1LolaWalser
I regret the unavailability of English, but this is a rare opportunity, a chance to see free (until April 5) one of Kira Muratova's films, if you can read French (or speak Russian):
Les Longs adieux (Долгие проводы, 1971).
Muratova was the daughter of a Russian father and a Romanian mother but spent all her active life in Odessa and identified strongly with Ukraine. In 2014 she expressed her support for Ukraine's right to self-determination quoting verses of Mayakovsky: If a vile / bully / hits / someone weaker / a little one, / This villain / disgusts me. / I exclude him / from my books!
Les Longs adieux (Долгие проводы, 1971).
Muratova was the daughter of a Russian father and a Romanian mother but spent all her active life in Odessa and identified strongly with Ukraine. In 2014 she expressed her support for Ukraine's right to self-determination quoting verses of Mayakovsky: If a vile / bully / hits / someone weaker / a little one, / This villain / disgusts me. / I exclude him / from my books!
2LolaWalser
After the one above, a second film by Muratova is available free (until May 3). This one was made in independent Ukraine and shot in Odessa. In Russian with French subtitles, a struggling piano tuner schemes to defraud two old women.
L'Accordeur (Настройщик, 2004)
L'Accordeur (Настройщик, 2004)
4LolaWalser
Hi! It's a hoot and also sad.
5LolaWalser
Pornographie du temps présent, Alain Badiou, first published in 2013
Badiou's scathing critique of liberal democracy's smoke & shadow circus is some years old but as fresh as ever in the face of such obscene spectacles like this current one following the death of one uniquely privileged individual, in a caste-ridden country the majority of whose territory and resources are in the hands of a tiny minority. That not being enough for the tiny minority, who --including the dead monarch--secreted their riches in offshore accounts to avoid taxes.
As the new king too will avoid paying taxes on the almost 700 billion pounds he inherits from dear departed tax-dodging mama. (No, King Charles III won't pay any inheritance tax on his massive gain)
Adding yet another insult to who knows how many injuries, and buttressing further Badiou's pornographic metaphor, this new king has apparently allowed his minor-exploiting, sex-trafficking-friendly younger brother to be his "deputy"...
But I'm not interested in these debased, over-privileged idiots. The real tragedy lies in the servility of those who support them.
Badiou describes the middle class's mindless intoxication with words that have lost all meaning, the prime example being "democracy". For a long time we had to bear being bludgeoned by American propaganda about the US being "the greatest democracy"--never mind that it was a "democracy" founded on genocide, slavery, and a persistent (because carefully preserved) caste system which quite deliberately sets out to create an eternal underclass--a "democracy" where most often less than half of eligible population actually voted, and those who voted saw their choices routinely sabotaged, a "democracy" that nevertheless ruined other democratic systems and propped the worst tyrants as it saw fit, a "democracy" that abhors even the mildest progressive measures (and persecutes them all as "communist"), whereas its old sympathy for Nazism not just survives but THRIVES. Why wouldn't it--Nazism doesn't threaten capitalism, and as hackneyed as the statement is, capitalism is all that matters to America. A "democracy", finally, that just reached a sort of apocalyptic climax in STRIPPING AWAY freedom of half or even more than half its entire population.
This is why "American democracy" is accurately seen as fascism. But it's a fascism "done-up" with Madison Avenue glossy looks and lies. Besides, who's to care? The oppressed poor are too crazed by the sheer fight for survival, and the middle class...
Here I'll quote Badiou (my translation):
...the middle class individual, which we all are in some part of ourselves, desires to persevere in the world such as it is, provided that capitalism offers him a less despotic authority, more consensual, a corruption better regulated, in which he will be able to participate without even having to notice it. That's perhaps the best definition of today's middle class: to participate naively in capitalism's formidable inequitable corruption, without even having to know it.
Close your eyes all you want. A lot of us here are old enough that we'll just about make it to our graves without having to reckon with the consequences of the lies we sustained. But if there's anyone you care for you are leaving behind... get a fucking clue, demand the "impossible", demand revolution.
6LolaWalser
Serendipitously, I picked up La Chinoise and Anne Wiazemsky's account (Une année studieuse) of her meeting with Godard and the making of said film just days before Godard's death. The New Wave was never my favourite period/movement in cinema but it acquires in interest as time goes by.
"Revolution that flows"... I can't remember whose translation, whose phrase it is, but it used to be something we made fun of--we who were comfortable. And yet there it is, always: always the need for revolution, and this is at the core of Godard's film. In which a small cell of wannabe French Maoists hoists their banner against not just or even primarily the capitalist fascist enemy, but the more insidious enemies on the left; the old, ossified, Moscow-beholden left, the "establishment" left.
It came out in 1967 and was thus considered prescient later on (after May 1968), but it's simply always relevant, timeless in its focus on youth.
Wiazemsky's book is fluid and very evocative. I feel embarrassed to comment on her and Godard's private lives (the greatest part of my dislike of the male New Wavers has to do with their insufferable egotistical, macho personalities), but even that has a special interest as so much was poured from "real life" into film.
Ed van der Elsken's 1954 "photonovel" Love on the Left Bank captures an earlier generation of youths, closer to the war and farther away from politics. The scene is dominated by quests to allay loneliness, survive poverty, get some drugs for a little trip, evade the immigration police...
7LolaWalser
Also read: Le pendu de Saint-Pholien, Simenon, first published in 1933. Quite by chance, Maigret notices one shabby looking individual behaving peculiarly and decides to follow him on a lark, even if that does lead him all the way to Belgium. At one point Maigret switches the target's suitcase for another, with dreadful results--on discovery that his suitcase is gone, the man commits suicide. Since the suitcase, now in Maigret's possession, contained nothing but one old faded man's suit, what on earth could have possessed him to do so? Fearing that he unwittingly caused an innocent man's death, Maigret must unravel an old mystery...
Also read: Frogs &. others. by Kusano Shinpei (various dates). Kusano adored frogs, but not as mere pets, somehow they represented to him a perfect avatar through which to address the mysteries of life and the universe. These poems are Western-like in form, mostly free verse, and often seem "experimental", for example in lengthy onomatopoeic/gibberish tracts. There are some non-froggy poems too, but basically, rrribbit, rrrrribbit.
After La Chinoise I watched Bertrand Tavernier's L'horloger de Saint-Paul, 1974, which can be seen in the same continuum as the previous film, without being in any way a commentary or sequel. By that date the student protests were history and France, like other Western countries, self-hypnotizing into the smug liberals' complacent consumerist culture. Only occasionally, as happened to the once-apolitical clockmaker of St. Paul (played by Phillippe Noiret), would a sudden rupture bring to light liberalism's fascist skeleton--in this case, the murder of a right-wing "vigil" (industrial police), an ex-soldier and known rapist terror of the factory girls, for which the clockmaker's estranged son gets accused. The defense tries to impose a "romantic" interpretation on the case (the vigil would have raped his girlfriend, thus inducing a "crime passionnel"), but the young man refuses it... and the father, who had come to understand things both about his son and the society they live in, declares himself "in solidarity" with his son.
Oddly enough, this is based on a novel by Simenon (not a political author in my book), but I gather Tavernier must have changed some of it.
Also read: Frogs &. others. by Kusano Shinpei (various dates). Kusano adored frogs, but not as mere pets, somehow they represented to him a perfect avatar through which to address the mysteries of life and the universe. These poems are Western-like in form, mostly free verse, and often seem "experimental", for example in lengthy onomatopoeic/gibberish tracts. There are some non-froggy poems too, but basically, rrribbit, rrrrribbit.
After La Chinoise I watched Bertrand Tavernier's L'horloger de Saint-Paul, 1974, which can be seen in the same continuum as the previous film, without being in any way a commentary or sequel. By that date the student protests were history and France, like other Western countries, self-hypnotizing into the smug liberals' complacent consumerist culture. Only occasionally, as happened to the once-apolitical clockmaker of St. Paul (played by Phillippe Noiret), would a sudden rupture bring to light liberalism's fascist skeleton--in this case, the murder of a right-wing "vigil" (industrial police), an ex-soldier and known rapist terror of the factory girls, for which the clockmaker's estranged son gets accused. The defense tries to impose a "romantic" interpretation on the case (the vigil would have raped his girlfriend, thus inducing a "crime passionnel"), but the young man refuses it... and the father, who had come to understand things both about his son and the society they live in, declares himself "in solidarity" with his son.
Oddly enough, this is based on a novel by Simenon (not a political author in my book), but I gather Tavernier must have changed some of it.
8LolaWalser
Free from the Cinémathèque Française, with English subtitles:
Conversation between Serge Daney and Jean-Luc Godard (1988)
Conversation between Serge Daney and Jean-Luc Godard (1988)
9LolaWalser
The conversation with Dan over in the Questions thread reminded me that I also saw Truffaut's 1977 L'homme qui aimait les femmes (The Man who loved women). I had seen this once long time ago and hated it (maybe even left half-way), and only put it in the player now to check that the disc wasn't damaged, as it appeared to be. But then the sheer preposterousness of it all captured me and I watched through, trying to imagine the response of a current young person, or even not so young.
Charles Denner plays the eponymous character, a 40-something engineer with an obsessive need to seduce all the women that appeal to him (and as the above shot shows, regardless of how many other current adventures he's engaged in). The first thing he notices about women are their legs, the rest being of less importance. His conquests are myriad. And not only that, although he dumps them quickly, they keep holding a torch for him, remembering him fondly and even lovingly. He forgets their names, or even if he ever bedded them (that comes from paying more attention to legs than faces), but they never forget him.
It's worth describing the first seduction we see in the movie. Bertrand notices a pair of gorgeous pins entering a rent-a-car and pursues them to the rent-a-car office where he fails to obtain the customer's number from a less attractive employee close to his age. He even goes and totals his car in order to claim that the rented car caused the crash, but the same employee is still adamant that she can't divulge the customer's information to him. A pretty younger woman employee, however, follows him and not only gives him this information, she invites him to call upon her whenever.
Bertrand calls the unknown woman with the legs (never mind what trouble his call may be causing her...) Indeed, she is shown getting up from a dinner table with another men and children present--presumably her family?--but never mind, as soon as Bertrand tells her about his infatuation with her fleeting image she breaks into huge smiles and agrees to meet him.
At the rendez-vous Bertrand is first disappointed that she shows up wearing trousers, then surprised that he can't recognise her at all. Not one to torture a man indefinitely, this attractive but "wrong" woman admits that he must have seen the legs of her cousin, who both has a boyfriend and has already left for Montreal. But, she suggests she'd give him her cousin's number in Montreal, if he's interested...
OK, that should be enough to show why I think the only right way to read this film is to see it as a male wish-fulfillment fantasy, a sort of dream. I doubt this is an original take but I also know for sure that there exist gajillion of people, mostly men, who'd insist (did insist) that characters like this do "love" women and by no means should be called misogynist.
After all, Bertrand is kind and soft-spoken, never violent (in fact one funny sequence has HIM at the mercy of a nutty "girlfriend from hell"), doesn't discriminate by age (much, he does prefer women as close to girlhood as possible), and actually sees SOME difference between the women, for instance, as his final monologue goes, he loved this one for her myopic gaze and round glasses, and that one for her defiant look, and the other one for some such other or another tidbit... and neither Bertrand nor his champions ever notice that he's constitutionally incapable of seeing WHOLE women, let alone respecting and relating to each one as a unique person.
There is an extra on the disc from a contemporary TV programme with Truffaut, Denner, a lady journalist (who had just published a book about "virility"), and Jean-Louis Trintignant, among others. Truffaut says nothing interesting, and when the presenter--who had stated upfront that she thinks Bertrand is a misogynist--asks him could he do a film like this with a female lead, he replies that he'd like to see that and that it would be fair, since there exist women who love men like Bertrand loves women. No mention of systemic differences, back in 1977, or really any questioning of the thesis that it's exactly the same situation for men and women, when they launch into the life of promiscuous sexual adventure.
But then I was surprised to hear what Trintignant had to say, when the journalist lady asked him what he thought of "virility", how did he define it. Trintignant bluntly panned the concept as "racist" (I think we are supposed to understand "discriminatory") and "fascist", because it is tied to the notion of superiority etc.--he'd wish to have it done away with completely. Bravo Trintignant!--this considerably improved on the ugly memory of his slapping around Brigitte Bardot in Et Dieu crea la femme.
In conclusion, this movie can be seen as a prime example of both a failure and success in the "men writing women" category. Taken straight, it's a dismal failure. But taken as an unreliable narrator's projection, it may be noted that women keep slipping away from Bertrand. His imagination shows them gathering mournfully at his funeral (this is not a spoiler, the scene opens the film), but MY imagination shows them gathering to cheer on, as in that old joke, the lowering of the coffin.
Charles Denner plays the eponymous character, a 40-something engineer with an obsessive need to seduce all the women that appeal to him (and as the above shot shows, regardless of how many other current adventures he's engaged in). The first thing he notices about women are their legs, the rest being of less importance. His conquests are myriad. And not only that, although he dumps them quickly, they keep holding a torch for him, remembering him fondly and even lovingly. He forgets their names, or even if he ever bedded them (that comes from paying more attention to legs than faces), but they never forget him.
It's worth describing the first seduction we see in the movie. Bertrand notices a pair of gorgeous pins entering a rent-a-car and pursues them to the rent-a-car office where he fails to obtain the customer's number from a less attractive employee close to his age. He even goes and totals his car in order to claim that the rented car caused the crash, but the same employee is still adamant that she can't divulge the customer's information to him. A pretty younger woman employee, however, follows him and not only gives him this information, she invites him to call upon her whenever.
