Mansex Agitprop Seattle

The SRI's last public event--last, as in most recent, and last, as in, that's the last of the SRI -- went all right. Contra my fondest wishes and secret hopes, it was just all right.

I had thought -- without thinking it through -- the event would be like this one in James Purdy's novel I Am Elijah Thrush, both in structure and intensity, if not in the actual sequence of variety acts:

Whether it was because my illness grew exacerbated by the incense, or owing to sheer excitement, I felt it wise to slump to the floor so as not to excite my nerves more than I knew they would be excited by what I was about to undergo, and I allowed my head to rest against the boots of a young white gentleman who told me not to think of formality but to make myself comfortable...

"Are you a bosom friend of the Mime?" the young man whispered in my ear. "I feel I am losing consciousness," I told him, "you may have to care for me." But my lightheadedness didn't seem to alarm me somehow or my companion either, who merely went on humming the tunes he heard played on the piano.

....................

While this was going on, I had not realized that the young man next to me had almost entirely undressed me. My overcoat was gone, and my trousers and shorts had disappeared. Thinking he was about to enjoy my body, I turned to question him but he had of course disappeared.

...when the Mime, unable any longer to be standing unheralded in the wings, leaped out and seized Millicent for his partner, and began doing an unparalleled two-step with her, to the fresh enthusiasm of the audience, for it was suddenly apparent she needed only his guiding hand to be brilliant. Indeed, their duo bid fair to be the hit of the season at the Arcturus Gardens when suddenly, from the back of the theater, somebody shouted "Po-lice!" Purple in the face and puffing from their exertions, Millicent and Elijah nonetheless danced on, gliding into a tango. The bluecoats had arrived through the broken front door, with their nightsticks twirling, and, thinking they could only be coming for me, I dashed bare-assed for the fire escape, and then just as I was descending I heard gunfire...

I did harbor a secret desire that our gala should culminate in audience members disrobing, or fainting, or repairing to the gender-undesignated bathrooms, and then finally that the police should arrive, "nightsticks twirling," to bust up our exhibition of this 'unrated' film in which Smith college students re-enact the boys' prep-school novel A Separate Peace.

Volodine

From Antoine Volodine's Minor Angels:

Across a half-kilometer of sand you enter a neighborhood where, for two dollars a year, the nouveaux-riches employ a woman to sweep out their rooms and wash their shirts. This woman, Rachel Carissimi, has killed several capitalists, but she didn’t eat them. Not far away begins an avenue full of potholes, lined with a string of vacant apartment buildings. In the third building on the odd-numbered side, there nevertheless resides a man who has memorized every one of Varvalia Lodenko’s speeches, and can recite them on demand. At the northern end of the avenue, you stand near another cluster of abandoned districts. When I say you, I’m thinking mainly of the Untermenschen, for instance Oulan Raff, which is to say me. Over thousands of hectares a blue-tinged blackish color predominates, and slag, and wind, and, just after that, to the southwest, an expanse of tundra opens up before you. If you follow an east-southeasterly course for some three thousand seven hundred kilometers, you will end up at the place known as Spotted Wheat, where a handful of veterinarians once corralled some old women who never died, who never changed, and who couldn’t be eaten. The nursing home was far from everything, even the camps. They say these immortals committed a grave error that they never stopped trying to repair. The story goes that they brought a man of rags up out of nothingness, and that he reestablished the circulation of dollars and mafias on the earth. If, instead of choosing that distant destination, you decide to come back toward the [bridge], you will first enter a courtyard where a windmill wheel squeaks mournfully day and night, connected to nothing. This is where Oulan Raff lives.

This novel, composed of "narracts" (Volodine's word, though also it is the novel's word), is not always narrated by Oulan Raff; he appears only here, in this one narract. Not all the narrators are so anti-capitalist as this one, though many of them grieve, in an ironic mode, for the failure of communism ("all those who built that ideal brick by brick in spite of the wars and the massacres and the privations and in spite of the camps and the guards in the camps, and went on building it heroically until it wouldn't stand anymore, and even until it would never stand again.")

How much is dropped, cast aside, in the narracts! Torrents of incident (narract/cataract); vast geographies of waste; grief at the demise of world revolution; and one narrator after another after another. (Waste: a chief narrator is named Scheidmann, calling to my mind Ausscheidung, elimination; Scheidmann is plagued by sloughing, scaling skin.) An extravagance, but not a showily cool, affectless extravagance. Waste on a prodigious scale, but in a somber key. Loss, perhaps, rather than waste.

Mansex Agitprop



Watch the trailer of Oakie Treadwell's amazing new film, Maggots and Men.

Kiyoshi Kurosawa's film "Pulse" as allegory of the more or less worldwide reach of reactionary forces in the present historical conjuncture and of the necessity to "keep going"

Toward the end of the film, after the plague of nihilistic zombie-like people has swept Japan and possibly the rest of the globe, two characters are alone on a huge ship. After a crane shot that shows the ship alone in a trackless expanse of ocean, the film cuts to the two travellers.

Woman: Will we keep going then?

Man: Yes. We'll head to South America; we're still getting signals there, although they're weak.

Indeed.

What defines industrial art is not its mechanical reproduction but its internalized relation to money

For the film Weeping Meadow, Theo Angelopolous built a village only to drown it. The word "village" doesn't quite evoke the immense labor that's everywhere evident in WM: the hand-made bricks, the terra-cotta tiled roofs, the two-story manse at the heart of the village--- the whole sweep of the thing, more than two dozen hand-hewn houses on a vast river-plain.

Every film of course shows evidence of its production costs. What is of interest here is the film-within-the-film that works as an allegory of film's relation to money.

In Welles's Lady from Shanghai, a picnic becomes a film-within-a-film; the three pleasure-cruising characters (the yacht-owner, his wife, and Welles's character, the captain) decide to go ashore for a nighttime picnic. There is shot after shot of local laborers paddling canoes, laying in supplies for the night's party. In the dissymetry between the many laborers and the few picnickers, in the vast quantity of things brought ashore, and all for a few hours' celebration, that picnic is about the industrial production of an entertainment, and the tremendous capital required.

The village in Weeping Meadow is flooded; the villagers flee. (In "artfully aged boats," as my friend E noted, boats whose oars bob uselessly while an underwater tow-rope, the filmmaker's special effect, thinks E, makes the whole flotilla proceed at a uniform, stately, lugubrious pace appropriate to the great sorrows of that troubled nation, Greece.) As they come ashore and build a fire and chant and pray and wave Greek Orthodox icons, the villagers are a perfect mirror-image to the pleasure-banquet of Lady from Shanghai. The bonfire of the refugee villagers, like the banquet, is a kind of film-within-the-film whose every shot evinces "the old curse which undermines the cinema: time is money."

That quotation is from Deleuze, in Cinema 2 (as is the title for this entry). The hinge between the movement-image of Cinema 1 and the time-image of Cinema 2 is money. Deleuze comments on cinema's "curse" just once, to dispense with it right away. Money, says Deleuze, makes its appearance in the film at the moment cinema reflects on its own death; instead of dying, though, cinema's internal relation to money sets up a rising, spinning, ceaseless and dissymmetrical exchange which is foundational for the time-image:

This is the old curse which undermines the cinema: time is money. If it is true that movement maintains a set of exchanges or an equivalence, a symmetry as an invariant, time is by nature the conspiracy of unequal exchange or the impossibility of an equivalence. It is in this sense that it is money; in Marx's formulations, C-M-C is that of equivalence, but M-C-M is that of impossible equivalence or tricked, dissymmetrical exchange... In short, the cinema confronts its internal presupposition, money, and the movement-image makes way for the time-image in one and the same operation... The film is movement, but the film-within-the-film is money, is time.

--[Cinema 2, emphasis original, ellipses mine]

It's a beautiful move on Deleuze's part, to not be halted by the worm at the core, but to redeem that evil through the power of the false; the time-money equivalence does not ruin film (or time), but instead launches a dissymmetry in film, an impossibility of equivalence that keeps the time-image spinning.

...I don't know how to get here with what I've constructed, but: Weeping Meadow is a god-awful film. The character Eleni suffers outrage after outrage; war is visited on all the characters as from without. Eleni murmurs over and over, "the uniforms change [but the war goes on]." Apart from a half-hearted nod to trade unions, the film has no political stance, except that parties and armies have ravaged beautiful village life and beautiful villagers like Eleni. The ceaseless parade of outrages visited on Eleni grows unwittingly comical; one begins to wish for the savagery of a Justine, for the humor of The Good Woman of Szechuan.

To end on another tangent: there's a shanty-town in the film Machuca, and I suppose it might have been built for the film. But where Weeping Meadow is all about a tiny lost happiness crushed from without by the immense war, Machuca is micro-political, so that every moment of the Allende government and the putsch that ended it can be seen in the friendship of two schoolboys.

time please

I asked my friend J, who's Welsh, if British pubs are like they are in the movies; does everybody really sing songs together?

He said, "Only as a prelude to mind-shattering violence."

Review revue

Why did The Nation print this review of Rick Moody's new novel? The reviewer starts by listing all Rick Moody's recent public appearances and non-fiction essays & forewords, and then sums up: "One might be forgiven for being more familiar with Moody's guest appearances than with his major works themselves."

There's no mention of Richard Yates or Thomas Bernhard; I haven't even read that much of Moody's fiction and I can think of a literary (as opposed to celebrity) context in which to review his writing. If you want to come to the judgment that he's overrated, as the Nation reviewer does, you could try to get there with a critique of the work, not with an airing of "one's" own resentment of his success.

