From last week's New Yorker, this tidbit about Aguirre:

Perhaps unfairly, [Herzog] is less renowned for his oddly brilliant movies than for the arduous, and sometimes savage, circumstances under which they were made. On the set of his 1972 masterpiece, "Aguirre: The Wrath of God," a vertiginous portrait of a Spanish conquistador who unravels during a search for El Dorado, Herzog struggled to control his gifted but satanically mercurial star, Klaus Kinski; at one point, when Kinski abruptly announced that he was quitting the production and leaving by canoe, Herzog threatened to shoot him. ("I said, 'You may reach the next river bend, but you'll do so with all the bullets in this gun in your head - except the one for me,'" he recalled. "He did not get in the boat. I believe that it was the right thing to do. Otherwise, there would be no 'Aguirre.'")

Perhaps, I am unfair as Daniel Zalewki implies those of us are who are so fascinated by the backstory to these movies, but I also think the films are totally brilliant, so I think it is okay, my fascination. One more tidbit that I find amazing is that Herzog and the crew were scheduled to be on a flight and at the last minute despite Herzog bribing the airline crew to get on the flight, weren't allowed to board because the plane was going to be rerouted. That plane crashed, killing everyone except one passenger. Herzog made a documentary about the survivor of that flight, Wings of Hope.

It is a beautiful day outside and I need to get dressed and head down to Wall Street even though I did not refresh my knowledge of copy editing symbols which I haven't looked at since high school, and which even then, working on a crappy high school newspaper, my knowledge was surely amateurish at best.

This Viswananthan story makes me so mad and it is so absurd. She is the Harvard student who wrote what sounds like a crappy YA novel, and got paid a $500,000 advance for it. Um, what? A half million advance?! That is a really obscene amount for what sounds like a book that probably wouldn't sell enough copies to even come close to even making back the advance. But, despite having a gigantic advance, something most people only dream about, she plagiarized from another YA novel. This isn't a term paper that you are turning in last minute, which even then, would be really disgusting. Surely, someone was going to notice this. What the hell was she thinking? She claims that she "internalized" these books that she was a big fan of, and accidentally, unintentionally copied them. Yeah fucking right. Some of the passages are way too identical for that. This is disgusting. This story probably makes me irrationally angry.