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You're hell-bent on trying to scare me off this thing, aren't you?
I was woken this morning by a phone call from Istanbul. I can say with perfect accuracy that's never happened to me before.
(The connection was terrible, so B. hung up and sent me a text message instead to explain that he'd just been to the Aya Sofya and thought of me and I was flattered and went back to sleep, but it was still one of the more randomly awesome ways I've had a day begin.)
I am slightly disappointed that on either side of this interruption, I dreamed nothing weirder than agreeing to marry a friend for political reasons and trying to get directions out of a city made almost entirely of rusted girders and new construction with something about bartering oranges for a place to sleep, because I spent the previous evening at the Brattle Theatre, watching the first night of their H.P. Lovecraft Birthday Tribute—the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society's The Whisperer in Darkness (2011) was having its Boston premiere, with The Call of Cthulhu (2005) screening first as a short. At the very least, I should have woken up screaming.
Despite giving my brother a DVD of this very same film for Hanukkah a few years ago, I had never actually seen the HPLHS' The Call of Cthulhu until last night. I'd tried in October; circumstances had interfered. I think this was the right way to do it. It's a faithful translation of the story to silent film circa 1927, a risky and rewarding conceit—it's very difficult to reproduce an earlier art form without parodying it and the heightened emotional atmosphere of the story on top of the dramatic exaggerations of silent film could have come off as silly or tongue-in-cheek at least; instead, they play everything as straight as the obvious influences of Lang and Murnau allow and the results are actually forty-seven minutes of film that feel, if not quite like the recovery of an artifact Lovecraft himself might have encountered some evening at Fay's Theatre, pretty damn close. Visually, it is intensely and consciously expressionist, which helps a great deal with the non-Euclidean geometry of risen R'lyeh. The plot adds a frame-story in an asylum à la Caligari but otherwise follows the original text almost scene-by-scene, dramatizing each new document as the narrator's puzzle-quest through his great-uncle's papers falls back in time from present-day Providence to New Orleans in 1908 before catching up horribly to the last few years again. (There is even a very brief flashback to the coast of Greenland in 1860, although I think it is mostly played by papier-mâché.) The special effects are minimal and almost strictly within the bounds of what would have been technologically possible in the late silent era. When great Cthulhu rises, he's stop-motion. I do not think it ever frightened me, but I did find myself smiling in sheer joy of some of the set-pieces, which for a project of this nature may be even better. There are echoes of Freder's vision of Moloch in Henry Wilcox's nightmares of R'lyeh, staggering before the skewed angles of structures that don't for one second convince us of their stonework, making them all the more effectively wrong. When the narrator begins to dream of the same city, he finds the cyclopean streets through which he wanders composed of the contents of his uncle's file on the "Cthulhu cult," like Angus McBean's portraits of Emlyn Williams or Robert Helpmann, only not whimsical: newspaper clippings blurring into masonry underfoot, huge books overhanging. The rare moment of humor reminds us we're (so much the worse for us) in the real world, not some stacked deck of doom and gloom: the narrator finds himself reproved by a tsk-tsking curator when he tries to walk out of the Australian Museum with Johansen's idol. And in true silent fashion, the actors have all been cast with an eye to faces. Henry Wilcox could have been a juvenile lead with his soft dark lashes and handsomely sulky mouth; the captain of the doomed Emma has a genuinely aquiline profile, nostrils flaring between his watch cap and his peacoat's turned-up collar. We don't need to hear them to know exactly how they would sound if they spoke.
