Diary

This is peak cabin fever season for me at the moment. It has been cold and snowy, and the main disadvantage to me is that I don't get enough exercise. I manage to stay entertained by reading or by watching films. I still make an effort not to follow Trump closely, because he is predictable and boring. Fortunately, he is so stupid and self-centered that he is accelerating his own political demise, and, rather than obsessing about him, I am content to watch his death spiral from a distance. Conventional news media are still doing shoddy reporting, but I find The Contrarian quite reliable, and there is now a massive movement to get rid of Trump or at least to reduce his influence, and I think it is already succeeding. The problem is that this all occurs in slow motion. Although I find it very hard to get excited about politics, it could be an interesting year.

The films I've watched recently have been Chinatown, The Wizard of Oz, Claire's Knee, My Night at Maud's, Love in the Afternoon and A Summer's Tale. Chinatown, I think is one of the best noir films, with great acting – and a fantastic musical score. I saw The Wizard of Oz in a theater with family members. From a historical standpoint, I think that The Wizard of Oz may be the most important American film ever made, because it effectively captures the American mindset at the end of the Great Depression; the basic pattern of innocent, simple people trying to survive in a world full of hucksters still exists here. And I just love Margaret Hamilton as the Wicked Witch of the West. Also, the production quality for the time (1939) is amazing.

The reason why I'm re-watching the Éric Rohmer films is that I plan to read a biography of him soon. He is not exactly a household name here, but he is one of my favorite directors. Technically, he was part of the French New Wave, but stylistically he had little in common with the others. I think that most viewers find him boring, because there is a lot of dialogue and not much action. His films shot outdoors in color are generally easier to watch. What I like is seeing male-female interactions in which there are complex undertones to the dialogue. That is something that I have rarely experienced not just in films, but in my own interactions with females. Rohmer represents an earlier period, as he was born in 1920, and, though some of his films are autobiographical, social interactions between men and women may also have deteriorated in France by now. But France has a long history that included many sophisticated women, and the same can't be said of the U.S. Although there was and still is sexism in both countries, French history includes many talented women, such as Madame de Staël – with no equivalents here. More generally, France and other European countries have long had intellectual classes that function independently from universities. Although Tony Judt thought that French intellectuals declined in quality after World War II, he lamented the fact that there was no intellectual class in the U.S. Rather, we merely have PhDs who teach at colleges and universities. Czeslaw Milosz felt the same and didn't identify with his "colleagues" at Berkeley. The reasons for this are complex, but derive mainly from the fact that this is primarily a money-driven country that awards little status to any activity that doesn't somehow produce income. As my father-in-law, the rich lawyer, used to say, he didn't want to waste time meditating on pinecones. This attitude permeates American society and severely reduces the number of interesting conversations that one is likely to have in one's lifetime, and, as I've said, in recent years the internet and political correctness have only made things worse. Even Ralph Waldo Emerson would probably find the U.S. boring now; life was so boring in Boston in 1832 that he had to sail to Europe to find someone interesting to talk to.