#James Pennebaker

[pier-carlo-universe]

Il potere terapeutico della scrittura: perché dovremmo avere sempre con noi un taccuino e una penna. Recensione di Alessandria today

La scrittura è molto più di un semplice strumento di comunicazione: può diventare una terapia, un mezzo per esplorare il nostro mondo interiore, elaborare emozioni e trasformare il caos in chiarezza.

“Scrivere è un modo per parlare senza essere interrotti.” – Jules Renard Questa frase evidenzia il potere della scrittura nel dare voce ai pensieri, permettendo di esprimersi liberamente e senza filtri. Perfetta per rafforzare il concetto dell’articolo! 😊✍️ La scrittura è molto più di un semplice strumento di comunicazione: può diventare una terapia, un mezzo per esplorare il nostro mondo…

[fourdiagnosesinatrenchcoat]

It turns out that one of the most effective ways to recover from trauma is to write about it, in like a diary. Not immediately, at least a month or two after the fact. Kind of like morning pages, just writing nonstop once you start, but specifically trying to put your emotions on the page. To gain control of the story of what happened.

Doctors don't prescribe this because essentially they can't get paid for it, but also it sounds fucking HARD. But many many studies show that is works.

[enthusiasticallydawn]

Journaling Onward to Discovery and Delight

Today is the first day of the new year. There is no better time to begin writing a new chapter in the story of your life. Do you keep a journal? Are you one who loves to write, reflect and keep your memories tucked in notebooks? Or are you someone who has spent more time thinking about journaling, but can’t quite see the value of it? Or maybe you are one who has dabbled here and there with…

[gatheringbones]

[“In the 1980s, social psychologist James W. Pennebaker conducted some now-famous studies on his theory of expressive writing. Pennebaker instructed participants in his experimental group to write about a past trauma, expressing their very deepest thoughts and feelings surrounding it. In contrast, control participants were asked to write as objectively and factually as possible about neutral topics without revealing their emotions or opinions. For both groups, the schedule was fifteen minutes of continuous writing repeated over four consecutive days. Some of the participants in the experimental group found the exercise upsetting. All of them found it valuable and meaningful. Monitoring over the subsequent year revealed that those participants made significantly fewer visits to physicians. Pennebaker’s research has since been replicated numerous times and his results supported: Expressive writing about trauma strengthens the immune system, decreases obsessive thinking, and contributes to the overall health of the writers. And this is after only four days of fifteen-minute sessions.

Pennebaker has since written extensively about how this effect can also be consistent on a much larger scale, in communities who have suffered the atrocities of war and other political events. The articulation of painful memories, including the literature and art that arises out of political upheaval, is integral to the formation, preservation, and integration of collective memory. Let’s face it: if you write about your wounds, it is likely to be therapeutic. Of course, the writing done in those fifteen minutes was surely terrible by artistic standards. But it is a logical fallacy to conclude that any writing with therapeutic effect is terrible. You don’t have to be into therapy to be healed by writing. Being healed does not have to be your goal. But to oppose the very idea of it is nonsensical, unless you consider what such a bias reveals about our values as a culture. Knee-jerk bias backed by flimsy logic and pseudoscience has always been a preferred disguise of our national prejudices. That these topics of the body, the emotional interior, the domestic, the sexual, and the relational are all undervalued in intellectual literary terms, and are all associated with the female spheres of being, is not a coincidence. This bias against personal writing is often a sexist mechanism, founded on the false binary between the emotional (female) and the intellectual (male), and intended to subordinate the former.”]

melissa febos, from body work: the radical power of personal narrative, 2022

[fiori-interiori]

“La guarigione avviene quando impariamo a raccontare la nostra storia in modo diverso.”

— James Pennebaker

[gigi-journaling]

Mental Health Journaling-Expressive Writing

Journaling and Your Health

💛Come join our journaling community on tumblr here! 💛

The “expressive writing paradigm” refers to the original study published by James W. Pennebaker in 1986–“Confronting a traumatic event: Toward an understanding of inhibition and disease.”