So it makes natural enough sense that the filmmakers should move on to the sound era for their feature film, as if Lovecraft might have caught a showing on one of the nights he wasn't waiting to see Berkeley Square (1933). I wrote to Rob afterward, "With any luck, The Whisperer in Darkness will show at the 'Thon. Wax cylinders, vintage trains, sweater vests, radio accents, biplanes, a mysterious man by the name of Noyes . . . It is a film I would like very much to have seen with you, and so may yet. One decision near the end threw me completely out of the conceit that it was filmed in the 1930's, but it was otherwise an extremely impressive adaptation, invented third act included." And I find myself reluctant to discuss the plot much past that point, unless anyone wants to open up a spoiler thread in the comments, because the third act seems so precisely what a film of the time would have extended the story into and that one twist seems so precisely not that it's created a weird sort of cognitive dissonance in my assessment of the movie—it ends exactly where it needs to, which works as well for 1927 as 2012, but I'm not sure about how it gets there for 1935. I can't rake up Howard Phillips for his opinion, though, so I will just state that until then and afterward I was very nearly going from grin to grin at each new touch of atmosphere or cinematography or correctly placed cultural wink and a particular Chekhov's gun of the early first act went off just at the point I'd given up on it as a background detail. It's a wittier movie than The Call of Cthulhu, which is entirely in keeping with its callbacks to Universal. There's no Ernest Thesiger, but there is a playboy student arch enough to have been directed by James Whale. Allusions are made to other incidents at Miskatonic, both Lovecraft-canonical and plausibly invented, never overwhelming the story at hand. And if the previous film cast for faces, the latest takes full advantage of its leap forward in time by casting for voice: no one in The Whisperer in Darkness sounds like anyone else except insofar as regional accents are concerned. It is always possible to identify the characters in any given scene by simply listening. I was pleased, but not actually surprised to see afterward that the HPLHS also does radio theater. Yes, look, someone explain to me how these people have stayed off my radar this long?
The star of both films is Matt Foyer, an ideal Lovecraftian leading man. As the narrator of The Call of Cthulhu (Francis Wayland Thurston in the original, "The Man" in the credits), he has a nervy, fretful quality that only increases as the events of which he reads become increasingly unthinkable and even more inevitable, impinging finally on his own life and sanity; the silent-era makeup gives him the look of a haunted Pierrot, white-faced and hollow-eyed even as he sits by his grand-uncle's deathbed, his mouth a perpetual sad clown's crescent. Less stylized in The Whisperer in Darkness, he really comes into his own as Professor Albert Wilmarth of Miskatonic University, a character I did not think I would ever feel protective about. With his center-parted hair, his round wire-rimmed glasses, and his long, nervously twisting mouth, his face seems made to furrow up in apprehension or dismay; he has a harassed, angular voice to match, being a skeptical folklorist intellectually drawn to stories of the inexplicable and professionally despairing of humanity's wholesale subscription to them. It is a testament to the actor that Wilmarth does not come off as a jerk, even in his introductory scenes pooh-poohing the reality behind the Vermont legends he's about to debate with Charles Fort on Davis Bradbury's Radio Fantastica. (That goes exactly as well as you might imagine.) Perhaps more impressively, he succeeds in making a person out of a narrative device. The typical Lovecraft protagonist has a fairly minimalist arc: to encounter something beyond their understanding and be destroyed by it. In Foyer's Wilmarth, we can see his eagerness as an academic in conflict with his frustration that not everyone can take the same rational approach to some really quite interesting folk beliefs and what they say about the human capacity for myth-making; we also suspect that he needs not to be susceptible to notions of the otherworld, since his wife and daughter died of the 1918 Spanish flu and he might otherwise be wistful. When he's not making a fool of himself on Boston radio, he's a surprisingly capable, slightly melancholy man, more socially rusty than intrinsically inept. He's liked by his colleagues, even if one of them considers him dangerously dismissive of the weirder fringes of New England (and in fact one of the script's few flaws is the amount of second-act protest Wilmarth puts up against the evidence accumulating around him, although I suppose it could be argued that he's not disputing the facts, just desperately wanting to wish them away). But he's not a boy who doesn't know how to shiver. He's merely accustomed to being afraid of things of this world. He would be the perfect hero in a story about facing the supernatural head-on with reason, Hammer Horror Van Helsing-style. In Lovecraft country, he's screwed.
So it seems I have a new film collective to keep an eye on, and another contemporary character actor to watch out for, and I would recommend both of these movies to anyone with an interest in Lovecraft adaptations that actually have something to do with Lovecraft. This qualifier brought to you by going back to the Brattle tonight to see The Dunwich Horror (1970), which was very nearly as gonzo as the previous night's presenter had made it sound. The 35mm print was sufficiently decayed to have turned a sort of broad-spectrum pink and we were reliably informed it smelled like a bag of chips and vinegar. There were not as many tentacles as I had been hoping, but there was honest-to-God Vaseline on the lens in the dream sequence with the orgy, or whatever those weirdly painted, mostly naked cultists were doing in the field. I was left with the feeling that I may be haunted for life by Dean Stockwell's mustache. (That's another of those sentences you don't expect to type.) Every now and then I felt a shudder at my shoulder and looked over wondering if I would see a lanky, reclusive old New Englander with an expression between awe and the death of God, but it was just![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
derspatchel.
