Mario Vargas Llosa, Nietzsche en Sils-Maria

Nietzsche (viewed by Fernando Vicente)

Cuando Nietzsche vino por primera vez a Sils-Maria, en el verano de 1879, era una ruina humana. Perdía la vista a pasos rápidos, lo atormentaban las migrañas y las enfermedades lo habían obligado a renunciar a su cátedra en la Universidad de Basilea, luego de profesar allí 10 años. Fue un amor a primera vista: lo deslumbraron el aire cristalino, el misterio y vigor de las montañas, las cascadas rumorosas, la serenidad de lagos y lagunas, las ardillas y hasta los enormes gatos monteses. En Sils-Maria escribiría o concebiría sus libros más importantes, La gaya ciencia, Así habló Zaratustra, Más allá del bien y del mal, El ocaso de los ídolos, El Anticristo.

Mario Vargas Llosa, Nietzsche en Sils-Maria (El País)

(Mario Vargas Llosa)

(Nietzsche)

Jeremy Corbyn

Jeremy Corbyn
photo by David Hunt, 2007
(source: wikimedia)
no copyright infringement intended

An article to read in today's NY Times, about the current situation in the British Labour Party (the author is Steven Erlanger). Will be Jeremy Corbyn the next leader?

After Defeat, Britain’s Labour Party Argues Over Its New Leader

(Zoon Politikon)

Luchino Visconti, Ossessione (1943)

Ossessione, 1943
(Massimo Girotti, Clara Calamai)
(source: Cinema High and Low - the good, the bad and the cheesy)
no copyright infringement intended

Visconti's stunning feature debut transposes The Postman Always Rings Twice to the endless, empty lowlands of the Po Delta. There, an itinerant laborer (Massimo Girotti) stumbles into a tatty roadside trattoria and an emotional quagmire. Seduced by Clara Calamai, he disposes of her fat, doltish husband (Juan De Landa), and the familiar Cain litany - lust, greed, murder, recrimination - begins. Ossessione is often described as the harbinger of neo-realism, but the pictorial beauty (and astute use of music, often ironically) are pure Visconti, while the bleak view of sexual passion poaches on authentic noir territory, steeped, as co-scriptwriter Giuseppe De Santis put it, 'in the air of death and sperm' (SJo in TimeOut, London)

Here the filmmaker is intent on his subject, though his shaky visuals feel looser, as if another subject wandering into frame could suddenly lead us to a tangential narrative. In the opening scene, the camera shimmers in the point-of-view of an approaching streetcar, but the quakes remain on stable ground when characters appear. The visual style of this classic trend-setter now feels customary, as if the Neo-Realists could anticipate the extensive hand-held docudrama tradition to follow them. Visconti’s long takes accentuate the style all the more; shorter takes would only chip away at the truth (Matthew Sorrento in Pop Matters)


Before bursting into the Italian movies of postwar years, Neorealism had been but a concept developed within a group of film thinkers. It was during the end of 1930's / beginning of 1940's, and the group included Visconti, Zavattini, De Santis, Ingrao, among others, all of them revolving around the magazine Cinema (whose editor-in-chief was Vittorio Mussolini, the son of Il Duce - history enjoys sometimes playing ironically, all those guys having strong antifascist convictions). What preoccupied these young film thinkers was the crisis of the Italian cinematography (maybe a sign of a much larger crisis throughout the society). The Italian movies of the epoch were not telling anything consistent to the viewer, being totally disconnected from reality, placed in an artificial universe - the historic superproductions and the Telefoni Bianchi comedies. So Visconti and the others were looking for ways to revitalize the cinema, inspired by the Verist traditions of Italian literature, as well as by the Poetic Realist French movies of the 1930's (in synch with the leftist sympathies of the guys around Cinema, by the way).

Ossessione was a collective project implying these Cinema guys: a laboratory to test their ideas, a proof of concept. As film director and co-scenarist, Visconti was the main guy in this enterprise. The other co-scenarists were Mario Alicata, Eduardo De Santis and Gianni Puccini (together with Alberto Moravia and Antonio Pietrangeli - these two remaining in the end uncredited).

