This is one of those very few cases in which the movie is better than the book. I rather enjoyed it.

It was okay, but nowhere near as good as A Mighty Wind or Best in Show.

In the Miso Soup is…interesting. It’s not bad, but it’s not too good either. There’s one very vivid, gory scene of violence, but besides that I was bored with most of it. It does have some really interesting commentary on the differences between Japanese and American minds, but those parts have very little to do with the plot. Frankly, I really don’t understand why In the Miso Soup is so popular. If you want to read contemporary Japanese novels, try Haruki Murakami – he’s much better.

I’m afraid to say it, but I think Talladega Nights might be even better than Anchorman. It was sooooooooo funny. And it wasn’t only the movie. Three people were sitting behind Michael and me, and one of them made stupid-but-funny comments throughout. For instance: At some point, Ricky Bobby says something about Highlander getting an Oscar for being the best movie ever. The woman behind us replied, “It was Citizen Kane, I’ll have you know!” And she kept that up through the whole movie. I was more amused than annoyed, and I didn’t even see Michael turn around and give her a dirty look.

This book is reminding me more and more of my very favorite book, Einstein’s Dreams, by Alan Lightman.

The city of Sophronia is made up of two half-cities. In one there is the great roller coaster with its steep humps, the carousel with its chain spokes, the Ferris wheel of spinning cages, the death-ride with crouching motorcyclists, the big top with the clump of trapezes hanging in the middle. The other half-city is of stone and marble and cement, with the bank, the factories, the palaces, the slaughterhouse, the school, and all the rest. One of the half-cities is permanent, the other is temporary, and when the period of its sojurn is over, they uproot it, dismantle it, and take it off, transplanting it to the vacant lots of another half-city.

And so every year the day comes when the workmen remove the marble pediments, lower the stone walls, the cement pylons, take down the Ministry, the monument, the docks, the petroleum refinery, the hospital, load them on trailers, to follow from stand to stand their annual itinerary. Here remains the half-Sophronia of the shooting-galleries and the carousels, the shout suspended from the cart of the headlong roller coaster, and it begins to count the months, the days it must wait before the caraven returns and a complete life can begin again. (63)

Something else:

“Memory’s images, once they are fixed in words, are erased,” Polo said. “Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it. Or perhaps, speaking of other cities, I have already lost it, little by little.” (87)

Just one more, I promise.

I thought: “You reach a moment in life when, among the people you have known, the dead outnumber the living. And the mind refuses to accept more faces, more expressions: on every new face you encounter, it prints the old forms, for each one it finds the most suitable mask.” (95)

A really nice passage:

The traveler’s past changes according to the route he has followed: not the immediate past, that is, to which each day that goes by adds a day, but the more remote past. Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.

Marco enters a city; he sees someone in a square living a life or an instant that could be his; he could now be in that man’s place, if he had stopped in time, long ago; or if, long ago, at a crossroads, instead of taking one road he had taken the opposite one, and after long wandering he had come to be in the place of that man in that square. By now, from that real or hypothetical past of his, he is excluded; he cannot stop; he must go on to another city, where another of his pasts awaits him, or something perhaps that had been a possible future of his and is now someone else’s present. Futures not achieved are only banches of the past: dead branches.

“Journeys to relive your past?” was the Khan’s question at this point, a question which could also have been formulated: Journeys to recover your future?”

And Marco’s answer was: “Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveler recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have.” (28-29)

This is quickly becoming my favorite novel EVER. Here’s a passage:

“There’s no time to tautologies. That’s the difference between tautologies and dreams. Tautologies are instantaneous, everything is revealed at once. Eternity can actually be experienced. Once you set up a closed circuit, you just keep spinnin’ ‘round and ‘round in there. That’s the nature of tautologies. No interruptions like with dreams. It’s like the encyclopedia wand.”

“The encyclopedia wand?” I was evolving into an echo.
bq. “The encyclopedia wand’s a theoretical puzzle, like Zeno’s paradox. The idea is t’engrave the entire encyclopedia onto a single toothpick. Know how you do it?”

“You tell me.”

“You take your information, your encyclopedia text, and you transpose it into numerics. You assign everything a two-digit number, periods and commas included. 00 is a blank, A is 01, B is 02, and so on. Then after you’ve lined them all up, you put a decimal point before the whole lot. So now you’ve got a very long sub-decimal fraction. 0.173000631…Next, you engrave a mark at exactly that point along the toothpick. If 0.50000’s your exact middle on the toothpick, then 0.333’s got t’be a third of the way from the tip. You follow?”

“Sure.”

“That’s how you can fit data of any length in a single point on a toothpick. Only theoretically, of course. No existin’ technology can actually engrave so fine a point. But this should give you a perspective on what tautologies are like. Say time’s the length of your toothpick. The amount of information you can pack into it doesn’t have anything t’do with the length. Make the fraction as long as you want. It’ll be finite, but pretty near eternal. Though if you make it a repeatin’ decimal, why, then it is eternal. You understand what that means? The problem’s with the software, no relation to the hardware. It could be a toothpick or a two-hundred-meter timber or the equator – doesn’t matter. Your body dies, your consciousness passes away, but your thought is caught in the one tautological point an instant before, subdividin’ for an eternity. Think about the koan: An arrow is stopped in flight. Well, the death of the body is the flight of the arrow. It’s makin’ a straight line for the brain. No dodgin’ it, not for anyone. People have t’die, the body has t’fall. Time is hurlin’ that arrow forward. And yet, like I was sayin’, thought goes on subdividin’ that time for ever and ever. The paradox becomes real. The arrow never hits.”

“In other words,” I said, “immortality.”

“There you are. Humans are immortal in their thought. Though strictly speakin’, not immortal, but endlessly, asymptotically close to immortal. That’s eternal life.” (284-285)

Very, very interesting idea.

I absolutely loved Porco Rosso. I didn’t think I would – it seems so un-Miyazaki, and I’m a huge Miyazaki fan. I mean, it’s about a pig who’s a sea pilot, and there’s a lot of fighting. I generally don’t like fighting. But once I turned it on I simply couldn’t stop watching. It’s absolutely intriguing. I think it might be the perfect movie to introduce anime to people who think they hate all things anime. It seems so…real. I’m gonna find a way to convince my fiance to watch it (he says he hates everything animated), and I’ll report back. ;)

Castle in the Air definitely wasn’t as good as Howl’s Moving Castle, but it was still quite an entertaining read. It’s only loosely a sequel – the characters from Howl’s Moving Castle basically stay on the periphery. You only get a brief idea of what happens to Sophie and Howl after the events of the first novel.

Castle in the Air does, though, provide some insight into how and why Miyazaki veered so far from the story line of Howl. Wondering where Miyazaki got the war from? Here, though it’s not all too important.

I liked it well enough.

I absolutely lovedHowl’s Moving Castle. It’s very well-written, and the fantastical world feels completely natural and believable. I’d been putting off watching the movie (I’m a huge fan of Miyazaki) until I’d read the book, but now I don’t know if I want to see the movie at all – there’s no way it can be as good as the book no matter who made the movie. I’ve definitely become a fan of Diana Wynne Jones, and I’ll be reading more of her work very shortly.