Two or Three Things I'm Dying to Tell You

Cultural Writing. "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 Shahrayar dying to tell Shahrazad? 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, inducing the undead to wonder: "Am I in a film?"; as well as a significant number of other anomalies"--Jalal Toufic. "Resurrection through simulation-an end time fantasy in real time. The graves open...the dead walk...Toufic is a sort of postructuralist spiritualist, a critical medium for the peculiar specters that haunt the society of the spectacle." Ben Lerner "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 Forema"