Vitro Nasu

Colin Wilson laughing here.

“The mind has exactly the same power as the hands; not merely to grasp the world, but to change it.

Colin Wilson ((26 June 1931 – 5 December 2013)

Telegraphe obit (More detaied bio info here)

(Above photo via)

Colin Wilson was born in Leicester to Arthur, a shoemaker, and his wife, Hattie, who passed on her love of reading. “My mother did not particularly enjoy being married, any more than my father did,” he wrote in a memoir. Wilson went to a local technical school, where he did well at physics and chemistry, and left at 16 to work in a wool factory. He had spells as a laboratory assistant, tax clerk, labourer and hospital porter. Vehemently alienated from all materialistic and collective life, he grew obsessed, he said, with the notion of being a Buddhist tathagata (truth-seeking wanderer).
. via

Colin Wilson on Peak Experience youtube above. (Reading some of his books gave me many peak experiences… however that was long ago. )

Independent

Inspired by the title and content of Camus’ novel l’Etranger (The Outsider, 1942), he sought to rationalise the psychological dislocation associated with Western creative thinking. Wilson took the outline and sample pages to the publisher Victor Gollancz, who immediately accepted the book. Published on 26 May 1956, The Outsider sold out of its initial print run of 5,000 copies in one day.
Cyril Connolly said it was “one of the most remarkable first books I have read for a long time” while Philip Toynbee called it “a real contribution to our understanding of our deepest predicament”. It shows how artists and writers such as Van Gogh, Kafka and Hemingway are affected by society and how they in turn, as “outsiders”, impact on society.

Michael B’s Colin Wilson

Alan Sondheim saw Colin Wilson speak on Campus in 1960

Alev Croutier

RIP COLIN WILSON! I’m so deeply sad to lose a great friend, a brilliant and most prolific writer, one of the kindest and most brilliant men I know. I was fortunate to publish a few of his books, learn dowsing from him, and walk along the cliffs in Cornwall. He had a stroke last year and lost his ability to talk. It must have killed him. I wonder what he thinks of “Afterlife” now.

Raul Hilberg, the first historian to document the banality of Nazi evil, nursed a lifelong grudge against Arendt. who borrowed from and popularized his work without crediting him.

Hanna Arendt never did the research, she popularized the idea that Nazis were primarily bureaucrats. Here is a book about the man whose research Hanna used without attribution.

Hilberg was not happy either. After toiling for thirteen years on his book, he was being eclipsed by someone who had worked for little more than two years on hers. “Who was I, after all?” Hilberg asked bitterly in his autobiography. “She, the thinker, and I, the laborer who wrote only a simple report, albeit one which was indispensable once she had exploited it.”

Hannah and Her Admirers by David Rieff (Susan Sontag’s son)

Margarethe von Trotta’s biopic of Hannah Arendt is a film about ideas that remains intellectually detached from them.
Arendt had relied, by her own admission, on Raul Hilberg’s magisterial history of the Shoah, The Destruction of the European Jews, published in 1961. Most valuable of all to her was Hilberg’s account of the role of the Judenräte during the Shoah, and to what degree the leaders of these councils had in effect collaborated in the Jews’ extermination. Her conclusion was that had the Jews been leaderless and unorganized, there would have been chaos and misery, but nowhere near as many as 6 million would have been murdered. It was this position, far more than her thinking about the banality of evil, that had set so much of the official Jewish world against her. And while Hilberg did not agree with her, as he makes clear in a few icy paragraphs of his memoir, The Politics of Memory, he nonetheless defended Arendt publicly during the controversy.

It is a film about ideas that remains intellectually detached from them. Despite her immense talent as a director of actors, perhaps with Hannah Arendt von Trotta is not so far from those late Rossellini films after all, and is nowhere near being as diligent or trustworthy.

Barbara Sukowa as Hannah Arendt

Photo via

Democracy Now.. interviewed Michel Gondry.

