WEBVTT

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Um, some of you will have seen
PT Anderson's-- probably all

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of you; young ones, anyway--

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will have seen PT Anderson's
marvelous movie, Magnolia.

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I was just amazed
when I first saw it.

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He had-- we'll
remember, it will--

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you will remember that it
features, at one juncture,

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a rain of frogs.

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The director, being
exceedingly hip and young,

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did not know that he was
making a biblical allusion when

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he made the film.

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I love that so much.

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He'd read some sort of
Victorian novel, a 19th century

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French novel, in which
the rain-- he thought,

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cool, a rain of frogs.

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So it was one of the older
actors in his production who

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said, you know, that's
really-- how did you--

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you were reading Exodus?

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And he said, what do you mean?

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He said, you know, the frogs?

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Then he said, what do you mean?

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He said, no, it's in the Bible!

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He said, really?

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And so this actor brought-- and
then Anderson thought it was

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so-- that he'd been being--

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he'd been speaking in
prose all his life.

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He was so amazed that
he'd been making--

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made a biblical
allusion that he stuck

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chapter and verse in the film.

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And you'll notice,
if you look at it

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again-- somebody,
it was Frances,

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was trying to locate
a Bible for me

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somewhere in this building
desperately 15 minutes ago.

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And we didn't quite locate one.

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But I would have chapter and
verse for you, had we done so.

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What Anderson did
was he planted it

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all over the place in the movie.

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So if you see it
again, you'll see

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that there-- an exit
from the LA freeway

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will be to Route
18-1 or something.

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And it's all-- he's just planted
the Exodus chapter and verse

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references, which
I very much like.

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And I learned that from
the website, which makes

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me very modern by my standards.

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I think that's-- so I have both
PT Anderson and the biblical

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passage he did not
have in mind in mind.

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This is in four sections,
and it's called "Pass Over."

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"1.

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Plague of darkness.

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You point a camera at a kid.

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The kid will try
to smile, he said.

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No matter part of his mouth
is missing, eyelid torn,

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the rest of his face
such a mass of infection

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and half-healed burns, they'll
never make it right again.

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You know what the surgeon
found in his scalp?

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Pencil lead, six
broken points of it.

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Puncture wounds, some
of them 12 months old.

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They figure the
mother made him wear

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a ski mask for those
thousand-and-some odd miles

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on the bus, or why didn't
somebody turn her in?

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The kid is eight, the
camera belongs to forensics,

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and he thinks he's
supposed to smile.

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Do the math.

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If anyone here were
in charge, my vote

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is, scrap us and start over.

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2.

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Plague of frogs.

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Indicator species is
the phrase, I think,

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which means we pour our poisons
in the streams and swamps,

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and these poor creatures grow
an extra leg or lingual tumors

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or a cell wall so denatured
that the larvae fail.

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In my new favorite
movie, it begins

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as rain, a burst of guts
and mucus on the hero's car.

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The hero, such as he is for
men, who's lost his gun,

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and now, he's lost himself
before the windshield's

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slick indictment.

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Throat of frog,
webbed foot of frog,

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split belly sliding
down the glass

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in red and yellow
close-up, thence to join

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with the carnage on the
street, boot deep now,

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bred of neither air nor
water but of God's disgust

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with humankind.

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Behold them, said the prophet,
in thine ovens and thy

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kneading troughs.

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And then he said, take, eat.

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This is the body you have made.

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3.

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Plague of locusts.

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Because there's
never enough, no,

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not in this bright
field of surfeit.

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Milk rings on the phone
bill, tracked-in honey

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where the cats came through,
lost homework, last year's

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coggins on the tack room floor.

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My neighbor back in Somerville
had only the narrowest path

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to walk from table to
toilet, toilet to bed.

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The rest was floor
to ceiling with what

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normal people throw away.

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I see how it comes to
this, never enough of it

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battened down.

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I lose my pills,
he said to me once.

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They're rolling around
on the floor somewhere.

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The Parsis bring their
dead, as Zoroaster

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is construed to
have taught them,

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to Malabar Hill, where
when the world was well,

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the birds restored them to
simplicity in 90 minutes flat.

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The birds are
purpose-built for this.

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Their scabrous faces bear a
nearly paraphrastic kinship

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to the fetid stuff
they tunnel in.

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Oh, who will come
who will not choke?

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The birds cannot keep up.

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4.

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Hyssop lamb."

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Hyssop is what the Jews used to
paint blood on their door posts

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to keep the angel of death away.

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"Hyssop lamb.

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Explain to me the writing
on the door posts, will you?

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Now, while the angel
gorges on them and theirs.

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Each that was first to
open the matrix first

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still matters in
this first world.

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That much I have seen and
do, in part, acknowledge,

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archived in the space
behind the lintel

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and its hasty script, a logic
of division that has made

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the world articulate, a portal
for each fine discrimination

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of the covenanting mind.

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And heaven has
its discards, too.

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There's not a book I know
that tells me otherwise.

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I'm having trouble reading
in this light, though.

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Was it something in
the water or before?"

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