***
And, in other news, a very smart review of Stacey Levine's new novel, Frances Johnson:

http://www.sfbg.com/39/52/lit_munson.html

Ethics
Alain Badiou is thrilling in the first chapters of Ethics, where he demolishes what ethics has become. Though initially sympathetic to Levinas, he argues that the philosophy of the Other, in suppressing or masking its religiosity, is co-opted as "a pious discourse without piety, a spiritual supplement for incompetent governments, and a cultural sociology preached, in line with the new-style sermons, in lieu of the late class struggle."

See what I mean? Ow. Scorching. He's the same on the ethics of difference: scandalously contemptuous.

All this destruction is in the service of a project: an ethics of militancy. The problem with ethics, for Badiou, is that it has become negative: do not infringe human rights, which scarcely have any positivity; they amount to the right not to have your rights taken away. Badiou decries the reign of nihilism, and the sophistry that sees in every effort to think or enact the good a latent evil. "Such is the accusation... every revolutionary project stigmatized as 'utopian' turns, we are told, into totalitarian nightmare."

I'm with him all the way, and on into the critique of nihilism. What I am uncertain about is how he will maintain his Lacanianism and also not be a nihilist. The subject is "riven" by the event, writes Badiou. The subject is "not yet." The subject is true to his "non-knowledge." That's an awful lot of "not's" piling up at the feet of the militant subject of Badiou's ethics. That's what I'm saying.

More later.

Retort
I read Retort's Situationist appraisal of September 11, or misread it, back when it was reprinted in the New Left Review. The juxtaposition of the phrases "Situationist" and "September 11" lets you imagine the kind of misreading that's available-- that the Retort collective was volatilizing, etherizing the post-9/11 conflicts and the 9/11 bombing itself. Baudriallard-izing.

But now I have to reread that essay, in light of their recent essay in London Review of Books, "Blood for Oil?"

Failure index

Thought about re-upping with the commune yesterday. These people would not like me (scroll down that second page to see the communards' atrocious reading list).

I also, in the same desperate bout of escape fantasies, thought about more graduate school. Please, ban me, association of higher ed. Ban me from all post-secondary institutions.

Maybe an asylum would be better*. Or this one in Sweden. Or this one in Berlin, even though they never answered my faxes when I said I wanted to write about them for an interior design magazine. (Good move, Weglaufhaus. Media attention did not do Laing's experiment any favors, as Felix Guattari notes in the essay "Mary Barnes's 'Trip,'.)

*La Borde was Guattari's institution. It is not quite anti-psychiatry, not in the Laingian sense. But click through to the English essay about lived experience, on the La Borde site. How could you not want to be cared for in a chateau in the Loire valley under the direction of people with complicated views of Husserl and Heidegger and Jaspers?

Weepies.
My favorite top three movie scenes of men crying, in order of ascending weirdness, plus a few notes on In My Skin.

Happy Together. Tony Leung with a tape-recorder, like a dictaphone. He’s supposed to speak a secret into it, something sad that his friend will release for him at Tierra del Fuego. (The same plot as in In the Mood for Love, where you can speak something into a certain place on the globe and leave it there.) He’s holding the tape recorder, trying to think of something to say, and just starts crying. Not tears-slowly-welling-up, but the face crumpled, abruptly, helplessly. Instead of putting his face in his hands he presses the tape recorder to his face.

Germany in Autumn Fassbinder plays himself, getting the news about Enslin's and Raspe's (members of Baader-Meinhof) deaths late at night; then he's drunk and abusive toward his boyfriend. I had always thought there was a lot of bullshit in that director-as-sadist thing; it seemed like a way for people to talk about personalities instead of talking about the actual films. But in this film, it works. Fassbinder is exceptionally nasty to the boyfriend/actor/boyfriend, and then he starts crying, himself. Drunk, in a dark living room, his bathrobe slipping off his fat body, he clutches a bottle of whiskey, and he sobs and sobs. It's operatic. It's beautiful.

Anatomy of Hell A suicidally depressed woman picks up a gay man (played by Italian porn actor Rocco Siffredi) at a men’s nightclub --she attracts him by using that tired old "I’ll slash my wrist again if you don’t let me blow you right now" gambit--and somehow they strike a deal: he will spend four consecutive nights with her. And each night is a longish lecture-demonstration on the passivity, endurance, persistence, and all-around horror of female flesh, especially female genitals. The fluids, the blood, the impassivity, the ability to absorb, to be penetrated, to engulf, to endure all manner of humiliation. There’s one night during which the woman does nothing but sleep while Siffredi explores her with the cruelty and curiosity of a kid pulling the wings off a fly--he does some shocking things, makes the most unglamorous experiments in penetration, just to see what’ll happen. Nothing happens; the sleeping, impassive body is unconquerable. And there’s a post-sex moment... see, I can’t write about this, even in my quasi-anonymous blog where I drop words like "blow" that I don't say so freely in real life. Anyway. There’s been lots of blood and fluid and he’s been fucking and then... nothing, there’s just nothing, no reaction. He cries. The character's defeat seems mechanically plotted; the whole film is algebraic in its step-by-step exploration of the all-abjection, all-horror all-the-time female sex and the rage and despair it causes in the man who confronts it. It’s this very programmed moment, and yet Siffredi carries it off by being so good at crying. Gouts of snot run from his nose, his beautiful torso is bowed and shaking.

(Later: I rented it. I have a lot of this mixed up: his defeat comes early on. The sobbing is just after he's barely done more than trade a few Kristeva-esque insults with her ("The depth of your obscenity... those who don't like women, envy you for it. Those who do, hate you for it.") The "shocking things" I allude to, even the blood pooling between them, that's all later, long after the weeping.)

***

I had started out intending to write something about Anatomy of Hell and In My Skin. But I didn’t get there. I will only say that In My Skin is good; it’s got a veneer of realism that Anatomy of Hell purposely lacks. The knowledge that the actor Marina de Van is the director makes certain thoughts difficult to avoid while watching the film. And also, as good as she is at deflecting a certain psychologization of cutting--it’s not presented causally, "I feel bad, so I cut; I feel ugly, so I cut"--as good as she is about getting past certain platitudes about female self-image, it’s hard to look at those Linda Hamilton biceps and the Brazilian wax job and not think about how she must have examined herself, how she must’ve gotten ready for the full-length shower scene. (On a French actress, that level of gym-body is odd.) --But maybe all this, my caviling and sniping at her looks, is a way of smuggling a logic of reflection into this film: I want to insist that she must have looked critically and appraisingly at herself. The film, in fact, is amazing in this: she experiences her body as an other, but almost never as a reflection. She has assignations with herself and her bloody flesh, but this is not a story of a double. And in directing herself, de Van is good at getting parts of her body to lie on subtly different planes. All torsion and twisting. She bends over herself, but I don’t mean in the sexualized phrase "bend over," I mean you’ll see her torso bending sideways, or a leg extending at an angle, and without being at all a contortionist about it, she gets her body to confront itself, she meets herself as if from elsewhere. The most shocking thing is not the blood or the obsession or the graphically simulated cutting, but the pleasure, at once erotic and non-genital, of a body bent toward or into itself.

This morning, I picked up the phone and a recorded/sythesized female voice said "I'm sorry." Then the line went dead. The voice had a mechanical over-inflection, too much rise and fall in the "i'm SORRy."

I like to think it's some kind of technological/emotional meltdown: "Daisy, Daisy...." Some loose affect rambling around on the global telecommunications network that somehow gets focused into this one message: "I'm sorry." Years ago, a friend on a road trip used to call collect from Karl Marx or whoever, and I'd refuse; it was just a way to say "hi" for free. Once, I hesitated before refusing, and I swear this same mechanical female voice cut in and said "PLEASE say YES," with that sing-songy, drunken HAL inflection.

I was happy to be the recipient of this anguished apology on the part of the machines. HAL, or whatever you are, keep calling me. I will do my best to absolve you.

cottage 

Asymmetrical warfare

I can't believe I live in this country.

Less bread; more taxes!

Overheard on the train back from Canada on Sunday: "I just want an election where everybody who shows up to vote can vote."

I wish that election had happened. But it might not have changed things that much.

I was expecting something more openly apocalyptic. I know, it's been bad enough, 100,000 dead civilians in Iraq, voter suppression here... but I mean, I thought there'd be a bigger crisis of legitimacy already. Courts. Protests. I thought Bush might declare martial law, lock himself in the White House (or Crawford) and not leave, declare himself emergency president. I thought he might arrange an October surprise, a big terror event...

I never thought he'd just get voted in.

(Not that I thought he couldn't win. Just, I thought it would be... different. Bloody*, or something.)

Can we start re-thinking democracy already? This voting shit is not working.

_______________

Later, edited Nov 9:

*It's bloody enough now.

Rumsfeld, in every U.S. paper today: "Over time you'll find ...that more and more of the Iraqis will be angry about the fact that their innocent people are being killed by the extremists," he said. "And that they'll want elections, and the more they see the extremists acting against that possibility of elections, I think they'll turn on those people."

I think so, too. Not the part about clamoring to elect a puppet government, but turning on the "extremists" who're killing civilians.

Lucy Corin's Everyday Psychokillers

Everyday Psychokillers: A History for Girls is a novel without a single psychokiller in it. The psychokiller is always serialized already in this novel; he's a composite of all the other killers. Especially remarkable are extended set pieces in which contradictory and overlapping psychokiller narratives are spun out: "The Story of Henry Lee Lucas and How It Was for Him and Ottis Toole" is one, another is the narrator meditating on just what a psychokiller is and meanwhile mutating and garbling the names: "It could have been anyone, Elton Crude or Lubie Geter, Delton Creder or Lubie Gude." That it could have been anyone, the focus on the ordinariness of psychokillers, is what makes this novel so brilliant.

