Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Anthony Garrett

@anthonygarrett.bsky.social

A dear friend started what I hope will be a long series of video essays on film. Here's the first of his essays, on pastiche:

What Is Pastiche? | Style, Genre, and Postmodern Cinema Explained
youtu.be/WESMSa-xtWE?...

I still from the film pulp fiction. In the shot actors John Travolta and Samuel l Jackson are loading guns that they pull from the back of the trunk of a car.

July 2, 2025 at 2:12 PM

Anthony Garrett

@anthonygarrett.bsky.social

Hi, everyone. What's up? 🩷

A selfie of the author himself, a white man with short light brown or dark blond hair and goatee and mustache. I'm wearing a denim apron and t-shirt and standing against a background of greenery.

June 30, 2025 at 11:58 PM

Anthony Garrett

@anthonygarrett.bsky.social

Physical media continues its unbeaten streak over VOD.

The cover for the 4K Blu-ray of The Brutalist, the inside artwork also peaking out. The cover art is a still from the film of Adrian Brody smoking a cigarette at dusk, sparks from metal work flaring in the air in front of him.

April 7, 2025 at 1:58 AM

Anthony Garrett

@anthonygarrett.bsky.social

gonna tell my kids this was Challengers

A still of Donald O'Connor, Debbie Reynolds, and Gene Kelly singing and dancing in the song Good Morning in the film Singin' in the Rain

April 3, 2025 at 4:56 PM

Anthony Garrett

@anthonygarrett.bsky.social

NW

The movie poster for the documentary film Val which is a composite head shot of the actor Val Kilmer made up of fou images from different times in his life.

April 2, 2025 at 3:15 AM

Anthony Garrett

@anthonygarrett.bsky.social

Here's more:

Animals do not interrupt my story; they are the story.

The bestiary entries inside this book pause the narrative, but do not disrupt it. Instead, they supplement, support, and expand this story into one of past and present, language and image. There are so many ways to write about violence.

But in the violence is also a search for gentleness. In the open-ing pages of his bestiary, Elliott dedicates his translation to the memory of his mother. He writes, "One of the earliest of many tender recollections which I cherish is of her reading stories of ani-mals to me."

Come with me, and let me tell you an animal story.

April 1, 2025 at 8:50 PM

Anthony Garrett

@anthonygarrett.bsky.social

Here I was complaining I hadn't received my copy and a day later! Order yours:
www.wlupress.wlu.ca/Books/H/Huma...

A hand holding the book Human/Animal: A Bestiary in Essays by Amie Souza Reilly

April 1, 2025 at 6:20 PM

Anthony Garrett

@anthonygarrett.bsky.social

Happy Chungking Express Day to those who celebrate! ✈️🍍

Takeshi Kaneshiro in Chungking Express holding up a can of canned pineapple.

April 1, 2025 at 4:33 PM

Anthony Garrett

@anthonygarrett.bsky.social

After AWP I went with friends to the Garden State 20th Anniversary Concert. Zach Braff, Natalie Portman, Donald Faison, Sarah Chalke, The Shins, Frou Frou, Iron & Wine, Colin Hay, and others. I remember when I saw Natalie Portman slip those headphones on Zach Braff's head.

Natalie Portman and Zach Braff on stage together

Zach Braff, Donald Faison, and Sarah Chalke on stage

All of the acts on stage together at the end of the night

March 30, 2025 at 3:56 PM

Anthony Garrett

@anthonygarrett.bsky.social

Recently I heard about an architecture professor who has a syllabus of books he wants his students to read before they start drawing. The only title mentioned in bringing up the subject was The Baron in the Trees. What would be on your list?

A clutter of books whose titles and authors are:

• Territory of Light by Yuko Tsushima
• The Education of a Gardener by Russell Page
• The One Straw Revoluion by Masanobu Fukuoka
• Landscapes by Christine Lai
• The Pillow Book by Sei Shonagon
• Like a Sky Inside by Jakuta Alikavazovic
• The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino
• To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
• The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje
• Derek Jarman's Garden
• How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell
• The Anthropology of Turquoise by Ellen Meloy
• A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr

March 4, 2025 at 10:08 PM

Anthony Garrett

@anthonygarrett.bsky.social

#amwriting

A still from the film Mullholland Drive of Laura Harring's character covering her face in horror and Naomi Watts's character looking concerned at her but the film is doubled so that there are two overlapping versions of each. One version of Laura Harring is labeled my novel and another me. One version of Naomi Watts is labeled me and the other my novel.

January 28, 2025 at 6:19 PM

Anthony Garrett

@anthonygarrett.bsky.social

The line I wrote this morning.

A picture of several seagulls all in a row on top of a building of brutalist architecture in front of clouds and snow covered mountains

January 13, 2025 at 6:41 PM

Anthony Garrett

@anthonygarrett.bsky.social

A French duolingo exercise that says it's ridiculous to be afraid of being ridiculous.

