Long Sunday

Otium Tibi Molestum Est

After having spent the entire afternoon in daydreams I opened a book and found this.

The Most Beautiful Six Minutes in the History of Cinema

                              

Sancho Panza enters the cinema of a provincial town. He is looking for Don Quixote and finds him sitting apart, staring at the screen. The auditorium is almost full, the upper circle - a kind of gallery - is packed with screaming children. After a few futile attempts to reach Don Quixote, Sancho sits down in the stalls, next to a little girl (Dulcinea?) who offers him a lollipop. The show has begun, it is a costume movie, armed knights traverse the screen, suddenly a woman appears who is in danger. Don Quixote jumps up, draws his sword out of the scabbard, makes a spring at the screen and his blows begin to tear the fabric. The woman and the knights can still be seen, but the black rupture, made by Don Quixote's sword, is getting wider, it inexorably destroys the images. In the end there is nothing left of the screen, one can only see the wooden structure it was attached to. The audience is leaving the hall in disgust, but the children in the upper circle do not stop screaming encouragements at Don Quixote. Only the little girl in the stalls looks at him reprovingly.

                                                                                                               

What shall we do with our fantasies? Love them, believe them - to the point where we have to deface, to destroy them (that is perhaps the meaning of the films of Orson Welles). But when they prove in the end to be empty and unfulfilled, when they show the void from which they were made, then it is time to pay the price for their truth, to understand that Dulcinea - whom we saved - cannot love us.

                            

- Giorgio Agamben, Profanations

Blanchot Blogging

There could be little less discreet than writing "on Maurice Blanchot."  Hopelessly redundant, in a sense, either one must accept the theory he provides, or reject it.   There is little room for compromise. 

The real work of writing alongside, that which would work him silently (though not parasitically, or simply victim to mimetic contagion) into one's thinking.  Well, I'm not sure that I'm there yet...though the danger his writing poses in such regard, is certainly far greater than most.

Open Memorial?

A friend of mine has an interview with Peter Eisenman, architect of the new Holocaust memorial in Berlin, published in The Nation.  I've excerpted one bit, but the whole thing is rather worth reading.  One aspect of the memorial that strikes me is the apparent concern for irregularity, in particular for irregular distances, or steps.  (Agamben counterposes the "memorable" to the "unforgettable," where the "unforgettable," as represented by the tombstones, is that which resists closure or archival.)  While neither a uniform, sterilized graveyard nor purely ostentatious and inaccessible (nor excessively immune), the site suggests the opposite of what might be described as any essential distance.  Perhaps.

You once said in an interview that when you travel to Germany you go as a New Yorker and you return as a Jew. What did you mean by that?

I think that's really part of the problem. The Germans treat me with so much deference, and that makes me feel Jewish, right? They step all over themselves to be nice. Nobody treats you this way in New York. In New York a Jew is a Jew, an Italian is an Italian, a Muslim is a Muslim: Nobody's going out of his way to treat you in a special way. I really don't even think of myself as being Jewish except when I'm in Germany. And that's what we're trying to get over. The Germans should stop pretending that they love all Jews.

$4 a gallon

Like a cartoon character still running windmills, oblivious on air, suspended before the fall, “America...is over,” or so claims a recent article penned by Michael Ventura (via).  I suggest you read the entire thing, but here are some of the meatiest parts: