Vitro Nasu

About a week ago I saw the film My Name is Sabina Spielrein.

Sabina Spielrein stands out, both for the role she played in the rift between Freud and Carl Jung and because—no mere victim—she became a devoted convert to psychoanalysis’s cause. Drawing upon letters found in a Swiss basement in 1977, Elisabeth Márton’s documentary vividly illuminates a complex woman whose achievements were long relegated to the footnotes of history. -Jung Love: Vivid Doc Untangles an Affair of Hearts and Minds (Villagevoice)

Then I found out that there was an Italian film adaptation of her life which was on (youtube,1 2)

Sabina Spielrein - Russia, 1885-1942 (World Peaple’s Blog)

Jung to Freud, 4 June 1909: ‘Spielrein is the person I wrote you about. … She was, of course, systematically planning my seduction, which I considered inopportune. Now she is seeking revenge.’
(There are several books written about Freud, Jung and Sabina Spielrein, here is an article to get an introduction of Sabina Spielrein life story.)

It is interesting to note Lou Andreas Salome and Sabine Spielrein the two Russian intellectual women who had affairs with famous thinkers both became Freudian psychoanalysts and authors.

Sabina was born two decades later than Lou Andreas Salome, she had to endure the rise of Nazism and she and her family were killed by the Nazis troops.

Lou Andreas Salome and Freud
Lou on the other hand died in the late 30’s, saw the birth of Psychoanalysis and the rise of Nazism but not the Holocaust.
She became first known for her affairs with Nietzsche and Rainer Maria Rilke, and later her work as Freudian analyst came to light with the publication of her correspondence with Freud.

This I did not know.

It was rumored that Ibsen had modeled her famous Hedda Gabler, who desired to live like a man, after her, but Andreas-Salomé expressed particular dislike of the character: “She resembles a ravenous wolf on which a sheep’s skin has been growing for a very long time and who has forfeited its predatory strength only to keep its predatory soul.” (via)

Before meeting the founder of psychoanalysis, Andreas-Salomé had published a study of sexual love, Die Erotik (1911). In 1912 she asked in a letter to Freud his permission to come to Vienna for psychoanalytical training. Andreas-Salomé was still in her fifties, and youthful in appearance and when Freud first encountered her. He warned one of his younger followers that she was “a woman of dangerous intelligence” but that “all the tracks around her go into the Lion’s den but none come out.”

Poet and Muse.(The Nation) (Photos of Andreas Salome and Rilke)

They became lovers and constant companions for the next few years in a typically counter cultural, proto-hippie, turn-of-the-century way, walking barefoot through the woods, eating fruit paps with yogurt, studying religion as an artistic experience and art as a form of religion. Tolstoy, whom they traveled to Russia to meet, was their patron saint.

One amusing episode that I read somewhere long ago was that Tolstoy who was courted by Lou and Rilke, was not too impressed with Rilke, when they went to see Tolstoy, the great thinker and novelist. Tolstoy was more interested in Lou’s husband, an orientalist and a philologist.

The above is a found video experiment inspired by Raymond Queneau.
Raymond Queneau was born on February 21, 1903 in Le Havre.

Although Queneau’s novels give an impression of enormous spontaneity, they were in fact painstakingly conceived in every small detail. He even once remarked that he simply could not leave to hazard the task of determining the number of chapters of a book. Talking about his first novel, Le Chiendent (usually translated as The Bark Tree), he pointed out that it had 91 sections, because 91 was the sum of the first 13 numbers, and also the product of two numbers he was particularly fond of: 7 and 13.

Readng Raymond Queneau by Barbara Wright

Darkly interview on Queneau

Ouilipo <> <> <> Zazie dans le Metro (Directed by Louis Malle)
“Under the Net” Iris Murdoch’s first novel was dedicated to R. Queneau.