Bertrand calls the unknown woman with the legs (never mind what trouble his call may be causing her...) Indeed, she is shown getting up from a dinner table with another men and children present--presumably her family?--but never mind, as soon as Bertrand tells her about his infatuation with her fleeting image she breaks into huge smiles and agrees to meet him.
At the rendez-vous Bertrand is first disappointed that she shows up wearing trousers, then surprised that he can't recognise her at all. Not one to torture a man indefinitely, this attractive but "wrong" woman admits that he must have seen the legs of her cousin, who both has a boyfriend and has already left for Montreal. But, she suggests she'd give him her cousin's number in Montreal, if he's interested...
OK, that should be enough to show why I think the only right way to read this film is to see it as a male wish-fulfillment fantasy, a sort of dream. I doubt this is an original take but I also know for sure that there exist gajillion of people, mostly men, who'd insist (did insist) that characters like this do "love" women and by no means should be called misogynist.
After all, Bertrand is kind and soft-spoken, never violent (in fact one funny sequence has HIM at the mercy of a nutty "girlfriend from hell"), doesn't discriminate by age (much, he does prefer women as close to girlhood as possible), and actually sees SOME difference between the women, for instance, as his final monologue goes, he loved this one for her myopic gaze and round glasses, and that one for her defiant look, and the other one for some such other or another tidbit... and neither Bertrand nor his champions ever notice that he's constitutionally incapable of seeing WHOLE women, let alone respecting and relating to each one as a unique person.
There is an extra on the disc from a contemporary TV programme with Truffaut, Denner, a lady journalist (who had just published a book about "virility"), and Jean-Louis Trintignant, among others. Truffaut says nothing interesting, and when the presenter--who had stated upfront that she thinks Bertrand is a misogynist--asks him could he do a film like this with a female lead, he replies that he'd like to see that and that it would be fair, since there exist women who love men like Bertrand loves women. No mention of systemic differences, back in 1977, or really any questioning of the thesis that it's exactly the same situation for men and women, when they launch into the life of promiscuous sexual adventure.
But then I was surprised to hear what Trintignant had to say, when the journalist lady asked him what he thought of "virility", how did he define it. Trintignant bluntly panned the concept as "racist" (I think we are supposed to understand "discriminatory") and "fascist", because it is tied to the notion of superiority etc.--he'd wish to have it done away with completely. Bravo Trintignant!--this considerably improved on the ugly memory of his slapping around Brigitte Bardot in Et Dieu crea la femme.
In conclusion, this movie can be seen as a prime example of both a failure and success in the "men writing women" category. Taken straight, it's a dismal failure. But taken as an unreliable narrator's projection, it may be noted that women keep slipping away from Bertrand. His imagination shows them gathering mournfully at his funeral (this is not a spoiler, the scene opens the film), but MY imagination shows them gathering to cheer on, as in that old joke, the lowering of the coffin.
11Dilara86
>5 LolaWalser: That's a fascinating review. I've never read Badiou's "meaty" works - only his conversation with the other Alain (the infamous Finkielkraut) and a short essay called Méfiez-vous des blancs, habitants du rivage ! - but I really want to now!
12LolaWalser
>10 dchaikin:
Thanks, I always worry if I go past a paragraph that it turns into yadda-yadda-yadda... but if I'm going to keep talking about the movies here, I think it's good to remind ourselves that they can be as thoughtful and/or stimulating as books (although I'm a terrible critic and miss more than I see).
>11 Dilara86:
This particular work is tiny, 60 pages or so, it's the text of a speech he gave somewhere. The back blurb describes its message thusly (keeping it in French for all the nuance):
I didn't mention that Badiou uses Lacanian symbolism to describe power and images of power, which frankly almost made me abandon the text at the start, since it's all Phallus this and Phallus that... but it's worth putting up with. His second frame of reference here is Genet's Le Balcon and I must say I feel I understood the play (which I had read long before) only now.
My interest in Badiou (who is often described, and not only by friends, as the greatest living philosopher) is in that he's a communist (a Maoist at that!), has always been a communist, and explicates the need for communism now and forever. I had trouble following his argument in The Communist hypothesis, though, but then, quite unexpectedly, it clicked for me after reading an earlier book of his, The meaning of Sarkozy!
I haven't tackled any of his longer works and I'm not happy with his stance on feminism, or the ease with which he salvages Heidegger for philosophy, but on the former--possibly on the latter as well...-- I feel constrained to give him Old White Dude pass points...
Thanks, I always worry if I go past a paragraph that it turns into yadda-yadda-yadda... but if I'm going to keep talking about the movies here, I think it's good to remind ourselves that they can be as thoughtful and/or stimulating as books (although I'm a terrible critic and miss more than I see).
>11 Dilara86:
This particular work is tiny, 60 pages or so, it's the text of a speech he gave somewhere. The back blurb describes its message thusly (keeping it in French for all the nuance):
La seule critique dangereuse et radicale du temps présent, c'est la critique politique de la démocratie. Il ne suffit pas de lutter contre la domination du capitalisme libéral, il faut sortir du bordel financier des images pour voir le pouvoir dans sa nudité.
I didn't mention that Badiou uses Lacanian symbolism to describe power and images of power, which frankly almost made me abandon the text at the start, since it's all Phallus this and Phallus that... but it's worth putting up with. His second frame of reference here is Genet's Le Balcon and I must say I feel I understood the play (which I had read long before) only now.
My interest in Badiou (who is often described, and not only by friends, as the greatest living philosopher) is in that he's a communist (a Maoist at that!), has always been a communist, and explicates the need for communism now and forever. I had trouble following his argument in The Communist hypothesis, though, but then, quite unexpectedly, it clicked for me after reading an earlier book of his, The meaning of Sarkozy!
I haven't tackled any of his longer works and I'm not happy with his stance on feminism, or the ease with which he salvages Heidegger for philosophy, but on the former--possibly on the latter as well...-- I feel constrained to give him Old White Dude pass points...
13rocketjk
>5 LolaWalser: "But I'm not interested in these debased, over-privileged idiots. The real tragedy lies in the servility of those who support them."
Don't know if you've seen this, from the London Review of Books, but I think you will enjoy it. In an essay titled "The Death Parade," author Andrew O'Hagan presents a take-down of the British media's reactions to the queen's demise. An excerpt:
"It’s really quite unfair that Charles Dickens is not available at this hour, because his pen would ooze with rapid invention if confronted by the BBC’s royal correspondent. On a good day – and this, sad to say, is as good a day as Witchell’s ever going to get – he makes Uriah Heep look like Brad Pitt at his easy-going peak, the reporter’s face a gravitational field bringing his mouth into the saddest of all rictuses. He spent his long hours before the camera masticating fresh delights of toadyism. It was terrific to watch, in the same way that it’s terrific to watch a snake being fed live mice."
https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2022/september/the-death-parade
Don't know if you've seen this, from the London Review of Books, but I think you will enjoy it. In an essay titled "The Death Parade," author Andrew O'Hagan presents a take-down of the British media's reactions to the queen's demise. An excerpt:
"It’s really quite unfair that Charles Dickens is not available at this hour, because his pen would ooze with rapid invention if confronted by the BBC’s royal correspondent. On a good day – and this, sad to say, is as good a day as Witchell’s ever going to get – he makes Uriah Heep look like Brad Pitt at his easy-going peak, the reporter’s face a gravitational field bringing his mouth into the saddest of all rictuses. He spent his long hours before the camera masticating fresh delights of toadyism. It was terrific to watch, in the same way that it’s terrific to watch a snake being fed live mice."
https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2022/september/the-death-parade
14Dilara86
>12 LolaWalser: Oh, Lacanians... People who think puns are proofs... I must say I'm rather prejudiced against them: their writing tends to be annoyingly abstruse. But hey, Lacan's lectures at the Collège de France were so entertaining! I'm glad you told me Pornographie du temps présent is only 60 pages - that's manageable.
I should really get to Genet. He was an influence on a number of novels I've read lately, and I feel I missed some of the subtext. I'm pretty sure I read one of his works (can't remember which) when I was a teenager and was both flummoxed and underwhelmed. Not sure he would be more to my taste now, but I'm more likely to have the cultural and intellectual knowledge needed to understand him, superficially at least...
I must say I feel I understood the play (which I had read long before) only now.
This is such a great feeling!
I should really get to Genet. He was an influence on a number of novels I've read lately, and I feel I missed some of the subtext. I'm pretty sure I read one of his works (can't remember which) when I was a teenager and was both flummoxed and underwhelmed. Not sure he would be more to my taste now, but I'm more likely to have the cultural and intellectual knowledge needed to understand him, superficially at least...
I must say I feel I understood the play (which I had read long before) only now.
This is such a great feeling!
15thorold
>5 LolaWalser: The Badiou sounds good — thanks for posting about it.
>7 LolaWalser: Also oddly enough, L'horloger d’Everton is the first Simenon I can remember reading in French, in my early teens. Sadly I don’t remember anything about it other than the title and the unexpected way it was set neither in a French-speaking country nor in Liverpool, none of which is relevant to the film.
>9 LolaWalser: Probably my least-favourite Truffaut. I think there’s meant to be at least some irony in his observation of Bertrand, but it doesn’t really stand the test of time. You’re probably right about his fundamentally sexist approach. Even somewhere like Les deux anglaises he makes a female point-of-view novel (albeit one written by an elderly man…!) into a film that’s all about the male character. But he does have something that sucks you into watching his films over and over again.
On the topic of “men writing women”, I’ve been watching a lot of Eric Rohmer lately. What do you think of his work? Some of the early stuff is clearly just as sexist as Truffaut, but later on he moves into films that are often just long free-form conversations between women, with the men absent or in the background.
I need to watch a bit more Godard.
>7 LolaWalser: Also oddly enough, L'horloger d’Everton is the first Simenon I can remember reading in French, in my early teens. Sadly I don’t remember anything about it other than the title and the unexpected way it was set neither in a French-speaking country nor in Liverpool, none of which is relevant to the film.
>9 LolaWalser: Probably my least-favourite Truffaut. I think there’s meant to be at least some irony in his observation of Bertrand, but it doesn’t really stand the test of time. You’re probably right about his fundamentally sexist approach. Even somewhere like Les deux anglaises he makes a female point-of-view novel (albeit one written by an elderly man…!) into a film that’s all about the male character. But he does have something that sucks you into watching his films over and over again.
On the topic of “men writing women”, I’ve been watching a lot of Eric Rohmer lately. What do you think of his work? Some of the early stuff is clearly just as sexist as Truffaut, but later on he moves into films that are often just long free-form conversations between women, with the men absent or in the background.
I need to watch a bit more Godard.
16LolaWalser
>13 rocketjk:
I was thinking mostly about ordinary people, not the sellout media, but speaking of media, it's worth noting that over on Democracy Now they put up a few thoughtful videos about the fallout of British colonialism, e.g.:
Dismantle the Commonwealth: Queen Elizabeth's Death Prompts Reckoning with Colonial Past in Africa
The commentators are "Kenyan American author Mukoma Wa Ngugi, who teaches literature at Cornell University and whose own family was deeply impacted by the bloody British suppression of the Mau Mau revolution" and Caroline Elkins of Harvard whose Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire came out this year.
In passing, respect to John Oliver who refused the OBE because of the implications of the "BE"-- you can hear him on that in this clip from the Seth Meyers' show:
John Oliver Roasts the U.K.'s "Very Weird" 10 Days of Mourning for Queen Elizabeth
>14 Dilara86:
It's the whole pornographic metaphor, and Genet's play being set in a brothel (itself a microcosm of capitalist society) that made Lacan so apposite, I think. Badiou has (sarcastic) fun with it, there's humour in this.
Genet is one of my favourites, was from the first paragraph of Notre Dame des Fleurs. He is lush, heady, perversely romantic, unapologetically, fervently queer, untameable, and unerringly on the side of the underdog.
>15 thorold:
Hold onto yer hat--I have seen nothing by Rohmer (well, technically I did see Le rayon vert a million years ago but recall nothing of significance). Growing up as a not-straight girl deeply aware of being a PERSON (to myself but not to others) I was instinctively repelled by the heteronormativity and heterosexism of the stuff thrown at me, books and cinema, and tended to choose the less hurtful options whenever possible--say a programme of Chaplin (old, silent, zany, even grotesque) over a programme of Bergman (male navel-gazing, eternal gender war, godlike male director abusing a herd of actresses etc.)
I too am watching Godard again, there's lots I never saw, and what I did see before now, was decades ago. I have to say Wiazemsky's memoir, while a moving enough love story (it sounds authentic, so of course it's moving) reveals (or confirms) that he really was a dick in parts, just like ordinary men--vain, extremely proud of himself as someone sleeping with beautiful women and driving a super car etc. Then there's the whole age thing, which seemed gross to some people even then--she was eighteen/nineteen, he was thirty-six--but at the time she'd have been the first to protest she was an adult etc. (Ironically, one was legally a minor, by then law, until 24!)
This Truffaut often comes up as his worst movie, but I'm thinking it has unexpectedly become something one could discuss at length today, much more than when it was made and a lot of its premises were tacitly accepted (that women exist only through male attention, are always and eternally grateful for male attention no matter in what guise it comes; the corollary being that the only thing women can value in themselves is beauty).
L'horloger de Saint-Paul , it's worth noting, has captured great vistas of Lyon of the time. The commentary said that the locals were spurred to organise a campaign to save the river docks after this film was released and they saw how beautiful they were.