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Inspired by Heisenberg (Digital image by Fung Lin Hall)

Green hirstutism – according to Lilyaradiaohead.

What quantum physics tells us about Walter White’s alter ego.

Happy Halloween

Wellfleet. Massachussetts
Patrick Morell –Golden Rabbit films LLC

Patrick’s #1 inspiration was Louis Malle’s most personal film, Phantom of India (Oct 30 was Louis Mall’s birthday).

See an inspirtional dance video from Phantom of India directed by Louis Malle.

Uummannaq. Western Greenland. (click to see large)
Photo by Patrick Morell

Angel Island Speed shows by Jurgen Trautwein
(Click to see large)
Traces of Times Past:
Temporary space occupations @ Angel Island’s Fort McDowell’s East Garrison,
South–East shore, 37.86˚N 122.43˚W

News from the world –

List of Weird philosophers

Mark Young (poet) – something strange from Australia

Winterson on Oscar Wilde

Raising Cockroaches in China.

Two photos by Christian Wolther from his visit to USA. The photo below is from THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY in L.A.

Click to see large
See more photos here

Sept 23: Birthday of John Coltrane

My Favorite Things 1961 (youtube)

John Coltrane the spiritual (youtube)

Coltrane Stan Gets. Oscar Peterson

Levinas and Blanchot
Sept 22 – birthday of Maurice Blanchot.

Levinas on Blanchot (youtube)

Derrida on Blanchot (youtube)

Emmanuel Levinas (previous post)

Speak Low wiki

Lyrics by Ogden Nash (Aug 19 birthday) Music by Kurt Weil
The opening line is a (slight mis)quotation from William Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing (1600), where it is spoken by Don Pedro.

Frank McCourt – the Teacher Man
(August 19, 1930 born in Brooklyn -Limerick childhood came later. )

“Your mind is a treasure house that you should stock well and it’s the one part of you the world can’t interfere with.”
― Frank McCourt, ‘Tis

Happy birthday Li young Lee <> <>
Poet’s father was Mao’s physician. (See Station – a great video)

Arthur Waley-the Orientalist

Waley (Chinese: 衛利- 19 August 1889 ) was an English orientalist and sinologist. Translated Tao Te Ching. The I Ching..

Alain Robbe Grillet anti-roman author (Aug 19 birthday) directed Trans Europe Express (a stylish film – see on youtube)

R.I.P John Hollander Poet known for his range dies at 83

John Hollander, Poet at Ease With Intellectualism and Wit, Dies at 83

“His mind was singularly capacious, filled with baseball statistics, detective novels, mathematical formulas, vintage wines, German hymns, you name it,” Mr. McClatchy wrote. “It is said of a man like John Hollander that when he dies it is like the burning of the library at Alexandria.”

Book cover of Julia Kristeva Black Sun appears here on Post Mutant Eggplant – Tristana/Toledo


Julia Kristeva

Sollers and Julia.. (photo above) Julia Kristeva married Derrida’s close ally.

Derrida’s closest intellectual comrade in the late 1960s and early 1970s was the writer and editor Philippe Sollers, who published a number of Derrida’s early essays in Tel Quel. But the friendship soured. Sollers wanted Tel Quel to become the cultural journal of the French Communist Party (PCF) and enforced strict obedience to the Moscow line. At a dinner with the Derridas, one telquelian launched into a passionate defence of the Soviet invasion of Prague, where Marguerite’s relatives lived. It did not go down well. Sollers was also worried that Derrida’s reputation might eclipse his own, suspecting that Derrida’s essay in praise of his novel, Numbers, was a covert ‘attempt at appropriation’. In 1967 Sollers had secretly married the Bulgarian literary theorist Julia Kristeva, whose career he was also keen to promote over Derrida’s. Rebuffed in their efforts to capture the cultural apparatus of the PCF, in the early 1970s Sollers and Kristeva converted to Maoism. This led to a deepening estrangement from Derrida, whose friend Lucien Bianco, a distinguished Sinologist, had disabused him of any illusions about revolutionary China. When Derrida gave an interview to La Nouvelle Critique, a PCF literary journal, Sollers and Kristeva protested by ‘boycotting’ a dinner in his honour. Derrida’s Tel Quel years were over. Years later, in her novel The Samurai, Kristeva would mockingly depict Derrida as Saïda, founder of ‘condestruction theory’, a man who was so attractive to American feminists that they ‘all became “condestructivists”’.)(Via Not In the Mood – a review of Derrida’s bio..)