The study concluded that while participants experience the short-term effects of higher blood pressure and emotional distress immediately after writing sessions, the long-term effects saw an improvement of physical and mental health symptoms including reduced stress, anxiety, and improved immune function.

Instructions and sample prompts:

“For the next four days, I would like you to write your very deepest thoughts and feelings about the most traumatic experience of your entire life, or an extremely important emotional issue. You might tie your topic to other parts of your life: your childhood, your relationships with others, your past, present or future. All of your writing is confidential. Don’t worry about spelling, grammar or sentence structure. The only rule is that once you begin writing, you continue until the time is up.”

Day 1:

Today, your goal is to write your deepest thoughts and feelings about the trauma or emotional upheaval that has been influencing your life the most. As you write about this upheaval, you might begin to tie it to other parts of your life. How is this event related to who you have been in the past, who you would like to be in the future, and who you are now? Do not forget that this writing is for you and you alone.

Day 2:

In your previous writing session, you were asked to explore your thoughts and feelings about a trauma or emotional upheaval that has affected you deeply. In today's writing, your task is to continue exploring your very deepest emotions and thoughts about that event, situation, or experience. You can write about the same trauma or upheaval as yesterday's, or you can choose a different one. Begin thinking about how this upheaval is, right now, affecting your life in general and perhaps whether you might be responsible for some of the effects of the trauma.

Day 3:

In your writing today, focus on the same topics you have been examining or shift your focus to another trauma or to another feature of the same trauma. Your primary goal is to continue focusing and elaborating on your emotions, as well as the thoughts about those events that are affecting your life the most right now.

Day 4:

This is the final day of the four-day writing exercise. As with the previous days' writings, explore your deepest emotions and thoughts about those upheavals and issues in your life that are most important and troublesome for you. In your writing, try to tie up anything that you haven't yet confronted. Really let go in your writing and be honest with yourself about this upheaval. Do your best to wrap up the entire experience into a meaningful story that you can take with you into the future.

Reflection and Introspection 💭

Articles: (Write your secrets), (James Pennebaker’s Expressive Writing Paradigm, (Sample Prompts), (The Pennebaker Protocol)

[disappointingyet]

A Complete Unknown

Director James Mangold Stars Timothée Chalamet, Edward Norton, Monica Barbaro, Elle Fanning USA 2024 Language English 2hrs 21mins Colour 

Curly-haired bloke buys an electric guitar. Lots of people, some supposedly responsible adults, act like someone had chainsawed their children 

Here’s why I think this film following Bob Dylan from 1961 to 1965 exists:

Bob Dylan remains a undimmable hero to the Baby Boomers, controversial in his prime but now less, uh, complicated than many of his peers, and has some traction with the succeeding generations, too

Music biopics continue to do good business. Last year’s Bob Marley: One Love made no discernible cultural impact but picked up $180m worldwide at the box office 

Timothée Chalamet is now indisputably a movie star and has the bushy mop of hair needed to play Dylan

With Walk The Line and Ford v Ferrari, director James Mangold has shown he can recreate the 1960s in a way that’s both handsomely cinematic and feels alive* 

Here are four works whose existence meant I was doubtful that there was any artistic need for A Complete Unknown:

Don’t Look Back – DA Pennebaker’s extraordinary fly-on-the-wall documentary shows us snarky, sarky, sulky, sparky Dylan at his peak in 1965

No Direction Home – Martin Scorsese’s comprehensive (3 hours plus) doc taking us from Dylan’s childhood up to 1966, framed with footage taken from Eat The Document, Pennebaker’s long-lost follow-up to Don’t Look Back. Many of the key figures in A Complete Unknown, including creaky old Bob, contribute

I’m Not There – Todd Haynes’ ambitious attempt at reinventing the biopic, with assorted Dylan personas filmed with different actors (Cate Blanchett, Heath Ledger, Christian Bale, Richard Gere and more) and in different styles. It doesn’t all work but often does and the concept is a great one

Inside Llewyn Davis – Dylan himself is only glimpsed but the Coen brothers’ somehow both loving and brutal portrait of folk-boom-era Greenwich Village captures the moment without that getting in the way of a terrific character study

Leading to the resulting question: could A Complete Unknown add much that those four films don’t already have? We’ll get back to that.

