Nick Cave offers advice to a thirteen-year-old correspondent asking how, in a world of hatred and disconnection, one can live life to the fullest and not waste one’s potential. Cave’s reply begins: “Read.”
Wonderful stuff: read the full response.
Wednesday, November 27, 2024
Nick Cave’s advice
A pocket notebook sighting
[From 13 West Street (dir. Philip Leacock, 1962. Click for a larger view.]
That’s Rod Steiger as Detective Sergeant Pete Koleski. Don’t mistake him for a contemptuous waiter.
Related reading
All OCA notebook sightings (Pinboard)
[The Pinboard link does a search — no account needed.]
Tuesday, November 26, 2024
Wittgenstein’s Private Notebooks 1914–1916
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Private Notebooks 1914–1916. Edited and translated by Marjorie Perloff (New York: Liveright, 2022). xiv + 217 pages. $24.95.
Three notebooks survive of the six that Ludwig Wittgenstein kept during his time as an infantryman in the Great War. He enlisted, immediately and improbably, on August 7, 1914, leaving England to serve with the Austrian army on the war’s Eastern Front, operating a searchlight on a patrol ship, laboring in an artillery workshop, directing fire from an observation tower, and, later, seeing battle in Russia and Italy. All the while, he was writing in notebooks.
The recto pages of the three surviving notebooks, containing material that became the stuff of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, were published in German with English translation as Notebooks 1914–1916 (1961), with no indication that anything was omitted. The verso pages, written in a simple code (a = z ), were long unavailable in German or in translation, likely because of executors’ unease about Wittgenstein’s occasional references to masturbation, unnamed “sins,” and his love of David Pinsent, the Cambridge student who was the first of Wittgenstein’s three significant attachments. The verso pages — the private pages — appear in this volume in German and, for the first time, in English translation.
The title Private Notebooks promises much in the way of personal revelation. Wittgenstein writes (briefly) of his brother Paul, a pianist, losing his right arm in battle; of David Pinsent’s brother, killed in action; of joy in receiving letters from Pinsent (he kisses one). He writes repeatedly about his fellow soldiers as rowdies, ruffians, boorish “swine” who tease him unmercifully. He writes at greater length about his service as “a test of fire” and about his fear of death, wondering how he’ll behave when he’s fired upon, even as he acknowledges that he’s “intoxicated” by gunfire. He sees the fact of death as redemptive: “Only death gives life meaning”; “Perhaps the proximity of death will bring me the light of life!” But he desperately wants to live. He carries with him Tolstoy’s The Gospel in Brief, calling it a talisman. He repeats to himself words from Tolstoy: “Man is helpless in the flesh but free in the spirit!” In a letter, he was to say that Tolstoy’s book kept him alive.
All through his military service, Wittgenstein is doing or trying to do what he calls his “work” — the work of philosophy. In quiet times, his duties become the setting for that work:
15.9.14.Thus a paring knife, like a pen or pencil, becomes a tool of thinking.
I can think best right now when I am peeling potatoes. Always volunteer for it. It is for me what grinding lenses was for Spinoza.
Many of the entries are terse notations:
29.11.14.And there are long dry spells, with entry after entry beginning “Did no work,” as Wittgenstein seeks “the redeeming thought” that would pull his efforts together.
Worked pretty hard.—.
3.12.14.
Didn’t work but experienced a great deal, but I’m too tired to write about it right now.—
25.12.14.
Ate dinner in the officers’ mess. Worked a little.
Marjorie Perloff, a major critic of modern and postmodern poetry, sees a breakthrough in the merging of recto and verso in the final surviving notebook:
As I was editing the notebooks, it occurred to me that the short Notebook 3 would make much more sense if I included some of the most striking and beautiful passages from the philosophical side (the recto); indeed, as I argue throughout, verso and recto, at first quite disconnected, gradually come together so that, by the end, they often correspond. This does not mean neat pairing of any sort, but a close and uncanny chronological correspondence between the left-hand and right-hand pages.Perloff begins juxtaposing passages with Notebook 2. Here is one instance, with a recto passage (in italics) added between verso entries:
22.5.15.Perloff has chosen to interpolate a striking sentence that would find its way into the Tractatus (as 5.6), but I’m hard pressed to see a connection to the verso passages that frame it here.
Lovely letter from Russell!
23.5.15
The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.
24.5.15.
Made the acquaintance today of the old logician Dziewicki, whom Russell mentioned in his letter. A nice old man.
Another example. The numbers in brackets refer to sections of the Tractatus:
24.7.16.Here, too, it’s difficult to see anything “close and uncanny” between verso and recto. If anything, the two seem markedly distinct: a passionate plea to stay alive on one page, a series of abstract pronouncements on the other. I can imagine someone speaking these italicized passages and being met with a rejoinder: Hey! We’re being shelled!
We’re being shelled. And at every shot my soul contracts. I would like so much to keep on living!
24.7.16.
The world and life are one. [5.621]
The physiological life is naturally not “life.” And neither is the psychological life. Life is the world.
Ethics does not deal with the world. Ethics must be a condition of the world, like logic.
