Movie list.

I realized the other day that I should be keeping a list of movies I've seen on the big screen, just like my list of non-school books I read. A grad student I knew in undergrad had such a list, but for some reason I never kept one, though I was thinking the other day that it would be fun to look back at the end of the year and see everything I'd seen that year, since I go to a lot of movies.

So, I started. No time like the present.

Fucking Ayn Rand.

From Nathaniel Branden's "My Years with Ayn Rand", pp. 139-140, on fucking Ayn Rand:

In the realm of sex, I knew her as thoroughly as someone I had been intimately involved with for years. I had penetrated her consciousness in every way I possibly could since first reading "The Fountainhead", so the actual act of sex felt almost like a continuation of the same endeavor. The desire to 'know' her in all conceivable senses was central to my interactions with her. It was as if we had been engaged in foreplay for four years -- since the evening in March 1950 when we first met. Later, Ayn told me that was exactly how she felt.

I was conscious of two different responses to our first sexual experience. My body felt completely unastonished, completely serene, as if what was now happening was the most natural thing in the world. My mind, in contrast, had flashes of excitement and disorientation at the thought 'I am now *sleeping with Ayn*." The two perspectives were like musical themes running in counterpoint, yielding a result more thrilling than either could produce by itself -- a high level of excitement devoid of any trace of anxiety. I believed I did see a touch of apprehension in Ayn, but it was a kind one welcomes because it makes one feel more alive, makes the moment more momentous.

She made love with the same single-tracked concentration with which she did everything else; nothing existed but the moment, our bodies, this sensation, and then the next. What was electrifying was that in her gentlest, most sensual touch, I could feel the full force of her personality , as if the voltage of her mind and the voltage of her flesh were one.

Watching her eyes watching me was aphrodisiacal. I knew that what she wanted most was not my tenderness but my aggressiveness, my willingness to do anything I felt like doing, without asking and without hesitating. She wanted me to be a master, to use her language, exercising his rights over his property. This, and this alone, allowed the female in her to emerge fully. Because I had no unusual sexual predilections and no interest in giving or receiving pain and every interest in giving and receiving pleasure, our lovemaking was uncomplicated happiness.

That I could bring such joy to a woman twenty-five years my senior, a woman I admired so passionately, nourished my sexual self-esteem. That she could evoke an intense response in a man so many years younger, a man she perceived as the incarnation of her values, nourished hers...

In the bedroom there was no split between the novelist and the woman. She was sensual, passionate, uninhibited, aggressive, submissive, strong, helpless, and magnificently greedy. She made it abundantly clear that her most ardent desire was to be reduced to a state of total surrender, which meant that I was free to release my own aggressive energy. We were like two prisoners let loose.

Nothing we could say or do could frighten or overwhelm the other. Nothing was too much. Whatever one gave, the other welcomed. Whatever one wanted, the other provided. We embraced sex as a person embraces oxygen after being underwater for too long.

'What's happening to me?' Ayn would say. 'You're turning me into an animal.' And I would grin mockingly and answer, 'Really? What were you before?' 'A mind,' she would say. And I would reply, 'Really? Do you have a mind? Who ever told you that?'

...

3 (black) women: 2 bus stories, Tiger Woods.

1) My one (light black-skinned) friend was telling me and another friend when we were driving to the black theater to see "Precious" that she felt really racist the other day, because she was telling a story about how one time she was on this bus in the bad neighborhoods south of campus, and she felt really uncomfortable when she noticed there wasn't any white people on the bus.

"Does that make me racist?", she was like.

2) The other evening I was coming home from downtown on the bus, and there was like 10 Asian undergrads in the back of the bus with shopping bags, and every once in a while the girls would shriek and laugh loudly like they were in middle school, since Asian women do that a lot (I mean, behave a lot younger than they should be).

Anyhow, when it was time to get off the bus, the bus stopped, and when the bus was about to get going after some other people got off, like 3 of the Asians jumped up and went to the door and got off, and just as they got off, 4 other of their friends got up and followed them off, and then just when they were getting off, like the last 3 got up to get off, and the 2 girls of them lingered at the door saying bye to someone they had run into as they held the door open.

I was looking really confused at all of this, and 2 younger (black) women up ahead of me were too, and then the one poked the other and pointed to me and was like, "Look, he sees it too!"

3) After that, I needed a drink, so I got off the bus a couple streets early and went to the black neighborhood bar.

On the way there, there was 2 hulking 30-something (black) guys dressed like thugs, and one met my eyes and was like, "Good evening," to show that they weren't a threat.

Anyhow, when I was there, the bar was pretty full (almost no one at the tables, though), but I pulled up a chair between 2 (black) women. Betty Wright's "Tonight is the Night (Parts 1&2)" was on the jukebox, and they were both talking along with the spoken word parts, and laughing when she asked the audience to think back to the time they lost their virginity, and then when the singing started, they sang along, and also thumped the bar to mimick important percussion bits.


After a bit, one of the women introduced herself to me ("Cecille"), and we started talking, and she brought up Tiger Woods because of his crash.

