Friday, December 15, 2006

Absent

http://absentmag.org/

Here's an interesting journal by Simon DeDeo, who also runs the Rhubarb blogspot. It's in the mold of Typo and Octopus. There are a couple of essays worth reading.

In fact I wanted to write a reply to one of them and to Josh Corey's discovery of the reductiveness of the paradigm of immersion vs estrangement, but I've been incredibly sick over the past week and now I am working on putting the final touches on my Henry Parland manuscript for Ugly Duckling and my New Quarantine manuscript for Apostrophe Books.

I'm going through A New Quarantine and I am actually shocked at how violent it is.

At first I thought about ways to tone it down, but really it's at the core of the whole book so I would have to write a new book if I wanted to get away from the violence.

I blame it on Hitchcock. As part of my dad's plan to make me into a film director, I had watched a significant share of Hitcock's total artistic output (that's a lot of viewing, if you include TV shows etc) by the time I was six or seven.

My favorite one I haven't seen anywhere since. There's a guy in bed but he can't get out because there's a snake in his pajamas (I'm not making this up!). So all these doctors gather around and give him tons of shots etc. Finally it's time for him to make a break for it. He gets ups and (exclammation point) there is no snake in his pajamas. While the doctors file out of the room, the pajama-guy and his best friend toast with champagne. BUT: a closeup of a snake whirling out from beneath the pillow. Full of joyful celebration and champagne, the friend leans back on the bed and gets struck by the snake. Choking he tells the pajama-guy: "Go get the doctors! I'm dying!" But the pajama guy (in a very Strindbergian fashion) says: "No, you deserve this. You wanted the snake to bite me all along." Or somethign like that. Has anybody else seen this film?

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