A conjunction of quotations #13

— edited by Ryland Walker Knight

— Paul Nozolino
1.
We don't even know if what ends in daylight terminates in us as useless grief, or if we are just an illusion among shadows, and reality just this vast silence without wild ducks that fall over the lakes where straight and stiff reeds swoon. We know nothing. Gone is the memory of the stories we heard as children, now so much seaweed; still to come is the tenderness of future skies, a breeze in which imprecision slowly opens into stars. The votive lamp flickers uncertainly in the abandoned temple, the ponds of deserted villas stagnate in the sun, the name once carved into the tree now means nothing, and the privileges of the unknown have been blown over the roads like torn-up paper, stopping only when some object blocked their way. Others will lean out the same window as the rest; those who have forgotten the evil shadow will keep sleeping, longing for the sun they never had; and I, venturing without acting, will end without regret amid soggy reeds, covered with mud from the nearby river and from my sluggish weariness, under vast autumn evenings in some impossible distance. And through it all, behind my daydream, I'll feel my soul like a whistle of stark anxiety, a pure and shrill howl, useless in the world's darkness.
— Fernando Pessoa

2.
C. Bergvall says space is doubt—
What emerges then?
Something cast in aluminum from a one-half scale model of a freight shed
Intrication
The slight smudge of snow in the shadow of each haycock in the still-green field
The hotel of Europe. Its shutters.
Fields and woods oscillate as in Poussin
While the vote is against renewed empire, or at least capital temporarily
Each wants to tell about it but not necessarily in language
— Lisa Robertson

3.
Walked through Covent Garden; there were five of their mimes knocking about. I don't understand why people take pictures of mimes. Everyone looks like a mime in a picture.
— Karl Pilkington

4.
Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements? Surely you know! Or who stretched the line upon it? To where were the foundations fastened? Or who laid its cornerstone, when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?
— Job, 38:4-7 º

5.
English has a hard time speaking the deed, articulating the event. We can speak actively — I love you — or passively: I am loved. But it's difficult to speak in a way that is neither active nor passive, that is both active and passive: loving. Which is to say, it's difficult to speak with the world because either we're doing things to it or things are being done to us.
— Daniel Coffeen

6.
There’s no need to invoke the Beyond when talking about Dreyer. Neither God, nor master. Just soul, that’s all. A gospel of images, that’s all. That the images happen to be sharp, ultra-sharp, is a plus – a ‘bonus’, as people say these days. The essential thing in Dreyer (as in Fassbinder, the master of cinema after cinema, which obviously needs a master) is what he tells, not how he tells it. What he sings, if you like. Oh, you don't like, you want your short-order review of Ordet. And what does Ordet even mean? It means ‘the word’. And that means there is speech, and that this speech matters. Is that too complicated for you? Tough luck.
— Louis Skorecki

7.
The logic of artistic construction and esthetic appreciation is peculiarly significant because they exemplify in accentuated and purified form the control of selection of detail and of mode of relation, or integration, by a qualitative whole. The underlying quality demands certain distinctions, and the degree in which the demand is met confers upon the work of art that necessary or inevitable character which is its mark. Formal necessities, such as can be made explicit, depend upon the material necessity imposed by the pervasive and underlying quality. Artistic thought is not however unique in this respect but only shows an intensification of a characteristic of all thought. In a looser way, it is a characteristic of all nontechnical, non-"scientific" thought. Scientific thought is, in its turn, a specialized form of art, with its own qualitative control. The more formal and mathematical science becomes, the more it is controlled by sensitiveness to a special kind of qualitative considerations. Failure to realize the qualitative and artistic nature of formal scientific construction is due to two causes. One is conventional, the habit of associating art and esthetic appreciation with a few popularly recognized forms. The other cause is the fact that a student is so concerned with the mastery of symbolic or prepositional forms that he fails to recognize and to repeat the creative operations involved in their construction. Or, when they are mastered, he is more concerned with their further application than with realization of their intrinsic intellectual meaning.
— John Dewey

8.
My difficulty is only an — enormous — difficulty of expression.
— Wittgenstein

9.
Somebody go fetch me a preacher
So I can buy the rights...
I wanna love you!
— The Mighty Hannibal

10.
I’ve been dancing so long, I don't know. Maybe. I don't know, I’m not against the idea. Again, it’s like these guys in the play entering middle age. You say, well, what stopped me from this, and was it the other person, or was it in me? And I don’t have the full answer for that. I was never really settled in being an actor, what I wanted to really do in my mind was think, Okay, let me settle that first because then I’ll do this. Because if you get married and have kids you should shovel shit for them, you really should. When I was 25 or 35, "shoveling shit" in my parlance would mean doing really crappy movies, intentionally making crappy movies I didn't want to do. I mean, I had some that came out crappy, but it was never the ideal.
— Jason Patric

11.
We're going to turn this team around 360 degrees.
— Jason Kidd

12.
Sometimes it’s unfair, because of how strong I am.
— LeBron James

13.
The palm at the end of the mind,
Beyond the last thought, rises
In the bronze distance.

A gold-feathered bird
Sings in the palm, without human meaning,
Without human feeling, a foreign song.

You know then that it is not the reason
That makes us happy or unhappy.
The bird sings. Its feathers shine.

