writing

A scene is not life. A scene is an orderly storytelling unit, set off by the filmic narrator or the editors, the person in charge of structuring the montage. So that while it might seem like life, it is actually highly ordered, designed to elicit a particular response or to achieve some greater narrative end. The arbitrariness that gives the sense... See more

I think in part because we are so accustomed to receiving life through the mediation of a screen. What these writers are writing is not life. They are writing a mediation of life in stock moves and maneuvers they have gotten from somewhere else without fully understanding them. How else does one arrive at the notion to write in first-person without... See more

The deracinated I is a filmic projection, dancing on cinema’s halogenic glow, but lacking the charisma and poetic force of cinema qua cinema. The first-person narrator without interiority, subtext, and indeed the very capacity for thought or judgement is the purest expression of the passivity that organizes much of contemporary life. This passivity... See more

I’ve started to suspect that what’s going on with Cusk and other unknowing imitators of Sebald via the Cusk pathway is really postmodernism wearing autofiction drag to a realism costume party.

“casting tape fiction,” which is really just first-person narration evacuated of interiority and dramatic context. A kind of consequence of misguided cinematization that I blame on reality TV, tbh. Though, looking back over it, it kind of reminds me of the “hyperreal.”

style is always an external manifestation of a disposition toward life. It seems unfair that what we so often focus on that external aspect without showing equal consideration to that vast inner terrain that gives shape to the external aspect.

And when it comes to the work of writing—which is also the work of thinking, reading, and living—I’ll say this. As a human being, intellectual discovery and gratification are your birthright. Nothing is more worthy, and more self-actualizing, than taking your interests seriously and pursuing them as far as you can go.

I now find first-person narrators so mediated that they even mediate their own experience of reality and consciousness back to themselves. You see it again and again, first-person fiction written as though it is third-person, external to the person narrating it.