Homer and Shakespeare

O there's nobody left to read, to read!

There's nobody left to read!

"Homer"

May be as misnomer

For several otherwise out-of-work guys

Half his size.

And can I take heart from a work by committee,

The daily battle before the invested city?

The smug gods dilute me till I'm gone,

The pale eternal coffee break on the office lawn—

I want more!

It was all spacemen anyway.

O there's nobody left to read, to read,

There's nobody left to read!

I keep the bible in the bathroom,

Chapel grotto of my steadiest meditations

Where,

Bloody lamb of my intestine's perturbations

I am likeliest reduced to prayer.

Not that I'm getting anywhere.

At least the gods were my moral inferiors,

Not having to die.

Here I am outdone even in this.

O there's nobody left to read, and I'm tee-ed,

There's nobody left to read!

But if my ego is on a par with the Savior's

By what rule of thumb shall I plot my behaviors?

How shall my thoughts and my feelings agree?

O how shall I structure my ee-ssential me?

(I guess Arnold was right there, but that's all he gave me.

There isn't a line in his poems that can save me.)

Let's move up to Shakespeare,

Reconsider that sneer

At erotic esteem,

A Midsummer Night’s Dream,

Not the romp it might seem,

And the blind bastards we're.

No anomalous fear.

It's a bitch going steady.

Or let us to the height

Of the language, King Lear,

And again get the shove,

Feel the pain all we might

Over betraying love,

About which I felt awful already.

"To be or not to be, that is the question,"

Just isn't poetry. It's indigestion.

The Video

The Book

Robert MacLean is an independent filmmaker. His The Light Touch is on Amazon Prime, Tubi and Scanbox, and his 7-minute comedy is an out-loud laugh. He is also a novelist, a playwright, a blogger, a YouTuber, a film reviewer, a literary critic, and a stand-up comic poet. Born Toronto, PhD McGill, taught at Canadian universities, too cold, live Greece, Irish citizen. Committed to making movies that don't matter. No brains, but an intellectual snob.

In Praise of Older Women

Film review: Kinds of Kindness

The Light Touch on Amazon Prime

The Natural Wish to Be Robert MacLean

Also on YouTube:

Boccaccio’s "The Husband" 

Boccaccio's "The Horse Trade" 

Boccaccio's "The Stupid Friar" 

Chaucer’s "The Miller's Tale"

"Red Devil Rag"

"Attack of the Giant Feminists"

"But Is It Love? Or, The Destruction of West Los Angeles"

LINDA, A Highly Successful Call Girl

A lady of the evening with dignity and business sense is superior to her circumstances.

Linda is so beautiful, so refined, so aloof that her clients fall in love with her.
She's making a pile with American businessmen—who introduce her to the French President—who falls for her too.

Her passion for independence only inflames him—he wants to marry her, have children!—they all do, but she is resolutely herself.

Professional cool is the secret of her success, and the allure that enslaves powerful men.

Cops, pimps, hookers, judges, prison guards, psychiatrists, politicians—there isn’t much she can’t deal with.

And when the President introduces her to the American President…

Proposed cast: Diane Kruger (Linda)

LINDA is a call girl, a businesswoman and an independent spirit.  Presidents fall in love with her, though she’s not that interested, and she winds up in the Oval Office advising one of them.

Proposed cast: Peter Sarsgaard (Barry)

BARRY is the American  junior executive who’s in love with her.  He will do anything to have her, and ultimately kills for her, which finally gets her attention.

Proposed cast: Fabio Forte ("the French President")

Proposed cast: Elisa Spina ("the French President's wife")

Proposed cast: Timothy Watters ("the former American President")

Proposed cast: Teresa Barnwell ("the American Secretary of State")

Proposed cast: Gerardo Puisseaux ("the President")

A France-UK co-production of a dry comedy. 

Foreign Matter—the movie

Toby travels with an American woman who pays. He's got it made, except that her nine-year-old daughter is smarter than he is.  Based on the novel:

   

“A very, very funny book"—The West Coast Review of Books 

“Enormously enjoyable”—Kirkus Reviews 

“Fresh and spirited”—Publishers Weekly

Think of:

Toby Tucker gets along as a tour guide, though all he knows how to do is keep the clients amused. 

Proposed cast: Hugh Grant

In Venice he falls for rich bubble-head Marcie but can't afford her style.  "To-bee!  Let's just live on my money!"  Well—it’s awkward but what can one say?  He reclines into the good life.

Marcie Harding, sweet, fresh, blonder than blonde and all heart, is a lonely widow who takes a tour in Venice.    Toby abandons the tour to take her to Rome, and when he runs out of cash is about to abandon her.  He loves her more than he knows.

But for Andrea, things would be perfect.  "The child."  Toby and Marcie are no smarter than anybody else; the child is smarter than anybody else.  She'd have got rid of him long ago but her mommy loves him, so she keeps him around to, how shall I say, play with.  When you’re not looking she rotates her head like Linda Blair.

Proposed cast: John Goodman

Marcie’s father-in-law, billionaire Hazelton Turnbull “Hard Turd” Harding IV, loathes Toby, and loathes giving Marcie her allowance to feed him.  But he loves his little granddaughter, and there lies the control.

When Haze spends Marcie’s money on a painting for the Harding Memorial Museum it looks like Toby's meal ticket is gone.

Proposed cast: Catherine Tate

Johna Nerg is the butch-nightmare artist whose painting Toby accidentally steps in, sits in and sets on fire.  He really doesn't mean it but she thinks, as who does not, that he's trying to destroy it—and gets real mean with him.
 

He has no choice, finally, but to try to steal it.  But until the child takes a hand, nothing works.

Foreign Matter is part of the Toby series: 

Pretentious Pictures presents a summer comedy.