The first thing to say is that James Mangold, as expected, delivers a pretty, visually satisfying film rich with, but not suffocated by, period detail. Here, 1964 feels organically different from 1961 without people shouting ‘Have you heard the Beatles?’ (I mean, we do get lots of Walter Cronkite on the TV updating us on the Cuban Missile Crisis, March on Washington etc, but I think in the context of this story, that’s fair enough.)

The second is that Chalamet is really good. It’s unsettling when you get to a song playing over the closing credits and suddenly clock that he doesn’t actually sound like Dylan, when for the running time of the film, at least for me, watching him act as Dylan had fooled my brain to hearing him as Dylan. 

And indeed, almost the whole gang are immaculate. Monica Barbaro, as many people have said, is remarkable as Joan Baez – the cast all did their own singing, and pulling off a decent Baez seems like a steeper technical challenge than wheezing the Bob way. Ed Norton made me feel sympathy for folk ideologue Pete Seeger, a figure who I’ve never really warmed to. Will Harrison is perfect casting as Dylan’s ever-present mid-‘60s sidekick Bob Neuwirth.** The only stumble is Boyd Holbrook as Johnny Cash, but Cash is a tough ask, and maybe I’m just chronically anti-Holbrook because of the godawful Narcos. 

That’s all lovely, but still: does this amount to more than either one of those TV movie musician life stories but with top-end talent and production, or one of those West End biog musicals? In narrative terms, the film takes us from Dylan hitchhiking his way into New York to visit his hero Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) in hospital, meeting Seeger there and beginning a rapid ascent through the folk scene until he feels he’s outgrown it, all leading us to the notorious 1965 Newport Folk Festival.

Meanwhile, women find him initially irresistible but learn that they can’t get him to open up emotionally and that he’d rather write songs than talk. 

While it’s thankfully not doing the cradle-to-grave thing, the five years covered were still too packed with stuff happening in the world and in Dylan’s career to squeeze in, making it feel like we’re just skimming the surface as we race through time.

So maybe it’s a film of ideas and ideals, maybe it’s a film about an impatient young man outgrowing his mentor, maybe it’s a bad boyfriend movie. And in all those cases, you can’t spend too long digging into them because Mangold urgently needs to show us people singing again. 

As with Ford v Ferrari, I’m not convinced Mangold has a sophisticated grip on the ideas he’s playing with. After this film, I’m no closer to understanding why quite so many fans felt so violently betrayed by Dylan. (I’m broadly clear about why Seeger and folksong collector Alan Lomax – the true villain of this film – were so narked.)

If this a bloke and his mentor pic, it’s not operating at Paul Thomas Anderson levels. And if you want bad boyfriends, you’d probably be better off with something like Passages.

But of course, the underlying aim here, like the aim of most music biopics, is to let the audience indulge in a couple of hours spent with their hero, even if (as here) the movie seems to think that hero was a bit of a prick. In the sense that the songs are all diegetic, this isn’t what most people would describe as a musical. But it is a film whose ability to deliver pleasure is fully dependent on having people sing for us as often as possible. 

And that’s where I come back to the fact that so much footage exists – it’s easy to watch what actually happened at the Newport Folk Festival. And, yes, that’s on stage, but with Dylan at this time, we also have Don’t Look Back and the fragments from Eat The Document – you can see him interacting with fans, other musicians, the media… and yes, strumming away in hotel rooms. It’s all there. 

I went to see A Complete Unknown with a mate of mine who loves a bit of Bob (she is, it should be said, on the saner side of Dylan fandom.) She really enjoyed it. I also enjoyed it as an object, as a texture, as something I can see will work really well when you rewatch individual scenes. I’m just not sold that it fully hangs together as a piece of narrative, nor is it any way radical enough to be a film that rejects the need to tell a story.

