February 2011
“Our personality is precisely that: the continuous melody of our inner life.”
– Henri Bergson (1946)
I Shall Be Released (Bob Dylan cover) - The Los...
“there isn’t enough of anything
as long as we live. But at intervals
a...”
– Raymond Carver
a bright wall in a dark room.: True Grit (2010) →
brightwalldarkroom:
THE WORLD ITSELF IS VEXING ENOUGH
by Edward Montgomery
Let’s begin with Anthony Lane, of The New Yorker, and his somewhat famous discerning criteria for movies: the 6 o’clock movie and the 9 o’clock movie. Lane writes:
As a rough rule, cinema can be sundered into two halves: six…
It’s my birthday today. I got to sleep in for the first time in months (years?). My wife made an ice cream cake from scratch. I get to spend the day with the best 4 year old and the best 19 month old in the whole entire world. Life is good, sometimes.
Mashable Officially Outs Me as the Director of Toy... →
chriscantwell:
I will milk this until the day I die.
And you should! After all, writing for BWDR don’t pay the bills. :)
What do you think is uniquely magical about fiction?
David Foster Wallace: Oh, Lordy, that could take a whole day! Well, the first line of attack for that question is that there is this existential loneliness in the real world. I don’t know what you’re thinking or what it’s like inside you and you don’t know what it’s like inside me. In fiction I think we can leap...
a bright wall in a dark room.: The Conversation... →
brightwalldarkroom:
FOR YOUR OWN SAKE, DON’T GET INVOLVED ANY FURTHER
by Chad P.
It starts with a camera’s dazzling longshot from high above, a slow telephoto zoom that begins with a crowd and winds up with a person - or, rather, the back of a person’s head. Harry Caul (Gene Hackman), supposed…
Something I wrote, up now at BWDR…
“Try to understand men. If you understand each other you will be kind to each...”
– John Steinbeck
“Love is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise. If love were only a...”
– Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving
“If you value your relationships with your children, you can’t write about them....”
– Louise Erdich
Pitchfork interviews Will Sheff about the new... →
Pitchfork: The title of the album sounds like a very personal statement— what does it mean?
WS: It’s not about me at all. The funny thing is, when you finish a record, the interview process happens— and by the end of it you’ve been interrogated about every little minute detail and the mystery starts to disappear. It becomes an autopsy. All of my past records now look like a piles of guts...
Endnotes: David Foster Wallace (BBC Radio) →
This sounds like it will be entirely wonderful (gonna listen tonight!), but it’s only available for six more days…so if you’re going to listen, listen soon!
“This Sunday Feature is presented by Professor Geoff Ward, author of a literary history of America. He, like many, was convinced Wallace would be the preeminent American writer to reckon with in the years ahead, and...
mythologyofblue asked: If you could choose any one book you could have written, which book would it have been? (pick any published work in the history of the world)
davidquigg asked: You reblogged a link to the new Bright Eyes. Have you listened? What do you think of it?
“If you don’t believe in God, it may help to remember this great line of...”
– Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
It's important that you know the contents of...
I made this mix tape in September or October of 1991, when I was thirteen years old. It was done the old-fashioned pre-internet way, where you had to listen to the radio and try to catch when the songs were going to be on and then hit record just right so that you didn’t get too much of the DJ’s intro over the beginning of it (the very worst DJ’s, in my mind, were definitely...
“Whether we like it or not, we are the sum of our past. We haunt ourselves.”
– marginal gloss on Barry Lyndon (1975)
“Love loves to love love.”
– James Joyce, Ulysses
a bright wall in a dark room.: Stanley Kubrick... →
brightwalldarkroom:
ANGEL TRUMPETS AND DEVIL TROMBONES
by Karina Wolf
You’ll remember the gist of A Clockwork Orange from your compulsory high school reading: Alex (Malcolm McDowell), an aggressively mischievous youth, leads his gang of droogs (that’s Nasdat for mates) as they enact a series of…
Karina Wolf on A Clockwork Orange. Life is good.
Does Insight in Therapy Equal Happiness? (New York... →
It is practically an article of faith among many therapists that self-understanding is a prerequisite for a happy life. Insight, the thinking goes, will free you from your psychological hang-ups and promote well-being.
Perhaps, but recent experience makes me wonder whether insight is all it’s cracked up to be.
Not long ago, I saw a young man in his early 30s who was sad and anxious after being...
a bright wall in a dark room.: Stanley Kubrick... →
brightwalldarkroom:
WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT DOOMSDAY
by Michelle Said
It had been a long, tough day for Dimitri. Cold as usual. A blistering sort of cold that made you feel like your blood would freeze over just thinking about it. He was tired. So very tired. As premier of the Soviet Union, he…
Michelle is basically a genius.
“What’s impossible to communicate, what you can’t experience unless...”
– Darin Strauss, More Than It Hurts You 