She didn't know what happened, and was sure the truth would come out about whatever he was doing leaving his house at that time of night - it didn't make any sense to her - and then she was like, "But let me tell you, he is a very smart man. He's only thirty-three, and what's Jack Nicklaus, like 80? Just think, he's already a gazillionaire, and he still has a thirty-year career ahead of him. That's nothing at all like those basketball players, they're out there for 5 years at most."

Renewed my passport.

The other day I went and got some passport pictures and sent in my renewal application for my passport. I can't believe it's been 10 years. It was something, to have my old passport in my hand, and then look at the new pictures of me just taken.

Addendum.

I forgot -

This is the only memoir I've ever read that when I go up to crease the page of some juicy part, the corner folds down easily, since someone had done that a long time ago.

(It's a library book.)

Memoir of the guy who fucked Ayn Rand.

I'm starting the memoirs of Nathaniel Branden, who wrote a fan letter to Ayn Rand when he was a college student at UCLA and ended up being her heir apparent and lover despite their 25-year age difference.

He also helped found the modern self-esteem movement.

Anyhow, I love this part from the end of the "Author's Note" that begins the book:

Finally, my greatest debt is to my wife, Devers, whose contribution to this book - both editorial and psychological - is immeasurable. She provided inspired input from the first page to the last. Not only did she encourage me to write freely and openly about my relationships with three other women but she lovingly and mercilessly challenged me to keep going deeper into self-disclosure. This book is dedicated to her in love and gratitude.

When you read something like that, you know it's going to be a good memoir, esp. when it's from the guy who fucked Ayn Rand.

Historians and scientists on religion.

Overall, historians are usually pretty tone-deaf when it comes to religion or the Bible - their studies usually never deal with it or leave it out, or they use a lot of crude Marxist 'false consciousness' explanations from the 70.

One time, a ph.d. student I know at another (really good) school emailed me on behalf of his friend. The friend had this conceit that the difference between now and the (whatever) century (the 17th? the 18th?) was that people wouldn't say "What would Jesus do", but rather "Who was Jesus", or some bullshitty thing like that. I told him that that did not make much sense, and it seemed like his friend did not only not have any knowledge of biblical interpretation, but probably also had never read the Bible at all.

(I said this nicely, by the way - probably something like, 'That doesn't quite work, he should work on other projects.')

Anyhow, later in reflecting back I realize that this was probably the way the ph.d. student thought:

1) Only simple people read the Bible.

2) Therefore, the Bible is simple.

3) Therefore, I can easily write about the Bible, having never read it or anything about it before.

And, I realize now that this is kind of how scientists think about religion:

1) The supernatural does not exist.

2) Therefore, people who think there is a supernatural are dumb.

3) Therefore, I am an expert on people who believe in the supernatural (i.e., are religious people).

So maybe their problem isn't science per se, but illogically projected condescension that happens in the absence of critcial thinking skills?

New job idea.

Acting dialect coach!!!

The Hungarian actress I've been helping with her English pronunciation has been very pleased with my help in identifying her pronunciation problems and recommending exercises that she can do on her own to improve pronunciation, and she said that if I can teach people English and southern accents etc., I can be making like $50/hour or so.

Toilet problem.

This past week, whenever I've been flushing, as soon as the tank starts to refill, two stream of water come running out from under the lid and down the outside of the tank and spill onto the floor. I opened up the top, and discovered that for whatever reason, like half of the spout of water that refills the tank sprays upward onto the lid, and that's what's causing it.

Still haven't notified my landlord, I keep forgetting.

Manson conversion bio.

So, I was going through my bookshelf the other day, and realized I never returned the Manson conversion bio (not of Manson, but of Sadie Mae Glutz).

I found it very interesting, because it turns out she became Pentecostal and reinterpreted a lot of her experiences as encounters with demons.

For example, she had this vision once on drugs where there were these spirits in her belly and then they crawled out through her skin, and in remembering she combines that with Manson telling her there was something special in her, so she sees that as the demons in him recognizing the demons in her.

The night of the Sharon Tate murders, too, she was chasing someone out on the lawn with a knife, and she looked back and saw Tex levitating above the ground inside, and she remembered at that moment that a woman from the Family said she felt possessed after sleeping with him, and she realizes now that he was possessed during the murders.

In the photo section in the middle of the book there's this picture of her with long hair and in a flowery dress smiling, above the caption:

My smile is because of Jesus.

My favorite part of the book is when she converts, she tries to convert other prisoners in her women's prison, like this lesbian she converted (I'm jumping in at the tail end of the story, p. 284-285):

When she was released from prison, an entirely different person walked out the front gate, delivered from one of the most blatant sins found in a women's prison. Lesbianism is rampant, with sixty-five per cent of the women at least occasionally participating and forty-five per cent openly committed to it as a life style. Most of these become lesbians after entering prison, and prison officials seem unable or unwilling to do anything about it. They don't condone it, but they don't condemn it either.

On the main campus at CIW, women frequently manage to sleep together, and lesbian activity is often visible right on the lawns and other places.

With that, she ends a section in the chapter.