*My view, though, is that much as in the narrative June Carter through sheer force of will saves Johnny Cash, Reese Witherspoon through sheer force of will gives the movie emotional life

**Along with a bunch of other things, Neuwirth was the link between the Dylan scene and Warhol’s Factory

[cinemaocd]

Movies I watched in March 2024

Under the Cherry Moon (1986)** I'm Not There (2007)*** Jingle All the Way (1996)* Three Graves to Cairo (1943)** Hitchcock (2012) ** Silent Partner (1978)** Possession (2002)** Oppenheimer (2023)** Oscar Wilde (1960)** Turning Point: The Cold War and the Bomb (2024)** Anselm (2023)*** 24 Hour Party People (2002)** Two of Us (1999)*** Remains of the Day (1993)*** Doubt (2008)*** Dune (1984)*** Dune Part II (2024)***

Under the Cherry Moon (1986)** Absolute bobbins of a script is still beautiful to look at, very gay and of course mainly a vehicle for Prince's music. Under the Cherry Moon was the follow up to Purple Rain. It was a box office flop, a critical failure that earned Razzie nominations, but is a worth another look. Prince and Jerome Beton are sex workers with a rich female clientele on the French Riviera, the kind of career that only exists in movies. Kristin Scott Thomas makes her film debut as the debutante who comes between the friends and threatens to part them. Prince's death scene, harkens back to Camille with Prince playing Garbo. Like Garbo, Prince was happy to exploit his own androgyny and like Garbo, he was doomed to only explore that in a way that could be squeezed into heteronormative films.

I'm not There: (2007)*** A fascinating look at Bob Dylan, dividing him into six personae played by six different actors. Haynes uses different film styles, the Cate Blanchett mid Sixties Dylan of Bringing it All Back Home and Blonde on Blonde is matched in style with the black and white cinematography of D.A. Pennebaker's Don't Look Back. It also has elements of the Italian Surrealists like Felinni or Antonioni with a scoch of A Hard Day's Night. The soundtrack is particularly good, avoiding for the most part, the licensing pitfalls that plagued Haynes' Bowie biopic, Velvet Goldmine. Some of the most effective moments of I'm Not There, pair landscape shots with Dylan's music. Given the catalogue and the array of talent, Haynes has gathered, one perhaps expects a bit more , but then that has always been Dylan's nature, he's mysterious and aloof, leaving us wanting more.

Jingle All the Way (1996)* We watched this Christmas movie in March because we recently learned that part of it was filmed at my son's elementary school. It had Jake Lloyd somehow being more annoying than he was in the Phantom Menace as a bonus. Phil Hartman got dragged into this unfunny mess as well.

Three Graves to Cairo (1943)** Tense war time drama about a British officer who gets trapped behind the lines and ends up hiding out in a hotel working as a waiter for Field Marshall Rommel. Billy Wilder ratchets up the tension, his script giving all the best lines to Rommel, played by Erich Von Stroheim who really owns the film though Anne Baxter and Franchot Tone nominally "star."

Hitchcock (2012)** Hichcock's struggle to make Pyscho dramatized with fantasies where he hangs out with Ed Gein, while Alma Hitchcock gets involved in a Hitchcockian romance with a hack writer. Scarlett Johannson plays an almost deliberately obtuse Janet Leigh and James Darcy captures pre-Psycho Tony Perkins. It's a bit silly but I'll never turn down Helen Mirren and Anthony Hopkins in anything. This has a slight, arch feel to it, like many of Hitchcock's pictures, but lurking underneath are the ordinary hates and passions of a man who fears being left behind, at the height of his career. For his long-suffering wife's part, she too feels she's being replaced by the young actresses that Hitchcock is obsessed with at the moment. The conclusion is sweet enough for the Hayes office: husband and wife rediscover the magic of their working relationship, which was always the rock upon which their relationship was built.

