Thursday 22 March 2018

erratically annotated and incomplete list of books, films and music which I have tried unsuccessfully to interest m'doctor in

Talking Heads, 'Psycho Killer' 
- as noted previously: and because I've written about this instance already I think it now serves for me as the archetypal moment of bringing something to her - a text - that I wanted to talk about, and of very much not getting to have that conversation. This not having of those conversations interests me. I've been thinking since Monday about whether there's any other recurring topic of conversation I bring to her that gets shunted off in the same manner, and I'm pretty sure there isn't. And I think this is kind of strange, because how does any text that resonates with me really differ from, say, a dream?

Playtime

Van Morrison, Veedon Fleece
- A hard truth: nobody exists, or has ever existed, in the entire universe, who wants to discuss Veedon Fleece. So it's perhaps not quite fair to hold this against the doctor although I'm not sure that what I'm doing here is compiling a list of offences. I don't know, you tell me? I'm going to have to have this whole thing out with her I suppose.

Jane Austen, Emma
- I was trying to explain something about why novels matter, ie justifying my life choices, by relating the way they're constructed to the capacity for perspective-taking, which seems to be something she thinks is important and also that I appear to be either not very good at, or, alternatively, too good at. I am confused now about which, and that might explain why we did not get to have the erudite little chat I was probably angling for. This abortive conversation occurred at least five years ago.

Jane Austen, Persuasion

Chinatown
- Chinatown she evidently did know but level of interest in discussing it with me = 0.

Grease and Grease II

Sufjan Stevens, Carrie & Lowell

Flora Rheta Schreiber,  Sybil
- What kind of doctor ignores an invitation (issued more than once) to explore her client's adolescent fascination with this dreadful book? A doctor who is excellent at giving away nothing about what she thinks about this book including whether she has in fact ever heard of it before, that's the kind. Having written that I can now see that it's impossible that she hasn't.

The Triffids, 'Wide Open Road'
- Recently I alluded to this song by its name because I was trying to evoke something about how I'd felt when I drove out of the city alone on a warm late summer evening not long ago, and then, because she looked like I was speaking in Martian, I had to listen to myself uttering the following monstrously ridiculous sentence 'There's this song called Wide Open Road...by The Triffids...they're a band...and ah, well it's a very famous Australian song.'

Daisy Ashford, The Young Visiters

Rolf Boldrewood, Robbery Under Arms

Alison Bechdel, Fun Home

The Rolling Stones, 'Moonlight Mile'

Patricia Highsmith, Alfred Hitchcock, The Sports, Strangers on a Train
- What is especially annoying about this one is that she started it, by informing me that a newly minted friendship I had been describing to her over a number of sessions was not real, rather it was like I was sitting next to an interesting person for the length of a train trip then going on alone just the same as before. And so what immediately crystallised for me was this collection of evidence that no, the whole world agrees with me that it's exactly the other way around and it's the strangers on trains who impact on your life the most. I could have gone on to 'The Man in the Brooks Brothers Suit,' but it wouldn't have helped.

William Shakespeare, Hamlet

The one book which we did, in fact, talk about, and it was a good conversation too:

Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis

2 comments:

jc said...

I also read Sybil as a horrified adolescent. Haven't read Robbery under Arms yet, thanks for the suggestion.

lucy tartan said...

I must have read Sybil at least ten times between the ages of twelve and twenty. I don't particularly recommend Robbery Under Arms. It reminded me of something