The palm stands on the edge of space.
The wind moves slowly in the branches.
The bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down.
— Wallace Stevens

14.
The bowl that emerged was one of those gifts whose first impact produces in the recipient's mind a colored image, a blazoned blur, reflecting with such emblematic force the sweet nature of the donor that the tangible attributes of the thing are dissolved, as it were, in this pure inner blaze, but suddenly and forever leap into brilliant being when praised by an outsider to whom the true glory of the object is unknown.
— Vladimir Nabokov

15.
Forgiving is never as easy as we would like. Apparently quite a lot of people cried.
— Karen Green

Viewing Log #73: Two of each please [2/7/11 - 2/14/11]

by Ryland Walker Knight

• Somewhere [Sofia Coppola, 2010] What a bonehead "third act." What a bonehead idea of significance in general. See, I wanted to like it and that's probably the problem. There's plenty to respect, like a female director's representation of sex, say, but, to be 100% unfair, this is no In The Cut. And there's this pride that gets in the way of Harris Savides phenomenal (that's the word) work and Elle Fanning's affectless though not flat performance (the word "natural" seems wrong, though it may be right) and the expert sound design. Granted, that sounds like it's coming from the really absurd and really sexist angle on Sofia that most critics take. But you don't have to announce your ideas in a Work Of Art to make your points. That was the thrill of the mess of Marie Antoinette: it really aimed for something beyond literalisms (not a word). You'll have to excuse me this seeming dismissal, ladies I love, but: maybe Sofia should make a documentary all about food. She gets parties great, sure, with all the haziness, but she also has a lot of good takes on food, where it's eaten and how it's made. Which is another way to say that my favorite scene was Cleo's preparation of the eggs benedict breakfast, as evidenced above.
  
  
• The Fighter [David O. Russell, 2010] # "Research" & "jokes"
  
  
• L'argent [Marcel L'Herbier, 1928] Wasn't as wowed as I'd hoped. Loved all the shadows but I couldn't suss a logic to all the ostentatious stylistics. And it felt lumpy. Though I don't doubt the producers hacked it up and cut what I would not, this movie would certainly benefit from some fat-trimming. Or at least some silent-movie-cliche-trimming. That is, there's way too many reaction shots. My favorite scene came in the second half, with Brigitte Helm entering Pierre Alcover's Saccard's privacy to needle his fears with a certain masochism that turns into fear past an unmarked threshold; the close-ups here make perfect sense and even add some deviant sexual charge, though also some misogyny, when we're honest with what this man (this director) expects of his subjects.
  
• Four Windows [Ry Russo-Young, 2011] Um. "Shorts. Fashion. Pretty. Vacant? You decide!"
  
• The curve of forgotten things [Paul Cole, 2011] You don't say. (Also via that pullquote queen; see link above.)
  
• High on Crack Street: Lost Lives in Lowell [Mary Ann DeLeo & Rich Farrell & John Alpert, 1995] Could only handle a half hour while sick in bed, but it made me rethink The Fighter to the extent that it's a movie out to serve reality at bottom but David O. Russell's out to serve an audience a good time, too, which complicates things. Watch here, via the cinetrix, who's maybe a little weirded out by all these links (don't know the lady!), but, well, I'm not; I'm just thankful.
  
  
• No Country For Old Men [Coens, 2007] # Okay, maybe this is some kind of masterpiece, over-determined though it may be. Danny wrote about the inheritors of Hitch in a dispatch from Rotterdam and I can't shake that association when watching "later Coens" movies. Every shot is so intentional, loaded with specific significance, that their beauty isn't strictly pictorial (don't you love the shadows throughout this thing?) but, ahem, semiotically, which carries over to the specificity of the language; that is, words carry another weight of meaning, adding a sonorous burden to these brutal procedings. (Always forget there's no score in this one, very Birds-like, and that makes the words crystalize.) Also, top notch action scenes, one after the other, that are more "thrilling" than "fun" because they're meant to be scary and they are quite scary. Plus, this has to be some of the finest work Roderick Jaynes has ever done. That lap dissolve from the coins on the carpet to Ed Tom's truck barreling towards Ellis's hut is one of my favorite transitions in the entire Coens corpus.

A conjunction of quotations #10

— edited by Ryland Walker Knight

— Jacob Langvad
1.
The attitude that nature is chaotic and that the artist puts order into it is a very absurd point of view, I think. All that we can hope for is to put some order into ourselves.
— Willem de Kooning

2.
Nature's above art in that respect. There's your press money. That fellow handles his bow like a crow-keeper. Draw me a clothier's yard. Look, look, a mouse! Peace, peace, this piece of toasted cheese will do't. There's my gauntlet. I'll prove it on a giant. Bring up the brown bills. O, well flown, bird; i' th' clout, i' th' clout — whew! Give the word.
...
They flattered me like a dog, and told me I had the white hairs in my beard ere the black ones were there. To say "ay" and "no" to everything that I said "ay" and "no" to was no good divinity. When the rain came to wet me once, and the wind to make me chatter, when the thunder would not peace at my bidding, there I found 'em, there I smelt 'em out. Go to, they are not men o' their words. They told me I was everything; 'this a lie, I am not ague-proof.
— Lear

3.
The divide between Heaven and Hell isn't a gulf of intellect but of sensibility. Detractors balk at the obstacles to comprehension; defenders prize the challenge and excitement of this same intractability. With the recent passing of Stan Brakhage, no other living film maker has so ceaselessly lived up to Pound's great battle cry: Make it new! That's the simple secret to the passion of those of us who love him.
— Nathan Lee

4.
    Fix. Colloquial in America for arrange, prepare, mend. The usage is well established. But bear in mind that this verb is from figere: "to make firm," "to place definitely." These are the preferred meanings of the word.
— Strunk & White

