Of pain and pleasure

The Tears of Eros, in a German translation, with a cover by José Manuel Capuletti.

I’ve been re-reading Bataille’s last book The Tears of Eros, including the introduction by J. M. Lo Duca and their correspondence. I also found an online version (see above) of the cover picture as used in the German and Dutch translations. The painting is by José Manuel Capuletti, a now forgotten surrealist, here depicting yet another Danaide just as Rodin did in post #795.

This afternoon I acquired the excellent Quatre siècles de Surréalisme, L’Art fantastique dans la gravure.

World cinema classics #14

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8n1kDrwneg]

Blood Simple (1985) Joel and Ethan Coen

Today is Ethan Coen’s fiftieth birthday.

Look out for the scene where the detective opens the window; the woman slams it on top of his wrist and drives a knife through his hand into the windowsill. The original soundtrack is by Carter Burwell, who has done the soundtracks to all of the Coens’ films.

Previous “World Cinema Classics“

She loves the alcohol on my lips

In the history of co-dependent relationships there is Hans and Unica, there is Scott and Zelda.

Zelda Fitzgerald

Of his relationship with Zelda, Scott says:

“Perhaps fifty percent of our friends and relations will tell you in good faith that it was my drinking that drove Zelda mad, and the other half would assure you that it was her madness that drove me to drink. Neither of these judgements means much of anything. These two groups of friends and relations would be unanimous in saying that each of us would have been much better off without the other. The irony is that we have never been more in love with each other in all our lives. She loves the alcohol on my lips. I cherish her most extravagant hallucinations. In the end, nothing really had much importance. We destroyed ourselves. But in all honesty, I never thought we destroyed each other.”

Inspired by the chapter “1874: Three Novellas, or “What Happened?”” in  Gilles Deleuze Félix Guattari‘s A Thousand Plateaus (which begins with an illustration by Outcault). The chapter features the short stories/novellas “In the Cage” by Henry James, “The Crack-up” by F. Scott Fitzgerald and “The Story of the Abyss and the Spyglass” by Pierrette Fleutiaux and begins with an analysis of the difference between the short story (nouvelle in the original French version, rendered as novella in Brian Massumi‘s translation) and the tale:

“It is not very difficult to determine the essence of the [short story] as a literary genre: Everything is organized around the question, “What happened? Whatever could have happened?” The tale is the opposite of the [short story], because it is an altogether different question that the reader asks with bated breath: “What is going to happen?” . . . Something always happens in the novel also, but the novel integrates elements of the [short story] and the tale into the variation of its perpetual living present.”