Vitro Nasu

John Stuart Mill 20 May 1806 – the most influential philosopher of the 19th century.
His wife Harriet Taylor reinforced Mill’s advocacy of women’s rights and the writing of On Liberty. He was a godfather to Bertrand Russell.

John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor; paintings by George Frederic Watts, 1873, and an unknown artist, circa 1834

In 1851, Mill married Harriet Taylor after 21 years of an intimate friendship. Taylor was married when they met, and their relationship was close but generally believed to be chaste during the years before her first husband died. Brilliant in her own right, Taylor was a significant influence on Mill’s work and ideas during both friendship and marriage. His relationship with Harriet Taylor reinforced Mill’s advocacy of women’s rights. He cites her influence in his final revision of On Liberty, which was published shortly after her death. Taylor died in 1858 after developing severe lung congestion, after only seven years of marriage to Mill.

The Subjection of Women

If society really wanted to discover what is truly natural in gender relations, Mill argued, it should establish a free market for all of the services women perform, ensuring a fair economic return for their contributions to the general welfare. Only then would their practical choices be likely to reflect their genuine interests and abilities.

Mill felt that the emancipation and education of women would have positive benefits for men also. The stimulus of female competition and companionship of equally educated persons would result in the greater intellectual development of all.

Phyllis Rose Parallel Lives Five Victorian Marriages.

In her study of the married couple as the smallest political unit, Phyllis Rose uses as examples the marriages of five Victorian writers who wrote about their own lives with unusual candor.The couples are John Ruskin and Effie Gray; Thomas Carlyle and Jane Welsh; John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor; George Eliot and G. H. Lewes; Charles Dickens and Catherine Hogarth.

Soren Kierkegaard and Regina Olsen (previous post)

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Andre Bazin (18 April 1918 – 11 November 1958)
was a renowned and influential French film critic and film theorist.

His personal friendships with many directors he wrote about also furthered his analysis of their work. He became a central figure not only in film critique, but in bringing about certain collaborators, as well. Bazin also preferred long takes to montage editing. He believed that less was more, and that narrative was key to great film.

Bazin, who was influenced by personalism, believed that a film should represent a director’s personal vision. This idea had a pivotal importance in the development of the auteur theory, the manifesto for which François Truffaut’s article, “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema”, was published by his mentor Bazin in Cahiers in 1954. Bazin also is known as a proponent of “appreciative criticism”, the notion that only critics who like a film should review it, thus encouraging constructive criticism.

François Truffaut dedicated The 400 Blows to Bazin, who died one day after shooting commenced on the film.
Jean Renoir dedicated the revival of The Rules of the Game to the memory of Bazin.
David Foster Wallace’s novel Infinite Jest references Bazin in regard to film and film criticism.

Cahiers
Bazin started to write about film in 1943 and was a co-founder of the renowned film magazine Cahiers du cinéma in 1951

Jump Cut

Chögyam Trungpa (February 28, 1939 – April 4, 1987)

In 1974, Trungpa founded the Naropa Institute, which later became Naropa University, in Boulder, Colorado. Naropa was the first accredited Buddhist university in North America. Trungpa hired Allen Ginsberg to teach poetry and William Burroughs to teach literature.

“When we talk about compassion, we talk in terms of being kind. But compassion is not so much being kind; it is being creative to wake a person up.” Trungpa Rinpoche

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Trungpa had a number of notable students, among whom were Pema Chödrön, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Anne Waldman, Diane di Prima, Peter Lieberson, José Argüelles, David Nichtern, Ken Wilber, David Deida, Francisco Varela, and Joni Mitchell, who portrayed Trungpa in the song “Refuge of the Roads” on her 1976 album Hejira.
Shambhala vision is described as a nonreligious approach rooted in meditation and accessible to individuals of any, or no, religion. In Shambhala terms, it is possible, moment by moment, for individuals to establish enlightened society. His book, Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior, provides a concise collection of the Shambhala views. According to Trungpa, it was his intention to propagate the kingdom of Shambala that provided the necessary inspiration to leave his homeland and make the arduous journey to India and the West

Merwin
My feelings about Trungpa have been mixed from the start. Admiration, throughout, for his remarkable gifts; and reservations, which developed into profound misgivings, concerning some of his uses of them. I imagine, at least, that I’ve learned some things from him (though maybe not all of them were the things I was “supposed” to learn) and some through him, and I’m grateful to him for those. I wouldn’t encourage anyone to become a student of his. I wish him well.