Sollers is also an interesting writer. For Maoism, read Chinese Women, which is both good and sad – Alan Sondheim via email

Julia Kristeva ‘James Bond of Feminism

In November this year, Kristeva visited China to give lectures at Fudan University in east China’s Shanghai.
This was not Kristeva’s first time in China, as she had previously visited in 1974 with a group of left-wing students who were championing social equality. Afterwards, she wrote about her experience in a book titled About Chinese Women.

Julia Kristeva (click to see large)

Julia Kristeva (24 June 1941) is a Bulgarian-French philosopher, literary critic, psychoanalyst, sociologist, feminist, and, most recently, novelist, who has lived in France since the mid-1960s.
Her sizable body of work includes books and essays which address intertextuality, the semiotic, and abjection, in the fields of linguistics, literary theory and criticism, psychoanalysis, biography and autobiography, political and cultural analysis, art and art history. Together with Roland Barthes, Todorov, Goldmann, Gérard Genette, Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, Greimas, and Althusser, she stands as one of the foremost structuralists, in that time when structuralism took a major place in humanities. Her works also have an important place in post-structuralist thought.

Thomas_McEvilley was an American art critic, poet, novelist and scholar, who was a distinguisted lecturer in art history at Rice University [1] and founder and former chair of the Department of Art Criticism and Writing at the School of Visual Arts in New York City
Thomas McEvilley studied Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, and classical philosophy.

Thomas McEvilley (born 1939, Cincinnati, Ohio – died March 2 2013)
Photo via

Art and Otherness

Directly following the internationally acclaimed Art & Discontent, Thomas McEvilley argues in Art & Otherness for an advanced anthropological perspective that contravenes conventional thinking in the visual arts, and leads to a concept of artistic globalization.

Yves Klein the Provocateur and Pat Steir

17 ancient poems (Jacket)

14 Poems read by Thomas McEvilley (vimeo)

Jacques Barzun, 30 Nov 1907 – 25 Oct 2012
Historian & Scholar dies at 104 (NYtimes)

Jacques Barzun (on vimeo)

The Achievement of Jacques Barzun (The First Things)

Cynthia Ozick – “the last of the thoroughgoing generalists,”

My notion about any artist is that we honor him best by reading him, by playing his music, by seeing his plays or by looking at his pictures. We don’t need to fall all over ourselves with adjectives and epithets. Let’s play him more.
— Jacques Barzun, in an interview with John C. Tibbetts

Barzun 100 (a blog dedicted to Barzun)

William James

William James – (blog fantasy)

Helen Cixous – The Dumb Box and Two Helens

Colin Wilson

Italo Calvino
Calvino-google

Italo Calvino – Oct 15, 1923

Cosmicomics

Kublai Khan
Cities and Memory 3. – Italo Calvino – Invisible Cities

In vain, great-hearted Kublai, shall I attempt to describe Zaira, city of high bastions. I could tell you how many steps make up the streets rising like stairways, and the degree of the arcades’ curves, and what kind of zinc scales cover the roofs; but I already know this would be the same as telling you nothing. The city does not consist of this, but of relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of its past: the height of a lamppost and the distance from the ground of a hanged usurper’s swaying feet; the line strung from the lamppost to the railing opposite and the festoons that decorate the course of the queen’s nuptial procession; the height of that railing and the leap of the adulterer who climbed over it at dawn; the tilt of a guttering and a cat’s progress along it as he slips into the same window; the firing range of a gunboat which has suddenly appeared beyond the cape and the bomb that destroys the guttering; the rips in the fish net and the three old men seated on the dock mending nets and telling each other for the hundredth time the story of the gunboat of the usurper, who some say was the queen’s illegitimate son, abandoned in his swaddling clothes there on the dock.

