Repetitive things usually annoy me: repetitive motions like finger-tapping, repetitive sounds, even spoken choruses in songs when the rhythm of speech fights the beat. (That’s not repetitive, exactly, I guess, but it bothers me in the same way.) One of the things I thought was most charming about WALL-E, though, was the way the animators lingered on the little repetitive motions their characters made — how the characters were given time to be entranced with the movements of their stubby hands or with the lighting of an old Zippo. It’s sort of babylike, sort of animal, that kind of fascination; I’ve seen my cat do the same thing.

Before the movie — which we saw at the Alamo Drafthouse in south Austin — we sat through a number of Pixar shorts, all of which I profoundly disliked. T. kept looking over at me and laughing because I looked miserable. This was mostly because I really hate slapstick, whether cartoon or live-action. I was the sort of kid who watched the first Home Alone movie through my fingers not because I was scared for tiny Macaulay Culkin but because I felt awful for the crooks he was knocking around. But also I think I disliked the shorts because they don’t have those graceful little moments of discovery. They’re designed for visual gags and broad, predictable humor. And transparent cuteness. WALL-E included some visual gags and predictable humor and transparent cuteness, too, but that wasn’t the whole joke. It wasn’t a joke. It was a good movie.

There’s a particular pleasure in reading an articulately written and deeply negative review of something you also despise.

For example, Momus reviews Pan’s Labyrinth:

I thought it was a terrible film, deeply impoverished both in imagination and in its moral vision, stale to the core, and brutal to boot. It actually saddens and infuriates me that this kind of thing is what passes for fantasy, humanity and imagination, and that no single critic, apparently, took the film to task for its great failings, which I’ll number here, as I see them …

YES. Gah.

Via boingboing, an odd, beautiful series of photographs of derelict Soviet bus stops.

I’m thinking about stealing this one for the novel I’m revising.

Friday I looked at a fourteenth-century manuscript of the Divine Comedy, with marginal notes in Latin. Tiny, spidery, beautiful pale blocks of notes, accompanied by sketched “manicules” — also known as digits, hands, fists, or indices, apparently — pointing out important passages in the main text. At least two different annotators had worked on the text; I’m sure there were more, but I could see two definite unique scripts (and drawing styles). Some of the manicules had sweet petal-like sleeves. Some had wrists like pretzels.

For another class, I pulled several copies of Friedrich Rehberg’s Drawings faithfully copied from Nature, at Naples (1794) — Piroli’s engravings of Rehberg’s drawings of Emma Hamilton’s Attitudes, that is. They’re more striking than they were in the modern reprint I first saw, and I still can’t understand why so many modern critics call them “failed” drawings. (More on that whenever I get my paper on visual representations of Emma worked up as an article.) Two of the copies are printed entirely on bright orange paper, which is odd.

I looked at The Waste Land, ostensibly to study its notes & glosses — but, being a stereotypical literature geek, I’ve been obsessed with that poem since my freshman year of high school, and those notes are so familiar that I can hardly see them as paratext any longer. They’re like a little friendly murmur under the melody. A professor I TA’d for several years ago called the tone and apparatus of the poem elitist, and, while my students seemed to sympathize with his complaint, I couldn’t. Whatever Eliot meant to impart, those notes were a promise, when I read them first. This is how much I know, how much I’ve read and understood of the world; you can read and know and understand this much, too.

1. For a lesson in how to take a perfectly decent series and ruin it in the last installment, see X3. Or, rather, DON’T. Ugh.
2. Last night we went with some visiting friends to the Paramount Theatre, where we saw The Maltese Falcon. I hadn’t seen it since I was little, and I’d forgotten how funny it is and how purely great Bogart is in it. T. thinks Peter Lorre’s Joel Cairo must have partly inspired Andy Serkis’s Gollum.
3. I’ve added Perfect Stars to my blogroll, because everyone should appreciate its delightfulness. I like the Dorian Grey and Oscar Wilde strips the best, though they’re all lovely and weird.
4. Via T.: Cate Blanchett is going to play Bob Dylan in Todd Haynes’s next movie. A Todd Haynes film is probably one of the only things that could lead me to be interested in Bob Dylan — plus, you know, Cate Blanchett.

And finally, a book question: help me list novels set during the Great Depression in the US? So far we’ve come up with books by:

1. Steinbeck
2. Faulkner (As I Lay Dying, Snopes trilogy)
3. Cormac McCarthy, part of the Border trilogy
4. Philip Roth, The Plot Against America
5. Frank Norris (whom I’ve never read)
6. John Dos Passos, maybe? (again, I’ve never read him)

And, in light of my botheration about the NY Times list several weeks ago: can you point me toward any good novels set in the US Depression written by women?