Ethics and aesthetics are one. [See 6.421]
But sometimes entries do jibe:
11.8.16.Now that’s a provocative pairing.
I am living in sin, hence unhappy. I’m morose, joyless. I’m at strife with my entire company.
11.8.16
I can objectively confront every object. But not the “I.”
So there really is an art and method by which philosophy can and must come to terms with the “I” in a non-psychological sense. [Cf. 5.641]
And recto excerpts that prefigure the enigmatic final sections of the Tractatus seem to have baffled Wittgenstein himself:
6.7.16.The humanity on view in the Private Notebooks makes them worth reading, but if you haven’t read Wittgenstein, there are better places to start: The Blue and Brown Books and Philosophical Investigations. I’d liken the Notebooks to a multiple-CD set with a recording session’s every false start, breakdown, and alternate take: for completists only.
Colossal exertions this last month. Have thought a great deal about all sorts of things, but curiously enough cannot establish their connection to my mathematical train of thought.
Related reading
All OCA Wittgenstein posts (Pinboard)
[It’s not clear what Wittgenstein’s dashes signify. Perloff cites without further explanation a hypothesis that they represent forms of prayer. Russell: Bertrand Russell. Dziewicki: M.H. Dziewicki, a logician.]
Gibson sues
Good news: “Trump Guitars hit with cease and desist from Gibson over use of Les Paul body shape” (Guitar World ).
I can imagine the excuse-making: “But we didn’t know — we bought them from China.”
A related post
These guitars are those guitars
Rural education shrinking
From The Washington Post, “Rural students’ options shrink as colleges slash majors”:
Many of the majors affected by cuts are in the humanities and languages, making those disciplines less available to rural students than they are to people who live in urban and suburban areas.Two-tier education, for sure.
Monday, November 25, 2024
In the can
[Beetle Bailey, November 25, 2014. Click for a larger view.]
In today’s Beetle Bailey, art imitates life. From a post about my part-time job in college, at a Two Guys discount department store:
I remember just one Two Guys co-worker who spoke of “break” as her own: not “I’m going on break” but “I’m taking my break.” We found her one Saturday in the garbage can aisle, hiding in a plastic garbage can, where, it seemed, she had been taking her break for several hours.Vickie: are you out there somewhere? Or in there?
Mystery actor
[Click for a larger view.]
Here’s a hint: look closely at both views. I think this actor’s identity is gettable if you consider both.
Leave your guesses in the comments. I’ll drop a hint when I can if one is needed.
*
Lunchtime. Here’s a clue: You may have seen her carrying an animal in a basket. But she’s not Judy Garland.
*
The answer is now in the comments.
More mystery actors (Collect them all!)
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Twelve movies
[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers. Sources: Amazon Prime, Criterion Channel, Hulu, Netflix, TCM, YouTube.]
Terror on a Train (dir. Ted Tetzlaff, 1953). In Birmingham, England, a saboteur plants a bomb on a train that carries sea mines. An engineer (Glenn Ford, playing a Canadian abroad) is called in to help. There’s little real suspense here: we can be confident that Ford isn’t going to be killed and that he and his wife (Anne Vernon) will be back together when the movie ends (neither of those statements will prove a spoiler for anyone who’s watched movies). The fun here comes from local color — a pub, a refreshment room, a train-loving eccentric (Herbert C. Walton) — and mid-century tech, with telephones and train machinery galore. ★★★ (TCM)
*
High Wall (dir. Curtis Bernhardt, 1947). Starring Robert Taylor, Audrey Totter, Herbert Marshall, and Amnesia. A WWII veteran (Taylor) is accused of his wife’s murder, and he doesn’t remember a thing. In a psychiatric hospital, he bonds with a doctor (Totter), and with the help of sodium pentothal, he begins to piece together a narrative featuring a sinister publishing executive (Marshall). The story is thin, but Paul Vogel’s cinematography makes this movie another good old good one from our household’s favorite year in movies. ★★★ (TCM)
*
A Lady Without Passport (dir. Joseph H. Lewis, 1950). Hedy Lamaar is a Buchenwald survivor awaiting permission to emigrate to the United States from Cuba. John Hodiak is an immigration agent. George Macready is the head of a human-smuggling group. Many interesting on-location shots of metropolitan Cuba, a great score by David Raksin, and closing atmospherics straight out of Gun Crazy (also by Lewis), but a drearily glamorous and at times highly confusing story. ★★ (TCM)
*
The Man with a Cloak (dir. Fletcher Markle, 1951). Joseph Cotten is the man, a mysterious New Yorker known as Dupin, enmeshed in the affairs of a dysfunctional household: a wealthy old French expatriate (Louis Calhern), a housekeeper and mistress (Barabra Stanwyck), a butler, a cook — all of whom are waiting for the old man to die — and his grandson’s lover (Leslie Caron), who has traveled from France to plead with the old man to give money to aid the cause of revolution. There’s a mystery to be solved — a missing will — and, lo, Dupin solves it. Sheer hokum, with clues abounding, and I’m not going to spoil the fun. With another great score by David Raksin. ★★★ (TCM)