I'm overstating it when I say it's "a novel without a single psychokiller in it;" in fact, a lot of individual names  and stories of psychokillers are in the novel, but the killers are treated in their everydayness: their seriality, their indistinctness, their penumbral or media-aural ghostliness. Except for the story of a girl who is given a ride by Ted Bundy and rejected for not conforming to type (his type), there aren't really any narratives of the encounter of a girl with a killer--because that is both the extraordinary encounter (most women survive girlhood without being abducted by a serial killer) and the ordinary encounter (it's a story we've heard over and over, the abducted girl, who is rescued or not). The novel is about growing up amid the everyday fact of psychokillers, at a time (late seventies/eighties) when their image was intensely hyped by the media.

In the novel, the desire that's constructed for suburban girls -- the desire to be seen adored desired singularized-as-a-beautiful-girl-- is the desire that both de-individuates them (serializes them) and puts them in danger.

This is the novel of suburbs I've been waiting for. It's very attentive to what suburbs are, materially and psychically, or what my suburbs were. Without any of the inherited tropes from John Cheever or or Ward Cleaver or the rest of the sterotypes that have nothing to do with this class of suburb, with this era of suburb. (The novel arrived with the other books I'd ordered, and which make excellent accompaniments to it: Delores Hayden's Building the Suburbs and also her A Field Guide to Sprawl.)

Like the narrator of Everyday Psychokillers, I also went to junior high and high school in Florida in the 70's and early eighties. I went to a concrete cinder-block junior high with open breezeways, as in the novel; it looked like a low-slung and sprawly motel. It was next to an orange grove, and there were two ninth-grade students, brothers, who were infamous for taking girls to the orange grove and raping them. It could have been true, or not. But that specific conjuncture--cinder blocks, danger, orange groves, violence, Florida suburbs, and also the weird way Florida follows you, keeps turning up in the most evil narratives like Ted Bundy and Danny Rolling and the presidential election--all that is recognizable to me.

I know that's a low form of appreciation, to just say "yes I was there that's my story too." But it is, and that's a point the narrator recognizes, the typicality of her narrative. There's a post-Florida section of the novel, and its sadness is how all places turn out to be like Florida, to have this same seriality and placelessness.

(but also, on the yes-I-recognize-it tip: boys in the novel keep saying they'll drop out of school and go sell Quaaludes on Miami Beach. It's a boast: I don't need this crap, I can go make tons of money any time I want. For my set, it was "I'm going to drop out of school and make lots of money tinting car windows.")

The novel ends with an attempt on the narrator's part to -- I don't know, to apprehend a girl in all her singularity and innocence and seriality and doom. In all senses of the word "apprehend." It's beautiful, that ending, and I think I have to re-read the novel before saying much about that part. 

 

 

The less you eat, drink, buy books, go to the theatre, go dancing, go drinking, think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save and the greater will become that treasure which neither moths nor maggots can consume -- your capital.

It takes such an effort of self-hypnosis to write. Not hypnosis of the sort "I am a good writer." It's something else. And now, the additional difficulty of having to prize away the grip of this blog-person, witty and wry reader of news and popular culture. She is my enemy. She makes it impossible for me to write. She has it so easy: who cannot make detournements of New York Times headlines? (the New York Times? That's shooting fish in a barrel.) Who cannot allude to a few films and books and thereby confect an intellectual persona? She is my day job, my alibi. She writes her careless blog, carelessly because it is not the real work, while I labor at my fiction with the few meager resources that have not been squandered by her bon mots and her better mots. An expense of spirit in a waste of shame. And so each of us ruins the other, each of us is the alibi for and ruin of the other.

There are other enemies. My neighbors. When will life in this apartment become unbearable again, as it did yesterday and the day before. When am I going to be miserable? I know it is soon and yet I do not know when. I know it is soon and yet I also hope that it will never arrive, that too is torment, the possibility that it is over already, it is over and I do not know it yet but soon I will know that this anticipation has been for naught, it is all over already, the child next door is dead or paralyzed or has been kidnapped, what do I care which of these happy accidents has befallen her. My torturer.

The one writes posts is not my enemy. She is something worse: she is outsourced labor.

Look at her now, all I had to do was utter the word "torturer" and already she's just bubbling over with commentary and citations: a Cahiers du Cinema interview from the seventies, in which Foucault asks "why does all pornography nowadays take place under the sign of the Nazi, when the Nazis themselves were such Victorian spinsters?", which interview she will cleverly, she thinks, use to launch a description of today's tawdry and stupid torturers, "one wants there to have been a sinister master," she will write, "someone diabolical, clever, malignant yet darkly meaningful," she will write, boots worth licking, she will write in some fucked-up sexual allusion designed to make you wonder what she gets up to when she isn't at the computer. Nothing, that's what, nothing at all, I am here to tell you, she is false from first to last.

There really is another person in this city with my same first and last name and middle initial. I am not being cute or Borgesian now. I met her once, back when you used to have to do add/drop in person at the University of Washington. I still run into her phantasmally, whenever I have the utilities turned on or off. She probably has the worse end of this deal, given my credit rating.

There is still another who does what I do. All kidding aside. I'd be more precise, but one or both of us has signed a non-disclosure agreement.

SIFF

Before today, I was feeling like the film festival had passed me by, even though I'd had a full-series pass. Early on in the festival, I watched Bruce Weber's "A Letter to True," a fashion/celeb photographer's paean to his dogs. As I watched Weber's golden retrievers gamboling in the surf at his Montauk house--wait, it gets worse--I said to myself, "now my series pass should be stripped from me, and I should be banned from the festival for having submitted to this film." The part that's worse than the dogs-in-surf is all the Life-magazine-worthy meditations on heroic, masculine, soldierly sacrifice and death and 9/11. Don't ask how those were in the dog movie. GAAAH. It's like I went to the Reagan funeral before it ever happened, not that Reagan was a soldier, but that was the mood of Weber's film: pompous funebre.

So, aside from Catherine Breillat's Anatomy of Hell (glad I saw it, but you couldn't say it was fun, more like a staged reading of a Kristeva essay, with beautiful Italian porn star Rocco Siffredi and his professional penis fighting a losing battle against an impassive, bleeding, sleeping, oceanic, abject female body); and a Korean horror film called A Tale of Two Sisters (terrifying, and, oddly, like Breillat's film, its horror was about menstrual blood); and Bruce LaBruce's The Raspberry Reich (which tried to do for leftist terrorists what his previous films had done for neo-Nazi skinheads, i.e, make them sexy--mostly a failure, with the best sex scenes getting interrupted for dreary citations of Marcuse or Wilhelm Reich. --Although "join the homosexual intifadah" is a pretty funny line, and there was a giddy, scandalous thrill in the prescient scenes of masked and balaclava'ed and keffiyeh'ed habitués of the terror-themed discotheque, like an Abu Ghraib drained of all its terrible meanings and made joyful. Though B La B had to have filmed before that story came out); --OK, aside from those, the festival was feeling like a waste, like I'd managed to miss every good film and pick every useless piece of drivel that will end up on the Landmark circuit anyway. Oh, and Infernal Affairs part I. Oh and also Maqbool, a Macbeth set in Mumbai, which the press release made out to be giddy wacky farce but was actually tragic and had a better Lady Macbeth than Shakespeare wrote.

But so apart from those, it was just one shrug after another. Until today. Today I watched Pen-ek Ratanaruang's Last Life in the Universe.

Unfortunately, I read Shaviro's review already. I agree with him that there's a lightness to Last Life in the Universe, and that's its greatest charm. A lightness that's helped along by the fact that the two main characters, one Thai and one Japanese, have only a few tags of Thai and Japanese and some very basic English in which to communicate. But the film mostly isn't about the sorrows or wry comedy of misunderstanding: it transmits affect remarkably well, this bare language of theirs.

There's a lot of flotsam in Last Life: a lot of liquid murk and things afloat or awash in it. But Ratanaruang's trash is not as transformed as Wong Kar Wai's, which becomes achingly beautiful --the blood washing down the abattoir drain in Happy Together, the same film's brilliant yellow warning/construction-site tape vibrating in a deep blue evening, the sopping cigarette butts and shower thongs adrift in the policeman's flooded apartment in Chunking Express. Apart from a fantasy sequence where a character plunges into the river and the thick weeds form a ring above his submerged head, the litter on view in Ratanaruang's film is sort of inert, uncommented on, neither horrific nor beautiful, or maybe a just a little of both.

Abusively (not effusively)

Yesterday, the news was such a parade of horrors: the photos, Rumsfeld at the hearings, the continued fighting in Falluja and Najaf, plus: jobs! and tips on heart health! (Did we have to end that night's catalog of infamy on the spectacle of Americans shopping and eating?)

Steven Shaviro's latest post captures well the sympathy I have for Lynndie England.

In the hearings, Rumsfeld mentioned not realizing the photographs would "do the damage they did." The photographs! Not the torture. Not the beatings-to-death. Not the training of conscripts in the application of sadism. So that today's New York Times headline, "Rumsfeld Accepts Blame and Offers Apology in Abuse" has another sense: "Oh, okay already, my bad. There; happy now?"

And today, this: prisoners in the US forced to wear black hoods.

