• Reread the first three books of Lloyd Alexander's Prydain chronicles. This was sort of an experience--I haven't read them since I was an early teenager, and I'd forgotten how uncomplicated they are. Lots of things are only a day's journey--maybe two--although this might extend as long as a few weeks if necessary for the plot. Character development is told as often as shown, although this gets a bit better by the third book. Still, they feel more like the outline of a book I'd read now than a whole book in and of themselves. I'm wondering if I'll feel the same way when I reread Susan Cooper's Dark is Rising sequence--long my favorite books in the wrold.
• The second and third Buffy Season 8 comic compilations. Not sure about the whole Buffy/Satsu thing. Sure, women have more flexible sexuality in general, but...somehow, in my head, just not Buffy. The Master and Xander, however, cracked me up like nobody's business.
• Peter Sagal's Book of Vice. review--three and a half stars
• Leonie Swann's Three Bags Full. review--four stars
• Robert Sawyer's Hominids. review--three stars
• Jo Walton's Farthing. review--five stars

The last one, granted, was at least five years long. And I hadn't done much serious fiction writing, even then. But I thought the process would be similar: a lot of starts and stops, waiting for the right words, constantly editing even though I know I shouldn't. But it's completely different.

I feel...like my thought processes, at least the ones not related to physics, are writerly. So even in terms of social thinking, I tend to "practice" conversations, which is an awful lot like writing a story with real people as characters. And the exercise of writing these little stories for my friends is less like laboring to come up with something that works, and more like becoming aware again that I can capture these fleeting bits of fancy my brain creates all the time. I'll be sitting somewhere, think, "Oh, that would make a nice bit of a story," and there's a beat before I remember that--oh yes! I CAN write it down! And because I'm trying to write now, in a way I haven't had time to for a while, that's more...directed than it was before.

It also feels pleasantly like cleaning out cobwebs from my mind.

For one thing, I don't really have many friends here yet (I've only been here a couple of months, after all) and so I'm not spending a lot of time hanging out with people. That sounds sort of depressing but it's fine--I have some friends, just not a plethora.

Mostly, though, I think it's the lack of busy work. Most semesters I had some kind of class that was way too easy, and it's...draining. I guess it's like pushing the gas pedal on your car when you're in neutral, or something--the engine revs, but you don't really go anywhere, so you get wear & tear for no purpose. But all my stuff is hard now! Wow! But not impossibly so--it's stuff I feel like I can do, just not stuff I know how to do the minute I look at it.

I haven't been writing much so I'm determined to start doing an hour a day (probably after finals--it strikes me as a horrible idea to stick to that kind of plan the week I need to start studying, when I'm still cold). It's been so long since I've really written a lot that the normal banked oven of skill is totally dead and everything on the back burners is gelatinous and kind of disgusting, so I should build up slowly--so I'm counting correspondence and blog posts, for the moment. (I seem to have a thing for inappropriate analogies at the moment.)

In good news, I just got a Levenger lap desk for my birthday (a little early since I was home). Yay for working on soft surfaces!

"Story," by Lydia Davis, is an odd piece. I think it's supposed to be metafictional--there's a point where the author says she wrote down a sentiment obviously expressed in the text--but it just doesn't work for me. The central assumption of making this metafictional is that we never think of our lives like a story...which might be true for people who aren't as heavily steeped in writing and reading as I am, but for me, sure, I'm aware that sometimes bits of my life look like a bad movie. Just one of those things. I didn't find it particularly new or innovative. Beyond that, I didn't care about the characters, I didn't find the situations particularly exciting, and the writing didn't thrill me.

Michael Wilkerson's "Can This Story Be Saved?" was my favorite piece of the day--really metafictional, I think, putting forward a group of people who have MFAs as well as degrees in social work who provide therapy for stories. I wasn't totally sure about the way it portrayed counselling the author the same way as the characters, as for me it sort of broke what the story was doing by muddying the metaphor, but anyway. The ending was brilliant, though: trying to bring the story into line with what is expected of a story, the therapists totally destroy it. Or save it--I'm a big fan of the final story, in a sort of absurd kind of way--but it definitely is not what the therapists were going for!