Iris Murdoch’s first published novel, Under the Net, presents the picaresque adventures of Jake Donaghue, a feckless failed artist who guides the reader on pub crawls through London’s City district and Paris’s Left Bank while he searches for love and meaning in his life. The novel is dedicated to French novelist Raymond Queneau, and Murdoch has admitted his and Samuel Beckett’s influence in this work: “I was copying them as hard as I could!”

Queneau spent much of his life working for French publisher Gallimard, where he began as a reader in 1938, rose to be general secretary, and eventually became director of l’Encyclopédie de la Pléiade in 1956.

More on Feb 21 birthday writers

Anais Nin was born on the same day, Feb 21, 1903.
Here on youtube you can hear her voice, talking about Miller and Durrell.

Two American writers were born on Feb 21, 1962 Chuck Palahniuk and David Foster Wallace.

Happy Birthday Alan, how many beans will you be eating today?
Today is Setsubun. Previously on this day this blog has celebrated the birthday of Alan Sondheim, Gertrude Stein and Simone Weil. Recently Alan reminded me that February 3 is bean throwing day in Japan. Bean throwing sounded too matter of fact in English compared to the poetic sounding Setsubun. Setsubun was never used for a title or subject of any Ozu film (Ozu was not into exorcism) Ozu had Soshun, Bakushu and Banshun, all of which indicate changes of season.

Oni wa soto, fuku wa uchi (devils out, fortune in)

Japanese Drive Out Devils in Spring Ritual
Setsubun Festival celebrated with a fanfare of bean-throwing exorcisms

Censer and censor Alan’s book review - (bio of Baudelaire the author of Flowers of Evil)

Keith’s book fascinates me, in particular because of the violence it does to the text, or at least what appears to me as a violence, and a ‘tenor’ in the translation that strikes me as Jon Stewart meets Bartok; it’s a kind of breeziness across what appears as the subterranean rootings of melancholy, a bridge across that, which is far too often, for me, the bridge of the fast read, which this translation is not. So a contradiction at the beginning. This is founded, for me, on the belief, that the unconscious plays an enormous role in FoE and that the unconscious is, in fact, not breezy, but on the order of the Kristevan chora – inchoate, dark, abject – the murmurings, not the signposts, of language.

Devils are out in the Arizona desert, fortune in and out - (the world needs plenty of luck these days).
Oni wa soto

Happy Birthday

David Markson is 80 years old today.

David markson on drinking with malcolm lowry & dylan thomas He looked great here on youtube.

They all seem like they shouldn’t have driver’s licenses, even. You do become aware of the names, of course. Who are they, Lethem, Foer, Eggers? Are they mostly named Jonathan?
An Interview with David Markson from Bookslut.

I fear I already posted something with this title. But whoa, David Markson’s The Last Novel totally makes me feel *GREAT*
Cash bag writers -from Venom Glitterati.
(Venom G is linked at my blogroll)

From an Essay by H.R. Two Masters: Variation on Markson
It is said that in the street markets of Florence Leonardo da Vinci would buy the various small birds that were for sale—the ones caged at the food stands, the ones for purchase by those with a palate for small roasted finches and warblers—and then he would go somewhere and set them free.
I presume the birds were in cages. Though I do not know. Surely bird cages are an ancient art. You see, Leonardo was a vegetarian. If he saw other animals under the same market duress I suppose he might have let those go as well. After buying them. Monkeys and dogs and such. This would only make sense. He would want to spare all the innocents from the dastardly meat eaters. Though doubtless there were some animals which were not for sale as food. Decisions would have to be made. Was he only going to buy the birds and animals that were in the most immediate danger? Were there labels to help with momentous decisions such as this?
Food monkey. Companion monkey. Edible parrot. This dog is for eating, this one is not. Please do not eat these birds. One does not want to think of the trial and error involved in birdeaters knowing which were the tastiest of birds. Let us say nothing of the dog testers.

(This essay was begun after several images stuck in my head from David Markson’s stunning book Wittgenstein’s Mistress. Mister Markson’s book is one of the most beautiful books in my small opinion, in my fevered reading life. I have read the book at least once each year since its appearance in 1988. It was purchased in a small book shop in Little Rock.)