I was thinking mostly about ordinary people, not the sellout media, but speaking of media, it's worth noting that over on Democracy Now they put up a few thoughtful videos about the fallout of British colonialism, e.g.:
Dismantle the Commonwealth: Queen Elizabeth's Death Prompts Reckoning with Colonial Past in Africa
The commentators are "Kenyan American author Mukoma Wa Ngugi, who teaches literature at Cornell University and whose own family was deeply impacted by the bloody British suppression of the Mau Mau revolution" and Caroline Elkins of Harvard whose Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire came out this year.
In passing, respect to John Oliver who refused the OBE because of the implications of the "BE"-- you can hear him on that in this clip from the Seth Meyers' show:
John Oliver Roasts the U.K.'s "Very Weird" 10 Days of Mourning for Queen Elizabeth
>14 Dilara86:
It's the whole pornographic metaphor, and Genet's play being set in a brothel (itself a microcosm of capitalist society) that made Lacan so apposite, I think. Badiou has (sarcastic) fun with it, there's humour in this.
Genet is one of my favourites, was from the first paragraph of Notre Dame des Fleurs. He is lush, heady, perversely romantic, unapologetically, fervently queer, untameable, and unerringly on the side of the underdog.
>15 thorold:
Hold onto yer hat--I have seen nothing by Rohmer (well, technically I did see Le rayon vert a million years ago but recall nothing of significance). Growing up as a not-straight girl deeply aware of being a PERSON (to myself but not to others) I was instinctively repelled by the heteronormativity and heterosexism of the stuff thrown at me, books and cinema, and tended to choose the less hurtful options whenever possible--say a programme of Chaplin (old, silent, zany, even grotesque) over a programme of Bergman (male navel-gazing, eternal gender war, godlike male director abusing a herd of actresses etc.)
I too am watching Godard again, there's lots I never saw, and what I did see before now, was decades ago. I have to say Wiazemsky's memoir, while a moving enough love story (it sounds authentic, so of course it's moving) reveals (or confirms) that he really was a dick in parts, just like ordinary men--vain, extremely proud of himself as someone sleeping with beautiful women and driving a super car etc. Then there's the whole age thing, which seemed gross to some people even then--she was eighteen/nineteen, he was thirty-six--but at the time she'd have been the first to protest she was an adult etc. (Ironically, one was legally a minor, by then law, until 24!)
This Truffaut often comes up as his worst movie, but I'm thinking it has unexpectedly become something one could discuss at length today, much more than when it was made and a lot of its premises were tacitly accepted (that women exist only through male attention, are always and eternally grateful for male attention no matter in what guise it comes; the corollary being that the only thing women can value in themselves is beauty).
L'horloger de Saint-Paul , it's worth noting, has captured great vistas of Lyon of the time. The commentary said that the locals were spurred to organise a campaign to save the river docks after this film was released and they saw how beautiful they were.
17LolaWalser
Uranus by Marcel Aymé (1902-1967), first published in 1948
This is one of the first French novels about collaboration with Germans under Vichy, but being that early, and also given the date of Aymé's demise, it means it was written and published in a specific framework later superseded by first honest histories of Vichy and, in particular, by a novel consciousness of the Holocaust and Nazi crimes. This may help to explain to some extent Aymé's obvious sympathy for the right-wing collaborators and hatred for the left.
The terms are not too strong--this is a book of strong feelings, the primary being a scathing and superficially all-encompassing misanthropy. All the residents of the fictional small town of Blémont, barring a few fools, are pictured as selfish hypocrites who all, as it happens, collaborated with the enemy in some way and degree. Therefore, the worst hypocrisy is that of the municipal government--communists--who are prosecuting collaborators, and with the threat of death penalty. Aymé pictures a "communist" future for the town with a new regime no different to that of the Nazis and Vichy, thus excusing the actions of the collaborators. His communist characters are thugs, cowards and liars. The collaborator who actively served the Gestapo and embraced its cause, is, in contrast, merely weak--he did it because he was lonely and loveless and wanted love, even if from Germans (not a direct quote but almost). Even the physical ruin of Blémont--the town was thoroughly bombarded, forcing many into homelessness and shared quarters--is due not to German, but American bombing, although the new government is falsifying the fact and everyone goes along with it. There's a general sense of "we all collaborated, we all liked it, and the Germans weren't so bad after all".
What bothers me the most is Aymé's apparent inability to imagine that anyone could have, would have, stood up to the Germans. The one "resister", a young man who joined the Resistance, did so only two months before the end of the war out of pure calculation for future advantage. Such a general lack of virtue and goodness begins to seem more of a personal problem of the one doing the "imagining".
At this point one can't help remarking that Aymé himself was criticised for his wartime collaboration in Nazi-approved journals (but never charged nor publicly reprimanded), and further shown his colours by his defence of Robert Brasillach, who was executed for collaboration (he directly caused people to die, listing names of those to be deported), and Céline (who escaped France for a while, to return to glory with fanfare, because publishing murderously hateful antisemitic pamphlets and working for the Vichy government is no biggie).
Postwar France only had conservative governments, with a mainstream conservative culture and rightwing traditions. (Even Miterrand, the "socialist", had a Vichy past and connections.) It was only the publication of a book by an American historian, in 1973, that introduced a critical look at Vichy and French collaboration (Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940-1944) to the mass public (communist scholarship being ignored at large as usual). 1973! Full consciousness of the Holocaust, which has come to shape the Western perspective on the WWII so strongly, was even later to develop, Claude Lanzmann's Shoah still causing shock as a novelty in 1985.
18LolaWalser
This year looks as if it may be the first ever where I will note seeing more films (including re-watches) than reading books. This upsets me, but it was an inordinately trying and scatter-brained year, when my powers of concentration hardly sufficed to cover both work and not-work. I'll try to be more selective about what I talk about regarding "moving pictures", though.
One item I highly recommend is the Maysles brothers' 1976 documentary Grey Gardens about Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter (cousins to the presidential Kennedys, the mother being Jacqueline Kennedy's aunt). I saw it first long ago in New York in a crowd of people who knew it well (apparently it's a culty classic), but being uninvolved with the American political scene my response was less to the element of celebrity and the mystique around the Kennedys, than simply to those two women as human beings.
The curiosity of their situation lay in falling out of the upper class and living in poverty, but surrounded with reminders of the old opulent life: the 28-room mansion of which they occupied only two rooms (to save on heating), the original portraits of the mother ("Big" Edie), behind which cats now went to toilet, the many photographs of the daughter ("Little" Edie) in her heyday as a model and socialite, now an eccentric in a tight headscarf and upside-down skirts. But the main wonder and attraction of the film is the glorious sparkle of the two women, who in the midst of the squalor never seem less than two banished queens. There's a Rorschach test for every viewer, as I understood only on listening to the commentary--where I (and obviously many other) saw glamour and dignity, some critics saw lunacy and one (a man of course) even deplored that the filmmakers had shown the old woman's ageing body.
Yes, they do, she's eighty and has "batwings", but she's one of the most beautiful women that ever lived, even at eighty and with "batwings". This is no hyperbole--the photographs of Edith Bouvier in her youth prove that she was one of those rare creatures constructed of pure beauty, of such beauty that shocks and freezes thought because it's so... absolute, unanswerable and inexplicable, unanalysable. A primary fact whose origin and purpose can't be discerned. Why should such beauty attach itself to transient creatures? Total beauty is a mystery.
Beauty like that draws consequences in its train, which often befuddle even its owner. "Big" Edie apparently wanted to be a singer, a performer, but as a member of her class she couldn't become a professional and had to satisfy herself with singing privately, at parties with friends. Nevertheless, she eventually left and divorced her husband (the daughter was then sixteen), and that marked her fall. The circumstances weren't clear to the filmmakers, and a second mystery was why the daughter failed to get married, how this once pretty debutante with famous connections came to live with her mother in a house that was falling apart, filled with dirt and cats.
Their relationship is another element that is bound to elicit strong feelings in many people with mothers (and maybe in some mothers). In me, for example, a lot resonates as I too am likely to spend some time living alone with my mother. I tried to escape my family and all family life, but we're all in one and the same big sea hitting the same shore. The main thing is that under the quarrels and conflicts and sincere incomprehension there be that other mystery: love.
One item I highly recommend is the Maysles brothers' 1976 documentary Grey Gardens about Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter (cousins to the presidential Kennedys, the mother being Jacqueline Kennedy's aunt). I saw it first long ago in New York in a crowd of people who knew it well (apparently it's a culty classic), but being uninvolved with the American political scene my response was less to the element of celebrity and the mystique around the Kennedys, than simply to those two women as human beings.
The curiosity of their situation lay in falling out of the upper class and living in poverty, but surrounded with reminders of the old opulent life: the 28-room mansion of which they occupied only two rooms (to save on heating), the original portraits of the mother ("Big" Edie), behind which cats now went to toilet, the many photographs of the daughter ("Little" Edie) in her heyday as a model and socialite, now an eccentric in a tight headscarf and upside-down skirts. But the main wonder and attraction of the film is the glorious sparkle of the two women, who in the midst of the squalor never seem less than two banished queens. There's a Rorschach test for every viewer, as I understood only on listening to the commentary--where I (and obviously many other) saw glamour and dignity, some critics saw lunacy and one (a man of course) even deplored that the filmmakers had shown the old woman's ageing body.
Yes, they do, she's eighty and has "batwings", but she's one of the most beautiful women that ever lived, even at eighty and with "batwings". This is no hyperbole--the photographs of Edith Bouvier in her youth prove that she was one of those rare creatures constructed of pure beauty, of such beauty that shocks and freezes thought because it's so... absolute, unanswerable and inexplicable, unanalysable. A primary fact whose origin and purpose can't be discerned. Why should such beauty attach itself to transient creatures? Total beauty is a mystery.
Beauty like that draws consequences in its train, which often befuddle even its owner. "Big" Edie apparently wanted to be a singer, a performer, but as a member of her class she couldn't become a professional and had to satisfy herself with singing privately, at parties with friends. Nevertheless, she eventually left and divorced her husband (the daughter was then sixteen), and that marked her fall. The circumstances weren't clear to the filmmakers, and a second mystery was why the daughter failed to get married, how this once pretty debutante with famous connections came to live with her mother in a house that was falling apart, filled with dirt and cats.
Their relationship is another element that is bound to elicit strong feelings in many people with mothers (and maybe in some mothers). In me, for example, a lot resonates as I too am likely to spend some time living alone with my mother. I tried to escape my family and all family life, but we're all in one and the same big sea hitting the same shore. The main thing is that under the quarrels and conflicts and sincere incomprehension there be that other mystery: love.
19thorold
>16 LolaWalser: Don’t go off and watch Rohmer on my account (you weren’t going to anyway, but just to be sure…). I was just curious what you thought. I suspect that it would come down to “less egregiously sexist than most male directors”. He does obviously spend a lot of time listening to women and getting his actors to improvise conversations, and his films tend to make the hetero-love-plot less important than what the characters learn about themselves and each other in the course of the film, but there usually is some sort of pairing-off plot going on, even if it’s eventually frustrated, and the women characters are generally made to spend at least part of the film talking about philosophy in their underwear…
I particularly liked Le rayon vert (which didn’t do it for you), Quatre Aventures de Reinette et Mirabelle, L'Ami de mon amie and the Seasons quartet.
I particularly liked Le rayon vert (which didn’t do it for you), Quatre Aventures de Reinette et Mirabelle, L'Ami de mon amie and the Seasons quartet.
20LolaWalser
>19 thorold:
Oh, I definitely had Rohmer on my infinite list, I was just explaining what generated the pattern of my movie knowledge (and lacunae)... No, I just don't remember anything about Le rayon vert as I had seen it in my teens (I kept basic notes on movies but didn't regularly write at length). Until internet and the ability to watch stuff on a computer I relied strictly on what I could catch in cinemas (never owned a television), and for stuff like that I'd have to wait for retrospectives.
I never minded women in lingerie (or men :)), and at this age I'm far less vulnerable than I used to be. Also, this is so old, it's to wonder who even watches it now... Case in point: I saw recently La dolce vita (for maybe tenth time or more) and went to check something on IMDB, where I noticed one angry review execrating the movie and calling Mastroianni's character a loser etc.--and I'm not saying he is or isn't, just that I shook my head in wonder that a figure we were supposed to identify with as a matter of course once upon a time, had so fallen off the pedestal.
(Interestingly, there was an extra with an interview with Mastroianni who declares in it that he doesn't believe any movie is "forever"...)
Oh, I definitely had Rohmer on my infinite list, I was just explaining what generated the pattern of my movie knowledge (and lacunae)... No, I just don't remember anything about Le rayon vert as I had seen it in my teens (I kept basic notes on movies but didn't regularly write at length). Until internet and the ability to watch stuff on a computer I relied strictly on what I could catch in cinemas (never owned a television), and for stuff like that I'd have to wait for retrospectives.
I never minded women in lingerie (or men :)), and at this age I'm far less vulnerable than I used to be. Also, this is so old, it's to wonder who even watches it now... Case in point: I saw recently La dolce vita (for maybe tenth time or more) and went to check something on IMDB, where I noticed one angry review execrating the movie and calling Mastroianni's character a loser etc.--and I'm not saying he is or isn't, just that I shook my head in wonder that a figure we were supposed to identify with as a matter of course once upon a time, had so fallen off the pedestal.
(Interestingly, there was an extra with an interview with Mastroianni who declares in it that he doesn't believe any movie is "forever"...)
21labfs39
>17 LolaWalser: Interesting review of an ugly book and the place of the book and author in a larger history.
P.S. I'm not sure if you usually post your reviews, but it looks like this book doesn't yet have an English language review.
