Wednesday, August 31, 2005

Be Drunk

You have to be always drunk. That's all there is to it—it's the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk.

But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be drunk.

And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace or the green grass of a ditch, in the mournful solitude of your room, you wake again, drunkenness already diminishing or gone, ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, everything that is flying, everything that is groaning, everything that is rolling, everything that is singing, everything that is speaking. . .ask what time it is and wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you: "It is time to be drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk, be continually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish."
Charles Baudelaire
(1821 - 1867)

Monday, August 29, 2005

"Inside Deep Throat" Reexamines a Smut Classic

Mafia porn flick or avant-garde legend? A documentary takes a new look at the 1972 pornographic film "Deep Throat" -- which made the name Linda Lovelace a household name. The cultural wars that the film sparked at its release are still raging three decades later...more here

Birth, death, balls and battles

IN 1951, AFTER READING War and Peace for the twelfth time, the Russian writer Mikhail Prishvin (1873- 1954) noted in his diary that he felt, at last, that he understood his life. Like all great works of art, Tolstoy’s masterpiece has the capacity, on each successive reading, to transform our understanding of the world.

On any first reading, War and Peace is bound to dazzle with its immense panorama of humanity. The whole of life appears to be contained in its pages. Tolstoy presents us with a cast of several hundred characters. Yet to each one he brings such profound understanding of the human condition, with all its frailties and contradictions, that we recognise and love these characters as reflections of our own identity. ...more here

The seduction

Vladimir Nabokov (left) in September 1958. ''L'Affaire Lolita,'' as the French had christened it, was just beginning its long career. THE ELOQUENCE OF EVIL? James Mason as Humbert Humbert (top right) in Stanley Kubrick's 1962 film version of ''Lolita.'' Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann (bottom right), in confinement in Jerusalem in 1961. Eichmann's disgust with ''Lolita'' raises the unsettling question of how to read the novel.
N THE SPRING OF 1940, on the last crossing of a French ocean liner that would be sunk by German U-boats on its return voyage, Vladimir Nabokov, his wife, and his young son arrived in New York. The family's first, precarious years in America brought many changes, but one element remained constant. Every summer, Nabokov and his wife would drive cross country to the Rocky Mountains, which offered the country's best butterfly hunting.

On those trips, during sudden rainstorms, bouts of insomnia, long drives, and flashes of impromptu inspiration in this or that alpine meadow, the Russian emigre Nabokov began to jot down on three-by-five-inch cards a singular story. This story was to become the greatest and most controversial American novel of the 20th century: ''Lolita."...more here

Thursday, August 25, 2005

Every Day

Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to be always part of unanimity.
Christopher Morley
US author & journalist (1890 - 1957)

Wednesday, August 24, 2005

Solitude

At last! Alone! No sound but the rattle of a few belated, worn-out hackney cabs. For a few hours silence will be ours, if not rest. At last! The tyranny of the human face has disappeared, and I will suffer no more, except from myself.
Charles Baudelaire, À une heure du matin (At one o'clock in the morning)

Reading


Insensibly he formed the most delightful habit in the world, the habit of reading: he did not know that thus he was providing himself with a refuge from all the distress of life; he did not know either that he was creating for himself an unreal world which would make the real world of every day a source of bitter disappointment.
W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage, chap. 9

Saturday, August 20, 2005

In the House of the Hangman

Defining Defeat
May 8, 1945

The surrender of the German military to Allied forces took place at the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) at Reims in the early hours of May 7, 1945. On April 30, Hitler and Goebbels had committed suicide, leaving Grand Admiral Dönitz as head of state; on May 1, the last remaining German forces in Italy capitulated; the following day General Weidling surrendered Berlin to Soviet general Chuikov, though Weidling stalled as long as possible to allow Martin Bormann and others to escape from Hitler's bunker; on May 3, Hamburg fell to the British. By the first week of May, the endgame was played out, as had been inevitable all spring...more here

Inside the North Korean Slave State

The charm of dictators has been known to reduce the hardest men to jelly. I remember a tough-minded Japanese photographer returning from Pyongyang in the nineteen-seventies still aglow from the experience of Kim Il Sung's “warm handshake.” Similar reports have come from some of those allowed into Hitler's mesmerizing presence: warm handshakes and piercing eyes appear to go with the position.

