Tuesday morning 1.35 a.m. We're into October already! And I have decided that since I will never get up early in the morning unless, possibly, my life absolutely and immediately depended on it, I'll just pretend to work at night instead.

Wolf Trap (or perhaps Wolf Den), dir. Jiri Weiss, 1957: a strange love triangle: couple adopt an orphaned teenager. The man is the Mayor and the District Vet and not very old and kinda good-looking I guess in a scholarly kind of way in the right light. Or at least he's supposed to be. His wife is Mrs Bennet multiplied a hundredfold. The girl is wide-eyed and blonde and pretty. Intense -- melodramatic -- emotional exploration because of course she and the man fall in love but they are both, for different reasons, grateful to the wife.

And lots of Chinese soft porn. I think The Golden Lotus -- the two chapters I read of it anyway -- is soft porn. It may be lots of other things besides but I think it was written to be soft porn. And it's damn funny, but that might be because Chinese doesn't translate well into English, let alone grandiloquent classical Chinese narratives.