P.S. I'm not sure if you usually post your reviews, but it looks like this book doesn't yet have an English language review.
22LolaWalser
>21 labfs39:
Thanks, but I'm chronically insecure about my babblings as "reviews", there's always so much I feel is missing, badly expressed, and of course there's no end to things one could keep exploring and adding...
Thanks, but I'm chronically insecure about my babblings as "reviews", there's always so much I feel is missing, badly expressed, and of course there's no end to things one could keep exploring and adding...
23avaland
>9 LolaWalser: Enjoyed that film review, thanks.
>22 LolaWalser: Please get over that insecurity. We are all different and review differently (keeps us as a group from being boring!)
>22 LolaWalser: Please get over that insecurity. We are all different and review differently (keeps us as a group from being boring!)
24SassyLassy
>18 LolaWalser: Really liked your thoughts on Grey Gardens which I saw years ago, but with the wrong companion. I was impressed, the companion was not. I should see it again on my own. I see it's part of the Criterion collection.
>22 LolaWalser: I know that feeling.
>22 LolaWalser: I know that feeling.
25LolaWalser
>23 avaland:
I'll try!
>24 SassyLassy:
If you can find the Criterion set, it includes a later (2006, I think?) compilation of additional material from the original shooting. I still haven't watched it. This time I was listening to the commentary on the original movie, by Albert Maysles and some of the other people involved, highly recommended.
To me this is one of the relatively rare films that always shows a different facet, tugs at me from some new angle. I mean, it's probably a different film to anyone who watches it at different times in their lives.
I'll try!
>24 SassyLassy:
If you can find the Criterion set, it includes a later (2006, I think?) compilation of additional material from the original shooting. I still haven't watched it. This time I was listening to the commentary on the original movie, by Albert Maysles and some of the other people involved, highly recommended.
To me this is one of the relatively rare films that always shows a different facet, tugs at me from some new angle. I mean, it's probably a different film to anyone who watches it at different times in their lives.
26LolaWalser
Abridging the almost four weeks since the last post... distorted as the view is (I've read quite a bit of different fare between those books), there is a common feature uniting the Aymé above, the new Céline (La guerre), and Pierre Drieu La Rochelle's Chiens de paille (written in 1943). I noticed the last one in the library for its aggressively provocative shininess of a newly minted book. So touching of Gallimard, in these days of increasing popularity of fascism, to keep us well-equipped with fascist writings.
I can't say I've read a lot of it (compared to how much exists), and I won't even pretend to be "objective" in regard to it, but even so I am astonished once more by how miserably ugly and BAD fascist literature is. (Can anyone name a few titles of fascist literature that, ideology apart, wows you as literature? I'm not being rhetorical, genuinely asking for my own edification.)
This last novel of Drieu's is the first of his I've read. I knew he had been an avowed fascist and Nazi collaborator who killed himself in March 1945, almost certainly escaping Brasillach's fate. The title (Straw dogs) is in an epigraph derived from a Tibetan Buddhist sutra, denoting humans as seen by gods.
The paper-thin plot really serves only to bring the author's alter ego Constant into relations with various other characters so that we may hear what he thinks of them and things in general. It's a book-length fascist screed that barely keeps a coherent point of view, like a drunkard with an idée fixe but with occasional dadaist lurches into self-negation, even parody. In short, it's the usual insane mishmash of antisemitism, anticommunism, and misogyny, each obsessive hatred pouring out repeatedly and along by now traditional lines--the Jews are an infestation that will turn the whole world Jewish, the communists are Russians and the Russians are Mongols (however, Moscow no less than Washington are also Jewish), and women are soul-lacking cattle incapable of thought, creativity etc.
Given the enormous narcissism on display, it's interesting what things Drieu lies about. Constant, while entirely a mouthpiece for the author's ideas, is very much the author's idealised picture of himself and not an honest portrait. Drieu was a card-carrying (hell, card-WAVING) fascist; Constant is pictured as "above" every political party, better and infinitely wiser than either the communists or the fascists. In fact he is a sort of superman-saint, having partaken of all earthly delights and absorbing all of earth's knowledge. He is the last intellectual but also the biggest action man. For his last mission he envisages to play the--reviled but necessary--character of Judas to the imagined Jesus of the French nation (an ultra-nationalist uneducated peasant boy).
This type of thing would become the chief excuse of the Nazi collaborators, that they betrayed for the greater glory of France, although most would not offer it in the guise of a preposterously dumb, pathetic, repulsively self-pitying book.
I can't say I've read a lot of it (compared to how much exists), and I won't even pretend to be "objective" in regard to it, but even so I am astonished once more by how miserably ugly and BAD fascist literature is. (Can anyone name a few titles of fascist literature that, ideology apart, wows you as literature? I'm not being rhetorical, genuinely asking for my own edification.)
This last novel of Drieu's is the first of his I've read. I knew he had been an avowed fascist and Nazi collaborator who killed himself in March 1945, almost certainly escaping Brasillach's fate. The title (Straw dogs) is in an epigraph derived from a Tibetan Buddhist sutra, denoting humans as seen by gods.
The paper-thin plot really serves only to bring the author's alter ego Constant into relations with various other characters so that we may hear what he thinks of them and things in general. It's a book-length fascist screed that barely keeps a coherent point of view, like a drunkard with an idée fixe but with occasional dadaist lurches into self-negation, even parody. In short, it's the usual insane mishmash of antisemitism, anticommunism, and misogyny, each obsessive hatred pouring out repeatedly and along by now traditional lines--the Jews are an infestation that will turn the whole world Jewish, the communists are Russians and the Russians are Mongols (however, Moscow no less than Washington are also Jewish), and women are soul-lacking cattle incapable of thought, creativity etc.
Given the enormous narcissism on display, it's interesting what things Drieu lies about. Constant, while entirely a mouthpiece for the author's ideas, is very much the author's idealised picture of himself and not an honest portrait. Drieu was a card-carrying (hell, card-WAVING) fascist; Constant is pictured as "above" every political party, better and infinitely wiser than either the communists or the fascists. In fact he is a sort of superman-saint, having partaken of all earthly delights and absorbing all of earth's knowledge. He is the last intellectual but also the biggest action man. For his last mission he envisages to play the--reviled but necessary--character of Judas to the imagined Jesus of the French nation (an ultra-nationalist uneducated peasant boy).
This type of thing would become the chief excuse of the Nazi collaborators, that they betrayed for the greater glory of France, although most would not offer it in the guise of a preposterously dumb, pathetic, repulsively self-pitying book.
27LolaWalser
I don't remember whether I'd read any Morgenstern during my previous Club Read thread. I dip more or less regularly.
Ein Knie geht einsam durch die Welt is a selection made by asking a bunch of German writers to pick a favourite poem by Morgenstern. Volker Ladenthin (nobody I'd heard of, I admit) picked an old fave, "Fisches Nachtgesang"
It first appeared in 1905, in the first edition of Morgenstern's Galgenlieder (Songs from the gallows), without that line underneath ("deepest German poem"). But the line is included in this selection...
Ein Knie geht einsam durch die Welt is a selection made by asking a bunch of German writers to pick a favourite poem by Morgenstern. Volker Ladenthin (nobody I'd heard of, I admit) picked an old fave, "Fisches Nachtgesang"
It first appeared in 1905, in the first edition of Morgenstern's Galgenlieder (Songs from the gallows), without that line underneath ("deepest German poem"). But the line is included in this selection...
28baswood
Enjoying your reviews as ever and:
Close your eyes all you want. A lot of us here are old enough that we'll just about make it to our graves without having to reckon with the consequences of the lies we sustained. But if there's anyone you care for you are leaving behind... get a fucking clue, demand the "impossible", demand revolution.
Yeah! right on
Close your eyes all you want. A lot of us here are old enough that we'll just about make it to our graves without having to reckon with the consequences of the lies we sustained. But if there's anyone you care for you are leaving behind... get a fucking clue, demand the "impossible", demand revolution.
Yeah! right on
29LolaWalser
>28 baswood:
Vox clamantis in not-quite-deserto! Get thee beside me, comrade :)
A few more items, hodgily podgily...
I've talked quite a bit in the last year's thread about my fascination with the DEFA films (films made in East Germany approximately between 1945 and 1990). Turns out that not only am I not entirely crazy to find them interesting; if anything, I'm way late with getting on the bandwagon... Sebastian Heiduschke's East German cinema: DEFA and film history, published in 2013, describes the revival of interest, post 1999, in this cinematic corpus (including formation of fan groups and merch like T-shirts and posters) and explains how it came to be that hundred+ of those films are available for streaming in North America, to say nothing of the remastered, bonus-equipped and generally lovingly restored offers on DVD and Blu-Ray. (I was astonished yet again a few days ago to see that not only feature films, but documentaries such as "DDR Plattenbau", about block apartment construction, with the subtitle "Jedem seine Wohnung"--"to everybody their own apartment"--are available to buy.)
It wouldn't be correct to say that this is nothing but "Ostalgie", and besides, even the part that IS due to it nevertheless requires explanation. I think, picking up on Enzo Traverso's critique of the (loss of) memory of leftism post-1989, that we're finally seeing SOME correction, some compensation of this loss. As I have had all too much opportunity to complain around here, the history of communism/socialism around the world cannot be reduced to the scarecrows relentlessly pushed by the anticommunist front. The USSR doesn't reduce to Stalinism, and apparently the DDR doesn't reduce to a "Stasiland".
But, I did grow bitter reading Heiduschke, because of the comparisons I couldn't help making to what happened with the Yugoslav cinematic corpus. Which is nothing, or nothing GOOD, so far. And yet--and I realise this isn't very scientific of me, given that at this point I've seen about 20 times more East German films than Yugoslav ones--I am confident that the latter is overall superior in every way to the DDR set. Freedom matters, and where it's doled out by a paranoid communist party, the degrees of freedom matter. As interesting as the East German films are, all too often that interest lies in what can be painstakingly read between the lines. This is not to doubt that people genuinely enjoyed some of them, like the musicals and the "Red Westerns". Only, given the restrictions on the population, the fact that the state, as in all Soviet satellites, functioned like a giant prison, there is no question that any state-approved entertainment would be hobbled a priori by the cynicism of low expectations.
Yugoslavia breathed differently. From the fifties onward it functioned as a space that consciously positioned itself as a mediator between the capitalist West and the communist East. Not only were tourists welcome, the populace could travel and work abroad. (During the Cold War the Yugoslav passport was unique in providing the broadest global visa-less access.) Given open borders, there was no point in blocking Western media. Foreign films and television were bought and shown (the former to the detriment of national cinema, as elsewhere in Europe), foreign newspapers and books available to buy.
In this climate, repression of material happened more or less haphazardly, and completely inefficiently in the big picture. There is no huge cellar of "forbidden" Yugoslav films, as happened in East Germany. Scandals there were, and typically they created a hunger FOR those films. The system was porous; something banned in one republic was likely to be available in another (each republic had its own bodies for production, distribution etc.)
I am not aware of a single film career ending in Yugoslavia because of a run-in with the communists, although plenty of people experienced headaches and setbacks due to apparatchik meddling. Even in the most famous case of a Yugoslav author being "frozen" for naughtiness, that of the banning of Dušan Makavejev's W.R. : mysteries of the organism in 1972, said banning happened AFTER the film was not just widely distributed and seen in Yugoslavia, it had won an international prize. And only THEN some nimrod decided that the line about "the red fascists" was, all things considered, inconvenient. Makavejev was punished by not getting other projects in the country. He left and spent a decade in the West, making films in France and the US. But he returned to Yugoslavia before it fell apart. On that note--if you manage to see the Criterion edition of "W.R.", there is a bonus programme from the Scottish BBC, made in 1994, where Makavejev gives a heartbreaking interview about the breakup of the country. If this man--who was never a communist and actually suffered ostracism and professional damage at the hands of the ex-country's stupider political elements--cried for Yugoslavia, cried for its loss as a "loss of his own soul", then I hope you will understand what Yugoslavia meant. None of that ignorant fascistic bullshit about an "artificial" country, please. All countries are "artificial". Not all are loved like the Yugoslavs loved Yugoslavia.
But where was I... right, the envy and sadness I felt seeing what was done to preserve creepy DDR's filmic treasure, compared to the nothing done for Yugoslavia's. Of course the former is much easier to deal with--it was a homogeneous totally centralized body, all they needed was will and money to go through the archives in one spot. The Yugoslav federation was broken into pitiful banana republics. Who has the wherewithal to worry about the film legacy. Croatia's neofascist period under the HDZ was marked by a surreal effort to forget five decades of socialism and everything that was created under the old system. But since then, old Yugoslav movies are in regular rotation on TV (which is how I got to see the handful that I did see, more than ten years ago).
Which finally brings me to a couple of words about the movies I saw recently. From the DEFA collection, I saw Georg Klaren's late-Expressionist "Wozzeck" from 1947. This is of course based on Georg Büchner's astonishingly "modern" play (Büchner died in 1837, at the measly age of 23). Wozzeck is a poor soldier who for a few pennies acts the human guinea pig to the sadistic regimental doctor. He has a child with a young woman of indefinite profession and comparable poverty. Destitution and oppression have brutalised these people, making mockery of the real love they feel for each other. For how long does a starving one love?
Kurt Meisel gives a fantastic performance as Wozzeck and the film's effects, I feel, serve the story better than anything achievable on stage, as Wozzeck hallucinates, talks to phantasms and the like.
Vox clamantis in not-quite-deserto! Get thee beside me, comrade :)
A few more items, hodgily podgily...