January 11, 2025 at 3:58 AM

Anthony Garrett

@anthonygarrett.bsky.social

Since I last posted, I acquired this Derrida two of swords t-shirt for my official unofficial Derrida reading group with @adrianf.bsky.social.

a picture of my torso wearing a t-shirt with the image of tarot card depicting Jacques Derrida sitting backward on a chair holding two swords

January 10, 2025 at 2:19 AM

Anthony Garrett

@anthonygarrett.bsky.social

Your last saved meme is your moral philosophy.

a picture of a novitiate wearing sunglasses, drinking a Monster energy drink, and looking at an iPhone. The accompanying text reads: me every day in my ferocious pursuit of both worldly pleasures and complete union with God

January 5, 2025 at 2:53 AM

Anthony Garrett

@anthonygarrett.bsky.social

And Jack's shelf to himself.

Books by and about Jacques Derrida:
Writing and difference, of grammatology, dissemination, on touching Jean Luc Nancy, postcards, the gift of death, of hospitality, specters of marx, ghostly demarcations, an event perhaps, post structuralism and the question of history, ethics politics subjectivity, insister of Jacques Derrida

January 4, 2025 at 4:13 PM

Anthony Garrett

@anthonygarrett.bsky.social

Here's some commodity fetishism for you this morning.

Three shelves of theory and philosophy books whose authors' last names are from A to M. Some highlights include Barthes, Benjamin, Blanchot, Foucault, Kierkegaard, and Marx.

January 4, 2025 at 3:36 PM

Anthony Garrett

@anthonygarrett.bsky.social

"...latticed with yellow slashes full of dust motes which Quentin thought of as being flecks of the dead old dried paint itself blown inward from the scaling blinds as wind might have blown them."

From a little after two oclock until almost sundown of the long still hot weary dead September afternoon they sat in what Miss Coldfield still called the office because her father had called it that a dim hot airless room with the blinds all closed and fastened for forty-three sum- mers because when she was a girl someone had believed that light and moving air carried heat and that dark was always cooler, and which (as the sun shone fuller and fuller on that side of the house) became latticed with yellow slashes full of dust motes which Quentin thought of as being flecks of the dead old dried paint itself blown inward from the scaling blinds as wind might have blown them. There was a wistaria vine blooming for the second time that summer on a wooden trellis before one window, into which sparrows came now and then in random gusts, making a dry vivid dusty sound before going away: and opposite Quen- tin, Miss Coldfield in the eternal black which she had worn for forty- three years now, whether for sister, father, or nothusband none knew, sitting so bolt upright in the straight hard chair that was so tall for her that her legs hung straight and rigid as if she had iron shinbones and ankles, clear of the floor with that air of impotent and static rage like children's feet, and talking in that grim haggard amazed voice until at last listening would renege and hearing-sense self-confound and the long-dead object of her impotent yet indomitable frustration would appear, as though by outraged recapitulation evoked, quiet inatten-

January 4, 2025 at 2:03 AM

Anthony Garrett

@anthonygarrett.bsky.social

"And chanting sentences is the only way to feel better finally. And writing sentences, making shapes, is the only way to feel better. Sustaining, miraculous language, that all these years keeps illness at bay...Maybe I will be saved."

Miss Page introduces me to the third woman, Virginia Woolf. We read her together in class. I begin to write. For the first time. And I am left permanently changed. On almost any page of those luminous beautiful novels I can find peace, challenge, the shock of recognition, company. One could live here, in lines like this, happily, for a long time. And I have done just that. In to the lighthouse, Mrs dalloway, between the acts, the waves. And in fact I feel more at home here than just about anywhere. And it is for the most part home enough to dispel the terrible house that mental illness builds, for the first time really during the time I am at Vassar, a place that will become so demanding and after a time so familiar that I do not have a choice but to live there. And chanting sentences is the only way to feel better finally. In writing sentences, making shapes, is the only way to feel better. Sustaining miraculous language, that all these years keeps illness at Bay. Dear Virginia woolf. Dear barbara, dear helen. Dear 50 pages toward a novel I write as a senior in order to graduate. Maybe I will be saved.

December 27, 2024 at 3:07 AM

Anthony Garrett

@anthonygarrett.bsky.social

$2 paperbacks at the used book sale at the library. All of these in pristine or near pristine condition.

A stack of books made up of madness and civilization, Paris stories, residents on earth, purity, being dead, what have you lost?, how we became human.

December 13, 2024 at 8:36 PM

Anthony Garrett

@anthonygarrett.bsky.social

Were I filmmaker I would shoot a film in ultrawide aspect ratio at the main branch of the Salt Lake City Public Library.

Brutalist building scene across a large public quad as seen through floor to ceiling windows across the quad on a snowy day.

December 13, 2024 at 8:23 PM

Anthony Garrett

@anthonygarrett.bsky.social

Fourth grader saw some of my current reading and went straight for the Derrida. "'Oh my friends, there is no friend.' How can he talk to his friends if there is no friend?" I think you and an ole Jackie are on the same page, kid.