(The connection was terrible, so B. hung up and sent me a text message instead to explain that he'd just been to the Aya Sofya and thought of me and I was flattered and went back to sleep, but it was still one of the more randomly awesome ways I've had a day begin.)
I am slightly disappointed that on either side of this interruption, I dreamed nothing weirder than agreeing to marry a friend for political reasons and trying to get directions out of a city made almost entirely of rusted girders and new construction with something about bartering oranges for a place to sleep, because I spent the previous evening at the Brattle Theatre, watching the first night of their H.P. Lovecraft Birthday Tribute—the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society's The Whisperer in Darkness (2011) was having its Boston premiere, with The Call of Cthulhu (2005) screening first as a short. At the very least, I should have woken up screaming.
Despite giving my brother a DVD of this very same film for Hanukkah a few years ago, I had never actually seen the HPLHS' The Call of Cthulhu until last night. I'd tried in October; circumstances had interfered. I think this was the right way to do it. It's a faithful translation of the story to silent film circa 1927, a risky and rewarding conceit—it's very difficult to reproduce an earlier art form without parodying it and the heightened emotional atmosphere of the story on top of the dramatic exaggerations of silent film could have come off as silly or tongue-in-cheek at least; instead, they play everything as straight as the obvious influences of Lang and Murnau allow and the results are actually forty-seven minutes of film that feel, if not quite like the recovery of an artifact Lovecraft himself might have encountered some evening at Fay's Theatre, pretty damn close. Visually, it is intensely and consciously expressionist, which helps a great deal with the non-Euclidean geometry of risen R'lyeh. The plot adds a frame-story in an asylum à la Caligari but otherwise follows the original text almost scene-by-scene, dramatizing each new document as the narrator's puzzle-quest through his great-uncle's papers falls back in time from present-day Providence to New Orleans in 1908 before catching up horribly to the last few years again. (There is even a very brief flashback to the coast of Greenland in 1860, although I think it is mostly played by papier-mâché.) The special effects are minimal and almost strictly within the bounds of what would have been technologically possible in the late silent era. When great Cthulhu rises, he's stop-motion. I do not think it ever frightened me, but I did find myself smiling in sheer joy of some of the set-pieces, which for a project of this nature may be even better. There are echoes of Freder's vision of Moloch in Henry Wilcox's nightmares of R'lyeh, staggering before the skewed angles of structures that don't for one second convince us of their stonework, making them all the more effectively wrong. When the narrator begins to dream of the same city, he finds the cyclopean streets through which he wanders composed of the contents of his uncle's file on the "Cthulhu cult," like Angus McBean's portraits of Emlyn Williams or Robert Helpmann, only not whimsical: newspaper clippings blurring into masonry underfoot, huge books overhanging. The rare moment of humor reminds us we're (so much the worse for us) in the real world, not some stacked deck of doom and gloom: the narrator finds himself reproved by a tsk-tsking curator when he tries to walk out of the Australian Museum with Johansen's idol. And in true silent fashion, the actors have all been cast with an eye to faces. Henry Wilcox could have been a juvenile lead with his soft dark lashes and handsomely sulky mouth; the captain of the doomed Emma has a genuinely aquiline profile, nostrils flaring between his watch cap and his peacoat's turned-up collar. We don't need to hear them to know exactly how they would sound if they spoke.
So it makes natural enough sense that the filmmakers should move on to the sound era for their feature film, as if Lovecraft might have caught a showing on one of the nights he wasn't waiting to see Berkeley Square (1933). I wrote to Rob afterward, "With any luck, The Whisperer in Darkness will show at the 'Thon. Wax cylinders, vintage trains, sweater vests, radio accents, biplanes, a mysterious man by the name of Noyes . . . It is a film I would like very much to have seen with you, and so may yet. One decision near the end threw me completely out of the conceit that it was filmed in the 1930's, but it was otherwise an extremely impressive adaptation, invented third act included." And I find myself reluctant to discuss the plot much past that point, unless anyone wants to open up a spoiler thread in the comments, because the third act seems so precisely what a film of the time would have extended the story into and that one twist seems so precisely not that it's created a weird sort of cognitive dissonance in my assessment of the movie—it ends exactly where it needs to, which works as well for 1927 as 2012, but I'm not sure about how it gets there for 1935. I can't rake up Howard Phillips for his opinion, though, so I will just state that until then and afterward I was very nearly going from grin to grin at each new touch of atmosphere or cinematography or correctly placed cultural wink and a particular Chekhov's gun of the early first act went off just at the point I'd given up on it as a background detail. It's a wittier movie than The Call of Cthulhu, which is entirely in keeping with its callbacks to Universal. There's no Ernest Thesiger, but there is a playboy student arch enough to have been directed by James Whale. Allusions are made to other incidents at Miskatonic, both Lovecraft-canonical and plausibly invented, never overwhelming the story at hand. And if the previous film cast for faces, the latest takes full advantage of its leap forward in time by casting for voice: no one in The Whisperer in Darkness sounds like anyone else except insofar as regional accents are concerned. It is always possible to identify the characters in any given scene by simply listening. I was pleased, but not actually surprised to see afterward that the HPLHS also does radio theater. Yes, look, someone explain to me how these people have stayed off my radar this long?
