July 2011
22 posts
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“The idea that we ought to help children become more challenging, more willing to...”
– Alfie Kohn, “Challenging Students… And How to Have More of Them” Phi Delta Kappan (November 2004)
And that, in a nutshell, is the crux of my problems with education as it currently exists.
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“His films are difficult. In one way or another, they are all about death, about...”
– Dan Sallitt on filmmaker Maurice Pialat
Pialat is a director I’ve been trying to get a handle on after seeing two of his films, L’enfance nue and À nos amours. I didn’t unreservedly love either of those films, as some of Pialat’s supporters do. Sallitt’s statement...
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“In Poetry and the World, I wrote: “Poetry is the most bodily of the arts.” A...”
– Robert Pinsky, “The Art of Poetry No. 76” (interview with Ben Downing, Daniel Kunitz) The Paris Review No. 144 (Fall 1997)
I’m fascinated by the relationship between the bodily and the aesthetic. This reminds me of my further fascination with listening to music that prominently...
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“The cruelty is that we can understand them both [Annie and Sarah Jane], both are...”
– Rainer Werner Fassbinder on Imitation of Life (Douglas Sirk, 1959)
Here, Fassbinder quite elegantly describes three core ideas that form part of the DNA of his work:
True happiness and fulfillment for the individual is impossible unless we can change the whole world first.
Changing the...
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“Occasionally, you will still find a seller on eBay who will play you records...”
– Hua Hsu, “Ain’t I Worth a Dime: Phone Calls, Broken Connections, and Busy Signals in Song” The Believer (July/August 2011)
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A bibliography of Stanley Cavell's writings on... →
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“BARTHELME
The task is not so much to solve problems as to propose questions....”
– Donald Barthelme, “The Art of Fiction No. 66” (interview with J.D. O’Hara) The Paris Review No. 80 (Summer 1981)
I like what Barthelme has to say here a lot, and the interview as a whole is well worth reading. The debate about art and morality is often tiresome because both...
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“Some nights he would make me sticky. Rub himself very fast, and he would say I...”
– From A Twin Peaks Book: The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer (1990), as seen by Jennifer Lynch.
(via keithuhlich)
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“If one looks at an Egyptian votive sculpture from 4,000 years ago, one can...”
– Nathaniel Dorsky, Devotional Cinema
For me, this is one of the most simple and elegant descriptions of what art is and how it works.
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“Film history was a pursuit founded on scarcity, for any film not still in its...”
– D.N. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film
Without referring to it by name, Rodowick is aptly describing the “new cinephilia” of the internet age. The key shift, according to Rodowick’s conceptualization, is the shift from a culture of scarcity to a culture of abundance.
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“In his remarkable book The Death of Cinema: History, Cultural Memory, and the...”
– D.N. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film
Recently, I attended a screening of Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice (1971). That I saw this movie projected on film and not on DVD is, I think, an important detail, and it’s difficult for me to imagine a movie that benefits more from being...
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“The loss of a public is in fact the artist’s withdrawal from his public,...”
– Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (1979)
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“Reading [Julian] Barnes, like reading so many other English writers of his...”
– Gabriel Josipovici, quoted in “Feted British authors are limited, arrogant and self-satisfied, says leading academic” The Guardian 28 July 2010
The specific names are unimportant—as is the fact that the discussion here is centering around the medium of the novel. What’s...
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“Viewing Greek mythology and religion as the expression of a shift from a...”
– Rainer Funk, Erich Fromm: The Courage to Be Human
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“The philosopher Henri Bergson said that one definition of comedy was watching...”
– James Wood, “Laughing matters” The Guardian 24 April 2004 