Category Archives: life

Don Juan

Les Exploits d’un jeune Don Juan (1987) – Gianfranco Mingozzi, after a novel by Guillaume Apollinaire

After the Death of Don Juan (1939) – Sylvia Townsend Warner
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Don Juan is a legendary fictional libertine, whose story has been told many times by different authors. The name is sometimes used figuratively, as a synonym for “seducer”. The best known version of this tale is probably Mozart’s 1787 Don Giovanni opera.

The Don Juan legend

The legend says that Don Juan seduced, raped or killed a young girl of noble family, and killed her father. Later, he came across a statue of the father in a cemetery and impiously invited it home to dine with him, an invitation which the statue gladly accepted. The ghost of the father arrived for dinner as the harbinger of Don Juan’s death. The Statue asked to shake Don Juan’s hand, and when he extended his arm, he was dragged away to Hell.

Most authorities agree that the first recorded tale of Don Juan is El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra (The Playboy of Seville and Guest of Stone) by Tirso de Molina. Dates vary for the first publication of this, from 1620 to 1635, depending upon the source, although it appeared in Spain as early as 1615. In it, Don Juan is an unrepentant womanizer who seduces women by disguising himself as their actual lovers, or by promising marriage. He leaves a trail of broken hearts and angry husbands and fathers behind him, finally slaying a certain Don Gonzalo. When later he is invited to dinner in the cathedral by Don Gonzalo’s ghost, he accepts, not wanting to appear a coward.

Depending upon the particular rendition of the legend, Don Juan’s character may be presented in one of two perspectives, or somewhere in between: According to some, Don Juan was a simple, lustful womanizer, a cruel seducer who simply gets sex wherever he can. Others, however, see Don Juan as a man who genuinely loves every woman he seduces, and it is his gift to see the true beauty and intrinsic value which exist within every woman. The early versions of the legend always portray him in the former light.

Other Don Juan literature

Another more recent version of the legend of Don Juan is that presented in José Zorilla’s (1817-1893) “Don Juan Tenorio” (1844). The version is formatted as a play in which Don Juan is depicted quite villainously. The action starts off with Don Juan meeting with his old friend Don Luis and the two men recounting their conquests and vile deeds of the last year. In terms of the number of murders and of conquests (i.e. seductions), Don Juan out-scores his friend Don Luis. Outdone, Don Luis replies that his friend has never had a woman pure of soul, planting in Don Juan a new tantalizing desire to sleep with a woman of God. Also, Don Juan informs his friend Don Luis that he plans to seduce his future wife. Don Juan manages to seduce both his friend’s wife and Doña Ines. Incensed, Doña Ines’s father and Don Luis come to try and avenge their lost pride, but Don Juan kills them both, though Don Juan begs them not to attack, for he claims that Doña Ines has shown him the true way. Don Juan gets a little nervous when he is visited by the ghosts of Doña Ines and her father, and the book concludes with a very interesting scene of a veritable tug of war between Doña Ines and her father, with the daughter eventually winning and pulling Don Juan up into Heaven.

In Aleksandr Blok’s poetic depiction, the statue is only mentioned as a fearful approaching figure, while a deceased Donna Anna (“Anna, Anna, is it sweet to sleep in the grave? Is it sweet to dream unearthly dreams” ) is waiting to return to him in the fast-approaching hour of his death.

In the novel “La Gitanilla” (the she-gipsy) by Miguel de Cervantes, the character who falls in love with the Gitanilla is named Don Juan de Cárcamo, possibly related with the popular legend.

A play called Don Juan (Don Giovanni Tenorio, ossia Il Disoluto) was written in 1736 by Carlo Goldoni, famous Italian comic playwright.

In the novel The Phantom of the Opera, the name of the opera written by the Phantom is “Don Juan Triumphant.”

The famous Romantic Lord Byron wrote an epic version of Don Juan that is considered to be his masterpiece. It was left unfinished upon his death, but portrays Don Juan as the innocent victim of a repressive Catholic upbringing who unwittingly stumbles into love time and time again. In Canto II, for example,he is washed up shipwrecked on an island and is rescued by the beautiful daughter of a Greek pirate, who nurses him back to health: a love relationship develops. When her father returns from his journey, however, he is angry and sells Juan into slavery, where he is bought by a Sultan’s wife for her pleasure. Byron’s don Juan is less the seducer than the victim of women’s desire and his unfortunate circumstances. —http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Juan [Oct 2006]

The Man of the Crowd (1840) – E. A. Poe

Ce grand malheur, de ne pouvoir être seul. —La Bruyère.

