JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

I was all set to watch A Good Year, the new film by Ridley Scott starring Russell Crowe, then I realized I didn’t want to. It’s based on one of those Peter Mayle books about yuppie scum who decide to abandon the rat race and buy a farm house in Provence or Tuscany or someplace rustic, charming and full of eccentric locals. Then they go into rhapsodies about the wine, cheese and fresh produce, which somehow leads to their discovering the true meaning and purpose of life, at which point they should be force-fed their books in hardcover. How I know all these without having read any of those books, I have no idea. I avoid that genre because it promotes envy, and my envy will be pointless because if I had to live in the country for long periods I would start skinning people out of sheer boredom. I don’t care how pretty those Mediterranean countrysides are, the quiet would drive me bonkers. I once spent 24 in a little Tuscan town called Camaiore, and at bedtime it was so quiet I could hear the refrigerator humming three floors below my room. In fact I could hear the refrigerator in the neighbor’s house a mile away, and I had to sleep with my iPod on to drown out the tranquillity.

Then I asked myself, Do we really want to see a movie starring Russell Crowe in which he doesn’t kill anyone? A Beautiful Mind was ridiculous. Finally, why would I watch a Ridley Scott film that does not involve swords, acid-spewing life-forms, or poetic replicants (“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe/Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion”)?

So I ended up lurking in the bookstore, where I found a new translation of War and Peace by Anthony Briggs, a very nice Penguin Red paperback at an extremely reasonable Php249. I’m serious about reading the Russians in 2007, but only in recent translations. And I mean the gloom and doom doorstoppers, none of that cheerful Nabokov. It helps that I’ve stopped watching television. (If you’re a tennis fan you must read Dostoevsky’s The Gambler—you will begin to grasp how Marat Safin’s mind works.)