Utilized in many variations, but often when one character is about to lecture the other.
Of one character, he jokes about "how much energy she was putting into saying as little as possible of what she felt" and says that in Brooklyn "I wanted to reduce the style to zero".
It's all, as one character yells, about "a cock in a frock on a rock".
"The hitter can never be the judge," one character says about a schoolyard fistfight.
"If she acts like a whore, she is a whore," one character onserves about Samantha, and it is a point of view that the film seems to share.
"Fragrant Harbor," which takes its title from the meaning of the territory's name ("Chinese joke," one character says, about the harbor's aroma), has an unusual structure.
When we met, he drew my attention to an idea that one character has about art's ability "to arrest our attention in the midst of distraction," but he had forgotten that the phrase was not his but Saul Bellow's.
Reviews of his adult novels seldom fail to praise the vivid vernacular (in Brixton Rock - which plays with the name and themes of Brighton Rock - one character inquires about a fight by saying: "What-a-gwarn last night? Someone told me you bust up Terry Flynn").
When one character, complaining about James's prevarications, notes that James writes "a little bit like a virgin," she soon apologizes for "being, specifically, not to put too fine a point on it, a sort of, what could be called an, though not entirely, aesthetic bitch".
