IS THAT

Here it is! The full performance of Een Klein Leven, in its 4-hour-long glory. Note that the portion originally missing from the English stream is not subtitled but features precious little dialogue anyhow. My endless thanks to _ZERO-ErRoR_ZROE for putting all of it together. Further thanks to all of you who contributed your recordings–none of this would have been possible without you.

Enjoy!

thinking of Harold telling Jude that no matter what gets damaged, life compensates for your loss, sometimes wonderfully, and then reflecting on his own son and Jude (perceiving them both as his children). Maybe he thought that way when he was planning to introduce the adoption, the thought of it never fails to break my heart.

timothée chalamet in bones and all (2022) dir. luca guadagnino

(suicide cw) (a little life spoilers) I habitually go back to the last portion of the book. As I read it the first time, I was only dimly aware this was the ending. I could see the number of pages, sure, and the repetitive title of Lispenard Street was ominous enough that I should’ve known - after all, why else would you bookend it like that?

I think it didn’t hit me initially, though, because for all the arduous buildup, all the scares, this is all we get of Jude’s death.

We get the aftermath, of course (and naturally I sobbed through it) - but this is the tragedy we’re led to anticipate the whole book through, and so, aware of its inevitability, I’d expected all the magnitude of Jude’s suicide attempt, of all the tragedies that followed. But Jude’s life gets 800 pages and his death gets two sentences.

The story doesn’t end on an ending. It ends on Lispenard Street.

This is what Harold leaves us with: kindness, and a father and his grinning son reminiscing; and of course that’s how he would tell Jude’s story, of course that’s how you would speak of someone you love, after: with all the kindness of eternity. People aren’t endings. Jude’s life wasn’t a stopgap, it was the story.

I can see how A Little Life might be read as a gruesome, cobweb veiled backstory to a suicide to many. That’s certainly how Jude would see it, at times, I think; but that’s why Harold is the narrator. (Harold, to whom Jude’s life was so precious, who treasured it so wholly and selfishly, as parents often do.)

And so, as we’re taken back to Lispenard Street, I can’t possibly read this story as anything other than a love letter — from a father, to his son’s life.

Ian Curtis's handwritten lyrics to Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart"

“I didn’t watch it [ the Oscars ceremony] on tape for a long time and having seen it one time I will never watch it again, it bummed me out. I looked so fucking fragile and I’m not fragile like that. What the fuck… I don’t even understand what I’m putting across to people. I don’t even know what it is, and when I see it, I’m just kind of appalled.”

Elliott Smith

I just like what he says about making music here :)

Wyd when me and my gang show up at Claire’s?

i'll eat you up i love you so!

if you saw this on twt no you DIDNT