Sheldon Costa

@sheldoncosta.bsky.social

178 Followers 278 Following

Writer and miniaturist. Author of THE GREAT WORK Conjunctions | Georgia Review | Electric Literature | Michigan Quarterly | Swamp Pink He/him https://www.sheldoncosta.com/

still from widow's bay: poster of a sedan with dialogue "boys love their cars."

For all the extraordinary richness of the sensory and dramatic texture of “One Battle After Another,” there’s no submerged iceberg of experience or knowledge below its majestic peak. Regardless of any ethical or historical import to the prominence of political debate and analysis in such movies as “La Chinoise” and “Zabriskie Point,” what matters is their documentary connection with experience. Both films were made contemporaneously with political action of the sorts they dramatize, and both films make documentary-like contact with real-life activists. They show the practical labor of revolution, whereas Anderson’s film emphasizes its emotional labor. In so doing, he makes a movie that’s both brilliant and hollow, an old-fashioned movie about the world of today (and maybe tomorrow), a vision of hopeful possibilities that remains unmoored from realities. Yet his film, even in its omissions, brims with strategic ingenuity and daring, cinematic and political—to fight other films’ empty fantasies with substantial ones, to battle other advocates’ pernicious myths with virtuous ones.

A mottled, pale E.T laying face down in a river, presumably on the edge of death

A photo of my novel, The Great Work, in front of a red sky at night

The flying castle from Howl’s Moving Castle

"Then again, it's the whole Reagan program, isn't it - dismantle the New Deal, reverse the effects of World War II, restore fascism at home and around the world, flee into the past, can't you feel it, all the dangerous childish stupidity — 'I don't like the way it came out, I want it to be my way.' If the President can act like that, why not Brock?"

Table of books: Valencia, Tender is the flesh, rakesfall, looking backward, the big sleep, a little house of my own, death’s end, gravity’s rainbow, the scar, swan song

A medieval alchemist sitting in his messy workshop surrounded by various alchemical tools

Fish from spongebob saying "how many times do we have to teach you this lesson, old man?"

Alchemical symbol of salamander burning inside of a snake-encircled orb