Daily Blague

It's another mostly-grey day, unseasonably cool. I have two flats of impatiens that must be potted this afternoon, or I shall stop talking to myself. One of the "Stella de Oro" (daylily) buds is fit to bloom, which reminds me to toss some Miracle-Gro into the watering can.

Ms NOLA takes off this evening for Paris. Much as I'd like to be in Paris myself, I don't envy her the trip. Too many things are up in the air at the moment for me to be traveling. Actually, it's more like one big thing. There's not a thing I can do about it, so I put one foot in front of the other and do my job. Doing my job means updating the Affinities List on what's called the Individual Entry Archive template. That's the armature for permalinks and such. It had never occurred to me that this needed to be done, this updating, and I thank Ms NOLA for taking the time to nudge me about it this morning.

This morning, I was "doing my job" by watching Dirty Pretty Things, Stephen Frears's 2002 film, starring Chiwetel Ejiofor and Audrey Tautou, with Sophie Okonedo, Sergi López, and Benedict Wong in important supporting roles. The movie had seemed to be coming up in all sorts of contexts and I found myself confusing it with another picture that I've never seen, Pretty in Pink. I found DPT quite harrowing. There was the static uncertainty of eking out an existence as an illegal alien, and then, on top of that, the horrors of clandestine organ sales. The contrast between the pristine hotel rooms and the gruesome goings-on reminded me of another movie, but I can't place it, and maybe I'm making it up. The film has a great score, by Nathan Larson.

Has anybody else made it all the way through "Up, Simba," a lengthy essay about going along on the Straight Talk Express during John McCain's 2000 bid for the Republication nomination, reprinted in David Foster Wallace's Consider the Lobster. It struck me the other day that I hadn't finished this book. I certainly hadn't wanted to read about the McCain campaign. But I'm glad that I did, because the piece is astute about campaigning in general - Mr Wallace learned that the best interpreters are the "techs" (cameramen and so forth) - and about John McCain's appeal in particular - the man is so straightforward that the sheer delight of listening to an honest candidate makes us forget Mr McCain's often troglodytic opinions.