Word: affectlessness
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...European and American backpackers who circle like dead leaves in an eddy through the guesthouses of Southeast Asia: this month Lombok, next week or next month or in another life, Loh Liang or Zanskar. Garland writes as they travel, without emotion or opinion or allegiance. His narrator is an affectless young Englishman named Richard, who, in Thailand, comes upon a hand-drawn map that seems to locate a dimly-rumored and supposedly unreachable island beach unknown to tourists or authorities. With a young French couple, flaccid Etienne and wanly beautiful Francoise, he manages to find this Eden, whose legendary sands...
...Republicans. But that's not really the issue. All these guys appear in movies where the vast body count is composed entirely of anonymous victims. They are to other movies what assault weapons (another of the Senator's favorite products) are to the rest of gundom-instruments of totally affectless violence...
...wonder that the work Twombly was doing 30 years ago, before the debate about Post-Modernism blew up, now seems like a talisman to certain Post- Modernists. Po-Mo's relation to the past was all about the sort of skittering, rather affectless quotation, the shoring of fragments against the ruins, that is written all over Twombly's work. One detects the artist's own hand behind the hyperbole of his admirers. But he is still a considerable painter...
...photographer's own dilemmas, Avedon's pictures would be less compelling than they are. His portraits of Marilyn Monroe and Samuel Beckett command attention because's Monroe's baffled abjection and Beckett's quiet endurance correspond to states of mind familiar enough to most people. And the affectless pictures of oil-rig workers and cowboys and drifters that Avedon made in the western U.S., a place that still holds some of its mythic power as a land of opportunity, are a powerful representation of everyone's worst fears of disappointment...
...mother. In the most unnerving scene, he brings in the kidnap victim's estranged husband, an alcoholic abuser who considers himself saved by born-again Christianity. It was he who, in the aftermath of their breakup, raped his wife as a way of reasserting his claim. Speaking in an affectless, almost lobotomized-sounding whisper, the husband alternately pledges to put his ex-wife on a pedestal and take possession of her and the child as rightfully his. The minister looks on approvingly throughout...