Vitro NasuIconoclastic Incubator
|
(Dudley Moore, Alan Bennett, Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller: The Cast of “Beyond the Fringe)
BBC obit
Jonathan Miller, director and humorist, dies at 85
Jonathan Miller and The Kinds of Genius
(Jonathan Miller directs Mikado)
(Philip Seymour Hoffman with German cast)
A Most Wanted Man – Peter Bradshaw
Philip Seymour Hoffman’s superb swansong
(Photo of John Le Carre by Lord Snowdon)
John Le Carre on Philip Seymour Hoffman
John Le Carre explains the novel – A Most Wanted Man
(Willem Dafoe played the banker)
Notes on mourning. By Roland Barthes
September 6, 2010
Roland Barthes – A Cruel Country – The New Yorker
What I hide by my language, my body utters (See a Necktie Skirt)
Jacques Derrida paid ironic homage to Barthes’ “The Death of the Author” in his essay “The Deaths of Roland Barthes”
(Roland Barthes and Julia Kristeva in China, 1974)
Iconographie (more photos)
Neil Young in the desert, photo by Dennis Hopper
Happy birthday Neil Young!
<> <> <> 
Derrida and Harold Bloom
Question-one-should-never-ask-about-work-art – Stanley Fish
Harold Bloom on the Band –
(Harold Bloom thought Levon Helm was the heart and soul of the Band)
On Iris Murdoch
In his edited volume on Iris Murdoch, Harold Bloom wrote that no contemporary British novelist could rival her skill. The Good Apprentice and Bruno’s Dream were both included in Bloom’s Western Canon, and he also admired The Black Prince and The Word Child.
In his New York Times review of The Good Apprentice, Bloom wrote that “Of all her talents, the gift of plotting is the most formidable, including a near-Shakespearean faculty for intricate double plots.” He describes her as “a religious fabulist, of an original and unorthodox sort” who “thinks for herself theologically as well as philosophically,” starting out as an existentialist before turning to a kind of post-Christian Platonism.(via)
Walter Benjamin, Iris and Derrida (previous post)
(Peter Handke google image gallery)
A Troubling Choice, Authors criticise Peter Handke
Handke collaborated with director Wim Wenders on a film version of The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty, wrote the script for Wenders’ The Wrong Move, and co-wrote the screenplay for Wenders’ Wings of Desire and The Beautiful Days of Aranjuez. He has also directed films, including from his own novels, The Left-Handed Woman and The Absence. (wiki)
Repost from my previous post on Peter Falk below
Peter Falk is counterweight to Peter Handke?
Wenders had admired Peter Falk in Cassavetes’ films in the 1970’s, and it was probably from Cassavetes that he obtained Falk’s telephone number. He phoned one evening, introduced himself, told a little about the film and explained that he needed a former angel, to which Peter Falk replied after a pause: “How did you know?” When Falk asked whether a script could be sent, Wenders said that he had nothing at all in writing about this ex-angel, not even a single page. If anything, that apparently made the part even more interesting to Falk, who answered: “Ah, I’ve worked like that before with Cassavetes, and honestly I prefer working without a script.”
Falk arrived in Berlin one Friday in November and he and Wenders spent the weekend together, developing the role on the basis of taped improvisations. All of Falk’s scenes were shot the following week, and Falk returned to Los Angeles.
Peter Falk-les ailes du désir (Wings of Desire)
\
Via
Toni Morrison, Seminal Author Who Stirringly Chronicled the Black American Experience, Dies at 88
“Toni Morrison Will Always Be with Us”: Angela Davis, Nikki Giovanni & Sonia Sanchez Pay Tribute
Paris Review (Remembering Toni Morrison)
Toni Morrison 
Nelson with Simone de Beauvoir –Paris with Sartre, Chicago with Nelson Algren
Chicago Man 
Nelson Algren
(click to see large)
