You were playing in the snow, you were banging on the doors

Thanksgiving: the substantial amount of cooking was a success. There may be photographs. Sadly, not a lot of these photographs seem to include people, so you may have to take it on faith that schreibergasse and Peter were there, but my ungodchild remains sweet and his father a good conversationalist (and handy with sharp objects and a pile of zucchini), so I was glad of them. At least two of the dishes named in the previous entry were enough of a success that I would make them again, especially if I have vegans to cook for; I probably wouldn't treat the mushrooms and leeks as a shepherd's pie next time, but would put them in an actual pastry crust that wouldn't drown out quite so much of the (Marsala, tarragon, crème fraiche and lemon) sauce. The coleslaw came out addictively enough that I am contemplating, for the first time in my life, eating a Reuben tomorrow. The stuffed zucchini were tasty, but probably outclassed.

My mother was solely responsible for the pumpkin pie, which this year was shockingly edible and is in consequence now gone. Usually it's just sort of there; it is traditional, but not coveted in the same manner as the pecan bourbon pie my brother brings from a college friend's bakery in Connecticut or the apple pie I make with cardamom, ginger, and a lot of true cinnamon. She doesn't remember making any changes to the recipe, but its half-life was noticeably short. Next year, or possibly as soon as I can look dessert in the eye again, I want to make this.

It has taken me this long to post about Thanksgiving because I am going through another period when I don't want to write anything down. My written output is already so diminished from what I consider healthy levels that it would be melodramatic to say it scares me, but it's really not a good sign. I used to make up assignments in elementary school so that my parents would let me use the computer to write. (I learned to type when I was eight, first on the machines my father built from scratch and later on a toaster Mac, on which I also learned to play Tetris. My handwriting was a thing of eldritch horror. It is now a kind of lanky print which I had complimented a couple of years ago. Puritan work ethic, eat your heart out—I started working on my handwriting in middle school. It still unravels into Enigma-grade scrawl if I have to take notes too quickly.) Almost nothing I think now gets written down, unless it's part of an ongoing conversation or intended for a post. I keep toying with the idea of taking a day and posting whatever goes through my head whenever it does, except that's more or less the point of short-form social media like Twitter or Facebook, which I am still mostly managing to avoid along with Google+ and the internet's apparent need to know my full legal name, my birthdate, my spatiotemporal location, and what articles I want other people to know I'm reading. I may still try it, just to see what happens; I can't help feeling it will result in a lot of thumbnail film or book reviews, since the chance of me saying anything thoughtful about myself at this point feels like a lost cause, aside from the whole issue of whether I would want to say it in public if I did.

I am just tired of being a blank space.

Let's go downtown and talk to the modern kids

I went to my rehearsal. I ran my two duets. Then apparently I looked enough like I had a fever that they sent me home, which was probably for the best. I am seriously considering going to bed.

From Alexander Mackendrick's On Film-making (2004), ed. Paul Cronin:

The key to the Film Grammar class is the common-sense notion that if we are living in the era in which children—before they can spell or read—are exposed to the moving-picture image on television, then what we should be doing is teaching people about the images they are reading and instruct them how to speak back in this visual language that is the literacy of today. In short, it is important that citizens become consciously aware of cinema's conditioning influences. It is not, however, enough to be merely receptive to its codes of communication. To be literate in a medium is to be able to write as well as read. To know how film and video communicate (and, in turn, manipulate), one should also be able to speak the 'language' and have some idea of how a film is made.

The book is a selection of Mackendrick's handouts and notes from the twenty-five years he taught at the California Institute of the Arts until his death in 1993; I don't know when this paragraph was written, but I'm guessing his students weren't in the habit of recording events around them with their cellphones, or uploading their own music videos to YouTube, or recutting footage of their favorite shows and movies in order to retell or critique them (or subtitling Hitler). All of which are activities that no longer require access to specialized equipment or even necessarily an investment in film as a field and are proliferating, which certainly sounds like an increase in writing as well as reading; I don't know if it means that we have become a more film-literate society, or if most of us are just speaking the cinematic equivalent of tweet-speak, but let's assume it's not the latter, because I'd love to know whether mainstream film grammar (which Mackendrick admits is an imprecise and probably misleading term: "The semiotics professors use terms like 'syntactic articulations' to describe the way shots and camera angles can be organised to represent a coherent, though imaginary space/time continuum, but it's rather a mouthful") is altering in response to being so casually and frequently spoken back to. Or maybe that all happened in the '80's and we're onto a different dialect now.