Book currently changing my life:

Viktor Shklovsky’s Energy of Delusion: A Book On Plot:

“Storyline and plot are closely related to the beginning and ending of works.”

“Today's literature is experiencing a deterioration of its beginnings and endings, which seem to be in a decline.”

“When inventing something new, mankind is hooked up to the cybernetic machine of universal thought.”

Putting aside the Energy of Delusion the other night, I ended up watching Doctor Zhivago from Netflix instant downloads. Doctor Zhivago, which I must have seen last around 1965 when I was 13, was my first experience of The Revolution. I may have accidentally based my life on the movie. Dated various men along the lines of Antipov, Strelnikov or Zhivago himself, mysterious dog-eyed poet. Julie Christie was 23 when she played the 17-year-old Lara. Perhaps Shklovsky was working on the book during the making of the movie, as he says in the various prefaces that he has been writing it for 20 years and it was first published in the Soviet Union in the 1981 when I was 29 and Julie Christie was 40 but didn’t look a day over 25. I think I used to confuse Bruce Andrews with Strelnikov or vice versa.

I can't think of the phrase Doctor Zhivago without remembering Rose Marie of the Dick Van Dyke Show – she played Sally Rogers – singing in true vaudevillian style “Doctor Zhivago, please come to Chicago. Have I got a girl for you!”

See you in Chi!


Laura Moriarty