Jim Bauerlein

I love Trungpa…a very special being..he was deep, complex and not cut of the ordinary cloth..

So many buy into pop publicity about Trungpa…he was elusive, strange, and a brother from another planet..What he created, Naropa is a great place…if we look at those who call him a teacher we can see that many fine minds and spirits found him a source of enlightenment…He was whimsical and taught through humor and shock.

The story of Trungpa Rinpoche’s connection with Alan Watts, as told by Sam Bercholz.
Alan spent his last days with Rinpoche.

Søren Kierkegaard and Regine Olsen

Drawing comparisons to, among others, Dante and Beatrice, Abelard and Héloïse, he says of the couple that they are “together in eternity because they never could be together in earthy life.” Indeed, Kierkegaard and Regine’s story often reads like the stuff of folk tales and verse epics (cryptic notes and secret gestures abound). For instance, the 31 letters Kierkegaard sent Regine between their engagement and its dissolution a year later, Garff says, are “not ordinary communication; they are art” (the passage in Regines gåde appears word-for-word in Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography):

[…] by virtue of their indisputably aesthetic qualities, the letters make it clear that their author was to become not a husband but a writer. So they were actually farewell letters, grandiose exercises in the art of indirect communication: With enormous discretion and employing the entire panoply of the most nuanced shades of language, they try to make Regine realize that the person who sings her praises in letter after letter has long since disappeared from her life because he has lost himself in recollection of her and is thus utterly unsuited for married life. Indeed, recollection, from which fantasy draws its life, is also the source of the death that divides the lovers. In looking back upon events, Kierkegaard claimed that the very next day after Regine had said “Yes,” he had already realized that he had “made a mistake.”
Thanks to Garff’s book, we can more fully appreciate the extent to which the perception of Regine as a woman cruelly seduced by an eccentric philosopher is inaccurate. On the contrary, she proved to be at once selfless and cunning; her final gesture, this glorious double-act, allowed her to reveal the nature of her relationship with Kierkegaard while simultaneously disappearing into posterity, the innermost secrets of her being intact. Though their graves at Assistens Churchyard in Copenhagen are separated by just 50 yards, it is in the papers Regine received on an island in the Caribbean that the remains of their love are buried. “Posthumous papers are like a ruin,” the aesthete A writes in Either/Or, “what haunt could be more natural for the interred?”’

Leap of Faith

See “Leap of Faith” gif animation from Post Mutant Eggplant: Gravity and Grace – (scroll down.. down down down)

Happy Valentine!

Monday
In the year 5000, my birthday falls on a Monday, I won’t be around.
Somehow, this makes me unutterably sad, weeping.

Our span is so short, we all know that, but this, this concrete
instance, tears through me. And I won’t make it, to be sure, past
2020…

February 5000

Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
1
2 3 4 5 6 7 8
9 10 11 12 13 14 15
16 17 18 19 20 21 22
23 24 25 26 27 28

Happy birthday Alan Sondheim.

Coming event..

ALAN SONDHEIM PRESENTATION AT BROWN UNIVERSITY
February 6th, at 7, at the Granoff Center (see below)
Broken World, Steerage
thinking through blankness, terror, and broken worlds
There is material from distorted motion capture employed in
virtual worlds; considerations of terror and genocide in terms
of anguish and the unutterable; phenomenology of blizzards and
whiteout; revrev ? live reverse reverberation or anticipatory
music; and practical-theoretical issues of gamespace/edgespace.

Join Alan Sondheim for a talk and presentation at 7pm on Friday,
February 6 in Englander Studio, Granoff Center at Brown
University. This event is free and open to the public.

One more poem..