5.
Since the Photograph is pure contingency and can be nothing else (it is always something that is represented)—contrary to the text which, by the sudden action of a single word, can shift a sentence from description to reflection—it immediately yields up those "details" which constitute the very raw material of ethnological knowledge. When William Klein photographs "Mayday, 1959" in Moscow, he teaches me how Russians dress (which after all I don't know): I note a boy's big cloth cap, another's necktie, an old woman's scarf around her head, a youth's haircut, etc. I can enter still further into such details, observing that many of the men photographed by Nadar have long fingernails: an ethnographical question: how long were nails worn in a certain period? Photography can tell me this much better than painted portraits. It allows me to accede to an infra-knowledge; it supplies me with a collection of partial objects and can flatter a certain fetishism of mine: for this "me" which likes knowledge, which nourishes a kind of amorous preference for it. In the same way, I like certain biographical features which, in a writer's life, delight me as much as certain photographs; I have called these features "biographemes"; Photography has the same relation to History that the biographeme has to biography.
— Roland Barthes

6.
I may not cook the best tripe and onions in England, but whoever gets me won't have to worry about his plumbing.
— Cluny Brown

7.
And yet the fact remains that in the broad cultural mainstream of millennial America, men do not wear skirts. If you, the reader, are a US male, and even if you share my personal objections to pants and ream as I do of a cool and genitally unsquishy American Tomorrow, the odds are still 99.9 percent that in 100 percent of public situations you wear pants/slacks/shorts/trunks. More to the point, if you are a US male and also have a US male child, and if that child might happen to come to you one evening and announce his desire/intention to wear a skirt rather than pants to school the next day, I am 100 percent confident that you are going to discourage him from doing so. Strongly discourage him. You could be a Molotov-tossing anti-pants radical or a kilt manufacturer or Dr. Steven Pinker himself—you're going to stand over your kid and be prescriptive about an arbitrary, archaic, uncomfortable, and inconsequentially decorative piece of clothing. Why? Well, because in modern America any little bot who comes to school in a skirt (even, say, a modest all-season midi) is going to get stared at and shunned and beaten up and called a total geekoid by a whole lot of people whose approval and acceptance are important to him.* In our present culture, in other words, a boy who wears a skirt is "making a statement" that is going to have all kinds of gruesome social and emotional consequences for him.
____
* In the case of little Steve Pinker Jr., these people are the boy's peers and teachers and crossing guards. In the case of adult cross-dressers and drag queens who have jobs in the straight world and wear pants to those jobs, it's bosses and coworkers and customers and people on the subway. For the die-hard slob who nevertheless wears a coat and tie to work, it's mostly his boss, who doesn't want his employees' clothes to send clients "the wrong message." But it's all basically the same thing.
— David Foster Wallace

8.
Most women I know are reluctant to say, 'I am better than her, and her, and her - OK, I'll keep going.' And most men I know rely, when necessary, on some formulation of exactly that. Plus women have not only each other to compete against (in devious and exhausting ways, requiring much track-covering and nice-making as they go) but men to envy; because it's still the case that women writers are compared to each other, and the big (as opposed to, say, lyrical) literary novel persists as an essentially male category. Women's books are still not talked about in the same way men's books are, and women are still sensitive to that.
— Kathryn Chetkovich

9.
Go, dumb-born book,
Tell her that sang me once that song of Lawes:
Hadst thou but song
As thou hast subjects known,
Then were there cause in thee that should condone
Even my faults that heavy upon me lie,
And build her glories their longevity.

Tell her that sheds
Such treasure in the air,
Recking naught else but that her graces give
Life to the moment,
I would bid them live
As roses might, in magic amber laid,
Red overwrought with orange and all made
One substance and one colour
Braving time.

Tell her that goes
With song upon her lips
But sings not out the song, nor knows
The maker of it, some other mouth,
May be as fair as hers,
Might, in new ages, gain her worshippers,
When our two dusts with Waller's shall be laid,
Siftings on siftings in oblivion,
Till change hath broken down
All things save Beauty alone.
— Ezra Pound

10.
In short, representation may well become infinite; it nevertheless does not acquire the power to affirm either divergence or decentering. It requires a convergent and monocentric world: a world in which one is only apparently intoxicated, in which reason acts the drunkard and sings a Dionysian tune while none the less remaining 'pure' reason. The ground or sufficient reason is nothing but a means of allowing the identical to rule over infinity itself, and allowing the continuity of resemblance, the relation of analogy and the opposition of predicates to invade infinity. This is the originality of sufficient reason: better to ensure the subjection of difference to the quadripartite yoke. The damage is done not only by the requirement of finite representation, which consists of fixing a propitious moment for difference, neither too large nor too small, in between excess and default; but also by the apparently contrary requirement of infinite representation, which purports to integrate the infinitely large and the infinitely small of difference, excess and default themselves. The entire alternative between finite and infinite applies very badly to difference, because it constitutes only an antinomy of representation.
— Gilles Deleuze

11.
It was rather an opposite frame of mind in which Parmenides found his doctrine of being. On a certain day and in a certain frame of mind he tested his two interactive contradictories, whose mutual desire and hatred constitute the world and all coming-to-be. He tested the existent and the nonexistent, the positive and the negative properties-and suddenly he found that he could not get past the concept of a negative duality, the concept of non-existence. Can some-thing which is not be a quality? Or, more basically, can something which is not, be? For the only single form of knowledge which we trust immediately and absolutely and to deny which amounts to insanity is the tautology A = A. But just this tautological insight proclaims inexorably: What is not, is not. What is, is. And suddently Parmenides felt a monstrous logical sin burdening his whole previous life. Had he not light-heartedly always assumed that there are such things as negative qualities, nonexistent entities, that, in other words, A is not A? But only total perversity of thinking could have done so. To be sure, he reflected, the great mass of people had always made the same perverse judgment; he had merely participated in a universal crime against logic. But the same moment that shows him his crime illuminates him with a glorious discovery. He has found a principle, the key to the cosmic secret, remote from all human illusion. Now, grasping the firm and awful hand of tautological truth about being, he can climb down, into the abyss of all things.
— Nietzsche

