January 21st, 2008

            It’s winter in London. The 80 kilometers left to Cambridge are very tedious. I’m inspired in my task to read the book “La scoperta dell’alfabeto”, by Luigi Malerva, a book I was aching to read. Borges would have loved his style, the Argentinean writer, Anglophile for excellence . This book transports me, or, I could vulgarly say, distracts me. And, besides, it takes me away of my existencial crisis. The classes in the University are annoying, especially the absurd internals there. Truly, that happens on every university in the world, but at this stance in my life, it looks like I haven’t got the required antibodies to run them down.

            The loneless in my book’s world saved my life many times. Borges (I turn to him one more time) tried with his “Aleph” to make an infinite space where you could find absolutely every object and place on Earth. Today, Borges’ Aleph is Internet, although my collage and friend David Brown disagrees with me, whom I shared with him lots of conversations that lasted until the morning.

            I talked about the internals in Cambridge. The ones of Marxist extraction are confronted with the Post-Moderns, the ones that say that this is the end of Ideologies, that there’s a transeconomy imposed (as Baudrillard says) of a market that absorbes everything. I have many existencial doubts, though sometimes I think Postmoderns are right. Sometimes, the world’s reality shocks the living daylights out of me.

            So, I dive in my own world, in the fantasies I had as a child, to escape of the inevitable things. Sometimes I blame myself because I know I can’t nor I’ll never can the reality transmitted by satellite . But, at the same time I realizad that I have never helped with that reality. ¿Am I so selfish? I don’t know. I just try to live, which it is not a little important thing.

            Well, ¿How can I explain my Cambridge cathedratics colleagues my madness for the James Bond films? I mantained lots of discutions about the Bond’s persona . Many of my colleagues said: “He’s a machist hitman, who uses women as an object”. They are on the hard line. It’s just a game. It’s a unique character, Though many people brand Fleming as a second-class writer, or a “B-class” one. The series are full of exquisite details that can’t stop to atract people from all ages.

            “A man that saves the world with class and glamour”, I read on a web site. I thinks that’s a poor affirmation. You just have to see the humor in Moore’s films to notice that 007 it’s more than that. The film plots (many people say) are deranged and absurd, and the people that can’t Ejoy that it’s because they don’t understand that the fiction and fantasy are made to save the world, in contrast with a distressed reality.

            I’m analizing Moonraker now, my favourite film, and Casino Royale, the most recent one. They’re both very diffrent between each other, different eras, different contexts, different courses. Moonraker has a delicious plot. Is there something more sinister that create a “new master race” in the outer space and then destroy the Earth from there? A plan like Hitler’s. So, How could they say that Bond is absurd?

            Casino Royale is different. Bond swings between an unlimited cruelty and a vulnerability that overwhelms him. Apparently, he falls in love, despite he finds it hard to admit it  and ends recurring to his coldness affirming that “the bitch is dead”.

 

January 22nd

 

            I’m still reading Malerva’s book. At the same time, I enter in the Internet’s Aleph looking for websites about James Bond. Some of them amuse me. They are linke a stereotype enumerating girls-cars-villains as a never-ending collage. But particulary  one of them called my attention. An Argentinean site. It’s weird. The most southern land in the planet, in the end of the world . I’m puzzled and charmed for it. The articles are interesting, and some of them are translated in English. Every Bond memorabilia that they sell call my attention . I admit I’m not an addict to the objects as the ultra-aficcionados but I can’t gasp in awe to the variety and exclusivity of the ones that the web offers. Suddenly I wish to write and ask them some questions. The Bond universe calls for everything. Even to send an e-mail to Argentina asking  about James Bond, on our British Monarchy’s secret service..

 

                                                                                              Patrick Cullen

patrickcullen@gmx.co.uk