I

On the bus this morning I began The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat proper; yesterday at Fair Trade I only read the introduction before finishing A Princess of Roumania. I've known about Sacks (ATTN: It's-never-too-early-for-cephalopods Zinfandels—Sacks has the shirt for you ...) for years and years but for some reason have never gotten around to reading his works, which is curious if not downright strange and an oversight, given my interests and work.

Compared to the last several days the bus—same time for me each day—was surprisingly uncrowded; I got my own two-seat bench, and nobody sat next to me. I'm always one of the last ones people choose to sit next to, even though unlike the truly obese I do not take up 1.5 to 2 seats, and unlike some of the other passengers I have meticulous hygiene. But I've learned to live with it. Today I managed to make it most of the way through the first "chapter," minus the postscript, to which I'll return later.

To continue on a similar topic, Salon has a current story-slash-book-review, "A penny for your deepest thoughts," dealing with Halburt and Schwitgebel's Describing Inner Experience, which sounds fascinating. It's the psychologist vs. the philosopher. The philosopher with with a gift for mischief, it seems. I got hold of PBS's "The Secret Life of the Brain" (5 parts), which seems perhaps remedial and/or introductory, but also well-done and interesting.

Tonight I learned about hulu.

One of the points Sacks raises in his introduction is that until relatively recently conditions afflicting the right hemisphere were un- and understudied; it was aphasia and such dealing with the left that received the most literature, and Sacks, unlike far too many authors on this and other science topics, has a decent grasp of (clinical) history, which just takes me back to some not so distant clinical and other history.

My second German course in college was on Vienna ca. 1900, where I learned about Schoenberg and Klimt and Hofmannsthal, but also about Freud & Breuer and Schnitzler. I still have my old paperback Fischer edition of Studien über Hysterie (Studies on Hysteria, by Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud), which contains the famous report on "Anna O" (Bertha Pappenheim). Only years later did I get the following two volumes: The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 3, The Phenomenology of Knowledge by Ernst Cassirer; and the Phenomenology of Perception by Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Cassirer (1874–1945) is woefully ignored these past decades; rarely (see: Russell) have clearer explications of philosophy and its history been put to paper, but in the wake of Heidegger's brand of phenomenology Cassirer fell out of all favor. I'm of the opinion that a lot of his original works, while interesting as commentaries and critiques, do not necessarily have a lot to offer us, but he's a much greater reader of the Enlightenment than his peers and successors, and so provides an invaluable resource for me and my work.

I mention this only to state that for those interested in the study of aphasia, both the Cassirer and Merleau-Ponty texts, while ostensibly focused on other topics, deal quite a bit with such clinical phenomena and provide interesting reading.

II

There might be spoilers below.

D and I decided to catch I Am Legend today.

It opened two days after I returned "home" for the holidays and my brother and I had discussed going to see it together; my 2007 movies-in-theaters exploits had been split between my brother and D. The weather remained mediocre, the parents had the only two vehicles, and so my brother and I stayed home and just watched what we had available to us. Plenty. Then the weekend before xmas arrived, my brother's friend B came to town from Portland, and my brother went out with B one afternoon and evening. The two of them watched I Am Legend, so I didn't to catch it while out west.

It wasn't long ago that I watched The Omega Man, which is a curious mixture of very dated early-mid 70s sci-fi styles and interests and more generic sci-fi tropes; it will never be "timeless" but it will be watchable for years to come. I haven't had a chance to watch Vincent Price in The Last Man on Earth.

The 2007 release is, as a film, arguably the best of the three (I'm ignoring the 2007 straight-to-DVD release I Am Omega—starring Marc Dacascos [Brotherhood of the Wolf]—which has all the martial arts action the other adaptations were clearly missing) and yet also deviates the most from Matheson's novel. Matheson's everyman is transformed into a medical researcher and then "doctor/scientist" in the adaptations; I Am Legend is a weird mix of the novel and the Heston flick in some regards, though the social commentary and criticism of The Omega Man (hell, a hallmark of most late-60s through mid-70s sci-fi, up to Star Wars in a way) is entirely missing, unless you consider it contained in the trite idea of mankind being f*cked while trying to play god. Which is just to say that like the novel and the earlier adaptations this one is a reflection of its times and fears.

