"animals laugh at me"

finally, an article on dogville, the latest and most controversial lars van trier movie. this is the one that was called anti-american and for a while couldn't get a distributor. i think it sounds fascinating.

it will be released this winter, i've heard. maybe they'll release it on the same day as the passion of mel gibson, and then all the righties in this country can go into their theaters and the lefties can go into ours. yay!

while browsing the internet, i came across this several-days-old-but-still-active discussion thread on book people vs. movie people. it's written by a fella who uses too many semi-colons, tends to ramble, and who raised my eyebrows by suggesting that the vast majority of novels should just be 50 pages long.
he raises several interesting points about the literary world, which he indicts as being an extention of the academic one. in essence, he says that book people don't have a sense of humor (about books or about themselves) while movie people necessarily do. moreover, movie people, unlike stodgy book people, glory in mixing art and trash and enjoying both.

it does remind me of my very first fiction teacher who drew a vertical line down the middle of the blackboard to segregate "FICTION" from "LITERATURE." when we called out an author, she wrote that author's name down either on one side of the line or the other. as i recall, there was no cross-over and there was no hazy in-betweenness.
that was my first introduction to that kind of thinking and it troubled me.
she did, however, say that it's perfectly okay to love both fiction and literature; it's just important to recognize the difference between the two.

mr. 2blowhards doesn't think so. i once had a long argument where i argued the side of my fiction teacher. really, though, it doesn't bother me overmuch. if i hadtohadto choose, i'd say i'm a movie person by his definition at least since i want to work in movies and not publishing. but i loved books first, including/especially fiction-not-literature: tom robbins, marjorie morningstar, gwtw, rebecca, douglas adams ... and earlier, Choose Your Own Adventures, encyclopedia brown, the babysitters club. i look back on that reading with fondness. in fact, hell!, i just reread a douglas adams book, and that was after i reread two of the harry potterz. man, slumming it.