“But bad movies—I think I’ve got a word for the kind of sadness I’m talking about. Schoenfraun. The sadness of when you’re watching someone enjoy something that you think is substandard. Schoenfraun. Schoenfraun. It just sounds right. The ineffable sadness when someone is happy and something is not as good as it should be.”

“..it may seem disingenuous—but the hardest thing in the world is to be good and clear when creating anything. It’s the hardest thing in the world. It’s really easy to be obscure and elliptical and so fucking hard to be good and clear. It breaks people. Because you don’t often get encouragement to do that, to be good and clear.”

“A lot of people who write about art don’t understand the importance of failure, the importance of process. Woody Allen can’t leap from Annie Hall to Manhattan. He has to make Interiors in between to get to Manhattan. You’ve got to let him do that.”

– Stephen Soderberg, interviewed (self-indulgently but valuable-ly) in The Believer.

Just saw his “Contagion” today, at Zlote Tarasy, as a reward after a day of writing with a fellow Fulbrighter. The film was excellent. I would recommend it to anyone–with the caveat that you might want to close your eyes when they begin this one particular autopsy–but otherwise, I think it’s a really sensitive, delicate film about a really hard-to-be-sensitive-delicate-about topic. Everyone should see it. Especially the people who like science.

PS. Shout-out to the Polish airplane pilot who safely landed the screwed-up Boeing earlier this week. All systems go at Warsaw again–my roommate just got in from a trip, with no problems. Other travelers earlier this week were delayed.