowing what we mean; wanting the things we want, and not knowing why we want them; aping our weaknesses, exaggerating our follies, ignoring or ridiculing all we care about - you come from hotels as big as towns, and from towns as flimsy as paper, where the street haven't had time to be named, and the buildings are demolished before they're dry, and the people are as proud of changing as we are of holding to what we have - and we're fools enough to imagine that because you copy our ways and pick up our slang you understand anything about the things that make life decent and honorable for us!

Bowen thinks:

The dining-room at the Nouveau Luxe represented, on such a spring evening, what unbounded material power had devised for the delusion of its leisure: a phantom 'society,' with all the rules, smirks, gestures of its model, but evoked out of promiscuity and incoherence while the other had ben the product of continuity and choice. And the instinct which had driven a new class of world-compellers to bind themselves to slavish imitation of the superseded, and their prompt and reverent faith in the reality of the sham they had created, seemed to Bowen the most satisfying proof of human permanence. 

quoted from The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton

And you-, you know you are pretty and that is everything.