Glad to hear you’re starting to feel your fighting spirit coming back, Kim. I knew all along that it would only take your reading a few of my mean-spirited, antagonizing, disrespectful, misogynistic, hate-filled, spot-on, totally correct, elegantly worded, brilliantly argued entries before you were overcome with the desire to punch back. I look forward to a solid four days of reading slanderous comments about my family and my religion. Now, on to day two. For the next 24 hours, Kim and I will be arguing the relative virtues of the great old-school playwright and screenwriter George S. Kaufman (You Can’t Take It With You, The Man Who Came to Dinner, A Night at the Opera) vs. those of the decidedly new-school screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the soon-to-play-at-the-Austin-Film-Festival Synecdoche, NY). I will be defending George; Kim will fight for Charlie. I will stand on the side of the Greatest Generation; Kim will slouch to wallow in the mire of our own. I will argue the virtues of a time defined by self-sacrifice, high wit, narrative sophistication, and Franklin D. Roosevelt; Kim will try her best to defend a time defined by dick jokes, methamphetamine use, global terrorism, and George W. Bush. So, since you’re in a fighting mood, Kim, I believe I’ll come out swinging: The films of Charlie Kaufman are willfully obtuse, painfully clever exercises in narrative incomprehensibility, designed to confuse viewers with flashy intellectual pyrotechnics and time-bending trickery in order to distract them from the fact that his world is a cold, cerebral place where characters aren’t humans but rather pieces in an elaborate puzzle no one can understand. George S. Kaufman, on the other hand, is the warmest, most human of comedy writers, constructing dialogue and scenarios that manage to speak to both the best and worst tendencies of the human species (well, maybe not the absolute worst; you’d be hard-pressed to find drug-abuse or child-molestation subplots in Animal Crackers) while never shying away from the philosophy that stories are, first and foremost, designed to entertain. They are rapid-fire, quick-witted trifles on the surface, but they’re filled with social concern and moral ambivalence for those who choose to look deeper. In other words, they are perfect for the pictures.

Near as I can tell – at 1:30 on a Tuesday morning - there is one fundamental problem with human beings: We are either unwilling or unable to believe that the sordid tendencies of others might actually be beneficial to them. Oh, we accept those tendencies, usually; we tolerate them; we even celebrate them in a sort of amused, there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I kind of way. But acceptance only goes so far. It allows us to live in a state of tenuous peace with our neighbors. But it doesn’t get us inside their sinister little heads. That's what's so great about movies about writers who have substance-abuse problems: They’re the only opportunity most of us have to drop our moral and aesthetic guard completely and revel in the idea that maybe – just maybe – there are people out there for whom destructive self-indulgence is the source of creativity, of inspiration, of power and identity. For some, I'm saying, squalor is the key to the kingdom. I don't see this as an act of romanticizing, as you do, but rather as a celebration of the great, vast, unending variety of human personality. I admit I went though a William S. Burroughs phase in high school (I may have actually been recording secretary in our school's fan club, but who can remember that far back?), and I'll gladly admit now that part of my affection for the man was born out of my romantic fascination with the junkie lifestyle (that and a reverence for his indifference to the rules of grammar, a reverence born, I think, out of a desire to rebel against the strict proper-usage regime I had been raised under). But fascination only gets you so far. Real works of art are explorations of the human condition, whether that condition is something you can accept or not, and the great writer/addict movies are the ones that don't downplay the role degradation can - can - play in the creative act.

I told you earlier tonight that I was having some trouble with this Film Fight – that I was having some trouble finding the fight in me. I think I just found it. With all this poetry talk, I got to thinking about Bukowski – and I hate thinking about Bukowski. But the cult of Bukowski has everything to do with what I hate about junkie movies. I hate – and jaysus, there’s a lot of hate going around (just wait until tomorrow, it’ll be nothing but sunshine and blue skies and mash notes to our favorite writers, I swear it) – I hate junkie movies because, by and large, even as they’re gumming at the scummiest parts of man, they’re romanticizing them, too.

“Writing and writer’s block are very particular kinds of experiences, and not necessarily ones that translate to the human experience.” I’d actually argue that being at a loss for words is a far more universal experience than losing your life to the monkey on your back. But I do agree that the writers-in-movies genre is an inherently clubby one. So I guess what I’m saying is, if you’re going to devote an entire movie to the ins and outs and the insularness of the writer and his process, then for goodness sake, make it funny. Or make it scary. (I’m speaking of course of The Shining, but I know you haven’t seen it, and honestly, it’s nearing the witching hour and simply typing the words has guaranteed that tonight I will sleep with the lights on. So let’s move on.) Right, so if you’re gonna make a whole movie about how fucked up writers are, then at least make us laugh. Block is bad, but it can comically bad. Heroin is just bad bad, and tedious to watch. We are all, as you say, grasping blindly for something to give our lives a little meaning, a little hope, a little poetry. But poetry in a bottle is obvious. Now, poetry in physics-defying communion with one’s own literary creation (Stranger Than Fiction)? Poetry in confronting one’s own personal and professional burnout in a pink fuzzy bathrobe while carting around the upstart writer who's gonna knock you off your throne (Wonder Boys)? That is something unexpected and harder-earned – and infinitely more rewarding for the viewer. At least a viewer like me.

... before I head off to play basketball: Kim Jones just admitted that she'd rather watch Funny Farm than a film by Billy Wilder.

Film incentives are rightfully the buzz around Texas right now with the next session of the Legislature just around the corner. But they're also getting some national attention, including as a "pork" addition to the government bailout of the mortgage biz. It seems a national fix for film incentives, primarily aimed at equalizing the playing field with Canada, made it into the bill's language: According to Broadcasting & Cable magazine, it will "extend and modify temporary expensing rules (they were to expire at the end of this year) that are meant to discourage the flight of TV and film production to Canada and elsewhere by expanding the number and type of deductions that can be taken in the year of production.

I've already resorted to numbering. Bad sign. 1) I didn't say that junkies make less meaningful characters – merely less interesting characters. Sure, there are variations from character to character – in what drove him to drink or to drugs, in what prize possession of his mother's he'll hock for that next fix – but the frame of the addict-writer-narrative-arc is depressingly monotonous.

Thank god we have a free media and Fox News to debate the crucial issues of our day:

It was delightful to see Pamela Des Barres’ 2007 book, Let’s Spend the Night Together (Chicago Review, $14.95), released in paperback. As the Mother Superior of groupies, Des Barres’ interviews with the old-school and contemporary groupies was eye-opening, at least for me. I know a few of these women personally but reading them recount their halcyon years was enlightening, sometimes salacious, and sometimes sad. (I should say up front that there’s a chapter on the Texas Blondes and me). Let’s Spend the Night Together, like Des Barres’ groundbreaking I’m With the Band, is a keeper. In the end, we were all women who made a dream come true, that you could reach for a star and bed him; none of us seem traumatized or otherwise permanently debauched by the experience. Des Barres’ Take Another Little Piece of My Heart: A Groupie Grows Up (Chicago Review, $14.95) has also been released in paperback. This sequel to I’m With the Band was dishy and readable – her writing style is always chatty, witty, and conversational – but paled compared to IWTB.