Sympathy for the Devil (3/28/07)
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... The Lecoq thing sounds like the Shaolin monastery for theater; I picture wise old kung fu monks whacking you alongside the head every time you fuck up. But anywhere you can learn to juggle can’t be all bad ...
... I do, actually, know how to talk to dogs; though I’m not up to speed on the latest theories on the evolution of language. Obviously a lot can be conveyed without grammar, vocabulary, etc., making it a philosophical puzzle why exactly all those things are necessary; though in some sense they must be. — There was a lot of speculation in the early [pre-talkie] days of film about whether it could form the basis of a universal language; the great theoretician in this area was Eisenstein [famous author/director of
The Battleship Potemkin,
Alexander Nevsky, etc.], who had a very elaborate conception of editing [or montage — the French word here has a specific connotation different from the English, at least to the film geek] as the combination of images a la Chinese [or at least Eisenstein’s idea of Chinese] to assemble complex ideas from simple ones without reference to words; the idea being that there is some pre-existing “language of images” that everyone already understands that spoken/written languages implicitly refer to. Or something like this. — The contemporary descendant of this line of thought would probably have something to do with mirror neurons, but, the urge to bullshit notwithstanding, I won’t make it up off the top of my head at the moment. Maybe tomorrow ...
... when Walter Benjamin conceived the Arcades project, he submitted a request for support for research to the Institute for Social Research, relocated [as of 1938] from Frankfurt to New York, and sent them three chapters about Baudelaire as a preface. Adorno wrote back to turn him down, saying “Your study is located at the crossroads of magic and positivism. That spot is bewitched. Only theory could break the spell.” ...
... why I was interested in alchemy is a long weird story, [mainly] dating from my [semi] Pure Hippie period, during which I pissed away many happy hours smoking the Killer Weed and playing with a Tarot deck. There’s an elaborate symbolic apparatus associated with this, related to alchemy and the basis for Thomas Mann’s
The Magic Mountain. [Which is about a Fool. — on a Hill, come to think of it, meaning that Paul McCartney probably had the whole thing figured out before I ever got to it.] Jung made the most elaborate investigation of the symbolic content of alchemy of anyone I know. — The best book now about the occult sciences [though it’s completely tongue in cheek] is Umberto Eco’s novel
Foucault’s Pendulum; which reminds me of Wittgenstein’s famous remark that a philosophical work could be written entirely in the form of jokes ...
... in re hyperactivity, I’m hardly immune; having today, for instance, composed a lengthy vehement letter to the
New York Times in my head while walking Tashi down the creek, answered a question about movie trivia for the benefit of a mathematics professor and sent him a couple of puzzles I was thinking about, written a couple of computer programs that don’t quite work and need to be fixed, read a bit in an anthology volume about film studies, and done what little I can to get you into a graduate program in theater. And I still haven’t gotten around to what I was supposed to be doing, which was to send an irate letter to a lawyer about some Serious Business I simply don’t want to think about. If only I could harness my powers for good ...
... I’m not exactly flogging myself for being a prick. It’s just the familiar principle that, when you haven’t any other butt for your jokes, use yourself. Anyway I’m a hundred times harder on myself when I’m writing. It’s like ballet: you do it; you look at yourself in the mirror; you swear at yourself; you do it again. If you’re lucky, eventually you won’t suck. Or at least not suck so much ...
... As for the wandering-scholar problem, this is ongoing. A short attention span, I figure, is the price you pay for originality; the key is to maintain a kind of balance between periods of letting your mind wander and periods of focussed concentration. Interruptions are counterproductive, obviously, and I count all forms of Serious Business as interruptions. Thus my annoyance with the legal hassle ...
... Meanwhile, it stopped snowing finally, the sun came out, the heat turned off, and I’m sure before I know it it will be ninety-five degrees again. Against my usual habits, I composed a haiku to commemorate winter:
Shit shit snow shit. Shit
Shit snow. Snow shit snow shit. Snow
Shit snow. Snow snow. Shit.
Tashi says hello.
____________But I’ll go you one better if you’ve got the nerve (2/16/07)