Ah. And then there's Stephen Dixon's "Milk Is Very Good For You." This story apparently is trying to make a point about our dirty words, how they're just social constructs and don't mean anything. I have a big problem with this stance on language in general--in my opinion, either you take the thing as it is, or you point out that *none* of it has meaning. Sure, dirty words are artificial, but no more so than language at its politest. So already I'm prejudiced against the story. Then, we start in on the subject matter--lots and lots of sex which is apparently supposed to be shocking. *yawn* A guy is at a party for swingers; goes home and has sex with the babysitter; his wife comes home and joins in; then the neighbors watch and ask to join; and then it all goes fubar at the end. But really, other than the sheer number of people, there's nothing particularly abhorrent about it. It's still very heteronormative (the wife and babysitter have sexual contact, but it's apparently for the benefit of Rich, the main character...Rich Richardson, quite a juvenile joke. Anyway. I do like that his "made-up" dirty words are close to the real ones, though I had to think about it a little to decide...the slight skewing highlights his point better than completely altering the words, though as I said I still don't *agree* with the point.

But, I think, what it comes down to for me is that I feel, reading this story, like half the impulse or more that started Dixon writing was to get a dirty story published as literature. And that annoys me for two reason: it's not terribly dirty, and even if it is porn, it's not very good porn. It's essentially a list of people sticking various body parts in various orifices, and it's just kind of painfully not interesting. I don't know when this story was published, which may account for some of this, but...God. If you want to do something like this...make it kinkier, so it makes an impact, or make it better, so people are disturbed by how much they like it. Don't try to dress up a mediocre and dull dirty story by flipping some letters around and calling it art.

I read "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" for my interpretation of literature class way back...uh...like two years ago. We discussed it so heavily then I'm not sure I have anything new here...but it is always fascinating to sit and try to decide if the ending is a dream or not. I like this story much more than I ought to, I think, given its general opinions of Those Teenagers, but it's such an odd little half-fantastic thing that I like it anyway. (I should note here that she writes a fair amount of spec fic.)

We were supposed to read "In the Penal Colony," by Franz Kafka, but I stopped a few pages in. I can't read descriptions of torture--even as far as I managed to get in this story made me nauseated. (I can't help but think what it would be like to be in that situation, and I have a very good imgination...)

The Ellison story was extremely cool. It's called "Battle Royal," and is, essentially, a story about race. The motivating quote comes from the protagonist's grandfather, who tells the protag that if he says what the white men want him to say, he can become a traitor in their midst. There's a lot of action in the story, though, focusing on a battle between blindfolded black boys done for the amusement of white businessmen, which I found...well, disturbing. (Interestingly, almost nobody in this story is labelled as black or white by the narrator; but it's extremely easy to tell from the context.) I'm a little curious about the end of the story, though, as the last paragraph is,

(It was a dream I was to remember and dream again for many years after. But at the time I had no insight into its meaning. First I had to attend college.)

...what? This sounds like there's a sequel or something, and I wonder if this is part of a set of short stories, but I really have no idea. And the rest of the story is tied up so neatly that I'm very curious.

I did enjoy the rats, though. :> And I appreciate the sort of circly repetition of themes. And the voice...the narrative voice was great. But I suppose I'm a fan of old-style storytelling, where everything happens for a reason and how you live your life affects how your life ends up, and this was just too capricious for me. Plus, although I understand that you can't really say how this will end given the ending of the protagonist, I wanted to know more about what would happen with the rats and the cavern, etc etc etc. This felt, I guess, like the start of a really good story. And the suspense was good. It just didn't pay off for me.

I've never been a big fan of Poe, either; I'm not really a horror person, and Poe's world is a lot darker than I generally like mine to be. I've read terribly dark pieces I enjoyed, but there's a difference between darkness in setting and darkness in a character--the first I'm all for, but crazy or despairing characters, at least for a whole piece, are very hard for me to deal with. So Poe, yeah.

I've read the Tell-Tale heart before, and it transpired much more quickly than I remembered. I can't help but think that with this kind of story, it's better to have a long buildup...the ticking coming in, then out, slowly rather than quickly driving him nuts. The early buildup is good, the slow way the protagonist gets into the old man's room, and I wish it had stayed so anticipatory throughout.

Then again, now I'm thinking about it a little more, maybe that isn't the best idea. Because part of what makes this story work, when it does, is that you don't know exactly what's going on. Is the heart still beating? Is that what the guy hears? Or is he hallucinating? I can accept maybe, maybe, the heart is still beating after a few minutes. But days later? Perhaps not.

