Thursday, March 22, 2007

André Gide



On his (1936) travels by train through the vast country he was met at each station by a reception party carrying large banners of welcome in identical words – “The Russian proletariat greets André Gide, writer of genius and friend of the labouring masses” or some such formula. Initially he took this to be just another sign of the growing regimentation of cultural life, that each local party branch had received detailed instructions from Moscow as to exactly how he was to be greeted. Later he discovered that the truth was even simpler: the banners travelled with him in the baggage van of the train.

Enda O’Doherty: Koestler's Anti-Communism



posted by Adfero Affero @ 10:57 AM 0 comments

Music: magnatune.com

A fine example of what is on offer from magnatune:

American Bach Soloists - J.S.Bach Favorite Cantatas

John Buchman set up Magnatunes







posted by Adfero Affero @ 10:26 AM 0 comments

Monday, March 19, 2007

Beckett and Bion



where traditional psychoanalysis functioned like a nineteenth-century inheritance plot, in which the forward movement of the narrative is defined by the desire to retrieve the past, and this forward movement culminates and concludes with the reappearance of that past, the kind of analysis proposed by Bion would inhabit the looped, interrupted, convoluted duration of the modernist or postmodernist text, in the form represented by Beckett's Trilogy, and anticipated in Beckett's own attempted rescue of the work of Proust from the atemporal condition of consummated unity; in a review written in the early months of his analysis, Beckett protested that Proust's work was `the search, stated in the full complexity of all its clues and blind alleys, for that resolution, and not the compte rendu after the event, of a round trip'. [Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn (London: John Calder, 1983), p. 65.]




Beckett and Bion

Someone's already done a script with this title, surely? Beckett and Psychoanalysis: The Movie. Though only less than a third through this long paper, it seems it has a lot to offer. In a sense it is is the sort of explanation which could form the rational basis for tackling some of his plays and or novels for the first time.

It is one thing to have learnt about Beckett because you recognise he is an important figure in 20 C. literature, quite another to wade through the titles when there is so much else to read and life is short.




posted by Adfero Affero @ 10:22 AM 0 comments

Monday, March 05, 2007

Jose Luis Borges: The Mirror man - a film by Phillipe Molins




Borges: 47 minute film from ubuweb archive

Tried this twice and never got beyond the 31 minute point, which is very aggravating. If anyone has tried it and got all the way through please let me know.

A bit or reading around on Borges suggests he was soft on the Junta or at least did not go out of his way to condemn it for its human rights record.

Clive James had recently written on this under the title Jorge Luis Borges - Can a writer be blind to the world around him



posted by Adfero Affero @ 2:41 PM 0 comments

Saturday, March 03, 2007

Orson Welles being argumentative



Stumbled upon this audio from Things I find Curious



posted by Adfero Affero @ 1:16 PM 0 comments

Friday, March 02, 2007

Film script resources - Network the movie



A new side link under 'screenplays' to INFlows Screenplay repository and directly to the script of a film I liked very much: Network, starring the late, great Peter Finch:

"I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!"

Still not clear if these are transcriptions from watching the films or the author's efforts. Though in the case of Network Paddy Chayefsky is credited and it says underneath: Revised - January 14, 1976.

That's why there are two versions of the Charade script in the sidelink: to demonstrate. Dialogue is great. But if you want to see how they are made you gotta have the instructions!

It says at the Museum of broadcast Communcations that PC wrote the script for Ken Russel's Altered States but refused a credit. He died in 981. No, not Russell. He's still waddling about in his outre trainers!



posted by Adfero Affero @ 11:11 AM 0 comments

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