IT was well said of a certain German book that “er lasst sich nicht lesen” – it does not permit itself to be read. There are some secrets which do not permit themselves to be told. Men die nightly in their beds, wringing the hands of ghostly confessors and looking them piteously in the eyes — die with despair of heart and convulsion of throat, on account of the hideousness of mysteries which will not suffer themselves to be revealed. Now and then, alas, the conscience of man takes up a burthen so heavy in horror that it can be thrown down only into the grave. And thus the essence of all crime is undivulged. —http://poe.thefreelibrary.com/Man-of-the-Crowd [Oct 2006]

The Man of the Crowd, telling of one who roams day and night to mingle with streams of people as if afraid to be alone, has quieter effects, but implies nothing less of cosmic fear. –H. P. Lovecraft in Supernatural Horror in Literature (1924-1927)

See also: 1840 – E. A. Poe – flâneur – crowd

Love needs closeness, desire needs distance

Mating in Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic and the Domestic (2006) – Esther Perel
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“Love,” says Perel, “needs closeness and intimacy and familiarity to flourish. Desire does not. Desire needs distance, insecurity, novelty and surprise. Desire needs tension, breaches and repairs.”

“Love is not comfortable with fights, but desire needs fights,” says Perel. “Fights generate energy, erotic energy – and this is not just desire for sex, but a general exuberance and vitality, an élan, an aliveness! We often judge couples on the amount they fight, like: “Oh, they have such a good relationship! They never fight!” And yes, I know of couples who never fight and do have a very good relationship – but they also have a sex life that is somewhat flat. Desire needs fights! Intimacy – that is, emotional intimacy – inhibits erotic expression. Desire needs edge!”

“Love needs absence of sexual threat, but desire? Desire needs to know there are other options out there for your partner, that your partner moves out there in a sexual world when they are not with you, a world of other people who look at them, sexually. Love needs talk. Desire needs not to talk. Eroticism thrives in the space between the self and the other. In order to maintain a sexual edge in our relationships, we must learn to tolerate this void, these uncertainties.”

“I wrote this book,” she says, “because, in 22 years of practice in six different languages, I’ve met couples over and over again who were having a good relationship, who love each other, but who have no sex, no tingle! I met couples who had a bad relationship, and who I helped to have a good relationship again, and the expectation was that the sex would just come back – but it didn’t. I began to think there’s something in this premise – that if sex is wrong, the relationship is wrong; and equally that more talk, intimacy and closeness will equal more sex, better sex – that just doesn’t work.”

“Fantasy… is never politically correct, it’s transgressive and about power, which is why it’s so hot. It’s about surrender, revenge, aggression, abandonment. You can transcend moral and social boundaries. But this idea that you should share your fantasy with your partner… I think that’s very risky.”

“Talking is overrated. Especially talking to just one person”.

“I cannot stand this tendency to identify a victim and a perpetrator in an affair.”

“This idea that tenderness and emotional intimacy leads to good sex – I’m afraid it became current when women came into my profession.” –via Click Opera [Oct 2006]

National stereotypes

I’ve been thinking about the concept of national stereotypes for some time now. Partly the reason for this is that I am interested in all sorts of generalizations. The nearest philosophical concept to national, racial or ethnic stereotypes is the German term volksgeist (a concept first put forward by German folklorist and romanticist Johann Gottfried Herder) which is similar to Zeitgeist. The premise is simple: is there any truth in German gründlichkeit and pünktlichkeit, are the French good lovers or do they more frequently make love than the rest of Europe, do Italians really have better aesthetic judgement, are Belgians averse to authority, are the Dutch blunt and permissive? A recent survey tells the contrary:

Generalizations about cultures or nationalities can be a source of identity, pride … and bad jokes. (…) If national stereotypes aren’t rooted in real experiences, then where do they come from?

One possibility is that they reflect national values, which may emerge from historical events. For example, many historians have argued that the spirit of American individualism has its origins in the experiences of the pioneers in the Old West. —http://msnbc.msn.com/id/9598717/ [Oct 2005]


Then Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel were bored en famille

Inspired by a new post by Spurious on Kierkegaard:

Surely no one will prove himself so great a bore as to contradict me in this. . . . The gods were bored, and so they created man. Adam was bored because he was alone, and so Eve was created. Thus boredom entered the world, and increased in proportion to the increase of population. Adam was bored alone; then Adam and Eve were bored together; then Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel were bored en famille; then the population of the world increased, and the peoples were bored en masse. To divert themselves they conceived the idea of constructing a tower high enough to reach the heavens. This idea is itself as boring as the tower was high, and constitutes a terrible proof of how boredom gained the upper hand. —Either/Or : A Fragment of Life (1843) – Kierkegaard

And here is a quote from Spurious’s post:

To find an idea for which he could live and die – this is what Kierkegaard says he hopes for in an early entry in his journal. No surprise, then, his impassioned experience of God, a few years later. He has found what he sought – or was it the idea that sought him, waited for him and then trapped him? Now his torment had a name; the idea was clothed, and he could sacrifice his life as he always wanted to sacrifice it.  —Spurious

