The mountains were a thick molasses pouring slowly down the glass

[sovay]

I am honestly surprised that no one other than me, five minutes ago, in the shower, to spatch, has ever described radio drama as "black box theater of the mind."

Farah linked me to the glass art of Shayna Leib, thinking correctly that I would like it. Unaffordably, I covet much of her Wind & Water series.

Anthony Tao's "Coronavirus in China" is a very good poem.

Comments

[sovay]

then again, most of the stuff I listen to is sf/fantasy/horror, which has a long tradition of compensating for the weirdness of the subject with the ring-of-truth vibe you get from an epistolary or found-footage narrative.

Weird fiction especially has a long tradition of the documents in the case; those are honestly the antecedents I assumed for something like The Magnus Archives, not necessarily the frame-story of War of the Worlds.

[moon_custafer]

Yeah – I guess I was thinking of something like the original version of Homecoming, which I haven’t listened to but which apparently took the form of phone calls, answering-machine messages and recordings of therapy sessions, specifically so the audience wouldn’t wonder “how are we eavesdropping on these conversations?” while the tv version had no worries about showing us the events in fairly standard third-person PoV like you get on most tv shows (though it did use a lot of high-angle shots for that ominous rats-in-a-maze feel, and also played with aspect ratio as it jumped between the two time periods).

ETA, much later-- OK, so there *is* a podcast called Tales from Beyond the Pale that’s trying to be like Suspense, though the only one I’ve listened to was still mainly first-person narrative with a little bit of dialogue, as though the writers didn’t trust the audience to follow a conversation without being able to see the actors. Might be worth trying others for comparison, though—they’ve got some good guest stars: https://dangerousminds.net/comments/masters_of_horror_tales_from_beyond_the_pale_returns