Her first digression from abstraction came in 1986, when she choreographed and danced in Lina Wertmüller's production of "Carmen".
But first, a digression: In trying to get to a 9 30 a.m.
Mr. Nelson tells this part of the story mechanically, and often repetitively, with annoying first-person digressions.
At first these digressions seem disruptive, as though television had evolved into the Internet, wandering away from an article midstream to follow an explanatory link.
Seth, who had been a Stegner Fellow in 1977-78, used the Russian bard's swift tetrameter, not pentameter, lines, along with a complicated rhyme scheme involving masculine and feminine endings, and also including Pushkin's characteristic first-person digressions.
In a passage in the book that at first seems a digression, he recalls his father taking him to a deserted beach as a boy to teach him to shoot.
But if you think that our interest in movies has everything to do with our feelings about them, and if you have a tolerance for repetition, digression, first-person indulgence, and general narrative shagginess, then you are not likely to find a more affecting and intellectually absorbing book on film as a popular art.
But first, a quick digression... when I was a kid, there was a soft drink called "TEEM".
The detective story as existential crisis took form with Beckett's Molloy more than 60 years ago; and the concept of the novel as crazed digression was first incarnated in Tristram Shandy, over 250 years ago.
While Tom dithers, Antrim treats us to a long digression (the first of many) that's as freshly minted as any of the tangents in "The Mezzanine," Nicholson Baker's first novel.
