This is exciting! Though for some reason the note that Terence Malick was a Heidegger scholar before becoming a filmmaker is more exciting than the other dudes' film. Which is, though, as I say, still exciting apart from Terence Malick's being a Heidegger scholar once.

NB: I saw twenty minutes of a Terence Malick movie once. It was nice. That's all I can say with authority.

'There's no part of that sentence I didn't like.'

'We have stopped reading, we have not the time. Our mind is solicited simultaneously from too many sides: it has to be spoken to quickly as it passes by. But there are things that cannot be said or understood in such haste, and these are the most important things for man. This accelerated movement, which makes coherent thought impossible, may alone be sufficient to weaken, and in the long run utterly to destroy, human reason.'

Crystal left for work at nine. When she called later in the day I found that I had bundled all the blankets into a person-shaped lump to lie beside.

Three things, in particular, that caused me to cry this week:

1. the end of the Futurama episode in which Frye trades hands with the Robot Devil so that he can get good at the holophonor, where after everything has fallen apart and he's once again musically retarded, he plays the ending of his opera just for Leela and the image his playing creates is of a scrawled kids-drawing Frye and Leela holdings hands

2. imagining the glee with which Tarantino must have ordered the return to large-sized titles for the name actors like Sonny Chiba in the opening credits to Kill Bill - as in, holy crap, oh my god, look who I got! (just look, for confirmation, to the way he enthuses over Hero, which by the way he well should)

3. the sublimity of the beginning to the rooftop duel between the Bride and O-Ren, when the Santa Esmerelda cover of 'Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood' is playing; here as over and over again during the movie, I feel as if every single little thing was made to meet my own personal artistic and critical ideals, to satisfy even my most personal tastes

This site was unavailable last week while my host moved into a new apartment and waited for the phone company to turn his service back on. Sorry about that. If you sent me any mail that bounced and was ultimately not automatically resent, give it another whack if you can.

Annoyingly enough, I've been feeling the faint stirrings of ideas possibly worth writing out, ever since I have been unable to put them up; worse, though, my iBook just died or freaked out or 'suffered a catastrophic specific logic board component failure' or whatever they call it - so I will be kept away for a while longer.

Not that, as the past three years show, my having a working computer is any guarantee of new posts.

Augh! Did nobody like this movie?

And when did plausibility and fidelity to reality move up so high on all the critics' major motion picture comedy checklists?

Is it possible that Ebert has never in the past gazillion years of human civilization heard someone make the second-order joke of picking a certain character to utter a lame first-order 'joke' like 'denial is not just a river in Egypt'?

(Which, nota bene, removes it from the realm of verbal humor.)

(Also, 'he steals a horse on rides around on it more than is necessary' is a remark of praise, yes? Yes? Yes.)

I have no idea what they're talking about - the flaming-marshmallow-stuck-in-Lyle-Lovett's-eye gag was hilarious!