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mary jane austen's avatar

re: challengers, if i, noted homosexual, could face my sports related trauma, our gracious host should not deny himself the pleasure of seeing, through Luca’s queerwashing lens, zendaya serving pure c**t.

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Henry Begler's avatar

Thanks, just Henry will do nicely! (Though 'Brother Begler' has a nice ring to it). You're totally right about plot, though I think in Bellow's case the plot is often there, it just happens to be in illustrating the movement of the soul from one state to another. By the end of Herzog you feel like you've been on a comparable journey to Pierre's in War and Peace, it just happens to have taken place in some very quotidian interactions. Where Amis fails is that by the end of The Information at least, I didn't feel as if I were in a very different place from where I started, for all the fireworks in between.

Re your footnote's footnote: I'm surprised I haven't seen much talk about Queer in the public sphere: maybe Challengers exhausted all the discourse (also, I expect better than sportsballisms from you! -- pro tennis at its height is the supreme clash of wills, like watching an hours-long dissection of someone's soul in public -- DFW for all his faults knew this).

Anyway it's a rather awkward marriage between, if you'll permit some broad white ethnic stereotyping, Luca's operatic sad boy passion vs the icy, categorizing WASP sensibilities of Burroughs, who only hints at the melancholy soul within after you've read pages and pages of pretty sick stuff. But it has stuck with me, there is some unforgettable imagery, like Death In Venice meets Altered States, and Daniel Craig, who initially seems so wrong, gives a strange, sweaty, speed-addled performance. Burroughs was a very important writer for me and I expect he will be back on trend at some point but it hasn't happened yet. I think he's a victim of his last period of prominence having been being big in the 2005-2014 or so Mark Fisher-JG Ballard-"we're surrounded by the totalizing machines of capital" circles, which is a valid reading of his work I suppose but misses the pain and loneliness and utopian longing that you find in something as superficially shocking as Cities of the Red Night.

There's also another instance of high Mediterranean passion in theaters that also seems to have passed by the critics: Maria, the Angelina Jolie last-days-of-Maria Callas biopic. Another strange film anchored by a strange performance, though Jolie is barred out rather than sped up. In both cases, I spent the first 30 minutes in profound skepticism -- in Maria's case I was convinced I was witnessing a disaster, one of the worst movies and performances I've ever seen in a theater -- but by the end of both films I found myself quite moved. Although burying Maria on Netflix is a huge disservice, I expect half my reaction just came from hearing Callas's voice through some big theater speakers. I think there's lots to chew on in both, if you get around to them I hope to hear your thoughts!

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