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“Here, your pal will pull out a piece of criticism and kindly ask if the critic, on second glance, would care to have another crack at it. It’s Gentleman’s Snark.”

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“Powers’s most powerful influences were James Joyce and Thomas Hardy, but it was coding that gave him an education in how to put a book together.”

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Tarkovksy on individual expression in film and fiction

Tarkovsky’s films are, to me at least, something like literature. They’re slow, perfectly crafted, remarkably internal. Even when the characters are just wandering through corridors or tromping through fields, they hold me spellbound until the credits roll. In Sculpting in Time, the filmmaker compares the editing of film with the crafting of fiction. In so far as sense of time . . .

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Patti Smith, Philip Pullman, and others praise William Blake as the 250th anniversary of his birth approaches. (Via.)

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It’s that time of year again. The trees are bare, it gets dark early, and we’re all wondering why the Confederacy of Dunces adaptation never got made.

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