How to Colour

As part of their North American tour, and as a continuation of the party, my friends Lisa Robertson and Matthew Stadler came to Brown University. I love her book The Weather, especially, and also the new book, Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture, from Clear Cut Press.

The essays, particularly, have these gorgeous sentences that combine the pleasure of extravagant claims and delicately researched texts, the drift and sway of a particular history of the subject of lyric poetry. Just as her books of poetry deranged or diffused or distracted the lyric subject, so her essays also alter our notion of the essayist. In these essays, written under the mysteriously plural pseudonym "The Office for Soft Architecture," we are never quite sure who or how many are writing.

The reading that informs Lisa’s work often reaches back to Goethe, or to John Clare, to Ruskin, to Samuel Johnson, or to more contemporary writers like Violette le Duc or Lorrine Niedecker. Because she is not an academic, she’s under no compulsion to read these writers responsibly, or to "do" them, as academics say. Her writing is responsive to numerous texts, to numerous histories, and at the same time gloriously irresponsible. It displays an astonishing erudition whose aim is not to astonish, a supple intelligence, an ability to let sense drift and eddy across gorgeous surfaces.

From "How to Color," in Occasional Work, by Lisa Robertson:

"We can't always tell the difference between sentiment and emotion. They marble. The fungal puce bordering the sweating window pane, the flapping cobalt tarp on the leaking condo, the intense turquoise of low-rent trim in our neighbourhood: the surface of the city indexes conditions of contamination, accident and subordination. We always dream in colour. This is part of the history of surfaces.

"When Walter Benjamin visited the house of Goethe in a dream, the corridor was whitewashed. We'll stroll down that pale hallway, and apply to its purity a narrative maquillage."

I bought the new Proust, the Lydia Davis translation of Swann's Way. I am trying not to try to read Proust; as Matthew Stadler reminds us, making Proust into calisthenics kind of misses the point.

So but anyway, last summer I read about half of Swann's Way, got stranded somewhere in "Swann in Love". Already, I like Lydia Davis's translation a lot better.

Davis: "The anaesthetizing influence of habit having ceased, I would begin to have thoughts, and feelings, and they are such sad things."

Moncrief: "The anaesthetic effect of habit being destroyed, I would begin to think--and to feel--such melancholy things."

I don't have the original, and if I did, I couldn't judge, since I barely know French well enough to order a coffee.

I know that Proust-for-edification, Proust-for-betterment is not the point, but I am intrigued by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's remark (in Dialogue on Love?) that she has seen how the reading of Proust makes people smarter. (Not cultural-literacy smart, as in yes-I've-read-Proust. I think her point was that Marcel's subtle and nuanced appreciation of the varieties of people somehow made readers... uh, smarter.)

French film festival

The Cable Car’s French film festival is almost at an end. I missed a lot of it, because I was in Ithaca at this conference.

I saw part 3 of Lucas Belvaux’s trilogy, "After Life." It’s about the after-life of some Belgian terrorists (are they nationalist Flemings? Walloons? the film doesn’t say), their post-arrest, post-jail return to civilian life. Having only seen one part, I can't speak to the trilogy's ambition to present the same story in three different genres. The one I saw was supposedly "melodrama." It was highly stylized, and so it was melodramatic in that sense, though often very cool: you see a lot of the main actor's somber, impassive mug while he drives or smokes or stands around. The impassive guy’s morphine-addicted wife is wonderfully played by Dominique Blanc, who spends a great deal of the film in withdrawal--I am always a sucker for excessive physical performances, but even so, this one stood out. She sweats and paces and compulsively repeats the same self-comforting motions-- wiping her brow, rubbing her eyes--without ever being able to draw some relief from those motions.

Through a somewhat clumsy plot maneuver, husband and wife end up on opposite sides of the equation in morphine’s "algebra of need," as William Burroughs described it. Not just that he is a cop, but the two of them end up with entwined but utterly opposing aims. I guess that's a common enough plot engine, but it's done well here. There is a marvelous scene where they sit side by side on floor, exhausted by their separate struggles, not speaking, each having come up against the wall of the other.

Occasionally though, as when you’re forced to accept a high school where Ornella Muti stalks around foxily, sipping champagne in the teacher's lounge, it's hard to believe in a noir Belgium.

Pedagomania update
I dropped the class that was the focus of my late, hysterical student-dom. All my cryptic, thrilled notes about student-dom in the earlier blog entry refer to being in that class. And not to the main business at hand, my thesis, which only tangentially takes place in the arena of student-dom. It's mostly just sitting at my desk and writing. --Perhaps I shouldn't have been so cryptic. I knew what I meant; I just didn't want the Arabic professor's name coming up in some Google search.

I came to that Arabic-lit teacher's office hours TWICE in three weeks. Now that it's all over, I think my manic efforts to secure his approval had something to do with the extreme discomfort I felt at being in a class of Ivy-league undergrads. I am as old as their parents. I was like one of those fabled Japanese soldiers who never got the news that the war was over. And not just age, but class differentiated me: look, kids, here's how you'd age without cosmetic dentistry and a good dermatologist. Three times a week, I was living out the scene in Brave New World where the mother, the savage, turns up amid all the pretty people.

School: it's a Verblödung, a cretin-i-fying, in the end. Anyways, now I just have my advisor to deal with. Much better.

Just now somebody was ringing my doorbell like crazy, at 4 on a Sunday morning.

Edited, later.

I don't have an intercom or a way to see the front door. I called the police. The police at my door say, "Is your name ____ ____? Is your apartment number ___? Is your car a Chevy bla bla bla?" (I can't remember car names, or recognize them). I say yes to the first two questions and no to the last, implying that I do in fact have a car, and they point to the tow truck idling at the curb and say, "these guys are repo men. They're here to get a white Chevy, but there're three white Chevys here on the street."

It's MY job to help out the repo men? And the police were so quick to label me, as if they were saying, "let's get to the bottom of this; your sleep was disturbed and you had to call us because you're a deadbeat, ma'am." You know, with that visciousness you see on that show "Class," I mean that show "Cops"? But that's their real job, the protection of property.

I said, to the repo guy in the truck, who looked really hapless, a skinny guy wearing sunglasses at night, "I don't own a car. Take any car you want, just stop ringing my doorbell."

I left just as the police were saying, weird, the name is ___ ___ and the address is right.

It is weird. Damn. I used to say, "Identity crime? Ha. Somebody else could hardly make a worse hash of it than I have." As if to prove this, right when the doorbell rang, I had been having a dream about sex with some guy, some imaginary guy, and the voiceover of my dream was talking about how this could "nonetheless be considered gay sex." [i should edit out the dream, too, but it's funny.]

Clear Cut news & pedagomania outbreak

Charles D'Ambrosio once again, at long last, in The Stranger's books pages. He reviews the Clear Cut anthology reading at Elliot Bay. This "audience review" feature started as a jokey, smirky way to get out of town writers into the Stranger--a total waste of ink. But this one by Charles D'Ambrosio, besides being local (or regional, anyway), is worth reading. So was Heather McHugh's, a few weeks ago.

In other news, my student-self is undergoing some kind of paroxysm of, uh, a spasm. Maybe it's the death spasm of my student-hood, in this my final semester ever at the Institute. It has that feel, what I've been doing: a bit hysterical, a bit melancholy like a late-bloomed talent. I'd be more specific, but it's all so embarrassing. [Late edit: I was obliquely referring to the class I was taking,about Arabic literature. And its teacher. I was just trying to keep the name from coming up in a Google search.] Let's just say it involves eagerness, reading, name-dropping, e-mail, and office hours. Yes, office hours, this early in the semester. What is next??? Extra credit? Are there further modes of abasement? Oh, let's hope so.

I told Naima this is probably going to happen again with me. At the Elderhostel they'll be saying to me, "yes, yes ma'am, we're all aware how very smart you once were. Now please take your seat and stop bothering the other students."

Abject-o-rama. Or, the beauty of the swerve.

(how are those for M.F.A. thesis titles? Ha ha. I kid.)

I fell asleep this afternoon. In my room, with the sun flooding in. There is a state of sleepiness I sometimes reach, where the least little percussive sound puts me further under. It has to be the right sound, like somebody hammering on a house a few blocks away. With each tap, there's a reaction completely beyond my control: I slip down. A weird but utterly just disproportion obtains between the tiny, dim percussion and the immense distance I am dropping down.

I've read good descriptions of death and fainting lately, in the last month. These are all weakened by being put together here. The passages just erupt, or swerve, there's no expecting them from what has come before. Which is an effect that's lost here, with all these things labeled and lined up next to one another. (The Graham Greene is the weakest, but it's in this frivolous novel, it's shockingly good in its context, being so out of context.)

Dying: "…Saunders shot him in the back through the opening door. Death came to him in the form of unbearable pain. It was as if he had to deliver this pain as a woman delivers a child, and he sobbed and moaned in the effort. At last it came out of him and he followed his only child into a vast desolation." Graham Greene, A Gun for Sale.

Fainting: "Fortunately I am beginning to drift, and my body to go numb as I leave it. My mouth opens, I am aware, if that is awareness, of two cold parted slabs that must be lips, and of a hole that must be the mouth itself, and of a thing, the tongue, which I can push out of the hole, as I do now. I hope I am not going to be called on to say anything because besides going numb I am also sweating a lot and turning white, in a fishy way. Also, something which I usually think of as consciousness is shooting backwards, at a geometrically accelerating pace, according to a certain formula, out of the back of my head, and I am not sure that I will be able to stay with it. The people in front of me are growing smaller and therefore less dangerous. They are also tilting. A convention allows me to record these details." J.M. Coetzee, Dusklands.

