No Romance in E-mail Anymore

I spent the last two hours reading e-mails, junked e-mails, checking out links in e-mails and deleting e-mails.

Over the last half week or full week, I somehow accumulated something like 400 e-mails that I hadn't addressed at home. I dealt with them at work mostly. No wonder I don't really have much time to have good, quality e-mail conversations and don't really have much energy for productive things.

Ugh.

Our Society Needs Its Own Romance and Mythology

Last week when I went to see Aeon Flux, I saw a preview for Isolde and Tristan (or is Tristram?).

A bit ago, I read some reaction to the "Before there was Romeo & Juliet (and West Side Story and. . . and. . .)" line. I think the reaction pretty much said that Romeo and Juliet trumped Isolde and Tristan story because Romeo and Juliet was told much better.

Nevertheless, I want to see Isolde and Tristan. I don't really know why. I think it has something to do with this comic I read a long time ago in which Isolde and Tristan both got reincarnated as women then remembered that they were Isolde and Tristan. Tristan had a hard time accepting that she was a woman but, in end, accepted it and ended up a romance with the Isolde character.

I'm a man. . .can you blame me?

Nonetheless, I always wanted to know the story. Of course, the Hollywood version won't tell the original story, but it'll give me an introduction.

While watching the preview, a thought occurred to me: Our society has yet to make or has stopped making great movie romances. At least, the quantity of them have gone downhill recently in the last couple years. We've just been re-making old TV shows and movies, good literary books or, almost as worse, going all the way back to Roman history and even further back to make movies. . .and besides, most of those have turned out pretty trite.

This phenomenon feels particularly telling since it manifests itself on the movie genre, which I guess could be considered something of a dying medium, anyway. The great romances seem to occur on TV these days. . .Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, Angel, Farscape and probably many others. Could Lost be considered some kind of Romance or should we consider more of a Modernist thriller that meditates on the point of everything and some people die along the way.

Ever since getting caught up with TV after getting out of college, I started seeing the potential for great Romances (and I mean the adventure Romance over the love Romance. . .but love is part of that Romance, anyway) on TV while the movie screen really doesn't necessarily hold as great of potential for it.

It saddens me, though, this lack of original Great Romance at the moment. I hope to one day write Great Romances along with pieces in other genres, too.

I would like to see more original Great Romances, though. . .I would like to see more.