Philosophy, Simple, Pretention

Phenomenology doesn’t rhyme, all the time.
Philosophy in this form isn’t serious.
Aphorisms are always suspect, unpacking
revealing the dirty laundry of language.
You have to develop an argument and
neologisms help with their wayward vacuity.
Pictures are more suspect, and Wittgenstein’s
formulas appear to be the bones of an
irrelevant animal.
On the other hand, the formulas of physics
and cosmology contain an absolutely
untranslatable grain of truth, do you hear
that, Badiou?
Our place in the world is indeterminate but
that doesn’t interfere with description and
the latitude or epigenetic landscape of the
resulting deep sketching.
Violence threatens everything but not the
world, nor mathesis.
Violence is not violence until you are
physically touched by it, and philosophy
in this form, that of the witness, is always
serious and always correct.
Do unto others is senseless unless one
believes in the imperative.
There is nothing that can be _said_ about
cosmology.
A picture is the decay of the word; neither
mathematics nor mathesis are languages.
Mathesis and the world is closest to the
film which binds, not sutures, the viewer.
Meaning washes out of the aphorism; meaning
washes out the aphorism.
There is no point to decay.
On the phenomenological level, decay is
everywhere and inconceivable.
One can never explain oneself; and the
attempt to explain one’s writings just
increases the bulk of them.
Hence the mark is always and already the
same, every mark the same mark, except the
number; it is the number which may
function as the sign of violence, and the
word which becomes the diacritical mark.
Narrative never understands that thinking
is thoughtless.
The philosophical example is already lost
in thought.
Philosophy is what I am; writing is what I
do.

Karl Pribram
Dr. Karl Pribram at his home in Washington, D.C.
Photo by Harvey Wang

Yesterday (Jan 31) on FB Alev Croutier informed us the sad news that her friend Karl Pribram passed away.

The Holographic Brain

Pribram

Karl Pribram, Margaret Mead & Moshe Feldenkrais
Photo via

Via Alev Croutier

Karl Pribram 1919-2015

Karl H. Pribram, the eminent brain scientist, psychologist and philosopher, died of cancer on January 19, 2015, at age 95, at his home in Virginia. Dr. Pribram has been called the “Magellan of the Mind” for his pioneering research into the functions of the brain’s limbic system, frontal lobes, temporal lobes, and their roles in decision making and emotion.

Born in Vienna, Austria in 1919, to a Czechoslovakian father and Indonesian mother (both distinguished bacteriological researchers) Pribram attended grammar school in Gstaad, Switzerland, and high school at Culver Military Academy in Indiana, from which he graduated in 1936. He received his BS degree from University of Chicago in 1939 and received his MD in 1941, becoming one of the first 300 board-certified neurosurgeons in the world.

During his years as a practicing neurosurgeon (1941-1948) first in Memphis, Tennessee and then in Jacksonville, Florida, he began his collaboration on primate research with Karl Lashley at the Yerkes Primate Center, where Pribram succeeded Lashley as director and also introduced numerous human surgical techniques to the field of animal research. During Pribram’s subsequent ten years (1948-58) on faculty at Yale University in New Haven, CT, Pribram simultaneously established a research lab at the Institute for Living in Hartford, which “became a mecca for students intensely interested in the relationship between brain and behavior.”

In 1958-59, Pribram joined the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University in Palo Alto. During his subsequent 30 years at Stanford University (1959-1989), Pribram pioneered the field of neuropsychology (a term that he coined), leading groundbreaking research into the interrelations of the brain, behavior, and the mind. Upon becoming emeritus at Stanford in 1989, Pribram was named Eminent Scholar of the State of Virginia, and Distinguished Professor of Psychology and director of the BRAINS center (Brain Research and Informational Sciences), a research laboratory created for him at Radford University. Over this same period (1989-2013) he was also appointed Distinguished Professor in the Engineering and Computer Science Department at George Mason University, and (simultaneously, up to his death) also served as Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience at Georgetown University in Washington, DC.

