Recent notes

8/18
“Leerheit mit Munterkeit” — attempted un-translation of x quoting Müller quoting Brecht… His comments that the Giacometti room at the Pompidou was a “temple of deep-breathing” where one could escape from the “emptiness with alacrity” of bourgeois society.

Müller:
"What counts is the example, death means nothing."
"Optimismus ist nur ein Mangel an Information"

Brecht’s definition of the special nature of the book-- “Die geheiligte Ware Buch”, a sacred commodity
Beckett quoted by Unseld:”I have the feeling that there is nothing to express, nothing with which one could express it. No force of expression either, no desire to express anything along with the obligation to express it.”

8/19
Where in the world does wisdom reign over vanity?
How is it possible that music and movies have become so, so bad?

8/29
Ponge: Monde muet, ma seule patrie. Silent world, my only fatherland.

“In die Natur hinauszugehen ist das Höchste.”

K. Bayer:
“Meine Damen und Herren, verehrte Anwesende, lieber Herr Präsident.
Rauchen verboten.”

8/30
Kolleritsch’s dissertation: “Eigentlichkeit und Uneigentlichkeit in der Philosophie Martin Heideggers”

9/4
John Ford: “He always had music played on the set and would routinely break for tea (Earl Grey) at mid-afternoon every day during filming. He discouraged chatter and disliked bad language on set; its use—especially in front of a woman—would typically result in the offender being thrown off the production. He rarely drank during the making of a film, but when a production wrapped he would often lock himself in his study, wrapped only in a sheet, and go on a solitary drinking binge for several days, followed by routine contrition and a vow never to drink again.”

“One famous event, witnessed by Ford's friend actor Frank Baker, strikingly illustrates the tension between the public persona and the private man. During the Depression, Ford—by then a very wealthy man—was accosted outside his office by a former Universal actor who was destitute and needed $200 for an operation for his wife. As the man related his misfortunes, Ford appeared to become enraged and then, to the horror of onlookers, he launched himself at the man, knocked him to the floor and shouted "How dare you come here like this? Who do think you are to talk to me this way?" before storming out of the room. However, as the shaken old man left the building, Frank Baker saw Ford's business manager Fred Totman meet him at the door, where he handed the man a cheque for $1,000 and instructed Ford's chauffeur to drive him home. There, an ambulance was waiting to take the man's wife to the hospital where a specialist, flown in from San Francisco at Ford's expense, performed the operation. Some time later, Ford purchased a house for the couple and pensioned them for life. When Baker related the story to Francis Ford, he declared it the key to his brother's personality.”

O. Wiener:
"die welt ein sirup aus der sprache unsrer väter"

9/13 
Proust: “I do my intellectual work within myself, and once with other people, it's more or less irrelevant to me that they're intelligent, as long as they are kind, sincere, etc."

9/17
Debord, Panegyrique:  “It is understood that all this has left me very little time for writing, and that is exactly as it should be: writing should remain a rare thing, since one must have drunk for a long time before finding excellence.”
“‘Beautiful as the trembling of the hands in alcoholism,’ said Lautréamont. There are mornings that are stirring but difficult.”

11/8
Maybe now that I’m thirty everyone will finally leave me the hell alone.
Progression: from demand for true name, to realization that every name is false.
Being successful means being able to not give a damn what anyone else thinks about you.
"Oh, the fault’s in me, yes."

from Pierre Étaix, Le Soupirant (1962)

Cosas

First off, a stunning bit of ignorant, self-absorbed buffoonery from the master of such things, Bernard-Henri Lévy. In an aggravatingly uncritical article by Benjamin Wallace-Wells about his role in the Libyan intervention in New York magazine, BHL drops this clanger attempting to explain his aggressive defence of Dominique Strauss-Kahn after his arrest:

One day in Paris, when we are sitting in the lobby bar of the Right Bank five-star Hotel le Bristol, I ask Lévy what had motivated this response. “Principle,” he says, gravely. “Principle.” I ask what the principle was. He sighs. “Class justice,” he says. “Twenty years ago, class justice was to be gentle with the rich and terrible with the poor. This was a problem. When you are a rich man, you can escape justice. When you are a poor man, stealing a fruit—how do you say, a ­pomme?—you went to jail. Today there is a reversal of the process. You have a lot of people who, if you are rich, powerful, and white, do not care if you are guilty or not guilty—you are guilty by principle. It is exactly the same but reversed. And for me, I cannot, I cannot—it is as unbearable as the other one.” 

