After Lee Siegel was exposed and suspended for confronting nasty commenters on his New Republic blog under a pseudonym (“sock puppet”), I e-mailed him a condolence note to the effect that blogging is a pipeline to the id, and that some of us — the exhibitionist, the paranoid, the batshit-crazy — should approach such unmediated self-expression warily, if at all. It’s too bad that in his recent book (Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob), he blamed the medium far more than the lesser part of his — our — nature. I’m not going to blame the medium for the dumb-ass stuff I wrote in my last blog entry. It was an unholy confluence of man and machine.

Now that the shock of Anthony Minghella’s sudden death has dissipated slightly, I think it’s less unseemly to say that this brilliant and soulful filmmaker died unfulfilled. Yes, The English Patient won a host of Academy Awards (one for Minghella), and many regard The Talented Mr. Ripley as an unqualified success. Even Cold Mountain has its lonely champions. But I found them all a disheartening falloff from his theatrical debut, Truly, Madly, Deeply (1990). And I can’t help thinking that what happened has something to do with someone whose name rhymes with Shmarvey Shmeinstein.

Do I have evidence? Peter Biskind’s chronicle of the indie movement, Down and Dirty Pictures, provides some. But I’m less interested in what happened behind the screen than in the compromises in front of it.