22 September 2018

Not that we all need work the same

One dialogueless scene in Woody Allen's Interiors is a matter of the camera cutting between Renata’s (Diane Keaton's) face, and the pad of paper at whose head she is laboring at alternately scribbling (nervously) and striking-through (thoroughly), and at last, with only two lines of text penciled in, and unable to get the first line to her satisfaction, she crumples the page.

Ah, the tortured artist. Not but I'm (reasonably) sure that some are really racked. Gosh, but it remains a durably popular image. But that's not the fish presently in my frying pan.

As for myself, that's not what I do with paper. Mind you, I appreciate the cinematic applications of paper-crumpling. Rod Serling's “Midnight Never Ends" from the second season of Night Gallery comes straight to mind. But even when I feel that there is something inadequate in what I have set down on paper, I want to see it. I strike through mistakes, but the not-yet-up-to-snuff measures, I want to see them. To reflect on what was amiss with them. To benefit from even the discards.

I never crumple paper. But, that may just be me.


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