Like two filmless filmstars

I see that there is now a film of the musical of Fellini's 8 ½ (1963). I do not understand how this happens. I mean, I was nonplussed enough by The Producers in 2005—having thought the stage version was fantastic; I was lucky enough to get tickets before it won all its Tonys and sold out for several years—and I think it is no insult to Mel Brooks to agree that his original movie is not one of the acknowledged masterworks of the screen in any language: 8 ½ is so purely and deliberately cinematic, I can't see the point of fitting a stage adaptation back into 35 mm just because you can. This version has Sophia Loren. I approve of that. But otherwise I don't know what I'm going to get from the inside of Rob Marshall's head that I couldn't from Fellini's unreliable, free-falling, dream-slipped, embarrassing, transcendent beautiful confusion. Onstage, whatever. Theater is reperformance; it should never be the same twice. But onscreen is time immortalized in light, and the ghost of Guido Anselmi, clown and magus, is hiding under the table, laughing at you.

What spires, what farms are those?

From the Department of What the Hell, Brain, We're Making Fruitcake: Horace's labuntur anni (Odes 2.14) should be translated as "the years give us the slip." I have no idea where this precipitated from. I'm up to my wrists in flour and dried cherries. I was reading J.L. Carr's A Month in the Country (1980) before bed last night, but that only made me think of Housman.