*
13 West Street (dir. Philip Leacock, 1962). “I felt like an animal”: mild-mannered engineer Walt Sherill (Alan Ladd in his last starring role) is beaten by a gang of teenagers, and when the police (in the form of Rod Steiger) do little about it, Walt takes matters into his own hands. The interesting thing about this Death Wish-like story is that the gang members are from what are called “fine familes,” though maybe not so fine after all. (When Margaret Hayes plays the gang leader’s mother, drinking the day away by her pool, you know there’s trouble). The most compelling character here is the gang leader himself (Michael Callan), a budding psychopath whose unwillingness to step away from a confrontation brings about disastrous consequences. ★★★ (TCM)
*
The Common Law (dir. Paul L. Stein, 1931). Constance Bennett again, as Valerie West, a beautiful free spirit in Paris who leaves her much older lover (Lew Cody) to work as a model for the thoroughly respectable painter John Neville (Joel McCrea). Alas, John’s sister has ideas about the kind of woman her brother should marry, and Valerie ain’t it. A surprisingly grim story of gossip, rigid mores, and the need for dissembling: Valerie cannot even let John’s family know that they sailed to the States on the same ship. A strange surprise: Hedda Hopper. ★★★ (TCM)
*
Paterson (dir. Jim Jarmusch, 2016). I watched for a second time, with friends, after visiting the Great Falls, and I found myself warming to the movie’s depiction of dailiness: small bright spots (cupcakes for sale), adversities small and large (a crooked mailbox, a destroyed notebook), and routines (walking the dog, getting a beer). Poetry is everywhere in the city: a man in a laundromat, a schoolgirl waiting for her mom, a visitor from Japan. And I loved the absolutely non-condescending depiction of a city with pride in its hometown heroes (Lou Costello, Uncle Floyd). But Paterson (Adam Driver), the bus driver and poet at the center of things, is still a cipher. ★★★ (AP)
*
It Ain’t Over (dir Sean Mullin, 2022). A documentary about the life of Yogi Berra, with numerous interviews and great archival footage (I count ninety names in the IMDb credits). I knew something of Yogi Berra as a speaker of Zen-like sentience, but I didn’t know what a great baseball player he was, nor did I know that his appearance made him a subject of mockery on and off the field, nor did I know that in retirement he supported LGBTQ inclusion in sports. There’s a lot I didn’t know about Yogi Berra. The most exciting moments herein: Don Larsen’s perfect game and the Berra-Jackie Robinson dispute over a call at home plate. ★★★★ (N)
[I say he was safe.]
*
Plan 9 from Outer Space (dir. Edward D. Wood Jr., 1957). Everyone should see Plan 9 once. The first time through, its absurdities are guaranteed to amuse: the deadly serious Criswell, the laughable special effects, the incoherent plot, Tor Johnson’s “acting,” Bela Lugosi’s “double,” Vampira’s waist, the alien visitor’s passionate denunciation of humankind: “Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!” Repeated viewings tend to make the movie feel longer and longer and longer. Which makes me wonder: is there any great bad movie that rewards repeated viewing? ★★★★ (YT)
*
Mysterious Intruder (dir. William Castle, 1946). “Have we seen this?” “It doesn’t look familiar.” “Wait — this part does.” Yeah, and it’s still a dud, albeit a stylish dud. ★★ (YT)
*
From the Criterion Channel’s Noirvember Essentials
The Maltese Falcon (dir. John Huston, 1941). I’ve watched it many times, but never with as much appreciation for Mary Astor or with less appreciation for Humphrey Bogart. Astor’s Brigid O’Shaughnessy is a quick-thinking manipulator, trying out lies, one after another, to get Sam Spade in her corner, and the viewer realizes, at some point, that Astor is playing — brilliantly — a character who’s acting. As Sam Spade, Bogart is just acting, woodenly, I’m afraid. A detail I’ve never noticed before: Spade’s bed, visible when he gets the news of Miles Archer’s death at the story’s start, appears to disappear once Miss O’Shaughnessy enters his apartment: the Code at work? ★★★★
*
Road Diary (dir. Thom Zinny, 2024). Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band (and E Street Choir), preparing for and going on a world tour after a long hiatus. I’ve never taken to Springsteen’s music, but I found this documentary exciting and solemnly moving by turns. Mortality hangs over everything for a band that’s been together for fifty years: in the deaths of Clarence Clemons and Danny Federici, in Patti Scialfa’s cancer, in Springsteen’s awareness that he is the “Last Man Standing,” as a song says (the last living member of his early band the Castiles), in Springsteen’s comment that he’ll keep playing “until the wheels come off,” and in the set list created for the tour. The musical highlights, for me: “Letter to You,” “Mary’s Place,” “Nightshift,” “Last Man Standing,” and “I’ll See You in My Dreams.” ★★★★ (H)
[As I wrote to a friend who is a (huge) Springsteen fan, “It’ll rip your heart out. Mine’s on the floor.”]
Related reading
All OCA “twelve movies” posts (Pinboard)
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