I've talked quite a bit in the last year's thread about my fascination with the DEFA films (films made in East Germany approximately between 1945 and 1990). Turns out that not only am I not entirely crazy to find them interesting; if anything, I'm way late with getting on the bandwagon... Sebastian Heiduschke's East German cinema: DEFA and film history, published in 2013, describes the revival of interest, post 1999, in this cinematic corpus (including formation of fan groups and merch like T-shirts and posters) and explains how it came to be that hundred+ of those films are available for streaming in North America, to say nothing of the remastered, bonus-equipped and generally lovingly restored offers on DVD and Blu-Ray. (I was astonished yet again a few days ago to see that not only feature films, but documentaries such as "DDR Plattenbau", about block apartment construction, with the subtitle "Jedem seine Wohnung"--"to everybody their own apartment"--are available to buy.)
It wouldn't be correct to say that this is nothing but "Ostalgie", and besides, even the part that IS due to it nevertheless requires explanation. I think, picking up on Enzo Traverso's critique of the (loss of) memory of leftism post-1989, that we're finally seeing SOME correction, some compensation of this loss. As I have had all too much opportunity to complain around here, the history of communism/socialism around the world cannot be reduced to the scarecrows relentlessly pushed by the anticommunist front. The USSR doesn't reduce to Stalinism, and apparently the DDR doesn't reduce to a "Stasiland".
But, I did grow bitter reading Heiduschke, because of the comparisons I couldn't help making to what happened with the Yugoslav cinematic corpus. Which is nothing, or nothing GOOD, so far. And yet--and I realise this isn't very scientific of me, given that at this point I've seen about 20 times more East German films than Yugoslav ones--I am confident that the latter is overall superior in every way to the DDR set. Freedom matters, and where it's doled out by a paranoid communist party, the degrees of freedom matter. As interesting as the East German films are, all too often that interest lies in what can be painstakingly read between the lines. This is not to doubt that people genuinely enjoyed some of them, like the musicals and the "Red Westerns". Only, given the restrictions on the population, the fact that the state, as in all Soviet satellites, functioned like a giant prison, there is no question that any state-approved entertainment would be hobbled a priori by the cynicism of low expectations.
Yugoslavia breathed differently. From the fifties onward it functioned as a space that consciously positioned itself as a mediator between the capitalist West and the communist East. Not only were tourists welcome, the populace could travel and work abroad. (During the Cold War the Yugoslav passport was unique in providing the broadest global visa-less access.) Given open borders, there was no point in blocking Western media. Foreign films and television were bought and shown (the former to the detriment of national cinema, as elsewhere in Europe), foreign newspapers and books available to buy.
In this climate, repression of material happened more or less haphazardly, and completely inefficiently in the big picture. There is no huge cellar of "forbidden" Yugoslav films, as happened in East Germany. Scandals there were, and typically they created a hunger FOR those films. The system was porous; something banned in one republic was likely to be available in another (each republic had its own bodies for production, distribution etc.)
I am not aware of a single film career ending in Yugoslavia because of a run-in with the communists, although plenty of people experienced headaches and setbacks due to apparatchik meddling. Even in the most famous case of a Yugoslav author being "frozen" for naughtiness, that of the banning of Dušan Makavejev's W.R. : mysteries of the organism in 1972, said banning happened AFTER the film was not just widely distributed and seen in Yugoslavia, it had won an international prize. And only THEN some nimrod decided that the line about "the red fascists" was, all things considered, inconvenient. Makavejev was punished by not getting other projects in the country. He left and spent a decade in the West, making films in France and the US. But he returned to Yugoslavia before it fell apart. On that note--if you manage to see the Criterion edition of "W.R.", there is a bonus programme from the Scottish BBC, made in 1994, where Makavejev gives a heartbreaking interview about the breakup of the country. If this man--who was never a communist and actually suffered ostracism and professional damage at the hands of the ex-country's stupider political elements--cried for Yugoslavia, cried for its loss as a "loss of his own soul", then I hope you will understand what Yugoslavia meant. None of that ignorant fascistic bullshit about an "artificial" country, please. All countries are "artificial". Not all are loved like the Yugoslavs loved Yugoslavia.
But where was I... right, the envy and sadness I felt seeing what was done to preserve creepy DDR's filmic treasure, compared to the nothing done for Yugoslavia's. Of course the former is much easier to deal with--it was a homogeneous totally centralized body, all they needed was will and money to go through the archives in one spot. The Yugoslav federation was broken into pitiful banana republics. Who has the wherewithal to worry about the film legacy. Croatia's neofascist period under the HDZ was marked by a surreal effort to forget five decades of socialism and everything that was created under the old system. But since then, old Yugoslav movies are in regular rotation on TV (which is how I got to see the handful that I did see, more than ten years ago).
Which finally brings me to a couple of words about the movies I saw recently. From the DEFA collection, I saw Georg Klaren's late-Expressionist "Wozzeck" from 1947. This is of course based on Georg Büchner's astonishingly "modern" play (Büchner died in 1837, at the measly age of 23). Wozzeck is a poor soldier who for a few pennies acts the human guinea pig to the sadistic regimental doctor. He has a child with a young woman of indefinite profession and comparable poverty. Destitution and oppression have brutalised these people, making mockery of the real love they feel for each other. For how long does a starving one love?
Kurt Meisel gives a fantastic performance as Wozzeck and the film's effects, I feel, serve the story better than anything achievable on stage, as Wozzeck hallucinates, talks to phantasms and the like.
30LolaWalser
Vaslav Nijinsky : a leap into madness, Peter Ostwald 1995
Martha Graham, Merle Armitage, reprint 1966
Martha Graham Dance on Film, Criterion Collection 2007
The mystery of Nijinsky's withdrawal from the world probably can't be solved and Peter Ostwald's meticulous analysis of the information he was able to get to regarding Nijinsky's health (supposedly he was the first to have access to the surviving medical files) is compelling but in the end remains speculative. That said, this is probably the closest we can get to a fact-based account of Nijinsky's condition and decline.
One question that haunts me is why was there such a lack of effort (as far as one can tell) to capture Nijinsky on film. I have Valentine Gross's drawings of the Ballets Russes, there are the well-known photographs, but can it be true that no one thought even to try filming them? (One could say the same about the lack of live recordings of music at the same time.)
Searching for the earliest films of ballet I found this bit on YouTube:
Very Early Ballet: Geltzer & Tikhomirov Pas de Deux 1913?
and there are films of Pavlova from the 1920s... so it does seem like an unnecessary loss.
I went on to read Armitage's compilation of the first contemporary reviews of Martha Graham's dancing, from the 1920s and the 1930s. Curiously enough, I could have asked the same question about filming her, the earliest record is from the forties. She wouldn't be filmed until the fifties and the sixties and by then she was, well, much older so what you see is more like a reminder of what the first audiences saw, than the thing itself. But this is not the best way of looking at something as alive and transitory as dance--every dance is dance, whether performed by a twenty year old or an octogenarian.
At the same time, just as I would have wanted to see one of those famous "suspended" jetées of Nijinsky, I'd want the Martha Graham of boneless youth.
31LolaWalser
Cleaning up the gallery on my phone... this is a screenshot I took earlier this year of the game played on Reddit, called r/place. Briefly, a canvas is provided where individuals contribute pixels (only one pixel at a time!) to form images (symbols etc.) I didn't last more than thirty minutes or so, much too enervating--I was trying to help with the feminist symbol but the site is just too male misogynist, we were attacked in droves non-stop.
But this was a nice surprise--looking at the centre of the picture, under the German eagle and the EU dove, clockwise from the upper left: Slovenia, Montenegro, Croatia and Serbia cooperated to form this rectangle:
The heart in the middle, like those on the borders of various images, denotes groups of players who made a pact to help each other maintain their fields. :)
Cute details: the white thingy on the far left of the Slovenian flag represents Proteus anguinus, a species of salamander endemic to the Postojna caves. In Croatian and Slovenian the folk name translates to "human little fish".
In the Croatian part the figure is a cartoon character, Profesor Baltazar.
But this was a nice surprise--looking at the centre of the picture, under the German eagle and the EU dove, clockwise from the upper left: Slovenia, Montenegro, Croatia and Serbia cooperated to form this rectangle:
The heart in the middle, like those on the borders of various images, denotes groups of players who made a pact to help each other maintain their fields. :)
Cute details: the white thingy on the far left of the Slovenian flag represents Proteus anguinus, a species of salamander endemic to the Postojna caves. In Croatian and Slovenian the folk name translates to "human little fish".
In the Croatian part the figure is a cartoon character, Profesor Baltazar.
32LolaWalser
A very belated first read of a fiction of Toni Morrison's, The bluest eye. To my mind it's clear this is a great writer from the first dozen pages, the language soars, and yet the sentences are so precise, the emotional blows land so justly. Analytical and lyrical--the combination isn't frequent.
--
Another too-late read, bell hooks' Outlaw culture : resisting representations collects some of her articles and interviews from the mid-1990s, including a great putdown of Camille Paglia and an important conversation about hip hop and its attitudes to women.
--
Uwe Johnson's An absence (Eine Reise wegwohin) captures remarkably something unpinnable about his thought, a perennial unease and unhappiness about the fracture in German society, which also led to fractures within individuals. His situation was something of a square peg in a round spot, if that spot also had a shifting address and his square-pegness were also subject to quantum indeterminacy. Born in the east, Johnson moved to Western Germany before the Wall went up, but couldn't stop repeatedly going back East, sometimes for extended periods (like the one described in the novella). One might suppose this is one way to keep a split country together, but the cost of it is alienation (of which Johnson may be one of the major exponents), a multi-layered, multi-dimensional absence.
In the end he chose to live anywhere BUT either of the Germanys -- Italy, the UK etc.
The novella is also interesting for juxtaposing two camps of refugees--those from the East in the West and vice versa. When the ex-East now-West German writer tries to communicate with either of them, everyone turns round on him.
--
After a break of two years, encouraged by the riots in Iran I took up again writing about the Arab/Muslim women's books, in the Feminist Theory group:
https://www.librarything.com/topic/318625#n7964932
Women of sand and myrrh by Hanan Al-Shaykh I liked even better than her Story of Zahra although it's as tough a read, emotionally.
Note that the thread is open to everyone, if you'd like to add your reads in that category to it.
--
Another too-late read, bell hooks' Outlaw culture : resisting representations collects some of her articles and interviews from the mid-1990s, including a great putdown of Camille Paglia and an important conversation about hip hop and its attitudes to women.
--
Uwe Johnson's An absence (Eine Reise wegwohin) captures remarkably something unpinnable about his thought, a perennial unease and unhappiness about the fracture in German society, which also led to fractures within individuals. His situation was something of a square peg in a round spot, if that spot also had a shifting address and his square-pegness were also subject to quantum indeterminacy. Born in the east, Johnson moved to Western Germany before the Wall went up, but couldn't stop repeatedly going back East, sometimes for extended periods (like the one described in the novella). One might suppose this is one way to keep a split country together, but the cost of it is alienation (of which Johnson may be one of the major exponents), a multi-layered, multi-dimensional absence.
In the end he chose to live anywhere BUT either of the Germanys -- Italy, the UK etc.
The novella is also interesting for juxtaposing two camps of refugees--those from the East in the West and vice versa. When the ex-East now-West German writer tries to communicate with either of them, everyone turns round on him.
--
After a break of two years, encouraged by the riots in Iran I took up again writing about the Arab/Muslim women's books, in the Feminist Theory group:
https://www.librarything.com/topic/318625#n7964932
Women of sand and myrrh by Hanan Al-Shaykh I liked even better than her Story of Zahra although it's as tough a read, emotionally.
Note that the thread is open to everyone, if you'd like to add your reads in that category to it.
33labfs39
>32 LolaWalser: I'm not sure what you would think of it, but I liked Iran Awakening by Shirin Ebadi. One of the things I found interesting was the juxtaposition of her public and private selves. Publicly she fought to be educated, become a lawyer, and judge, but privately she was a "traditional" wife and mother, even cooking and freezing meals for her family to have while she was in prison. So not strictly a feminist memoir, but one I found interesting.
34LolaWalser
>33 labfs39:
Thanks, I've read some of her articles over the years, mostly in The Guardian IIRC. I admit I have a possibly irrational aversion to books by political or public figures, so that's not an easy choice for me.
privately she was a "traditional" wife and mother, even cooking and freezing meals for her family to have while she was in prison.
Oh my! Unless dear family was held hostage or bedridden or something... lol, I'd strangle them. :)
Thanks, I've read some of her articles over the years, mostly in The Guardian IIRC. I admit I have a possibly irrational aversion to books by political or public figures, so that's not an easy choice for me.
privately she was a "traditional" wife and mother, even cooking and freezing meals for her family to have while she was in prison.
Oh my! Unless dear family was held hostage or bedridden or something... lol, I'd strangle them. :)
35labfs39
>34 LolaWalser: Unless dear family was held hostage or bedridden or something... lol, I'd strangle them. :)
Right? The dichotomy between her public and private selves struck me as odd. I did find it an interesting read, but I understand about not wanting to read books by political figures.
Right? The dichotomy between her public and private selves struck me as odd. I did find it an interesting read, but I understand about not wanting to read books by political figures.
36LolaWalser
Inhaled Butler's Parable of the sower and Parable of the talents. Many blurbs have something along the lines of "incredibly prescient" and I get it, but I also want to argue "no you fools, according to Butler herself, if you think this is "incredibly prescient" it's because you are not paying attention, and WHY aren't you paying attention!, ARRRRRGHHHHH!
