What drives these scenes is the dramatic irony of the audience knowing that, whether at the dentist's or in a tanning booth, the characters are unwittingly at the centre of a death trap. "[The audience] know that there's something in the room manipulating elements, so they're immediately empathetic to the characters, pointing and yelling at the screen," adds Perry. "So you're looking at a can of tuna and after two or three shots, that's no longer a can of tuna, that is an instrument of death."
Originally, however, the word stock, of Germanic origin, denoted a stump or stick (Stück), the lifeless mass that’s left behind once you’ve chopped down a tree—deadstock you might say. In recommending that we look again to the past to learn to live in the present and future, following Nature’s lead, I only hope not to have become a laughingstock, a compound derived from this original sense as a useless remainder, worthy only of scorn, a stick in the mud, as it were.
And yet anyone who has cut down a deciduous tree will know that it soon grows back. (Conifers, alas, tend not to.) Hence the idea of coming from good stock, meaning that one’s root system and potential for life is strong and vigorous.
If we one day encounter aliens through first contact or a signal sent across the galaxy, their language might be nothing like ours. After all, humans have evolved with certain cognitive abilities and limitations. Expecting intelligent beings with alternative origins to use languages like ours betrays an anthropocentric view of the cosmos. If we want to move beyond exchanging prime number sequences to figuring out what the extraterrestrials are actually saying, we need to be prepared.
Before making the transition from action passages to prose paragraphs, I’d always viewed screenwriting and literature as two distinct disciplines, but as I dipped my toes in uncharted waters, I began to realize how much the boot camp of TV had given me years of on-the-job training in the essentials of storytelling—from plot and structure to character development and dialog.
Heartbreaking, heartwarming yet unsentimental, and savagely comic all at the same time, The Emperor of Gladness is about just how wobbly things can become.
Set in real places and liminal spaces, the poems in Jo-Ann Mort’s A Precise Chaos grapple with life’s inevitable transitions, contending, often concretely, with time as a relentless force. This dramatic impulse moves gracefully between glory days and decline as it takes up the challenges of war, friendship, and the wayward turns of the human will.
All of Us Atoms is best understood as a sort of love letter. The central theme is human interdependence – the idea, hinted at in the book’s title, that our sense of self is largely shaped by the roles we perform in our relationships with others. Axiomatic, perhaps, and borderline platitudinous, but it bears repeating. Caring is the only truly important thing we do in every phase of our brief time on Earth – “This constant procession of becoming and unbecoming. From each to each a legacy.”