Paul Tillich <>
When he said jump (Iconic Photos)

Paul Tillich (August 20, 1886 – October 22, 1965) was a German-American theologian and Christian existentialist philosopher

Hanna Tillich and Paul Tillich : Their relationship, sexual affair, and personality

From Time to Time by Hannah Tillich

Paul Tillich on youtube (on literature)

Professor Mitsuo Aoki – Hawaii Living Treasure was Paul Tillich’s student.

Jacques H. Lartigue

See more photos by Lartigue here

Arthur Waley <> <> ..

Arthur Waley (August 19 1889 – 27 June 1966) was an English orientalist and sinologist.

Translated the Pillow Book, the Noh, Tao Te Ching -see the list of his works.. amazing. and he has never visited Asia.

Lawrence at Hejaz

Birthday of T.E Lawrence – 16 August 1888

His bedroom with books

Ralph Fiennes took us to see his cottage at Clouds Hill (see One Foot in the past – youtube)

His bedroom without books.

Nothing in Clouds Hill is to be a care upon the world. While I have it there shall be nothing exquiste or unique in it. Nothing to anchor me.” T.E. Lawrence

Clouds Hill

“The sleeping bag that served as a guest bed to some of the 20th century’s most distinguished authors at TE Lawrence’s weekend retreat has been returned 36 years after it was stolen. National Trust custodians of Clouds Hill, the author’s cottage in Dorset, were amazed when a weather-beaten package from Belgium arrived containing the sleeping bag, along with a sheepish note that read: ‘This is yours’. The bag, embroidered with the word ‘tuum’ [‘yours’], was provided for guests at the cottage, while Lawrence slept on the floor in the other sleeping bag, marked ‘meum’ [‘mine’]. According to Jeremy Wilson, Lawrence’s biographer, tuum’s occupants included George Bernard Shaw, E. M. Forster and Robert Graves.

T.E. Lawrence

Lawrence was born in Tremadoc, Caernarvonshire, Wales, the illegitimate son of Thomas Chapman. His father left his wife, who had refused to allow a divorce. He set up a new home with Sarah Junner, a woman who had been governess in his household. Lawrence was the third son of this union.

Did TE Lawrence Have a Miserable or a Happy Childhood?

Lawrence first meeting with Faisal

His grave

Previous post Ralph and T.E. Lawrence

One-eyed Afternoon [Dumb Box 17] by Ward Schumaker (This one has often seemed my favorite – Ward wrote)

Throne for a New Ubu Dumb Box

and more Dumb box from Ward Schumaker

In 1950 our family thought of my aunt Helen as the most beautiful woman in Genoa, Nebraska. She was 29 years old, had two infants, was pregnant, and she was dying of leukemia

Helen of Genoa [Dumb Box 12]

Happy birthday Helene Cixious

French feminist writer, poet, playwright, philosopher, literary critic and rhetorician

Helen Cixous on youtube (Helene is speaking fluently in English)

Kafka in Cixous –

“What do we do with the other when we create? What does the author do? What does the painter do? That is, what do we do? This is our portrait, the portrait of the artist done by himself or herself, the portrait of you by me: it is oval: the Egg of Evil. What do we do with the body of the other when we are in a state of creation — and with our own bodies too. We annihilate (ourselves) (Thomas Bernhard would say), we pine (ourselves) away (Edgar Allen Poe would say), we erase (ourselves) (Henry James would say). In short, we institute immurement. It all begins with walls. Those of the tower. Those of the chateau we enter as we follow a seriously wounded narrator. ‘The Oval Portrait’ starts like this: