books and movies that are just people walking around thinking baout things

inspired by: the rings of saturn

many of the films of richard linklater

i think this may be the closest i get to a favourite genre

i love these movies

inception

haha

when I was younger one of my friends' brothers came home from college

at some point he started talking about life or something

started talking about what he really wanted to do

said he started writing a book

"What's your book about?"

sounds like a real loser

He paused for a second and looked at the ground

Cleo from 5 to 7

said, "It's about this guy"

"There are tree around him and he's walking outside"

"Some of the leaves are falling from them"

save it for your blog funny guy

"He's just thinking"

Ulysses
Hunger
The Magic Mountain

the daytrippers. not thinking baout things, but talking baout them.

"He's just thinking about what it all means"

the bittersweet symphony video

lol

Andre Breton - Nadja

michel butor - passing time

so I guess this is flaneur lit, no?

basically! it doesnt have to be though.

from "joe gould's secret":

My novel was to be “about” New York City. It was also to be about a day and a night in the life of a young reporter in New York City. He is a Southerner, and a good deal of the time he is homesick for the South. He thinks of himself as an exile from the South. He had once been a believer, a believing Baptist, and is now an unbeliever. Nonetheless, he is still inclined to see things in religious terms, and he often sees the city as a kind of Hell, a Gehenna. He is in love with a Scandinavian girl he has met in the city, and she is so different from the girls he had known in the South that she seems mysterious to him, just as the city seems mysterious; the girl and the city are all mixed up in his mind. It is his day off. He has breakfast in a restaurant in Fulton Fish Market***, and then starts poking around the parts of the city that he knows best, gradually going uptown. As he wanders, he encounters and reencounters men and women who seem to him to represent various aspects of the city. He goes up Fulton Street and walks among the gravestones in St. Paul’s churchyard, and then goes to certain streets on the lower East Side, and then to certain streets in the Village, and then to the theatrical district, and then to Harlem. Late at night, on Lenox Avenue, he joins a little group of men and women, some white and some Negro, who have just come out of a night club and are standing in a circle around an old Negro street preacher. He had seen the old man earlier, preaching at a street corner in the theatrical district, but had not listened to him. Now he listens. The old man is worldly wise and uses up-to-date New York City slang and catch phrases, but he also uses a good many old-fashioned Southern expressions, the kind that are mostly used by country people, and the young reporter realizes that the old man is also a Southerner, and, like himself, a country Southerner. His sermon is apocalyptic. There are fearful warnings and prophecies in it, and there are phrases snatched from bloody old Baptist hymns, and there are many references to Biblical beasts and fruits and flowers..to the wild goats of the rocks and to the pomegranates in the Song of Solomon to the lilies of the field that toil not, nor do they spin. The old serpent is in it, and the Great Whore of Babylon, and the burning bush. Like the Baptist preachers the young reporter had listened to and struggled to understand in his childhood, the old man sees meanings behind meanings, or thinks he does, and tries his best to tell what things “stand for.” “Pomegranates are about the size and shape of large oranges or small grapefruits, only their skins are red,” he says, cupping his hands in teh air and speaking with such exactitude that it is obvious he had had first-hand knowledge of pomegranates long ago in the South. “They’re filled with fat little seeds, and those fat little seeds are filled with juice as red as blood. When they get ripe, they’re so swollen with those juicy red seeds that they gap open and some of the seeds spill out. And now I’ll tell you what pomegranates stand for. They stand for the resurrection. The resurrection of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ and your resurrection and my resurrection. Resurrection in particular and resurrection in general. All seeds stand for resurrection and all eggs stand for resurrection. The Easter egg stands for resurrection. So do the eggs in the English sparrows’ nest up under the eaves in the ‘L’ station. So does the egg you have for breakfast. So does the caviar the rich people eat. So does shad roe.” The young reporter intends to stay for only a few minutes, but he is held fast by the old man’s rhetoric. Even though he feels that he has heard it all a hundred times, he is enthralled by it. The old man reminds him of the Fundamentalist evangelists who were powerful in the South while he was growing up and who went from town to town holding revival meetings in big tents. He had hated and feared these evangelists..their reputations were based on the hideousness of their descriptions of Hell; the more hideous the description and the wilder the sermon, the better the evangelist was considered to be..but nevertheless they had left him with a lasting liking for the cryptic and the ambiguous and the incantatory and the disconnected and the extravagant and the oracular and the apocalyptic. He finds himself drawing oblique conclusions from the old man’s statements in order to make them have some bearing on his own spiritual state. “All you have to do,” the old man says, “is open your eyes and see the light, the blessed gospel light, and you can enter into a new time. You can enter into it and live in it and dwell in it and reside in it and have your being in it. You can live in the three times in one time. At one and the same time, believing in Him, you can live in the time gone by, you can live in the time to come, and you can live in the now, the here and now.” As the young reporter listens, it dawns on him that it is not the South that he longs for but the past, the South’s past and his own past, neither of which, in the way that he has been driven by homesickness to think of them, ever really existed, and that it is time for him to move out of the time gone by and into the here and now..it is time for him to grow up. When the sermon is over, he goes back downtown feeling that the old man has set him free, and that he is now a citizen of the city and a citizen of the world.

