Written in 1890, An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce’s is one of the great subjective time stories. Watch the 1962 short above, read the story, read the story while listening to a reading, or listen to the story done as a radio thriller in 1947.
The Salman Rushdie Case by Zoe Heller in the NY Review of Books.
Excerpts:
“One is struck here, not just by the implied disregard for the free speech of other writers who might not qualify for “the quality defense,” but also by the lordly nonchalance with which Rushdie places himself alongside Lawrence, Joyce, and Nabokov in the ranks of literary merit.”
“A man living under threat of death for nine years is not to be blamed for occasionally characterizing his plight in grandiloquent terms. But one would hope that when recollecting his emotions in freedom and safety, he might bring some ironic detachment to bear on his own bombast. Hindsight, alas, has had no sobering effect on Rushdie’s magisterial amour propre. An unembarrassed sense of what he is owed as an embattled, literary immortal-in-waiting pervades his book. He wants us to sympathize with the irritation he felt when the men in his protection team abbreviated his grand, Conradian-Chekhovian alias to “Joe.””
“Some of his most egregiously uncharitable moments occur when writing about his four marriages. Rushdie has a habit of excusing his own fairly frequent infidelities and betrayals with reference to the imperative nature of his own desires. (“His own needs were like commands,” he recalls when explaining why he had to leave his third wife, Elizabeth West, and young son to go gallivanting in America.) The various failings of the wives—their money-grubbing and nagging, their jealousy of his talent, and so on—are not so readily excused.”
“Rushdie’s shuddering hauteur at this moment may strike the reader as a bit rich, coming from a man who spends much of his memoir recalling encounters with pop stars, Playboy bunnies, and “hot” pop-star girlfriends in the breathless style of a young Austen character writing up her first visit to the pump rooms at Bath. But Rushdie would have us understand that his copious accounts of nightclubbing with celebrities are the record of a doughty man’s will to survive, of his commitment to a moral duty…”
Oh read the whole thing.
Someone told us that Lav Diaz’s new film Florentina Hubaldo, CTE was four hours long, which in the context of his filmography is a short film. But the Cinemanila 2012 schedule listed its running time at 5 hours. In fact it is 6 hours long, and here’s the amazing thing: It feels longer than six hours, but at no point did we have the urge to walk out. We had to see how it would turn out, and when the credits appeared, we cried, “Bitin!”
We actually wanted more.
Florentina Hubaldo, CTE is brilliant, and we say this though we still don’t know what “CTE”* means. It is both slow and gripping. The point of the 6 hours is to make you feel the passage of time. The black and white photography is stunning (Diaz did his own camera work, apart from writing, directing and editing). There is no acting, nothing that feels contrived or phony. It is not for everyone, but if you commit, you will find yourself richly rewarded.
At this time there are no other screenings scheduled, but check the Cinemanila schedule for updates.
* Checked with the filmmaker. CTE is “Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, a progressive degenerative disease diagnosed postmortem in individuals with a history of multiple concussions and other forms of head injury.”
* * * * *
Notes written in the dark, no looking.
(Helpful tips: Bring coffee and snacks. If like us you have difficulty sitting still for a long time, take notes in the dark. Don’t look because you’ll hurt your eyes. We started taking notes on our phone but we switched to pen and paper so we didn’t have to take our eyes off the screen. If you have to, take walks periodically. Go out and buy a banh mi baguette.)
Photo from Asia Bullion News
Our column at InterAksyon.com.
Complete this couplet:
B is for Bullion. The gold bars, not the soup.
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