More links here (with the same photo of David Markson)
Vanishing Point (a clumsy hommage to David Markson by this blogger)

Roberto Bolaño

Álvaro Rousselot’s Journey (New Yorker Fiction Nov 26, 2007 - my introduction to his work and I intend to read more.)

Vagabonds:Roberto Bolaño and his fractured masterpiece by Daniel Zalewski from the New Yorker.

Bolaño began submitting short stories to state-sponsored contests around Spain; when a story won prize money, he would retitle it and submit it to another competition, which it would also win. (Similar mischief is detailed in his darkly witty story “Sensini.”) When he was thirty-eight, Bolaño learned that his liver was severely compromised, and he began writing with unrelenting concentration; starting in 1996, he published one or more books a year.

Obit from Guardian Chilean creator of ‘infrarealism’

Another one

Bolaño wasn’t shy about revealing that he lived a hard life in his wanderings. His nutrition, dental care, and smoking habit were bad enough that he lost nearly all his teeth on the way, and he joked he left them scattered throughout Latin America the same way Hansel and Gretel left a trail of bread crumbs in the forest.

Pagina Official (Multimedia page in Spanish)

Comparison to Borges from here.

Another Borges and Bolano

Bolano on youtube (Spanish only)
This Spanish page has great Photos

Self Portrait at Twenty Years

I set off, I took up the march and never knew
where it might take me. I went full of fear,
my stomach dropped, my head was buzzing:
I think it was the icy wind of the dead.
I don’t know. I set off, I thought it was a shame
to leave so soon, but at the same time
I heard that mysterious and convincing call.
You either listen or you don’t, and I listened
and almost burst out crying: a terrible sound,
born on the air and in the sea.
A sword and shield. And then,
despite the fear, I set off, I put my cheek
against death’s cheek.
And it was impossible to close my eyes and miss seeing
that strange spectacle, slow and strange,
though fixed in such a swift reality:
thousands of guys like me, baby-faced
or bearded, but Latin American, all of us,
brushing cheeks with death.

—Roberto Bolaño
(translated from the Spanish by Laura Healy)

If Fred McDarrah was the eyes for the Voice, Norman Mailer would have been the eyebrow and the brain for the Voice. Norman Mailer who co-founded the Village Voice passed away following the death of the Voice Photographer Fred McDarrah.

Obit by David Wiegand (SF Gate), Obit by Louis Menand of the Newyorker. BBC here, Villagevoice here.

Mailer as Houdini
Norman Mailer, who mythified Gilmore in his best-selling book The Executioner’s Song, plays the escapologist Harry Houdini. (Mathew B. plays Gary Gilmore in his Cremaster 2.)

Mathew Barney spoke of Mailer, Gary Gilmore and Houdini.

Well, I think what Norman Mailer’s book The Executioner’s Song does so elegantly is it describes the psychological state that landscape creates.

I think he has (qualities) not so different from this idea of Houdini having himself chained and locked and blindfolded and thrown in a box and this is the procedure to make a light, creative gesture. There’s a brutality in there that appeals to me in the same way. There’s a brutality and a physicality… that combination of accuracy and speed and violence. (Read more here)

Mailer on reincarnation

You believe in reincarnation. So what are you coming back as?
Well, I’m waiting, right? I’m in the waiting room. And finally my name is called. I go in and there’s a monitoring angel who says, Mr Mailer, we’re very glad to meet you. The good news is you’ve been passed for reincarnation. I say, Oh thank you, I really didn’t want to go into eternal peace. And the monitoring angel says, Well, between us, it isn’t really necessarily eternal peace. It can be a little hectic. Let me see, before I look and see what we’ve got you down for, we always ask people, What would you like to be in your next life? And I say, Well, I think I’d like to be a black athlete. I don’t care where you put me, I’ll take my chances, but yes, that’s what I want to be, a black athlete.
And the monitoring angel says, Listen, Mailer, we’re so oversubscribed in that department. Everybody wants to be a black athlete in their next life. Let me see what we’ve got you booked for. So he opens the big book, looks, and says, Well, we’ve got you down for a cockroach. But here’s the good news: you’ll be the fastest cockroach on the block. (From here)

