Learn its language and speak it

1) From “Intuition,” by Feist (2007)



And in came a heatwave/
A merciful save/
You choose, you chose/
Poetry over prose

A map is more unreal
than where you've been
or how you feel.


2) From “70 Million” by Hold Your Horses! (2010)



And it hardly looked like a novel at all.
I hardly look like a hero at all.
And I’m sorry you didn’t publish this.
And you were white as snow. I was white as a sheet.

When you came down in this black dress.
In your mom’s black maternity dress.
And so,
though it hardly looked like a novel at all,
and the city treats me, it treats me to you,
and a cup of coffee for you.
I should learn its language and speak it to you.


3) From "Ever Greenberg," by Richard Brody, The Front Row (March 29, 2010)

"There are two ideal durations for a feature film: sixty-three minutes, which is an hour of setup and a brief tag of a wrap-up; and three hours, of which the first hour of setup is followed by two of working-out. The ninety-minute length (or its modern variety, the two-hour version, which includes more backstory) is constructed on the artifice of a plot mechanism that brings lots of plot threads together in an accelerating dénouement. It worked in an age of abstraction—an age when movies themselves, made largely on studio sets with the help of an unprecedented battery of theatrical paraphernalia, achieved an extraordinary simulation of specifics through remarkably artificial means. The stories that studios set in motion were equally abstract, relying on situations that had the built-in necessities of social conventions that themselves ran along more or less unchallenged. Classic Hollywood storytelling bought its efficiency at the price of all it excluded or filtered out, and its ingeniously constructed stories were less the cause of that exclusion than the effect of a society that was hardly inclusive.

"Romantic comedy has become boiled down to its essence: two people are thrown together and sometimes it’s funny."