The Pepsi-Cola Check in Gantry Plaza State Park. Kidfly182, CC BY-SA 4.0, by way of Wikimedia Commons.
The Pepsi-Cola Addict, written in 1981 by the cryptophasic teenager June-Alison Gibbons—who refused most communication with anybody apart from her twin sister, Jennifer—is as idiosyncratic as one would anticipate. Preston Wildey-King—the Pepsi-Cola addict of the guide’s title—lives in a tenement together with his mom and his sister in Malibu, California. How Preston developed an dependancy to Pepsi is unknown. This omission begs interpretation—readers should make their very own projections onto Pepsi-Cola. Is it a candy elixir that dulls the bitter style of Preston’s fleeting childhood? Or a logo of American overconsumption and extra? Gibbons doesn’t present a solution, leaving us with a plot level as perplexing because the addictions we see day by day. Typically a can of Pepsi is only a can of Pepsi.
—Troy Schipdam, reader
Éric Rohmer’s 1986 movie The Inexperienced Ray facilities on a troublesome particular person. We all know that she’s troublesome as a result of, throughout a dialog halfway by way of, she insists, a number of instances, “I haven’t been troublesome in any respect.” Her title is Delphine, and she or he’s a Parisian secretary who broke up together with her fiancé two years earlier. Whereas she craves human connection, she flees, typically actually, each time it appears it’d seem. In one of many movie’s finest scenes, she runs away from individuals who have the gall to ask her to a nightclub. In one other scene, she stops to learn an indication on a lamppost that claims, “Retrouver le contact avec soi-même et avec les autres. Groupes et séances individuelles.” (“Reconnect with others and your self. Teams and personal classes.”) She walks on.
When a buddy tells her she’s unhappy, Delphine says, “I’m not unhappy.” She sublimates her loneliness into an obsession with having an excellent summer time trip. Because the movie opens, Delphine learns that her vacation plans have been upended: she’s been ditched by a buddy who desires to journey with a brand new lover as a substitute. “The three of us might go collectively,” Delphine suggests. She’s rebuffed. We quickly see why: even when she’s not a 3rd wheel, she’s onerous to be round. A complainer who doesn’t get pleasure from a lot of something, she’s immune to provides of assist and recommendation. When she learns that her sister and brother-in-law are going tenting in Eire, she asks her younger niece, “It’s very wet. Does that scare you?” At a cocktail party, when the host has simply served pork chops, she extols the virtues of vegetarianism.
An acquaintance takes pity on Delphine and invitations her alongside on a household trip to Cherbourg, however that goes badly. She then goes on an more and more disastrous collection of journeys and spends a lot of the movie in tears. In North America, the movie was first launched as Summer time, however possibly it’s extra acceptable to look at it in fall. The story concludes as Delphine is lastly heading house after her depressing peregrinations. As she arrives on the prepare station, there’s a way that she’s getting older, that not solely summer time but additionally her finest years have handed, that possibly the solar will set with out her discovering love once more.
However there’s an opportunity one thing completely different will occur. The inexperienced ray of the title—and of an eponymous Jules Verne novel that served as Rohmer’s inspiration—refers to an virtually mystically elusive optical phenomenon. Underneath sure atmospheric situations, within the final moments earlier than it dips beneath the horizon, the setting solar can flash inexperienced. On one in all her journeys, Delphine overhears some older individuals discussing the plot of Verne’s guide. Its heroine by no means sees the inexperienced ray, however she “manages to know her personal emotions.” All through the movie, Delphine claims to know her emotions. She might imagine that she’s being susceptible; she even cries in entrance of different individuals. However her self-pity prevents her from accessing true vulnerability. It’s not till the very finish of the movie that she dangers sharing her actual emotions with one other particular person.
For years, I additionally confused self-pity with vulnerability, and I relate to the movie. I find it irresistible not, although, for its relatability however as a result of I discover it so strikingly naturalistic. Rohmer purportedly inspired his actors—lots of whom had been buddies and even household—to improvise their dialogue. That authenticity, which I try for in fiction, is what I feel provides the movie its luminosity. Even the inexperienced ray captured within the movie’s final shot is real; fairly than create it within the studio, as producers needed, Rohmer introduced a photographer to the Canary Islands to seize the true factor.
—Alena Graedon, writer of “No Altering”
I found the American Museum of Paramusicology by way of makes an attempt to seek out extra details about the American composer and choreographer Julius Eastman, maybe crucial artist of the late twentieth century in the US, though individuals exterior the artwork world don’t know who he’s. The location/journal/publishing concern/archive is run by the musicologist and artist Matt Marble and hosts a variety of supplies—books, recordings, scores, histories—regarding music by composers whose work is inflected by esoteric non secular or philosophical observe, amongst them Alice Coltrane, David Lynch, and Constance Demby. The location and its related podcast, Secret Sound, just lately went subscription-only—however I like to recommend the 5 {dollars} monthly. Every little thing there may be completely good and humbling.
—Lucy Ives, Robert Glück’s interviewer for The Artwork of Fiction No. 260
