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Laura Lee Bahr

Loving David Foster Wallace's Take on Lost Highway

Having just re-watched David Lynch's Lost Highway, I have been loving this article by the late David Foster Wallace (DFW) on Lost Highway, to the point that reading just a paragraph or two at work makes me happy like a little sweetish-salty snack.


DFW's comments here on LA invite memorization and repetition like Homer's Odyssey.


"L.A.'s murder rate is apparently higher during Santa Ana Wind periods than any other time, and in Griffith Park it's easy to confirm that there's something Lynchian in the air today: Sounds sound harsher, breathing tastes funny, and the sunlight has a way of diffracting into knives that penetrate all the way to the back of the skull. The air smells of sage and pine and dust and distant creosote. Wild mustard, yucca, sumac, and various grasses form a kind of five o'clock shadow on the hillsides, and scrub oak and pine jut at unlikely angles, and some of the trees' trunks are creepily curved and deformed, and there are also a lot of obstreperous weeds and things with thorns that discourage much hiking around. The road where the set is is like a kind of small canyon between a butte on one side and an outright cliff on the other."



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© 2024 Laura Lee Bahr
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