I gave up on reading my used copy of the Gabler Ulysses not because I don’t want to read the book or have any strong opinion on the scandals swirling around the various editions, but because the entire first third of my Gabler is covered in distracting (though lovely) marginalia. So I picked up a pristine Modern Library edition and I’m ploughing through it more easily, though I do miss the notes from time to time.

There are certain books or movies — for example, the recent noirs Match Point and Brick — that reward your expectations of genre and which might frustrate you if you choose not to read them using that model; Room is exactly this in reverse. It reminded me in this way of Adolfo Bioy Casares’s novel The Adventures of a Photographer in La Plata. Both have the appearance of a Hitchcockian thriller but end with you wondering if both you and the protagonist have misread all of the clues.

Of course, I saw this at the Alamo Drafthouse, an Austin theater with waiter service, and it’s possible that I simply missed some crucial detail while I was signing the check for my meal.

In this very readable and relatively straightforward Barthelme novel, a 53-year old divorcee shares a New York apartment with three lingerie models half his age, living in “hog heaven,” as the models call it. The back cover blurb tells us that it’s a gentle satire of the mid-life crisis, which it is, but I’m inclined more to read it as a gentle parody of the beer commercial.

My girlfriend and I wondered after the movie if we would have liked it more if we had approached it from the outset as a film noir.

I just reread this, and I’m glad I did. The story (stories) of the three storytelling machines is a particular favorite.

Okay, I finally read the book. The writing is clumsy — I think Dick’s ability is often outstripped by his ideas — but it’s still a captivating and sometimes funny read. It’s cute how the holy trinity of Mercer is manifested in Jesus Christ, Camus’s Sisyphus, and Alfred Jarry.

Keep the coffee warm!

This must be the sort of movie that people mean when they talk about gritty, cynical Vietnam War-era cinema. “Popeye” Doyle is obviously not meant to be a sympathetic character, and I nearly turned the movie off because my threshold for watching asshole cops isn’t too high, but the chase scene really is as good as they say.

This movie rings true for me. I’m surprised to see a movie get this sort of thing right.

There’s much to like about this movie, but the structure of the story left something to be desired — all of its major questions are answered halfway through the movie, making the second half merely perfunctory. And the script is regrettably heavyhanded, not trusting enough of its audience to allow us to draw our own lessons from the story.