Grooming

Today on the subway I started reading Crime and Punishment. My mother bought me the Norton Anthology of Short Fiction for my birthday (only because I asked for it), and I haven't read a lot of the stories, especially stuff like "The Lottery," by Shirley Jackson, and "Heart of Darkness." According to Owen, I haven't read the classics. Over the summer I worked for an English professor, and I realized that I'm very good at faking my way through conversations about music and literature. I'd never thought I was faking it, before.

Over the weekend I saw The Darjeeling Limited, which like all Wes Anderson movies produces this weird, only momentarily satisfying sense of fullness. The way he has people handle objects in his movies is the kind of cinematic trick that totally does it for me every time. It's like, Natalie Portman brushes her teeth! And it looks great. And obviously this must be the universally appealing thing about his movies, and why white people of a certain leaning like them so much. I also think this is something about Cigarettes and Movies, and really I'm just talking about smoking in movies and how much I am persuaded by it. I'm so impressionable.