Those concerns shift from a reflection on modernity (hell, everyman factory worker trying to make sense of a changing world) to a post-Woodstock period when the last member of the ancien régime, standing for authority and culpability, must give way. And now we get a more psychologically nuanced protagonist and a story that is both all about him (our egocentrism) and about turning back the clock and restoration of what we've lost. The protagonists of the earlier works are the last members of their kind, their age is over, and a new society is to come, but that is impossible here because just when the speechless (but vocal) monsters become psychologically interesting a cure is found and work can commence on creating a new world on the foundations and in the mold of the old.

The other shift that I found interesting and curiously effective was increasing the role of the dog (though it turns out Sam is a link to the past) and the diminished role of other people (though here they're humans, not "infected" who can either reclaim their humanity or who have become something new), and Sam is the most effective real animal not found in a movie for kids in ages.

Reviews:

• Roger Ebert (3/4)
• Stephanie Zacharek: "Here, the virus-infected mutant creatures that surround Neville aren't really vampires, but skinless, seemingly mindless zombies motivated only by their own bloodthirst." A grrr moment, please. Stupid stupid (re)viewer. This is exactly Neville's position—and mistake—in the movie. Compared to The Omega Man this movie indeed makes the "monsters" zombie-esque, but mindless, clearly not. They set traps, they've got some limited animal husbandry, and what sets off their attack is Neville kidnapping the head honcho's love interest. Hello? Zacharek ... the fact remains, the director (Francis Lawrence [Constantine]) messed this up. He wants to have it both ways, he wants monsters à la Resident Evil and he wants antagonists with motivations and goals, but the latter is poorly developed and feels a bit tacked on. But oh that first hour—it's gorgeous, it's well-paced, it's wonderful.
• Tasha Robinson (B): "He's amiable enough, in a Will Smith kind of way, but he's barely clinging to sanity, and when something knocks him out of his well-developed groove, he rapidly disintegrates." Good enough description, though I'm fond enough of Will Smith for that "in a Will Smith kind of way" to be a good thing, but Robinson does indeed capture the important psychological moment of the film (which Ebert, for example, didn't, which led him to wonder why Neville was working for a cure and looking for other people if, as he claims with Anna arrives, he then claims there is nobody else; Ebert was unwilling to take the character rather than just the plot and dialog into account).
• A.O. Scott: "The presence of the lovely Brazilian actress Alice Braga does seem promising; if she and Mr. Smith were to reboot the species together, Humanity 2.0 would be quite a bit sexier than the present version, as well as friendlier. But really the movie is best when its hero is on his own, and Mr. Smith, walking in the footsteps of Vincent Price and Charlton Heston, who played earlier versions of the Robert Neville character, outdoes both of them. There is something graceful and effortless about this performance"—amen, brother ...

Needless to say, weakness (generic nature ...) of the ending aside, I really enjoyed this.

Afterward came Qdoba burritos (the shredded pork is quite tasty). I gave D my copy of A Princess of Roumania (see: yesterday). I was tempted to say "lent," but I don't particularly need it back, and there's the whole just-give-it-away thing. If she returns it, I'll give it to L for her birthday in a couple months. D stopped by the/a bookstore yesterday and picked up Matheson's I Am Legend as well as Foucault's Pendulum and something else worthwhile, I think Wicked. Whenever I see those books (Wicked & Co.) the covers, titles, and synopses always seem tempting in a way, for they promise a quick, witty read, but they also promise so much formula that I can't be bothered to spend money on them. Anybody with experience reading them?

Next week or perhaps later we'll probably get to seeing Juno and/or No Country for Old Men. I have Blood Meridian sitting on a shelf.