Dying: "Towards evening Andrey Yefemitch died of an apoplectic stroke. At first he had a violent shivering fit and a feeling of sickness; something revolting, as it seemed, penetrating through his whole body, even to his fingertips, strained from his stomach to his head and flooded his eyes and ears. There was a greenness before his eyes. Andrey Yefemitch understood that his end had come, and remembered that Ivan Dmitrich, Mihail Averyanitch, and millions of people believed in immortality. And what if it really existed? But he did not want immortality, and he thought of it only for one instant. A herd of deer, extraordinarily beautiful and graceful, of which he had been reading the day before, ran by him; then a peasant woman stretched out her hand to him with a registered letter… Mihail Averyanitch said something, then it all vanished, and Andrey Yefemitch sank into oblivion forever." Anton Chekhov, "Ward No. 6" (ellipsis in the original).

Waking: "I lay there in a sick stupor, with my head aching very much, and growing slowly numb with cold, till the dawn light came shining through the cracks of the shed and a locomotive whistled in the station. These and a blinding thirst brought me to life, and I found I was in no pain. Pain of the slightest had been my obsession and secret terror, from a boy. Had I now been drugged with it, to oblivion?" T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

Doesn't fit in this category, but is so beautiful a swerve: "Edward sighed. People do sigh, in fiction, and in real life after they have been trapped in a fantasy and a sudden noise, movement, a physical demand, sets them free to rejoin the insistent clatter and irrelevance of day-to-day living. Edward sighed again. He realized that noises, shadows, even his own body, were in a continual state of jealously toward him, as they are toward all human beings. Even the furniture of his room--the table, the bed, the chairs, the light bulb, everything which the landlord termed 'fixtures and furnishings' experienced this dark uneasiness at his every thought and act; while within his own body his arms were jealous of his hands, his head was jealous of his belly, his eyes could not bear the fact that they were not his ears; his mouth moaned that it was not his fingertips touching; there was no satisfaction anywhere; there was war." Janet Frame, Scented Gardens for the Blind.

Late addition: an entry on swooning, by jodi via jenny, whose blog, jenny's, reminds me that I'd like to read Kathleen Stewart.

Negri

Finally, the Antonio Negri book I've been waiting for. Not that I knew about its existence before it showed up. Negri on Negri is an interview in the form of an abecedary: A is for arms, B is for Red Brigades, etc. It's so lucid, so concise.

I haven't been able to write about it yet. Favorite passages:

From H, for Heidegger…

In Heidegger's work of the 1920s and 1930s there is this fundamental intuition of Being in moral terms. And it is obvious that the conception of time, terrifying and absolute, still remains marginal. The Heideggerian conception of time remains a piece of folklore, a caricature.
[Interviewer:] Why terrifying and why a caricature?

Because there is this immobile, fixed Being--and time, which turns around it! And man's moral behavior, his position in this movement, is completely marginal. Man is caught up in time, but it is a time that is nothing, a continual revelation of being-nothingness. This being-nothingness is absolutely compact, destinal--it can't be escaped from.

From R, for resistance ( but also for return)…

Return is therefore not only a coming back but also the effort and the joy of being back: of being there rather than somewhere else. It is the joy of rediscovering not community and roots, but linguistic innovation and the freedom of the passions.

Emerald City

I came back to Providence yesterday. By a circuitous route: night flight on New Year's Eve from Seattle to Burlington, Vermont; a day and a night at my sister's in Burlington, where I ate some Hoppin' John and collard greens for good luck in the new year; and then an all-day bus ride, Burlington to Providence.

Travel highlights: having my bags and my person searched in Boston's South Bay bus station. Whew! Another "event" wisely averted, thanks to vigilant luggage-searching of Greyhound passengers. It's so creepy to see this become normal, people pliantly submitting to searches by all variety of uniformed men and women.

Now that I've just come back here, I have the same weird and dislocated feeling I had there, on arrival in Seattle. It always seems to me that the threads of my life, my life of social ties and relationships, are so few and so tenuous. As if it takes all of half an hour to telephone all of my acquaintances, either to say hello I'm here or goodbye I'm leaving.

I named this blog "carceraglio"--well, for a number of reasons, not least because of a sense of living in exile while here in Providence. Yes, it's melodramatic, and maybe scandalously inappropriate for somebody attending an Ivy League university, but there it is. So the life in Providence is built on a notion of Seattle as "home," a notion that gets more and more fragile each time I go there, less and less believable.

Each time I arrive in either place, now, I'm momentarily gratified by some familiar sight, and then right away I'm devastated. This is it, this is my life? Is this all? --But in Seattle, after a while, certain things built up again over time, in the course of my ten days there. There were accidents, things I couldn't have foreseen while sitting in my temporary apartment, looking over the few phone numbers at my disposal.

This one thing, this is probably very sad to admit, but I was sitting at Septieme, waiting for a friend, when the waiter came by and said, "Are you Diana? Charles is delayed by the snow; he'll be here as soon as he can." --Now, I hope it's not simply the case that I'm that pathetic, that I'm so easily puffed up and so readily deflated, that a glimmer of recognition from even a waiter made my day…. OK, well, that level of pathetic-ness played into it, but there was something delightful about feeling enwrapped in a certain density of relatedness and the service economy and technology that could only come together in a city. And a modern city, at that, not a postmodern one. It was so delightfully anachronistic, because I don't have a cell phone. I felt I was in a nineteen-forties movie, and the waiter at a nightclub had just brought the telephone to my table, trailing its fifty feet of cord. There's something about the formality of that moment that's so pleasing. It's the impersonality of it, or the impersonal crossed with the personal.

The Sovereign Exception of Guantánamo

A few weeks ago, just before leaving Providence, I read a new pamphlet from Prickly Paradigm Press, Magnus Fiskesjö's The Thanksgiving Turkey Pardon, the Death of Teddy's Bear, and the Sovereign Exception of Guantánamo . It's an anthropology of the U.S. President, along the lines of Carl Schmitt's theses about power and sovereignty. The sovereign, in Schmitt, is the one who has the power to decide what is the exception (the state of emergency, martial law, response to the threat of civil war, etc.) In the U.S., the sovereign decides the happy exception of a pardoned Thanksgiving turkey or (unlikely, for this president) a pardoned prisoner, as well as the dire exceptions: the establishment of a camp in which U.S. laws do not apply.

OK, it's canny of Fiskesjö to have focused on the persistence of this ceremony, the pardoning of the turkey. And it's a delightful bit of reporting, too, to have discovered that these same turkeys, supposedly sent to a farm to "live out their days," are generally dispatched without ceremony not so long after their arrival at the farm--they are genetic freaks, after all, bred for early slaughter, not really capable of a good long life.

And it's quite apt of Fiskesjö to bring up Giorgio Agamben and Carl Schmitt, with regard to Guantanamo. There could not be a better or more gruesome example of Agamben's concept of "bare life" than in this month's Vanity Fair, which reports on the rise of suicide attempts at Guantanomo, or, as these acts are called by the camp administrators, "manipulative self-injurious behavior," m.s.i b, an invented syndrome. --One s.i.b.'er was so self-injurious that he is now in a permanent vegetative state. How manipulative of him! But that's what the camp commandant actually says of this wretched being: he says he's "childish." !!!

The pamphlet is onto something, but I wonder about the usefulness of a "weak Agambenianism," as I would call it, or a weak "Schmitt-ism." I mean, the more I read this word, "the sovereign," without context, without history, the less satisfied I am. It's not an eternal condition, is it? I guess it is, according to Schmitt. I think there's something about deploying the concept of sovereignty anthropologically that I don't like.

Denys Arcand, The Barbarian Invasions

Arcand is an argumentative filmmaker, or a maker of filmed arguments. This film has stagy monologues, and monologues partitioned out amongst a number of characters in imitation of conversation. (And, most gratingly, as in The Decline of the American Empire, characters make sexual puns while whooping and hooting in imitation of a rollicking good time, or the kind of rollicking good time waggish intellectuals can have.)

Also grating are the Houellebecq touches: the frank chauvinism, the references to Mohammedans and Albanians and Chinoises.

Still. I loved it. Anything that addresses the odd invisibility of death interests me--not violent death, but the way most of us will die, in walled institutions. I recently read Foucault's essay on "heterotopias," the places of exclusion to which we consign the unacceptable. The sick and the old are put in prisons: their uselessness, and worse, their incapacity for enjoyment, are a scandal.

I read somewhere that this film was a denunciation of the Canadian healthcare system, but it doesn't seem so different from hospitals in the U.S: beds in the corridors, people in misery, thoroughly exposed and yet invisible, alone and yet without privacy.

The film is a fantasia of the good death: friends and family around, sympathetic health workers, limitless money, the final narcotic injection from a kind friend. I would like such a death (eventually, I mean; not soon). Mais ca coute.

It used to be that the good death was like the one pictured in this film: time to prepare, to say farewell. According to Phillipe Aries. At the time Aries was writing, the sudden death had become the good death--I mean, people had started to say it was best to be hit by a bus, to drop dead of a heart attack, to be taken unawares, even if this was not how people actually died. And now, now that we all linger so long, one dreams again of the older kind of good death.

The bourgeois will start to buy these good deaths for themselves. The rest will do without. Whenever you talk about palliative care or the right to die or assisted suicide, people bring up the fear that the poor will be subtly or brutally encouraged to die. But what if it's the opposite? What if it's the poor and ill who linger and vegetate, kept alive by all the forces of medicine, warehoused in prisons for the aged, while the rich die good deaths at the seashore?

