I plan to teach a seminar on the interwar apocalypse, broadly considered, in the spring, and, while there’s much to choose from, I’m leaning toward showing at least a clip from one of the Bergfilme. Riefenstahl’s maenadic turn seems to be the most representative. I’m also interested in relating the mountain-cult to the scholarship associating human behavior with climatic differences.
Because of backorders, and frustrating customer service, I had to relinquish the potential Dell Ubuntu notebook in favor of a Gateway with the dreaded Vista pre-installed. (Note to Mac Users: I have .5 GHZ less processor speed [bus issues are not relevant, I don’t think], twice as much memory, and 40GB more hard drive space for $1100 less than the equivalent MacBook–how is this even possible?)
Our moving company made yesterday one of the most unpleasant days of my life, as we had to take turns staking out the visitors’ parking lot so that the behemoth trailer would have room. It was supposed to have been delivered on Tuesday, then yesterday morning. It arrived at 5:30 PM. I would calculate the heat index at 135° by then.
“In every New England town library, there is likely to be an ancient Puritan virgin, shriveled and dried in the snows of sixty Massachuetts [sic] winters and suitably shrouded in black bombazine, who has been at work for the past twenty years on the story of her home town from 1633 to 1933, when Franklin Roosevelt was inaugurated and history came to an end” (Fischer, David Hackett. Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought. New York: Harper, 1970. P. 141).
I wanted to write something about this, but it turns out it’s old news. Oh well. (Page 27 of the “Family Jewels,” if you’re interested.) I should draft a letter to the Birchite county newspaper where I grew up and alert the credulous citizenry about this perhaps unexpected comsympy, but I’m sure it’s already been assimilated.
Also, from p. 47: “Roselli was, along with four other individuals, convicted of a conspiracy to cheat members of the Friars Club of $400,000 in a rigged gin gummy [sic] game.”
I read James Ellroy’s The Black Dahlia a few days ago and was struck by his reference to Hugo and the comprachicos. I believe that Rimbaud also identified the mutilated rictus as a metaphor for the artist, and the reader may infer substantial self-loathing from the excessively lurid details in Ellroy’s presentation.
D. S. Neff’s “Anoedipal Fiction: Schizoanalysis and The Black Dahlia” (Poetics Today 18.3 jstor) is a theoretically rich reading of the novel.
I’ve been reading Lem’s Peace on Earth intermittently on this long, shelter-finding trip; and he envisions, perhaps influenced by Jaynes–though he doesn’t cite him as I remember–, ultrasonic callotomy emerging as nanotech warfare strategy. . .on the moon! (There was a piece linked on metafilter today about chemical efforts to homosexualize, halitosisize, or enflatulate an enemy force– all rejected as unsuitable by planners, but braincandy just the same.)
I can remember very well the belladonna eyes of the deer that ran into my car last night on the Natchez Trace, though I don’t, of course, remember the mechanics of the swerve, braking, protective arm over my wife–any of that. I have learned to be skeptical, perhaps too skeptical, of hemispherical differentiation hypotheses, after such baroque efforts of Jaynes and then the Omni and such expositions in the early 80s; but the image-affect-memory process is interesting to consider from that perspective. (After only a glancing blow, the doe picked herself up and ran off into the woods, presumably ok.)
I’m sure others have noticed this, but Ted Tally’s screenplay for The Silence of the Lambs (on this morning on the SF channel) mucks up Thomas Harris’s reference to the phrase “stinks of the lamp,” apparently having Lecter apply it to Clarice’s father working in a mine with a headlamp, I suppose, rather than, as in the book, having Lecter call her use of a subjunctive tense pretentious.
Mr. Krongard even recalls receiving a proposal for help with questioning Qaeda suspects from an American dentist who said he “could create pain no human being could withstand.”
From the NYT. I thought of Marathon Man, of course, as, I’m sure, did we all.
No, I haven’t seen it. But Welles, in 1971, clearly fit the part of the gastronome Abbe Doucedame, as those of you who’ve read Ray’s lurid tale will know. (The credits seem to imply that Welles played the part of Cassave, but I will not take the trouble to deny this calumny.)
Freud’s lamprey, a poltergeist in an old pond. That some Danes believed that flight could be attained by eating the hearts of seven or twelve fetuses cut from the womb. The third (morbus sacer) heaven. Wouldn’t these make for an interesting story?
A recent paper (summary) about the encoding of a message in bacteria DNA left me wondering what the first use of this idea in literature was (i. e., a persistent, long-term message decoded by DNA analysis left by previous humans, aliens, god(s), alien gods, god-like aliens, humans who became aliens then gods then humans, etc.)
“Golem XIV” has some related speculation on the informational nature of the genetic code, I believe, and Memoirs Found in a Bathtub also raises the problem of data persistence which the paper cites as a potential practical application; but I seem to remember something using essentially the same idea.