It’s time to do the unthinkable again
Or not, if we haven’t thought it yet.
Category: Writing
The Innocents
The Innocents (1961) goes well beyond the original source material. This is not merely a case of sexual repression. It is sexual projection, a mapping of desire and repulsion onto the possession delusion made concrete and real. A desire so powerful it broke through the surface of reality. A hideous self-loathing becomes entwined by a foreboding religious terror. She is tormented by the very demons which possess and consume her. She is nightly ravished by her tormented dreams. The paranoid mind must seek out clues from the barest of facts drawing the most far reaching assumptions, weaving out of whole cloth the unholy presence of this sickness. The explanation becomes its expiation. She seeks out in Ms. Grose an ally for her paranoid delusion. Every minor detail must be made to conform; every behavior that deviates in the slightest manner is evidence of a foul crime. Capote is at his masterful best and Clayton’s pacing and direction are chilling. The use of deep focus, a somewhat lost art form, and minimalist lighting force us to endure the unrelenting grip of her self-possession.
Writers Right
I write so little and think even less. By what right do I consider myself a writer? An arrogance based upon an old dream. I’m not even sure the original dream was mine but my mother’s.
Exhausted
55 feels a bit too long, no? Where do we go from here? Nowhere. Back to the womb. The eternal reoccurrence of all events. A mathematical certainty: the Poincaré recurrence theorem. Replay the same game. No Nietzschean heroism needed. It wasn’t terrible. It was just never terrific without someone to love.
The Connection
“If you fail to feel the pain of others, you do not deserve the name of man.” – Saadi Shirazi, translated words of Bani Adam inscribed at entrance to UN headquarters.
Time
“Physics does not describe how things evolve “in time” but how things evolve in their own times, and how “times” evolve relative to each other.” – Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time
Baptism Through Drowning
Ah, the Purgists are back, though in truth, they never really leave us. It’s not even a sane argument but the dark brooding of a psychopath’s wet dream, a psychotic belief that Utopia must come at the cost of inflicting a massive amount of human suffering, degradation, and punishment. Sin, after all, must be purged, and what is more sinful than modern civilization? Of course, the suffering must be born by others, the masses, never by themselves, safe behind their ivory towers. Too many people in charge of too many things think like this. If we could purge this parasitic form of thinking from the souls of men, how much better off would we have been as a species? How many wars and injustices would have been averted, how fewer drops of innocent blood would have been spared?
Parasites Paradise
7 Signs that Parasites are Living Inside You and Using your Credit Card to make Unauthorized Purchases
Ray Carney on Cassavetes
“In Cassavetes’ work, personality is plot; behavior is narrative. Living does not involve doing anything but being something – a much harder task for both a character and a viewer to deal with.”
Cassavetes
“Other films depend on a shorthand, a shorthand for living. You recognize certain incidents and you go with them. People prefer that you condense; they find it quite natural for life to be condensed in films. They prefer that because they can catch onto the meanings and keep ahead of the movie. But that’s boring. I won’t make shorthand films. In my films there’s a competition with the audience to keep ahead of them. I want to break their patterns. I want to shake them up and get them out of those quick, manufactured truths.”
The Hack 