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Ars Poetica
Thursday April 10, 2008
At the beginning of the score of his Valses nobles et sentimentales, composer Maurice Ravel placed a dedication based a quote from Henri de Régnier: “le plaisir délicieux et toujours nouveau d’une occupation inutile” (to the delightful and always novel pleasure of a useless occupation).
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The Sight of Silence
Wednesday April 9, 2008
In a film without words (or more precisely, with only two minutes of them), it’s a tautology to say that the visual experience overwhelms all other cinematic considerations. If the cinematographer doesn’t do his job here, then the experience is no better than thumbing through a very long coffee table book. But after the first fifteen minutes of such an undertaking, it becomes apparent that there’s more at stake than just filming sights worth seeing....
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Upper Room Productions
Tuesday April 8, 2008
It was time to incorporate. Given the tax incentives to do so as a screenwriter, it was time to become a company of one. To be sure, the spiritual correlatives were not lost on me either, for which reason I had decided well in advance that when the time came to make it official, I would name my corporation Upper Room Productions. The double (or triple) entendre was something to chew on, for me at least.
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Beauty in the Cube
Monday April 7, 2008
My last Good Letters post lamented the surreal appetites and remedies of the bureaucratic hive, as well as that world’s great need for beauty. I may have left you wondering: if life in the L’Enfant Plaza Canyon is so dire, then why don’t I just ditch it? Aside from my lot as the family breadwinner, I stay on because....
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Housekeeping
Friday April 4, 2008
When my mother-in-law was a bride in 1968, she discovered that one of her new responsibilities was to iron my father-in-law’s army uniform. First she dipped the freshly-washed pants and shirt in a solution of water and starch. Not a can of Niagara, but the powdered kind in a box. She’d squeeze it, then roll the uniform in towels and chill it in the refrigerator for hours before she ever even got the ironing board.
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Current Issue
Issue 57
The sculpture of Richard Serra, Franz Wright on the Gospels, interview with Ron Hansen, fiction by Pinckney Benedict
Good Letters: The Image Blog
