Yes, that stack of books will fall on me … there is a difference between book accumulators versus book collectors. Thank FSM for Kindle and the Interwebz. Started accumulating books and then selling them when there was no apparent use for them… even read most of them but my life was defined by projects whether it was for school or something else. New things to learn, except I kept putting some off because some other contingency occurred or went south. But I still have too many things and their tyranny means less now that there’s really no one to whom they will be left.
"Tsundoku" is the condition of acquiring reading materials but letting them pile up in one's home without reading them.
"Tsundoku" originated as Japanese slang (積ん読) "tsun-doku". 「積ん読」 came from 「積んでおく」 "tsunde-oku" (to pile things up ready for later and leave) and 「読書」 "dokusho" (reading books). 「積んどく」 "tsundoku" is a euphonic change of 「積んでおく」. It is also used to refer to books ready for reading later when they are on a bookshelf. As currently written, the word combines the characters for "pile up" (積) and the character for "read" (読)
According to Quartz, tsundoku has quite a history. It originated as a play on words in the late 19th century, during what is considered the Meiji Era in Japan. At first, the “oku” in “tsunde oku” morphed into “doku,” meaning “to read,” but since “tsunde doku” is a bit of a mouthful, the phrase eventually condensed into “tsundoku.” And a word for reading addicts was born.
Speaking of addictions ― the term “bibliomania” emerged in England around the same time as “tsundoku.” Thomas Frognall Dibdin, an English cleric and bibliographer, wrote Bibliomania, or Book Madness: A Bibliographical Romance in the 1800s, outlining a fictional “neurosis” that prompted those suffering from it to obsessively collect books of all sorts…
Tsundoku seems to better capture the lighter side of compulsive book shopping, a word that evokes images of precariously stacked tomes one good breeze away from toppling over. While there’s no English equivalent quite as beautiful, no one’s stopping you from incorporating the Japanese word into your regular vocabulary.
www.huffingtonpost.com/...
it’s more about projects left undone … like an analysis of the Michael Curtiz film Santa Fe Trail that might resemble the analysis of John Ford’s Young Mr Lincoln, a paradigmatic object of cinematic critical analysis.
Young Mr. Lincoln (YML) and ideological analysis: a reconsideration (with many asides) by Chuck Kleinhans Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media (Jump Cut, No. 55, fall 2013)
In 1970 the editors of Cahiers du cinéma published “Young Mr. Lincoln, texte collectif,” an article written by all the editors, which, upon translation into English in Screen (UK) as “John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln,” in 1972, became a landmark essay in Anglo-American film theory. The essay was quickly referenced, commented on, and republished repeatedly in film theory anthologies. The commentaries produced a cottage industry of new studies of the 1939 film.
My concern here is to mark the place of the original essay and its subsequent discussion. It needs some context for a new generation, some 40 years later.
Because the French article became so central to key issues in emerging film studies, today’s reader finds many paths leading through and out of the essay, many tangents that turn out to be useful for grasping the essay in the abstract and in history. And it also lets us think about the historical vicissitudes of film theorizing. Reconsideration today also aptly opens further thought in terms of Spielberg’s Lincoln and the larger project of ideological analysis.
In summary, Cahiers argues that the film’s “ideological project” (validating a Lincoln myth to serve an electoral aim) is contradicted in at least five ways:
- There are significant distortions such as deception by shot and editing in the murder scene.
- There are omissions such as scenes that would be needed for the crime thriller genre but which would have lessened the presentation of Lincoln’s omnipotence: for example, he never confronts the accused about what happened, what they know.
- The film relies on exaggerated accentuation as seen in the very heightened drama of the final scenes at the trial and the aftermath.
- There is a scriptural violence, invoking God, and Law, Truth, and Family in a distorted way.
- The film’s project aims at a religious (Puritan) sense of election, that Lincoln’s place is predetermined, but it must maintain suspense and a presentation of free choice in order to maintain basic narrative interest.
So if you haven’t yet dozed off, my project-variation on that magisterial, discipline-defining method for Young Mr. Lincoln (YML) would be to look at another film with respect to the social divisions in domestic audiences represented by the impending European war, as opposed to the electoral history of YML as a Republican party film, much like today’s White House is a peculiarly odd collection of RW film and television producers.
As a Michael Curtiz film, Santa fe Trail (SFT) has a different directorial perspective than John Ford’s YML. SFT is a more historically positioned text rather than the more mythological YML because it includes secession, slavery, Bloody Kansas, John Brown and Harper’s Ferry. Unlike YML’s God, Law, Truth, and Family, SFT has more to do with religious extremism, insurrection, authority, and the problems of historical revision, especially considering the ideological problems of intersectionality in choosing a revolutionary path. SFT however, is no Django Unchained, but as a historically referential text, it even resembles some contemporary discourses.
Santa Fe Trail (1940) Trailer
The film loosely follows the life of J.E.B. Stuart (Errol Flynn) before the outbreak of the American Civil War. Among its sub-plots include a romance with the fictional Kit Carson Holliday (Olivia de Havilland), friendship with George Armstrong Custer (Ronald Reagan), and battles against abolitionist John Brown (Raymond Massey).
Synopsis
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0033021/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Fe_Trail_(film)
Run time 1:49:26
Production Company Warner Bros. Pictures Inc.
Audio/Visual sound, Black and White
War in Europe:
On December 20, the day of the New York release of the film Santa Fe Trail, the Roosevelt administration announced the establishment of an Office of Production Management, the goal of which was to expand defense efforts and speed military aid to the British and other non-Axis powers.
On December 21 the German government denounced the act as a form of "moral aggression."
On December 29, President Roosevelt, in a “Fireside Chat,” (his second of the year—the previous one was in May 1940) called for a huge war production effort that would make the United States “the great arsenal of democracy”: planes, ships, guns, and munitions for those countries fighting for Democracy.
http://libraryautomation.com/nymas/americafirst.html http://www.indiana.edu/~league/1940.htm
www.nvcc.edu/...
You can see I’m no fun at all in a movie theater, especially with teenagers using their cell phones, screaming babies of couples who cannot afford sitters or PPV cable… As much as it should be a social event, experiencing cinema once was as important as going to a museum.
I can empathize with those who smuggle in whole microwaved meals whose smell fills the theater.
Probably needed my own screening room or a several generations forward VR goggle-set.