So I finally watched Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven and enjoyed it tremendously. The film is most certainly is an experience. The sprawling Texas, 'erra, Canadian, expanse lends itself to an expressed womb, of sorts, vitalizing and comforting our senses yet concealing the imminent. Why this guy doesn't make more films is a question to be asked/answered. Well worth the rental and probably a future purchase. No, I won't be rushing out to see The New World... sorry. Without spoiling anything, the film's parting line (in part): "I was hopin' things would work out for her. She was a good friend of mine" is as powerful a piece of summation as is in all of filmdom.
On the literary front, I finally dove into Dostoevsky's The Double: A Petersburg Poem (part of a split release with his own The Gambler) after some months and it's turning out to an absorbing little thriller where a diminutive, paper-pushing bureaucrat is traumatized during a office soiree held at a superior's home. The nature of this trauma is that he...
...come now, you didn't believe I'd launch into one of the story's most impressive scenes did you? I'm two-thirds into this little gem, this my third Dostoevsky; Crime & Punishment and Demons being the others. All translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. I make mention of the decoders (if you will) simply to champion the profoundly preferable translations by this husband and wife team. I compared several passages in The Brothers Karamazov, Anna Karenina (which I have read in full), The Master and Margarita, the all three of the aforementioned Dostoevsky novels, as well as Gogol's Dead Souls only to be blown away by the lucidity and fluidity of the Pevear/Volokhonsky editions. If these translations haven't replaced the Constance Garnett translations as the editions of reference, particularly in schools, someone has dropped the proverbial ball. Trust me.
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