July 2012
4 posts
5 tags
Cervantes on "Hysterical realism"
When James Wood penned that famous article where he coined the term hysterical realism (a catch-all phrase to describe —or perhaps circumscribe— the sprawling post-modern novel packed as it is with digressions, anecdotes, intertextual exegesis, social analyses, and so forth) I assumed that he had stumbled upon an original insight. He had found a way to say what we were all vaguely thinking and...
9 tags
Remarks on Geoff Dyer's "Zona"
Geoff Dyer asserts that the age at which a young man begins to truly discover literature and film is between the late teens and early twenties. In Zona, his excursion through his personal tastes and education as constellated around Tarkovsky’s Stalker, he describes a journey and life that is rich, rewarding, and completely foreign to me.
My late teens and early-to-mid twenties were a...
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“Adam Mars-Jones remarks: ‘Amis doesn’t so much inhabit his characters as leave...”
– A comment in a London Review of Books review of Martin Amis’ “Lionel Asbo”
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A short note on Béla Tarr and Tarkovsky, and...
I find it impossible to seprate Tarr from Tarkovsky. To my mind their work is intertwined in a deep way that I hope to one day understand better. The idea that “Tarr does not believe in God” 1 is worth contrasting with what Geoff Dyer (Zona) says about Tarkovsky,
Now, one might want to ignore the Orthodox Christian aspect of Tarkovsky but it’s unignorable—unignorable but, at...
