A few answers...

scrubschick asked, What do you think -- if anything -- about the upcoming XF movie? Will you go see it? Is it a complete waste of celluloid and theater space? Do you have hopes for it?

It takes a lot to get Mr. F and I out to the movies--we'd much rather wait for a DVD and watch a movie in our jammies.

So yeah, I think we'll spend a few bucks to rent it when it comes out, if the flist reviews don't warn us away. I wouldn't say I have hopes for it, having long ago decided that I don't trust Chris Carter to plot his way out of a paper bag. He's more likely to plot his way into making the paper bag into an origami version of the Collyer brothers' townhouse.

fbf asked, Poetry. I know some of it, I've asked before, sort of, but I want to hear it again.

Poetry and I don't get along, but it's not poetry's fault.

To quote Mr. F, English is my second language. Technically it's my only language, but I don't think in language, so everything I do with words requires translation. You can guess that I'm not an easy speaker, but the weird thing is that it also affects my reading. Concepts are a tactile experience for me, and their corresponding words are imbued with some of those properties. I mentally route what I read through my throat, a very slight subvocalization so that I'm kind of touching the key words of a sentence as my eye skips over them.

This works very well with the rhythm of prose because the ratio of concepts to beats is what I'm used to, it's close to that of speech. Poetry is too concentrated. I read it too fast, I can't easily break through the skin to get at the blood and meat. There's too much in too little space, I have to keep backtracking and making myself pause, and that's frustrating and boring and I can't lose myself in it.

Speak a poem to me and I can hear more of it, smiling and frowning at the right moments. Sing it to me and I hear it all, laughing and wellling up tears. It's a matter of ease of input. For me, poetry goes way past a pure distillation of an idea, it's an idea refined into an odorless crystalline powder I have to fuck around with to even identify.