My country is my spiritual wife and I lost respect for her. (Mailer on Youtube with French subtitle)

Mailer and his perfectionism - the sound of punching himself to eternity. Tough Guys - Nostalgia

Cinematic Life of Norman Mailer (Harvard Films Archive)

Mr. Tendentious and his enemies.

The last word was reserved for Andy Warhol: ‘I always thought Norman kept a low profile, that’s what I liked about him. (via greencinedaily also from Norman Mailer writes his own Obituary)

Mailer was an Aquarius dog - Brash Rescuer DOB:January 31, 1923

Happy Birthday Doris and congratulations for your Nobel win.

Doris Lessing and Iris Murdoch are my kind of authors. I read quite a bit of Sontag, Duras, Nathalie Sarraute, Simone de Beauvoir. I don’t actually love Sontag or Beauvoir the way I love Iris or Doris. (Compared to Iris and Doris, Susan and Simone were competitive and vain prima donnas.)
Iris is deep and strange and Doris is fearless, independent, grounded, self-aware, and refreshingly anti-bullshit. They both flirted with communism when they were young. Iris was barred from visiting the USA but Doris was granted permission.
I went to her lecture at Berkeley about twenty two years ago, the hall was packed with smart women and a few angry feminists. Doris can scold feminists fascists. Often labeled as “radical feminist”, Doris has been highly critical of feminism in general, chiding them for attacking men needlessly. She felt many of them lack self-criticism.

There are many feminists who work in the media, and they think that feminism is very important. It is in their own lives, but mostly feminism has had an impact among privileged women in the advanced Western countries. For the most part, it hasn’t begun to touch the lives of poor and working women in the Third World, and that distresses me.

Doris still does her own grocery shopping. The world saw the Nobel prize winner ambushed by the media and a large artichoke (see youtube) her diabetic son was carrying danced around her.
( If Doris is a vegetable she would most likely be an artichoke. Peeling away the layers of leaves to get to the core of the heart.)

She was once asked to become a dame of the British empire, but was reported to have said to have turned it down because it was “a bit pantomimey“. Did she really say that? “Yes, I did,” she says, rocking back on a sofa so low we are almost squatting on the floor. “Well, first of all there is no British empire, no one seems to notice this. Then they said would I like to be a companion. A companion to whom or of what? Honestly.”

Born in Persia, raised in Rhodesia, Doris Lessing is self-taught. She worked as a nursemaid and literature saved her from becoming another one like the murderous Papin sisters. She became a communist because communists were the only people who read back in her days in Africa. Her falling out with communism is well documented in her autobiographical novel “The Golden Notebook”.

Joyful blessings from her colleagues, here are some.

Her fellow laureate JM Coetzee has called her “one of the great visionary novelists of our time”

“She’s an intrepid soul” - Margaret Atwood

“She is one of the very few novelists who has refused to believe that the world is too complicated to understand,” Margaret Drabble has said.

Soon after the news of prize award spread around the world. The best, she says with unconcealed glee, was a call from her hero Gabriel Garcia Marquez. (From “I have an impressive list” Guardian.)

Lessing’s scary genius lies in her ability to bring her readers face-to-face with an unadorned reflection of some of our more depressing, but all too human, features. At the same time, her realism has always coexisted with a tendency toward mysticism. (Salon)

Doris Lessing as Jane Somers (Something Doris could not help it, playing pranks at the expense of the publishing industry.)

“Looks to me like the Fifth Child made it to the White House…” a comment from here.

Doris says, Sufism is something you experience on your own. It’s the same for Buddhism. You can’t read a book and receive enlightenment. (John Raskin interviews Lessing at the Progressive)

LESSING: “Think about that: If there was no World War I, there would be no Russian revolution, no Hitler, no Mussolini, no Holocaust.”

