Outtakes from Against the Day

[Monte Davis]

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/photobooth/2014/04/the-view-from-a-pinhole.html#slide_ss_0=1

p. 300, one of many quiet Big Bangs knotting explosions,light and time:

>From a drawer in a cabinet against the wall, Merle took more gelatin-silver
prints. “Maybe these’ll be some help.” One showed a pair of what looked
like drovers in town for the Fourth of July, one of them appearing to force
the other to eat a giant firecracker, all lit and throwing bright sparks,
flying, dying, filling the unmeasurable fragment of time the shutter was
open, to the amusement of others in the background looking on from the
porch of a saloon.

“You’re not telling me—”

“Here, this one’s a little clearer.”

It was out in front of this exact same amalgamator’s office. This time
Deuce and Sloat were not smiling, and the light was more proper to autumn,
you could see dark clouds in the sky overhead, and nothing was casting
shadows. The two men were posed as if for some ceremonial purpose. For the
gray day, the exposure was a little longer, and you’d expect one at least
to have moved and blurred the image, but no, they had stood rigid, almost
defiant, allowing the collodion mixture its due measure of light, to record
the two killers with unrelenting fidelity, as if set in front of some slow
emulsion of an earlier day, eyes, Frank, bending close, noticed now,
rendered with that same curious crazed radiance which once was an artifact
of having to blink a couple of hundred times during the exposure, but in
this more modern form due to something authentically ghostly, for which
these emulsions were acting as agents, revealing what no other record up
till then could’ve.
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