Two Or Three Things I'm Dying to Tell YouCultural Writing. "What was Orpheus dying to tell his wife, Eurydice? What was Judy dying to tell her beloved, Scottie, in Hitchcock's Vertigo? What were the previous one-night wives of King Shahrayar dying to tell Shahrazad? What was the Christian God "dying" to tell us? What were the faces of the candidates in the 2000 parliamentary election in Lebanon "dying" to tell voters and nonvoters alike? While writing (Vampires): An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film and Undying Love, or Love Dies, I, a mortal to death, was dying to tell these books' readers and myself about diegetic silence-over, which produces a dead stop and reveals the occasional natural immobilization of the living as merely a variety of movement; and an unreality that sometimes behaves in a filmic manner, inducing the undead to wonder: "Am I in a film?"; as well as a significant number of other anomalies"--Jalal Toufic. "Resurrection through simulation-an end time fantasy in real time. The graves open...the dead walk...Toufic is a sort of postructuralist spiritualist, a critical medium for the peculiar specters that haunt the society of the spectacle." Ben Lerner "Jalal Toufic is an amazing writer. He documents the moves of consciousness in a way that leads the reader ever deeper, from impasse to illusion to new impasse turning the trap of what can't be named' into a true paradise." Richard Forema" |
Contents
Saving Face | 9 |
Rear Window Vertigo | 38 |
The City of the Fellowship of Strangers | 59 |
Copyright | |
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Common terms and phrases
acrophobia Alfred Hitchcock Amsterdam André Bazin angel animal apartment Arab artists Âshûrâ asks Beirut Blood Spilled body Border Comedy buried Captain Wiles Carlotta Valdes culture David dead death discarded double feature dream dying to tell edition feel filmmaker flower François Truffaut Friedrich Nietzsche Gavin Elster gaze Gilles Deleuze Godard's hair happened Harîrî Harry Hitchcock's human interview Iraq Jalal Toufic Jeff Jesus Judy Barton killed King Shahrayâr Lebanese Lebanon Lisa living looks Lyn Hejinian Madeleine Madeleine's magical Marlowe messianic Midge mind Miss Miss Lonelyheart mother murder necklace never Nietzsche notwithstanding painting photograph portrait Press protagonist psychogenic fugue Rear Window Vertigo robot Saddâm San Francisco Saving Face scene Shahrazâd Sleep of Reason someone STEVEN SPIELBERG stories stranger things Thorwald thousand nights trans Trouble with Harry unconscious Vertigo voice voiceless waiting walking wife woman words write