U.S. troops opened fire on anti-American demonstrators for the second time this week as Iraqis marched Wednesday to protest the previous shooting.

There is a kind of nightmare logic operating policy these days. It will only get more nightmarish and less logical. Or, put another way, po-tweet.

At the student awards luncheon

I'm the one in black, holding the contraband coffee. I was supposed to read something, so I read my little Nabokov festshrift thingie, whose chief virtue was that it was short -- they announced lunch right before I headed to the podium, and everyone seemed self-conscious about stepping out and loading up while I read, so I told them to go ahead and do it, go eat, which resulted in no one moving, which sucked because it meant that I couldn't go eat after I was done reading, because there were other readers.

The other people on the table? An exceptional bunch of people, and fun to hang out with -- the person to my immediate right (with the gray shirt and the blocked face) is a frequent tennis partner and a cook of formidable qualities and a good friend. Also: 67% of the table is involved in waching more Buffy than anyone would think humanly possible, but is.

The actual path to the photos is through here, by going to "English Photo Gallery" and clicking on "English Events," then "2003 Awards Luncheon."

Also: here is the main page for the VN celebration -- the other contributions are fantastic: there are chess problems, poems, other prose pieces, and a wonderful gift from Dmitri Nabokov, Vladimir Nabokov's son.

"You spend half your life trying to turn the other half around."

You do. I do, at at any rate, and learn slowly what needs turning around and what doesn't. I'm amazed, right now, by how little turning is required. If there was any wood to knock I'd knock it.

So: Holes is a remarkable movie, and a strange one, and nothing like what the ad campaigns and the trailer suggest it will be. The roommate and I saw it yesterday, and dad called today to talk and as it turned out he saw it too, in Texas. We were all surprised and charmed and caught up in detangling the causality of the universe: how it's not just Stanley's last name (Yelnats) that works as a mirror image, but the girls (Mary, Mary Lou, Myrah -- I think... I should really check) themselves, plus the similarity of these M-names to the word "mirror," plus everything else: the world falls apart if you try to explain it, but it flies on charm and on its own internal logic while you're watching, and suggests that the universe and fate are bored and need to set up elaborate schemes to keep themselves amused, much like death in Final Destination, which this movie is much better than.

Here's the thing: I hadn't even heard of Holes till one of the remarkable people mentioned on 4/12/03 showed me the trailer, and asked if it didn't look awful (it did: it looked like any number of generic Disney movies about kids doing shit), and said that the book was obviously being horribly adapted. And then she said that she didn't think that the book was that great, but that it was still a shame to make a generic adaptation of an okay book regardless. Which I understood: Print must be defended. (Although, while waiting for the movie to start, I walked to the children's section of the Barnes & Noble to look at LM Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables, and lo, there were a whole bunch of kids reading. So print was in good hands. I'm actually not all that fond of children in the abstract (loud, cutesy) but they are okay and cheer me up when I see them around: they're short and not all that bright so we have a lot in common.)

Biological Warfare & the Buffy Paradigm

See pp 4-5 if all you're really interested in is the latter.

Also, Teller talks about Enoch Soames. (Via CH.)

The semester is for all intents and purposes is over. Two portfolios to turn in. One revision still in the air. Not nearly enough sleep. The usual frustrations over the quality and quantity of the work have begun to seep in. Rushed from place to place yesterday, so missed out on treadmill time, and will make up later today after the stint here at the labs.

Swell is Other People

I've been spending the past few weeks in remarkable company -- the semester's wrapping up, and there is stuff that needs attending to, but overall it's been less about that and more about a couple of good clumps of people. Today, after work, there'll be football w/ a whole bunch of girls, with I believe one other guy who I haven't asked if he thinks, as I do, that football with women is preferable to any other kind (he might disagree: I don't think any of us are bad players, but he can kick our collective asses), and later I'm being taken to see The Two Gentlemen of Verona (which reminds me that the Shakespeare project has stalled at As You Like It -- I'm halfway through the plays and have not picked up the next yet), and tomorrow there's more Buffy than is probably healthy for anyone. And yesterday and the day before there was the watching of some much-loved movies: three of us are rotating films the others have not seen.

There's a part of me that isn't wired at all for this: that part wants to stay in a room w/ printed material for many hours. I don't think there's anything wrong w/ that side of anyone. Everyone needs a bit of solitude. But it seems as though we're built to be around others, which should somehow be less surprising than it is, but there you go.

It's not just that it's fun. It's not just that these people are all wonderful and great to be around, and that there is comfort to be derived from small crowds. It's also that all of these people can cook -- we're talking about remarkable people making remarkable dishes.

Which, while on subject, here is an NPR story about a once-remarkable man making some very unremarkable work, work so unremarkable it's actually remarkably bad work.

Dictation

Secretary is not a great movie, but it's sweet and unusual and worth watching: it's a very good small movie -- at heart it's a romantic comedy, but with a disturbing beginning involving self-mutilation (which yes, of course, is a disturbing subject, but made all the more unsettling, and all the sadder, because the girl has a little kit w/ knives, and iodine, and this little kit has been decorated w/ butterfly decals), followed by an unexpectedly sunny take on s&m (the usual disclaimer is that it's handled tastefully, but tact & taste, in these matters, seems overrated -- tone, on the other hand, strikes me as far more important, where the pitfalls are ponderous, pretentious, bombastic junk on the one hand, fluffy and harmless farce on the other).

The movie is based on a Mary Gaitskill short story, and I was surprised to find Frederick Exley singing her praises (not because Gaitskill isn't great, but because I had not thought of Exley in a while), which made me think of another hard-drinking man, James Agee, whose one original screenplay was the movie I watched earlier this week: Night of the Hunter.

So where am I going w/ this? OK, the people I was watching Night of the Hunter with liked it, kind of, which has always been my reaction to the movie -- I wasn't sure if it was good, but I was absolutely sure that I had never seen anything quite like it, and probably wouldn't ever again. Nothing could match it for weirdness. And it was a kind of cumulative weirdness, with Laughton, a first-time director, helping out considerably.

So there is Agee, and there is Exley, and there is also Southern -- all producing works unmatched in strangeness, some of which are both brilliant and strange, and some just strange. And all living piecemeal lives -- shorter than they could have been, strewn with wreckage, rife with wounded passersby, filled w/ long stretches of inactivity.

So where am I going w/ this? I don't know. Part of it is wishing that anyone who produces anything worthwhile live the kind of life wished upon by the narrator of The Lovely Bones in the last line of the novel, which by the way you should really read.