I feel better today. Mark found me in a miserable heap muttering crazily about "word formats being against me, and the world too" so he is going to help me with his keen proofreading eye on the weekend. I also had a nice day which made me stop and think about the fact that even though I am working about 6-10 hours a day every day on this damn thesis, I still get to be flexible and do things it would be hard to do in another job.

First I went to a Writer's Festival event that Naomi had booked but had to miss because of sickness (get well soon!), it was good. It was an interview with Michael Burleigh and Orlando Figes who are experts on the Third Reich and Stalinist Russia respectively (I also really like Peter Mares who is the temporary The Book Show presenter). The session was about evil, but that concept was more or less summarily dismissed early on as not all that useful. I would have liked a bit more in depth probing of evil itself, and why perhaps we label these regimes as evil, while we don't with others. But it was interesting.

Then I was passing ACMI and as one of my friends has just got a job there I thought I should have a look see as I never go. The main exhibition is correspondences: víctor erice and abbas kiarostami . I didn't look at everything because there was a lot there, but some of the highlights were a parallel film by both filmakers about childhood, one in Spain and one in Iran, just exisiting alongside one another rather than making a didactic point. Very beautiful.

Then I went into the next room and realised the Kirostami's photos are some of my favourites! I hadn't put the filmaker togethr with the photographer for some reason.
Here is one that is in the exhibition:


I will go back again.

Then I did a bit of a cafe attached to library editing crawl. I had a flat white at Journal and edited 'Shows and spectacle', then wandered through Myer to try expensive hand creams, then went to Mr Tulk and had a radicchio and taleggio toasted sandwich and edited Illusions, the stayed for a flat white and struggled with editing 'Fake and Ephemeral Structures'.