NOTHING is so generally coveted by Womankind, as to be accounted Beautiful

NOTHING is so generally coveted by Womankind, as to be accounted Beautiful; yet nothing renders the Owner more liable to Inconveniences. She who is fond of Praise, is in great Danger of growing too fond of the Praiser; and if by chance she does defend herself from the Attacks made on her Virtue, it is almost a Miracle if her Reputation receives no Prejudice by them: And a Woman who is very much admir’d for the Charms of her Face, ought with infinitely more Reason be so for those of her Prudence, who preserves both amidst so many Enemies as Love and Opportunity will raise against them. For one Woman that has made her Fortune by her Beauty, there are a thousand whose utter Destruction it has been.—Some, among a Crowd of Adorers, are so long determining which shall be the happy Man, that Time stealing every Day away some Part of their Attractions, they grow at last depriv’d of all, and on a sudden find themselves abandon’d, and not worth a Bow from those whose Hearts and Knees bended at their Approach before. —The Fatal Secret, or, Constancy in Distress from Secret Histories, Novels, and Poems, by Eliza Haywood (ca.1693-1756)

See also: amatory fiction – women’s fiction – British literature – 1700s literature

Girl on the Bridge (1999) – Patrice Leconte

In search of hope and hopelessness

“Vous avez l’air d’une fille qui va faire une connerie” (Eng: You look like a girl who is about to commit a terrible mistake.) –Daniel Auteuil

Girl on the Bridge (1999) – Patrice Leconte
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La fille sur le pont (The Girl On the Bridge) is a French film released in 1999, directed by Patrice Leconte, starring Daniel Auteuil and Vanessa Paradis.

At the beginning of the film, the character played by Vanessa Paradis is about to throw herself off a bridge when she is asked by Daniel Auteuil: “Why are you doing this?” Vanessa’s character answers: “Because I am desperate” and than retorts: “What are you doing here?”. Auteuil answers: “I am looking for desperate women.”
See also: Girl on the Bridge (1999) – Patrice Leconte

Momus on thin models

Audrey Marnay

Momus:

I find calls to ban “unrepresentative” or “abnormal” models from the catwalk farcical not only because I’m a thin person myself, or because I’m an artist whose work is often about beauty, and who doesn’t think that art should restrict itself to merely average levels of beauty. It’s also because I’m fundamentally anti-rockist. In other words, I’m against “keeping it real”, and I think that claims that a catwalk show, or even a street fashion shoot, are only valid when they’re “based on a true story” are overblown. (If rockism is Stanislavskian, all about realism, anti-rockism is Brechtian, about drawing attention to the fact that all spectacle produces illusion.) —Momus

Digression #1: Vanessa Beecroft Google gallery

See also: heroin chic – fashion

Notice the words love and hate …

The Night of the Hunter (1955) – Charles Laughton
Notice the words love and hate have been tattooed across his knuckles.

The Night of the Hunter is a 1953 novel by American author Davis Grubb. The book was a national bestseller and was voted a finalist for the 1955 National Book Award. In 1955 the book was adapted by Charles Laughton and James Agee as the film The Night of the Hunter.

The story concerns an ex-convict who, acting on a story told him by his now-dead cellmate, cons the cellmate’s widow into marrying him in hopes that her children will tell him where their father hid the money from his last robbery. After killing their mother, he embarks on a hunt for the children, who have sensed his evil and are running from him.

The plot was based on the true story of Harry Powers, who was hanged in 1932 for the murders of two widows and three children in Clarksburg, West Virginia. —http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night of the Hunter [Sept 2006]

See also: serial killer – American cinema – 1955

Barrington pickpocket

George Barrington robs Prince Orlov.

George Barrington (May 14, 1755 – 1804) was an Irish pickpocket. A book on him was mentioned in the 1959 film Pickpocket by Robert Bresson. —http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Barrington

At one point in the film, Jeanne asks Michel if he “believes in nothing” and he replies, “I believed in God, Jeanne, for three minutes.” — Culture?Ugh!

The absences and overall minimalism in Bresson are accentuated by repetitions. (In Pickpocket: repeated scenes in Michel’s room, the Metro, the racetrack, of staircases, writing in his journal etc. ) Paradoxically, this combination creates a sort of hollowed-out, emptied-out vessel into which we pour….our own projections, ideas, feelings, and (very important) spiritual yearnings. But we don’t see the spiritual in his films; we see the material. Concrete surfaces are paramount here; and yet they are the portal to the spiritual. We intuit an inner life, a metaphysical life, via our immersion in the material. Quandt has called Bresson’s cinema both minimalist and maximalist for this reason.  —Girish Shambu