“The detective is a true son of the murderer Oedipus, not only because he solves a riddle, but also because he kills the man to whom he owes his title, without whom he would not exist in that capacity (without crimes, without mysterious crimes, what would he be?) because this murder was foretold for him [...]
December 27th, 2008
Categories: Literature, The Everyday
The Infinitesimal Novel
Lindon asked me, one day, if I knew what this new literary movement could be called. Back then, I had dodged the question, but now, eighteen years later, I think I can answer it. It took me quite some time, about twenty years of reflection, but I found the answer. The answer is in the [...]
October 19th, 2008
Categories: Literature, The Everyday
Quotidian mystery
All these are but memories that delude and inflame, all are desires of the night, but Georgette had understood that, to be beautiful and desired, she must identify herself with the night, with the quotidian mystery.
Soupault, Philippe. Translated by William Carlos Williams. Last Nights of Paris. Exact Change, 1992. p.50. (my emphasis)
Bonus quote:
…for some, those [...]
October 8th, 2008
More constraint presentation follow-up
Issac asked for clickable links, so I’ve added links to all the works I cited (or used) in my presentation to the post that has the audio version. I’ll also add, that Mike Wenthe made my day in his post where he refers to me as “cartoonist, critic, and comics theorist”.
Issac also commented:
It’d be interesting [...]
September 1st, 2008
Categories: Literature, The Everyday
Toussaint at the Quarterly Conversation
The latest Quarterly Conversation has an interview with Belgian novelist Jean-Philippe Toussaint, who happens to be one of my favorite contemporary authors (though I seem to have only posted about him once):
MR: Critics comment on your interest in the minutiae of daily experience. Do you feel that you have a particular interest in minutiae?
JPT: What [...]
August 28th, 2008
Categories: Literature
Rereading Kawabata
The publication histories of both A Thousand Cranes and Sound of the Mountain resemble the erratic, scattered pattern Kawabata set with Snow Country, though they do not stretch over as long a period of time or undergo as many major revisions. But the technique of evolving narration–with one segment suggesting, through the “remnant of feeling” [...]
August 22nd, 2008
Categories: Literature
Love in the Western World
My wife recently rearranged a large portion of our books so that they are on shelves by color. It’s not the best system for finding a specific book (granted, I’ve had some of these books long enough that I do know off the top of my head what color many of them are), but by [...]
September 5th, 2007
Categories: Literature
Kundera on Theme Words
A theme is an existential inquiry. And increasingly I realize that such an inquiry is, finally, the examination of certain words, theme-words. Which leads me to emphasize: a novel is based primarily on certain fundamental words. It is like Schoenberg’s “tone-row.” In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, the “row” goes: forgetting, laughter, angels, litost, [...]
June 4th, 2007
Categories: Literature
The Last Novel by David Markson
The latest issue of the excellent online lit journal The Quarterly Conversation is now up for your reading enjoyment and edification. Among other interviews, articles, and reviews it includes my review of David Markson’s The Last Novel. Markson is one of my favorite authors, and for some reason this is the first time I’ve written [...]
May 7th, 2007
Categories: Comics, Literature
Nonplot-Based Narrative Ordering
Most readers when they think of the way a narrative (novel, comic, tv show) is ordered will think about plot: what Brian Richardson, in his “Beyond the Poetics of Plot: Alternative Forms of Narrative Progression and the Multiple Trajectories of Ulysses,” describes as “a teleological sequence of events linked by some principle of causation; that [...]