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Sebastien's avatar

Excellent piece here Thomas. I think almost everyone feels the nausea of the modern entertainment, where everything is caricatured and exacerbated to the maximum. Almost every Netflix original is the re-writing of an existing story with obscene layers of drama to satisfy the over-stimulated and desensitized average consumer. Kinda what a cupcake is to a Saint-Honoré (yeah, I'm French).

I was recently reading an article Umberto Eco wrote about Ian Fleming's style in the James Bond series. The question was roughly "Why have these books been so popular, when many other spy and cold wars pulps were not?". Eco has a very interesting theory that echoes (pun intended) with your article: Fleming lingers and put emphasis not on the unknown, but on the already known; the little things that will resonate with every reader. For instance, the attack on Fort Knox in Goldfinger takes only 5 or 6 pages, whereas the golf game with said Goldfinger at the beggining of the book lingers during 20 pages. Contrary to authors like Jules Verne, he does not describe the Moonraker rocket for more that a page. But he does spend almost 30 pages of the game of bridge between Bond and Hugo Drax, taking its time to describe the table, the veal cutlets served before, the specific champagne they're drinking an so on. He does not describe Dr No's underground facility but he describes at length the menu of the beach restaurant, the Jamaican countryside, the trip to the island in a little fishing boat, etc. Fleming knows none of his readers will identify with robbing Fort Knox, but he knows they will with the little acts they "could" be doing themselves and that make the story more "real" and tangible (almost "physical) . You don't particularly remember a Bond book because of the quality of the story; they are more often that not kitsch and conventional. You remember it because of the atmosphere he's managed to create. And this atmosphere almost always works through descriptions of mundane activities, unimpressive road trips and trivia interspersed with brief moments of bravado and action. In that sense, embracing the ordinary IS the way to create the extraordinaire.

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Thomas W. Gardner's avatar

Another great piece, Tom!

Unfortunately, I find the the escape rather enticing. I'm very future-orientated so I rarely find the mental space to embrace the ordinary. But when I do, the stillness that I feel is beyond words.

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