Visconti had firstly in mind to adapt a novel by Giovanni Verga, the great don of Verismo; well, the censorship of Il Duce said no: the story revolved around Sicilian bandits - it would have been too much for a regime petrified in his adoration for the dictator. So Visconti turned to an American policier written by James Cain: The Postman Always Rings Twice (he had read it in a French translation - a copy that seemingly had been given to him by Jean Renoir: Visconti had been his assistant sometime in the 1930's). And a story so Americana became a story very à l'italienne, placed in a sordid inn on the road to Ferrara. And a demonstration in full force of how should Neorealism look like. A shabby inn with shabby owners, attracting only mediocre clients, everything around is just sordid: the people, their dreams, their reactions. Even the landscape becomes sordid, as it is viewed through the eyes of these small unimportant people. The tragedy of a total lack of perspective. A world enclosed in itself.

An interesting character (who is not in Cain's novel) comes in the movie at a certain moment, to propose just a perspective, the possibility of getting free from that sordid world: it is Lo Spagnolo (Elio Marcuzzo) who believes that roads aren't just for making love, and life is not just about making some money (there is a radical approach in this character, beyond his nice appearance, and maybe he speaks actually in the name of the filmmaker - think at other similar characters in his other movies, with radical approaches,  for instance Ciro Parondi from Rocco e i suoi fratelli). This Lo Spagnolo brings a balance, an air of liberation, in the small universe of the others. Anyway, people around him are too weak to get free of themselves. It is also a homosexual suggestion in this personage (which maybe shouldn't be a surprise in Visconti's complex universe).

Was Ossessione the first Neorealist movie? There had been earlier movies (like some made by Alessandro Blasetti) that presented the same style; but the movie of Visconti was the first made programmatically Neorealist, the first being totally aware of his appurtenance.

The life of this movie was as dramatic as the movie itself. The fascist regime banned Ossessione immediately, and destroyed the copies. Fortunately Visconti succeeded to keep a duplicate negative. On the other hand, as the movie had been made in 1943, the director could not get the American copyright for the novel, due to the war situation. That was why after the war the international distribution of this movie was banned, a situation that would be solved only much later, in 1976.

Ossessione, 1943
(video by Giorgia Fracassi)

(Luchino Visconti)

Reading John Carey: Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici

pirated edition from 1642 of Religio Medici
(published by Andrew Crooke)
frontispiece engraved by William Marshall
source: Houghton Library at Harvard University
(wikimedia)
no copyright infringement intended

If a proof is needed to demonstrate a pompous character and a ridiculous mind, here it is:

I would be content that we might procreate like trees, without conjunction, or that there were any way to perpet6uate  the world without this trivial and vulgar act of coition. It is the foolishest act a wise man commits in all his life, nor is there anything that will more deject his cool imagination, when he shall consider what an odd and unworthy piece of folly he hath committed.

It belongs to Sir Thomas Browne: a fragment from his Religio Medici, and it is quoted everytime the name of Browne comes into picture. I found it in NY Times, also in a book of John Carey. I tried to upload the whole opus, without success (you can give a shot: it is on a site of Chicago University).

Well, John Carey gives an interesting explanation: it is not necessarily about pompous character (or ridiculous mind).

... he (Browne) is simply being rational, and comparing, in a spirit of scientific detachment, the human species and its curious means of reproduction, with other forms of life.

(John Carey, The Unexpected Professor - An Oxford Life in Books, Faber and Faber, 2015, ISBN 978-0-571-31093-7, page 211)

To understand Browne one should keep in mind that he belongs to a special epoch: watching him, his curious sentences, means watching the moment when modern world comes into being (John Carey), the epoch of two simultaneous revolutions, the Protestantism and the modern science. Simultaneous and maybe contradictory, anyway with ups and downs, with pushes forward and backward, and with an amazing mix of old and new, of superstition and free mind.