12.
To read is to dream, guided by someone else's hand. To read carelessly and distractedly is to let go of that hand. To be only superficially learned is the best way to read well and be profound.
— Pessoa

13.
As the above examples demonstrate, Muriel is cluttered with emblems of itself and its operations. In fact, absolutely everything in the film comes to stand as potential emblem, and Muriel forever runs the risk of seeming utterly overdetermined, an airless and rather literary conceit in which themes and images are forever reflecting back to a central premise. What saves the film from this and sets up its unique tension is its parallel urge to dispersal and expansion—an apparently insatiable and obviously impossible desire to include more and more detail, to record every nook and vantage of the city and to represent the full continuum of the lives of its characters through seemingly random selection, including a fair proportion of the apparently unmarked and "in-between" moments of daily life.
— B. Kite

14.
And I been 'fessing double fast
Addressing questions nobody asked
I'll get this joy off of my chest at last
And I will love you 'til the noise has long since passed

And I did not mean to shout, just drive
Just get us out, dead or alive
A road too long to mention, lord, it's something to see!
Laid down by the good intentions paving company

All the way to the thing we've been playing at, darlin'
I can see that you're wearing your staying hat, darlin'
For the time being all is well
Won't you love me a spell?

This is blindness beyond all conceiving
Well, behind us the road is leaving, yeah, leaving
And falling back
Like a rope gone slack

Well, I saw straight away that the lay was steep
But I fell for you, honey, as easy as falling asleep
And that right there is the course I keep...
— Joanna Newsom

15.
Love has got to stop somewhere short of suicide.
— Sam Dodsworth

A conjunction of quotations #9

— edited by Ryland Walker Knight

— William Gale Gedney

1.
I believe in me. I’m a little screwed up but I’m beautiful.
— Steve McQueen

2.
As he stood in the darkness outside the church these memories came back with the poignancy of vanished things. Watching Mattie whirl down the floor from hand to hand he wondered how he could ever have thought his dull talk interested her. To him, who was never gay but in her presence, her gaiety seemed plain proof of indifference. The face she lifted to her dancers was the same which, when she saw him, always looked like a window that has caught the sunset. He even noticed two or three gestures which, in his fatuity, he had thought she kept for him: a way of throwing her head back when she was amused, as if to taste her laugh before she let it out, and a trick of sinking her lids slowly when anything charmed or moved her.
— Edith Wharton

3.
[Hats] can be great fun. And it is true that they can put a woman in a good mood. Anyone who laughs at this fact just knows nothing about the finer points of woman’s capacity for survival.
— Marlene Dietrich

4.
In the quotation that both slaves and chastises, language proves the matrix of justice. It summons the word by its name, wrenches it destructively from its context, but precisely thereby calls it back to its origin. It appears, now with rhyme and reason, sonorously, congruously in the structure of a new text. As rhyme it gathers the similar into its aura; as name it stands alone and expressionless. In quotation the two realms—of origin and destruction—justify themselves before language. And conversely, only where they interpenetrate—in quotation—is language consummated.
— Walter Benjamin

5.
Remember Barbara
It was raining nonstop in Brest that day
and you walked smiling
artless delighted dripping wet
in the rain
Remember Barbara
It was raining nonstop in Brest
and I saw you on rue de Siam
You were smiling
and I smiled too
Remember Barbara
You whom I did not know
You who did not know me
Remember
Remember that day all the same
Don't forget
A man was sheltering under a porch
and he called your name
Barbara
and you ran toward him in the rain
Dripping water delighted artless
and you threw yourself in his arms
Remember that Barbara
and don't be angry if I talk to you
I talk to all those I love
even if I've seen them only once
I talk to all those who love
even if I don't know them
Remember Barbara
Don't forget
that wise happy rain
on your happy face
in that happy town
That rain on the sea
on the arsenal
on the boat from Ouessant
Oh Barbara
What an idiot war
What has happened to you now
In this rain of iron
of fire of steel of blood
and the one who held you tight in his arms
lovingly
is he dead vanished or maybe still alive
Oh Barbara
It is raining nonstop in Brest
as it rained before
But it's not the same and everything is ruined
It's a rain of mourning terrible and desolate
It's not even a storm any more
of iron of steel of blood
Just simply clouds
that die like dogs
Dogs that disappear
along the water in Brest
and are going to rot far away
far far away from Brest
where there is nothing left.
— Jacques Prevert

6.
The basic things you've learned stay the same. The world is right there in front of you in more or less dreamlike incarnations: moving water; tall buildings; ridiculous pain; voices singing; people to love. Your job is to imagine yourself in it. When it rains, You rain. When the birds fly, they fly inside of You.
— Ben Polk

7.
It looks like high time baby
to stop our lovin' nickel dime
We're in the high times baby
Where words are lost and tempest tossed in lemon lime.
When times and places effervesce
In words of wonder from down under
I'm no less. I'm fine. It's my time.
— Van Dyke Parks

8
No. [I don't feel like audiences are ever really in danger watching a film.] That's the problem with movies, and that's the problem with watching too many of them. It's not ultimately a suitable substitute for life. You can get a lot out of it—I've spent a lot of time with movies, and I love it. But I think it can warp your perception a little bit.
— Andrew Bujalski

