OK. I dropped it. Back to Wilde.

Anyway, do you think if I showed them this video next year when I teach the class it would do the trick?

Get serious. Likely, it would only lead to a volley of cringe-inducing stories about their own Purity Pledges. Oy….

Over at the excellent (but everyone knows that) BLDGBLOG, we learn tonight that the antiseptically modernist “city” in Jacques Tati’s Playtime was actually a set constructed for the film… Amazing…

According to a press release from an austrialian distributor of the film:

Conceived by Jacques Tati and designed by Eugene Roman, it was strictly a cinema town, born of the needs of the film: big blocks of dwellings, buildings of steel and glass, offices, tarmacked roads, carpark, airport and escalators. About 100 workers laboured ceaselessly for 5 months to construct this revolutionary studio with transparent partitions, which extended over 15,000 square metres. Each building was centrally heated by oil. Two electricity generators guaranteed the maintenance of artificial light on a permanent basis.

One of the foremost tasks of art has always been the creation of a demand which could be fully satisfied only later.

Eliot, in “Tradition and the Individual Talent”:

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.

In a certain sense, the new work that I am taking up finds the fault line that it will uncover, test, and perhaps widen between these two statements.

From Kafka’s Diaries, 1912:

This story, “The Judgment,” I wrote at one sitting during the night of the 22nd-23rd, from ten o’clock at night to six o’clock in the morning. I was hardly able to pull my legs out from under the desk, they had got so stiff from sitting. The fearful strain and joy, how the story developed before me, as if I were advancing over water. . . . How everything can be said, how for everything, for the strangest fancies, there waits a great fire in which they perish and rise up again. . . . Only in this way can writing be done, only with such coherence, with such a complete opening of the body and the soul. . . .

I first read Kafka toward the end of high school, now eleven or twelve years ago. I next read Kafka toward the beginning of my undergraduate program. Nothing, or very little, since, then.

You return a decade later, a decade into life and work and success and childrearing. Suddenly, the “night writing” aspect of Kafka’s life seems more than especially relevant. It seems like everything. It is the only salient point in the story of his life, it now trumps the Holocaust uncannines, the works themselves now all refer – and only refer – to what it is like to write at night, after the day job, exhausted but obligated. You tell your students – young, and whether driven or aimless, not quite up to the task, and they knod, and they knod. And you sink…

Later, you mention it, the night-writing, to your spouse. She knods her head, she corrects – “But it’s Kafka we’re talking about!” “What do you mean?” “Kafka wrote at night too, like you…” “Yes, but he died… He died before most of it saw the light of day….”

A strange delusion possesses the working classes of the nations where capitalist civilization holds its sway. This delusion drags in its train the individual and social woes which for two centuries have tortured sad humanity. This delusion is the love of work, the furious passion for work, pushed even to the exhaustion of the vital force of the individual and his progeny. Instead of opposing this mental aberration, the priests, the economists and the moralists have cast a sacred halo over work. Blind and finite men, they have wished to be wiser than their God; weak and contemptible men, they have presumed to rehabilitate what their God had cursed. I, who do not profess to be a Christian, an economist or a moralist, I appeal from their judgement to that of their God; from the preachings of their religious, economics or free thought ethics, to the frightful consequences of work in capitalist society.

[...]

And meanwhile the proletariat, the great class embracing all the producers of civilized nations, the class which in freeing itself will free humanity from servile toil and will make of the human animal a free being, – the proletariat, betraying its instincts, despising its historic mission, has let itself be perverted by the dogma of work. Rude and terrible has been its punishment. All its individual and social woes are born of its passion for work.

(via sit down man, you’re a bloody tragedy – perhaps my favorite blog for the past year or so…)

An interesting collection of images from the USSR in the 1980s. Some of the captions are rather priceless…

And it occurs to me that you could probably tuck a few shots of the university from which I type this post into the mix without breaking the rhythm. I don’t know whether this makes me love or hate this place, appearance-wise.

By the way, the signs on top of the buildings pictured above parse out GLORY TO THE WORKING CLASS.

I’m thinking of starting my second book (still working on the first…) with some sort of discussion of the iPod, its design, its design’s early critical reception, and the way that it has come to function as an avatar of a consumer-product aesthetic of simplicity…

Over at Subtraction, an interesting take on one way to look at the iPod’s appeal, especially vis à vis other, less lovely devices….

One thing that I like about my new iMac (in spite of its problems) and my iPod— is that they’re both basically hunks of cheap plastic — and neither tries to be anything else. This is a beautiful thing.

By way of contrast, consider my Treo 650. Or, for that matter, consider any of the many, many pieces of digital hardware currently available on the market that, like my Treo, share the absolutely cringe-worthy characteristic of being pieces of plastic that are painted to look like metal.

[...]

But nothing irks me more than a hunk of plastic that’s trying to look like it’s something else. To me, if you paint a plastic object to look like anodized aluminum or chromium steel, you may as well paint it to look like rosewood and line the walls of your basement bar with it. Which is to say: the attempt to disguise its true nature seems cheap.

It is a lucid point of intersection between the economic and the aesthetic, between marketing and the object for its own sake, this description…

(Don’t tell the guy at Subtraction, but this wordpress standard-issue design seems to be based on the design of his site. He’s had problems with this sort of thing in the past – he apparently doesn’t enjoy the flattery via imitation. So shh…)

(via pas au-delà)

1) Makes me, you know, miss my old neighborhood. All that semi-pertinent stuff flashing past, cab rides. The canyons, the recursive appearance of the same stuff, the same drug stores and bank branches, flickering past. Before I left, NYC was starting to feel a bit small to me. I now know better.

2) Probably could be deployed as a warm body performance of a certain version of modernist aesthetics. The rhythm of it, squeezing oneself into the (dangerous) flow, the flow, thrown into relief by the cut you make in it, sliding from dangerous to utterly beautiful…