Vitro Nasu

Conversation with Michael Ondaatje ( Coming Through Slaughter 2005 previous post on M.O.)

Ways of Seeing (youtube) 4 programs

Interview may 2011

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).

Revisionsing Europe the films of John Berger and Alain Tanner

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.

Interview Newstatesman.

Across the planet we are living in a prison.” John Berger

Bento’s Sketchbook.

Happy birthday Tilda Swinton! (Her new film.. We Need to Talk about Kevin?)

Vivien Leigh dances Charleston she too was born on Nov 5.
Three birthday celebrations from UK.

Foucault an Introduction – Part 1, Psychiatry, Power, Oppression, Depression, Philosophy

Michel Foucualt

Michel Foucalut was born on 15 October 1926 (Same birthday as Friedrich Nietzsche)

RIchard Hamilton Picasso’s Meninas

Les Mots et Les Choses (The Order of Things)

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.

Click to view Images From The Writings Of Michel Foucault (Youtube)

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.

NOTHING IS FUNDAMENTAL by Victor Bellomo & David Pace (3 min)

Badiou interviews Michel Foucault (1965) 1/3 English Subtitles (youtube)

The Dark Brain of Piranesi (previous post -scroll down to see Michel Foucault and Noam Chomsky debate).

“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)

Immense Journey (a book review)
Starfish Story

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

Part Ii<> <> <> Part III

James Baldwin August 2, 1924

Baldwin and Marlon (Dangerous Minds – civil rights 1963)

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.”

See a photo of James Baldwin with Marlon Brando and Charles Heston (Strange to see Charles Heston there with them).

Two related links:

Hidden in the Open (Flickr: A Photographic Essay of Afro American Male Couples )

James Zwerg’s physical wounds healed after he was attacked by an Alabama mob, but the emotional wounds festered

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)

Blaire Broussa the winner of SLS contest First place

Blaire Broussa’s blog Voice in the Wilderness

Excerpt from Love is such an old fashioned word

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
and the Cat.. another photo from writing & the feline muse.

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)

See his paintings here

Max Von Sydow and the Steppenwolf and Tango Steppenwolf (remixed – Pierre Clementi, Max Von Sydow and Dominque Sanda)

Siddhartha trailer – (cinematography by Sven Nykvist)

Herman Hesse wiki

Sigmund Freud “praised Peter Camenzind as one of his favorite readings.

One more clip..

(via)

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).

Lorca born on 5 June 1898

Jonathan Mayhew Apocryphal Lorca: Translation, Parody, Kitsch

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.

Lorca’s manuscript discovered

“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.

Daphne du Maurier 13 May 1907

Obit

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.

The Doll by D. M.
Lost Daphne du Maurier story discovered

(Saint-Lô )

Vire will wind in other shadows
unborn through the bright ways tremble
and the old mind ghost-forsaken
sink into its havoc.

-Samuel Beckett, “Saint-Lô” (1946)

Where is Saint-Lô?

In Love with Hiding

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.

A Piece of Mononlogue Waiting for Samuel Beckett (all six parts of the documenatry film are linked here)

Looking at the film

Georges Bataille (1951):

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. . .

We’re sad here at the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto to announce the death of poet and novelist Victor Martinez. His bio on the Harper Collins website reads: Victor Martinez was born and raised in Fresno, California, the fourth in a family of twelve children. He attended California State University at Fresno and Stanford University, and has worked as a field laborer, welder, truck driver, firefighter, teacher, and office clerk. His poems, short stories, and essays have appeared in journals and anthologies. Mr. Martinez was awarded the 1996 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature for Parrot in the Oven, his first novel. (Meghan Ward)

<> <>
Victor Martinez 2.21.1954 – 2.18.2011

“It was very important for Victor to be known as an American writer,” said his wife, Tina Alvarez. “He was not writing for any specific group. He was writing for everyone.”
“His poetry was more about life and thoughts. It made you think.”

Read more here

When Martinez died in the early morning of Feb. 18, 2011, in his apartment on Capp Street, a few days before his 57th birthday, that book Parrot in the Oven: Mi Vida, had become part of the canon of books taught to American high school students.

Martinez, who counts among his friends, the Chicana writers Sandra Cisneros (The House on Mango Street, Woman Hollering Creek) and feminist Ana Castillo, makes a sustained effort not to live a publicly writerly lifestyle. “When people ask what I do, I don’t say ‘I’m a writer,’” he says. “I tell them I drive a truck, I wash dishes, so people aren’t suspicious of your motives, or put a spin on their relationship with you. (Kevin Davis – Mission Scribe)

PBS Interview after winning the award
Victor’s wife told him to go with the big publisher so he did.

Victor loved Giacometti wrote Jurgen Trautwein via email.

Victor Martinez was my friend for 20 years, a great inspiration, a true artist and an amazing poet and writer. I will really miss you Victor.

Victor Martinze with Enrique Chagoya, Sal Garcia at the Berkeley Art Museum (photo by jtwine)

Francisco X. Alarcon

It was at Stanford University where Victor Martínez met Tina Alvarez, the love of his life. I told Linda Wilson over the phone, that one morning Tina and Vic called me to come in a hurry to their pad on Capp Street. I ran from my flat on San Jose Avenue, few blocks away, and found out that they had decided to get married that day and they wanted me as a witness. (Via)

Carson and George Davis by Cartier Bresson <><> Carson by Richard Avedon

A biography of a most fascinating author.

Carson McCullers February 19, 1917

“Mrs McCullers and perhaps Mr. Faulkner are the only writers since the death of D. H. Lawrence with an original poetic sensibility. I prefer Mrs McCullers to Mr. Faulkner because she writes more clearly; I prefer her to D. H. Lawrence because she has no message.” – Graham Greene
“Carson’s major theme; the huge importance and nearly insoluble problems of human love.” – Tennessee Williams.

Lunch hosted by Carson

(Lunch with Carson)

Karen Blixen and Marilyn (including the link to the menu)

Carson kissing Marilyn here.

Watch Marlon Brando talking to himself in the mirro.. hilarious
A Reflection in a Golden Eye was directed by John Huston. Carson and Huston remained close friends.

Carson and Reeves

McCullers is reluctant to reveal her feelings or her reasons for returning to marry Reeves a second time in 1945. The inclusion of the war letters between Carson and Reeves – an inclusion that Carson herself dictated in the original manuscript of her autobiography – betrays this reticence, and instead shows a tender, strongly felt bond between the two.

Unfinished autobiography by Carson (Letter: Carson McCullers to Reeve McCullers, late December 1944.)

Simon Callow directed the Ballad of Sad Cafe (Vanessa Redgrave and Keith Carrdine boxing here) <> <> <> The Ballad of Sad Cafe (Sesame Street)

Alan Arkin was nominated for an Oscar – The Heart is Lonley Hunter.

Berhard archive at This Space

Thomas Berhard wiki

False
‘People are always talking about it being their duty to find their way to their fellow men – to their neighbour, as they are forever saying with all the baseness of false sentiment – when in fact it is purely and simply a question of finding their way to themselves.’

from Concrete
Bernhard blog

A Visit

Envelope

About halfway through The Loser, Austrian novelist Thomas Bernhard’s 1983 book about blocked creativity, the narrator drops a bomb on the unsuspecting reader. In a momentary suspension of his virtually unswerving tone of aggressive pessimism and misanthropy, Bernhard inserts a single sentence that smacks awkwardly of humanism. (read more here – Cabinet magazine)

Wittgenstein’s Awkward Nephew by Gabriel Josipovici

Thank goodness for Thomas Bernhard, the most truthful, the funniest and the most musical of writers since Marcel Proust.