9.
Because when you do a film, it's generally five, six or seven weeks at the most. We had the ambition to do it for a year and a half, and that changes a lot of things and we were not in the same state of mind... When you spend a year and half with the film, you are just there and life is much more together. You have lots of other things. You have people who are born, people who die and seasons change. So the film becomes, really, almost organic. You don't really think about the film. Or you think about the film and life at the same time. So it's good. It's because it brings down the importance of cinema. The balance is more correct, I think. In what you live, that a film should not be the main thing in your life. Perhaps it's one of the things. It's your work. It's like the guy in the office, or the guy who makes food, or the guy who makes shoes. They do it everyday, from 9-7. It should be the same thing... It's like the idea of trying to make it all your life, because I like it, it's what I chose, and make it day to day, everyday... And with this small budget crew and in this place where people are very generous.
— Pedro Costa

10.
Anything that gives us room and allows us to do something gives us a possibility, that is, it gives what enables us. "Possibility" so understood, as what enables, means something else and something more than mere opportunity.
— Martin Heidegger

11.
But I don't wish that I was dead
A very old friend of mine once said
That either way you look at it you have your fits
I have my fits but feeling is good
Confusions not a kiddney stone in my brain
But if we're miscommunicating do we feel the same?
Then either way you look at it you have your fits
I have my fits but feeling is good
— Animal Collective

12.
I go down to the river
Filled with regret
I go down and I wonder
If there was any reason left
I left just before my lungs could get wet
I'm lonely, but I ain't that lonely yet
— The White Stripes

13.
There’s a great deal that’s bad about having a body. If this is not so obviously true that no one needs examples, we can just quickly mention pain, sores, odors, nausea, aging, gravity, sepsis, clumsiness, illness, limits—every last schism between our physical wills and our actual capacities. Can anyone doubt we need help being reconciled? Crave it? It’s your body that dies, after all.

There are wonderful things about having a body, too, obviously—it’s just that these things are much harder to feel and appreciate in real time. Rather like certain kinds of rare, peak-type sensuous epiphanies (“I’m so glad I have eyes to see this sunrise!” etc.), great athletes seem to catalyze our awareness of how glorious it is to touch and perceive, move through space, interact with matter. Granted, what great athletes can do with their bodies are things that the rest of us can only dream of. But these dreams are important—they make up for a lot.
— David Foster Wallace

14.
After all, a girl is…well, a girl. It’s nice to be told you’re successful at it.
— Rita Hayworth

15.
Under that sky find a spread of strange when
you look down on our ochre'd earth holding
the splay in the eye, yielding at my
golden main. Sit, please, on the lip to name
a fawn or see hosts scorch a gorge brown, full
of flowers curled to dirt. A storm of her
decomposing trees is just soot at rest.

The whole whorl wave of blue thunder goads mothers
behind screens. Dads, though, can't fight it, can't save
cellmates from walls: walls and tall trees, poles, beams—
—bars, at bottom, only proxies hacksaw.

—Hard to say, he says, when the clouds light up!
—Heard her playing, she says, over that hill.
—Grass. He shook his head, letting a fistful
fall on her knees. Who knew? Who knew, Blue? You?
She just laughed. They fell facing their faces,
their teeth telling yellow on the green's twill
mat getting matted more matted. Then the
girl, with a bounce, crested a new, left lawn.
— Ryland Walker Knight

Our City Our Words: Emerson + Philadelphia, or the helpmeet

by Ryland Walker Knight

—Character teaches above our wills
The moral crisis or question highlighted in this week's scenes (chapters, texts) is humility, or learning to be humble, in the face of one's world-life-lover. Put otherwise, at all events these passages enact a humbling, or shaming, as equally as they name such instances so. But Cavell does not argue that we need feel shamed by the genius of another, or our helpmeet, over and over; rather, the shaming scene inspires further communion, deeper conversation. That is, the conversation we enjoy with our respective others, whether in private with a lover or in private with a friend (sometimes the same thing) or in public with either, will be refreshed. There's never a tabula rasa but there is this renewal. (It should be clear I am more talking along the lines of the film under our noses, this Philadelphia Story, and Cavell's coined remarriage comedies, rather than attacking Emerson to start. I think this reversal may make sense as we gambol forth—this is a film blog after all, or before all.) In fact, erasure is exactly the opposite aim of these scenes of humbling. In The Philadelphia Story, the aim is explicitly exposure: Cary Grant's majestic C.K. Dexter Haven tells Katherine Hepburn's imperious Tracy Lord "to get those eyes open." Open, as Cavell puts it, to the fact that Tracy "does not desire what she protests to desire" (42). Here we are to understand perfectionism not just (not ever?) as "Self-Reliance" but also as "self-recognition"—and that such will only ever be instigated by one's interaction with the other. The trick is then to find another who not only inspires such alerts to acknowledgment (instead of aversion) but does it with a sense of humor, one whose sense of you is helpful and, cross your fingers, fun and funny.

We're dealing with a comedy, here, so the helpmeet is necessarily a comic figure. The helpmeet is a friend (that friend) that reflects what we've forgotten or clouded with a grin. Granted, not every helpmeet will wind up a Cary Grant. Not everybody can beam and wink like that guy. These are idols on the screen, not shadows, products of a star system. There is more about Cary Grant in particular in Pursuits of Happiness ("what becomes of this mortal on film?"), and there is more about Katherine Hepburn here, including an aside to acknowledge her "garçonne" quality, which was made explicit in her first onscreen interaction with Grant in Scarlett Sylvia (a not-quite film) wherein she plays a girl dressing/posing as a boy. The focus on Hepburn is apt since the moral crisis of humility is hers to bear throughout The Philadelphia Story. It's up to her to recognize her helpmeet, her Dext, in the noontime bright of day. It's up to her to find a way to feel "like a human, like a human being," as she tells her father before her remarriage. This
perfectionism, like writing, is a personal action/activity and choice.

