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Like a party favor, a thought pops into my head: My daughter coming home from school. She is, what, twelve or eleven. I don’t know. She wants to be with me, and I’m working, watching Talfan’s Dysgu i gi Bach Gachu backward. It is one of the most significant films in all of Welsh cinema, and that is…

THE BUS HAS been double-booked. Greyhound offers four dollars off any domestic bus trip for passengers willing to take the following bus, which is at 5:30 P.M. next Thursday or Friday; they’re not certain. No takers, so they implement their “Emergency Lap Plan.” All passengers are weighed and assig…

I rose above his arrogance. I would not play his game. He told me he was a filmmaker of sorts. It is all I could do to not laugh in his unformed face. I do not mean to brag but I can detect an artist on sight. It is my version of gaydar (which I also have). Artdar. This is not based on physical app…

Ingo doesn’t respond but simply limps to a notepad on the cluttered kitchen table and begins to write. I scan the room, hoping for elucidation. Boxes. Perhaps hundreds of them, maybe thousands, possibly millions—all marked: Automobiles, Firemen, Weather, Natives, Pastries, Trees (Palm, Spruce)…

…

“Are you a cinephile?” I ask, suddenly impressed with this withered, white papery Jew (?) before me.

“If by cinephile you mean someone sexually excited by film or film stock, then yes.”

“I didn’t mean that. I meant a lover of the art of film.”

“I am that as—”

“In the platonic sense, I m…