Criticism-in-finity!
Posted in Reviews on Sep 21st, 2010
I recently read an essay on hunting. The author, struggling in a virile attempt to convey the precise feeling of having a young buck held tightly in one’s scope, compared the act of pulling the trigger to orgasm. There was the tension—nervous hand on stiff trigger—and then the pervasive calm that overtook his body once [...]
Posted in Reviews on Sep 16th, 2010
Far be it for me to refudiate how folks speak, but it’s the non-expression of the phrase that’s troubling. It exists only as tart acquiescence. Consider the face of its speaker—one with the look of lemon seed in his mouth. For my money, I’m fucking over this is just as lyrical, and more honest in [...]
Posted in Reviews on Sep 14th, 2010
The opening shot establishes the double rainbow of the film’s title: Two arcs of light rise from a slope of mountain and slice their way off screen. The cinematography is shaky, shoddy, but not quite dizzying. More than anything, the camerawork feels naturalistic. Our narrator speaks from off-screen, as if via voiceover, delivering lines such [...]
Posted in Reviews on Sep 9th, 2010
There have always been places trodden by feet, then hooves, then wheels. At some point these paths become roads; they are paved and hardened; they become thoroughfare; they are named. Nowadays, paths weave a kind of carpet over the entire world. It’s almost impossible to leave them behind. Chances are, when we step from one [...]
Posted in Reviews on Sep 7th, 2010
Six weeks into my first semester, I’m struck by the language’s insistence on remaining poetic under all circumstances. Modifiers and interrogatives shift to match the gender and number of the nouns to which they’re wed, leaving you with a perpetual mouthful of lyricism. And then there are the silent letters, so many consonants tucked away at the ends of words, [...]
Posted in Reviews on Sep 1st, 2010
After you move to Tuscaloosa, Alabama you find your first encounters with Alabama Football are more like confrontations. If you are a creative writer from the West Coast, your first encounters with Alabama Football resemble the film ‘Taxi Driver’. You attempt to study at the library on Game Day and find your concentration pummeled by [...]