IJ study archive

JOI's father delivers the garage monologue (pp. 168–169)

quote

It did not did not happen in slow motion. […] I learned what it means to be a body, Jim, just meat wrapped in a sort of flimsy nylon stocking, son, as I fell kneeling and slid toward the stretched net, myself seen by me, frame by frame, torn open.

Context

The fall that destroys the father's knees is remembered cinematically — he denies the slow-motion cliché and then supplies the film anyway, "myself seen by me, frame by frame." The man who never got to be on screen shoots his own catastrophe from outside his body; JOI will spend a career building lenses to do exactly this. The doubled "did not did not" is as written.

Quoted from

In anthology