Library videos

(I wrote this post three days ago, but posted it on the wrong blog!)

"What do you want, scorpion?"--Twentieth Century

"Where are you going?" "Where Whitey isn't allowed!"--In the Heat of the Night

I've finished Doctor Zhivago and started on two books.  One is Bill Bryson's The Mother Tongue, for the History Discussion Group. (I should finish it pretty quick.) The other is Robert Graves' I, Claudius sequel Claudius, the God, which I borrowed from the North York Centre library Thursday.  I could have got it at the closer Deer Park library, but I went here because I wanted to find "He," a Katherine Anne Porter story of mother love which I was thinking of reading at tomorrow's Reading Out Loud.  But it turned out to be a bit too long for that.

While I was at North York Centre I also borrowed some DVDs for us to look at.  One was the silent movie Broken Blossoms, but I'm not sure I can bear to see it again, it's so sad!

Another was Howard Hawks' Twentieth Century, from a play by Ben Hecht and Charles McArthur, which we saw last night, me for the second time. (Moira got too sleepy to watch it to the end.) It's a classic screwball comedy with obsessive theatre man John Barrymore scheming to get his star Carole Lombard to resume working with him.

The third, which we saw tonight (me for the second time), was Norman Jewison's Oscar winning civil rights-themed mystery In the Heat of the Night.  Rod Steiger was something else!

Friday afternoon I saw From Scotland With Love at the Bloor. (I also bought one of their stainless steel bottles!) It's a feature made from documentary footage of Scotland in the 20th century, from as long as over a century ago.  They had curling, but no golf.

The other night I dreamed of visiting Prince Edward Island, which I've dreamed of before, but this time it was the late fall!  Now the idea of travelling at that time of year has a strange attraction for me...