Re-reading the Picture of Dorian Gray
I’ve never really been attracted to the horror genre. The story invariably seems too contrived to be plausible. I need the horror to be real. The Picture of Dorian Gray is definitely a horror...
Category: fiction
Writing and Digging
My first reading at Telltales (the writers group in Falmouth–see last post) was called “Daisies”. It’s pretty much a description of something that happened to me–hard to say exactly when, but within the...
Burning Bread
“Prepared” by having been in a slow oven overnight, the loaf that appears in Charlie Sinclair’s fine image Burning Bread is perhaps nearly incredible but not quite. In fact it’s perfectly “straight” photography: the bread has become...
science fiction
I became a bit unruly at a dinner party recently when my hostess asserted that science fiction was “license to just do anything you want, no rules”. I guess it’s a common enough bit...
Plausible Fictions
Suppose photographing is, as Flusser contended, an act of projecting, rather than “capturing” extant meaning. Rather than constituting records, then, photographs propose possibilities, sometimes in tremendously persuasive detail. Photographs are what comes of reaching...
Is fiction “theory”? is “theory” fiction?
Suppose Flusser is “wrong” about most things. He could only be wrong in the sense of someone working within a scientific model–probably a rather narrow one at that, someone who expects to predict something,...