(Sir Thomas Browne)

(John Carey)

Sir Thomas Browne

Lady Dorothy Browne (née Mileham) and Sir Thomas Browne
by Joan Carlile, c. 1641 – 1650
National Portrait Gallery, London
(source: wikipedia)
no copyright infringement intended

To say that Sir Thomas Browne was a minor writer with a major style (as Hugh Aldersey-Williams puts it) wouldn't probably be so nice. To say that he was not a thinker of the first rank (like Newton), or even of the second rank (like Hobbes) (you gotcha, the same Hugh Aldersey-Williams) wouldn't be elegant either. To say that he was inclined rather toward isolated marvels than to the general laws - well, that begins to be fair (and it is said by Hugh Aldersey-Williams, to make things straight). Let's say this: he created symphonic prose (ditto), transforming English into an elegant Mandarin tongue. And he coined throughout his grandiose sentences lots of new words (electricity, hallucination, medical, ferocious, deductive - just a few examples).

Wow! English getting a Mandarin dimension! You'd ask what's all this galimatias. Here's how Jim Holt (the author of Why Does World Exists?) puts it: the history of English prose can be seen as a dialectical struggle between two tendencies: plain versus grand; the plain style (Dryden, Swift, Hemingway, The New Yorker) aims at ease and lucidity; it favors simply structured sentences, short words of Saxon origin and a conversational tone; it runs the risk of being flat; by contrast, the grand style (Gibbon, Nabokov, the Time magazine, and of course Sir Thomas Browne) — also called (by Cyril ­Connolly) “mandarin” — aims at rhetorical luxuriance; it is characterized by rolling ­periods decked with balanced subordinate clauses, a polysyllabic Latinate vocabulary, elaborate rhythms, stately epithets, sumptuous metaphors, learned allusions and fanciful turns of phrase; it runs the risk of being ridiculous.

A book dedicated to Browne (In Search of Sir Thomas Browne, and authored by - you betcha - Hugh Aldersey-Williams -  it seems to be a fascinating opus) has a review (written by who else than Jim Holt - if not small our world is definitely circular) in NY Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/19/books/review/in-search-of-sir-thomas-browne-by-hugh-aldersey-williams.html

• Reading John Carey: Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici

(A Life in Books)

Reading John Carey: Milton's De Doctrina Christiana

title page of De Doctrina Christiana
written pre-1700, published before 1825
(source: wikimedia)
no copyright infringement intended

In De Doctrina Christiana Milton rejects belief in Holy Trinity, and with it the belief that Christ, the Son of God, is of the same essence as God the Father. If the Father and the Son were of one essence (he briskly observes) it would follow that the Father was the Son's son, and the Son the Father's father. With similarly robust common sense he rejects the orthodox belief that God created the universe out of nothing. It is impossible, he asserts, to make anything out of nothing, and, since only God can have existed before the creation of the universe, He must have made the universe out of Himself.As the universe is made of matter, it follows that God must be made of matter too. Spirit is just a refined form of matter: everything that exists is matter (and advanced view for his day) ... the soul has no separate existence from the body and dies with the body.

(John Carey, The Unexpected Professor - An Oxford Life in Books, Faber and Faber, 2015, ISBN 978-0-571-31093-7, pp.188-189)

Quite inflammatory sentences from a mainstream Christian perspective. So it goes (would maybe have said Vonnegut). De Doctrina Christiana is a manuscript in Latin, attributed to Milton, the question of authorship remaining controversial up to this day. It was translated in English twice: in 1825 by Charles Richard Sumner (who was a bishop of the Church of England, in Llandaff and then in Winchester) and in 1973 by John Carey, who worked on it for five years: a huge effort, and the real gain (said Carey) was the amount of knowledge he got about the mind that created Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained.


(John Milton)

(John Carey)

A. E. Stallings: Greekdebtcrisishaiku

(source: Corfu Blues)
no copyright infringement intended

Europa, we’re through:

Take back your privative a-

vowals: I, O, U.

*

Why is Hope the one

campaign promise still stuck in

the jar, Pandora?

*

Tragic ironies:

Stock Market’s not on Wall Street,

here it’s Sophocles.

*

Snowfall. Parthenon.

Is it a miracle, or

Hell freezing over?

*

Finance minister:

fashion shoot in Paris Match,

swanky apartment.

*

It’s like the movies,

Only not Zorba the Greek,

Thelma and Louise.

