Paul makes a confession:
"I listen to records I don't like alot more than records I like."
Ana stares over the steering wheel, then looks at herself in the rearview mirror, and grabs her ponytail in her right hand to straighten it. Absently...
- Why?
- I dunno. I feel bad for them. Like I wasn’t a big enough person to hear their merits the first few times I listened.
She smiles as he rambles. And eventually (it takes a few miles), she shakes herself back out of her own head and into a conversation. They go from music to music criticism, to criticism generally: The merits of a work of art are determined by professional reviewers, discuss. Critical mass and backlash and the secrets of "deep reading"...of symbolism.
When is a fog a fog? And when is it something else, something more? Paul says he doesn’t understand symbolism in literature, and Ana says that’s because he never took lit classes in college: "You have to learn to spot the recurring motifs in practice."
Oh really? Outside, haystacks begin appearing in the fields.
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