Monthly Archives: October 2009

Peter Greenaway: From “The Falls”

Erhaus Bewler Falluper Whilst acknowledging his output, Falluper’s detractors accused him of manufacturing fictions and deliberately confusing identities. He was also accused of not knowing the difference between a good joke and a bad one. Falluper’s supporters were certain that these accusations were often true, but they believed that Falluper’s half-fictions were effervescent by-products of [...]

30 October 2009, 21:50 Comments (1)

Cesar Aira’s Bad Writing

I don’t usually write about bad books because there’s little point to it, even if they’re popular. (This is why you don’t see me complaining about such important contemporary writers like M_______ or F_______ or L________.) But sometimes I read a book where the badness is illustrative or at least interesting, and Aira’s Ghosts is [...]

26 October 2009, 22:24 Comments (9)

Bernhard on Heidegger

And speaking of Heidegger, here is the much less subtle Thomas Bernhard on him, from the always amusing Old Masters: I always visualize him sitting on his wooden bench outside his Black Forest house, alongside his wife who, with her perverse knitting enthusiasm, ceaselessly knits winter socks for him from the wool she has shorn [...]

26 October 2009, 00:14 Comments (1)

Blumenberg and Husserl

Durkheim (not that one) wrote about my account of Blumenberg: I think that Blumenberg is much more positive about the modern age than you suggest. Indeed, one might even compare his remarks on science – particularly its institutionalisation of method – with those of Popper. Popper of course would have no time for myth, but [...]

24 October 2009, 23:20 Comments (1)

Teshigahara and Kobo Abe: The Man Without a Map

That is the opening to Hiroshi Teshigahara’s The Man Without a Map, better known in its English novel translation as The Ruined Map. The amazing cutup music is by Toru Takemitsu. It’s the final of four collaborations between Teshigahara and novelist/screenwriter Kobo Abe, who also produced the gorgeous The Woman in the Dunes and the [...]

18 October 2009, 19:14 Comments (3)

Robert Musil: Black Magic

I’ve quoted from it before, but it’s always worthy. Life is living: you cannot describe it to someone who does not know it. It is friendship and enmity, enthusiasm and disenchantment, peristalsis and ideology. Thinking has, among other functions, to establish an intellectual order in life. As well as to destroy that order. Every concept [...]

16 October 2009, 09:35 Comments (1)

Satie

“Je suis venu au monde tres jeune dans un temps tres vieux,” he famously said, and today I feel just about the opposite.

15 October 2009, 10:25 Comments (3)

John Williams: Augustus

Williams wrote the serious, affecting academic novel Stoner before he wrote this (mostly) epistolary novel about Augustus Caesar. Despite Williams’ protestations that both novels are concerned with power, the poor academic Stoner had no power while the characters in this one have nothing but. Augustus himself does not speak until the short, final section. The [...]

3 October 2009, 14:07 Comments (0)