In between a busy day and a busier day next I find myself enjoying this film.
Yet at mid-movie I had to stop, in between Picasso and Gertrude Stein, after scenes with the Fitzgeralds and Hemingway. It was obviously contrived the way they talked like they wrote. But it was heady just listening to them, to Hemingway for example, and remembering how it was always a compliment to call someone’s writing Hemingwayesque. Nick Joaquin’s was a bit Hemingwayesque, or so I think; the late Bishop Pacis’ was definitely Hemingwayesque. And once in a while in my less gifted writing I try to keep the style in mind. But it is not about the style.
It is about the golden age, how every generation looks back
at one to contrast and attempt to escape from a dull present.
at one to contrast and attempt to escape from a dull present.
It was the character least liked of all, the pedantic one, who said it first early on, only to be realized near the film's end, as in a fable, by a starry-eyed Owen Wilson, playing half-naive, half-wise, for the nth time. Annoying in its irony, but that is the genius of Woody Allen. He has moved me enough to take another moment and look back at our nation's proffered golden ages, then at my busy day and the busier one ahead, and I just know in some future I shall be looking back and declare this day, amidst its dullness and turmoil, its complexity and campiness, I have a feeling that today stands in line with our generation’s current golden age.
29 November 2011
Chancery, Diocese of Legazpi
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