My next - self imposed - writing camp starts this Saturday. I'll have 9 days to rewrite my script. Two more days off from work await me on the 11th and 12th.
Not much time but I'll definitely have a go at it. I'm itching to and that is a good sign. The stories I wanted to write will have to wait 'till after. Too bad, but it can't be helped. My mind is completely focused on the script now.
Jackie didn't want me to post this on fotolog but she never said anything about xanga, now did she? 
 I actually think it's a pretty nice one. It just shows that she doesn't like to be photographed unawares. I sort of tricked her here. Hah! 
I think she looks very nice, don't you?
This is taken on the balcony of our apartment in Antwerp. We've had such a gorgeous summer. Hot but wonderfully sunny and bright. Now we're in for a long, cold winter with lots of snow. At least, that's what the forecast is.
I love snow; it makes for beautiful photographic opportunities.
Plus I 'd like to have violent snowball fights with this pretty vixen standing on my balcony! 
Who do you think will surrender first?
I'm reading this awesome - long banned - book by Henry Miller. I think he was one of the best writers ever to come from the States.
A little quote:
"I have walked the streets in many countries of the world but nowhere have I felt so degraded and humiliated as in America. I think of all the streets in America combined as forming a huge cesspool, a cesspool of the spirit in which everything is sucked down and drained away to everlasting shit. Over this cesspool the spirit of work weaves a magical wand; palaces and factories spring up side by side, and munition plants and chemical works and steel mills and sanatoriums and prisons and insane asylums. The whole continent is a nightmare producing the greatest misery of the greatest number. I was one, a single entity in the midst of the greatest jamboree of wealth and happiness ( statistical wealth, statistical happiness ) but I never met a man who was truly wealthy or truly happy."
The book, of course, is 'Tropic of Capricorn' his bitterly funny take on human hypocrisy - moral, social and political. The book, published in 1939, had been banned for twenty years because of its explicit sex. Another act of moral and political hypocrisy? I believe the ban was imposed out of fear. Fear of the truth spoken by a young man who wasn't afraid to describe the Depression era as it really was. Not because he uses four letter words and describes sexual acts explicitly.
No, the danger in Miller's writing lies (yes, it still does) in exposing the weakness of America's economical system. It's heartless, based on chicanery. The US pays three (3!) times less for raw oil than we in Belgium do. Even so, with this huge advantage, America has no social system worth speaking of.
Aren't you guys and dolls in the US of A feeling a little bit cheated?
We, Belgians, pay three times more for raw oil, pay crippling taxes on top of that but our jobless are protected. Our sick and disabled are protected. Losing a job doesn't automatically mean losing a house.
And furthermore: get this: EVERYBODY gets health insurance. It costs every working person only 50 euro a year. The jobless and pensioners pay less.
Then again, we can't afford to wage war or build space shields. That's true.
Don't ban your best writers. READ them!
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