Pribram authored more than seven hundred books and scientific publications, including: Plans and the Structure of Behavior (with George Miller and Eugene Galanter, 1960), which is credited with launching the “Cognitive Revolution in Psychology”; Languages of the Brain (1971), an early influence upon neural networks and pattern recognition; Freud’s Project Re-assessed (with Merton Gill, 1976); and Brain and Perception (1991) which expands Pribram’s long-established holonomic theory of memory and perception, and has become the subject of numerous popular books, including Michael Talbot’s The Holographic Universe and Lynne McTaggart’s The Field, among many others. He edited the publications of the proceedings of a series he founded of international brain conferences with papers presented by distinguished scientists and Nobel laureates, through the 1990s. Pribram’s recent and final publication, The Form Within (2013), provides the 200-year history of brain research from his 70-year-long insider point of view. (Pribram’s theory and data papers may be found on his website KarlPribram.com.

Pribram was the recipient of more than sixty major international awards and honors, including a lifetime grant from the US Office of Naval Research; a Lifetime Research Career Award from the National Institutes of Health; a Lifetime Achievement Award from both the Society of Experimental Psychology and from the Washington Academy of Sciences; honorary doctorates in psychology and neuroscience from the universities of Montreal, Canada and Bremen, Germany; and an Outstanding Contributions Award from the American Board of Medical Psychotherapists. Pribram was also the first laureate to receive the Dagmar and Vaclav Havel Award for uniting the sciences and the humanities.

Karl Pribram is survived by Katherine Neville, and his five children: John Pribram of Charlottesville, Virginia; Joan Pribram-Jones of Redwood City, California; Bruce Pribram of Brooklyn, New York; Cynthia Pribram-Byrne of Bruce,Wisconsin; and Karl S. Pribram of San Francisco, California. Also surviving him are five grown grandchildren: Sarah Pribram of Shelburne,Vermont; Megan Pribram of Brooklyn, New York; Aurora Pribram-Jones of Tustin, California; Thomas Pribram-Jones of Redwood City, California; and Andrew Pribram-Riddell of Prague, Czech Republic; as well as one great-grandchild, Aiyada Pribram-Jones of Thailand.

A memorial service and tribute to Karl H. Pribram will take place in October, 2015, in Washington, DC; the date, when determined, will be posted at KarlPribram.com. Letters may be sent to website contact form.

In lieu of flowers, memorial contributions may be made in support of The Smithsonian Libraries’ Neville-Pribram Mid-Career Educators Awards, established in 2013 by Karl H. Pribram and Katherine Neville. To learn more click here or call 202-633-2241.

Violette

Martin Provost directed Violette. See Violette trailer here (youtube)

Simone de Beauvoir and Sandrine Kimberlin (Jean Genet appeared in Violette but Sartre and Nelson Algren were mentioned briefly in the film)

Violette review from Guardian

Sandrine Kiberlain is superb as Simone de Beauvoir – demanding, principled and controlled. Emmanuelle Devos is even better as penniless, neurotic Violette Leduc, who arrives like a stalker on De Beauvoir’s doorstep with the dog-eared manuscript of her unpublished novel, L’Asphyxie (or Imprisoned in My Skin).

Violette Leduc

In 1942 she met Maurice Sachs and Simone de Beauvoir, who encouraged her to write. Her first novel, L’Asphyxie (In the Prison of Her Skin), was published by Albert Camus for Éditions Gallimard and earned her praise from Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Cocteau and Jean Genet.

The great Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges once described poetry as “algebra and fire.” The same is true of politics. Watching Violette, you’re reminded that the women’s movement was born not only of theories about equality and justice — the algebra — but of the fire of personal testimony, the willingness of women to say what they had thought and felt for centuries but never fully dared say before. Such willingness is what Violette Leduc possessed, what Beauvoir recognized, and what eventually made her books best-selling touchstones for women in France. Sure, it also made her miserable to be around, but then again, likability isn’t everything. (via)

Mademoiselle Chambon
Volcanic Emotions – Film Notes.

Martin Provost previous film (Seraphine)

Half Nelson . Ryan Gosling explains Dialectics.

