I love his writing. I always have. I found the writing before I knew anything about the strange, tortured man and I'm glad, because the writing has become subsumed to the image. The writing is exquisite and never cliched and full of all the pain that is living. Poor, lonely, needy Tru.
The movie is good, Hoffman's performance is breathtaking. I understand--I don't necessarily forgive--when he sells out the killers, sells out himself, would sell out his best friend to get that laugh at a party, to make life ironic and light when he knew that it wasn't. Grabbing that moment of adulation in a crowd rather than anything lasting--tomorrow may never come, after all. And you know he knows it's a lie too. He sold out Perry Smith, and yes, Perry was a dangerous and disturbed man who had murdered a family almost because they were there, but Truman played him to get that story, and lied and played with another human being's feelings and life to write the book. And what a book. A book he could never live up to again. What does it mean to write "non-fiction?" Is that even possible? Is it possible to do it and still have it be a good read? I didn't expect James Frey's book to be the truth--I was amazed that people thought it would be. What we remember is never the truth because we could never look at ourselves the way we really are--we cannot see how good or beautiful we are and we cannot see out bad and ugly we are. Memory fictionalizes everything around us--and a good story has to tighten it more, tighter narrative, stronger through line. The bit by bit, the unconnected, unflattering, uninteresting is tossed. But what about when it's not your life?
Wanted to link to this article that I found at A's blog "Mirror Up to Life," and this seems a good place for it.
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?041122fa_fact
It's about the play "Frozen" and what happens when truth is "accidentally" made fiction. It's about plagiarism too and how ideas distill down in our heads.
Also want to take a moment to plug "Mirror Up to Life." My friend A writes it. A is my friend and A is married to A who is my friend. When I first started this blog I thought I would refer to all my friends as B like Andy Warhol in "From A to B and Back Again," but then I started to use initials so they could find themselves if they were looking and realized I have an awful lot of friends whose name begins with A and several whose names begin with B. Strange...
Anyway, A's blog is on theater and it poses some very well thought out moral dilemmas for our modern age, specifically in theater, but stretching to the world, which is good because I think of A (shall we say A-masc.) as a very moral person, and someone I try to emulate when in moral dilemmas.
The movie is good, Hoffman's performance is breathtaking. I understand--I don't necessarily forgive--when he sells out the killers, sells out himself, would sell out his best friend to get that laugh at a party, to make life ironic and light when he knew that it wasn't. Grabbing that moment of adulation in a crowd rather than anything lasting--tomorrow may never come, after all. And you know he knows it's a lie too. He sold out Perry Smith, and yes, Perry was a dangerous and disturbed man who had murdered a family almost because they were there, but Truman played him to get that story, and lied and played with another human being's feelings and life to write the book. And what a book. A book he could never live up to again. What does it mean to write "non-fiction?" Is that even possible? Is it possible to do it and still have it be a good read? I didn't expect James Frey's book to be the truth--I was amazed that people thought it would be. What we remember is never the truth because we could never look at ourselves the way we really are--we cannot see how good or beautiful we are and we cannot see out bad and ugly we are. Memory fictionalizes everything around us--and a good story has to tighten it more, tighter narrative, stronger through line. The bit by bit, the unconnected, unflattering, uninteresting is tossed. But what about when it's not your life?
Wanted to link to this article that I found at A's blog "Mirror Up to Life," and this seems a good place for it.
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?041122fa_fact
It's about the play "Frozen" and what happens when truth is "accidentally" made fiction. It's about plagiarism too and how ideas distill down in our heads.
Also want to take a moment to plug "Mirror Up to Life." My friend A writes it. A is my friend and A is married to A who is my friend. When I first started this blog I thought I would refer to all my friends as B like Andy Warhol in "From A to B and Back Again," but then I started to use initials so they could find themselves if they were looking and realized I have an awful lot of friends whose name begins with A and several whose names begin with B. Strange...
Anyway, A's blog is on theater and it poses some very well thought out moral dilemmas for our modern age, specifically in theater, but stretching to the world, which is good because I think of A (shall we say A-masc.) as a very moral person, and someone I try to emulate when in moral dilemmas.
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