Next, Sondheim Will Make a Musical Based on Sartre's "Nausea"

I just finished reading Jose Saramago's Blindness a few days ago. It's an incredibly good book, even though it's not really the best light reading for the morning commute. The premise is that a pandemic of "white blindness" hits an unnamed country. Soon, the whole country is affected by this blindness, and the living conditions take a downward plummet. Only one woman is not afflicted by the blindness, and she remains the only person to see the horror of this new existence. The affected people soon start testing the limits of human nature and behaviors that set humans apart from animals. It's a very disturbing, but enlightening read. Once I read about how people were living in their own waste, and exchanging sexual favors (bordering more on gang rape than anything else) for access to small portions of food, I was a little jealous of the yuppies on the 135 reading things like The Redeye and Candace Bushnell's books. I'm not sure how I feel about being nauseated before I get to work. My nausea hour usually happens at around 2 PM.

As is tradition with everything else in my life, I refuse to believe the book actually exists, until I look it up on Wikipedia. I learned that this book is currently being made into a movie, starring Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo. What, uh, fun? Now, I don't know about ya'll, but my idea of a great time at the movies is watching all different types of people trying to survive in horrific conditions. Yeah, I really want to watch an old, blind lady eat a rabbit raw, because she can't cook it. It will be so nice to see people sleeping in their own, ahem, waste, and killing each other over the last food left in an abandoned supermarket. It's not that I don't think this is a statement that should be made. I loved the book, and I'm looking forward to reading another one of his. This is a very provocative story, but I think that bringing it to the big screen will inevitably gut it. It can't be edgy enough, out of the pure "ick" factor; however, if it does "go there," the movie will end up getting the dreaded NC-17 rating. I know this is the case with most books, which get made into movies, but this story is meant to be that visually and mentally disturbing. I don't know--I really hope it's at least directed well.

Now, I'm on to a lighthearted romp in a Jasper Fforde book. It's weird not to feel bad about myself and my fellow man on my morning commute. Maybe next, I'll read Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

Fun!