THE PETRIFIED FOREST

"Why in heaven's name don't you die and do the world some good?"--The Petrified Forest

At today's memoir slam the two subjects were hoarding, and talking to yourself.  My pen gave out as I started to write and I had to borrow someone else's.  On the subject of hoarding I talked about my comics collection and our used books.  On talking to yourself, I mentioned how Mother used to sing to herself, which someone bugged me, and how I found the craziness that makes you talk to yourself less scary than the patriotic craziness that makes people say about the Bradley Manning case, "The American government didn't do one thing wrong!" (Someone actually said that in a Huffington Post forum.)

While waiting for the group to start, I've got into the habit of reading one of Miroslav Sasek's series of This Is... children's travel books. (Lilian Smith library has a whole lot of them.) In previous weeks I read This Is London and This Is Edinburgh; this week I read This Is Greece.  I only have time to read part of each book before things begin, and read the rest afterward.

This evening I went to the Classic Movie Meetup at the Central, where we watched the stagy 1935 movie of the Robert Sherwood play The Petrified Forest.  I find Sherwood's plays rather dated (this and Abe Lincoln in Illinois and Waterloo Bridge).