Much of the action in this version takes place in a disused hospital, its institutional emptiness intensifying the alienation channelled by an
affectless and monotonal Alice.
It also contains one of its best-known scenes, in which the
affectless anti-hero Meursault murders an Arab on an Algerian beach, seemingly spurred by the glint of the other's knife and the heat of the sun.
A universal story of alienation and displacement, No One Writes Back "has the trappings of the avant garde--the carefully
affectless style, the way it is told in numbered paragraphs--but in terms of the emotional impact it delivers, it is, in its way, as sentimental as [Dickens's] The Old Curiosity Shop" wrote the Guardian (UK).
Especially when he claims: "Strictly speaking there is no need for the poet to go to America at all, for he already exists in a post-real, if not posthumous state of the soul he has moved over into, where everything, though perfectly in focus, is oddly
affectless, stripped of value."
Made in collaboration with Ward and composer Andrew Clarke, each translates scans of one of Johnson's drawings into its torpid, unnerving double, the
affectless bodies endowed with three-dimensional contour and basic motility.
in the form of the openly white nationalist alt-right who hid among an online army of ironic in-jokey trolls." Fourth, since the sixties, "the culture of non-conformism, self-expression, transgression, and irreverence for its own sake" has been associated with a sort of
affectless left-wing bohemianism, but in fact it's a morally and politically neutral ethos.
Throughout, the narrator relates his impressions, observations, and commentary in an oddly detached,
affectless tone that only acquires a degree of emotional investment when he describes the feelings of terror provoked by his nightmares.
Fernandez provides an excellent introduction to the British and European cultural milieu from which Blincoe and Thorne's collection emerged, pointing to its antecedents in the concept of blank fiction--the flat,
affectless, uncommitted prose of writers like Bret Easton Ellis and Dennis Cooper--in post punk aesthetics, in the inspiration found in Michael Clark's ballet entitled Hail the New Puritan (which also suggested the collection's title) and in the Dogme 95 movement, particularly Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinerberg's cinematic manifesto entitled the Vow of Chastity.
Their delivery of the quasi-poetical dialogue is
affectless, despite their apparent earnestness and the sing-songy characteristic of Urkish, their native tongue.
Helms is out-of-place, annoying as the
affectless, underemployed dad, and the movie seems unnecessarily cruel to his ex-wife (Alex Borstein).
But I do perceive that a certain risk-free,
affectless American poem seems most often to be by a white poet.