Bradley K. Martin, whose “Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty” (St. Martin's; $29.95) is the heaviest tome to appear in English on the subject, has spent decades penetrating the mysteries of North Korea. He paints a grim picture in exhaustive detail, backed by many first-person accounts. But, though he is no apologist, he is perhaps fair to a fault. “There might be two sides to the story,” he cautions. Kim Il Sung possessed “considerable personal charm that only increased with age and experience.” The same goes for his son: “I would describe him as an often insensitive and brutal despot who had another side that was generous and—increasingly as he matured—charming.”...more here

Wednesday, August 17, 2005

The Quiddity of Bullshit

Where do you start if you are an academic philosopher in search of the quiddity of bullshit? “So far as I am aware,” Frankfurt dryly observes, “very little work has been done on this subject.” He did find an earlier philosopher's attempt to analyze a similar concept under a more genteel name: humbug. Humbug, that philosopher decided, was a pretentious bit of misrepresentation that fell short of lying. (A politician talking about the importance of his religious faith comes to mind.) Frankfurt was not entirely happy with this definition. The difference between lies and bullshit, it seemed to him, was more than a matter of degree...more here

Tuesday, August 16, 2005

Beyond belief

Near the end of his life, Isaiah Berlin wrote these words to a correspondent who had asked the great imponderable:

"As for the meaning of life, I do not believe that it has any. I do not at all ask what it is, but I suspect that it has none and this is a source of great comfort to me. We make of it what we can and that is all there is about it. Those who seek for some cosmic all-embracing libretto or God are, believe me, pathetically mistaken."

It's time that we acknowledged honestly what most people believe, that religion is at bottom nonsense. I do not deny the good work of religious people, nor the cultural effects of religion, nor its deep penetration into our consciousness, but what I think we should acknowledge is that religion contains a massive falsehood, namely that there is a God who determines our actions and responds to our plight. As AJ Ayer said, if God has constituted the world in such a way that he cannot resolve the phenomenon of evil, logically it makes no difference whether we are believers or unbelievers...more here

Friday, August 12, 2005

Endless Forms Most Beautiful

All plants and animals, including humans, are essentially societies of cells that vary in configuration and complexity. As Darwin's theory made clear, these multitudinous forms developed as a result of small changes in offspring and natural selection of those that were better adapted to their environment. Such variation is brought about by alterations in genes that control how cells in the developing embryo behave. Thus one cannot understand evolution without understanding its fundamental relation to development of the embryo. Yet "evo devo," as evolutionary developmental biology is affectionately called, is a relatively new and growing field.

Sean B. Carroll, as a leading expert both in how animals develop and in how they have evolved, is ideally placed to explain evo devo. His new book on the subject, Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo and the Making of the Animal Kingdom (the title borrows a phrase from Darwin's On the Origin of Species), was written, he says, with several types of readers in mind—anyone interested in natural history, those in the physical sciences who are interested in the origins of complexity, students and educators (of course), and anyone who has wondered "Where did I come from?" Carroll has brilliantly achieved what he set out to do...more here

Evolution vs. Religion


President Bush used to be content to revel in his own ignorance. Now he wants to share it with America's schoolchildren.

I refer to his recent comments in favor of teaching "intelligent design" alongside evolution. "Both sides ought to be properly taught … so people can understand what the debate is about," Bush told a group of Texas newspaper reporters who interviewed him on Aug. 1. "Part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought."...more here

Wednesday, August 10, 2005

Written in the Flesh

The human body is only just coming to real life. With the Greeks it gave a lovely flicker, then Plato and Aristotle killed it, and Jesus finished it off. But now the body is really coming to life, is really rising from the tomb.
-- Lady Chatterley's Lover

D.H. Lawrence's 1928 novel of adultery, scandalous in its time, is a kind of template for Edward Shorter's Written in the Flesh. Buried deep within the neural pathways of our brains, argues Shorter, is the desire for sexual pleasure -- and for what he calls "total body sex." What, you might want to know (or be afraid to ask), is that? For Shorter, a University of Toronto professor of medical history, it means the expansion of erotic focus from face and genitals to include the sensual delights of the entire body. This biological drive can be channeled underground for a time -- in the case of Medieval Europe, for over a millennium -- by a combination of social control (religion) and social conditions (hunger, disease, lack of privacy). But in the end, desire will out...more here

Film, Violence, and Stardom

The existence of famous serial killers in contemporary American culture brings together two defining features of American modernity: stardom and violence. Not surprisingly, therefore, film is unique among popular cultural media in its potential to shed light on the reasons why we have celebrity serial killers because it is a medium defined by the representation of acts of violence and by the presence of stars...more here

Thursday, August 04, 2005

George Bataille and the philosophy of vampirism

The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. "Whither is God?" he cried. "I shall tell you. We have killed him—you and I."