J. Edgar Hoover sought to destroy Nelson Algren’s career — and was largely successful.
Into this maelstrom comes the first three-pound excavation of Algren, Colin Asher’s Never a Lovely So Real: The Life and Work of Nelson Algren, which Norton is bringing out, with some fanfare, in April. Besides being larger in size and scope than any previous biography of this last celebrant of what once was called Proletarian Literature, Asher’s book is devotional and beautifully written, seven years in the making, its sentences capturing the very same mix of lyricism and street, hard truths and sentimentality that made Algren himself so special. It delves into Algren’s lifelong struggle to stay true to his credo, his soulful cry that the purpose of any writer is to stand up to power, to take the judge down from the bench, to give voice to the voiceless. And it delivers a wrenching portrait of a man who struggled to maintain his sanity and his spirit in a society that was well prepared to see its writers give up or sell out, but struggled to comprehend writers who persevered and paid the price as Algren did.
See thetrailer here on youtube
Studs Terkel salutes a seriously funny man
(Visit youtube on Terkel and Nelson Algren)
Japanese Literature Scholar, Translater Donald Keene died at 96.
Akutagawa Hiroshi, Mishima and Donald Keene
Mishima (his final performance)
His autobiography is an excellent read.. what an amazing life.
Keene Observation 
(On his 84th birthday)
Interesting review of his book by Colin Marshall.. Donald Keene on Familiar Terms.
Portrait of Francine Du Plessix Gray by Balthus and Man Ray.
(Francine with her parents) became a cover photo of her book “Them”.
Francine Du Plessix Gray passed away
Francine du Plessix Gray (1933–2019)
Francine du Plessix Gray, the French-American reporter, critic, novelist, and feminist known for her elegance and unsparingness in chronicling issues of the self and beyond, died in Manhattan on Sunday from complications of congestive heart failure. She was eighty-eight years old.
Gray’s upbringing was defined by both entitlement and loss. Born to a French father and a Russian mother in Warsaw’s French embassy in 1933, Gray emigrated from France to New York with her mother, Tatiana Yakovleva, after her father’s plane was shot down by fascists near Gibraltar in 1940. In New York, Yakovleva—once a muse for the Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky—married socialite and future Condé Nast director Alexander Liberman and eventually became a prolific milliner for Saks Fifth Avenue. Gray recounted her complex childhood and family life in 2006’s Them: A Memoir of Parents, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Paris Review – Francine and sorrel soup.
Gore Vidal on “At Home With The Marquis de Sade – (A Life) by Francine Du Plessix Gray
“It was brilliant idea of Francine du Plessix Gray to re-create not so much the “Monster” who was to become, somber fate, an adjective but the actual man who spent so much of his time in prisons… thanks not only to his sexual capers but, also, to a real-life monster, his mother-in-law, who would have walked off with Les Liaisons Dangereuses had the author dared cast her.
“This is an elegant, enlightend Enlightenment study of a powerful sexual imagination trapped in the mere human body, not to mention the Bastille from which it would take a revolution to free him—and us, his unborn readers.”
Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop – Tragic Muses
Elizabeth Bishop
February 8, 1911 – October 6, 1979
Biography 0f Bishop 2017 (Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast
by Megan Marshall)
One Art – see her painting + many great links (previous post)
Reaching for the Moon – Brazilian film on Elizabeth Bishop (trailer)
How Philosopher Paul Virilio (1932–2018) Spoke to an Age of Acceleration and Total War
Claude Parent and Paul Virilio
Paul Virilio (wiki) (French: [viʁiljo]; 4 January 1932 – 10 September 2018)[3] was a French cultural theorist, urbanist, and aesthetic philosopher. He is best known for his writings about technology as it has developed in relation to speed and power, with diverse references to architecture, the arts, the city and the military.
According to two geographers, Virilio was a “historian of warfare, technology and photography, a philosopher of architecture, military strategy and cinema, and a politically engaged provocative commentator on history, terrorism, mass media and human-machine relations
Magdalene Jetelova 
– in which she laser-projected select quotations from, what else, Paul Virilio’s Bunker Archaeology onto the half-submerged fortifications found scattered along Normandy’s beaches.
Annette Michelson (photo via)
Art News – Annette Michelsonk Pioneering Film Critic, Co-founder October dies at 96.
Photo by Fung Lin Hall
