Not to jinx it but this flu is at the very least seriously dormant. Just in time too - about a thousand animalcules to take care of that need me to be on game: apartment, job, show, Hat (got your orders! ishes going out early next week, freals), school meetings birthday parties. Not to speak of the main event.

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Watched Walk the Line and rewatched Thank You for Smoking. Reese acts like a star from her first entrance - until halftime Joaquin lowballs the movie, can't sing can't act doesn't look much like his impersonatee, then suddenly ('round when Elvis gives him the Kerouac drugs?) he clicks in. Jason Patric is disappointingly monorote as the withholding dad, and Ginnifer Goodwin is stuck in second gear as the long suffering wife. Loved to bits Sandra Ellis Lafferty's Maybelle Carter - esp. when she shoos Johnny's speed dealer with a shotgun. Surprisingly watchable, like say O Brother Where Art Thou.

As for TYfS, I can't get enough of Aaron Eckhart's sophistry, David Koechner is the thinking man's John C. Reilly, and nevermind Katie Holmes and the potrack, that Maria Bello can actually act. What does that mean. That means she does the disappear-into-character thing. It's a shame, right? Hollywood puts about as much value on that power as poetryland does on the capacity to focus the reader on anything other than how stupendously special the poet is. Bread and butter. Stale bread, stale butter.

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Since I seem to be borrowing C. Dale's format I will mention that there are several nice surprises in the new New England Review: terrific poems by Ali, Susan Hutton, Maria Hummel, and Benjamin Jackson.