Tuesday, November 27, 2018

November 20, 2003

"Grown-ups have developed an unpleasant habit lately, I notice, of comforting themselves for their degradation by pretending that children are childish"--The Book of Merlyn

"Let them sin....  It's good for their souls....  They can repent afterward"--Viridiana

Dreamed of seeing a movie like Purple Rain, with Ben Kingsley as a married bourgeois professor carrying out perfect murders (Burgess Meredith was one of the victims); a drama like The Emperor Jones about the black tin-pot dictator of a third world nation.

Went out to the library and read the children's books What Do You Say, Dear? and What Do You Do, Dear?  They're real classics. (I remember them from childhood.)

Started typing out my September diary entries.

Started reading The Book of Merlyn, an extra book in the Once and Future King series.

Saw two movies at the Cinematheque.  The first was Luis Bunuel's Veridiana, an often brilliant satire about a young religious woman who inherits an estate and decides to take in the local paupers.  Its style reminded me of fellow Spaniards Velazquez and Goya!

The second was Fassbinder's Despair (for the second time), based on Nabokov's novel. Nice try, but Nabokov's really unfilmable.  Yet it was a great visual achievement.

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