29 October 2002 - 1:29 p.m.

I think it took me a span of no less than 13 hours to watch all of Roman Polanski's MacBeth. Apart from the fact that I had to sleep and talk to my mom on the phone, it was a longass movie. Like 12.5 hours.

Clearly I'm kidding. But it was long.

I can't handle violent Shakespeare movies. And it's not because I'm bothered by all those public hangings and knives in throats and heads on pikes and bloody ghosts floating in and out. I almost cheered when MacBeth's severed head thumped to the ground, evil, conniving, hubristic fucker that he was. But I was alone at the time, and you can't really cheer for stuff when you're by yourself.

What bothers me is that directors tend to film violent scenes that aren't shown onstage. This makes sense from a film perspective; why show, say, the hired assasins claiming to have killed Banquo when you can include a thrillingly explicit scene of that very ambush?

Well, I'll tell you why not: they confuse me! I mean, everything will be progressing just as I expect, then all of a sudden someone's getting stabbed in the woods, and I'm like, what the fuck? What act is this? This is not what happens now!

I guess this is a pointless entry, because I have just summed up the whole tragedy of making books into movies, which, to tell the truth, has never bothered me a whole lot. I guess that's because I've never had a neurotic attachment to any book before my glorious green-bound Norton Shakespeare, whose pages are locked like photographs in my memory.

I was not trying to be poetic there. I was telling the truth.

On a completely unrelated note, I'm sorry to have to report that my dad did not dress up as George Clooney in Oh Brother, Where art Thou?, but rather, Bill Murray from Caddyshack, as he hates groundhogs with a fiery passion, and has better golf clothes than fugitive-from-a-chain-gang clothes. Oh, well.

What I'm wearing:

What I'm reading:

What I'm doing after this: