First let it be said that while I love the film Orlando it is simply impossible to get all the themes and events of the novel into one movie, so I strongly urge all viewers, whether they loved or hated this movie, to read the book, Virginia Woolf's unique love letter to Vita Sackville-West.

The inevitable failings involved in translating a book into a film aside, 'Orlando' is visually exsquisite, the costumes and locations sumptuous and splendid, fully evoking the decadance and contrasting squalor of the centuries in which Orlando lives his/her life. The score perfectly compliments the surroundings, the atmosphere and the themes of each scene, and is beautifully composed and performed.

Though some have expressed doubts over Tilda Swinton's ability to play Orlando, the aristocrat born as man who turns into a woman half way through his/her life, I thought she was the perfect choice. I believe knowing she is a woman initially taints people's ability to find her convincing as a man; to me she played the part with great charm, amiability and empathy, and became even more charming as a woman - the character of Orlando at this stage in 'her' life becoming more rounded, more sympathetic, more knowledgable and Swinton captures that well.

This film does not follow the 'rules' of the 'real' world - besides changing genders, Orlando lives for 400 years and does not age a day. It is the story of a pursuit for life, for meaning, by one individual determined to discover what that means. Accept it, and enjoy.

In its attempt to capture the most important of the book's events the film does have a slight recurring bump in continuity, it seems, and will no doubt be pretentious and boring to some, if not many. Nonetheless, Orlando is a sometimes humorous, sometimes haunting movie, thought provoking and richly realised.

First of all, I have to say that I have not read Virginia Woolf's book on which this film is based. Ms. Woolf is not an "easy read", as her style tends to ramble a bit, and from what I understand, one could not literally translate "Orlando" to the screen. I commend Sally Potter for her adaptation of Woolf's novel. "Orlando", to me, is about a person's journey of self-discovery. As the lead character says, "The same person-just a different sex." There is a wonderfully sly mixing-up and playing with gender here. Orlando, an effeminate male poet who later becomes a woman, is beautifully underplayed by Tilda Swinton. I admire her performance, as it is played with a very subtle wit. Queen Elizabeth I is portrayed by that grand unwilling champion of gay rights Quentin Crisp, and the beautiful Billy Zane is treated as the "love object" in two scenes of lush sensuality. "Bronsky Beat"'s Jimmy Somerville, with his famous falsetto voice is here too, as a singing angel at the film's finale. His song, "Coming", is wonderful, stating that gender doesn't really matter here-"I am coming, I am coming, here I am, neither a woman nor a man." The art direction is breathtakingly beautiful, and Sandy Powell's costumes are remarkably accurate, spanning the centuries from Elizabethan thru Jacobean thru Rococo thru Victorian to present-day. Some may find the pace of this gorgeous film a little ponderous, but I found it to be an intriguing 90 minutes. We are all humans, individuals-why all this fuss about what a "woman's" role in society is, or what a "man's" role in society is? Virginia Woolf, I understand, based "Orlando" on a meeting she had with an Italian noblewoman who bemoaned the fact that she was denied her inheritance due to the fact that she was born a woman. Almost unbelievable, isn't it?

This is an amazing, ironic film, based upon Virginia Woolf's whimsically mock-serious epic about an immortal English lord, who experiences 400 years of history, changes his sex to that of a woman after refusing to participate in warfare (a feminist point that is subtly made), and never bores or condescends to us. What surprised me when I first saw it is how dry, boring and pompous it isn't; the film has a nice lightness and dry humor that make it digestible. The photography is beautiful and the film never drags, and the performances, which a lot of critics have suggested are somewhat two-dimensional, are that way for a reason: Orlando's adventure is too awesome to be rendered realistically; the people and adventures she experiences are meant, I think, to be represented symbolically---each character is actually a rough composite of perhaps hundreds of such types she meets in her journey from 1600 to 2000. Billy Zane, who is seen in the movie's poster, plays an American adventurer who romances the female Orlando, but to all of his "Titanic" fans, a word of caution: he's in the film for roughly twenty-five minutes, if that much. The real star of the show is the ethereally lovely, brilliant, and mysterious Tilda Swinton, whose male Orlando is unnervingly convincing; so much so that "he" almost seems to be doing a drag bit once the sex change happens---and because Swinton is so eye-pleasing and delightful, this is not a bad thing. Her intelligence and talent radiate from her face, which is so expressive that many shots consist simply of gigantic closeups of it---she can say more with a gaze than many lesser performers do with a page of dialogue. I first saw this film in 1993, as an exchange student living in London, and it gave me an appreciation for British history and for Woolf's books that I had never had before. It's really quite a smart, funny, cool, hip movie, but with no explosions, car chases, or hot-button themes, it's by no means a populist-type entertainment. If you like period films, or anything English, you'll dig this a lot: Orlando isn't just English, he/she *is* England, and the country should be so lucky as to be compared with Tilda Swinton's long-suffering (centuries of it, in fact, what a burden) poetry-spouting nobleman/woman. Very cool.

"I shall speak of ghost, of flame, and of ashes." Derrida has a flair for tackling different philosophical in unique and roundabout ways. If there can be any "main thesis" to this book (Derrida, I believe would "avoid" such a "thesis" statement) is an in depth and deeply nuanced examination of Heideggars' use of several german words "Geist, geistig, geistlich" and their evolution in his work, including his avoiding using them, over several years. The thread of discussing weaves through Heideggar's ever present idea of "questioning" the "question" and how, insidiously, through various textual operations, Heideggar privileges the "question" [fragen].This includes a look at Heideggar's seminal text Sein und Zeid (known to anglo-philosphers as Being and Time) and even several essays on one of Heideggar's favorite poets Georg Trakl.

In the end, this book is one of Derrida most dense, and "closed" discussions. What I mean by that, is that someone who is not sufficiently versed in Heideggar's philosophy, various emtymological aspects of teh german and french language, Heideggar's relation to Georg Trakl and ultimately the Nazi party, will be easily left out in the cold in this one. Derrida begins with several complicated questions and is ruthless in his close-textual readings and endless re-contextualization of Heideggar's work.

This is his forte. Its just not a great introduction text. Nor even a good intermediate text. Start with Of grammatology. Not Of Spirit. And return to it later with a deeper understanding of Derrida's strategy before tackling this one.

If you read this book, you might notice how one century tends to follow another, but certain problems could crop up, particularly in places which don't define the world quite like we do, philosophically or religiously. I expected to spend a full weekend trying to figure out what this book has to say, but it dropped right into my preconceptions.

Some questions are more unsettling than others, and the question of spirit in Heidegger is worse when Derrida makes it perfectly clear that Heidegger knew how to avoid the question in purely philosophical works, firstly in Sein und Zeit, but treated spirit like a bandwagen that "the leap" (p. 32) would land on for those "in the movement of an authentication or identification which wish themselves to be properly German" (p. 33) in his famous Rectorship Address six years later, in 1933. The key paragraph of that address pictures the Germans, for whom the "will to essence creates for our people its most intimate and extreme world of danger, in other words its true spiritual world." (p. 36) My confusion about this doesn't really start until page 41, where "Spirit is its double." The consideration moves to the Einfuhrung (1935) which "repeats the invocation of spirit launched in the Address. It even relaunches it, explains it, extends it, justifies it, specifies it, surrounds it with unprecedented precautions." (p. 41). What has become a concern for Heidegger is "The darkening of the world implies this destitution of spirit, its dissolution, consuming, its repression, and its misinterpretation. We are attempting at present to elucidate this destitution of spirit from just one perspective, and precisely that of the misinterpretation of spirit. We have said: Europe is caught in a vice between Russia and America, which metaphysically come down to the same thing in regard to their belonging to the world and their relation to spirit." (p. 59). The collapse of German idealism a century earlier was, to Heidegger, the problem of an age "which was not strong enough to remain equal to the grandeur, the breadth, and the original authenticity of this spiritual world, that is, to realize it truly." (p. 60). I dropped a lot of German words from the passages I quoted, and the bracketed "[to the character of their world, or rather to their character-of-world, Weltcharakter]", for the benefit of those who might have thought that he already said that. Plenty of attention is paid to language, but of all the foreign words which might mean spirit, I'm barely aware of how the Latin word spiritus might be sung in church with a different meaning than how German philosophers arrogate about geistliche or Geistigkeit.

Page 63 has a sentence on how the metaphysics of the latter word as well as the Christian value, "a word which will itself thus find itself doubled" form some "profound relationship with what is said twenty years earlier of the darkening of world and spirit." (p. 63). If you are following this, this might be the book for you, if you still want to know, "Heidegger names the demonic. Evidently not the Evil Genius of Descartes . . ." (p. 62).

An open question in the (by now) standard readings of Heidegger is his relation to Geist - spirit. From prescribed avoidance to evangelical inclusion over twenty five years, what motivated this change in Heidegger's pronouncements on spirit?

By following the formations, transformations, presuppositions and destinations of this sea change, Derrida once more opens the question of the question, that famous Heideggerian question or questioning which originates human kind: "Human being is that being which questions the being of its Being."

In reading any Derrida analytique, one is made aware all over again of the many echos surrounding every voice, every attempt to speak. This is particularly poignant with regard to Heidegger, and Derrida does not gloss over the German's naziism as much as trace the hubris of his fallen state.

Is there a conclusion? There is no conclusion. It's enough to keep talking...not to interrupt.

The best thing about "Carried Away," is the research Bowlby has done on marketers' changing models of shoppers' consciousness. She deftly shows that these models are empty of any true psychological insight, but instead entirely bound up with the culture and the time and the economic circumstances in which the models were devised. The worst thing is that she spends too much time researching British marketing publications from the 50s and 60s. The US has always been the hot molten center of marketing and retail trends -- a fact which Bowlby readily acknowledges throughout most of the book -- thus the inclusion textual readings from old British marketing journals seems to have everything to do with Bowlby being a professor in England and her original publisher being British, and nothing to do with whether this information is really appropriate.

But this is a relatively minor annyonance in what is really quite a witty, interesting look at the rise of the supermarket and the concomitant creation of new packaging, new advertising, new models of the shopper consciousness. Bowlby is at her best here, giving us an historical perspective of shoppers (mostly women in the early days of supermarket shopping) who,depending on the theorist, are believed to be extremely suggestible given certain conditions, or extremely rational no matter what the conditions. For instance, in the 50s, that era of mass outputs and mass consumption and McCarthyism, some social critics like Vance Parkard posited that advertisers were "hidden persuaders" using sophisticated brainwashing techniques to sell weak-minded women things they did not really need. But in the 60s and 70s, the model of shopper consciousness shifted. Suddenly, the shopper -- still nearly always seen as a woman -- was in charge, "with it," "sophisticated." The rise of the "power brand" in the 80s -- a time during which the appeals of certain brands were apparently so overwhelming that even the sophisticated 70s shopper succumbed -- swung the pendulum back to the weak-minded model. Bowlby neatly lampoons the variations these psycological models have gone through since the rise of the supermarket, but notes that ultimately, this bipolar model is still intact.

I particularly recommend "Carried Away" to marketers, especially young marketers who have never seen the vacillation in the models of shopper consciousness. Take it to the next marketer's conference you attend. It's the perfect antidote to those enlessly dull days spent listening to hour after hour of case studies in which consumers are uniformly described as "sophisticated," or "savvy." Bowlby's light touch and eye for the absurd will help you keep all the tepid, instrumetally tainted "shopper psychology" in perspective.

Psychoanalysis as a necessary and reasonable practice is defended and reviewed.. Roudinesco's book neatly narrates the contentious 20th century history of psychoanalysis in France and the United States. The author describes psychoanalyis as a deeply human(e) practice, a practice allied with democratic freedoms and care of the self. This small but thoroughly provocative book, raises questions about the chemical and genetic reducibility of the individual that medication as remediation readily assumes. Also assumed is the existence of a soul or psyche as an entity ready for care. The existence of this "given" does not meet discussion. The author evenly and smartly makes a thoughtful contribution to the discussion on caring for depression and addressing the person not just the chemical.