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Friday, May 16th, 2008
Looks from this article like the movie Blindness is going to be really dreadful. That's so disappointing! The book could absolutely be made into an excellent movie -- it is "cinematic", visual detail is such a key part of it. But Dargis' description gives me a sense of exactly how Blindness should not have been made into a movie -- with overt concentration on the allegorical aspects of the story. Saramago really played this down, except for the cathedral scene and a couple of spots while the characters were interned, and of course the very end -- but the end should be surprising, should take your breath away. If Meirelles is using blinding light effects throughout the movie, I can't imagine the end is going to feel meaningful at all.
posted evening of May 16th, 2008: 1 response
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Thursday, May 15th, 2008
(Žižek is speaking of the choice offered, in The Matrix [and note, I haven't seen that movie], between a  blue pill that will make the protagonist wake up to reality and a red pill that will bring him into the fantasy permanently):
But the choice between the blue and the red pill is not really a choice between illusion and reality. Of course, Matrix is a machine for fictions; but these are fictions which already structure our reality. If you take away from our reality the symbolic fictions which regulate it, you lose reality itself.
I want a third pill. So what is the third pill? Definitely not some kind of transcendental pill, which enables a fake fast-food religious experience, but a pill that would enable me to perceive... not the reality behind the illusion, but the reality in illusion itself. ...Also, a really nice digression in the fourth segment, about movie characters grappling with "the autonomous undead object" -- the red shoes, Dr. Strangelove's right hand, the ventriloquist's dummy in Dead of Night. "The lesson is clear: the only way for me to get rid of this autonomous partial object, is to become this object."
posted evening of May 15th, 2008: Respond
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 ...If it pans out. I just bought from an e-bay seller located in Shanghai, a 24-dvd box set of Werner Herzog's movies, for about $1.50/disk. (Plus $1/disk shipping.) Thing is I can't find info about this particular box set at Amazon, which has various other 6- and 8-dvd sets of Herzog. But, well, the photo looks legit. The price is low enough and the product (cross fingers) good enough that I decided to gamble on it.
 (It makes the gamble seem like more of a likely one, that the seller has numerous positive feedbacks. FWIW.)
posted afternoon of May 15th, 2008: 1 response
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At Edge of the American West, there is a fun thread about anticipating new books by your favorite authors. There was no criterion really specified for how to choose the authors you list; here is what I used: an author all or most of whose back catalog I have read*, and if I read about a new book of whose being published, I would run out to the bookstore and buy a copy. Most books I've bought in my life have been used; buying just-published books is a pretty new experience. I think this is a complete list of the books that I've bought on the day of their publication: Mason & Dixon, The Keep, Against the Day, Other Colors. (And come to think of it, I've pre-ordered a couple of books from Amazon or similar, so received them at the time of their publication. So probably should add to the list Monk's Music, and Autobiographies of Orhan Pamuk which I await anxiously, and the two volumes so far of Moomin comics.)
 *Except Saramago, I've only read two of his books.
posted afternoon of May 15th, 2008: Respond
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Wednesday, May 14th, 2008
Cinema is the ultimate pervert art. It doesn't give you what you desire; it tells you how to desire.  I just found out about this documentary today from A White Bear. Looks fantastic! You can watch it on YouTube, albeit broken up into 10-minute chunks. Slavoj Žižek is also the subject of the documentary Žižek!, which you can also watch broken up.(This YouTube user Mariborchan, from Maribor, Slovenia, has uploaded plenty more Žižek videos and other philosophical lectures.)
posted evening of May 14th, 2008: Respond
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Tuesday, May 13th, 2008
It occurs to me that I ought to read the rest of the Divine Comedy when I finish the Inferno, then read La Vita Nuova, and then I would probably have enough background to understand and like The New Life. Who knows, maybe I'll do it. I wonder if Dante's other works are available in reputable translations?
 Update: Hmm, well seems like given that I like the terza rima, the Dorothy Sayers translation may be the only way to go for Purgatory and Paradise. All the other translations appear to be in prose or blank verse. ...Except Lawrence Binyon, which also has rhyme. Guess I will go to a bookstore and look at some of them side by side.
posted evening of May 13th, 2008: Respond
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"Pape Satàn, pape Satàn, aleppe!"
Plutus began in a gutteral, clicking voice.
The courteous sage who knew all reassured me: "Don't let fear harm you; whatever power he has
Cannot prevent us climbing down this rock.
It seems to me like that "Pape Satàn, aleppe!" line was the first thing I ever knew from the Inferno. I think Eliot quotes it somewhere, probably in The Waste Land, and that my researching his quote in high school was the first thing that ever brought Dante to my attention. Could be misremembering though. It baffles and delights me how Dante, a pious Christian, can sprinkle pagan deities and ideologies throughout his afterlife. He basically has to do it, because all his literary reference points are pre-Christian; I like that he does not seem embarrassed about it.
posted evening of May 13th, 2008: Respond
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Roy and Tom are going to be at the Voice every ThursdayMonday [duh...] now, with a weekly round-up of the right wing blogs.
posted morning of May 13th, 2008: Respond
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Monday, May 12th, 2008
Reading the Inferno today and I was having a little trouble with figuring out what it should sound like. So I took the obvious path and started reading aloud. And what a revelation! I think I am going to read this whole book aloud -- the sound is lovely and I'm understanding it better. I think I "get" terza rima now, the way it leads you through the canto; Pinsky's introduction was helpful in this regard, but what really made it concrete was to listen to the reading. My sense of reading poetry aloud has been heavily influenced by Heany's reading (or "declamation"?) of Beowulf, which I've been listening to a lot in the last couple of weeks.
 Try reading this aloud:
"My son," said the gentle master, "here are joined
The souls of all who die in the wrath of God,
From every country, all of them eager to find Their way across the water -- for the goad
Of Divine Justice spurs them so, their fear
Is transmuted to desire. Souls who are good Never pass this way; therefore, if you hear
Charon complaining at your presence, consider
What that means." Then, the earth of that grim shore Began to shake: so violently, I shudder
And sweat recalling it now. A wind burst up
From the tear-soaked ground to erupt red light and batter My senses -- and so I fell, as though seized by sleep. -- See how the meter leads you on through the passage. I'm finding it impossible to stop reading in the middle of a canto.
posted evening of May 12th, 2008: Respond
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"We live for the strike of a match." Here's video of him recording on NPR for the Bryant Park Project -- more audio here -- Laura Conaway writes about another episode of BPP mentioning "I Often Dream of Trains" here. Will try and embed it later on. Here's audio of him on KQED's California Report. Also: he will be playing at Symphony Space in November, with Captain Keegan.
...Also: Here is a live performance of "Creeped Out", from Irene Trudel's show on WFMU. Hitchcock has an interview in this episode of "Paul Morley's Guide to Musical Genres" on BBC2.
posted afternoon of May 12th, 2008: Respond
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