This notion of the personal, or where we draw that line in praxis, gets at something Cavell spells out later in this book about the audience of philosophy, which I included in the last Conjunction, no.8: in a chapter about Plato, Cavell reiterates his claim "that the only audience of philosophy is one performing it" (331). It's pithy, but huge. In fact, it's been driving a lot of my own curiosities of late. How much am I writing (to say participating in a philosophical and/or critical conversation) strictly with myself? —Far too often, I scare myself. Yet, clearly, a good number of you are willing to arrogate to me and my troubles with words and images. (This is eternally flattering.) This preoccupation with my perhaps-indulgent investment in my own work also seems a marker of my current moods, which Emerson famously says do not believe in each other, during this new era I inhabit; an era that amounts to a terrifically and, I'm understanding, excitingly transitional time in my life. Trust: there's plenty of humility over here.

But to speak of myself isn't simply to speak of myself. It's an invitation, of course, to share my experience and somehow bridge our mutual skepticism of one another's minds. That is, it's a way to get at a universal language. And of course it fails. However, such failure is telling, another instance of education we'd do well to hear and heed.

The idea of "character" in Emerson always (so far as I recall) refers simultaneously to something about the worth and stamp of an individual's (or human group's) difference from others and to the physical traces of writing (or expression more generally). So "Character teaches above our wills" means simultaneously that writing conveys meaning beyond our intention, and quite generally that we express in every gesture more than our will accomplishes or recognizes. (33)

One of the sticking points for our Tracy in The Philadelphia Story is precisely her character. The film investigates her evaluation of her own character, which evolves, prompted by others' evaluation of her character, which, this being a comedy with a satisfying remarriage ending, evolves in its own right. Tracy goes from a series of "dressing downs" (Cavell's characterization of the scenes)—at the words of her ex husband, C.K. Dexter Haven, and subsequently of her father, Seth Lord—to a finale where Dext tells her he'll "risk it" (the remarriage, her new self-regard with those eyes now opened) and where, after she proclaims herself a human after all, her father tells her he feels "proud" (of her, of her changes, of her remarriage, we might say of this entire event, this life).

—How? Well, as I said above, it's a process of exposure. The entire film, as predicted by Tracy's little sister, Dinah, is an annulment of its proposed marriage in favor of another, truer union. It's getting Tracy to not just open her eyes but open them on her life and her true desires. That is to say this perfectionist bent is a process of making oneself intelligible both to others and to one's self. Evaluation, here, is premised on a certain pragmatism, not positives and negatives; i.e., what works. And it is work. The joy of The Philadelphia Story is how little work Cary Grant's Haven seems to do, though, as his non-rival George (Tracy's nominal fiancé) says, it certainly seems like he has a hand in every bit. Again, this majestic hands-off quality is a bigger part of Pursuits of Happiness's chapter on the film. But I would like to propose something that Cities of Words does not (or only alludes to) in this chapter: that C.K. Dexter Haven is a Socratic figure. His actions are largely pushing back words, posing questions. His "dressing down" of Tracy is not just scolding her back for being a scold but showing her scold to be such, to be exactly opposite of their purpose together—to help each other. That is, they reach a place where they equally regard one another as their helpmeet. That's Haven's magic: he offers a safety net, in a sense, as his name can signify, simply by reminding her that she's open with him for a reason. She brings her confession to him, not George, and her humility of imagined transgressions with Mike (the herein under-appreciated Jimmy Stewart) from the night before is proof he is not the one for her. Only Dext sits there, half-lit in the car, to tell her she's beautiful; she only hears him; and it's tribute to Hepburn that we see this at that moment. Her character, as an actress, is without reproach, a true equal for Grant, as it should be. For that's part of the satisfaction of many of these remarriage comedies: to see two beautiful people fulfill one another's promise of a life left open to what lies ahead. Who doesn't want that?

—e.g., look at their clothes
[You will no doubt excuse my tardiness with this post, I trust, as you will no doubt understand that obligations such as employment, a dog and some involved dinners both accompanied and alone (to say nothing of headaches) got in the way of its final composition. However, given the toll that Lost seems to take (though, truth be told, I'm doing my best to spend no more than a half-hour on those bits of folly), I think it might prove beneficial to me if we agree to convene for Cavell on Fridays such as today.]

[Next week: Locke + Adam's Rib, or consent]

Our City Our Words: Calling all corners

by Ryland Walker Knight

—Get your own copy all beat up
Here's a final reminder and syllabus, of sorts, or at the very least a notice, about my proposed group reading of Stanley Cavell's Cities of Words. I expect the weekly series to be a Thursday feature and, given the roll out these daze at home base, these posts will largely sit atop the vertical all weekend until the viewing log Sunday night. That gives us plenty of time to trade some ideas, if you decide to play this game with me. This will also, I hope, attract eyes away from the weekly Lost posts I plan to take on, though I'm not sure if they'll be recaps or idea strings or images grabbed off the television or what; chances are it'll be a goof, like the show, and, like anything on this blog, it'll just be designed to make me laugh. But that's not why we're here, in this post, today.

