Here are all the Cannes titles I want to see (without having looked at any of the plot descriptions, which I'm sure will intrigue me in others on the list). Especially stoked for the Weerasethakul and obviously the Godard.

COPIE CONFORME (CERTIFIED COPY) directed by Abbas KIAROSTAMI
LA PRINCESSE DE MONTPENSIER (THE PRINCESS OF MONTPENSIER) directed by Bertrand TAVERNIER
LUNG BOONMEE RALUEK CHAT (Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives) directed by Apichatpong WEERASETHAKUL
OUTRAGE directed by Takeshi KITANO
POETRY directed by LEE Chang-dong
FILM SOCIALISME directed by Jean-Luc GODARD
HAHAHA directed by HONG Sangsoo
HAI SHANG CHUAN QI (I WISH I KNEW) directed by JIA Zhangke
O ESTRANHO CASO DE ANGÉLICA (THE STRANGE CASE OF ANGELICA) directed by Manoel DE OLIVEIRA
CARLOS directed by Olivier ASSAYAS
TAMARA DREWE directed by Stephen FREARS
WALL STREET: MONEY NEVER SLEEPS directed by Oliver STONE
NOSTALGIA DE LA LUZ (NOSTALGIA FOR THE LIGHT) directed by Patricio GUZMAN

Today at church they ordained a new priest who looks like Michael Cera.

The other day I finished Harold Brodkey's Stories in an Almost Classical Mode.

Brodkey is a hard nut to crack: his stories obviously got worse as he went on, shifting subtly from a fictive mode something like Faulkner and Woody Allen in one unholy cigarettes-and-booze-fueled combination into florid dialectically-rendered monologues. One of the early stories was a real delight - involving a self-consciously Jewish fella entertaining an uptight German friend and her new husband the Count until an old friend of his, freaking out on acid, drops in and causes havoc. But with the later ones I found myself just skimming. Some weird stuff in this book involving childhood sexuality especially, very acutely observed and he doesn't seem to have been aiming for shock. I've looked a little into his Runaway Soul but didn't get far - I found his This Wild Darkness one of the most horrifying things I've read in a long time, it was written as he was dying of AIDS and it's unsparing in its explication of all the details of such a death.

Now working on Rosalind Belben novels. Pretty great so far!

Hey, it's been a while since I updated this. Here goes, with some of my recent reading:

- Alfred Corn, A Call in the Midst of the Crowd. Fantastic lyric poetry about NYC interspersed with prose selections. I'll read more of his work.

- Gert Hofmann, Luck. A moving and comical novel about divorce, sketched oddly from the perspective of a kid caught between his father, his mother and her "new man." Hofmann maintains a continual tone of surprise and bemusement which I like.

- Marguerite Duras, No More and Four Novels. The first is near-incoherent: her deathbed ramblings transcribed by Yann Andrea Steiner. Of the latter, I'd read Moderato Cantabile - by far the best - over last summer one evening with a glass of wine, feeling very much like its protagonist. Of the other three novels, The Square - told almost entirely in ruminatory dialogue - is the best.

- Joyce Carol Oates, A Fair Maiden, Beasts, I'll Take You There. She's really treading the same territory - young girls, mysterious/predatory men, the awakening of sinister sexuality - but she does it so well that I know I'll enjoy almost anything she writes these days.

- Isaac Bashevis Singer, Enemies: a Love Story. This was pretty grand too - slightly satirical and madcap, also desperate and tragic. I'll read Singer's stories eventually.

I wish I had more to say, but work is keeping me pretty exhausted these days.