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Why? and automatically answering, out of the blue, for no reason, just opening my mouth, words coming out, summarizing for the idiots: “Well, though I know I should have done that instead of not doing it, I’m twenty‑seven for Christ sakes and this is, uh, how life presents itself in a bar or in a club in New York, maybe anywhere, at the end of the century and how people, you know, me, behave, and this is what being Patrick means to me, I guess, so, well, yup, uh…” and this is followed by a sigh, then a slight shrug and another sigh, and above one of the doors covered by red velvet drapes in Harry’s is a sign and on the sign in letters that match the drapes’ color are the words THIS IS NOT AN EXIT. |
✖ Via American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis, 1991, p. 568 More news about Bret Easton Ellis: a new novels, a film in production and maybe another one in the pipeline (an no, I’m not talking about Glamorama). “Ellis speculated that Fox Searchlight might make his upcoming Hollywood novel Imperial Bedrooms (his seventh) into a film. […] Lunar Park is in pre-production, said Ellis; Jude Law may replace Benicio Del Toro, who Ellis knows and likes. He was set to play the role, but Ellis thought Del Toro was miscast. Ellis doesn’t see himself as Jude Law either.” (more) |
• May 31, 2010 link notes tagged:
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New York: Vintage Books
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Dans le passage conclusif de sa thèse, consacré à la recherche d’une définition de l’acte éthique, Simondon évoque ce qui en serait le revers, et qu’il nomme « l’acte fou ». L’acte fou est l’acte monadique, qui consiste en lui-même, incapable de réticuler, incapable d’étalement transductif. « L’acte en lequel il n’y a plus [un] indice de la totalité et de la possibilité des autres actes […], l’acte qui ne reçoit pas cette mesure à la fois activante et inhibitrice venant du réseau des autres actes est l’acte fou, en un certain sens identique à l’acte parfait. […] Cet acte fou n’a plus qu’une normativité interne ; il consiste en lui-même et s’entretient dans le vertige de son existence itérative » (IGPB, 247). L’acte éthique, à l’inverse, est celui qui, fondamentalement, inconsiste, c’est-à-dire est à même de faire réseau avec d’autres actes. « L’acte qui est plus qu’unité, qui ne peut résider et consister seulement en lui-même, mais qui réside aussi et s’accomplit en une infinité d’autres actes, est celui dont la relation aux autres est signification, possède valeur d’information » |
✖ Via “L’Acte Fou” by Bernard Aspe & Muriel Combes, Multitudes 4/2004 (no 18), p. 63-71. Muriel Combes wrote Simondon. Individu et collectivité. Pour une philosophie du transindividuel in 1999. You can read it online (French only). Learn more about Gilbert Simondon on Wikipedia. |
• May 17, 2010 link notes reblogged from leftoverfest [via] tagged:
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The term ‘MacGuffin’ was coined by Hitchcock’s Scottish friend, screenwriter Angus MacPhail, for something that sets the film’s plot revolving around it. It’s really just an excuse and a diversion. In a whimsical anecdote told by Hitchcock, he compared the MacGuffin to a mythical ‘apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands’. In other words, it could be anything - or nothing - at all. In Notorious, it’s just a lot of fizz: uranium-ore hidden in [wine] bottles. In North by Northwest, it’s ‘government secrets’, whatever they may be. (Hitchcock considered that this was his ‘best’ MacGuffin, because virtually non-existent.) Actually North by Northwest turns out to be one vast MacGuffin, being full of ‘nothings’ like the ‘O’ in Roger O. Thornhill’s name, or the empty prairie, or the non-existent agent named Kaplan. In effect, the function of a MacGuffin is like the ‘meaning’ of a poem - which T.S. Eliot compared to the bone
thrown by a burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind while the poem goes about its own, deeper business. Hitchcock’s most prescient MacGuffin is in Torn Curtain, whose ‘Gamma Five’ project, concerning an anti-missile missile, anticipated by more than a decade President Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’ project. |
✖ Via The Alfred Hitchcock Story by Ken Mogg, UK edition, 1999, p. 101 [Amazon] More over at Ken Mogg site. Wikipedia entry for the MacGuffin. In a sense, a MacGuffin is a mean (an apparatus) as well as an end. Or at least it pretends to be the goal, or the aim of a narrative, it’s conclusion whereas it’s never shown. It’s representing something that is never represented. Maybe it could be understand as the simulacrum capable of sustaining a journey with no end. |
• May 15, 2010 link notes tagged:
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