Fiction and film—they’re not just different mediums but diametrical opposites. Cinema is a vivid and intense simulation of perception: color, sound, cutting: its techniques lend it toward excess. “The visual is essentially pornographic” (Jameson, Signatures of the Visible). At first, it seems novels do the same thing, only through words. A flow of chatter, no natural beginning or ending. The difference is in how the novelist is expected as a rule to repress the tendency, lest it be cast to the experimental margin. Movies that do their own repression become minimal art films. One avant-garde of repression, another of removing inhibitions.
A cat with black markings along his back bounding down Moffat street; a tortie kitten with a bell scurrying from the back of the store to the front counter, behind the muffin stand.
The aluminum birthday balloons sagging next to the garbage bins across from the mailbox, reminiscent of small animals.
Second Slope 