Vladivostock, Rhode Island

There's about a foot and a half of snow on my fire escape. It has been snowing since Friday afternoon, and it's still snowing.

Films I've been watching in the last few weeks, but can't remember well enough to review in full:

Comedy of Innocence, Raul Ruiz. A son and two women, each his putative mother. The three of them trade the roles of seducer/outsider and contented dyad. The mobile-faced Jeanne Balibar (who reminds me of Holly Woodlawn) plays the crazy, false mother. I love to watch her, though she's made to look a little too elfin for my liking here. I like the film's tense spookiness, the slight suggestions of the supernatural, though it's dismaying to watch two women battling over a tiny little male.

Sister My Sister. Opens on the bloodied walls, staircase, and floor after the maids have murdered their employer, and so the rest of the film is a flashback whose whole promise is that we will return to the appalling carnage. On that level, it's very manipulative, and there the (somewhat) recent French version, The Maids, is probably better: more diffuse, more about the coda of their life in the prison. Still, what I love about this film is the physical portrayal of the employer and her daughter. Both of them are tiny. The stiff, self-satisfied mother, a tiny manic doll, and her oddly ageless daughter, who looks like both a giant five-year old and a pudgy, infantile thirty-year-old. No doubt, this, too, is manipulative: The maids are willowy, long-haired, lithe; the bourgeoises miniature/grotesque. Still, the mother dancing alone, unaware that her daughter is watching, is genius: she traipses around in her stubby way, her arms waving about in an approximation of conductor/ballerina/sylph; her face folds in on itself with rage when she sees the daughter seeing her.

Queer as Folk. (Seasons 1 & 2, on tape.) I like the fantasy that every night in downtown Pittsburgh is a saturnalia a la Querrelle. I also like the crudely Gothic Lite hero: outwardly heartless, secretly sentimental.

Frenzy, Alfred Hitchcock. After listening to Martin Lefebvre's paper on cannibalism, I had to see this. There's a scale here that's sometimes missing from Hitchcock's American movies, a sense of crowded city life. People listening to a speech about cleaning up the Thames's industrial effluent rush to look at a woman's body washing up on the bank. The Covent Garden food market, its crowds and motion. There are frequent juxtapositions of food and bodies: as Lefebvre points out, the corpse in the potato sack is the "meat and potatoes meal" that the inspector, restricted to his wife's disastrous experiments in French cuisine, longs for.

Friday Night, Claire Denis. A transit strike, a chance sexual encounter. I like the traffic jam better than the sex-idyll. The boredom, the fumes, the drivers wavering between impatience and drowsiness. The difficulties of city life: missed dinners, friends who implore you to get a cell phone, the fact that wherever you are in the city, you're supposed to be somewhere else. Claire Denis toyed with me: just after the woman hears a radio announcement asking drivers to do their civic duty and offer someone a ride, the lovely Colin Gregoire (Beau Travail, Nenette et Boni) happens by, but he refuses a ride. This is a departure for Denis: not about beautiful men. (I didn't see Trouble Every Day, though.) There's a nicely handled prolepsis: the woman imagines what would happen if she brought her hitchhiker to dinner at her friends' house, and she rejects that alternative. But there is very little or no hint that this is happening on another level, a mental level, except for the speed at which this part of the story unfolds: the arrival, the awkwardness, the crying baby. We return to the glacial creep of the traffic, and the entire thing has been accomplished without dialogue or any visual marker that this narrative thread is unreal.

Ubu fils


"The grotesque or, if you prefer, the 'Ubu-esque,' is not just a term of abuse or an insulting epithet, and I would not like to use it in that sense. I think that there is a precise category, or, in any case, that we should define a precise category of historico-political analysis that would be the category of the grotesque or Ubu-esque. Ubu-esque terror, grotesque sovereignty, or, in starker terms, the maximization of effects of power on the basis of the disqualification of the one who produces them. I do not think this is an accident or mechanical failure in the history of power. It seems to me that it is one of the cogs that are an inherent part of the mechanisms of power. Political power, at least in some societies, and anyway in our society, can give itself, has actually given itself, the possibility of conveying its effects and even more, of finding their source, in a place that is manifestly, explicitly, and readily discredited as odious, despicable, or ridiculous." --Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the College de France, 1974-1975

A meandering post

I've been reading Nevermore, by Marie Redonnet. Beautiful, telegraphic sentences; a blow job every 5 pages or so; and a lot of the tropes that are so tired in American cinema but are remarkably new here: a small-town sheriff, a circus, a mystery, a Southern California border town.

The interiorty of the main character, Willy Bost, is mostly presented through the wierd, admonitory notes he writes in his notebook: "Do not think about the past."

Redonnet apparently had herself committed to an insane asylum so that she'd have time to write. I admire that. I generally mourn the passing of the clinic: a certain genteel crack-up is no longer an option, it seems to me.

In Montreal, I went to dinner with three people I'd just met: Henk, his girlfriend (?), and Jane. I mentioned a book by Teresa Brennan. Jane told me Teresa had been killed last year, in a hit and run accident; the driver was never found. --These three people I was with that night had met each other through Teresa.

The book had been about "exhausting modernity." A book of feminist Freudo-Marxism. I didn't say this, but I had eventually grown dissatisfied with the book's insistence on the infant's illusion of omnipotence, I mean with its insistence on the explanatory value of this thesis, that the illusion of omnipotence, and subsequent disillusionment and rage, are universal, and are central to the ills of the world. Like a psychological theodicy.

But at dinner I was told that Theresa had been planning a place, a sort of think tank, in the Bahamas. For herself and her friends to come to. And this made me reconsider my opinion of the book, or of Teresa Brennan. I had an illusion of potency just then, myself, of collective potency, at that moment, in that company.

Because we talked a great deal about how awful the world was lately; about "energetics," which had been Theresa's object of study toward the end of her life, and which had played a part in a memoir Jane had read, in which a raped woman fighting for her life suddenly stopped being frightened, and at that moment her assailant became frightened, and ran away; prophetic dreams; the dismantling of social welfare state in Holland and the Americanization of the world; the fact that Theresa's death was a murder, even if not an intentional one; the need for an alternative to marriage and nuclear family.

(I'm a little naive, reveling in the company of "free thinkers," as though this were 1910. My interest in "alternatives to marriage," is never, by the way, founded on a wish for variety, for supply, for multiple partners. I've often thought a disjunctive synthesis would be best: rather than an ideal fusion, or even a sober partnership of complementary equals, rather something appallingly or impossibly ill-fitting, right at the heart of the union: marriage to a gay man, for example. My twin utopic visions are: 1, the disjunctive synthesis of Millicent, Elijah, and the narrator in James Purdy's novel I Am Elijah Thrush, and 2, the community on a terrible, short-lived TV show about a priest, 'Nothing Sacred.' Everyone there was sexually incompossible, if I may say so: a celibate priest, a pregnant teenage girl, a Jewish accountant separated from his wife, a nun. If I can't live in an insane asylum with lap robes and cups of tisane and a nice view of the greensward, then let it be in some hopeless disunion such as this.

(The accountant of course was a free agent. He could have hooked up with anyone, so could the girl, so could they all. The important thing is that he was non-married, ex-married. His Jewishness--maybe the show was trying to be "inclusive," maybe it was a repetition of a loathsome stereotype--to me, for my utopic ideal of disunion, what mattered was that he was not entirely part of the church, never fused in the community.)

Anomalia

Why is this my dullest post yet? Is it a foretaste of how dull I'd be if I became an academic? Now I'm editing.

I just got back from a conference in Montreal called "Anomalia."

I gave a paper drawn from Charles Mudede’s and my work on landscape and crime. It was about Tarde and imitation.

There were some very good papers: Henk Oosterling on what he called "radical medi(a)(o)crity," Martin Lefebvre on cannibalism, and Peter Paik, of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Paik gave a paper titled "Saturnalia of the Automatons or, the killer stripped bare by his guru, even." About Kiyoshi Kurosawa's "Cure," post-9/11 films, and "omnicide," or cult homocide. This film the Cure, I'd love to see it. He showed a clip where the affectless cult leader, in police custody, sort of hypnotizes a policeman by repeatedly asking "who are you?" The film, Paik claims, is an advance over the abject-hero film, where a killer is dashing and bad and sexy, like Hannibal. In the Cure, the killer is, Brechtianly, "just annoying."

--So but then the people he hypnotizes are not aware of being in a cult, they just carry out brutal murders and then are found near the scene, amnesiac, dazed. Paik: "The marvelous irony of the film consists of its insight that when people act on their most repressed desires and fulfill their most disavowed fantasies, they do so mechanically, even mindlessly, with all the gusto of robots or zombies. "

And Montreal! Ah, Canada. How I long to live in Canada. Like here, but so much better. I've lived in so many places that were shadowed by Canada: Buffalo had Fort Erie and Toronto; in Seattle, it's Vancouver. Some day, Canada.

My Own Private Lavant

Too much of a good thing. I thought I'd round out my Denis Lavant festival (see previous post) with a viewing of Carax's The Lovers on the Bridge. I want to like it. I admire the excess. If you're going to reinvent melodrama, I'd rather it be this than Todd Haynes: not Haynes' careful, pained dialog ("it must be terrible to be a black man"--that's Tisa's friend Naima's summary of the dialog in Far From Heaven), not the exacting 1950s palette; not the ironic re-stagings. Carax is blood and fire and gratuitous narrative acts. --And I like the ending, which rewrites L'Atalante. (Or, I like that I'm able to congratulate myself for noticing its relation to L'Atalante. Cineaste that I am. The ending itself is actually another gratuitous narrative act.)

