From: Michael Andre-Driussi <mantis@sirius.com>
Subject: (urth) alga-rhyme
Date: Wed, 9 Feb 2000 09:46:55 

alga wrote:
>> But for the purposes of our
>> calibrating your tastes, where does such a modern tale as "Forlesen" fall?
>> Do you dislike it as much?  Or is it below the radar (i.e., completely
>> forgotten)?
>
>No, I quite liked that. But it is a fable, not a realistic contemporary story.
>
>> And how about "The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories"?
>
>I get confused about those stories with the similar names. But if that is
>the one with the boy with the weird head, I liked it a lot. But it's
>hardly realistic. If it's the Tackman one, ditto. The hospital one, no.
>
> >"Beech Hill"?
>
>Below the radar. (But I can't remember titles.)
>
>> I mean, I can guess that you dislike "The Woman Who Loved the
>> Centaur Pholus."
>
>Correct.

Okey-dokey.  (THE DEVIL IN THE FOREST as realistic and contemporary? <g>)
So I would posit that you like "The Ziggurat" better than most of the
contemporary lot because you sense that it does deviate from "realistic"
into some form of fantastic (surreal, dream, etc.); that it leaves behind
the outer world of surfaces to dive deeply into the/an inner world.  (Not
to spur on more talk of the Zig, just to see how it crosses your internal
boundary from a badland into the verge of likeable.)

"The Woman Who Loved the Centaur Pholus" probably leaves you cold because
it is stuck in the outer world of surfaces, making a Greek myth concrete in
contemporary terms.  (In part based upon the guess that you don't like "the
hospital one" of the Dr. Death tales because it has a technological source
for the magic.)  Likewise I'd guess that you feel CASTLEVIEW plays fast
with Arthur on its surface, yet lacks true depth (or even the illusion of
depth) on either Arthur or anything else; all (dizzy) surface, no (inner)
depth.

Re: traffic jams in foreign cinema, I thought there was a Fellini film that
started this way.

=mantis=



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