Let us celebrate September 11 birthday boys - D. H. Lawrence, Arvo Part and Adorno.

Helen Mirren plays Frieda Lawrence

Paasion and Heartbeat (previous post on Lawrence includes a photo of Frieda and Lorenzo and the list of adaptation of his novels to cinema.)

Arvo Pärt: Silouans Song / Vienna Philharmonic Women

Touch, Sunday and Solitude with Japanese subtitles on youtube.
Arvo Pärt : 24 Preludes for a Fugue (2, 3, 4 of 29)
(documentary film (2005) films by Dorian Supin about Arvo Pärt to be released on DVD. )

Arvo Pärt : 24 Preludes for a Fugue (5, 6, 7 of 29)

Tabla Rasa-Miguel Robles/Arvo Part (Dance on Youtube)

Solo dance Spiegel im Spiegel

The Jargon of Authenticity

In his book “The Jargon of Authenticity,” Theodor Adorno discusses what he considers to be a major fallacy with all of society: the way we talk. It is his opinion and observance that we speak in such a way as to bring others down while at the same time raising ourselves up. “The jargon — objectively speaking, a system — uses disorganization as its principle of organization, the breakdown of language into words in themselves.” The jargon is a tool used by society in order to distinguish the few from the many, to distinguish “my” class from “your” class.

Adorno

Minima Moralia

I would like to draw attention to this great collection of reflections on a damaged life, wherein Adorno writes like a tragic poet, occasionally far away from the hassles of Marxism and Commodity Fetishism. Dedicated to his friend Max Horkheimer, the book begins with an epigram, life does not live. The book is in three parts with small chapters, the first of which is called For Marcel Proust. The book was written in America, when Adorno was in exile, when he became known as Teddy. The book has numerous anecdotes, parables and aphorisms and mostly reflections on exile, on damaged lives.

Adorno’s Minima Moralia is a favorite of this poet -12 or 20 questions: with Joshua Marie Wilkinson

Photograph by Raw Hage (Via)

Rawi Hage was born in Beirut and lived through nine years of the Lebanese civil war. He immigrated to Canada in 1992. He is a writer, visual artist, and curator. His writing has appeared in Fuse Magazine, Mizna, Jouvert, The Toronto Review and many others, and his visual art has been shown in galleries and museums around the world.

Rawi Hage talks about his novel here, part of Giller Prize Short list videos.
De Niro’s Game or Beirut in Long Sentences

De Niro’s Game refers to the Russian roulette scenes from the movie Deer Hunter staring Robert De Niro. After the movie, Russian roulette became a popular game among young boys in Beirut with ready access to guns. (Read more here)

Hage wants Ken Loach to direct his film.

Ahmed

My name is Ahmad. I arrived from Egypt on a rainy day. Only the clouds and noises of the waiting taxis met me at the airport. (Read his short story here)

Makioka Sisters

Edward G. Seidensticker, the renowned translator of Japanese literature , including Tales of Genji, Snow Country, Makioka Sisters and many more, has passed away on Sunday.

Donald Richie, who called “The Tale of Genji” Seidensticker’s best work, said the translation owes its beauty to Seidensticker’s phenomenal command of English.

Seidensticker’s experiences in Japan span over fifty years. He was a newly graduated English major from the University of Colorado at Boulder when World War II broke out. In June 1942, the Navy Japanese Language School moved to Boulder. Seidensticker enrolled immediately, graduating fourteen months later with a burgeoning command of Japanese that - unbeknownst to him - would become the basis of his academic career as a translator of Japanese literature, including Tanizaki, Kawabata, Mishima, Kafu and the arduous “The Tale of Genji.” (via)

Seidensticker’s translation of Kawabata Yasunari’s haunting novel of wasted love has been described as managing to capture the true voice of the author in the novel which was sighted as “outstanding” when Kawabata won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Related link
Previous post on Snow Country and Kawabata Yasunari

Here is a photo of Sidensticker receiving Honorary degree from the University of Hawaii.