My dad loves Dashiell Hammett, so I was expecting to enjoy the Hammett story ("Too Many Have Lived") a lot more than I did. The story was pretty much a straight-up mystery. There were a number of clues laid throughout the story, including a number of psychological tricks I thought were interesting, but the major things weren't revealed till the end--which I hate, hate, hate. Other than that, I thought the characterizations were pretty pedestrian and the events not terribly interesting. I think if I was a mystery fan I would have enjoyed it more--as an early example of mystery traditions, as a guilty pleasure--but as it is I feel neutral about the story.

The Sayers story, on the other hand...wow. A writer friend of mine just loves her mysteries, and I trust his opinion, so I was unsurprised at how much I liked this story. This particular story, "Absolutely Elsewhere," has everything I love when I enjoy mysteries: the clues were all there, but unobtrusive enough that at the end there were "Aha!" moments, and I didn't feel cheated by withheld information as I did in the Hammett story. (It's odd--I feel like I know more about mysteries than I've actually experienced, since my parents love them.) I don't know if this opinion is warranted, but I also felt like it was a snapshot of what kinds of lives the characters would live, while the Hammett story was more romanticized. The relationship between Wimsey and his butler was as hysterical as I remembered from the twenty pages of a novel I read a while back. And the pacing was, in my opinion, an example to all the other writers in this set of stories. I'd be curious to discuss this with mystery or horror readers, however--SF, horror, and mystery fans overlap enough that I *think* the sense of pacing should be the same in all three, but I don't know.

In fact, what I loved about this story was the amount of detail. There are many strange things occurring...infestations of crabs, for example (the sea-going kind). Only the angel (or, possibly, just a very old man with enormous wings) and a sideshow are ever highlighted as weird, and one is not more odd than the other, or so it seems. I'm also fascinated by the parallel of the oddities: a man with wings, a spider with a human face in the sideshow. Both displayed.

The Allende bit didn't thrill me. I have sort of a division in my head, based on the way metaphors are used in speculative fiction vs. mimetic fiction--short version, speculative fiction uses large metaphors, a story about first contact is about how humans interface with the other, while mimetic fiction uses smaller metaphors, aliens are people from another country. Trying to reverse that, to make a story with aliens representing another country apply to all others or to make the aliens of an SF story represent one specific nationality, tends to screw up the way the story's read. Not that one reading is necessarily more valid than another, but I suppose in terms of what makes the richest reading. The problem with the big overarching metaphors of spec fic is that you have to go for an overall feeling to the story, and that tends to be very individual. Marquez works for me--works very well, based upon this one example. Allende, according to this and another short story of hers I read a while back, never quite makes it for me. I can't specifically say why, and that's kind of frustrating for me--she's a fairly impersonal narrator, but I like that in some cases, i.e. Marquez; she seems to write about introverted or taciturn characters, but again, that's not always a problem for me. Somehow the emotional narrative of Allende's stories never quite clicks with my own experience, and I can't get invested in the punch at the end.

This is also the first time I've read "Harrison Bergeron." What an odd story... I loved the dialogue; it was close enough to life to sound like actual people speaking, but not so close that it failed to work in a prose setting. (That's another reason I dislike Hemingway, actually. A little too close to life.) And I enjoyed the arc of the story--right until Harrison appears and is described. He was so clownish, so cartoonish, so unreal that I was thrown out of the story and never got back in. There seemed to be a specific agenda Vonnegut was going for, about compliance and equality, which lost its immediacy for me the minute Harrison became such a larger-than-life figure. The story sort of retreated into pulp SF--not that that's necessarily bad, but I'm not really a pulp fan. On the other hand, though, I wonder if that's what Vonnegut was going for: rejecting the idea that this story was directly applicable to real life. And this goes back to my thoughts on metaphor as well.

Finally, "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas." One of my favorite short stories, though I find I'm starting to like it a little less--maybe overexposure or, more likely, more reading of Le Guin's later work, which I find too transparently ideological. Still, it's such a fascinating work; there are no characters, and the narrative speaks very directly to the reader. Don't really have much new to say on the story as a whole, except that every time I read this I appreciate Le Guin's use of language just a little bit more. This story is so compact, so perfectly worded in general, that I can go through now and say, "It might have sounded better if this adverb was moved before the verb," or something similar. It's precise enough to support that kind of poetic fine-tuning--and there are only a couple of places I think any changes need to be made. So nice to read.

