Friday, March 28, 2025
Early James† Reads Krysten Ritter*
"You are everywhere and nowhere.
You melt into the crowd. Swipe your boarding pass
over the small red laser beam and hear its reassuring beep.
You board the plane and take your first-class seat.
You lift into the air."
— Ritter, Krysten. Retreat: A Novel (p. 260).
HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
† "I've got this problem when I'm reading a book.
Know there's an ending, so I can't help but look."
* See this morning's Ritter post.
Thursday, March 27, 2025
Wednesday, January 29, 2025
Niche Worlds: Motley and Perplexed
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There is nothing more irritating to enthusiasts than when the mainstream tries to portray their niche world and gets it wrong. And The Brutalist gets an awful lot wrong. Just as Gladiator II recently vexed classicists with its inaccurate portrayal of the emperors and its anachronistic scenes of people reading the newspaper and drinking at cafes (neither of which, apparently, existed at the time), so too has director Brady Corbet riled the architecture world by playing fast and loose with his interpretation of brutalism, the Bauhaus, postwar immigration and the basic process of architecture itself.
— Oliver Wainwright in The Guardian, |
Chrysler Building Niche Worlds:
See also Alec Baldwin in "The Aviator" . . .
" 'There is a game of puzzles,' he resumed,
'which is played upon a map. One party playing
requires another to find a given word — the name
of town, river, state, or empire —
any word, in short, upon the motley and perplexed
surface of the chart.' " — Edgar Allan Poe
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