How could my cheeks be full,

my head held high, my heart not wrecked, my body not broken? 

… 

My friend Enkidu, whom I loved, has turned to clay. Am I not like him?

— Gilgamesh

Well, we could do a fart comedy.

But it’s also okay to make a fart drama.

– Daniel Scheinert

It prevents the spectators from forgetting unreality,

which is the necessary condition for art.

– Jorge Luis Borges, The Secret Miracle

Places we’re afraid to enter

because we’re afraid we won’t know how to leave. 

A chubby little salami.

Riders of Justice – 4/5

An action movie about coping mechanisms, homina homina. Genuinely touching and genuinely hilarious, moving easily between them. It's very good; I've no more to say.

I'm a little bit lonely these days.

Rushmore – 3.5/5

I never really thought much of it and, 20 years later, I'm on the other side of the fence. Ain't that the way it always be. I might have then complained of its artifice; in retrospect—and by comparison—it's one of the least artificial of Wes Anderson's career. There's an awkwardness, an unsteadiness, a genuine dweebishness that runs through it. It's not as perfect as he would one day become. Maybe that's the throughline of his career: people who fuck up because they're trying to be perfect. The flaws make us forgivable. There's also a willingness here for everything to not feel the same throughout. Max Fischer stands out because he doesn't know how not to. And Olivia Williams is just wonderful, isn't she? 

There are countless men

in the air, on land and at sea,

and all that really happens, happens to me. 

- Jorge Luis Borges, The Garden of  Forking Paths

By the pricking of my thumbs.

The Tragedy of Macbeth – 2.5/5

Well don't I need to take a college credit course on reading Shakespeare. Thank god for subtitles; blessed be the pause button. I think with this movie I finally start to understand Denzel as an actor; he's unpredictable; perhaps sane, bordering on not. He carries crazy well. He takes it with him off-screen. He's somewhere else, in a one-man play, and indeed I think he could have pulled it all off on his own; he need no other. Mostly. Kathryn Hunter's the only one who rises up to meet him. Everyone else is starring in some other, lesser movie, and they drag it down around them.

We will be told

which burning Asians to take seriously. Slowly. Later.

— Trip Without A Ticket, The Digger Papers

Finding that just-right patch of ground, you might even say,

is half the trick to growing old.

It's Your Friends Who Break Your Heart, by Jennifer Senior

I want to be just like a melody.

After Yang – 3.5/5

The soul is a shelf, and the illusion is that we are filled by the things we choose to keep—or discard. But, mostly, it's the things we have no choice in. The things that stay that we want to discard, and the things that wave goodbye as we cling for them to stay. Whole memories—minutes, hours, days-long—become little fleeting visuals; no longer stories, barely moments, not worth repeating, hazy as they are. I think there are times the movie approaches self-parody; brief recordings of light reflected on walls, children's laughter, women's smiles, wind blowing; the flashback montage of every dead girlfriend who died before the movie starts. It's so gentle as to feel inhuman. In a movie about life's preciousness, it feels overly deliberate. You can't paint a full portrait with snippets. So, like memory then.

The search is what anyone would undertake

if he were not sunk in the everyday-ness of his own life. To become aware of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.

– The Moviegoer, by Walker Percy

Round and round the shutter'd Square

I strolled with the Devil's arm in mine.
No sound but the scrape of his hoofs was there
And the ring of his laughter and mine.

– Enoch Soames, by Max Beerbohm

mot juste

The exact, appropriate word.

A child is born into a world of phenomena all equal in their power to enslave.

It sniffs — it sucks — it strokes its eyes over the whole uncountable range. Suddenly one strikes. Why? Moments snap together like magnets, forging a chain of shackles. Why? I can trace them. I can even, with time, pull them apart again. But why at the start they were ever magnetized at all — just those particular moments of experience and no others — I don't know. 

— Equus

This is love.

It is a mass of ice
melting, I can't hold
it and I have nowhere
to put it down. 

– Molly Brodak, by Molly Brodak