castle of illusion |
the password... for the house? |
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Locus Online Reviews: Paul Witcover reviews The Secret History of Science Fiction
Don DeLillo is a writer that many in the SF community regard as “one of us,” or at any rate a second cousin once removed. And I wouldn’t dispute that; his novel Ratner’s Star shows a genuine affinity for science fictional ambience, and I think he’s had a strong and salutary influence on many speculative fiction writers, myself included. But his story here, “Human Moments in World War III” (1983), merely drapes itself in the trappings of science fiction, beginning with that vaguely Ballardian title. The story takes place in a space station on which two astronauts go through their routines as, below them, an apocalyptic war breaks out. But really, there is no central reason for the story to take place in space. It could just as well be set on a submarine, or in a nuclear missile silo. Even the war is secondary: or, rather, symbolic. DeLillo is following the second course set forth above: he’s made a trip to the Curiosity Shoppe. Perhaps that’s too harsh; what I mean is that DeLillo doesn’t take any of it literally; the settings in space and in the future are not important to him in themselves but only as vehicles to transmit that certain feeling of anomie and absurd estrangement so central to all his work. This is true of Ballard as well. But here’s the difference. For DeLillo, the present is like something out of science fiction. For Ballard, the present already is science fiction, only most of us don’t recognize it yet. For DeLillo, it’s a simile. For Ballard, reality.
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The History of Stanley Kubrick's Never-Made Mega-Epic, 'Napoleon' -- New York Magazine
That obsession is laid out in staggering grandeur in Taschen’s new 23-pound tome Stanley Kubrick’s Napoleon: The Greatest Movie Never Made—a book as epic (indeed, it nearly is a coffee table) as Kubrick’s stillborn film, with a price ($700) to match. You have to see it to believe it, which is appropriate when you consider Kubrick’s obsession. “Stanley was besotted with this story,” says Jan Harlan, Kubrick’s brother-in-law and producer during the latter part of his career. “He was a political beast and fascinated with human folly and vanity. Napoleon was the perfect study object for that.”
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"I overheard the writer Geoffrey Wolff say “No cheap tricks” to a group of writing students. (…) I’d amend it a little to “No tricks.” Period. I hate tricks. At the first sign of a trick or a gimmick in a piece of fiction, a cheap trick or even an elaborate trick, I tend to look for cover. Tricks are ultimately boring, and I get bored easily, which may go along with my not having much of an attention span. But extremely clever chichi writing, or just plain tomfoolery writing, puts me to sleep. Writers don’t need tricks or gimmicks or even necessarily need to be the smartest fellows on the block. At the risk of appearing foolish, a writer sometimes needs to be able to just stand and gape at this or that thing—a sunset or an old shoe—in absolute and simple amazement."
Raymond Carver, “On Writing”
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"Não tenho lido o que se escreve sobre o filme porque… Porque de maneira geral não leio mesmo o que os outros escrevem. Sorry, mas não tenho interesse em saber o que pensam meus colegas (…)"
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"For me, impossible not to vote for JG Ballard’s Complete Stories (WW Norton) – I agreed to write about it for my hometown newspaper, thinking I could bat something out on my teenage recollection of Ballard’s greatness, but decided to crack the book open and soon found myself swallowed inside. Reading the entire volume in sequence, as I did, two or three stories a night for most of July and August, became a kind of mind-meld, and Ballard’s complete tales revealed themselves to me not only as a great, obsessive fictional voyage, but an epic covert autobiography of the writer behind them."
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The Avengers
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notes"Modernism brings out the dark drives that slumber in us. It reserves no place for the unexplainable or the mysterious – and for precisely that reason causes a return to barbarism. We need mystery, that little bit of poetry. Seeing everything makes you sad."
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Two-toned shoes as harbingers of sociopathy: Farley Granger & Robert Walker in Strangers on a Train (1951, dir. Alfred Hitchcock)
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“Art essentially has nothing to do with morality, convention or moralizing. I find the public passion for justice quite boring and artificial, for...
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“If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.”
— George Orwell, 1984 -
“Why is it a surprise to find that people other than ourselves are able to tell lies?”
— Alice Munro, Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You -
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In his droll 1989 book Making Meaning, the American scholar David Bordwell makes fun of a standard procedure in discussing film. Let us take...
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Still via Vampyr (1932, dir. Carl Theodor Dreyer)
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