Nora Wright

Matthew Goldin's book, Matthew, got me smoking. This book unrestained me from following good habits.

John Cassavetes on the decline of the American Dream & the reason why he made 'Faces' (1968): "In the last couple of decades or so, something has happened to the American dream. I don’t quite know what it is, and it’s still not very clear in my mind. Confusion has replaced Patriotism. The intellect has replaced love. America has changed. Look everywhere. It’s all about money. If something doesn’t make money, no one is interested. Every thing is for sale. Emotions are sold. Sex is sold. Everything is sex. Cars, women, clothes, your face, your hands, your shoes! Look at the ads, at television. My emotions aren’t for sale. My thoughts can’t be bought. They’re mine. I don’t want movies that sell me something. I don’t want to be told how to feel. I wrote 'Faces' (1968) out of a lot of anger and dismay with society. I was really angry at our age and especially at those adults who without thinking go to discotheques, without thinking join into anything that is fashionable and without any understanding. I wanted to show the inability of people to communicate; what small things will do to people; how people can’t handle certain things that they hear and read in news papers, see in films; and how, when they are not prepared to think with their own minds and to feel, how all this can become tragic circumstances. Old ladies trying to be young, shaking their fat asses. Men trying to be sexually attractive. All these old people acting like kids. People are afraid to be themselves, until they become other people, and they can never become themselves again. The change that overcomes all of us is so subtle it’s frightening. There’s where the frustration is: we never see where and how we started; how we got so mechanical; or what to do about it. You beat your brains out trying to find some way that you can encompass what people are feeling rather than what they are led to think. The result was a barrage of attacks on contemporary middle-class America, an expression of horror at our society in general, focusing on a married couple – old-fashioned in nature, safe in their suburban home, narrow in their thinking. The script gives them new situations to cope with, takes them out of their house, releases them from the conformity of their existence, forces them into a different context when all barriers are down." ('Cassavetes on Cassavetes', edited by Ray Carney, 2001) P.S: On this day, 58 years ago, 'Faces' (1968) premiered in Montreal, Canada.

Ivan's Childhood 1962 directed by Andrei Tarkovsky BOTD Ivan's Childhood was Tarkovsky's first feature film. It won him critical acclaim and made him internationally known. It won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival

So this is the guy everyone has been imitating the last 45 years

@kenyonreview @sentencedlit @sixsarahsix @jad__kamal @Powerman5006 @dawwwnkie my brother Evan Wight and uncle of @matthewgoldin posted about our Dad

This essay attempts to answer a question I'm sure many of us asked. open.substack.com/pub/matthewgol…

We all have that friend Maynard who shovels slop, but it may be @cranny__boy who has that friend most of all. Learn about it in “Still The Same.” Read now at sentencedlit.org/still-the-same/ Illustration by @KrammStanwich

Where the cool kids are submitting their writing: sentencedlit.org/submit/ that's it. Please retweet for visibility.

We all know the old adage that refers to a location in France where the girls don't wear underpants, which, even if no longer true, presents an opportunity to reflect on things.

@sentencedlit, Marx on. Anarchy & merch. Thank you, Editors! When is @sixsarahsix book coming out? Pls add LA launch. Ground Control to Major Tom, i worked for David Bowie, on planet earth: kind, humble. No bragger, unlike moi, a French word I speak better than anyone.

I wrote an essay called Flesh Light. It's about masturbation. open.substack.com/pub/matthewgol…

same here

@sentencedlit thats crazy. crazy awesome

I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff.

It's a tricky essay since the quality of writing I'm talking about is somewhat lacking in personality—adjacent to The Onion. Posting about a boyfriend getting a nose ring forcibly pulled out at a new job theoretically is also driven by the pleasure accompanying deceiving others.

I'm writing an essay about folks at the intersection of comedy/hedonism/nihilism who, perhaps especially thanks to AI, have "solved the problem" of how to write a fake/fictional small-town Kentucky complaint post but are by that same token working in a frozen/dead art form.

Letter from Hunter S. Thompson to Anthony Burgess, regarding an overdue article for Rolling Stone magazine, August 1973.

“Borges would come out of the dining room where they were writing and laughing, and say, Today we made significant progress—we wrote one full line.” —Luisa Valenzuela buff.ly/SvCoHyj

they give you this book in architecture school as a test — if you have the type of brain that finds it compelling, you become entranced by it & dedicate your creative energies to doing christopher alexander necromancy, therefore remaining safely contained from society at large

now available for preorder here: asterismbooks.com/product/aesthe…

“El primer gesto feminista es decir: ok, estoy siendo observada, pero yo también observo. Es el hecho de decidir mirar, decidir que el mundo se define por cómo miro y no por cómo me miran” Agnes Varda