It's a bit complicated like that. Throughout Butler champions a rational, scientific observation of the world, which would entail humane behaviour as much as (encapsulated in the "Earthseed" religion) adaptation, ever-flexible living with everlasting change. And as she (her characters) points out, the apocalypse in which we find them living started much before the most disastrous effects were seen. Obviously the same lesson applies to our world (well, this IS about our world...)
For example, I remember where I was when as a teen of sixteen in mid-eighties I first read about the ozone hole; it was a shocking, devastating piece of news, that we could--HAD--affected our planet's atmosphere. And of course there were even earlier reports about the ecological devastation and pollution our industry and growth were causing--I knew from before about poisoned rivers, acid rain, the hothouse effect...
And long before that, in the 1970s, 1960s, the hippies were worried about the environment and publishing on green living etc. And even before that, around the turn of the century, vegetarianism was turning from a fad into an alternative, and even before that, in 1848, Marx and Engels noted in the Communist Manifesto the ruination industry brought to the environment, with the logical conclusion that some day capitalism would come to the end of the environment... and they can't have been the first either.
So, we knew and we know. But nothing significant enough was done to stop the catastrophe, or at least mitigate it.
What follows is something like out of Butler's book (it reads as a single narrative): exhausted earth, restriction of resources, the breakdown of society, and in places like the US, the return of slavery and everything else stemming from the "might makes right" doctrine so close to its heart anyway.
It's a bit complicated like that. Throughout Butler champions a rational, scientific observation of the world, which would entail humane behaviour as much as (encapsulated in the "Earthseed" religion) adaptation, ever-flexible living with everlasting change. And as she (her characters) points out, the apocalypse in which we find them living started much before the most disastrous effects were seen. Obviously the same lesson applies to our world (well, this IS about our world...)
For example, I remember where I was when as a teen of sixteen in mid-eighties I first read about the ozone hole; it was a shocking, devastating piece of news, that we could--HAD--affected our planet's atmosphere. And of course there were even earlier reports about the ecological devastation and pollution our industry and growth were causing--I knew from before about poisoned rivers, acid rain, the hothouse effect...
And long before that, in the 1970s, 1960s, the hippies were worried about the environment and publishing on green living etc. And even before that, around the turn of the century, vegetarianism was turning from a fad into an alternative, and even before that, in 1848, Marx and Engels noted in the Communist Manifesto the ruination industry brought to the environment, with the logical conclusion that some day capitalism would come to the end of the environment... and they can't have been the first either.
So, we knew and we know. But nothing significant enough was done to stop the catastrophe, or at least mitigate it.
What follows is something like out of Butler's book (it reads as a single narrative): exhausted earth, restriction of resources, the breakdown of society, and in places like the US, the return of slavery and everything else stemming from the "might makes right" doctrine so close to its heart anyway.
37labfs39
>36 LolaWalser: I too inhaled these last year and have been meaning to read more of her work. The only other one I've read is Kindred.
38LolaWalser
The essential Jesus by John Dominic Crossan emphasizes the class war aspect of Jesus' message, something that is generally kept quiet about when it's not outright perverted, as in the "prosperity gospel".
--------------
Cartas a Ophélia collects Pessoa's love letters to his hapless once or twice a fiancée. It's really hard--nay, it's impossible--to believe Fernando was in earnest and no wonder the poor girl obviously doubted him (his letters are basically just repetitive protestations that he DOES love her). There's very little evidence that Pessoa was even heterosexual, or sexual at all, so what he needed this tortured and unreal liaison for is anyone's guess. Maybe he fancied having a Dulcinea or Beatrice of his own. Maybe it helped with establishing a rep with the machos in Lisbon. Maybe anything. What's clear is that nothing came out of it, that the girl was bewildered by him more than enamoured with him (and who can blame her--he insisted on introducing her to some of his "heteronyms", some of whom didn't even like her!) and that she was well shot of him when the year of their "engagement" ran out.
There's an odd coda when the correspondence takes up again for a while almost ten years later. But nothing happens this time too.
----------------
I borrowed from the library Virginie Despentes latest, Cher connard, and I hated it more than anything else I've read by her. What I hate about her is something so basic and fundamental that no mere difference of opinions applies (in fact, no doubt we'd agree on any number of opinions)--I hate that she's a dick-worshiper, moulded by and on dick-worship, from which no amount of "feminism" and "lesbianism" (she's a lesbian now...) can distance her.
Her would-be female characters are terrible stereotypes, she much rather identifies with men and in all her books men are the main characters. What's more, they are treated with such appalling slavishness and open adoration you'd think they were imagined by a twelve year old boy bigging himself up through hero-worship. In this book, she can't even sustain the requisite judgement on a sexual harasser (the book is advertised as an "edgy" commentary on MeToo) and allows the woman he grossly insulted to befriend him (as may be apparent form the affectionate title alone). So we get lengthy pages--almost half of the book--dedicated to the thoughts and tender feelings of a misogynist on the wrong side of MeToo, and almost another half to that of a woman who has more empathy for him than for other women.
Despentes tries to represent a different position on feminism through the character of Zoé, a young, social-media conscious feminist, but she fails to hide her own incomprehension of both what young feminists think and her contempt for their "masochistic" impulses that turn them into "eternal victims". (The survivors of the mid-1990s will recognize here Paglia's ugly footprints.)
But the worst caricature is that of lesbians. I can't imagine that, had she been publishing in English, someone may not have questioned this. I don't have the book with me anymore so unfortunately can't quote. It concerns the sister of the "dear asshole", Corinne, who is in her own thinking/expression "too ugly for men but is a Sharon Stone among the dykes". This is simply too revealing of Despentes, the dick-worship- moulded self-hating wannabe. It's tragic that she's supposedly a lesbian now, yet apparently knows nothing about lesbians.
Lesbians aren't men in female bodies. Lesbians, while vulnerable to prejudice and cognizant of society's constraints like anyone else, do not think "like men". We all know Sharon Stone and the like are considered beautiful by the heterosexual, -sexist, -normative public at large but this does not automatically translate to hotness. Moreover, as stupidly as any 4chan misogynist, she paints lesbians as ugly unfuckables. Corinne's prettier girlfriends keep leaving her to marry men. She finally finds one as ugly/unmarriageable as herself.
I have to wonder if this woman has ever been in a room with lesbians. The "ugliest" women (according to the heterosexist standard) I can think of were all not just straight but married. Some of the most beautiful women I know were lesbian. I was conventionally pretty and a lesbian. It seems to me I dated nothing but gorgeous women because gorgeous women were all there were.
There's no question that Despentes had a number done on her mind from early on, that her obsession with being ugly dates from earliest times hearing it as a child. But it would be high time for her to understand that this warping obsession is HER idiosyncrasy, part of her internalized misogyny.
She keeps writing she wants to be champion of "the ugly". But who the fuck gave her the right to call people "ugly" in the first place? Who the fuck is SHE calling "ugly"? She can fucking get lost with that dick-worshipful construct right now.
--------------
Cartas a Ophélia collects Pessoa's love letters to his hapless once or twice a fiancée. It's really hard--nay, it's impossible--to believe Fernando was in earnest and no wonder the poor girl obviously doubted him (his letters are basically just repetitive protestations that he DOES love her). There's very little evidence that Pessoa was even heterosexual, or sexual at all, so what he needed this tortured and unreal liaison for is anyone's guess. Maybe he fancied having a Dulcinea or Beatrice of his own. Maybe it helped with establishing a rep with the machos in Lisbon. Maybe anything. What's clear is that nothing came out of it, that the girl was bewildered by him more than enamoured with him (and who can blame her--he insisted on introducing her to some of his "heteronyms", some of whom didn't even like her!) and that she was well shot of him when the year of their "engagement" ran out.
There's an odd coda when the correspondence takes up again for a while almost ten years later. But nothing happens this time too.
----------------
I borrowed from the library Virginie Despentes latest, Cher connard, and I hated it more than anything else I've read by her. What I hate about her is something so basic and fundamental that no mere difference of opinions applies (in fact, no doubt we'd agree on any number of opinions)--I hate that she's a dick-worshiper, moulded by and on dick-worship, from which no amount of "feminism" and "lesbianism" (she's a lesbian now...) can distance her.
Her would-be female characters are terrible stereotypes, she much rather identifies with men and in all her books men are the main characters. What's more, they are treated with such appalling slavishness and open adoration you'd think they were imagined by a twelve year old boy bigging himself up through hero-worship. In this book, she can't even sustain the requisite judgement on a sexual harasser (the book is advertised as an "edgy" commentary on MeToo) and allows the woman he grossly insulted to befriend him (as may be apparent form the affectionate title alone). So we get lengthy pages--almost half of the book--dedicated to the thoughts and tender feelings of a misogynist on the wrong side of MeToo, and almost another half to that of a woman who has more empathy for him than for other women.
Despentes tries to represent a different position on feminism through the character of Zoé, a young, social-media conscious feminist, but she fails to hide her own incomprehension of both what young feminists think and her contempt for their "masochistic" impulses that turn them into "eternal victims". (The survivors of the mid-1990s will recognize here Paglia's ugly footprints.)
But the worst caricature is that of lesbians. I can't imagine that, had she been publishing in English, someone may not have questioned this. I don't have the book with me anymore so unfortunately can't quote. It concerns the sister of the "dear asshole", Corinne, who is in her own thinking/expression "too ugly for men but is a Sharon Stone among the dykes". This is simply too revealing of Despentes, the dick-worship- moulded self-hating wannabe. It's tragic that she's supposedly a lesbian now, yet apparently knows nothing about lesbians.
Lesbians aren't men in female bodies. Lesbians, while vulnerable to prejudice and cognizant of society's constraints like anyone else, do not think "like men". We all know Sharon Stone and the like are considered beautiful by the heterosexual, -sexist, -normative public at large but this does not automatically translate to hotness. Moreover, as stupidly as any 4chan misogynist, she paints lesbians as ugly unfuckables. Corinne's prettier girlfriends keep leaving her to marry men. She finally finds one as ugly/unmarriageable as herself.
I have to wonder if this woman has ever been in a room with lesbians. The "ugliest" women (according to the heterosexist standard) I can think of were all not just straight but married. Some of the most beautiful women I know were lesbian. I was conventionally pretty and a lesbian. It seems to me I dated nothing but gorgeous women because gorgeous women were all there were.
There's no question that Despentes had a number done on her mind from early on, that her obsession with being ugly dates from earliest times hearing it as a child. But it would be high time for her to understand that this warping obsession is HER idiosyncrasy, part of her internalized misogyny.
She keeps writing she wants to be champion of "the ugly". But who the fuck gave her the right to call people "ugly" in the first place? Who the fuck is SHE calling "ugly"? She can fucking get lost with that dick-worshipful construct right now.
39LolaWalser
On the moving pictures front, I saw a lot of Godard, maybe a dozen films. Some were repeats but at least a half were new to me. I have a new admiration for his work, but it sits uncomfortably with knowing more about him personally. The young girls thing, as common as it is, just gets on my nerves. He got Karina at seventeen, Wiazemsky at nineteen, and kept littering his movies with naked bodies of girls in a highly ornamental fashion. In Le petit soldat the main character drones about feeling sorry for women over 25, no woman should get that old... God forbid women might like living. For autumn leaves. For coffee. For ladybirds. For other ladies. Or JUST BECAUSE.
I did like Weekend so much it catapulted among my favourites. But there again, it scratches against hearing how he mistreated Mireille Darc during shooting.
Curious about the political films but not yet at the 90 euro curiosity point.
I did like Weekend so much it catapulted among my favourites. But there again, it scratches against hearing how he mistreated Mireille Darc during shooting.
Curious about the political films but not yet at the 90 euro curiosity point.
40LolaWalser
Chronique d'une jeunesse berlinoise by Nicolaus Sombart, OPD 1984
I had no intention of mentioning this fairly uninteresting memoir, until the last twenty pages or so on Carl Schmitt brought up stuff too bizarre to ignore. Unfortunately this needs a set-up.
Nicolaus was the son of the once famous social historian Werner Sombart, one of those Prussian professor-kings, academic patriarchs, begetters of disciplines. One of Sombart's less glorious claims to fame is his study of Jews and capitalism, which reinforced (some say, invented) the connection between the two in general opinion. The important thing is that this is today seen for a barrel of bollocks--but at the time was quite influential.
Sombart himself was considered a man of the left, although probably deeply misjudged as more radical than he ever was. Nicolaus, who was born in a second marriage when Sombart was sixty, hasn't shed more light on his father's convictions, which seem to have been a strange but perhaps not that uncommon mix of conservatism and some sort of socialism. He died in 1941, opposed to the Nazis (who banned his books), but with connections to some people on the right.
Of which no one could be more notorious than the political theorist and card-holding Nazi Carl Schmitt. In truth, Nicolaus' narrative is confusing on the issue of how his father felt about Schmitt after he came out in defense of Hitler in 1934--in one part Nicolaus writes that Sombart cut him (Schmitt) off, but he still shows up at their house, mentors Nicolaus etc. There was also the connection between Nicolaus' mother, a Romanian woman, and Schmitt's wife, an orthodox Yugoslav (presumably Serbian).
In any case, young Nicolaus would meet Schmitt on many occasions and receive his advice on education, books, his thesis. This last one was to be on Jewish theatre criticism--a choice that raises eyebrows today as then. Nicolaus seems to want us to think he was being courageous, but that would depend on what exactly he meant to say, and we never hear that. His milieu at this time, emptied of Jewish intellectuals he briefly had had contact with as a child, while not necessarily actively Nazi, also couldn't have avoided appeasing the latter. No matter how eager he and his mates may have been for the forbidden (they also indulged in a mania for fin-de-siècle Vienna), such things hardly amounted to real opposition, let alone resistance.