a journey around my room

Classic: Before Sunrise/Sunset. Dud: Waking Life.

i guess nicholson baker qualifies

i feel like Joan Didion's Slouching Toward Bethlehem is like this, obv not all of it, but that quality is there in several of the essays, especially the last one "Goodbye to All That".
i love this book.

also, like, most books of poetry

(or at least poetry i like)

Oh oh, I'd better be the first one to get to B.S. Johnson's The Unfortunates.

Also, Trawl might count, although he does less walking around and more lying in a bunk on a trawler.

i guess nicholson baker qualifies

Yeah, The Mezzanine is definitely this.

Plato- pretty much everything

I came in here to post The Mezzanine because yeah, that's all that happens in that one. And A Book of Matches is essentially the same thing but less walking around, more sitting.

i still need to read the unfortunates |:

After Brad Pitt gets hit by a van, "Meet Joe Black" is very much in this vein.

proust?

kafka, joyce get more than lion's share of credit for being ppl who introduced modern temperament into novels. but hardly anyone writes books these days that follow the cues of ulysses, finnegan's wake...kafka gets more points in that realm, but even then

i'm thinking there would be no nicholson baker, etc w/o proust first being obscenely lazy guy who wrote about his thoughts, impressions and used plot mechanics almost as afterthought i mean first and foremost the most compelling things in his writing is not whether or not he sorts things out w/albertine or whether swann's love life resolves itself neatly but more his digressions on staring at the light playing upon the ocean while on holiday

ulysses. the sound and the fury.

A great deal of both Paranoid Park and (especially) The Brown Bunny are dedicated to rumination baout things, I'd say.

I feel like My Dinner With Andre is related to these in some way, except it features people sitting rather than walking.

i think the brown bunny is a great, if ridiculous at times, film. fuck the hataz

i need to see my dinner w/andre

it has a bj scene to rival bunny

wittgenstein's mistress by david markson

the breakfast club by john hughes

the catcher in the rye

It's kind of weird, but my memories of the last rambo isn't him killing people, but just sort of wandering around wondering what he did in his life to get to where he is now. also, i can't remember too much of the missionaries, so in my memory they're kind of deleted, and he's just muttering to himself a la garfield minus garfield.

Classic: Before Sunrise/Sunset. Dud: Waking Life.

Waht, I love Waking Life.

Pi would kind of count here too, maybe.

http://saraschaefer.com/ss/falling_down.jpg

A Taste of Cherry? (driving around, anyway...)

what's that stephen king one where it's a post apocalyptic future where mankind competes in walkathons...TO THE DEATH?

APOCALYPTIC DEATH WALK

ready, set...die!

not 100% but apocalypse now/<3 of darkness?

All I remember from it is one of the contestants reveals..."Didn't you know...the head of Apocalyptic Death Walk...is MY FATHER?!"

American Splendor is like this in the best possible way.

The Road

ten days in the hills - jane smiley

Alfred OTM w/r/t Hunger

the goalies anxiety before the penalty kick

the box man

blind owl

wittgensteins mistress

im using a loose definition of "walking around" i dunno if thats ok

flauberts parrot

flying around works too if the protag is a bird if thats what u're getting at

guess you havent read flauberts parrot

(the parrot is stuffed)

(in flauberts parrot)

(it cant fly)

(it's fiction. it can fly if the author wants it to. open yr mind)

(actually it has strong nonfictional elements)

(regarding the biography of flaubert)

(and the stuffed parrot he had)

(it's still a book. anything can happen)

derridas antelope

antelopes... cant fly

i feel like most woody allen movies have a certain amount of this too, except also a lot of yelling baout things
xpostss

The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia

Allan Clarke's films/television particularyl Christine, but I'm not sure she is thinking, just walking, and that one where they just walk up and down the street and then have a musical interlude.

Police Beat

Hunger

Lots of Peter Handke

Permanent Vacation by Jim Jarmusch.

saul bellow - herzog

not quite sure i understand the genre, but is this Withnail and I?

The Moviegoer