Category: bookish

was paging through a few-months-old notebook and stumbled on this, which I’d copied down from Antonia Quirke’s bfi book on JAWS. brilliant, brilliant stuff:

There are two types of monsters. The first is our incarnation of fear. King Kong, Dracula, Godzilla. The other, of which the first sharkless hour of Jaws is a supreme example, is the inflection of the whole landscape with fear. Virus horrors, the Maryland woods of the Blair Witch, Hanging Rock. In the first

So, yeah, I’m on a desert island, can only have ten books. A strange, impractical set-up—that the dungeon master here can assume I’d grab a round number of books instead of a two-way radio or a knife—but so be it. I’m there. I can only have ten books. Which is a lot like punishment, but, too, is a lot better than just nine books. Here goes:

1.Don Quixote. Not because it’s a classic and not because it’s on the required reading lists and not because it was the first real no…

Or, really, just all of R.M. Berry’s stuff. It starts with Plane Geometry and Other Affairs of the Heart, ramps up to Leonardo’s Horse, then hits with The Dictionary of Modern Anguish. Each brilliant. His short story “Metempsychosis” has been, along with VALIS and COL49 [The Crying of Lot 49], probably the most influential, for me. In the sense of this is a thing I’m always trying to pull off, each time I sit down to write.

Frank, as Chiasmus Pre…