“Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.”

— Mel Brooks

The New York Times: Into Charles Bukowski? Hard to be, isn’t it? And I’ve tried. But there is a genius there, and this is an interesting reviewing of “Come On In,” the latest posthumous publication. He ain’t Wordsworth, but it’s art.

While aesthetically brutal, these considerations have a way of exposing pretense, even the pretense of exposing pretense. Bukowski makes Allen Ginsberg look like a mandarin. That his poems get an F for craft doesn’t bother him; since his life gets an F too, he achieves an extraordinary correspondence between word and action. And perhaps this is what he was after, with the headlong effort to kill himself with drinking and brawling – pummeling his life into simple enough terms to be within reach of a limited art.

So Friday I stopped by the local video store and picked up two five-day rentals: Gingerbread Man starring Kenneth Branaugh and People I Know, starring Al Pacino.

I started watching Gingerbread, and found it a little hard to buy Branaugh as a Savanah lawyer. He’s a good actor but I didn’t get far into it. Got bored. I had the feeling the director was bored too, and maybe the cast. Possibly the writer, John Grisham, is getting bored writing about people like Savanah lawyers. (But please, John, not another Painted House.) A quick google proves I’m not the only viewer who wasn’t caught up in it. It’s got a hell of a cast, though, including Robert Duvall, so I’ll probably try finishing it. It’s paid for and not due back until Wednesday.

So I popped it out and put in People I Know. Al Pacino as a has-been NY publicist. Not far into the film, I found myself watching Pacino and Tea Leoni suckin up some opium in a swanky whorehouse. God preserve me from movies that make me feel like I’ve just stepped in something that’s gonna need hosing off.

In short, I think I’m off movies for a while. There are just a few that have been recommended by people I trust, and I’ll watch those as the Winter goes by. (I liked March of the Penguins.) But for the most part, it’s time for a few — dozen — good books.

* I spelled weak that way on purpose. It’s a pun, get it? Ha ha .

Well, not literally.  I’m just wondering, why does it appear there are little crumbs of food under the keys in my keyboard?  When I do not eat at the computer.  I do eat in this room!  I have a dining table in the dining room, and a coffee table in the living room, and no food comes into my home office.  Is some sort of elfin nocturnal miscreant using my computer while I sleep?  Some hacker in Asia, with a cracker problem?  Dang.

OK, you gotta read this post on Bush’s overreaching of his powers, at Nothing But Love. Good stuff.

… back to Texas.

So right after Thanksgiving, I mentioned putting up my Christmas lights. It was a cold night, I remember. And it’s still cold tonight, and half a moon, which may give us hope. Do you have hope of a full moon? And shorter nights? Hope that the light will come and stand again in the center of your life? Yeah, so do I. I believe in spring. Still, soon the timer for my Christmas lights will shut them off, and tomorrow I’ll box them up, put them away, until they’re needed again. And they are, don’t you think? Light is something true for us, something more than pretty.

Today, on the Orthodox Christian calendar, is December 25. Christmas. The Nativity according to the flesh of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. On the “New Calendar,” it’s January 6, Theophany – Holy Epiphany in the West. Either way, Christmas is over, and the 12 days of it that end on Epiphany if you’re into that. And our endurance of the long dark night, which leads to lent, which leads to Pascha (Easter) resumes.

Bring it on. And May will be all the more wonderful.

It was time for a routine change, to kinda lighten the mood. Hope you like it.

Surfing around, I stumbled blindly upon this post about a writer facing imprisonment for insulting Turkey. Not the birdish beasties so many of us eat at Thanksgiving. This guy is a writer in Turkey, and he said something to piss off the powers that be. Apparently the Turks killed a bunch of Armenians, etc., and the Turkish powers are in denial. Same as it ever was.

Now it doesn’t surprise me that the Turks have no particular protections of freedom of speech, but I am a bit nonplussed that they’re so flagrant with its opposite. Especially with the armies of the perniciously democratic Emperor George just over the border. They must think His Arrogance can’t think of a good reason for some regime change there too, long as he’s in the neighborhood.

Weird. But as long as we’re the subject of free speech … ahem: The government of the United States killed off most of the native population of what is now America, in systematic acts of genocide, and left the few impecunious survivors royally screwed. There, I said it. Avast and have at me, oh blind and smelly winds of Justice!

He said, "Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way."

And, "Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you’re doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing."

As for me, I do a lot of that stuff.  And I’m not sure that Doctorow’s right, though he ought to know.  I think the creative process is what it is. And I’m often lost in the fog. Anyway, happy birthday, Ed.

Yesterday, I drove up to Summerland to have coffee with my buddy Erik, at one of my favorite coffeehouses, The French Bulldog Café. And guess what. It’s closed. For good. Doesn’t that suck? I liked that place. It was small and comfy and usually quiet. Which may explain why it isn’t open anymore, and the factory coffee Starbucks up the road a couple miles is jumping.

Goodbye, little Bulldog, miss ya.

The problem with being sure that God is on your side is that you can’t change your mind, because God sure isn’t going to change His.

-Roger Ebert