I Need to Stop Worrying that People Will Think I Am Trying to ImpressThem and Books and Films of Alain Robbe-Grillet

I spend too much time worrying that other people will think that I am trying to impress them. I need to relax and just say what is on my mind. Sometimes I am surprised to find that others share an interest in something I did not know they knew anything about. I like being around people who share their interests with me and are open to learning about my interests. I am not going to just arbitrarily bring up subjects that most of the people I am around do not know about. In most conversations I am not going to talk about the novels or movies of Alain Robbe-Grillet. I will write about them from time to time here. I do not have much to contribute to many conversations at work, because they tend to be about spouses and children. I do not have either, and I am not interested in hearing about those of coworkers. I would be more in interested in hearing about those things from friends. I would like to find a man whom I can marry and to be able to talk about my spouse. I am trying to get the people with whom I work to help me practice speaking Spanish. I also need to improve my comprehension of what they are saying in Spanish. Most of the people with whom I work are from Mexico, and their Spanish is different to what I am accustomed to. During the past few years I have watched the films of Pedro Almodóvar. I find the Spanish in his films easier understand than I do that of my coworkers. My intentions for wanting to do this are completely selfish. I want to improve my Spanish.

I have some books by Alain Robbe-Grillet that I want to read or re-read. I made the mistake of trying to read an English translation of one of his novels, La jalousie. In English it falls flat, because one of its main themes is built on a play on words in French that does not translate well into English. In this book we see things through the eyes of a husband, but he is not mentioned directly. It is interesting that his novels are better known in the U.S. than his films are. One of my favorite films is, "L'année dernière à Marienbad." He wrote the screenplay for that film. In it a man encounters a woman, and he says that they had planned on meeting again, She has no recollection of this. It is not clear in the film whether or not there had been a previous meeting between the two. I have only been able to find one of the films that he directed, "La belle captive." There is again the uncertainty of what has happened to the characters in the film and what they are just imagining. Of course none of is real, because it is just a film. He plays around with what is "real" and what is "imagined." He wrote a collection of very short stories called Instantanés. In these he treats some commonplace things. an escalator for example, in a way in which they do not appear commonplace at all. People have said that his writings are very objective because of detailed descriptions. I disagreed with a professor who had this point of view. I said that it is not possible to be completely objective, because the words one uses to describe something are always subjective. "He drove a blue car down the street," and "He cruised in a navy blue automobile along the tree-lined avenue," could both describe the same event, but the words chosen color the description differently. After I had that discussion with the professor I read aan essay by Robbe-Grillet about his writing, and he said the same thing that I had said concerning his writing.