When Tilda Swinton first discovered Virginia Woolf’s ‘Orlando’, she embraced it as a practical guide to living. Fifteen years later she played the gender-hopping hero on screen. Now, as a new edition is published, the actress maps the obsessions behind Woolf’s revolutionary novel
I haven’t seen the film but in the 1960s I hung around Whitman’s bookstore and got to know him; it was there that I met Steve Stollman, Bernard’s brother – that eventually got me a record contract with ESP-Disk. I really liked George; I didn’t know he was still alive, he was old then and seemed always old. I also met Joel Zabor there, now Rafi Zabor; he played drums with me, we played here and there in Paris and Copenhagen; as Rafi Zabor he won the Pen Faulkner award for The Bear Comes Home. After that he pretty much stopped speaking to me! That was a few years ago now. So a lot happened re: George – I also remember listening to Langston Hughes through the bookstore skylight, we were on the roof and I almost fell through and on him. There was a wishing-well in the center of the place. It was amazing.
The basics: James Graham Ballard – ‘Jim’ to his friends, ‘JG’ to the reading public – was born in Shanghai in 1930. When he was 13, he and his parents were interned by the invading Japanese forces, an experience he transformed into literature in his 1984 semi-autobiographical novel Empire Of The Sun (interestingly enough, the ‘Jim’ in the novel is separated from his parents – which the real-life Jim wasn’t – because the author felt that this represented a greater psychological truth). Finally arriving in a strangely alien England in the aftermath of World War II, he studied medicine at Cambridge.
John Berger collaborated with Swiss filmmaker Alain Tanner who made inspiring films in the 70′s – (Tanner’s Messidor was remade as Thelma and Louise in Hollywood).
is among the few existing English-language discussions of the films made by British novelist John Berger and Swiss film director Alain Tanner. It brings to light a political cinema that was unsentimental about the possibilities of revolutionary struggle and unsparing in its critique of the European left, and at the same time optimistic about the ability of radicalism and radical art to transform the world
Happy birthday John Berger!
John Berger reads Palestinian writer Letter from Gaza – Ghassan Panafani
When did Palestine become central to your writing?
I’ve only been actively concerned with Palestine as a writer for about seven years. But the crisis, the injustice, the suffering of the Palestinians, have coexisted alongside my whole life as a writer. The length of this injustice, the lack of recognition of it by the rest of the world, while Israel pursues its own logic, totally regardless of the views of the external world – all this I was not conscious of then, but I am now. I look back on the young man I was in Paris in 1948, with Jewish friends who were thinking of going to Israel. They all wore strident blue shirts, and they gave me one, and I wore it with pride. We had an idea of what a kibbutz was to be – an ideal of a co-operative, with a healthy link to the land, a collectivity, a questioning of individuality, all of which appealed to me.
The book opens with an extended discussion of Diego Velázquez’s painting Las Meninas and its complex arrangement of sightlines, hiddenness, and appearance. Then it develops its central claim: that all periods of history have possessed certain underlying conditions of truth that constituted what was acceptable as, for example, scientific discourse. Foucault argues that these conditions of discourse have changed over time, from one period’s episteme to another. Jean Piaget, in Structuralism,[1] compared Foucault’s episteme to Thomas Kuhn’s notion of a paradigm. Foucault demonstrates the parallelisms in the development of three fields: linguistics, biology, and economics.
These were culled from a variety of French philosopher Michel Foucault’s works – from the early “Madness and Civilization” (1965) through the last two published volumes of “The History of Sexuality” (1985-1986) – and some key essays …
In order:
1. Michel Foucault, cover illustration for Alan Sheridan’s ‘The Will To Truth’;
2. The Ship of Fools (‘Madness and Civilization’)
3. Marquis de Sade, by Man Ray (‘The Order of Things’)
4. ‘Las Meninas’, by Velazquez (‘The Order of Things’)
5. Friedrich Nietzsche, by Munch (‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’)
6. Don Quixote, by Picasso (‘The Order of Things’)
7. Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon (‘Discipline and Punish’)
8. Jeremy Bentham (‘Discipline and Punish’)
9. Philippe Pinel (‘Madness and Civilization’)
10. Friedrich Hoelderlin (‘The Father’s “No” ‘)
11. David Ricardo (‘The Order of Things’)
12. Georges Bataille {‘Preface to Transgression’)
13. Jorge Luis Borges (‘The Order of Things’) (continue below)
(see more from youtube comment)
Michel Foucault sings his philosophy through a surreal collage landscape. The film is from a series of mini-musicals based on the works of the great philosophers.
“One does not meet oneself until one catches the reflection from an eye other than human.”
“If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water.”
“There is no logical reason for the existence of a snowflake any more than there is for evolution. It is an apparition from that mysterious shadow world beyond nature, that final world which contains—if anything contains—the explanation of men and catfish and green leaves.”
