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Sad afternoon. Shopping. Purchase (frivolity) of a tea cake at the bakery. Taking care of the customer ahead of me, the girl behind the counter says Voilà. The expression I used when I brought maman something, when I was taking care of her. Once, toward the end, half-conscious, she repeated faintly, Voilà (“I’m here,” a word we used with each other all our lives). The word spoken by the girl at the bakery brought tears to my eyes. I kept on crying quite a while back in the silent apartment. That’s how I can grasp my mourning. Not directly in solitude, empirically, etc.; I seem to have a kind of ease, of control that makes people think I’m suffering less than they would have imagined. But it comes over me when our love for each other is torn apart again. The most painful point at the most abstract moment… |
✖ Via Journal de deuil by Roland Barthes, Seuil, 2009 The excerpt above was translated from French by Richard Howard and published in the latest edition of The New Yorker (September 13, 2010, p. 27). |
• Sep 12, 2010 link notes tagged:
art
life
death
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Barthes
mourning
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suffering
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Kalo
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― Or, as my grandmother once put it to my mother: ‘Your father would be a wonderful man, if only he were different.
― Ha
― Yes, ha. A whole epic of pain and suffering reduced to a single sentence.
― Matrimony as a swamp, as a lifelong exercise in self-delusion. |
✖ Via Leviathan by Paul Auster, New York: Penguin, 1992, p. 91 |
• Aug 08, 2010 link notes tagged:
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novel
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Paul Auster
couple
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mother
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A vision had seized hold of me, like the demented fury of a hound that sunk its teeth into the leg of a deer carcass and is shaking and tugging at the downed game so frantically that the hunter gives up trying to calm him. It was a vision of a large steamship scaling a hill under its own steam, working its way up a steep slope in the jungle, while above this natural landscape, which shatters the weak and the strong with equal ferocity, soars the voice of Caruso, silencing all the pain and all the voices of the primeval forest and drowning out all birdsong. To be more precise: bird cries, for in this setting, left unfinished and abandoned by God in wrath, the birds do not sing; they shriek in pain, and confused trees tangle with one another like battling Titans, from horizon to horizon, in a steaming creation still being formed. Fog-panting and exhausted they stand in this unreal world, in unreal misery―and I, like a stanza in a poem written in an unknown foreign tongue, am shaken to the core. |
✖ Via The Conquest of the Useless by Werner Herzog, tr. Krishna Wintson, New York: Harper Colllins, [2004]2009Werner Herzog (Grizzly Man) is one of the most revered and enigmatic filmmakers of our time, and Fitzcarraldo is one of his most honored and admired films. More than just Herzog’s journal of the making of the monumental, problematical motion picture, which involved, among other things, major cast changes and reshoots, and the hauling (without the use of special effects) of a 360-ton steamship over a mountain , Conquest of the Useless is a work of art unto itself, an Amazonian fever dream that emerged from the delirium of the jungle. With fascinating observations about crew and players—including Herzog’s lead, the somewhat demented internationally renowned star Klaus Kinski—and breathtaking insights into the filmmaking process that are uniquely Werner Herzog, Conquest of the Useless is an eye-opening look into the mind of a cinematic master. (Harper Collins Publisher) A review of Herzog’s book over at The New York Times |
• Jul 20, 2010 link notes tagged:
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Milgram found that 62.5% of his subjects could be encouraged, browbeaten or intimidated into seeing the test through to its conclusion by delivering scores of shocks of increasing intensity to the maximum of 450 volts. In Game of Death, 81% of contestants went all the way by administering more than 20 shocks up to a maximum of 460 volts. Only 16 of the 80 subjects recruited for the fake game show refused the verbal prodding from the host — and pressure from the audience to keep dishing out the torture like a good sport — though most expressed misgivings or tried to pull out before being convinced otherwise. |
✖ Via Time: “Game of Death: France’s Shocking TV Experiment” by Bruce Crumley, March 17, 2010 Learn more about the “Milgram experiment” on Wikipedia. |
• Mar 18, 2010 link notes tagged:
communication
technology
television
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psychology
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reality show
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Que retenir de ce qu’on a vécu? Les joies et les peines sans nom – mais auxquels on a su en donner un. La vie dure ce que durent nos émois. Sans eux, elle est poussière vitale. |
✖ Via Emil Cioran, Bréviaire des vaincus, §7, in Oeuvres, éd. Gallimard, coll. Quarto, [1993]1995, p. 516 This essay has yet to be translated in English. See Cioran’s bibliography on Cioran.eu. |
• Aug 10, 2009 link notes tagged:
art
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book
philosophy
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