November 21, 2003

"Moreover, by allowing terrorism to become our principal preoccupation, we are playing into the terrorists' hands.  They are setting our priorities"--George Soros

Dreamed of driving through Cape Breton, completing a huge jigsaw puzzle, and walking a distance up Mt. Wycocomagh (an actual hill in Cape Breton); reading in a dictionary the Chinese word for looking at your hand in the night light and seeing the outline of the bones inside(?); telling my girlfriend about it.

Went to Wychwood Library and picked up Lonesome Dove, only two days after it went on hold! (I'll have to email them a compliment.)

Baked gingerbread for tomorrow's fundraiser.

Indian summer isn't over yet. (The compost pile still has flies!)

The new Atlantic Monthly has a good George Soros essay criticizing Bush's foreign policy.

Dinner was chicken (which I fried).

Went to the dance studio again.  Cynthia was glad to see me.

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.

November 19, 2003

"He saw the problem before him as plain as a map.  The fantastic thing about it was that it was fought over nothing--literally nothing.  Frontiers were imaginary lines....  The imaginary lines on the earth's surface only needed to be unimagined"--The Candle in the Wind

Dreamed of making a list of actors who'd shown their pubic hair in movies, including Julianne Moore (an actual scene in Short Cuts).

Went to the library and placed a hold on the book Lonesome Dove.

Dinner was McDonald's.

Creative Writing was about short stories.  One last story for next week will be about whatever occurs to us.  I think I'll retell the story Mother told me about the man who was overheard saying to his mistress, "You look good to me, dear."

Finished The Candle in the Wind.  The last chapter is really majestic.

November 18, 2003

"People who say they are no good are always the good ones....  The bravest people are the ones who don't mind looking like cowards"--The Candle in the Wind

Dreamed of adventures in a land like Oz (including one where the Scarecrow helps stop a revolving juggernaut); a crowd of people walking on a huge globe; a newspaper article showing that my real-life Hong Kong lawyer friend Yvonne Ho was a famous chef; a movie crossing the space-age The Right Stuff with a vampire story, but taking place in daytime(!); waking in a motel room I didn't remember, singing "Are You Lonesome Tonight?" and remembering the superstition "If you sing before breakfast, you'll cry before night." (I decided to test this theory by singing the song before breakfast.)

Went shopping.

Registered at www.singleswithscruples.com . (Some people never learn from their mistakes!)

Dinner was pork chops.

At opera rehearsal the soprano performed her cadenza with the chorus for the first time.

Never did cry.

November 17, 2003

U.S. President Billy Bob Thornton:"You can have anything you want, so long as you don't ask for something I don't want to give"--Love Actually

Dreamed of a man recalling how the Germans occupied his coastal village and dared anyone to cut through their security fence, and he found out the hard way that it was electrified; a Maclean's magazine survey on youth violence; a GO transit route going north from Oakville.

Baked whole wheat bread.

The parents and I saw the British romantic comedy Love Actually at the Varsity.  It was rather thin in a hit and miss way.  In the children's Christmas pageant they sang the horridest Christmas song of all time:  Mariah Carey's "All I Want For Christmas"! [Bill Nighy was the best thing in it.  The scene where Colin Firth was writing outdoors without a paperweight so the wind could blow his pages into the pond and the Portuguese maid could wade in to save them in her bra was especially cheesy!]

After the movie was over we had dinner at the Swiss Chalet.

November 16, 2003

Dreamed of plotting to assassinate Ronald Reagan with a machete (in the name of justice) in a ship being towed uphill through a tunnell; the song "Santa Lucia"; a rural house putting another house in the shade of the setting sun (despite being a great distance away).

Went to the Cinematheque to see Lucino Visconti's The Damned, but left after 40 minutes.  What I was was an oddly lifeless epic about a family of Krupp-like steel magnates getting used by the Nazis.  Every scene seemed to take place in lavishly furnished by dimly lit rooms.  Cabaret did it better.

John and the girls came over for dinner, which was salmon and stuff.

Saw the first-season finale of Six Feet Under.  What a show!

November 15, 2003

Dreamed of being in a computer game set in a reconstructed historic fort (like Fort York in Toronto); setting a fire on a dinner plate; a group of women with some man trouble and imagining that one of them should tell another that that all men are jerks anyway, citing her husband as an example.

Got my hair cut.  This time I just got a small trim in preparation for the operas.

Went to Indigo Books and bought the course book Colloquial Dutch.  I also got some reduced books that my nieces and nephew might like.

Read about Dutch pronunciation. [I got interested in learning Dutch because there was this Dutch nurse in my writing course...]

John and Rae came over for dinner, which was pizza.

Saw Brian de Palma's Scarface remake at the Royal.  Brutal, dumb, slow and unpleasant.  It started out portraying wretched excess but ended up embodying it.  Howard Hawks' original version did infinitely more with less.