On the cover of The Romance of Happy Workers: Is the snake filled with dark knowledge, of the kind that the Orwellian pigs simply don't want to hear? Or at least not yet? Which is Napoleon? Which is Snowball? Is the author the snake or the pigs? Or the various shades of yellow? Or none of the above? Or all of the above? Or some or the above? The snake is given the prominent position in two ways for a Western reader--it is above the pigs, and it is to the left of them. These are both more powerful positions than the pigs. Or are the socialist pigs the central figures? Revolutionaries on the charge? Is the one pig talking or snarling? Can a socialist pig appear to be simply talking when it appears that it might be snarling? Does a pig tooth mean anything sinister, or is it simply dental realism? What does the loosely cursive H in Happy have to do with the reading of the pigs? Are we being led by font to a meaning, to two meanings, to meanings at odds with one another, within each other? Und so weiter.

We watched John Waters' Female Trouble last night. Very awkward, very funny. Waters is at his very best, and so is Divine. Someone at Youtube has gone to the trouble of posting the entire movie in 10 sections. I'll post the wonderful opening credits song (lyrics by Waters, vocals by Divine) and the first section of the movie.

Received:

Anne Boyer, The Romance of Happy Workers, Coffee House Press, 2008.

Marjorie Welish, Isle of the Signatories, Coffee House Press, 2008.

Still from 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance.


I finally got around to watching two films that have been sitting here for weeks from Netflix. Both films are from Michael Haneke--The Seventh Continent (1989) and 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (1994).

Haneke has always been interested in the creation of violence, usually depicting the banality of life through slow, haunting movements, or slow, alienating movements, or slow, moving movements, or (you get the drift). Almost always, someone in his films will descend into violence, which is not unusual in and of itself. What is unusual is how coldly he goes about showing it, drawing direct links between the numbness of televised violence, the numbness of emotional repression, and the numbness of isolation. What I tend to enjoy--if one can enjoy Haneke's worlds--are the long takes of seemingly harmless activities and what these long takes generate emotionally in a viewer/me. I'm reminded of the scene in 71 Fragments of a man practicing hitting balls on a table tennis board. The man obviously is "playing" with a machine that shoots out the balls to him, and quite rapidly, to the point where the man doesn't have more than a second between ball hits. It's just repetitive motion. The length of the fragment goes on and on, with the camera never moving. We are forced to watch this same activity, which results eventually in a hollowed-out feeling taking place in the viewer, or at least in this viewer. The feeling, like in so much of Haneke's work, is a mixture of a larger, existential sadness (what is this man really hoping to gain for himself by playing table tennis), isolation (he's alone), and undertowing violence (we see that this is a sport, but the incessant hitting of the ball reminds one of different hittings).

Haneke himself, in the special features, can come off pretty consistently as a person who thinks of himself a little too highly. The philosophical framings of the works are really not as novel and ground-breaking as he thinks they are, but this is a pretty common problem among artists. Still, he is adept at revealing versions of the present world and the present ennui very successfully. I have myself resisted watching his films, even while I'm drawn to them, because of how acutely he presents this ennui, this inherently violent, messy world that lies just barely beneath the surface.

Continuing in The Arcades Project. Finished the Fashion section and Ancient Paris, Catacombs, Demolitions, Decline of Paris. The arcades, I'm now realizing, seem to operate as a jumping off point, a locus. Benjamin seems to be offering a dream tale of capitalist production, joining levels of cities (the catacombs being a protected-from-above arcade-like environment, or the anti-arcade, the anti-soul), also showing the desperate desire to continue to live through fabric choices. He sees fashion and its ever-changing styles as an attack against Death. Perhaps. It sounds good. The temporary is killed constantly, so one must change continually, or feel death at one's heels, stasis. Is this why people like to put on low-level music at their parties? Behind the scene, to also stave off Death? He details the failures of crinoline in weather. Commerce pushes the need for new fashion, or does simply living push the need for something new? Do we see in the new something beyond Death?

I bought Walter Benjamin's The Arcades Project two nights ago, handing over a Christmas gift card as exchange value. I have read the preliminary pieces and the first of the Convolutes [Arcades, Magasins de Nouveautes, Sales Clerks]. The book's montage effects were very much in fashion at the time--in the air, so to speak, following Rupert Sheldrake--when he began writing the book (the assortment of notes?) in 1927. Eisenstein's Potemkin arrived two years prior, and back of that there were the Cubists. I can only assume more of the widening bric a brac of culture, commerce, art, architecture, science, fashion, fascism, capitalism, is coming. The text is arranged as examples of "a time," and they are offered as explanation of the rise of commercial arcades in the streets of Paris, with passages leading into other passages, police appearing as guardians of commerce. The assortment of appropriated texts wend around the notions of arcades and what they mean, recalling, somewhat, investigations in non-verbal communication and Barthes' readings of various places, events, etc. At the moment, the feeling is of moving around in space, among components, among textual commodities, if you will, easily digestible, providing something like a sense of continual lacking. As of now, I don't know if the accumulations will "build" or "swell" or continue to adopt the mobile as frame, but I am interested in following whatever arguments emerge, however buried beneath associations and reverberation they may be.

Last night at a dinner party, I was asked if I had ever wept during a film. I couldn't immediately think of one, but then I did recall watching Carl Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc. That was, I confessed to the questioner, the only time that I wept during a film. Dreyer digs down to the marrow.

Another of his, Ordet, is right there with Joan.

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One of my favorite songs: Bob Dylan's "Visions of Johanna"