In all this, Schmitt is someone who clearly meant to influence Nicolaus antisemitically, not just to make sure that the boy embraces antisemitism, but that the antisemitic credo is of the "correct", Schmitt's kind. Wherein lies the bizarre--as with Heidegger, it's in the content of their antisemitism, and in the clash between what is supposedly a great analytical intelligence, and the total lunacy of the antisemitic content.
Schmitt tells Nicolaus, oracularly (with a theatrical stance, whispering, as if inducing into a cult secret) that the key to understanding Jews (and concomitantly, to adopting the antisemitic stance such an understanding inexorably entails) lies in -- Disraeli. ("When you have read him you'll know about the Jews!") Specifically, he gives Nicolaus to read Tancred; or, The New Crusade, and to look for the "key phrase". Nicolaus obeys but fails to find "the key". Schmitt enlightens him: "Christianity is the Judaism of the people!"
Nicolaus describes Schmitt as "outraged" in this scene, furious at the Jewish impudence and "arrogance" that would "turn upside down two thousand years of Western history". He also says Schmitt had a portrait of Disraeli hanging over his desk, the better to keep "the enemy" in sight. He believed the British domination of the seas was serving the Jewish conspiracy to destroy nations. And to top the insanity, he had had to question whether Christianity itself hadn't been a Jewish trick, a ploy to "stultify" others and deprive them of power.
This, from a freaking viewpoint in 1941, in which the dominion of Christian Western countries lay practically over the entirety of the globe! THIS is what a supposedly "genius" mind had come up with.
Will people ever stop excusing the antisemitism of intellectuals like Heidegger and Schmitt as something worth addressing? It's shit in exactly the same way that the antisemitism of some illiterate butcher is. It's stupid shit, stupid beliefs held for stupid, shameful reasons: ignorance, envy, stupidity. And because they were philosophers and not widget-makers, it's shit that adheres to every single word and opinion they had. Heidegger's philosophy and Schmitt's vision of the state depend directly on the shit they believed about the Jews.
I had no intention of mentioning this fairly uninteresting memoir, until the last twenty pages or so on Carl Schmitt brought up stuff too bizarre to ignore. Unfortunately this needs a set-up.
Nicolaus was the son of the once famous social historian Werner Sombart, one of those Prussian professor-kings, academic patriarchs, begetters of disciplines. One of Sombart's less glorious claims to fame is his study of Jews and capitalism, which reinforced (some say, invented) the connection between the two in general opinion. The important thing is that this is today seen for a barrel of bollocks--but at the time was quite influential.
Sombart himself was considered a man of the left, although probably deeply misjudged as more radical than he ever was. Nicolaus, who was born in a second marriage when Sombart was sixty, hasn't shed more light on his father's convictions, which seem to have been a strange but perhaps not that uncommon mix of conservatism and some sort of socialism. He died in 1941, opposed to the Nazis (who banned his books), but with connections to some people on the right.
Of which no one could be more notorious than the political theorist and card-holding Nazi Carl Schmitt. In truth, Nicolaus' narrative is confusing on the issue of how his father felt about Schmitt after he came out in defense of Hitler in 1934--in one part Nicolaus writes that Sombart cut him (Schmitt) off, but he still shows up at their house, mentors Nicolaus etc. There was also the connection between Nicolaus' mother, a Romanian woman, and Schmitt's wife, an orthodox Yugoslav (presumably Serbian).
In any case, young Nicolaus would meet Schmitt on many occasions and receive his advice on education, books, his thesis. This last one was to be on Jewish theatre criticism--a choice that raises eyebrows today as then. Nicolaus seems to want us to think he was being courageous, but that would depend on what exactly he meant to say, and we never hear that. His milieu at this time, emptied of Jewish intellectuals he briefly had had contact with as a child, while not necessarily actively Nazi, also couldn't have avoided appeasing the latter. No matter how eager he and his mates may have been for the forbidden (they also indulged in a mania for fin-de-siècle Vienna), such things hardly amounted to real opposition, let alone resistance.
In all this, Schmitt is someone who clearly meant to influence Nicolaus antisemitically, not just to make sure that the boy embraces antisemitism, but that the antisemitic credo is of the "correct", Schmitt's kind. Wherein lies the bizarre--as with Heidegger, it's in the content of their antisemitism, and in the clash between what is supposedly a great analytical intelligence, and the total lunacy of the antisemitic content.
Schmitt tells Nicolaus, oracularly (with a theatrical stance, whispering, as if inducing into a cult secret) that the key to understanding Jews (and concomitantly, to adopting the antisemitic stance such an understanding inexorably entails) lies in -- Disraeli. ("When you have read him you'll know about the Jews!") Specifically, he gives Nicolaus to read Tancred; or, The New Crusade, and to look for the "key phrase". Nicolaus obeys but fails to find "the key". Schmitt enlightens him: "Christianity is the Judaism of the people!"
Nicolaus describes Schmitt as "outraged" in this scene, furious at the Jewish impudence and "arrogance" that would "turn upside down two thousand years of Western history". He also says Schmitt had a portrait of Disraeli hanging over his desk, the better to keep "the enemy" in sight. He believed the British domination of the seas was serving the Jewish conspiracy to destroy nations. And to top the insanity, he had had to question whether Christianity itself hadn't been a Jewish trick, a ploy to "stultify" others and deprive them of power.
This, from a freaking viewpoint in 1941, in which the dominion of Christian Western countries lay practically over the entirety of the globe! THIS is what a supposedly "genius" mind had come up with.
Will people ever stop excusing the antisemitism of intellectuals like Heidegger and Schmitt as something worth addressing? It's shit in exactly the same way that the antisemitism of some illiterate butcher is. It's stupid shit, stupid beliefs held for stupid, shameful reasons: ignorance, envy, stupidity. And because they were philosophers and not widget-makers, it's shit that adheres to every single word and opinion they had. Heidegger's philosophy and Schmitt's vision of the state depend directly on the shit they believed about the Jews.
41rocketjk
"Will people ever stop excusing the antisemitism of intellectuals like Heidegger and Schmitt as something worth addressing?"
Most probably not, I'm afraid. Fascinating review, though, so thanks for that.
But also I wanted to let you know that I've just begun reading John Heartfield: Laughter is a Devastating Weapon which I was inspired to purchase after I read your review here in 2021. Cheers.
Most probably not, I'm afraid. Fascinating review, though, so thanks for that.
But also I wanted to let you know that I've just begun reading John Heartfield: Laughter is a Devastating Weapon which I was inspired to purchase after I read your review here in 2021. Cheers.
43LolaWalser
Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History by Lea Ypi, OPD 2022
Lea Ypi was born in Albania in 1979, so about eleven years old in December 1990 when Europe's only Stalinist country began its World Bank-financed transition into a so-called "democracy". Seven years later she'd emigrate to Italy; today she's an academic in the UK.
The story is very long on her childhood, presumably because the oddity of the system makes that part most interesting to the non-Albanian audience; fairly expansive on the difficult transition years, and ends with the "Albanian civil war" of 1997-- the year that saw basically the entire population bankrupted and pauperized by the pyramid schemes and other neoliberal shenanigans resulting in mass unemployment, widespread unrest, violence, thousands of dead, and another huge wave of emigration.
All of this was interesting enough but I wished she hadn't disposed of the remaining half and counting of her life, and in particular her work, in a short epilogue. As it turns out (and this feels like a spoiler...) although received wisdom would expect such a tale to be yet another anti-Communist tirade--all the more so since Ypi's family wasn't "politically correct"--Ypi not only isn't a liberal shill, she finds things to defend about EVEN the Albanian version of communism.
No doubt her youth, the moment she knew under the system, made a difference. Her childhood and that of her friends sounds happy. Even the elders, while gradually revealed to lead a sort of double existence where they don't let on in public what they know and think in private, are too often mentioned laughing, joking, socializing, for us to picture their lives (as I admit I would have) as one of unmitigated grimness.
And in contrast to the depredations and humiliations that capitalism brought, from the yawning inequalities to sex trafficking, drugs, gangsterism and brutalization of daily life, the problems and constraints of old may have appeared, if not less serious, then maybe less final, less hopeless.
So there's this ironic coda where Ypi, presumably one "saved" from communism and a child of once wealthy anti-communist bourgeois, goes to the West only to discover Das Kapital and socialism anew, and instead of forswearing Marx, as she once promised her father, now teaches Marx.
Lea Ypi: “The freedom that liberalism brought was only for some people”
The acclaimed author on growing up in communist Albania, the cost of “shock therapy” and why she’s a “Kantian Marxist”.
Lea Ypi was born in Albania in 1979, so about eleven years old in December 1990 when Europe's only Stalinist country began its World Bank-financed transition into a so-called "democracy". Seven years later she'd emigrate to Italy; today she's an academic in the UK.
The story is very long on her childhood, presumably because the oddity of the system makes that part most interesting to the non-Albanian audience; fairly expansive on the difficult transition years, and ends with the "Albanian civil war" of 1997-- the year that saw basically the entire population bankrupted and pauperized by the pyramid schemes and other neoliberal shenanigans resulting in mass unemployment, widespread unrest, violence, thousands of dead, and another huge wave of emigration.
All of this was interesting enough but I wished she hadn't disposed of the remaining half and counting of her life, and in particular her work, in a short epilogue. As it turns out (and this feels like a spoiler...) although received wisdom would expect such a tale to be yet another anti-Communist tirade--all the more so since Ypi's family wasn't "politically correct"--Ypi not only isn't a liberal shill, she finds things to defend about EVEN the Albanian version of communism.
No doubt her youth, the moment she knew under the system, made a difference. Her childhood and that of her friends sounds happy. Even the elders, while gradually revealed to lead a sort of double existence where they don't let on in public what they know and think in private, are too often mentioned laughing, joking, socializing, for us to picture their lives (as I admit I would have) as one of unmitigated grimness.
And in contrast to the depredations and humiliations that capitalism brought, from the yawning inequalities to sex trafficking, drugs, gangsterism and brutalization of daily life, the problems and constraints of old may have appeared, if not less serious, then maybe less final, less hopeless.
So there's this ironic coda where Ypi, presumably one "saved" from communism and a child of once wealthy anti-communist bourgeois, goes to the West only to discover Das Kapital and socialism anew, and instead of forswearing Marx, as she once promised her father, now teaches Marx.
Lea Ypi: “The freedom that liberalism brought was only for some people”
The acclaimed author on growing up in communist Albania, the cost of “shock therapy” and why she’s a “Kantian Marxist”.
44Dilara86
>43 LolaWalser: Thanks, that's going into my wishlist.
45SassyLassy
>43 LolaWalser: >44 Dilara86: Me too. Love the idea of a "Kantian Marxist"
46labfs39
>43 LolaWalser: I would add it if it weren't already there!
47LolaWalser
I'm fairly sure anyone interested in Ypi's book will find it at a minimum engaging.
I saw a cartoon, Turning Red, and liked it immensely. A Chinese Canadian girl living in Toronto hangs out with her friends, daydreams about a boy band, and is a dutiful daughter to a formidable mother and a sweet, overshadowed father. Then overnight her atavistic genetic heritage kicks in and she transforms into a giant red panda. This is trouble until she learns to control the transformation, and then it's even more trouble.
There's all sorts of coming-of-age, puberty, feminist associations I suppose, but it's also just a very cute adventure movie.
I saw a cartoon, Turning Red, and liked it immensely. A Chinese Canadian girl living in Toronto hangs out with her friends, daydreams about a boy band, and is a dutiful daughter to a formidable mother and a sweet, overshadowed father. Then overnight her atavistic genetic heritage kicks in and she transforms into a giant red panda. This is trouble until she learns to control the transformation, and then it's even more trouble.
There's all sorts of coming-of-age, puberty, feminist associations I suppose, but it's also just a very cute adventure movie.
48LolaWalser
Aaaaah, I'm feeling like a very sleepy bear myself--let me hibernate till spring... but if I give in to torpor now, I'm doomed.
Some things:
The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H., OPD 1982 (anonymously)
Another example of intelligent people making dumb decisions. Whatever possessed Steiner to publish this? It ought to have been a back-of-the-napkin thought experiment, but instead it's out and about, doing no good to anyone.
The premise of the novel(la) is that a trio of Israeli commandos find Hitler alive, well, and ancient, in some corner of South America so remote they have to bring him out literally on their backs and arms, crossing swamps and rivers on foot. Their ultimate goal is to take him to court. Other national and political factions who got wind of this are monitoring the situation and may act to foil them, for no clear reason (there are only some short and utterly clichéd snapshots of various American, Soviet, French, British high-ups remarking cryptically on the scheme). The jungle trek exhausts everyone but Hitler, who seems to be getting stronger as they get closer to the pick up point.
And that's it, that's the story. However, the point isn't the story, but the horrible last pages Steiner gives over to Hitler's self-exonerating speech. It's the usual well-trodden litany of antisemitic thought since the late 19th century, as ever blaming the victims as perpetrators and piling on every possible insult to the injuries on record.
The effect is awful. Steiner may have hoped people would know (or be?) better, but considering that exactly the same reasoning still thrives and spreads around, he achieved nothing; or, even worse, he appears to leave Hitler in the "winning" position.
Fwiw, there's a section about the middle of the book when one of the men carrying Hitler is recalling a long list of crimes against Jewish individuals and wondering what sort of punishment could begin to expiate for a single one--I would have had that at the end, because it speaks for itself, because it is real and unanswerable.