I like pretty language--I don't think that's a secret. Concise can be excellent too, of course; take, for example, Lois McMaster Bujold's writing. But Hemingway takes it too far in the other direction. He wants you to think that he's doing something New and Important by writing in an extremely simple style, but really it's just choppy and gets him out of making any kind of coherent whole whatsoever. Or so it has always seemed to me.

"Indian Camp" was the first story. Kid goes with dad to Indian settlement. Dad is amazed by how he managed to do a C-section in such poor conditions. (Me: You just did a C-section. Without anaesthetic. And you're amazed at the technical aspects...? And the father's helper, also the kid's uncle, gets bitten by the woman as they start to cut. And again i say...) This is apparently supposed to be some sort of great story about leraning to be an adult and stuff, or maybe it's just about how much less women are worth than men, but anyway I found it extremely irritating.

Irritating, actually, is how I'd describe all of Hemingway's works that I have read so far. I've heard various people praise his dialogue up and down, but to me it seems very plain and lifeless. Dialogue should sound natural, true, but you're writing literature here bud--real life is frankly pretty boring; you can write that boringness, I don't care, but what's true to life does not always live on the page, and Hemingway's dialogue never does for me.

The next two stories concern the kid as he gets older, breaks up with his girlfriend, hangs out with his best friend in a drunken depression, and decides that even though he broke it off with this girlfriend (whom he was going to marry) rather suddenly, it's okay if he just goes back and tries to start it up again.

I'm sorry, these make me angry. I suppose that's a sign that he's at least somewhat effective--I would be apathetic if they weren't compelling in some way. And there are moments of really cool stuff--describing how one sets up fishing lines to work at night, frex. But overall, they just irritate me, because the good parts are totally going to waste in a mire of misogyny and faux elevation of fishing and alcohol.

Joyce was a lot better--more in a couple of hours, after class which is about to start.

The way I read this story is probably going to be different from my classmates. As a well-indoctrinated fantasy reader, I don't spend the story thinking she's crazy, but rather wondering if she's crazy or if there are things in the wallpaper. The recent anxiety problems also affect things: I completely sympathize when she says she thinks she'd feel better if she just had things to do. I'm the same way--it's boredom that scares me...

The last line of this story always gives me the creeps. (hehe.) In a good way.

I find this story very telling in its treatment of women's issues. Hm, not telling...emblematic? I mean, hysterectomy = getting rid of the uterus = getting rid of the source of women's hysteria. (Male physicians used to give their female patients orgasms to get rid of...what was it called, "nervous tension?") So this complete disregard of her mental state was common for the times, I'm sure, and it's interesting how Gilman clearly recognizes this (a depressive herself) without the outside viewpoint that we have now, i.e. depression is often organic and is a real and treatable condition. (Treatment does not, of course, consist of "it's all in your head, don't stress yourself.")

The wallpaper itself...for someone as nonvisual as I am, I think I've got a decent picture of what it looks like. We'll see later (apparently we get small groups today to draw it...)

"A Rose for Emily" is harder. I'm fascinated by the POV--an unnamed narrator telling us the story of Emily's life. I mean really, narrator, using I much of the time. "I" is certainly a resident of the town, but we don't know age or gender. The age seems old enough to remember many of the events, yet also young enough to be attending the funeral; also, the narrator does not identify with any particular age group ("The Colonel's generation;" "the grandchildren of the Colonel's generation").

I'm also confused by the ending. Necrophilia, what? And I understand that okay maybe she loved this guy, and wanted to keep him around, so she killed him to do so, but...ugh. And I also wondered what to do with the line, "He liked men," in reference to said deceased beau. ("He liked men...he said he was not the marrying kind.")

But the language was beautiful, and the story was a synopsis without the syndrome I mentioned before of getting through things without taking time so you feel like you're reading an outline. Or I didn't. There were vivid scenes among the time-sliding passages, which helped greatly, I think.

