Tim O’Brien is a Vietnam vet famous for the novel Going After Cacciato and The Things They Carried, his anthology of short stories about his time there. The idea he expresses in that title, your experiences being the things you sling around you, isn’t new (Jacob Marley says hello. Or perhaps ‘HELLOOOOOOOO!’) but I find the utility of …
I’ve been thinking a lot about narrative expectation recently. Pretty much every job I have I can get better at by watching, reading, listening to and playing things. So I do a lot of that, often at the same time. This week, as is often the case, that threw up some interesting comparisons. Luther is Neil …
Death haunts the opening act of The First. The chrome bus that takes the Providence crew out to the launch, the waterside mounted bleachers where the families watch and, most of all, the skittering angles of the SRBs after the ship explodes in mid-air. Apollo 1 and Challenger, scars on the face of crewed spaceflight evoked respectfully but not painlessly. This …