Aug 27 birthday of – German philosopher Hegel , a major figure in German Idealism. His historicist and idealist account of reality revolutionized European philosophy and was an important precursor to Continental philosophy and Marxism. Hegel’s influential conceptions are those of speculative logic or “dialectic”, “absolute idealism”. They include “Geist” (spirit), negativity, sublation (Aufhebung in German), the “Master/Slave” dialectic, “ethical life” and the importance of history. (wiki)

Click to see large
Portrait of Goethe by Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein

Johan Wolfganv von Geothe (28 August 1749 – 22 March 1832)

In 1810, Goethe published his Theory of Colours, which he considered his most important work. In it, he contentiously characterized color as arising from the dynamic interplay of light and darkness through the mediation of a turbid medium.[33] In 1816, Schopenhauer went on to develop his own theory in On Vision and Colors based on the observations supplied in Goethe’s book. After being translated into English by Charles Eastlake in 1840, his theory became widely adopted by the art world, most notably J. M. W. Turner.[34] Goethe’s work also inspired the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, to write his Remarks on Color.

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How Hegel put Goethe’s Urphänomen
to Philosophical Use

“Here Hegel recognizes that in Goethe’s hands, the concept escapes the airless depths of the philosopher’s study and connects up with Nature and the everyday life of the people. And he observes:

“the two worlds greet each other: our abstruse world and the world of phenomenal being. Thus out of rocks and even something metallic Your Excellency prepares for us granite, which we can easily get a handle on because of its Trinitarian nature and which we can assimilate”(Hegel 1984: 699).”

Alan Watts with Laura Huxley (youtube)

Aldous Huxley with D H Lawrence
(Huxley and his wife Maria visited D.H. Lawrence in Taos)

Photo via

Three Kings – Carl Jung, Adous Huxley and Stanley Kubrick (July 26 birthday boys)

Rembrant Born: July 15, 1606

Museum Hours (click to see large)

Museum Hours trailer on youtube.

Old masters, sweet mystery – A.O Scott

“Museum Hours,” Jem Cohen’s quietly amazing, sneakily sublime new film, is partly a reflection on such aesthetic puzzles. Shot on high-definition digital video and super-16-millimeter film in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, the film lingers over great paintings by Rembrandt, Bruegel and other European masters, inviting us to contemplate the complex, half-obscured tales they might tell. In one scene, an art historian (Ela Piplits) tries to initiate a crowd of skeptical tourists into the mysteries of Bruegel’s “Conversion of St. Paul” (1567), and Mr. Cohen’s camera supports her arguments by finding details in the picture that might be easy to overlook.

Jem Cohen directed the museum hours.

Iris Murdoch was born on 15 July 1919
Walter Benjamin, Iris and Derrida (previous post)

“Until the escape into art, then nature,
the stories are dark, dark, dark.
Parsifal with no Grail.
Isolde with no Death.
Papageno with no flute.”

Summer Interlude – Iris and Derrida
“Murdoch’s implicit philosophical position is austere, classical, rigorous: unromantic, and pessimistic. Not that pessimism precludes comedy: on the contrary, it is probably the basis of the comic spirit.

See Ingrid Bergman at the museum, looking at the sculpture.
Viaggio In Italia

Peter Matheisson

Peter Mattheissen dead at 86 (NYtimes)

Homegoing (NYtimes- Magazine )

Paris Review Interview

In the early 1950s, he shared a sojourn in Paris with fellow literary expatriates and helped found The Paris Review, a magazine devoted largely to new fiction and poetry. His childhood friend George Plimpton became its editor.

Photo journal (See more photos)

Beverly Pepper (homepage)

Beverly Pepper (born December 20, 1922) is an American sculptor known for her monumental works,
site specific and land art. She remains independent from any particular art movement.

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Infinite Potential– David BohmandHolographic Universe

Photo via

The Krishnamurti–Bohm Dialogues took place over a span of almost 25 years. Although they had met and talked before, the first one to be recorded was in August of 1965, after an annual Krishnamurti gathering in Saanen, Switzerland.

David Bohm speaks about Wholeness and Fragmentation
(Conference from 1979 with Robert Rauschenberg, David Bohm, The Dalai Lama, Stanislov Menshikov.)

David Bohm net

David Bohm (20 December 1917 – 27 October 1992