Claire Hopple – Maudlin House

Read This, Watch That: Quarantine Bonus Edition

Claire HoppleApril 28, 2020

Patricia: What’s your greatest ambition in life? Parvulesco: To become immortal, then die. —Breathless (1960) “...that’s what happens when you imme...

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Read This, Watch That: Temporary Patriot

Claire HoppleMarch 27, 2020

“His small murder business sits in a tidy shack not far from the water. Convenient for dumping bodies. ‘Location, location, location,’ he says.” —Hilary Leicht...

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Read This, Watch That: Gardens of Nerves

Claire HoppleFebruary 15, 2020

"The whole of human comedy is here: the great farcical masque of society seen from the inside of a cage." —Maria Gainza, Optic Nerve Big Edie: The c...

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Read This, Watch That: Abiding in the Suction

Claire HoppleFebruary 7, 2020

“‘I’m all booked up on buddies tonight. I’d rather redecorate my home with the staved-in skulls of deadbeats, assorted freeloaders, and other once-beautiful chi...

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Read This, Watch That: Delusions of Mundanity

Claire HoppleJanuary 30, 2020

“Everything burns to ashes. Lives out by whatever machinery, whatever injustice, then burns down to the very surface that held it up.” —Azareen Van der Vliet O...

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Read This, Watch That: The Wormwood Attendant

Claire HoppleMarch 29, 2019

“‘You don’t know my father.’” He threw up his hands. ‘I sometimes think I don’t know you, so who’s to say?’” — Nafkote Tamirat, The Parking Lot Attendant &n...

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Read This, Watch That: I Will Destroy Our American Movie

Claire HoppleMarch 9, 2019

“He had thoughts of California, of driving there, and doing something. Driving around, looking at stuff. He’d do things. He had an image of himself and his toy ...

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Read This, Watch That: Over-Shirked

Claire HoppleJanuary 29, 2019

“The truth was that sketchbook was full of nothing but failure, and maybe that’s what I wanted to hear, that every mistake has meaning.” — Uzodinma Okehi, Over...

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Read This, Watch That: Graded from Morning to Midnight

Claire HoppleJanuary 13, 2019

“...I am trying hard to be like you. I know I don’t succeed, but look how hard I try. Three hours to choose a hat; every morning an hour and a half trying to ma...

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Read This, Watch That: Milk-landia

Claire HoppleJanuary 6, 2019

“And they too are covered in holes. They each carry a bucket. And in each bucket is a hole. This is the song we’re in.” — Sabrina Orah Mark, Wild Milk “Who adop...

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Read This, Watch That: The Hotel That Wasn’t There

Claire HoppleOctober 28, 2018

“When a person did not know they were being watched, what they would do when they believed themselves to be in a state of true privacy—that was the lure of foun...

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Read This, Watch That: This Shouldn’t Be Beautiful but it is & it’s Embarrassing

Claire HoppleAugust 4, 2018

“We literally made you a skeleton of hyperbole, to teach you to dream again.’” -- Keegan Lester, this shouldn’t be beautiful but it was & it was all i had s...

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Read This, Watch That: Window Island

Claire HoppleJuly 7, 2018

“...has everyone always been a private pool of silent swimming words?’” -- Jane Alison, Nine Island “We've become a race of Peeping Toms. What people ou...

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Read This, Watch That: Hunting Smoke

Claire HoppleMay 12, 2018

“The boy said, ‘It ain’t no different than shooting a deer.’ ‘When did you ever shoot a deer?’ ‘I guess I had it mixed up with the movies. But this was just--...

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Read This, Watch That: When Going West Goes South

Claire HoppleApril 14, 2018

“It was a damn silly position to be in, trying to hold the bluff when it had already been called.” -- Halle Butler, Jillian “I’ll give one of you two hu...

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Read This, Watch That: The Passion of Lady Bird

Claire HoppleMarch 10, 2018

“One Friday, during a student-teacher conference, Sister Katherine said, ‘Isolde, you are a very special child.’ Isolde gripped the edge of her detachable colla...

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Read This, Watch That: Doppelgänger, Poltergeist

Claire HoppleFebruary 10, 2018

“...A snow globe, its surface so worn you can’t see what it holds, but by its heft you know the water still submerses the wintry scene inside, while nobody who ...

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Read This, Watch That: Core Stories

Claire HoppleJanuary 13, 2018

“And it’s not just me. Cindy hates everything.” “Teenagers are mean. They need to be. It’s the first interpretation of seriousness.” -- Leopoldine Core, When ...

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Read This, Watch That: All is Lost in the Distance

Claire HoppleDecember 16, 2017

“He had gone into the wilderness with the intention of coming out on the other end. That he had stopped trying did not mean that this was now his place.” -- He...

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Read This, Watch That: A Serious Sarah

Claire HoppleNovember 11, 2017

“The Uncertainty Principle. It proves we can’t ever really know...what’s going on. So it shouldn't bother you. Not being able to figure anything out. Although y...

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Read This, Watch That: Fiddly Digits, Itchy Britches

Claire HoppleOctober 14, 2017

“‘Look,’ I said to him. ‘The fact is you don’t always choose your choices. You don’t always choose your victims and you don’t always choose your witnesses. That...

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Read This, Watch That: Goodbye, Nebraska

Claire HoppleSeptember 16, 2017

Receptionist: Does he have Alzheimer’s? David Grant: No, he just believes what people tell him. Receptionist: That’s too bad. -Nebraska, Alexander Payne ...

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Read This, Watch That: Restless Wrestlers

Claire HoppleAugust 12, 2017

“The special squeaks and thumps heard in practice, which is the sound of your own flesh’s wet exertion…” - Stephen Florida by Gabe Habash “I’ve gone abou...

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Read This, Watch That: Isadora & Amelie

Claire HoppleJuly 15, 2017

“The whole cremation process came too quickly. Perhaps there was still some sense of life in them, some flickering pilot light; if we hadn’t turned them to ash,...

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Read This, Watch That: Paperback Defenses

Claire HoppleJune 17, 2017

“Death the abstract, death the concept was no preparation for the drawn out dumb confusion of death the specific. Really a wonder any living gets done, all this...

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Read This, Watch That: You’d Better See Me Dance

Claire HoppleMay 20, 2017

“She did philosophy in college and I said she could be an x-ray technician and still read her philosophy books and have a good paycheck and a skill she could mo...

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Read This, Watch That: Sinking Royalty

Claire HoppleApril 15, 2017

Eli: I’ve always wanted to be a Tenenbaum, you know? Royal: Me too. Me too. Eli: It doesn’t mean what it used to though, does it? - Wes Anderson’s The Roya...

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Read This, Watch That: No Gutshot, No Glory

Claire HoppleMarch 11, 2017

Picture that trite analogy of a car wreck from which you can’t look away. Okay, now amplify it and evolve it into a delightfully visceral set of absurdist tales...

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Read This, Watch That: The Spotted and Exiled

Claire HoppleFebruary 11, 2017

“You can feel them poking at you, trying to draw the pain out of your body with a syringe...You think how painful it would be if your pain were taken from you.”...

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Read This, Watch That: Darkness and Light on Land and Sea

Claire HoppleJanuary 7, 2017

“There’s nothing there,” says Lee Chandler (Casey Affleck) in Manchester by the Sea. Equally moving and understated, Kenneth Lonergan’s movie and Melanie Fin...

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