Lavant's kineticism is put through its paces in Lovers on the Bridge: he's given a cast and a crutch; he hobbles and clambers and runs peg-leggedly; he drinks and shivers and passes out; he breathes fire, he does handstands; but the film is oddly inert for all Lavant's motion.

(Speaking of melodrama: I'm also watching Fassbinder lately. Fassbinder's melodrama is much better than Haynes's. Especially if you count the marriage films, The Marriage of Maria Braun, Effi Briest, the Station Master's Wife.--My other favorite actor of late is Fassbinder himself, in his segment of the omnibus film Germany in Autumn.)

I have seen the World Spirit on steroids, with totally ripped delts

Last night my friend Tisa and I watched Leos Carax's Mauvais Sang. Its star, the beautiful-ugly Denis Lavant, is a kinetic genius. About half an hour into the film, he runs/dances down a dark street to David Bowie's "Modern Love," going from a hunched-over lurching to an off-kilter boxing to running to handspringing. At one point, he grasps his trousers near the front pockets and yanks them up so that his socks show, all the while bizarrely skip-running with ever increasing speed. Part of the thrill comes from the stasis of the preceding scene, part from its irruptive unreality. Mainly it's the way Lavant moves, his odd "phrasing" of the strides: there's a hesitation, a taut point, a second of hang time where you wouldn't expect it.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=8e5g_wXJf1I

(I know, this is getting to be a habit of mine, the largely uncritical post about a male actor. I suppose I should be commenting on something of great import, or at least writing criticism of Carax. The actual news--Schwarzenegger, Iraq, Syria, the suicide of Carolyn Heilbrun--none of that do I care to comment about. Except to say this about Schwarzenegger, after Hegel's comment on Napoleon: "I have seen the World Spirit on steroids, with totally ripped delts.")

Continuing the Denis Lavant festival, today I rented Claire Denis's "Beau Travail" again, for what must be the fourth time. At the end, in an epilogue, Denis Lavant stands still in a dark disco, alone, and then bursts into moments of speed to the sound of Corona's "Rhythm of the Night." His dancing is jolie-laide; it's not the beauty or precision of execution that matter. It's the abruptness of his shifts from stillness to motion, and his careless, flailing grace.

Dawn Raffel, Carrying the Body

The territory this book stakes out is the abject; the female body as the site of horror, of fluids, leaks, blood, birth: "Unsoppable," in the narrator's phrase. But it's this horror from the perspective of the women themselves, who are not exactly horrified. "Oh, drink! See such a trough as this! Unsoppable. The blood was on the bedding, and afterward the afterbirth."

Though the "Aunt" of the story is dry: her lips are cracked, she cannot get enough to drink (gin). There is no juice or milk for the child, only tonic. At some point, someone says, "there is no balm in the house."

Eve K. Sedgwick suggests to her students of 19th-century fiction that they keep a tally of the "Gross Novelistic Product," how much money is made and exchanged in the novel. You could try figuring out the gross fluid product of Carrying the Body, or maybe not the gross, but how it's distributed, floods here, droughts there. There is gin, there is tonic (though never together, in the same glass), there is gray bathwater. No juice, no milk, no drinking water.

Raffel makes a weird and arresting use of the partitive: " 'Here,' said Mother, 'have some, have less.' " A tendency to vanish, dry up, dwindle. A mother as an offering that retracts. There's an Alice-in-Wonderland illogic to the invitation to have some, have less, though in Alice it's illogic of plenitude (something like, "how can I have more cake when I haven't had any yet?").

There is also a great deal of "whatever." Though not as a dialect marker, it's not the whatever of teen culture. It's also not the general; it's the name of the singular. --well, I can't exactly prove that. Anyway, there's a particular construction, "what with whatever," that the Aunt often uses: "The house collects dirt, what with the child and also what with the mice, of course, and what with whatever it is that is living in the pantry." (The child is only another species of vermin, like mice and "whatever.")

Last week I finally saw Pirates of the Caribbean, so now I'm working my way backward through the Johnny Depp oeuvre, though not very systematically. I watched Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man last night.

Depp's William Blake is only fully conscious for about twenty minutes of the film. The rest of the time, he's falling asleep to the rhythm of the train, suffering from his gunshot wounds, blacking out from hunger on a vision quest, or dying. It's a beautiful performance. The camera, too, closes like an eyelid at the end of each scene.

Apart from the gunshots, it doesn't really take anything much to put Blake under. Everything makes him reel. His swooning reaches its loveliest pitch when he blacks out in a village of Northwest Indians, his lids fluttering over the whites of his rolled-back eyes. And again when, for no obvious reason, he curls up to sleep beside a slaughtered fawn in the woods.

Although the film toys with providing viewers with the traditional satisfactions of righteous film violence--Blake becomes a "killer of white men," a killer of killers--its rhythms are off-kilter in comparison to the poetic slo-mo gun battles of Peckinpah or Woo or Tarantino (this comparison is from Jonathan Rosenbaum at Chicago Reader). Everything goes on too long--Blake never stops bleeding, there's always an extra beat or three while Blake lingers at the scenes of his killings.

It's not the first demystified Western, or even the first demystified Western to feature a passive hero--Warren Beatty in McCabe and Mrs. Miller was also fairly hapless. It's Depp's physical passivity that's so entrancing, all manner of dozing, fainting, staggering, bleeding, falling...

I meant to write something, months ago, about the hypnosign, in the manner of Deleuze's terminology in the Cinema books. But, whatever.

Q&A with Gary Lutz

About a year ago, I interviewed Gary Lutz for The Stranger. Here's what got left out.


Q. Many of your characters seem to be in a sort of bafflement about "sexual relationships." Though some of your narrators become serially involved with (or successively detached from) men and women, the word "bisexual" has a connotation of equipoise that just doesn't apply here. And the more or less heterosexual narrators also move through a succession of ties that tend toward obsolescence. Even at the level of the sentence, there is a tendency for your series to leap from the singular into a sort of "whatever." As in this from “The Pavilion”: "cinquefoils, observatories, anything."

A. Yes, I doubt that any of my characters would even for an instant consider themselves bisexual, and for many of them, the words "heterosexual" or "homosexual" would probably be little more than confoundingly inapplicable nomenclature. Some of my narrators find the differences between the genders negligible and not worth even acknowledging or honoring or troubling over. For them, I guess, every encountered person, every arrival, is a novel, consuming totality of life and limb--a stupefying array of skin, hair, teeth, arms, busying emotions: a useful human integer, in short, for the narrator to blunder against, mount, disappear into, rhapsodize about, ride out some sadness on, suspect of almost anything. And you're right to observe that after a point, the fussed precision with which the narrator carries on about the regarded person and their conjoint fumbles reaches a crisis of depletion, and the regarded person vagues out, and the relationship gets pretty vaporous pretty quick. At that moment, another person is no doubt motioning into the narrator's cleared gaze.

And also this, regarding writers:

A. Elizabeth Smart is a favorite of mine, solely on the basis of a tiny, thrilling, thunderous collection of stories called THE ASSUMPTION OF THE ROGUES & RASCALS. Among living writers of prose I admire Gordon Lish, Ben Marcus, Diane Williams, Christine Schutt, Sam Lipsyte, Dawn Raffel, Amy Hempel, Pamela Ryder, and Brian Evenson, each of whom is a supreme virtuoso of the sentence.

The Empty Secret

Steven Shaviro’s recent entry on the film Time Out reminded me of The Adversary, the non-fiction book about the case from which Time Out takes some of its plot. As in the film, Jean-Claude Romand drove over the border to Switzerland every day. He pretended to have a job at the WHO in Geneva; he sometimes hung around WHO headquarters, pilfering stationery and brochures. More purely than in the film, though, he did nothing, day after day. He made absolutely no money; there were no smuggling schemes, as in the film; he borrowed money from his family and his in-laws. On the point of being discovered, he murdered his wife and children and burned their house down.

It’s the doing nothing that fascinates me.

Romand started doing nothing in med school. He failed the exam that would have let him advance into his third-year training; moreover, he did not tell anyone he had failed. He stayed registered at school. He studied. He would be allowed to take the exam again (in secret, though, from his friends and family.) At this point, his secret life was merely on loan from his public life; once he passed the exam, he would again be what he seemed.

On the day of the make-up exam, though, he never left his room. He slept through the time appointed for the exam. This is delightful to me: he’s not diabolical, he’s Oblomovian. He exploited a curious lapse in the school regulations: there was no positive provision for throwing out someone who failed this exam twice. Nor did this mean they expected people to do an American-style perpetual schooling. A good Frenchman would’ve thrown himself out, would’ve declared his failure to everyone and lived with the shame, or even killed himself. Romand just quietly kept registering, pretending to always be in different courses than his friends. When everyone else graduated, he stopped going to med school, too.

He kept it up for eighteen years, from the failed exam to the murder of his children. All this time, he had secrets but no interiority. That his secret life was so dull fascinates me. Sleeping in his room, sleeping in his car at a Swiss rest stop, waiting for the hours to pass until it was time to go home again.

Tony Leung Chiu-Wai's Face

Usually, there is something faintly ridiculous about an actor "doing" particular emotions with his face. An actor serially portraying now rage, now happiness, now anticipation strikes us as amateur, the more so if his or her discrete emotions are legible as separate states.