The Silent Partner (1978)** With Elliott Gould, Christopher Plummer and Susannah York in the cast, this should have been better. Decent heist plot that devolves into slasher film . Christopher Plummer takes on the dubious mantels of playing a villain in a piss-poor American action film and a cross-dressing murderer.

Possession (2002)** A rather thin adaptation of a great novel, A.S. Byatt's story of two modern academics who disover a previous hidden romance between two Victorian poets. The film lacks the poetry of the novel, which I think is necessary for the story to have its full impact, but the film is full of plenty of jabs at academia as well as burning passions. Gweneth Paltrow and Aaron Ecklund play the young couple, while Jeremy Northam and Jennifer Ehle play the poet/lovers. Tom Hollander has a small but memorable part as does Toby Stephens.

Oppenheimer (2023)** My least favorite half of Barbenheimer still damn good and the physics nerd in me reveled in seeing my dead physicist boyfriends on screen. There are better films about Oppenheimer's life (BBC did a mini series starring Sam Waterston and it's on youtube) but something about the dreamy quality of Nolan's film captures that quantum mystery kinda vibe and put it in a blockbuster package. Cool.

Oscar Wilde (1960)** Preceded the landmark film Crisis by one year, without the world shaking honesty that film managed, around the topic of homosexuality and the law. Both films hinged on blackmail of a gay man but Oscar Wilde is careful to skirt around explicit mentions of sexuality, using tricks like showing the dictionary definition of "sodomy" briefly on camera. More was needed and more was achieved a year later. Ralph Richardson contributes to the courtroom scenes admirably and Morley is a terrific Wilde, who would rather make point for style than save himself from prison.

Turning Point: The Cold War and the Bomb (2024)** Fascinating background to our current situation, most of which is terrifying and now I'm worrying about the bomb again. I took off a star for the sheer number neo-con/Reaganite talking heads in this...

Anselm (2023)*** Wim Wenders stirring mostly visual documentary about Anselm Kiefer, a German artist who has explored his childhood memories of post war Germany in a frank and intimidatingly in your face way, on a massive scale combining sculpture, painting and physical spaces, many of which he has engineered himself. As a middle aged person who feels estranged and terrified to look more deeply into her own childhood, Anselm was something to sit with for two hours.

24 Hour Party People (2002)** Steve Coogan plays Tony Wilson, the Manchester TV personality and club owner who helped launch the careers of Joy Division, New Order and The Happy Mondays. Coogan has a tendency to make all his characters Alan Partridge and this is no exception, but it kind of works? It did more to get me to listen to Joy Division that numerous goth roommates ever could...

Two of Us (1999)*** I can't stop watching this made for VH-1 fanfiction of a movie starring Jared Harris and Aidan Quinn as John Lennon and Paul McCartney, dramatizing a probably apocryphal tale that John and Paul met up in NYC in the 70s when Paul was playing Madison Square Garden. Pure fluff and nonsense. I need it like air.

Remains of the Day (1993)*** Revisiting this old favorite and finding that it's kind of pacey and funny for a Merchant Ivory pic. The movie that made me love Tony Hopkins as an actor, his Stevens is really such a fascinating, ostensibly tragic character and yet there is a weird kind of triumph to living one's life so completely to a schedule and a code, and yet never being to eliminate desire and feeling.

Doubt (2008)*** This is the second Philip Seymour Hoffman movie I've watched in the last few months that has left me utterly haunted. Like The Master, Hoffman creates a villain who charms the audience at the same time you know that he's probably done unforgivable things and is only at the start of a long career of doing unforgivable things. Meryl Streep gives a heavy handed performance (Streep never met a colloquial accent that she didn't wear like a Groucho Marx nose) that certainly gets the point across that unpleasant people usually aren't the bad guys you want them to be. Amy Adams plays a naive young nun who, like the audience, is left wondering what to believe.

