Today's quotation from work fits me too well and I hope to be changing that if I can:
"Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart; and his friends can only read the title." Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)

"Anime's greatest strength—also its most consistent weakness—is its imagination and ambiguity. Animation isn't restricted by what can be filmed and what can be developed as special effects; anything can be drawn, and anything can be connected. For great anime directors, like Satoshi Kon (Perfect Blue), it allows for a truly malleable reality—a puzzle of imagination. In the hands of lesser artists, it simply becomes a visual playground without logic and rules." Joel Pearce of DVDVerdict in his review of "Tekkonkinkreet". Another reviewer remarked that it is"often pushing the psychedelic boundaries a little too far for mainstream success." And that is precisely why anime still intrigues me and why Tekkonkinkreet was a visual treat. I watched the second half of the film after my birthday last Thursday while on the stationary bike at 1 am. Black and White, the two supernatural orphans that make up the soul of Treasure Town, are so named because they are yin/yang and can only protect their town by combining their abilities. White is extremely naive, living in a far more fantastic world than the dreary reality of his abandoned car home. Black is much more hardened, capable of violence, and aware of the dangers the two of them face. This is not a typical anime since it is an international project; the new blood brought into the project can be clearly seen and is very much welcome. The backgrounds are beautiful simply as they are.

I finished "Last Orders" by Graham Swift recently and while there were good stretches in the book and I did get into it more at the end, there were too many characters to keep track of (as the story is told in first person and jumping between the characters). It tells of the journey (both internal and literal) of four friends going to spread the ashes of their dead compatriot, but at least 12 points of view are given and I lost a lot of momentum early on because of the frequent POV changes. Two excerpts below for a flavoring:

"But the outcast and the outlawed have to die too, the shunned and the forgotten, and somewhere there's a reluctant relative who has to step uneasily forward. And you never ask, it's not your place, what exactly this death means to them. Though you can see sometimes it's not the simple, neat thing they'd hoped for, a merciful release."

"There was a strap rubbing on one of my shoes, my new shoes, so I gave him the teddy bear while I stooped down to fiddle. Maybe I just wanted to hide my face. And I think even as I handed it to him I knew what he was going to do. There he was for a moment, a grown man, on the end of a pier, holding a teddy bear, a man on the end of a pier. He looked at it for an instant like he didn't know what it had to do with him. Then he stepped nearer the railings. And then there wasn't any teddy bear, there was just Jack. Goodbye Jack."

"Electraglide" by vikingkungfubar, "Red #8" by TelefunkenU47, "Onion" by ElChode, and "Small" by ReggieNoble2.