It's like some broken fascination—I can't make it go away

I have not seen many films by Ang Lee. Based on Lust, Caution (2007), which I saw this afternoon with Naya, perhaps I should. This one was tremendous. It is an old-fashioned movie, in many respects: I think its closest cinematic cousins are Hitchcock's Notorious (1946) and Vertigo (1958), which the film acknowledges with occasional clips of Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman, a poster for Suspicion (1941) in a movie theater's lobby; an onscreen murder is as ugly and inefficient as anything in Torn Curtain (1966). It also contains the kind of sex scenes that most people only write, by which I mean that the characters make love like actual people, not like carefully cropped sculptures, and integrally to themselves. And to the story, which is the farthest from gratuitous as possible—without their detail and physicality, the audience would have only the characters' words to rely on: and this is the kind of movie where dialogue is almost always deception. I might not watch it again anytime soon. But I would certainly wait for whatever comes next.

It is cold and raw outside, like real October; the wind is full of wet leaves. I have nuked the sheep.* Having finished Phyllis Gotlieb's Birthstones, Emma Bull's Territory, and ellen_kushner's The Privilege of the Sword, I am reading Andre Norton's Witch World for the first time since high school. (I meant to post about Nabokov's Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle, which I picked up and finished last week, but now is not the coherent enough moment.) If only I don't have to get up early . . .

*The amazing herbal hot-pack from my brother and his girlfriend, which is heated in the microwave. The name is inherited ultimately from a hot water bottle I had as a small child, which came in a sheep-shaped cover, complete with fleece and ears and a woolly tail; it has since become the default term for anything that can be used as a bed-warmer, no matter that the current object resembles a sheep only in the sense that it contains some vegetation. I love family dialect.