Now we’re running just as fast as we can

Holding on to one another’s hands

Trying to blog away, into the watch,

When you put your arms around me and we tumble to the ground and then you say:

Old Oligarch: “Besides, you sick, wretched creature of the flesh filled with works-righteousness, the exploding drink is God’s mercy to you: By blowing off your lips, He teaches you to surrender your creatureliness.” In other words, the O.O. beats up on Karl Barth.

Unqualified Offerings: Superhero expressionism. I agree with this. Also agree that “people are as outlandish as they can afford to be.”

Sean Collins: “In a film theory class I took my sophomore year at Yale, one of the films on the syllabus was Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. … And when we began to discuss it, we naturally focused on the famous ‘Vertigo Shot’–that weird camera effect produced by simultaneously tracking back and zooming in, used in Vertigo to convey Scottie’s paralyzing fear of heights. …

“‘What’s going on in that shot?’ our professor asked. We weren’t really sure what she was after. I mean, there’s the technical trickery behind it, but other than that, isn’t it obvious? It’s a point-of-view shot that shows how scared Scottie is. ‘Is anyone here scared of heights?’ she then asked; I raised my hand, as did several others. ‘When you feel vertigo, is this what you see?’ Uhh, well, no, not exactly… ‘Of course not. When you are scared, your eyes don’t suddenly work differently. This image is impossible to see without a camera. It doesn’t and can’t represent anything in nature. And yet you all knew exactly what it was supposed to represent–the terror of vertigo.’ And what’s more, she went on to argue, it represents the spiraling chaos of Scottie’s life (connected as it is to the ever-present spiral motif of the film’s mise-en-scene), and his fixation on a point (the zoom/Madeleine) and his inability to actually reach that point (the track-back), and indeed by its very impossibility suggests the fundamental wrongness of Scottie’s life.

“All that meaning, all that power, would have been lost if Hitchcock had eschewed spectacle for realism.”

I have nothing to add to that except, YES. PREACH!

Yankee or Dixie? quiz. I seem to recall scoring “barely Yankee.” (Yup–41%. My answers were an apparently random mix of Northeastern, Midwestern, and Southeastern, which, you know, sounds about right.) And here’s a dialect survey that looks super-interesting and useful. I’m working on a story where the protagonists hail from New York City and North Dakota–thus nobody in the story has my actual accent and speaking patterns–so I’m going to be spending quite a lot of time on the second site. …A few months ago, I heard two girls speaking the way I (think I) speak, which is really rare. I of course turned around to watch them. They were the only white girls in an almost entirely black class of maybe sixth- or seventh-graders. So that’s it!

…I think we’re alone now…