III

The Onion got around to reviewing and appropriately trashing Uwe Boll's In the Name of the King; D and I had great fun laughing about the movie as we drove to see I Am Legend. The Onion gave it a D, and that's all I have to say on it. For now.

I recently caught several other movie trailers that fascinate me, though not necessarily in a good way, and both "star" the same actress, Abigail Breslin, who most know from "Heroes" ... oops, that's entirely wrong. For some reason I confuse Abigail Breslin, who was in Little Miss Sunshine, which I never saw, with someone named Adair Tishler, who looks nothing like her. In any case, the first movie is Nim's Island and the second is Definitely, Maybe.

Neither is marketed toward someone like me, but I watched both trailers, and while the latter interests me very little (finding a 'romantic comedy' or such that keeps my interest is a difficult task, but not impossible), though I liked that it—at least insofar as the trailer can be trusted—is self-aware enough to play with typical rom-com tropes.

The former stars Jodie Foster and Gerard Butler, but what burst into my conscious mind as the trailer started playing was that Foster was playing a twist on Kathleen Turner in Romancing the Stone (now that's a guilty pleasure), except without the sister who gets in trouble with the drug dealers. Gerard Butler is playing the Dabney Coleman role from Cloak & Dagger (and Coleman is someone I've far too often confused—when it comes to 80s roles, not more recent ones—with Gerald McRaney [see: the contemporaneous Neverending Story], which ties into my confusion of Breslin and Tishler). There are pirates, which leads me to think of Johnny Depp or Treasure Island, and the island setup reminds me of The Swiss Family Robinson, at least the 1960 Disney version, which also has pirates.

Combine the "office" of the Three Investigators with the island hangout of the Roinsons and all would be perfect. I loved that movie as a kid.

But my life does not consist of tree houses and fights with pirates. Instead I go to work, answer emails, prepare manuscripts, curse Word, and at last get an excuse to stop the boring stuff. One of our recent authors is up for some major history award, and we were requested to send either offprints or photocopies of the author's published article to the chair of the competition committee.

Adventure ensued.

We did not have any offprints, nothing official, that is, so $DEMIURGE asked me to go downstairs and make three photocopies of said article. The offprint option had not been mentioned to me at the time. Down the stairs I went to the unoccupied photocopy room. The copier proceeded to make rather faint copies from the journal I was using and whose spine I broke (journals are people to me). I recopied several pages, made two more sets, and returned to the office to show them to $DEMIURGE, who was not impressed with the quality.

I went back downstairs, with my goal being to turn on the other photocopier and see if would do a better job, but when I got there a slender guy of medium height in black slacks and a deep, violent blue shirt was setting up his laptop upon the second copier. He offered to let me use the second copier, which he'd activated, since he planned on being there a while, after I'd mentioned my difficulties with the first. He then looked at the first, punched a few buttons, and I gave it a try. Better results, though several pages still came out almost unreadably faint. Before leaving I saw his shiny pager attached to his hip on the left and noticed that he hadn't done any copying work; copier dude, then. Or network dude. $DEMIURGE and I contemplated and I said that since we have ten (more or less) extra copies of that issue, I could cut out the necessary pages and make a "clean" copy for photocopying, but then I asked whether the chair had requested photocopies. When I was informed "offprints or photocopies," I suggested we just mangle three extra issues of the journal and make our own offprints.

So two hundred pages of paper were wasted in an extraneous photocopying exercise, but all those pages will be reused as scrap paper in our offices for day-to-day printing. And I at least got to play with a razor blade for a while; cutting things up is always entertaining. Always. A high point of the week, really, destroying several pristine issues, breaking their spines, snipping the threads, digging into glue and cutting deep with long, steady strokes. Much better than photocopies, if you ask me, which you didn't.

Days Without:

• Alcohol: 11
• Ice Cream: 11
• Finishing a Book: 1 (nothing today)
• ...?