Adventure in Selfhood

Ian McKellen is luminous as the titular protagonist of Mr. Holmes (2015), directed by Bill Condon. Laura Linney, as his housekeeper, is good, and completely adorable is Milo Parker, the young fan who tries to get Holmes to work again, but McKellen could express so much with just one twitch in his hangdog face.

American Wrestler: The Wizard (2016), directed by Alex Ranarivelo, is too much of a feel-good movie to be genuinely moving, let alone intellectually probing. The teenage boy, who escaped from Iran, does not question his compulsive desire to assimilate into America. He succeeds when he helps his struggling high-school wrestling team to win and when he gets the blonde. Still, when George Kosturos finally pulled off his baggy shirt and showed off his Greek body, all my criticisms expired eagerly. Kevin G. Schmidt, who plays his teammate, was also dishy.

Read about Robert Penn Warren's long poem about Audubon in Literary Imagination Volume 20 Number 1 2018, in the essay "Robert Penn Warren's Panoramic Ecology in Audubon: A Vision" by Christopher Suarez. In Democracy & Poetry, Warren writes writes that a work represents

a shadowy persona of the literal self... Even the work with the most objective and clearly delineated characters presented in action, such as Raskolnikov or Hamlet, exists only because there is a story behind the objective story; there is the story of the relation of the self of the author to the work created. It is not only the objective characters that serve as 'models' of selfhood; the work itself represents the author's adventure in selfhood.

"Adventure in selfhood" is very fine.

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