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This week in my personal entertainment

Watched Miyazaki's Howl's Moving Castle last night. Ooooo, I loved it! I've heard people/critics say that it's not his best, but I found it delightful. Perhaps I'm biased because of the dog who reminds me of mine, but I think not. I am always blown away by his imagination.

Watched "Network" today. I missed a lot of the movies of the 70's because I was too young to see them, and by the time I wanted to see them, everyone I knew had already seen them. I've been trying to catch up, but sometimes the moment is just lost. I'd seen so many parodies of Apocalypse Now that it just struck me as funny when I finally saw it. Network is funny, but obviously deliberately so. I must read some Paddy Chayefsky (forgive me if I misspell, Gentle Reader). I had seen The Americanization of Emily when I was a teenager and I remembered it being good. Watched it again recently and realized it was brilliant. The lines, the acting. I didn't like Network as much, but was again boggled by his prescience.

I'm at an awkward point I reach every so often where I don't know what to read next. I was wandering amongst the books of our house that I haven't read. You must understand that we have more books than some lending libraries because of my husband's passion for books as well as mine. I love free things. I will pick up bags of books if they even vaguely interest me, if they are free. Unfortunately, sometimes nothing seems quite right. I want something with some substance, but Kim Stanley Robinson's Years of Rice and Salt seemed too weighty to get into. I tried rereading Old Curiosity Shop a few weeks ago and found that for once I could not get into the Dickensian language. Mysteries seem too light. Blech. I ended up pulling out a slim volume of short stories by John Crowley. Crowley is one of my favorite authors whom I've never managed to finish. My husband adores him and introduced him to me early on. The language is exquisite and very dense. I've started Little/Big two or three times and Aegypt as well and find myself so swept away by the writing that I wanted to go and write and ponder great thoughts myself instead of finishing the book. His writing demands complete attention, and I seldom give complete attention to anything. It's why I love Proust and have yet to make it through the whole of A La Recherche du Temps Perdue.
This is the intro. to the book of short stories:

We say to console us for the loss of Paradise
God gave to us alone among all his creatures
Hope and Memory. We might rather say,
Only because we are creatures burdened with
Hope and Memory do we intimate a Paradise
which we alone have lost.

You can see how one might spend a very long time simply considering those words and never manage to start the stories at all.

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