Umberto Eco’s On Ugliness, his follow-up to On Beauty arrived in the mail today. On the cover is the Ill-Matched Lovers (c. 1520/1525) by Quentin Matsys, depicting a dirty old man fondling a maiden.
I’ll be taking notes while I read here. Feel free to add your own.
[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1fNsjx1R6I&]
One of the few interesting magazines to come out of the late 20th and early 21st centuries was Colors by Benetton. Their first ever issue in 1991 featured an unwashed newborn baby [1] . Here [2] is an overview of the first 60 issues.
Benetton is nowhere as big a brand today as it was in the 1980s and while I was not exactly taken with their clothes, I did like the ads. I don’t see a comparable contemporary brand such as Tommy Hilfiger kicking this century a conscience.
The mood wasn’t always as serious though, witness this playful update of the nunsploitation theme to the 20th century: a priest kissing a nun.
The Crimes Of Love (1800) – Marquis De Sade [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
Reflections on the Novel (French: Une Idée sur les romans) is an essay by Sade first published in 1799 in Les Crimes de l’amour. Its preface features a history of the novel and Sade’s theories on the ‘modern novel‘:
Sade goes on to note that “It is Richardson and Fielding who have taught us that only the profound study of the heart of man . . . can inspire the novelist.” And goes on: “If after twelve or fifteen volumes [of Clarissa] the immortal Richardson had virtuously ended by converting Lovelace and having him peacefully marry Clarissa, would you . . . have shed the delicious tears which it won from every feeling reader?”
The essay exists in translations by Geoffrey Gorer and David Coward.
I have been looking for a public domain English translation of this text. Can anyone point me in the direction of the first English language translation?
Update: Wolf’s Hollow: The Marquis de Sade in English.
Lowell Blair seems to be have been the first English translator of Crimes of Love. No mention is made if he also translated the prefatory essay I mention.
[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxBrMrLjnAM&]
The Edge of Heaven (2007) Fatih Akın
The near-encounter is a plot device I first spotted in the French film L’Auberge Espagnole but I had already seen elements of it in the romantic comedy Serendipity. The Edge of Heaven, the latest film by Gegen die Wand director Fatih Akın is constructed around this plot device.
The premise of the near-encounter is simple: Two people, who are supposed to meet according to the plot, cross each other without noticing. The audience is aware of the near-encounter, the fictional characters are not. An example from the film L’Auberge Espagnole: a protagonist is tying his shoelaces while another protagonist walks by. Due to the shoe lacing, the “shoe lacer” cannot see the other, and the other cannot see the “shoe lacer” because of his bended position.
The Edge of Heaven is highly recommended.
[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kt24h_Ia2UA]
L’Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze (recorded in 1988, first broadcast in 1996)
An abecedarium is a a means to learn the alphabet. It is also used to denote an A to Z of a certain subject. Such as David Toop‘s A to Z of Dub and A to Z of Electro, and Gilles Deleuze’s A to Z of his thought, as interviewed (for seven and a half hours) by Claire Parnet.
On W, Wittgenstein, Deleuze says:
In English:
Update: A summary to be found online says:
Parnet says, let’s move on to W, and Deleuze says, there’s nothing in W, and Parnet says, yes, there’s Wittgenstein. She knows he’s nothing for Deleuze, but it’s only a word. Deleuze says, he doesn’t like to talk about that… It’s a philosophical catastrophe. It’s the very type of a “school”, a regression of all philosophy, a massive regression. Deleuze considers the Wittgenstein matter to be quite sad. They imposed <ils ont foutu> a system of terror in which, under the pretext of doing something new, it’s poverty introduced as grandeur. Deleuze says there isn’t a word to express this kind of danger, but that this danger is one that recurs, that it’s not the first time that it has arrived. It’s serious especially since he considers the Wittgensteinians to be nasty <méchants> and destructive <ils cassent tout>. So in this, there could be an assassination of philosophy, Deleuze says, they are assassins of philosophy, and because of that, one must remain very vigilant. <Deleuze laughs>
Esotika, the most adventurous film blog on the web, is self-consciously taking the nobrow route [1] :
“I’ve been throwing myself into contemporary critical theory … one of my main goals is to translate the idea of no-brow culture into criticism. What I mean by this is that I want to talk about and discuss the films that I’m writing about in a manner that isn’t obtuse and utterly academic, but I also don’t want to ignore the “academic” elements in the films reviewed, as for me that is part of their major fun.