The star of both films is Matt Foyer, an ideal Lovecraftian leading man. As the narrator of The Call of Cthulhu (Francis Wayland Thurston in the original, "The Man" in the credits), he has a nervy, fretful quality that only increases as the events of which he reads become increasingly unthinkable and even more inevitable, impinging finally on his own life and sanity; the silent-era makeup gives him the look of a haunted Pierrot, white-faced and hollow-eyed even as he sits by his grand-uncle's deathbed, his mouth a perpetual sad clown's crescent. Less stylized in The Whisperer in Darkness, he really comes into his own as Professor Albert Wilmarth of Miskatonic University, a character I did not think I would ever feel protective about. With his center-parted hair, his round wire-rimmed glasses, and his long, nervously twisting mouth, his face seems made to furrow up in apprehension or dismay; he has a harassed, angular voice to match, being a skeptical folklorist intellectually drawn to stories of the inexplicable and professionally despairing of humanity's wholesale subscription to them. It is a testament to the actor that Wilmarth does not come off as a jerk, even in his introductory scenes pooh-poohing the reality behind the Vermont legends he's about to debate with Charles Fort on Davis Bradbury's Radio Fantastica. (That goes exactly as well as you might imagine.) Perhaps more impressively, he succeeds in making a person out of a narrative device. The typical Lovecraft protagonist has a fairly minimalist arc: to encounter something beyond their understanding and be destroyed by it. In Foyer's Wilmarth, we can see his eagerness as an academic in conflict with his frustration that not everyone can take the same rational approach to some really quite interesting folk beliefs and what they say about the human capacity for myth-making; we also suspect that he needs not to be susceptible to notions of the otherworld, since his wife and daughter died of the 1918 Spanish flu and he might otherwise be wistful. When he's not making a fool of himself on Boston radio, he's a surprisingly capable, slightly melancholy man, more socially rusty than intrinsically inept. He's liked by his colleagues, even if one of them considers him dangerously dismissive of the weirder fringes of New England (and in fact one of the script's few flaws is the amount of second-act protest Wilmarth puts up against the evidence accumulating around him, although I suppose it could be argued that he's not disputing the facts, just desperately wanting to wish them away). But he's not a boy who doesn't know how to shiver. He's merely accustomed to being afraid of things of this world. He would be the perfect hero in a story about facing the supernatural head-on with reason, Hammer Horror Van Helsing-style. In Lovecraft country, he's screwed.
So it seems I have a new film collective to keep an eye on, and another contemporary character actor to watch out for, and I would recommend both of these movies to anyone with an interest in Lovecraft adaptations that actually have something to do with Lovecraft. This qualifier brought to you by going back to the Brattle tonight to see The Dunwich Horror (1970), which was very nearly as gonzo as the previous night's presenter had made it sound. The 35mm print was sufficiently decayed to have turned a sort of broad-spectrum pink and we were reliably informed it smelled like a bag of chips and vinegar. There were not as many tentacles as I had been hoping, but there was honest-to-God Vaseline on the lens in the dream sequence with the orgy, or whatever those weirdly painted, mostly naked cultists were doing in the field. I was left with the feeling that I may be haunted for life by Dean Stockwell's mustache. (That's another of those sentences you don't expect to type.) Every now and then I felt a shudder at my shoulder and looked over wondering if I would see a lanky, reclusive old New Englander with an expression between awe and the death of God, but it was just
derspatchel.
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Otherwise, totally agree with you on everything else. I wish they'd move faster with those adaptations, but I get that the total lack of funding and time probably interferes.