*

To: Lord Byron--Sir

Greek loan approved but held up

Now that you’re dead. Stop.

*

Easter: Anarchists

quit occupying buildings,

crack red eggs, not glass.

*

Alphabet of angst—

Ach! Is all that’s left between

Drama and drachma.

*

Panic, oligarchs,

Democracy, tragedy,

dilemma, chaos.

*

Solon promises

to devalue the coinage:

600 B.C.

*

Grexit—so ugly!

So Latinate! What’s wrong with

Hellenexodus?

(source: Partisan)

(A. E. Stallings)

Balcon la Argentin

(Bucureşti)

Casă pe strada Platon

photo made today

(Bucureşti)

Reading John Carey: W.H.Auden, Rhythm and Poetry

(source: quoteko.com)
no copyright infringement intended)

One night he (Auden) talked about rhythm in poetry, and how his poems - or some of them - came to him as rhythms rather than as words or ideas, and how he had to find words and ideas to fit the rhythms.

(John Carey, The Unexpected Professor - An Oxford Life in Books, Faber and Faber, 2015, ISBN 978-0-571-31093-7, pp.151-152)

(Auden)

(John Carey)

NY in Old Footage

NY in His Old Days
(source: Mindful Living)
no copyright infringement intended

I love NY!

(video by Yestervid)

(New York, New York)

(Early Movies)

Amateur Films by German Soldiers During World War 2

Catholic priests examine the ruins of their church
after the fighting ended
Coutances, France in July 1944
(source: History Place, WWII)
no copyright infringement intended

Winners are those who always write the history, and the defeated are those who always understand it. Here is a group of old Germans, who served in the Wehrmacht during WWII. They had the passion of filming, and went with their 8 mm cameras on the front. They watch now the footage, together with us, while meditating it. Chunks of reality, chunks of truth, this is to be found in any footage. They lost the war, and these chunks of truth get now for them the whole meaning: a horrible political regime that was possible because each of them simply lived there, in those times, and by living there they accepted it. And the horrible crime of starting a war that could not be won - and again, they simply participated in it, thus accepting it. And maybe that's what collective guilt means.

(source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPOTmC7ho-w)

(German and Nordic Cinema)

Berlin in July 1945

1945, Berlin in Defeat
(source: Eyewitness to History)
no copyright infringement intended

That's how it looked like just after the Second World War in Berlin!
Fascinating moving pictures in color show the situation of the city in summer 1945, just after the Second World War and the capitulation of Germany. Daily life after years of war.
Pictures from the destroyed city, the Reichstag, Brandenburger Tor, Adlon, Führerbunker, Unter den Linden, rubble women working in the streets, the tram is running again.
A collage of archive material produced by Kronos Media.

Berlin July 1945
(video by BERLIN CHANNEL)

(German and Nordic Cinema)

Flores del Alma

(source: enfemenino club)
no copyright infringement intended

- dedicado a Deborah -

Recuerdos de una noche venturosa

Que vuelven en mi alma florecer

Recuerdos que se fueron con el tiempo

Presiento que reviven otra vez

Igual que aquella noche tan lejana

Es esta de mi amarga soledad

La luna sobre el cielo azul me alumbra

Como otra blanca luna que ya nunca vere mas

Si quieres olvidarme, dejame

Dijiste la mañana que parti

Tu sabes que te quiero, te querre

Y tuyo es el cariño que te di

A nadie quise tanto como a ti

Mi amante te ofreci mi corazón

Yo se que para siempre te ha perdido mi alma

Ya que todo ha sido solo una ilusion

Asi me reprochabas sin saber

Que yo compadecia tu dolor

Que cuando me ofreciste tu querer

Yo estaba enamorada de otro amor

Comprendes el porque de mi partir?

Comprendes mi amargura en el adios?