I've also read "Girl" before. The constant reference to the younger woman as a slut always cracks me up .... it's so mean, and yet so in character for a mother who might tease her daughter. Especially if she was nothing like a slut (as one reference to her as a tomboy seems to indicate). But I love the warm way the mother speaks the rest of the time, and the sense that she's being taught...it's close to the way I've always thought a lot of our life skills are learned, just by someone saying "Here's how you do this." And one imagines the addressee of the speech of "Girl" actually learned, by the fact that she's relating the story.

The voice here is a little interesting too--some interjections make me believe we're getting the girl's point of view, but the story is almost entirely the mother lecturing her daughter, one long unbroken sentence between interruptions.

"The Sky is Grey" was also fascinating. Running out of time so I'll just say--the odd scene in the dentist's office, with the educated young man and the preacher, was very odd in this story. It's kind of like the outside awareness in "The Yellow Wallpaper" of the discourse outside the story, the social tales that describe the class of the protagonists, and yet it felt grafted on in a way "The Yellow Wallpaper"'s awareness did not. Perhaps because it was a clearly recognized aspect of life and so the author felt obligated to address it, whereas Gilman's audience might have been unaware of the issue.

Also, started out thinking the protags were black; realized this was terribly racist of me and realized they were probably poor and white; then they got on the bus and had to sit in the colored section. Stereotyping vs good writing? Who knows.

One thing I've noticed, though, possibly because of that inexperience, is a proliferation of stories which read like outlines. Some of them are like this a bit, with spaces of description in between vivid scenes; others are nothing but related action. I suppose I can't really talk, because the short story I just sent off a couple of weeks ago is 3/4 the protag relating how this situation got about and only about 1/4 current action; but I hope the narration was at least engaging.

So, questions:

1. Is this because some writers try to fit novel-sized plots in short stories, rather than taking stories which are more innately suited to the short story form?

2. Is this because it's the mode of most people to start writing as a teller (not the comedian) and only gradually to move into a shower (not the bathroom fixture), and I've just found people who are part of the way there?

3. Is this because I suck as a reader of short stories?

4. How many licks does it take....er, sorry, different area of expertise required.

The teacher's asked us to keep a reading journal, and I thought I'd do it here, to educate the large number of people who .... are not reading this journal at all, really. But it's handy and I can write in it anywhere with the Net, so.

This story follows a weirdly misogynistic character named Gurov as he has a short-lived affair with a much younger woman, then finds himself in obsession and finally ends up seeing her again. Um, I have to say, this kind of our-lives-are-horrible-look-how-terrible-it-all-is thing just doesn't really do it for me. He hates his wife, he hates his life; he's been having affairs and finally he has one that doesn't end, and he gets .... dependent? .... on her. Not really what I care to read about.

There were elements of the story I really liked--frex, the fact that he sits back and thinks about how he's not really a catch himself, and while she's younger she's also not anything truly special, but somehow together they work. That was a good moment, I thought, and it seemed more true to me than this sad little man having an affair without apparent consideration for anybody else.

Also, the woman he was having an affair with was rather ineffectual. She reminded me of a lot of female protagonists from that era: just sits around reacting to things, calling herself dirty for having this affair but still doing it, acting as nothing but a focus for Gurov's desires.

According to this photocopy, this story (paired with the next) was an example of Plot, and that highlights the difference in reading plot-centered sf stories and plot-centered mimetic fiction. Sf plots are often either full of action or full of intrigue, but this story was a couple of bland characters stumbling on a not very interesting path. To me, anyway.

The second story, its pair, was Joyce Carol Oates' "The Lady with the Pet Dog." It's the same story, told from the woman's point of view, and a lot of it is the same sort of static feel: not much changes for these characters, and I'm not sure what we're supposed to feel as readers. I did find it fascinating that in this case only the woman is named, none of the other characters; and she is not named until her lover says it, a third of the way through the story. Anna changed by the end, but I wasn't sure how. This is a problem I've had with Oates before--I can tell she's going for some kind of emotional mood, but I just can't get there myself. Obviously it works for other people though. Hm.

The woman's husband was a real character here, more defined even than the lover, and I appreciated that. Oates' version actually deals a bit with how the two lives contrast, rather than treating one as the interesting point and the other as backstory to create conflict. I'm still not sure what was going on with the repeated "Did I hurt you?" after they'd had sex. Well, of course, it shows that the two of them don't work together well, shows how disconnected they are; I get the metaphor, I guess, but not the reality of it; does anyone actually say that? More to the point, would he worry about it every time?

