(no subject)

I've been watching Hulu stuff based on available time windows, hence near-randomly. The fact that there's a few hundred Criterions got me thinking of that iTunes problem, where your favorite songs rarely work for you if selected onto short lists, can hardly fail to when grabbed by Shuffle from out of the hundreds of non-favorite songs you for some reason own. For those of us who have tens or hundreds of books to read, no helping it, but no set order to read them in, is there a way to recreate that kind of enthusiasm? If so how many would you need, and what quotient of indifferent experiences would you have to endure? My present list is wide but leaves me feeling unfree. How wide would it need to be for randomization to help, and what sort of randomization's best? It's sad for a beloved activity to grey into a chore. And makes me avoid it more than I should, hence the Huluing.

Probably unresearchable because of differences among individuals. Though graduate school necessarily killed my block against rereading at all, I still strongly resist re-exposure within a year or so, for all but the shortest works - couldn't even re-watch Upstream Color or Primer despite the strong incentive to. Whereas other people tell you they saw The Umbrellas of Cherbourg eleven times over the summer (or whatever) with convincing "I'm normal" expressions.

(no subject)

Should mention The Unbelievers isn't objectively a very good film - mostly just a self-celebration by the newly energized atheist movement.

It was neat hearing "our leader" Dawkins take questions after the screening, though; Krauss wasn't as good at it as you have to be - but he's new, and Dawkins presumably wasn't so good at it himself once. The long-form book arguments have to be matched by well-crafted short ones: epigrams, anecdotes, prepared one-sentence counterattacks to the double handful of nasty but effective shutdowns the other side's come up with.