December 2010
8 posts
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Questions about Fighting
One of the fundamentally false qualities of most narrative fiction -literary or cinematic- is its typically episodic structure. Because neither in prose nor in film can time be presented in its full, ceaseless fluidity, it is corralled into “scenes”; it is because we narrate our own lives according to such forms that we believe scenes exist, when in our lives there is no such thing, no...
5 tags
Questions about Fighting
One of the fundamentally false qualities of most narrative fiction -literary or cinematic- is its typically episodic structure. Because neither in prose nor in film can time be presented in its full, ceaseless fluidity, it is corralled into “scenes”; it is because we narrate our own lives according to such forms that we believe scenes exist, when in our lives there is no such thing, no...
2 tags
3 tags
“He noted with distaste his own trick of appealing for sympathy. A personality...”
– Saul Bellow in Herzog, quoted by American Roulette. Much of youth revolves around feeling ashamed of, burdened by, alienated from the unruly body: it does not do what one wants and needs it to do; it sabotages and humiliates; it is not one’s own, and it has an arsenal of idiocies with which...
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After the Delay
Her days started in the mute gray of early cold mornings and proceeded, to her eyes, dimly and dully through the gathering of dusk and into the darkness of night. Now and again, eating dinner on the laminate table in her little kitchen, she observed through the window above her steel sink a sunset that surprised her: if the sun was leaving, why hadn’t she seen it when it was there?
In the year...