Dune (1984)*** Unapologetic Lynch Dune lover here. I love the cheesy acting, the wild tonal shifts, and the attempts to put this sprawling multibook epic in the Star Wars shaped box that the studio wanted him to use. My favorite scene has become Lynch's cameo, he seems so happy just pretending to be a spice miner, in his little spice mining suit in his little unconvincing space ship. I love him and this whole stupid mess. Sorry Frank Herbert.

Dune Part II (2024)*** My prediction is that Villeneuve's probable trilogy will--like so many franchises--peak in the second film. The first part was a slow-moving visual feast, that only hinted at the potential of this cast. Things actually start moving in the plot and Chalamet's Paul does his best to cope. Unlike MacLachlan's avuncular Atreides, who takes being a Messiah as just being another Tuesday of being the Universe's Most Gifted Child, he actually seems conflicted. Zendaya continues to utterly dominate every time she's on screen. Can Channi be the focus of the movie? Please?

[popentertainment-moviereviews]

A COMPLETE UNKNOWN (2024)

Starring Timothée Chalamet, Edward Norton, Elle Fanning, Monica Barbaro, Boyd Holbrook, Dan Fogler, Norbert Leo Butz. Scoot McNairy, PJ Byrne, Will Harrison, Eriko Hatsune, Charlie Tahan, Ryan Harris Brown, Eli Brown, Nick Pupo, Big Bill Morganfield, Laura Kariuki, Stephen Carter Carlsen, Eric Berryman, David Alan Basche, Joe Tippett and James Austin Johnson.

Screenplay by James Mangold and Jay Cocks.

Directed by James Mangold.

Distributed by Searchlight Pictures. 141 minutes. Rated R.

I think I owe an apology. A few years ago, when I heard that Timothée Chalamet had been cast to play Bob Dylan in this film, I thought it was a horrible job of miscasting. I worried that Chalamet was too much of a pretty boy, not enough of a presence to capture all of the complicated levels of Dylan, who is a genius and often kind of a dick all at the same time.  

What can I say? Chalamet has proven me wrong, and I’m glad to see it. In fact, Chalamet absolutely nailed the performance, which is pretty impressive when you consider what a cipher Dylan has always been. He is spot on in his voice (both speaking and singing, as Chalamet performs all of the songs in the film), his movements, his lack of social skills, his self-involvement, his seeming inability to connect with others. It’s all a bit of an imitation, but it’s a good one. He is a bit too handsome to be Dylan, but it’s not distracting.

In fact, although A Complete Unknown is obviously created of great love for the work of Dylan, I’m pleased to see that the film does not totally whitewash the fact that the guy could be kind of an asshole at this point in his career – the film focuses on the years from when Dylan arrived in New York through to his infamous plugged-in performance at The Newport Folk Festival. (If you need further proof, check out DA Pennebaker’s classic documentary Don’t Look Back, which also looked at this era, which shows the singer to be both a genius and a total jerk.)

A Complete Unknown is not as good as the performance – it falls into certain rock biopic traps of skirting over major accomplishments and romanticizing the story a bit – but it’s mostly pretty enjoyable, as long as you go in knowing you’re not getting the complete true story.

In fact, it is somewhat reminiscent of Walk the Line, writer/director James Mangold’s previous 2005 biopic of Johnny Cash. (Interestingly, Cash is also a significant supporting character in A Complete Unknown, which seems like a bit of a screenwriter’s device, although the two men were contemporaries and really were friends.) However, like Walk the Line, the filmmaker takes some of the truth and stretches it a lot, or even makes a lot of stuff up, to make for a more interesting, cinematic story.

A Complete Unknown is almost like a greatest hits collection of Dylan’s early accomplishments, with little segue or explanation between accomplishments. And yet, Dylan had such a massively fascinating life at that point that fitting it all into two hours and twenty minutes doesn’t quite work. Even though it’s a long movie, it feels incomplete.

However, the music and the recreation of the early-mid 1960s Greenwich Village folk scene is fascinating, even when it’s slightly rushed or whitewashed.

