 | ― How come suddenly you’re an expert on women? ― I’ve got seven wives. How many you’ve got? ― So why aren’t you at home with your seven wives? ― I know how to marry them. Nobody knows how to live with them. ― So why did you marry them for? ― Shee-shee… someday I have to tell you the facts of life. |
| We never know anything about anyone. I used to think the same think about your marriage, and look what happened to you and Delia. It’s hard enough keeping track of ourselves. Once it comes to other people, we don’t have a clue. |
It reminds me of a line of dialogue in Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) (I’ll quote from memory):
On croit savoir, et puis non, jamais.
Previously on Skandalon: Paul Auster’s Leviathan
The New York Times: Harvey Pekar with a copy of “American Splendor” in 1986, photo by Mark Duncan for the Associated Press
Harvey Pekar, whose autobiographical comic book “American Splendor” attracted a cult following for its unvarnished stories of a depressed, aggrieved Everyman negotiating daily life in Cleveland and became the basis for a critically acclaimed 2003 film, died on Monday at his home in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. He was 70. […] Mr. Pekar (pronounced PEE-kar), who toiled for nearly 40 years as a file clerk in a Veterans Administration hospital, applied the brutally frank autobiographical style of Henry Miller to the comic-book format, creating a distinctive series of dispatches from an all-too-ordinary life. His alter ego, introduced in 1976, trudged on from episode to episode, quarreling with co-workers, dealing with car problems, addressing family crises and fretting over money matters and health problems.(“Harvey Pekar, ‘American Splendor’ Creator, Dies at 70” by William Grimes, July 12th, 2010)
| One day the expelled brothers joined forces, slew and ate the father, and thus put an end to the father horde. Together they dared and accomplished what would have remained impossible for them singly. Perhaps some advance in culture, like the use of a new weapon, had given them the feeling of superiority. Of course these cannibalistic savages ate their victim. This violent primal father had surely been the envied and feared model for each of the brothers. Now they accomplished their identification with him by devouring him and each acquired a part of his strength. The totem feast, which is perhaps mankind’s first celebration, would be the repetition and commemoration of this memorable, criminal act with which so many things began, social organization, moral restrictions and religion. |
Previously on Skandalon: Freud
| He stood in the street. There was nothing to do. He hadn’t realized this could happen to him. The moment was empty of urgency and purpose. He hadn’t planned on this. Where was the life he’d always led? There was nowhere he wanted to go, nothing to think about, no one waiting. How could he take a step in any direction if all direction were the same? |
Previously on Skandalon: Cosmopolis, Don DeLillo
| The things that made him who he was could hardly be identified much less converted to data, the things that lived and milled in his body, everywhere, random, riotous, billions of trillions, in the neurons and peptides, the throbbing temple vein, in the veer of his libidinous intellect. So much come and gone, this is who he was, the lost taste of milk licked from his mother’s breast, the stuff he sneezes when he sneezes, this is him, and how a person becomes the reflections he sees in a dusty window when he walks by. He’d come to know himself, untranslatably, through his pain. He felt so tired now. His hard-gotten grip on the world, material things, great things, his memories true and false, the vague malaise of winter twilights, untransferable, the pale nights when his identity flattens for lack of sleep, the small wart he feels on his thigh every time he showers, all him, and how the soap he uses, the smell and feel of the concave bar make him who he is because he names the fragrance, amandine, and the hang of his cock, untransferable, and his strangely achy knee, the click in his knee when he bends it, all him, and so much else that’s not convertible to some high sublime, the technology of mind-without-end. |
Let’s say for the moment that this quote relate to the general problem of the representation of the self: of the innumerable and diverse experiences I had, in my lifetime, how and under which conditions am I able to elaborate a stable representation of myself. Or, to put it in other words : How did I came up with a sense of my own identity?
Compare it with David Hume’s thoughts on mankind, Derrida’s view on the grammar of dreams (after Freud), who Pablo Neruda think he is (along with an excerpt from Paul Valery’s Mr. Teste), Quadrophenia, and finally the problem of translation from the perspective of media theorist Friedrich A. Kittler.
Previously on Skandalon: Don DeLillo
“A video on YouTube gets 50% of its views in the first 6 days it is on the site, according to data from analytics firm TubeMogul. After 20 days, a YouTube video has had 75% of its total views.
That’s a really short life span for YouTube videos, and it’s probably getting shorter. In 2008, it took 14 days for a video to get 50% of its views and 44 days to get 75% of its views.
Why? In the last two years, YouTube has improved its user interface, which helps videos get seen early on. Also, the world has gotten more adept at embedding and sharing videos in real-time via Twitter and Facebook. (And there’s probably more video to choose from.)” (more)
Ephemeral culture.
| We report the design, synthesis, and assembly of the 1.08-Mbp Mycoplasma mycoides JCVI-syn1.0 genome starting from digitized genome sequence information and its transplantation into a Mycoplasma capricolum recipient cell to create new Mycoplasma mycoides cells that are controlled only by the synthetic chromosome. The only DNA in the cells is the designed synthetic DNA sequence, including “watermark” sequences and other designed gene deletions and polymorphisms, and mutations acquired during the building process. The new cells have expected phenotypic properties and are capable of continuous self-replication. |
“John Craig Venter (born October 14, 1946) is an American biologist and entrepreneur, most famous for his role in being one of the first to sequence the human genome[1] and for his role in creating the first synthetic cell in 2010.[2] Venter founded Celera Genomics, The Institute for Genomic Research and the J. Craig Venter Institute, now working at the latter to create synthetic biological organisms and to document genetic diversity in the world’s oceans. He was listed on Time Magazine’s 2007 and 2008 Time 100 list of the most influential people in the world.” (wikipedia)
Just to keep things in perspective:
“Some other scientists said that aside from assembling a large piece of DNA, Dr. Venter has not broken new ground. “To my mind Craig has somewhat overplayed the importance of this,” said David Baltimore, a geneticist at Caltech. He described the result as “a technical tour de force,” a matter of scale rather than a scientific breakthrough.
“He has not created life, only mimicked it,” Dr. Baltimore said.
Dr. Venter’s approach “is not necessarily on the path” to produce useful microorganisms, said George Church, a genome researcher at Harvard Medical School. Leroy Hood, of the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, described Dr. Venter’s report as “glitzy” but said lower-level genes and networks had to be understood first before it would be worth trying to design whole organisms from scratch.
In 2002 Eckard Wimmer, of the State University of New York at Stony Brook, synthesized the genome of the polio virus. The genome constructed a live polio virus that infected and killed mice. Dr. Venter’s work on the bacterium is similar in principle, except that the polio virus genome is only 7,500 units in length, and the bacteria’s genome is more than 100 times longer.”” (The New York Times)
