After a few mornings of respite, we're back below zero again. This winter is wearing me down. The hours feel thinned and worn, like old towels or the skin of hands. The sun mocks and prevaricates: longer days, yes, but no heat and precious little beaming.

However, I am still reading books. There is that. One of those books is Michael Aronson's Nickelodeon City: Pittsburgh at the Movies, 1905-1929. The book is disappointingly dry, but one chapter, "The Morals of the Movies," does include the complete 1914 version of the Standards of the State of Pennsylvania Board of Censors, which offers up such gems as these:

Scenes showing the modus operandi of criminals which are suggestive and incite to evil action, such as murder, poisoning, house-breaking, safe-robbery, pocket-picking, the lighting and throwing of bombs, the use of ether, chloroform, etc., to render men and women unconscious, binding and gagging, will be disapproved. 

Vulgarities of a gross kind, such as often appear in slapstick and other screen comedies, will be disapproved. Comedy which burlesques morgues, funerals, hospitals, insane asylums, the lying-in of women and houses of ill-fame, will be disapproved. 

Bathing scenes, which pass the limits of propriety, lewd and immodest dancing, the needless exhibition of women in their night dresses or underclothing, will be disapproved. 

That the theme or story of a picture is adapted from a publication, whether classical or not, . . . is not a sufficient reason for . . . approval.

The conclusion I have drawn: Do not, under any circumstances, dare to make a movie based on Oliver Twist.

Also, yet another remark from Margaret Drabble's The Middle Ground has jumped off the page and bitten me. I think I will make this my motto for the rest of the winter. Perhaps you would like to borrow it as well.

You can only be one person, not a sum or cross-section of many, and if other people don't like what you do, or think you ought to do something different, they can GO OFF and DO IT THEMSELVES.