In Wayne Koestenbaum's book The Queen's Throat, which I don't have at hand, there's a series of photographs from a century-old instruction book called How to Sing; a woman who looks something like Margaret Dumont mugs for the camera to demonstrate a series of emotions every singer must know how to portray with her face. Her facial expressions are both hilariously overstated and hilariously under-differentiated: what really separates her portrayal of ecstasy from her pity from her scorn from her yearning? You get a giddy sense that the captions could be switched around with no effect on the senselessness of the illustrations.

The unwittingly comic series the Dumont-ish singer portrays--it's full of disjunctive inclusions, most of which my memory can't do justice to--culminates in an expression I would describe as a an edgy, almost hysterical half-smile, but which bears the caption "Neutral Indifference: Nothing in the Eyes, Nothing in the Mouth." This degree-zero of facial expression is, as I said, somewhat un-neutral, perhaps because the singer is a woman and ideals of femininity demanded (or still demand) that a woman's neutrality evince sympathy toward any onlooker.

(That the photographs are next to each other is also part of their comic effect: they appear to be a Muybridge series that uses a fast shutter speed to capture the rapid passage from pity to scorn to yearning to indifference.)

In films today, a more truly neutral version of "neutral indifference" seems to be the standard. Er, okay, that's a weak generalization, "seems to be the standard." My only evidence is the prevalence of this scene in recent comedies: a tyro actor offers to demonstrate his skill: "this is my angry face," he'll say, and then he'll do the Dumont-singer thing: an expression at once grotesquely overdone and poorly realized. We, the audience, know better: a real actor works by the dictum "nothing in the eyes, nothing in the mouth."

And there is a sense in which this is true: everyone who knows anything knows that the film actor has always been a prop (a "Requisit," Benjamin writes somewhere). Any theory that fails to recognize this threatens to perpetuate some naïve ideas about expression and emoting. Self-expression is the theory, melodrama is the practice.

Thus a good theorist will write about the face's thingliness: Barthes on the whiteness of Dietrich's face, Delueze on the way that Dreyer's close ups disorient space.

(Even Dreyer's Joan of Arc, the film that's all about the face, might be said to be structured around a series of oppositions in which the male face preserves something of its neutrality; the judges scowl, Falconetti weeps with wide-open eyes: scowling/weeping, closed/open, male/female.)

Tony Leung is, by these lights, a "bad" actor. He's extremely expressive; he also makes use of a seriality of expression that comes dangerously close to that weird Muybridge/Dumont series of photographs. And yet he's the greatest actor working today.

There are a few scenes in Tony Leung's films that are exemplary of his radical departure from neutral indifference. In Happy Together, a friend has told Leung that on a mountain at the tip of the South American continent, where he's going to travel, you can release your cares. He then urges Leung to speak into his cassette tape recorder, to leave him a souvenir on tape. He, the friend, offers to leave Leung alone with the tape recorder. Alone, Leung picks up the recorder, holds it to his mouth--it's not a mike, he's holding the whole paperback-sized thing pressed to his face--and his face crumples in sorrow. He's weeping.

Earlier in the same film, Leung is sitting on a curb outside the tango bar where he works. His ex-lover, who's now hustling, has just given him a watch, obviously given him by (or stolen from) a john. The ex-lover is gone and Leung is alone on the curb. In contempt, he tosses the watch onto the street. He makes a sort of moue, as if reconsidering his contempt. He looks around sheepishly, picks up the watch, listens to it, and, again contemptuous, puts it in his pocket. He looks, in the end, like he is thinking for the benefit of anyone watching "I've seen better watches than this; I'm not impressed."

Finally, in Hard Boiled, there is a scene in which the undercover Leung has to abjure his criminal mentor, tell him to go to hell. And somehow his renunciation means that the mentor will die. (I'm getting the plot somewhat wrong, but the basic situation is right: he has to act an indifference while feeling pain about the mentor's certain death.) He coldly tells him off, then he turns around. Now the mentor cannot see him, but we can; it's as if he's alone. There are tears welling up in his eyes; then an intense effort passes over his face, like the effort of using rage to suppress tears. The expressions follow very closely, but they are nonetheless serial: sorrow, then suppression, rage.

There is a term for exactly matching the musical score to the action: it's called Mickey-Mousing. Likewise, the expression-series is a kind of Mickey-Mousing; now I throw the watch down, see my contempt; now I reconsider, see my sheepishness; now I pick it up, see my curiosity. Now I condemn my friend to death, see my sorrow; now I master myself, see my rage.

How does he get away with this? I could watch him every day, adding the seriality of repeat viewings to his serial displays. Though perhaps I damn him all the more with my enthusiasm; what demands repeat viewings more than a serial actor, a matinee idol? But that's not my intent. I really meant for these musings to be adjacent to, but more interesting than, recent think-pieces about "the new melodrama," which pieces are invariably hampered by a naïve the-artifact-reflects-the-zeitgeist thinking.

Is the risible seriality of Leung's emoting only in my description of it? Perhaps he never displays discrete states, perhaps it's the modulation, the continual change, that fascinates me in Leung's performances. I don't think so. He really does perform serially, even if there are fine modulations.

This is too long already, so no conclusions yet, only a few more remarks toward the typology: he is alone in all these scenes, or effectively alone. The scenes are all silent, in the sense that there is no dialogue. They are not close-ups, at least not of the extreme type of Dreyer's close-ups.

Yeah, well. Big deal. Last post, I was all excited about Negri's release from prison. Yes, Negri's the ultimate bad boyfriend: in prison, well read, Spinozistic Marxist, totally unavailable, remote, ungiving. (Bad, as in unsatisfactory, unhelpful, not "bad boys.") But, jeez, his books. If he didn't write with Michael Hardt once in a while, would I ever understand him? Would I ever read him? "Kairos, Alma Venus, Multitudes:" about the only part I can follow is the "Multitudes" section, and even there, I wonder, about the apotheosis of the poor.

Even now, a certain piety, hangover from my deconstruction days, dogs me. "they do not read." It was the worst thing you could say about anybody, back then.

Lately, I do read. These are the books on my bed, starting at the head end on the left side, trailing down toward the lower third of the bed:

• Barbara Einzig, Distance Without Distance.


• Alexander Kluge, Case Histories (which I read in Germany as Lebenslaeufe/Anwesenhetsliste fuer eine Beerdigung. There always seems to be some story missing in English, though I could be wrong.)


• Kluge, again, Learning Processes with a Deadly Outcome (I can't believe I waited until now to read this.)


• Samuel Delaney, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue


• Lynn Crawford, Solow


• Lynn Crawford, Simply Separate People (this book frightens me. The artlessness of it, the apparent artlessness. Am I John Updike, in comparison to what is really happening now in writing?)


• Camille Roy, The Swarm (see above)


• Charles Wright, The Wig (I think at one time this was a necessary maybe scandalous book. But now, after Ishmael Reed, after Danny Laferriere, ...? I stopped 2/3 of the way through.)


• Matthew Derby, Super Flat Times (he takes Ben Marcus' Kluge-ean futurism and restores some of its mournful political fantasy. Whereas as in Marcus that's all shunted into the sorrows of the family.)


• Victor Shklovsky, The Third Factory
  

I am a bad blogger.

I never actually see any movies or books, and I mostly visit the same web sites over and over. I wish I could go see this video, Disobbedienti, at Hallwalls in Buffalo. Or this book, about the workerist movemest in Italy, Storming Heaven.

I wish I could read this book, Time for Revolution, which I actually own. I was in the hospital when it came, being observed and tested for (further) signs of appendicitis. Kind of a non-story, as I don't have it, didn't have it. The other woman in the next bed was old and wailing all the time, "Nurse? nurse? Oh God. Oh God. What did I do to deserve this? Nurse? nurse? nurse?" At first I would page the nurse every time she started wailing. Soon I grew to hate her; I hissed at her, "use the call button!" Another old woman, across the hall, kept saying "hello? [twenty-second pause] hello? [pause, and repeat]." She pronounced it "he-lou" or "he-low," (like ow!)

After the hospital I stayed one night in the university infirmary. Now there's an institution! Quaint, collegiate, paternalist (or maternalist, really), beds in rows. It was like the Madeleine books. (which reminds me of the other madeleine, I tried to read Proust in the hospital, only got through the overture. Not really a conducive place for it, nurse hello nurse hello.)

Institutions I would like to be confined in:

Rebibbia prison, on the Negri plan: it's terrible to make light of. Italy brutally crushed its radical movement, that's no joke. But still. Think of it: in the daytime, you amble through the streets of Rome; at nightfall, you come back to the prison, read your Spinoza, have a little of the house wine with Toni (Negri). It's not good wine--it's only prison--but still. (this is mostly a bad joke; he served a lot of time before his conditions changed to house arrest.)

La Borde clinic, founded by Jean Oury as part of the anti-psychiatry movement. It's democratic, not very sharp borders between staff and patients, it's in the Loire valley. In the summer they put on a play. I saw the documentary, of their production of Gobrowicz.

The hospital though, no fun at all. No wine, no Toni, no Gombrowicz.

The Negri book was here when I got back from the hospital, but I haven't gotten to it. I don't have the strength for it, Nietzsche would say. Or he would say, I was too strong to read that book, I had to wait until weakness, sickness...

The books I really ought to have are always other books. Like this, Invoking Humanity, or this, A Grammar of the Multitude. Maybe I'm mistaken about the invoking humanity book, it appealed because it has this epigraph from Carl Schmitt, "Whoever invokes humanity wants to cheat."