------------------------
The bloody countess, Valentine Penrose, OPD 1962
Interesting subject, interesting book, interesting author. What little is known about the real Erzsébet Báthory can probably never be freed entirely from later fictions--of which this one appears to be the pioneering one. Valentine Penrose (surname acquired through marriage to Roland Penrose) was a poet and artist of surrealist persuasion, occult and esoteric interests, and lesbian identity. She was also a card-carrying member of the French Resistance from day one.
Another Sadean-surrealist connection is provided by the translator into English, Alexander Trocchi. The translation itself reads beautifully, if you can withstand the gore.
--------------------------
Do what thou wilt : a life of Aleister Crowley, Lawrence Sutin, OPD 1993
This book has a great cover. There's a pentagram blind-stamped so that the points highlight Crowley's eyes--it really looks as if he's staring backatcha.
The information within was pretty much all new to me and served to inform. I'll probably remember the most scurrilous bits, as one is wont to.
--------------------------
Trouble follows me, Ross MacDonald, OPD 1946
I tried reading MacDonald before (The chill), but bounced off it. This one's unexpected features kept my attention to the last, to wit, the way race and relations were not just illustrated but part of the plot. Cautions upfront: the language used is what you may expect, and the ideas aren't up to our antiracist standards, but it's fairly clear this would've been "progressive" for the times.
Also, a male character speaking to another male character alludes to the work of Stevie Smith. That's so precious.
---------------------------
L'autre sommeil, Julien Green, OPD 1930
Very finely written novella about homosexual awakening.
--------------------------
Flowers of ice, Imants Ziedonis, OPD 1987
I finished this as "flowers of ice" appeared on my windows yesterday. Some wonderful bucolic poetry redolent with Slavic (Latvian) mythology, mixed in with jagged motorized Mayakovskyan futurism.
------------------------
Brilliant women : 18th-century bluestockings, OPD 2008
I was very much taken by the effect of female circles, which are so rare in history--the fact that one woman would commission a portrait of a second woman from a third, perhaps to be given to a fourth--a very ordinary thing for men, but almost unheard of from women, where several obstacles need to be overcome first. Above all, the question of money, and the question of profession--there were more women professionally employed as painters than I realised, but all still faced plenty of difficulty and straight-up discrimination when trying to exercise their profession.
The term "bluestocking" wasn't originally pejorative and had been applied to men as well (in fact the very first "bluestocking" was a distraught-professor type who came to a dinner wearing his work hose). Even more interesting, the first female bluestockings weren't necessarily of feminist outlook, and some were downright conservative. But here we encounter that low threshold misogyny imposes on what gets labelled "feminism"--when the mere fact of being literate is enough to "taint" a woman, it hardly matters next what her opinions may be.
This provided an interesting background to Mary Wollstonecraft's radicalism, far beyond what the original bluestockings would countenance.
Some things:
The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H., OPD 1982 (anonymously)
Another example of intelligent people making dumb decisions. Whatever possessed Steiner to publish this? It ought to have been a back-of-the-napkin thought experiment, but instead it's out and about, doing no good to anyone.
The premise of the novel(la) is that a trio of Israeli commandos find Hitler alive, well, and ancient, in some corner of South America so remote they have to bring him out literally on their backs and arms, crossing swamps and rivers on foot. Their ultimate goal is to take him to court. Other national and political factions who got wind of this are monitoring the situation and may act to foil them, for no clear reason (there are only some short and utterly clichéd snapshots of various American, Soviet, French, British high-ups remarking cryptically on the scheme). The jungle trek exhausts everyone but Hitler, who seems to be getting stronger as they get closer to the pick up point.
And that's it, that's the story. However, the point isn't the story, but the horrible last pages Steiner gives over to Hitler's self-exonerating speech. It's the usual well-trodden litany of antisemitic thought since the late 19th century, as ever blaming the victims as perpetrators and piling on every possible insult to the injuries on record.
The effect is awful. Steiner may have hoped people would know (or be?) better, but considering that exactly the same reasoning still thrives and spreads around, he achieved nothing; or, even worse, he appears to leave Hitler in the "winning" position.
Fwiw, there's a section about the middle of the book when one of the men carrying Hitler is recalling a long list of crimes against Jewish individuals and wondering what sort of punishment could begin to expiate for a single one--I would have had that at the end, because it speaks for itself, because it is real and unanswerable.
------------------------
The bloody countess, Valentine Penrose, OPD 1962
Interesting subject, interesting book, interesting author. What little is known about the real Erzsébet Báthory can probably never be freed entirely from later fictions--of which this one appears to be the pioneering one. Valentine Penrose (surname acquired through marriage to Roland Penrose) was a poet and artist of surrealist persuasion, occult and esoteric interests, and lesbian identity. She was also a card-carrying member of the French Resistance from day one.
Another Sadean-surrealist connection is provided by the translator into English, Alexander Trocchi. The translation itself reads beautifully, if you can withstand the gore.
--------------------------
Do what thou wilt : a life of Aleister Crowley, Lawrence Sutin, OPD 1993
This book has a great cover. There's a pentagram blind-stamped so that the points highlight Crowley's eyes--it really looks as if he's staring backatcha.
The information within was pretty much all new to me and served to inform. I'll probably remember the most scurrilous bits, as one is wont to.
--------------------------
Trouble follows me, Ross MacDonald, OPD 1946
I tried reading MacDonald before (The chill), but bounced off it. This one's unexpected features kept my attention to the last, to wit, the way race and relations were not just illustrated but part of the plot. Cautions upfront: the language used is what you may expect, and the ideas aren't up to our antiracist standards, but it's fairly clear this would've been "progressive" for the times.
Also, a male character speaking to another male character alludes to the work of Stevie Smith. That's so precious.
---------------------------
L'autre sommeil, Julien Green, OPD 1930
Very finely written novella about homosexual awakening.
--------------------------
Flowers of ice, Imants Ziedonis, OPD 1987
I finished this as "flowers of ice" appeared on my windows yesterday. Some wonderful bucolic poetry redolent with Slavic (Latvian) mythology, mixed in with jagged motorized Mayakovskyan futurism.
------------------------
Brilliant women : 18th-century bluestockings, OPD 2008
I was very much taken by the effect of female circles, which are so rare in history--the fact that one woman would commission a portrait of a second woman from a third, perhaps to be given to a fourth--a very ordinary thing for men, but almost unheard of from women, where several obstacles need to be overcome first. Above all, the question of money, and the question of profession--there were more women professionally employed as painters than I realised, but all still faced plenty of difficulty and straight-up discrimination when trying to exercise their profession.
The term "bluestocking" wasn't originally pejorative and had been applied to men as well (in fact the very first "bluestocking" was a distraught-professor type who came to a dinner wearing his work hose). Even more interesting, the first female bluestockings weren't necessarily of feminist outlook, and some were downright conservative. But here we encounter that low threshold misogyny imposes on what gets labelled "feminism"--when the mere fact of being literate is enough to "taint" a woman, it hardly matters next what her opinions may be.
This provided an interesting background to Mary Wollstonecraft's radicalism, far beyond what the original bluestockings would countenance.
49lisapeet
I'm always up for reading about historical women's circles, maybe especially bluestockings, so Brilliant Women is most definitely noted.
50LolaWalser
>49 lisapeet:
It accompanied an exhibition so half are pictures--I was grateful for that as the illustrations conveyed the way of life and the style of these women more immediately than any text could. Not all were rich (hence the pressure to break into professions), but practically all came from privileged backgrounds that at least allowed them sufficient education. The one exception mentioned was Ann Yearsley, "daughter of a milkwoman", who spent her childhood working alongside her mother but eventually became a celebrated poetess (she too was sponsored by a "bluestocking", but there was a later falling out).
I did wonder what larger implication for social progress such a small select group may have had. Especially when one considers how instant and relentless the backlash was to any actual equality of the genders. For example, two women painters, Angelica Kauffmann and Mary Moser were among the founding members of the British Royal Academy of Arts in 1768--and remained only women members ever until 1936, when the third woman ever was admitted. (Also, Kauffmann and Moser, while nominally members, still weren't allowed into the same spaces and to the same privileges as the men.)
And, of course, we know that it didn't take long for "bluestocking" to deteriorate into a gendered slur.
--------------------------------
Bedelia, Vera Caspary, OPD 1945
Another great entry in CUNY's Feminist Press series of forgotten woman-authored pulp fiction. These books come with introductions and afterwords filled with stuff one (well, I) would not think to search for, so I likely would have missed learning that Caspary (born 1899) was a one-time Communist and just generally a rebel--as the editor notes, maybe less of a feminist than a "female rebel".
Caspary made a hit when her novel Laura was adapted into a film noir, directed by Otto Preminger, and would go on to write other film scripts. Bedelia is the story of a mysterious young woman whose new marriage is threatened by news of her past, which may have involved multiple murdered husbands. Or is Bedelia just singularly unlucky?
It's important to note that Caspary thought Preminger distorted her character of Laura, and that in general men misread her (and possibly anyone's) "femmes fatales". Caspary's inspiration was anchored in real life problems women encountered whenever they tried to assert themselves; the male gaze kept shortchanging these characters.
---------------------------------
On the Moving Pictures front: I've been relaxing with television. Since I don't have television, I usually come late to novelties and hits, as they trickle down to free streamers and the selection CTV allows to the general public. I've binged the first season of (Awkwafina is) Norah from Queens (aw, no touchstones)--totally loved it. I'm somewhere in Season Three of Babylon 5, and deep into Season One of The fugitive--the 1960s series with Barry Morse...
I have nearly completed adding ALL of my film collection this year, with just a handful of Criterion titles left.
Two movie-viewing projects for next year: continue with the DEFA films I can find; and see all of my Criterion set.
It accompanied an exhibition so half are pictures--I was grateful for that as the illustrations conveyed the way of life and the style of these women more immediately than any text could. Not all were rich (hence the pressure to break into professions), but practically all came from privileged backgrounds that at least allowed them sufficient education. The one exception mentioned was Ann Yearsley, "daughter of a milkwoman", who spent her childhood working alongside her mother but eventually became a celebrated poetess (she too was sponsored by a "bluestocking", but there was a later falling out).
I did wonder what larger implication for social progress such a small select group may have had. Especially when one considers how instant and relentless the backlash was to any actual equality of the genders. For example, two women painters, Angelica Kauffmann and Mary Moser were among the founding members of the British Royal Academy of Arts in 1768--and remained only women members ever until 1936, when the third woman ever was admitted. (Also, Kauffmann and Moser, while nominally members, still weren't allowed into the same spaces and to the same privileges as the men.)
And, of course, we know that it didn't take long for "bluestocking" to deteriorate into a gendered slur.
--------------------------------
Bedelia, Vera Caspary, OPD 1945
Another great entry in CUNY's Feminist Press series of forgotten woman-authored pulp fiction. These books come with introductions and afterwords filled with stuff one (well, I) would not think to search for, so I likely would have missed learning that Caspary (born 1899) was a one-time Communist and just generally a rebel--as the editor notes, maybe less of a feminist than a "female rebel".
Caspary made a hit when her novel Laura was adapted into a film noir, directed by Otto Preminger, and would go on to write other film scripts. Bedelia is the story of a mysterious young woman whose new marriage is threatened by news of her past, which may have involved multiple murdered husbands. Or is Bedelia just singularly unlucky?
It's important to note that Caspary thought Preminger distorted her character of Laura, and that in general men misread her (and possibly anyone's) "femmes fatales". Caspary's inspiration was anchored in real life problems women encountered whenever they tried to assert themselves; the male gaze kept shortchanging these characters.
---------------------------------
On the Moving Pictures front: I've been relaxing with television. Since I don't have television, I usually come late to novelties and hits, as they trickle down to free streamers and the selection CTV allows to the general public. I've binged the first season of (Awkwafina is) Norah from Queens (aw, no touchstones)--totally loved it. I'm somewhere in Season Three of Babylon 5, and deep into Season One of The fugitive--the 1960s series with Barry Morse...
I have nearly completed adding ALL of my film collection this year, with just a handful of Criterion titles left.
Two movie-viewing projects for next year: continue with the DEFA films I can find; and see all of my Criterion set.
51labfs39
>50 LolaWalser: Oh, Babylon Five... that brings back memories. It premiered when I was in grad school and a group of us used to cram into someone's dorm room and watch every episode. I remember an Aussie studying piano who used to analyze practically frame by frame afterward. It was fun times. Is this your first time watching?
52rocketjk
I remember watching the very first episodes of Babylon 5 when the series first aired but for some reason didn't continue with it. But I started streaming the remake of Battlestar Gallactica when I was stuck in my home office with Covid and now I'm most of the way through Season 2. It's my laundry folding go-to.
53LolaWalser
>51 labfs39:
No, I saw five seasons (not the movies) about ten tears ago when a friend lent me his set. I too was in grad school when it originally aired but then as now had no TV. I remember only the broadest strokes. The level of devotion necessary to analyse it frame-by-frame is way beyond me!
>52 rocketjk:
I was very much impressed by the first few seasons of the BG remake but (I don't think this much is any sort of spoiler) absolutely detested where they took it in the end. For me it ruined it completely. I'll try to remember to ask what you thought, should you finish the whole thing.
No, I saw five seasons (not the movies) about ten tears ago when a friend lent me his set. I too was in grad school when it originally aired but then as now had no TV. I remember only the broadest strokes. The level of devotion necessary to analyse it frame-by-frame is way beyond me!
>52 rocketjk:
I was very much impressed by the first few seasons of the BG remake but (I don't think this much is any sort of spoiler) absolutely detested where they took it in the end. For me it ruined it completely. I'll try to remember to ask what you thought, should you finish the whole thing.