…
By “academic” I mean to imply the elements of these films that are ostensibly more “intellectual” than a reductive cinema incorporates. Take, for example, the films of Alain Robbe-Grillet. Traditionally there have been two opposing ways to read his films (and very rarely do these readings overlap). The first way is to ignore the “intellectual” elements of the film and focus on the genre elements; vampirism, eroticism, le fantastique. The second method seems to ignore or pay little attention to the genre elements and their contextual implications, choosing rather to focus solely on ideas of critical theory; narratology, structuralist construction, montage. Alain Robbe-Grillet is probably the most blatant example of this cross-pollination of readings, but obviously there are many other films and directors that fall into this divide.
…
My goal, which has hopefully become clear, is to read the films from BOTH perspectives, allowing the “low-brow” and “high-brow” readings to play off each other in order to create a much stronger way to think about the film. “
Unidentified English language edition of Psychopathia Sexualis (1886)
image sourced here.
Psychopathia Sexualis (1886) – Richard Von Krafft-Ebing [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
Case #1: J. René, always given to indulgence in sensuality and sexual pleasures, but always with regard for decorum, had shown, since his seventy-sixth year, a progressive loss of intelligence and increasing perversion of his moral sense. Previously bright and outwardly moral, he now wasted his property in concourse with prostitutes, frequented brothels only, asked every woman on the street to marry him or allow coitus, and thus became publicly so obnoxious that it was necessary to place him in an asylum. There the sexual excitement increased to a veritable satyriasis, which lasted until he died. He masturbated continuously, even before others; took delight only in obscene ideas; thought the men about him were women, and followed them with indecent proposals (Legrand du Saulle, “La Folie,” p. 533).
Moreover, women previously moral, when affected with senile dementia, may manifest similar conditions of great sexual excitement (nymphomania, furor uterinus).
It may be seen from a reading of Schopenhauer (Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung) that, as a result of senile dementia, the abnormally excited and perverse instinct may be directed exclusively to persons of the same sex. Gratification is obtained by passive pederasty, or, as I ascertained in the following case, by mutual masturbation —Psychopathia Sexualis
Thinking About Women is work of feminist literary criticism by Mary Ellmann first published in 1968 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Inc. In it, she supposedly said “I am interested in women as words.” The publisher describes it as “a scathingly witty attack on literary misperceptions of women and prejudice against women in letters by an Oxonian critic and writer.” From the cover: “An original, often starling, genuinely funny, and deeply serious investigation of our conceptions of femininity as revealed by writers from Jane Austen to Mary McCarthy and Norman Mailer. ”
Anne Koedt used this book to refute Freud’s two-orgasm theory in her “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm“.
The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm
The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm is a 1968 essay by Anne Koedt. I was very much intrigued by the tale of the two orgasms before I was sexually experienced. In her introduction to the essay, radical feminist Anne Koedt writes:
Empirical proof of vaginal orgasm came relatively late in my sexual life, and proved to be very liberating.
Speaking of Ways of Seeing (see previous post).
[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qu1ejGmPk2w]
Beginning of the first of four Ways of Seeing at the BBC
This is a first for me, I’ve read the book, but had never seen the documentary film. Fascinating.
It starts with Berger cutting a piece out of a quattrocento painting in a museum, moves to showing a printing press printing the cut-out, switches then to fragments of Man with a Movie Camera accompanied by the text of the 1923 manifesto Kinoks Revolution, by Vertov (see below). Please also the checkbook lettering which were en vogue at the time.
Notes how Berger constistenly says “camewa” and “woom”.
An excerpt of Vertov’s manifesto:
“I’m an eye. A mechanical eye. I, the machine, show you a world the way only I can see it. I free myself for today and forever from human immobility. I’m in constant movement. I approach and pull away from objects. I creep under them. I move alongside a running horse’s mouth. I fall and rise with the falling and rising bodies. This is I, the machine, manoeuvring in the chaotic movements, recording one movement after another in the most complex combinations. Freed from the boundaries of time and space, I co-ordinate any and all points of the universe, wherever I want them to be. My way leads towards the creation of a fresh perception of the world. Thus I explain in a new way the world unkown to you.”
One just has to love Youtube for making all of this available. Filesharing has made music available (but not in real-time alas), Google books did the same for books, Youtube does it for the moving image. There is still a wealth of TV and radio documentaries waiting to be unearthed. I am particularly thinking of European state funded radio and television since the 1960s.
![[1]](http://www.benetton.com/colorspress70/imgs/Colors_Cover_01.jpg){kind=link}