As Dylan gets more wrapped up in his art and his fame, he becomes harder to deal with and surer that he was constantly right. He treats people unfeelingly and often cruelly. His on and off girlfriend Joan Baez (Monaca Barbara) calls him an asshole multiple times during the film, and she wasn’t wrong.

He was particularly bad to the women in his life, as shown here by Baez and his long term relationship with Elle Fanning’s Sylvie Russo. (Sylvie is a fictionalized version of Dylan’s real-life ex Suze Rotolo. Dylan requested her name be changed in the movie, which is surprising because most of the other characters went by their real names.)

Yet, for all its imperfections, A Complete Unknown is still a fascinating film. Like I said earlier, it may not tell the real story of Bob Dylan, but the story it does tell is pretty damned interesting.

Jay S. Jacobs

Copyright ©2024 PopEntertainment.com. All rights reserved. Posted: December 24, 2024.

[dragonnarrative-writes]

Tagged by @syoddeye! Thanks!

No stress tags: @mi-i-zori, @sentientcave, @mortuarywriting, @godihatethiswebsite, @mikichko

Books Tag Game!

1) The last book I read:

Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton (I'm currently still reading it, and I recommend it highly.)

2) A book I recommend:

World War Z by Max Brooks - Amazingly comprehensive world exploration through different points of view. If you've hesitated because you're not into zombies, this book is NOT about the zombies. If you didn't like the movie, that's fine, I'm not sure why they pretended that had anything to do with this book. The full cast version got me into audiobooks.

Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer - The best way I can describe this is Science is Magic Again. This book is madness. I don't know what else to say about it without spoilers.

The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin - Holy shit. What a book. The world building, the magic, the twists, the turns. The way I screamed at the last line. The whole Broken Earth Trilogy is so much. This is NOT a happy story, but it's damn good.

3) A book that I couldn’t put down:

Devolution by Max Brooks (It's a bigfoot horror story, and it's amazing.)

4) A book I’ve read twice (or more):

World War Z by Max Brooks (Annual read for me, except for 2020-21 because it hit a little too close to home)

5) A book on my TBR:

I Accidentally Summoned a Demon Boyfriend by Jessica Cage (I love romance books, even if there's a lot of science thriller and horror on this list lol)

6) A book I’ve put down:

The Stardust Thief by Chelsea Abdullah (I really really wanted to like this one, but it just didn't enthrall me! It's such an interesting premise and story, with some very interesting characters! And my brain just... didn't want it.)

7) A book on my wish list:

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

8) A favorite book from childhood:

The Hobbit: or There and Back Again by J.R.R. Tolkien

9) A book you would give to a friend:

Depends on what the friend needs! (The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin)

10) A fiction book you own: The Broken Earth Trilogy by N.K. Jemisin. I have both physical and audiobooks of both.

11) A nonfiction book you own: Opening Up by Writing It Down: How Expressive Writing Improves Health and Eases Emotional Pain by James W. Pennebaker and Joshua M. Smyth

12) What are you currently reading: Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton

13) What are you planning on reading next? Planning????

No shelfie because I don't have a shelf right now, actually. I will be fixing this in the near-ish future.

[the-mechanica]

No shit. I mean, more aptly put:

... In 2018, a study by the same team found that written exposure therapy was as effective as cognitive processing therapy, another first-line, or most highly recommended, PTSD treatment.

Writing down traumatic memories may be easier for some people, if they feel shame or embarrassment about what happened to them, said Denise Sloan, a psychologist who helped develop the treatment and is an author of the study. She said patients were asked to write by hand, which takes longer and allows them to engage with the memory.

“It’s a slower process, that allows them to better think through ‘what happened next, and who was there, and what did they say,’ because they’re writing about it,” said Dr. Sloan, associate director of the Behavioral Science Division of the National Center for PTSD. “It slows everything down, versus just saying it out loud.”

The therapy was inspired by the work of James Pennebaker, a Texas psychologist who, in the 1980s, began experimenting with what he called “expressive writing,” and found that people who regularly wrote about negative life experiences had stronger immune systems and paid fewer visits to the doctor.