Acaso con los años me ya has olvidado

Pero nunca yo

(source: Planet Tango)

Flores del Alma, tango vals criollo, 1942
musica J. Larenza, testo Alfredo Lucero Palacios y Lito Bayardo
(video by Annalisa Mancuso)

Memories of a happy night
That fluorish in my soul again
Memories that went away with time
I have a premonition that they come back again

Same as in that far away night
It's this one of my bitter loneliness
The moon upon the blue sky shines on me
Like another white moon that I'll never see again

If you want to forget me, leave me
You said the morning when I left
You know that I love you, I'll love you
And yours is the affection that I gave you
I never loved so much like I loved you
My lover, I gave you my heart
I know that my soul has lost you forever
I know that everything has only been an illusion.

That's the way you reproached me without knowing
That I sympathized with your pain
That when you offered me your love
I was in love with another one
Do you understand the reason for my leaving?
Do you understand the bitterness in my farewell?
Perhaps through the years you have forgotten me
But I never did.

(source: Planet Tango)

(La Española - or Hispaniola)

(Les Troubadours du Temps Jadis)

Forgive my lips. They find joy in the most unusual places

Forgive my lips. They find joy in the most unusual places
(source: ohsuzeq)
no copyright infringement intended

I watched on TV a lovely film, A Good Year, with Russell Crowe, Marillon Cotillard, and Albert Finney. This replica comes twice. First, when the heroes are children: he is reading Death in Venice (wow!), she is kissing him while saying that sentence in a whisper, Forgive my lips. They find joy in the most unusual places. Second time, they are both adults, and he came to her, totally in love. Now he's kissing the young lady, saying the phrase he had said long ago.

Is this replica from Death in Venice? Just curious.

I read Death in Venice thirty or forty years ago. A French translation found at an antiquarian. Thomas Mann was perfect in everything he was writing. Much later I saw the film made by Visconti. I remember it was at télécinémathèque, and they had invited a professor from the University of Iași in the studio. He made a great comment: a man who was truly in love for Thomas Mann. And, as the homoerotic openness (only at conceptual level, to be clear) of the author is somehow known, one might say, Forgive my lips. They find joy in the most unusual places.

Enough for today

A Good Year, 2006
(video by Tample Pank)

(Filmofilia)

John Dryden

John Dryden (1631-1700)
(source: wikimedia)
no copyright infringement intended

poet, literary critic, translator, playwright, the leading man of letters of his day (source: wiki); English Restoration came to be defined in literary circles as the Age of Dryden (source: Project Gutenberg); Walter Scott called him Glorious John (source: Scott, W. Waverley, vol. 12, chap 14, The Pirate: "I am desirous to hear of your meeting with Dryden". "What, with Glorious John?"); I discovered him through Helene Hanff and John Carey.



(A Life in Books)

Example of Conceits: John Donne, A Valediction - Forbidding Mourning

(source: http://blog.sina.com.cn/)
no copyright infringement intended

A poem full of Metaphysical conceits, as I promised in my previous post:) A meditation on an anticipated separation of two lovers. The idea is that a pure sentiment transcends the mundane (well, we know that old French saying, loin des yeux, loin du cœur; it seems that John Donne was disagreeing). So this poem is a pageant of metaphors: a farewell should be as mild as the passing away of virtuous men, spiritual love is like the innocent trepidation of cosmic spheres (rather than the movements of th'earth, which bring harms and fears) ... and the poem goes on - each line keeps hidden a conceit. Enjoy.

As virtuous men pass mildly away,

And whisper to their souls to go,

Whilst some of their sad friends do say

The breath goes now, and some say, No:

So let us melt, and make no noise,

No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;

'Twere profanation of our joys

To tell the laity our love.

Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears,

Men reckon what it did, and meant;

But trepidation of the spheres,

Though greater far, is innocent.

Dull sublunary lovers' love

(Whose soul is sense) cannot admit

Absence, because it doth remove

Those things which elemented it.

But we by a love so much refined,

That our selves know not what it is,

Inter-assured of the mind,

Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.

Our two souls therefore, which are one,

Though I must go, endure not yet

A breach, but an expansion,

Like gold to airy thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so

As stiff twin compasses are two;

Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show

To move, but doth, if the other do.

And though it in the center sit,

Yet when the other far doth roam,

It leans and hearkens after it,

And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must,

Like th' other foot, obliquely run;

Thy firmness makes my circle just,

And makes me end where I begun.

(source: Metaphysical Conceit)

(John Donne)