Suffer The Child

It goes downhill from there. I spent much of Hour Two wondering if Hester and Arthur were ever going to do the wild thing and thereby allow the movie to earn the title. The Indian uprising! The black slave! The witch trials! The too-red bird! This isn't a tale of lust and guilt and torment; this is a tale of self-actualization.

Not enough sex to be a camp classic, but perhaps if they'd had more scenes of Gary Oldman swimming naked. (Well, perhaps if they'd had more of those, I would have enjoyed this movie more.)

The accents are making me crazy -- whoever the accent coordinator was should never, ever work again. Of course, the liberal use of "thee" and "thou" in the same sentence with "you" is also enough to drive one mad.

Yesterday Darin and I had a long chat. Later on Darin was talking to his father and Steve wanted to say the same things to me. Darin thinks this means they think alike; I think he's his father's son. (Which is kind of convenient, frankly.)

Darin said to me he thinks I am childish when it comes to how I deal with criticism. Childish because I confuse criticism of an idea with criticism of all my ideas, with my ability to generate an idea, with my ability as a writer.

We tried to talk some about my ideas, try to generate new angles, work out of problems. I'm not very playful when it comes to exploring my ideas. I don't know why. Why I think my ideas have to emerge fully formed instead of, as Len puts it, playing with my shit in public. I have learned that you have to come up with bad ideas to get to good ideas. But the process is like pulling teeth.

I need a new mindset. Of course, that canard about old dogs and new tricks keeps running through my mind.

Darin is reading Terry Prachett books. All of them. Periodically I hear a giggle, a guffaw, perhaps a rippling peal of laughter. I'm trying to ignore him.

His only comments about The Scarlet Letter have been, "Who came up with this?" and "This is interfering with my reading."

Nicole Kidman is on the cover of the new Vanity Fair. I feel a special affinity with Nicole Kidman for a very bizarre reason and no, it's not the Scientology stuff.

A few years ago, my friend Allison told me to go see the movie Dead Calm.

"Why?" I asked.

"You'll know," she said.

When I saw it, I went, Oh boy.

Nicole Kidman happens to look a great deal like me. True, she's 4 or 5 inches taller than I am and probably 20 pounds thinner, which means, frankly, that she's prettier. But there's a definite resemblance that several people have mentioned. If you pick up the current Vanity Fair, the picture on page 317 (if you can even heft up the magazine -- it's almost 400 pages) looks like me, complete with the lack of smile.

(My sister, by the way, looks like Gillian Anderson. We're a very Irish looking clan.)

Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

Still haven't destroyed any nail but the one on the middle finger of my right hand.

Woke up too late to go running, probably because I went to bed too late.