Loren Eiseley September 3, 1907
(anthropologist, philosopher, and natural science writer)
The Starfish and the Spider The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations is a 2006 book by Ori Brafman (Is this a good book? )
(Bored surf-board) – Fung Lin Hall)
R.I P Samuel Menashe
“We think not in words but in shadows of words,”
There is never an end to loss, or hope
I give up the ghost for which I grope
Over and over again saying Amen
To all that does or does not happen—
The eternal event is now, not when -
Samuel Menashe
Go Tell It on the Mountain, which Baldwin had worked on for years under various titles, was finally finished during a trip to Switzerland. When New York publisher Alfred Knopf expressed interest in publishing the work, Baldwin returned to America on a ticked bought with a loan from Marlon Brando. His novel was published a year later in 1953 and received rave reviews. (via)
James Baldwin published “A Talk to Teachers” in The Saturday Review of Dec. 21, 1961. The essay was originally delivered as an address in New York City on Oct. 16, 1963, titled “The Negro Child: His Self-Image.”
Love Is Such an Old-Fashioned Word – by Blaire Broussa (Via the Walrus)
“The limits of my language are the limits of my world” — Ludwig Wittgenstein
Read this delightful story here
When Felix Bronislav met Helen Ferapont in 1937, she was already an expert in Panini’s sutras on Sanskrit grammar. She was working on her dissertation under Nikolai Trubetzkoy in Prague, and her Ph.D. thesis was to be a discussion of the deification of speech found in Hindu Scripture. (continue here)
Helen went to revolutionary China to study both Mandarin and the praying-mantis school of Tai-Chi in Shandong province, writing verbose and melancholy letters back to Felix, ending each epistle with luxurious postscripts in a calligraphy that dripped libidinously off the page:
Herman Hesse Statue at Calw
On Monday 2nd July 1877 at 18:30 Hermann Hesse was born in a flat on the second floor of Marktplatz 6, Calw, opposite the town hall, and lived there for the greater part of his youth.
“Gluck” means… luck, fortune, happiness. ‘The very sound of it’, Hesse says, ‘brings forth that feeling of lightness, life and joy.’
To study history means submitting to chaos and nevertheless retaining faith in order and meaning. It is a very serious task, young man, and possibly a tragic one. HERMANN HESSE, The Glass Bead Game
The deity is within you, not in ideas and books. Truth is lived, not taught – HERMANN HESSE, The Glass Bead Game
Ninon Hesse – an art historian who married Hesse and became very important in his life (photos here)
The story goes that Frederico Garcia Lorca (the pilot here) erroneously believed that the film by Dali and Bunuel Un Chien Andalou (an Andalucian Dog) referred to him, coming from Granada, having recently fallen out with his surrealist friends. This to my mind seems doubly pained paranoia if you have seen the film. And who needed Dali as a friend anyway? (Walt Disney actually).
One reader of my blog pointed out to me the word APOCRYPHAL is a perfect anagram of HAPPY LORCA. I took this as a sign that my examination of the apocryphal Lorcas of American poetry and poetics was ultimately a felicitous one.
“I offer myself to be devoured by Spanish peasants,” writes the poet Federico García Lorca in a newly-discovered manuscript of a poem from his portrait of the United States during the Great Depression, Poeta en Nueva York (Poet in New York).
Of the films, du Maurier often complained that the only ones she liked were Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca and Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now. Hitchcock’s treatment of Jamaica Inn involved a complete rewrite of the ending to accommodate the ego of its star, Charles Laughton. Du Maurier also felt that Olivia de Havilland was totally wrong as the (anti-)heroine in My Cousin Rachel.
If Daphne du Maurier had written only Rebecca, she would still be one of the great shapers of popular culture and the modern imagination. Few writers have created more magical and mysterious places than Jamaica Inn and Manderley, buildings invested with a rich character that gives them a memorable life of their own.
Beckett might have sat out World War II in his native Ireland, but as he later quipped in an interview with Israel Shenker, “I preferred France in war to Ireland at peace.” By 1941 he had joined the Resistance in Paris, largely as a response to the arrest of such Jewish literary friends as his old Trinity College classmate Alfred Péron. As a neutral Irishman who spoke fluent French, Beckett was in great demand; he and his companion (later wife) Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil joined Gloria, a reseau de renseignement or information network, whose main—and dangerous—job was to translate documents about Axis troop movements and relay them to Allied headquarters in London.
Waiting for Beckett: A Portrait of Samuel Beckett is a must for anyone interested in his work. It traces Beckett’s early years in Ireland and Paris, before discussing the impact of his novels, plays and late work with the help of friends, scholars and publishers.
What ‘Molloy’ reveals is not simply reality but reality in its pure state: the most meager and inevitable of realities, that fundamental reality continually soliciting us, but from which a certain terror always pulls us back. . . . There is in this reality the essence or residue of being. . .
Via 
15 November 1930
Picasso’s Meninas 
sings his philosophy through a surreal collage landscape. The film is from a series of mini-musicals based on the works of the great philosophers.
(
born on 5 June 1898 
13 May 1907 
