“Now, when he stood with his forehead against the window or suddenly stopped on the third black tile, he made unexpected discoveries. He found out that those processes wrongly known as ‘monologues’ are really dialogues of a special kind; dialogues in which one partner remains silent while the other, against all grammatical rules, addresses him as ‘I’ instead of ‘you,’ in order to creep into his confidence and to fathom his intentions; but the silent partner just remains silent, shuns... Read more

BURN DOWN THE DISCO, HANG THE BLESSED DJ/BECAUSE THE MUSIC THEY CONSTANTLY PLAY… IT SAYS NOTHING TO ME ABOUT MY LIFE: Basic, but nice, series of posts from David Morrison about how little relevance “gay” and “ex-gay” labels have to actual existing Catholics with same-sex attraction. Read more

REVIEW OF BLANKETS that captures some of my problems with the book pretty well. You can find my review here. This review is a little too harsh. It makes several good points, but misses what struck me as (perhaps unintentionally?) sympathetic portrayals of Raina’s father and the narrator’s mother; and also misses the glimpses of Raina’s inner life that we do get in the book. Read more

ANG LEE, SHOOTING PROSE: Was talking with The Rat today about the “Hulk” movie and the reasons that, although it generally sucked, I was enthralled by its formal innovations. Everyone who saw the movie noticed two gaudy tricks the director, Ang Lee, pulled: comic-book-style panels within panels, dividing the screen into several different pictures; and bizarre dissolves rather than traditional cuts from scene to scene. Lee virtually never (by which I mean, twice) uses these tricks to actually enhance the... Read more

“WHERE DO YOU GET YOUR IDEAS?” One of the (several) points of contact between fiction and journalism is the way stories begin. When I was just starting to work on the Yale Free Press, I remember the editor-in-chief would point out various campus hijinks and ask, “So what’s our angle?” Every event on campus was a potential story. But the story wasn’t just “what happened”–that’s boring, and anyway, other people could do that better than we could. Our stories started... Read more

SHORT ATTENTION SPAN THEATER. So lately all I’ve been able to think about is fiction–reading it, writing it, figuring out how to write it better. I expect soon this energy will burn off and I’ll be back to the usual uneasy negotiation between time spent on fiction and time spent on journalism; but for now, I hope to exploit my current obsessions as much as possible. So expect more posts on the nature of fiction, form, and storytelling. And expect... Read more

THIS PREVIEW RATED R. THIS MOVIE NOT YET RATED. “‘All men and women are entrusted first with the task of crafting their own lives; in a certain sense they are to make of their life, a work of art, a masterpiece.’ (Letter to Artists 1999, JPII) “…If you had to describe your life up till now, would it be a masterpiece? “Would it be a reproduction or an original? “Would it be the kind of thing you would feel safe... Read more

THE FICTION BLOGOSPHERE: Besides my short story site, there’s also LeanLeft’s StoryPoint, which I found via Body and Soul. And Eugene Volokh has an odd little story here; alternate ending here. Read more

Blogwatch take a, blogwatch take a bow… Dappled Things: Homily for the Feast of the Queenship of Mary, a.k.a. my birthday. Sean Collins on manga and why it’s so popular here. Understanding Comics had a fascinating chart showing the differences in panel-to-panel transitions and use of time/space between manga and US-style comics, which made me want to read a lot more of the Japanese-style works; but I have to admit, I am both clueless and creeped out by the manga... Read more

“A ‘need,’ after all, is just a desire that’s had time to ferment.” —Reinventing Comics Read more