First off, if BHL really thinks that the situation has been reversed in the last twenty years, that rich people no longer escape justice, and poor people no longer go to jail for stealing apples, he deserves to be deprived of the power of speech. Is this really what European pseudo-leftist neoliberals believe, that twenty years of their own tireless political posturing has successfully solved the problems of "class justice" to such an extent that things have gone too far, necessitating a movement of class justice in defense of the rich? If this really is his view of "class justice," we should consider it terrifying that his dysfunctional moral compass is allowed to exert such an influence on public discourse.
This is also exactly what Brecht was thinking about in his comments on Grosz that I quoted earlier, where he speaks of the common tendency shared by himself and Grosz to more readily forgive injustice perpetuated by the proletariat rather than by the bourgeoisie. BHL shows his roots here: his inability or unwillingness to transcend his own privileged economic position, to see the full social schematic that is class relations. We see here only the myopia of contemporary humanitarian discourse, a misguided faith in the rights of the individual, regardless of class or social situation. This course of thinking serves and has always served to cloak an underlying ideology in defense of capital.
___________

Secondly, some wisdom from Fidel Castro, one of the few to be honest regarding yesterday's national holiday:

"The dreams of Martin Luther King Jr. are thousands of light years further away than the nearest inhabitable planet."

He also bemoans the inability of today's technological advances to solve the most pressing problems:

"Is it not obvious that the worst of all is the absence in the White House of a robot capable of governing the United States and preventing a war that would end the life of our species?"

___________

Finally, let it all float away with the art of Ann Steel:

George Grosz @ 50 Watts

>>>Twenty-One Book Covers by George Grosz @ 50 Watts

Es ist ziemlich bekannt, daß zwischen dem Proletariat und der Bourgeoisie gegenwärtig Krieg herrscht. [...] Es geschieht Unrecht von Seiten der Bourgeoisie, aber es geschieht überall Unrecht. Sie, George Grosz, und ich sind gegen Unrecht (wie alle Welt), aber wir hätten weniger dagegen, wenn vom Proletariat aus Unrecht getan werden könnte.

It is fairly well-known that, at present, war reigns between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. [...] There are injustices committed by the bourgeoisie, but there are injustices committed everywhere. You, George Grosz, and I stand against injustice (like the whole world), but we are less in objection when injustices may be committed by the proletariat.

–Bertolt Brecht, Foreword to Trommeln in der Nacht, 1926.

Heidelberg

In Heidelberg on the night of Michael Jackson’s death, heading to Antonio’s place with DB and others after a poetry reading and a tour of the local bars. We pass a bookshop near the Theodor-Heuss-Brücke, where we are presented with an entire window display devoted to the newest offering from Richard David Precht: Liebe – ein unordentliches Gefühl. From our position on the other side of the glass, outside in the dark summer night, we marvel at the brightly lit pile of hardcover books and the large cardboard profile of Precht’s smiling image. Before any of us has a chance to comment, Antonio leans backwards before swinging his torso swiftly forwards, discharging a large glob of mucus which crashes messily against the large window, directly in front of Precht’s visage, beginning to slowly trickle downwards toward the pile of books. DB jokes about the impending start to my graduate school career: “When you get there you should meet with the Brecht specialist and be like, ‘Oh wait, you work on Brecht? I came here to study Precht!’” When we walk past the bookstore the next morning, the dried spittle is caked onto the window, blocking the passerby’s view of Precht’s facial features.