[This post began as a response to some comments made by Douglas Storm on Amber's most recent post.] The name “Viktor Shklovsky” comes up a lot at this site (I’m guilty of mentioning it in perhaps half of my posts), and one might wonder why the man and his work matters. Below, I’ll try and [...]
Posts Tagged ‘Viktor Shklovsky’
Books lost between California and England. (Also on Head-On, Birol Ünel, blood, Pierre Loti, Lea Salonga, appendicitis in Paris, flirtations, transoceanic accents, impossible eulogies, Patroclus and Achilles, lost things, holes, giving yourself up.)
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged achilles, Anne Carson, birol ünel, fatih akin, gegen die wand, happy together, hôpital cochin, hôtel-dieu, head-on, Homer, Irma Vep, kim hyesoon, lea salonga, librairie galignani, madame butterfly, maggie cheung, masha tupitsyn, mfk fisher, miss saigon, mulan, nathalie richard, olivier assayas, patroclus, pierre loti, rachel bespaloff, rilke, sappho, sibel kekilli, simone weil, the iliad, tony leung, Viktor Shklovsky, wong kar-wai on June 16, 2011 | 15 Comments »
Nearly two years ago, when I moved to England from California, I had a box of books shipped over from California to England. The box was full of books, some of which were my most beloved books, and some of which were books I needed to finish the novel I was writing. At the same [...]
Food as Device
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Art as Device, enstrangement, Fresh Air, Grant Achatz, Terry Gross, Theory of Prose, Viktor Shklovsky on March 4, 2011 | 2 Comments »
Anybody who knows me knows this passage. I am constantly quoting it: [H]eld accountable for nothing, life fades into nothingness. Automatization eats away at things, at clothes, at furniture, at our wives, at our fear of war. […] And so, in order to return sensation to our limbs, in order to make us feel objects, [...]
What’s So New about the New Sentence?
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Bob Perelman, Bruce Andrews, Carla Harryman, Charles Bernstein, David Franks, Fenton Johnson, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, Language poetry, Lyn Hejinian, My Life, parataxis, Paul Sharits, Ron Silliman, Steve Katz, The New Sentence, Viktor Shklovsky, Yuriy Tarnawsky on December 19, 2010 | 10 Comments »
The new sentence, like all other “new” phenomena and movements (the New Criticism, the New Novel, the New Narrative, dozens of New Wave movements in film and music) keeps getting older and older—it is, in fact, roughly as old as I am, if you date it from 1977. Such is the danger of naming anything [...]
Scott Pilgrim vs. Inception for the Future of the Cinematic Imagination
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Amélie, Art as Device, Christopher Nolan, Edgar Wright, Inception, Plumtree, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, The Princess Bride, Viktor Shklovsky on August 26, 2010 | 19 Comments »
Since I wrote this critique of Inception, one question more than a few have asked me is: “What could Nolan have done differently?” Which is one way of asking: “What could he have done that you would have liked?” At first my response was along the lines of, “Well, not doing the things he did”—but [...]
Art as Device, and Device (When it Works) as Miracle (or, The Princess Bride vs. Inception)
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Art as Device, Billy Crystal, Christopher Nolan, Ellen Page, Inception, Joshua Gordon-Levitt, Mandy Patinkin, Peter Falk, Rob Reiner, The Princess Bride, Viktor Shklovsky, William Goldman on August 20, 2010 | 14 Comments »
In my recent criticism of Inception, I took Mr. Nolan to task for his inelegant use of screenwriting devices, such as his endless reliance on (often irrelevant) exposition. Some took objection to this. (See the comment thread here, also.) To clarify: the problem is not the device, but the clumsy, bare-boned way in which it’s [...]
Reading Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, part 6
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged apocalypse, Batman, Batman XXX, Corto Maltese, Frank Kermode, Frank Miller, Lynn Varley, nuclear winter, Superman, The Dark Knight Returns, The Sense of an Ending, Theory of Prose, Viktor Shklovsky, Vivid Entertainment on June 28, 2010 | 14 Comments »
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 7 | Part 8 Greetings again after much too long a while. Since the last installment in this series, the new pornographers at Vivid have announced, written, shot, and released Batman XXX: A Porn Parody, so it’s well past [...]
Experimental Fiction as Genre and as Principle
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Andy Warhol, Bruce Conner, Bubsy Berkeley, Carolee Schneemann, Christopher Higgs, Edwin S. Porter, Ernie Gehr, experimental fiction, experimental film, Harry Smith, Hollis Frampton, Howard Hawks, Jack Smith, James Sibley Watson, Jonas Mekas, Joseph Cornell, Kenneth Anger, La Gioconda, Lescaux, Lois Weber, Mary Ellen Bute, Maya Deren, Melville Webber, Michael Snow, Nathaniel Dorsky, P. Adams Sitney, Paul Sharits, Robert Flaherty, Roundhay Garden Scene, Shirley Clarke, Stan Brakhage, The Night of the Hunter, The Spectator, Theodor Adorno, Viktor Shklovsky, Yoko Ono on February 3, 2010 | 56 Comments »
Christopher Higgs at HTMLGIANT recently posted this question: “If you were teaching a class on American experimental fiction, what texts would you choose, and why?” He went on to list a set of possible books for an “Introduction to American Experimental Fiction” course: Ishmael Reed – Mumbo Jumbo William S. Burroughs – The Soft Machine [...]
Art’s Morality (A Reading of William H. Gass’s “The Artist and Society”)
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Animal Farm, Bruegel, Dia Beacon, Fiction and the Figures of Life, formalism, George Orwell, John Gardner, Kleenex/LiLiPUT, Minimalism, morality, Nineteen Eighty-Four, ostranenie, The Artist and Society, The Return of the Hunters, Viktor Shklovsky, William H. Gass on February 2, 2010 | 21 Comments »
Formalists are often accused of ignoring art’s morality, as well as its other social aspects. (Of course, artists are often faced with the same accusation—hence the logic by which legislators divert money toward math and the sciences. Whatever strange thing it is that the artist contributes to the culture, it is at best of secondary [...]
Tiny Shocks: Uncovering the Reductive Plot of James Wood’s How Fiction Works
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Ann Quin, B.S. Johnson, Breathless (1960), Breathless (1983), Chekhov, Cthulhu, Curtis White, Flaubert, G.I. Joe, Hamlet, Henry James, How Fiction Works, James Wood, Jean Luc Godard, Jean-François Lyotard, John Gardner, John Ruskin, Last Tango in Paris, Les Carabiniers, Madame Bovary, Nabokov, ostranenie (enstrangement), Saul Bellow, The 400 Blows, The Concept of Character in Fiction, The Middle Mind, Theodore Adorno, Theory of Prose, Three Blondes and Death, Tripticks, Viktor Shklovsky, Watchmen, William H. Gass, Yuriy Tarnawsky on January 31, 2010 | 40 Comments »
On January 22, I read Shya Scanlon’s post “The Dull King”; on January 25 I read his second post “Cover Your Tracks.” Both were about reading James Wood’s How Fiction Works. Before that I’d heard of James Wood but hadn’t read anything by him; I knew some people liked him and some didn’t like him. [...]
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