The first study of written exposure therapy as a treatment for PTSD appeared in 2012. It works, Dr. Sloan said, much the way other trauma-focused treatments do: by allowing the client to confront the traumatic memory, lessening their fear and avoidance, and allowing them to identify misconceptions like self-blame.

[the-resurrection-3d]

Interview with James Pennebaker, aka the “writing improves your immune function” guy I posted about a few days ago

[incamminoblog]

padre Ezio Lorenzo Bono" L'AUTOTERAPIA (James W. Pennebaker)"

Domenica 2 Marzo (DOMENICA – Verde)VIII DOMENICA DEL TEMPO ORDINARIO (ANNO C)Sir 27,5-8   Sal 91   1Cor 15,54-58   Lc 6,39-45 In questi giorni ho iniziato, come ogni secondo semestre, l’insegnamento all’Università LUMSA della disciplina “Educazione degli adulti” o formazione permanente (Lifelong Learning). Agli studenti insegno che la nostra vita dev’essere un continuo apprendimento e che…

[mylifeincinema]

My Week(s) in Reviews: January 25, 2025

Got distracted, trying and failing to play catch-up, but hopefully I'll be ready to get My Best of 2024 lists started at the beginning of February. Anyway, here's what I've seen so far in the new year...

A Complete Unknown (James Mangold, 2024)

When it comes to Bob Dylan, there will forever be the Man, the Myth, and the Music. On film the closest we've come—or likely ever will come—to knowing the Man is through documentaries like D.A. Pennebaker's Dont Look Back & Martin Scorsese's exhaustive No Direction Home. As for the he Myth, it was so creatively and completely explored in Todd Haynes' brilliant I'm Not There. Now... we get the music. In A Complete Unknown, James Mangold delivers Dylan's musical journey from the beginning of his storied career through that fateful, genre-changing night at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. On the surface, it's all a fairly by-the-numbers biopic. But through its flawless cast and Mangold's astute understanding of the musical relationships within—the influences and collaborations that caused Dylan the Man to evolve into Dylan the Myth—it becomes something truly special. And it's at its very strongest when it's focusing on the music these relationships and collaborations created; when it gets these people together on stage, in a studio, or in a hospital room playing music. I really wish Ed Norton was the front-runner for Supporting Actor. And I'm extremely excited that Monica Barbaro got in with the Supporting Actress Nod. - 9/10

Emilia Pérez (Jacques Audiard, 2024)

This might've been okay if it had been 30-minutes shorter and didn't have all those god-awful musical numbers (I love musicals, this is a terrible musical). Zoe is solid, so is some of Audiard's work, but otherwise this was pretty terrible. Is the Academy high?!? (I'd get the Zoe nod—and only the Zoe nod—if it wasn't a blatant case of category fraud.) - 3/10

The 4:30 Movie (Kevin Smith, 2024)

This might be Kevin Smith's worst movie?!? The cast was just embarrassingly bad. Oof. - 2.5/10

Strange Darling (JT Mollner, 2024)

An obvious yet cleverly structured and very well-paced little serial-killer thriller. - 7.5/10

A Real Pain (Jesse Eisenberg, 2024)

Eisenberg and Culkin are fantastic, but the pacing is all over the place and Searchlight did it dirty in both its release model and in its advertising it as a comedy. Go in expecting a rather depressing little drama, and there's some great shit in here. - 7/10

Nickel Boys (RaMell Ross, 2024)

Oof. This is an extremely ambitious adaptation of the extremely middle-of-the-road, Pulitzer-Winning novel by Colson Whitehead. It occasionally works in achieving its vision and cleverly adapting the harder to adapt aspects of the book, but the almost exclusively terrible cast brings everything crashing down around it, and Ross' more ambitious tendencies pile on the rubbish. It is mind-boggling to me that this made it into the Best Picture nominations. Yikes. - 3/10

Enjoy!

-Timothy Patrick Boyer.