It's hard for me to tell which of the two I liked better. I didn't like either of them very much, really. I "got" the Chekhov piece a little better, but his sentence-level stuff irritated me; Oates writes lovely prose, I just flow with her sentences, but I can never make a whole out of them. I'm guessing this is because the stories are plot-driven. I've been told I'm excellent at writing characters but it's a blind spot for me--I can't tell that I'm doing it, I don't notice it in others--but I guess, after reading this piece, that this is because it's something so basic to me that I don't even recognize I'm doing it. (Rather like teaching a friend to play euchre last night--we totally forgot to mention that we were playing with partners! Whoops.) So stories like these two, which put the sequence of events first and create characters to follow it, to change because of it, don't really work for me.

But of course this means I loved the other two stories that much more: they were both about character.

The first was Willa Cather's "Paul's Case." It's about a working-class Pittsburgh boy who feels like he really belongs among the elite--beyond what most people dream. He doesn't feel alive unless he's surrounded by the rich or the artistic. He ushers at Carnegie Hall and hangs out with a local theatre group. He acts the part of one who considers himself above those around him--believing it on a certain level, and on another level not even believing he is there himself. He's consumed by his need to be somewhere else, somewhere where he can be surrounded by color and music all the time. Even on his working-class street, the only thing that gives him any pleasure is his neighbors' stories of the iron magnates they work for. When he at last gets away (by stealing money from his job and living for eight days as one of the rich in New York City), he files away every moment, every experience--and when it's going to come to an end, he kills himself by jumping in front of a train.

What makes this story especially poignant is the fact that his home life is not that bad. It's working-class, sure, or maybe a little higher, but his family truly cares about him; the people who do not like him feel that way because he's deliberately alienated them. It is his own mindset that makes the world so oppressive--he can't deal with anything except exactly what he wants.

Also, most stories would end with his jump. This one's notable, first because he decides not to shoot himself and we think he's been saved; second because it actually follows him as he dies, describes what he might be feeling at impact.

I also wonder what it means that he goes back towards Pennsylvania to kill himself.

The final story is "Among the Mourners," by Ellen Gilchrist. It's about a thirteen-year-old girl whose father is head of the English department at an Arkansas university; one of the poets whom her father knew kills himself, and they have the wake and funeral at her house. Normally I prefer some sort of character change, but this is just a vignette following a precocious girl as she deals with Weirdness. Coming from an academic setting, I could sympathize with a lot of what was going on in the story. She's dating a boy--at first it's good that he's short (so she doesn't have to cheer for him at football games), later, after they've broken up, this is a detriment--but seems to adore his mother even more than him. They share a brief awkward groping session, and split up afterwards--Aurora remains unsure why.

The best thing about this story, for me, was the voice--very distinctive, very no-nonsense. I'm not sure it felt entirely 13-year-old-girlish to me, but I enjoyed it. She uses "to tell the truth" a lot, just often enough that it sounds like a real quirk of speech and not like a handle for the author to pound home I Am Writing In Somebody Else's Voice. At one point, as her boyfriend requests that she spend the night in the guest room at his house so she can sleep (the mourners in the house have been impeding that), Aurora says, "I'm an insomniac anyway...but that's okay, I can take it another night." Later, after her parents decide to let Aurora's sister repeat first grade rather than forcing her to take summer school, Aurora comments, "This is very advanced behavior for academics and everyone was congratulating them on it when they were getting in their cars and leaving." Hysterical.

So all in all I enjoyed the Gilchrist story but I think "Paul's Case" was better--and the one I'd be most likely to reread. But I enjoyed both of these fields more than I did the two Lady&Dog stories.

Two hours after coming downstairs, I finally check my email. I'm still trying to get up the courage to look at the actual review.

Well, I get this nervous about everything, I guess. I need to know but I'm just so worried that it'll be bad...

To quote: His remarks were echoed by Jim Kozak, editor-in-chief of In Focus, the magazine of the National Association of Theater Owners. "When [patrons] get there early to get a really good seat, they like to have something to keep them busy, something to do besides talk to the person they came with."

I'm trying to decide what's worst about this statement: that he thinks people like the fact that movies start 15 minutes or more after they're supposed to; that he thinks people don't like to talk at the movies; or that he might actually be right...