Today I'd like to talk Cavell, having re-read the preface and the introduction, as my own preface/introduction to why I chose this book and why I chose it now. My favorite beginning begins so: reading Cavell makes me feel good; plain and simple, as I tumble through his sentences, I can feel my face widen. Of course, it's never so plain nor so simple as that. There's a lot loaded into this pleasure. At this stage in the game, my mind is directed towards this text through too many lenses to filter in words without wasting everybody's time. But, largely, I'll say that though plenty of this pleasure is at the level of the prose, sure, it's the very idea of such writing that gets me going; the audacity, what Cavell might call the arrogance, of philosophy and its aim to speak for so much, so many, is never just "admirable" in its seriousness but hilarious in its ludicrousness. (Bloggers are a joke for a reason, but it should be admitted, as ever with human expression, some blog corners do yield fruitful thoughts.) Cavell, however, doesn't pitch modest to counteract any of that; nor does he pitch pompous. Rather, as a thinker invested in thinking about talking, about conversation, his words are largely conversational. Thus they meander, ambling around ideas as much as burrowing into them—but over all we get the sense that Cavell has covered every inch of an idea, explored the entire plot of it, or at least been curious enough to scour around as long as he can.

Philosophy can be easily debased, as Cavell argues, as the indulgence of idle minds prone as they are to returning to a text or to an idea. And, no doubt, it takes a certain life to support such a style, such a mode—such a pursuit. I, for one, understand that despite any complaints I may harbor (what twenty-something doesn't gripe? who hasn't been shit on at least once?), I lead a charmed life. I'm never hungry and I live in a world class metropolis. I work every day, I walk a dog every day, I have the luxury of a spice rack, I even find time to blog. (That is, I make the time.) And here I am, making time to go over a book I've already read at least twice all the way through not to mention any stray dips into its trough since 2007. Because I can, yes, but also because I think it will help me with a number of thoughts about things I love to think about, and need to rethink, here and now. I'm terrifically flattered that some of you readers out there are, indeed, planning on joining me as I go through these ideas in public. Put otherwise, I look forward to learning things from you, and about you, as this silly some-kind-of syllabus progresses. However, despite my interest in philosophy's therapeutic angle, I'll try not to bore you all too-too much with me. There's plenty of particulars in the text, and in the films.

—First up, her. And them.
For instance, now it should be no secret where I got the inspiration for my A Conjunction of Quotation series. I adore the idea of an epigram mix tape as imagined by Cavell here. I'm sure others have told similar stories elsewhere, but I first saw this construct here (and in the opening to Pursuits of Happiness). I just hope my attempts don't belittle the form; I certainly don't propose to claim it for my own.

For another, the exploration of "perfectionism" gets at the heart of this project: I'm not trying to master the text by any stretch. Rather, I'm just trying to understand it better. And I want to do that because I think it will help me live better. I want to answer the voices of my mind with more than a shrug or a to-do list; I hear their call of disappointment just like anybody else; I know I can find my words and actions with less head and heart aches. What's most curious about a project such as this, or such as a classroom, is located precisely in Cavell's first epigram from Emerson: "I know the world I converse with in the cities is not the world I think." Because what does calling for fellow autodidact "pedants" to join my pastime mean but an attempt to bridge, possibly even erase, that gap? (Related, broader: what's this impulse to blog? We all have a voice, and a life. Is it refuge? Or is it passion? Fuck shame: I will cop to both.) This idea starts another line of thought, though, which we will undoubtedly return to as we move forward with Cavell: skepticism, other minds, and how transparent can or should we be or get?

This line is the focus of The Claim of Reason, which was culled from Cavell's dissertation. One of the problems you might encounter reading Cities of Words, if this is your first Cavell, is that it's almost a summation book. Everything is bound up in his long life of thought. It reads richer the more you read by him. However, that should not dissuade you. His sentences may frustrate you from time to time and it may be easy to tune out and let your mind wander but every now and again I guarantee there will be a sentence that drops your jaw with its insightful redescription of an event in a film, or a line of a text. So, as he says/writes, read fast and slow and hopefully you'll have some fun with it. After all, for any selfish reasons behind a blog such as mine, and a project such as this, the guiding impetus is to inspire further curiosity. I hope you seek out the films, and the book, and other books that have inspired this effort at charity (on my part, on Cavell's part, on your part). Put otherwise, let's build something big. You know, expand our horizons. You know, for fun.

If you have already read the introduction, feel free to drop any ideas you have looking ahead in the comments. I'll be more than happy to trade topics. If not, no biggie! I'll see you back here next Thursday, the 4th, to continue this conversation. Until then, try to get outside.

Veiled in movie-blood red.

by Ryland Walker Knight

Despite a plethora of scintillating and smart pre-release reviews from a number of friends, I wrote a little something about Inglourious Basterds for Danny over at The Auteurs Notebook after I saw it Friday night. Today, you can click here to read it. It's a pretty damned insane movie, ballsy and self-immolating and, it seems to me, very personal. I didn't touch on this in the review, but somehow this stretched canvass feels even more personal than Kill Bill, though it springs from similar source: QT loves his women. More specifically, he gives Mélanie Laurent one of the most romantic moments of his career, kissing her black lover (Jacky Ido) goodbye; likewise, Ido's cigarette flick farewell is surprisingly tender. Also worth noting here is that I'm as tired as anybody of the "everything is cinema" refrain, but, if you start there (not end there), you can see that there's a bigger argument at play. It just helps that cinema is a perfect venue to talk about the things Tarantino is obsessed with: women, identity, action, the illusion of agency, the cost violence can rack up on a soul (or not), feet, performance, language and color. I really wanted to see the picture again before writing about it (I may go tomorrow), but it was fun to jam on it and bust out some quick reactions. I hope you like it, too.

Some reviews I dig: After Hoberman's mini gauntlet in the Voice, Karina Longworth's reappraisal at Spout, Koresky's enthused Reverse Shot piece, Eileen Jones' halfway there golf clap at Exiled Online, Manohla Dargis' three-quarter counter case in The Times, Walter Chaw's rapture at Film Freak Central, and a couple by Glenn: first and second. Also, in case you loved that Bowie interlude, too, give it a listen over here.