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I actually found it very effective in the scene where it attacks and kills Nancy's classmate; it was one of two instances where I thought the cinematography was doing something interesting (the other being the amazing wide-angle shot of Wilbur at his grandfather's funeral) as opposed to trying too hard (every single one of Nancy's dream sequences). When it vanishes in a puff of smoke over the altar, not so much.
I wish they'd move faster with those adaptations, but I get that the total lack of funding and time probably interferes.
Their visual effects coordinator, Dan Novy, was present to answer questions on Friday; he said The Call of Cthulhu took about two years (a year for shooting, a year for post) and The Whisperer in Darkness about twice that long. I'd love to know what they're doing next, and whether they plan to continue the conceit of adapting the stories for the year they were published or whether they'll keep moving forward in time. They have a really good company. The Thing from Another World makes me think a 1951 At the Mountains of Madness would be amazing.
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That was cool.
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If you get DVDs of the HPLHS productions, be sure to watch the making-of documentaries. R'lyeh was built in somebody's back yard. Greenland, otoh, actually was shot on location at some cliff popular with rock-climbers, and had to be tightly framed so none of them wandered into the background, which may be why it looks less than convincing (also, the explorer's hat was sewn from a pant-leg on the way over because he didn't have time to dye his hair. He's the same actor who plays Henry Akely, and his real accent is totally unlike the one he uses on-screen.)
The unhelpful curator is Andrew Leman, the ringmaster behind the HPLHS, and he's also Charles Fort (under a lot of padding).
I can also recommend their radio drama, particularly their take on "At the Mountains of Madness."
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*snerk*
If you get DVDs of the HPLHS productions, be sure to watch the making-of documentaries. R'lyeh was built in somebody's back yard.
Their effects coordinator (see reply to
He's the same actor who plays Henry Akeley, and his real accent is totally unlike the one he uses on-screen.
I would expect nothing less.
(I was really impressed by these people!)
The unhelpful curator is Andrew Leman, the ringmaster behind the HPLHS, and he's also Charles Fort (under a lot of padding).
I was thinking of the woman in the stacks with the fisheye glasses, but I did see that was him. I like that their actors are also their writers/directors/composers.
I can also recommend their radio drama, particularly their take on "At the Mountains of Madness."
Yay. I was wondering where to start. And I saw Matt Foyer's name on that one . . .
(I am also curious to hear what the Emma's captain sounds like, at least when he's a radio host. It's been so long since I discovered actors first through silents and then through sound. I think the latest was Clive Brook.)
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"Haunted for life by Dean Stockwell's moustache." Song title, surely.
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It's worth watching The Haunted Palace if you run across a copy -- basically, Roger Corman was running out of Poe to adapt, so he took the title of a Poe poem, but based the plot on 'Charles Dexter Ward,' except Ward is periodically possessed by his ancestor Curwen, rather than have two Vincent Prices on screen at once.
A somewhat more faithful CDW adaptation is The Resurrected, starring Chris Sarandon -- their major change is to transport the story to a 1980s setting, and make the PoV character a private detective hired to investigate Ward's worrying behaviour...
(Why yes, green_trilobite and I do have a lot of HPL adaptations.)
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It has international showings: e-mail them and request one in Birmingham! (Either that, or Netflix.)
The Dunwich Horror, I'm less sure about, having heard various bad things about it.
It was a perfect film to watch last night in the company we did. I have no idea how it would hold up on a television. Alcohol would need to be involved.
"Haunted for life by Dean Stockwell's moustache." Song title, surely.
I said to
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Oh, God, my brain has started trying to assemble an anatomy mixtape. This is a terrible idea.
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...he'd just been to the Aya Sofya and thought of me and I was flattered and went back to sleep, but it was still one of the more randomly awesome ways I've had a day begin.
That is definitely awesome.
I can't rake up Howard Phillips for his opinion...
I can imagine few people who would be more displeased at being called up by a necromancer. There's probably a story in there, but I don't think I'm the one to write it.
...I dreamed nothing weirder than agreeing to marry a friend for political reasons and trying to get directions out of a city made almost entirely of rusted girders and new construction with something about bartering oranges for a place to sleep...
Well, that's better than the dream I had just before I woke, of being in a café or something that had beignets,* or at least what looked like and were described as beignets, so I got one instead of the slice of cake I was initially going to have, only to discover when I bit into it that it was actually a blintz with a blueberry-cheese filling which had been cunningly disguised as a beignet.