(Friedrich Nietzsche The Gay Science, 125)

The function of myth is to express dramatically the ideology under which a society lives: not only to animate its conscience, the values it recognises and the ideals it pursues from generation to generation, but above all to express its very being and structure, the elements, the connections, the balances, the tensions which constitute it; to justify and reinforce the rules and traditional practices without which everything within a society would disintegrate. Some myths are drawn from authentic events and actions in a more or less stylized fashion, embellished and established as examples to imitate; others are literary fictions incarnating vital concepts of the ideology in certain personages and translating this concept into the connections between various figures.

The Vampire legend operates mythically, that is, as a series of narratives that serve to explain why the world is the way it is. In this sense Myths also exist to provide solutions for eternal questions; – the creation of the world, the relationship between men and women and beasts, the notion of the other. The myth provides solutions to these problems by positing an initial pair of binary oppositions such as life and death, nature and culture. This initially irreconcilable opposition is mediated by the introduction of a third term, which in some way partially inherits the nature of each opposed term. The third term, however, invokes its own opposed term, but this new binary opposition is not as completely intractable as the first. The process repeats, each new opposition being a little closer together than the previous one, until a set of oppositions that can provide some kind of cultural modus vivendi is reached. The vampire legend clearly illustrates this process...more here


"The cemetery is an open space among the ruins, covered in winter with violets and daisies. It might make one in love with death, to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place."

— Percy Bysshe Shelley
...A death angel stands in the middle of my room.
Yet I dance till I'm out of breath.
Soon lying in the grave I'll be
And no one will snuggle up to me.
Oh, give me kisses up till death.
Emmy Hemmings
Literature encourages tolerance - bigots and fanatics seldom have any use for the arts, because they're so preoccupied with their beliefs and actions that they can't see them also as possibilities.

— the Canadian literary scholar Northrop Frye
The Starry Night

by Anne Sexton

That does not keep me from having a terrible need of — shall I say the word — religion. Then I go out at night to paint the stars.

— Vincent Van Gogh in a letter to his brother

The town does not exist
except where one black-haired tree slips
up like a drowned woman into the hot sky.
The town is silent. The night boils with eleven stars.
Oh starry starry night! This is how
I want to die.
It moves. They are all alive.
Even the moon bulges in its orange irons
to push children, like a god, from its eye.
The old unseen serpent swallows up the stars.
Oh starry starry night! This is how
I want to die:

into that rushing beast of the night,
sucked up by that great dragon, to split
from my life with no flag,
no belly,
no cry.

All Joy

There are, as is known, insects that die in the moment of fertilization. So it is with all joy: life's highest, most splendid moment of enjoyment is accompanied by death.

Soren Kierkegaard
--Either/Or

Epidermal Macabre

…I hate my epidermal dress,
The savage blood's obscenity,
The rags of my anatomy,
And willingly would I dispense
With false accouterments of sense,
To sleep immodestly, a most
Incarnadine and carnal ghost.


— the last lines of "Epidermal Macabre," Theodore Roethke's lament for having "“fleshy clothes"

Monday, August 01, 2005

Religion itself is the fount of most evil

Muriel Gray argues that it’s all very well blaming fundamentalism, but religion itself is at the core of the world’s problems. It’s time for us to free ourselves from its shackles and draw a clear line between all churches and the state.

What’s the definition of a Conservative? A liberal who’s been mugged. I’ve kept this gag close over the last few weeks, lodging it as a reminder that immediate responses to the London nightmare are unlikely to be reasonable or helpful. But it’s been hard.

As the body parts of the murdered commuters were being bagged, and Iraqi children were blown apart for taking sweets from an American soldier, I sat by our daughter’s intensive care bed where, for the second time during her regrettably eventful 10 years, medical geniuses had saved her life. A pair of surgeons who shame Michelangelo with sculpting skills in flesh and bone, an anaesthetist possessed of the magic to rekindle glowing embers of life back into flame, and a team of tireless doctors and nurses grafted and toiled or her behalf in the sweltering temperatures of the Edinburgh heatwave, and then carried on grafting and toiling on behalf of all the other tiny mites and scraps of existence passing through their care...more here

Banality Of the Bombers

"The deeds were monstrous, but

the doer . . . was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous."

-- Hannah Arendt,

"The Life of the Mind"

The banality of evil that Hannah Arendt glimpsed in Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann lives on in this visual age. It emerges from surveillance photographs of four terrorism suspects in London that were splashed across the world's television screens, Internet sites and newspapers earlier this month.

Those police photos, as did Eichmann's words and appearance during his 1961 trial in Jerusalem, show the face

of evil as all too human and surprisingly mediocre -- a face not of mysterious supernatural forces that we cannot comprehend or combat, but one of petty criminality and hatred that we can easily recognize. In that sobering reality are reasons for comfort, and for anguish...more here