Saturday School: The Class Structure, or, Procedures of Breaking Down.

by Mark Haslam

It's strange—yet strangely on—to call Laurence Cantet's Entre les murs (The Class) a procedural. Strange mostly because it envisions teaching as improvisation, as precisely those moments when structure and procudure break down. Here, at communication's end, communication can (it hopes) begin.
...
We enter the class through its teacher, François Marin (played by François Bégaudeau, who lived and wrote the book on which the film is based). The camera follows him into the school, maneuvering the halls, picking up movement as profs set up their classrooms: one body bumps into another, darts through a doorway; a table is hoisted up and out of a room. It's exciting, excited, and anticipatory. Of course, much of this has to do with the fact that the kids've yet to arrive.

With the ringing of the first bell, movement/expectation shifts—to the students, yes, but, more importantly (and we can also say, as a result)—to language. The film is constructed around language and its potential to be played. So it's only fitting that the class we attend is a French class. Here, as in our English classes in America, kids are tought to deal with 'proper' language 'properly'. This, as an initial situation, results in tension—a tension immanent to power structures, where the idea of there being a way comes up against multiple, other ways. In The Class, in any class, really, the struggle which emerges from this tension is linguistic. (When Cantet, in an interview with Phillipe Mangeot, refers to a particular “scene where [François] answers that the difference between written and spoken language is a question of intuition,” we should perhaps hear the final word also as institution.) When M. Marin first introduces himself to the class, for example, the students instantly set to punning off of his name, beginning the language game that propells the film.

The teacher, however, plays the game with a disadvantage. He's isolated: spatially, for one—which allows, here, an occassional note to be passed, there, a stifled snicker, whisper, etc.—and second, bound by institution, socially—the constant evolution of language results in “lacunae,” as Bégaudeau calls them, ever opening between student and teacher. Yet François does not take the institution's approach to the emergence of these lacunae. He neither quells nor ignores them as threats to system, but recognizes, pursues, and actively engages their emergence.

Teaching is a navigation of the lacunae and the two bordering spaces. The pursuit of gaps in light of system's failure.
...
A scene's inception: a lesson plan, a question.

Follow the gazes: they cross, but don't ever really meet; they branch (but from where?). There's something chaotic about their pattern, as lines in a Bunimovich Stadium. “[A] school is sometimes very chaotic,” Cantet notes, “useless to cover its face, there are moments of discouragement but also moments of grace, immense happiness. And from this great chaos, a lot of intelligence can be born.” Existing between the walls, a bounce and redirection occurs over and again. The lesson plan proposes a direction. Its desire is to impart direction itself. Each gaze, in turn, proposes its own direction, or rather, holds the potential for a shift. With a question, the potential is realized; chaos emerges in/as language.

Cantet's process mirrors these gazes: “...what we planned to do would require three cameras: a first, always on the teacher; a second, on the student at the center of the scene, and a third prepared for digressions....”

Each camera, which together compose The Camera, entail both a structure and its unraveling. One eye trained on matters at hand; the other, rolling and wandering as if of glass. Entre les murs builds itself out of its own disregard. Through these cameras, seeing becomes a component of chaos, but also forms chaos into a pattern. When François pursues the students tangents and diversions, it's to make them no longer tangents and diversions. It's to make chaos the thing. He acknowledges a certain flow and flux within (the, this, any) class: the moments before the Big Bang, approaching phase transition, before a something emerged. The scenes that result from transitions aren't a part of any narrative, rather they're (linguistic) events. Parts composing a whole—individual acts of creation and resistance. Random, no doubt—like the appearance of language itself from sound and tone. But taken together they form, even in breaking from system, their own structure. The structure of a game, but nobody wins out. Nobody can, but nobody needs to.
...
So, yeah, structure must be set aside. Teaching must fail in order to continue. Okay. But Entre les murs isn't Dead Poets Society. Nor is it Half Nelson or Finding Forester or whatever. It doesn't want anything to do with life lessons and breaking from tradition and inspiring those poor, underpriveledged kids. Every moment of success is followed by a moment of failure: As soon as the class's official troublemaker, Souleyman, displays a moment of brilliance, or at least a moment of hope...a different incident leads to expulsion proceedings. Teaching's limits frame each image—are, in fact, often conflated with its successes. The film doesn't demystify the profession; it just approaches it without illusions. It documents, in other words. Here, finally, we see it as a procedural. A real desire to show everything about teaching emerges at the center. And though words like “real” or “accurate” may cause some cheeks to blush, I want to use them.

But, then, the reality of a school is performance. To be a teacher, to be a student (in middle-school, no less, where masks are the most colorful and the most varied) is to act. So, really, it's not hard to believe that the teachers and students in the film aren't actors, but are teachers and students—mostly because, well, they're so believable. Improvisation is what their stations already require of them. The film's desire to document, to unfold procedures, reveals this theater. School, sure, but more: “a sounding board, a microcosm of the world...”
...
The film ends with images of the empty classroom. Sounds from outside, where life continues to an impossible order, sift through the windows. Desks remain, but disarrayed—remnants of chaos in pieces of institution. And the cameras which documented the students? The year's procedures and performances having ended, they're just rolling. Or are they waiting? Is this perhaps not a winding down, but a gearing up again? The shouts and screams coming in from beyond are language before language, and so the potential remains between the walls—a space neither in nor out, but within the gaps that emerge between here and there, where chaos, which is seeing, becomes the lesson.

This is where learning happens.

[The Class opened at The Smith Rafael yesterday after limited runs in New York and Los Angeles. Sony plans to roll out the film further as it has been nominated for Best Foreign Film in this year's Oscars. Check your local listings. Learn something.]