Or the one a few nights ago that I'd bought a large-bore air rifle (forty to fifty calibre, I'd say), which had been made to look like a half-stock muzzle-loading sporting rifle of roughly 1850s vintage, but none-the-less loaded from the breech using a complicated mechanism which (as I didn't realise until I woke up) couldn't possibly work in our world. I was contemplating whether I'd be better off casting wax bullets using a round-ball mould or if I could make conical ones that would be more effective for whatever purpose** I had for wanting wax bullets.
*As in the New Orleans variety.
**Harassing nuisance wildlife? I don't even know...
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I don't know; maybe if we took him to the movies to make up for it?
only to discover when I bit into it that it was actually a blintz with a blueberry-cheese filling which had been cunningly disguised as a beignet.
Thanks a lot: I want blintzes now.
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It could be worth a try. Any road, I doubt you'd be too likely to lose your hat, so it couldn't be too bad a plan.
Thanks a lot: I want blintzes now.
I'm sorry if this has been a difficult thing. I hope you've been able to get blintzes, or that you will be soon.
If it's any consolation, I was craving beignets in the dream, still am, and have a bad feeling there's no source of them in this entire state.
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That's magnificent. Thank you.
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And you know what I love very, very much. Your intense empathy--or at least, sympathy--with characters. This:
Perhaps more impressively, he succeeds in making a person out of a narrative device. The typical Lovecraft protagonist has a fairly minimalist arc: to encounter something beyond their understanding and be destroyed by it. In Foyer's Wilmarth, we can see his eagerness as an academic in conflict with his frustration that not everyone can take the same rational approach to some really quite interesting folk beliefs and what they say about the human capacity for myth-making; we also suspect that he needs not to be susceptible to notions of the otherworld, since his wife and daughter died of the 1918 Spanish flu and he might otherwise be wistful. When he's not making a fool of himself on Boston radio, he's a surprisingly capable, slightly melancholy man, more socially rusty than intrinsically inept.
Let me elaborate on what I love here:
The first line, for one: he succeeds in making a person out of a narrative device.. There's a whole short story in that, I think. Something about humanizing and bestowing humanity.
Then this: a fairly minimalist arc: to encounter something beyond their understanding and be destroyed by it --just because it made me laugh.
And this for understatement, yo, understatement: we also suspect that he needs not to be susceptible to notions of the otherworld, since his wife and daughter died of the 1918 Spanish flu and he might otherwise be wistful.
And this for kindness. Makes me like him and you in equal measure: he's a surprisingly capable, slightly melancholy man, more socially rusty than intrinsically inept.
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Thank you! He can consider it a belated birthday present, because I completely forgot to post anything for him yesterday.
Lovecraft in concept has never appealed to me particularly, but Lovecraft in his particulars--as described by you, here? Very much so! But maybe it's just that I enjoy seeing movies through your eyes.
I don't think there would be anything to appreciate through my eyes if there wasn't something in Lovecraft to begin with. He was never one of my formative authors, but he became interesting to me: I have my doubts that my responses to his work are the ones he was aiming for, but you find whatever resonates.
I loved what you said about the contrast between the first picking the actors for their faces and the second picking them for their voices.
I have noticed voices for some years, possibly because I've never felt I can do much of anything with mine. (Speaking—I am not Wittgensteinian about my abilities as a singer.) I suspect it's been heightened recently from hanging out with
There's a whole short story in that, I think. Something about humanizing and bestowing humanity.
For several years in college, I tried to write a short story about a person who has lost his essential identity and exists now only as a kind of self-made stock character, outside of which he is so nondescript, he is literally invisible, but I think it disappeared up its own metaphor. I gave the title to
And this for kindness.
Hah. Thank you. I write about people that interest me.
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I tried to write a short story about a person who has lost his essential identity and exists now only as a kind of self-made stock character, outside of which he is so nondescript, he is literally invisible, but I think it disappeared up its own metaphor.
--As if he were trying to reclaim existence by having you write about him, but the power of his fate was too strong!
Thanks for the link to
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No, it's a good image. Has
As if he were trying to reclaim existence by having you write about him, but the power of his fate was too strong!
He had a name by the end of the story! I just never got the in-between not to suck!
oh and also
Please. I'll take your reject dreams! I want to know the story of this! What were the political reasons?
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I don't remember anymore! It was the equivalent of marrying for a green card, but it might have had to do with living space. There was very little in the city that existed between being torn down and being still built.