Fountain of Knowledge

Don't compare slipstream literature to cinema. Even if there is such a thing as slipstream cinema, I still wouldn't do it. Have you read Garcia Marquez "One Hundred Years of Solitude"? That's considered slipstream and probably magical realism too, and it's a masterpiece. Borge's short story collection The Aleph also works. Italo Calvino's "On a Winter's Night a Traveler" is considered slipstream. Even Orlando by Woolfe is part of the "canon". I'd bet Orlanda (the counterpart book I mentioned in another forum) would fit the title of "slipstream." Weight by Jeanette Winterson also fits.

Personally, I don't think you're far off by calling slipstream more of a literary device than a genre. Often there's just something amiss in the story telling - In Orlando, the main character a) changes gender and b) doesn't get any older but lives 400 years. Weight, Orlanda and On a Winter's Night are all books where the narrator literally breaks off in the middle of the story and starts talking to the audience. They all do it for different reasons that fit the book and give it an extra - thing - A je ne sais quoi that makes the book better 100 times better than if it wasn't there.

I didn't totally agree with Winterson when she did it in her book Weight, but what she wrote in response to her own story-telling was so brilliant I had to forgive her.

Slipstream isn't weird because it's trying to be profound - the oddness MUST MUST add something to the story. In Weight I think Winterson had to break narrative because she was so mired into the story personally that she had to comment on it - and it actually gave a whole new meaning to the story. One Hundred Years of Solitude would just be a massive information dump and boring history lesson if the time-line wasn't literally all over the place and there weren't elements of the fantastic involved. Orlanda's narration breaks because the author is having fun, and she knows she's having fun and wants you to have fun and dream about the impossible along with her.

If the author or reader just wants to be "profound" but can't find a reason for the weird or the odd to be there - and this is something I seriously struggle with in my more experimental stories - then it ultimately fails.

Now I will shut up and let someone talk about Romance and Love, which I have something to say about but I don't want to start the conversation.

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