The Seven Samurai is a film in complete command of its medium yet naive enough to deal simply and directly with first things. Specifically it deals with the birth of the state, and it does so with Shakespearean clarity and comprehensiveness. In fact, what The Seven Samurai offers is no less than the Kurosawan theory of the origin of the state. Excerpt from The Diary of a Bad Year by J M Coetzee.

Toshiro Mifune (top) Hollywood remake with Yul Brynner.

A new book by J M Coetzee The Diary of a Bad Year will be published in Janaury 2008.

Stepping Stones a review of Hugo Claus Poems by Coetzee

In one of Hugo Claus’s later poems, a celebrated poet agrees to be interviewed by a younger man, also a poet. A few drinks soon unleash the malice and envy that lie behind the visit. Just between the two of us, asks the younger man, why do you keep the modern world at arm’s length? Why do you pay so much attention to the dead masters? And why are you so obsessed with technique? Don’t be offended, but sometimes I find you much too hermetic. And your rhyme patterns: they are so obvious, so childish. What is your philosophy, your basic idea, in a nutshell? The older man’s mind roams back to his childhood, to the dead masters Byron, Ezra Pound, Stevie Smith. “Stepping stones,” he says.

“Pardon?” says the puzzled interviewer.

“Stepping stones for the poem to tread on.” He leads the young man to the door, helps him on with his coat. From the doorstep he points up at the moon. Uncomprehending, the young man stares at the pointing finger.

Raymond Radiguet who was born 104 years ago on June 18, influenced both Jean Cocteau and Yukio Mishima.

As Rimbaud had done years before, Raymond Radiguet made his breakthrough as a writer in his adolescence. Radiguet wrote the book before he was nineteen and by twenty he was dead.

Mishima was attracted to the novels and the personality of Raymond Radiguet. Mishima was facinated with youth, and especialy with youthful death. (Donald Keene - Five Modern Japanese Novelits)
Mishima wrote a short novel called The Death of Radiguet”.

Drawing by Pablo Picasso (enlarge) and painting by Modgiliani (enlarge).

Max Jacob introduced Radiguet to Jean Cocteau.

Do not accuse fate. Do not speak of injustice. He belonged to the solemn race of men whose lives unfold too quickly to their close. (Jean Cocteau, more here)

He was hard and of a brutal force, alternately passionate and indifferent, as Cocteau said, it needed “a diamond to scratch his heart.” (via)

A drawing by Jean Cocteau

Smoking a cigarette “At the Age of Fifteen”, another drawing by Jean Cocteau from Flickr.

Homophobic Hemingway accused Radiguet of using sexuality to advance his career. (Wiki)

In 1918 he met the 15-year-old poet Raymond Radiguet. The two collaborated extensively, socialized, and undertook many journeys and vacations together. Cocteau also got the youth exempted from military service. In admiration of Radiguet’s great literary talent, Cocteau promoted his friend’s works in his artistic circle and also arranged for the publication by Grasset of Le Diable au corps (a largely autobiographical story of an adulterous relationship between a married woman and a younger man), exerting his influence to garner the “Nouveau Monde” literary prize for the novel.

Gérard Philipe and Micheline Presle in an adaptation of Radiguet’s novel, Devil in the flesh. (1947)

(France was slowly overcoming a murderous war, its veterans were revered, the adultry of a soldier’s wife was intolerable. via.)

The novel is described as,

an extraordinary mixture of perception and brutality, tenderness and heartlessness. (via)

I have never been a dreamer. What appears dream to others more credulous than I seems to me to be as real as cheese to a cat – in spite of the glass that covers it. Yet the glass does exist.
When the glass breaks, the cat takes advantage, even if it is his master who breaks it and cuts his hand in the process.
– The Devil in the Flesh

His second and last novel Count D’Orgel, reviewed by Waggish.