Essays
Two or Three Things I'm Dying to Tell You
By Jalal Toufic
Jalal Toufic is an amazing writer. He documents the moves of consciousness in a way that leads the reader ever deeper, from impasse to illusion to new impasse—turning the trap of "what can't be named" into a true paradise.
—Richard Foreman
What was Orpheus dying to tell his wife, Eurydice? What was Judy dying to tell her beloved, Scottie, in Hitchcock's Vertigo? What were the previous one-night wives of King Shahrayâr dying to tell Shahrazâd? What was the Christian God "dying" to tell us? What were the faces of the candidates in the 2000 parliamentary election in Lebanon "dying" to tell voters and nonvoters alike? While writing (Vampires): An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film and Undying Love, or Love Dies, I, a mortal to death, was dying to tell these books' readers and myself about diegetic silence-over, which produces a dead stop and reveals the occasional natural immobilization of the living as merely a variety of movement; and an unreality that sometimes behaves in a filmic manner (for example, lapses in hypnosis, schizophrenia, and undeath permit editing in reality), inducing the undead to wonder: "Am I in a film?"; as well as a significant number of other anomalies. This new book contains two or three additional things I am dying to tell its readers as well as the poet Lyn Hejinian and myself.
—Jalal Toufic
June 2005 150 pages $20.00 ISBN 0-942996-55-0
