“Vague longing and boredom are close akin” (Schopenhauer)

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Goethe says somewhere that man is not without a vein of veneration. To satisfy this impulse to venerate, even in those who have no sense for what is really worthy, substitutes are provided in the shape of princes and princely families, nobles, titles, orders, and money-bags.

* * * * *

Vague longing and boredom are close akin.

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When a man is dead, we envy him no more; and we only half envy him when he is old.

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Misanthropy and love of solitude are convertible ideas.

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In chess, the object of the game, namely, to checkmate one’s opponent, is of arbitrary adoption; of the possible means of attaining it, there is a great number; and according as we make a prudent use of them, we arrive at our goal. We enter on the game of our own choice.

Nor is it otherwise with human life, only that here the entrance is not of our choosing, but is forced on us; and the object, which is to live and exist, seems, indeed, at times as though it were of arbitrary adoption, and that we could, if necessary, relinquish it. Nevertheless it is, in the strict sense of the word, a natural object; that is to say, we cannot relinquish it without giving up existence itself. If we regard our existence as the work of some arbitrary power outside us, we must, indeed, admire the cunning by which that creative mind has succeeded in making us place so much value on an object which is only momentary and must of necessity be laid aside very soon, and which we see, moreover, on reflection, to be altogether vanity—in making, I say, this object so dear to us that we eagerly exert all our strength in working at it; although we knew that as soon as the game is over, the object will exist for us no longer, and that, on the whole, we cannot say what it is that makes it so attractive. Nay, it seems to be an object as arbitrarily adopted as that of checkmating our opponent’s king; and, nevertheless, we are always intent on the means of attaining it, and think and brood over nothing else. It is clear that the reason of it is that our intellect is only capable of looking outside, and has no power at all of looking within; and, since this is so, we have come to the conclusion that we must make the best of it.

Notes from “Psychological Observations.”

The Little School Boy — Pierre-Auguste Renoir

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Two Wine Glasses — John Singer Sargent

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David Gordon Green’s Prince Avalanche Reviewed

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At this point, pretty much anything anyone writes about director David Gordon Green sets out to divide his early “promising” work—impressionistic, Malick-beholden films like All the Real Girls and George Washington—from more recent stoner comedies like Pineapple Express, the much-vilified-now-but-future-cult-classic Your Highness, and Green’s work on Eastbound & Down.

The critical line on Green’s latest film, Prince Avalanche, is that it synthesizes the poetic and artistic impulses of the earlier films with the commercial comedy of what came after—that, in short, Green has found his way again. I don’t think that this is especially true.

Based on the 2011 Icelandic film Either Way, Prince Avalanche floats around the barest wisp of a plot. It’s the end of the 1980s, and in the middle of wildfire-ravaged Texas, uptight Alvin (Paul Rudd) and slacker Lance (Emile Hirsch, channeling a sensitive Jack Black) paint yellow lines on the old rural roads and hammer in new signposts. They squabble, share vodka with an alcoholic truck driver, and encounter a woman whose house has burned down. We learn that Lance has scored the job because his sister is Alvin’s girlfriend—but that romantic relationship looks pretty rocky from the get-go.

Prince Avalanche is never better than its opening scenes, where Alvin and Lance wordlessly perform their duties, hammering stakes into the ground and measuring out yellow dashes. Green is confident enough to let the camera linger on his actors, and most of the memorable scenes are simple—Paul Rudd’s motions as he sets up a folding table, or Hirsch tying down equipment to the work jeep. The blasted Texas forest is beautiful, as new growth mixes with charred tree trunks in frames by turns surreal and painterly.

The story line of Prince Avalanche isn’t especially bad; it’s just not especially good, or even interesting. There’s simply too much indie dramedy quirkiness going on here, and when Green’s plotting hits familiar arc-driven beats—a climactic fight, a scene of drunken abandon—the story feels false against the pure, beautiful cinematography. The original score by postrockers Explosions in the Sky is maddeningly intrusive, buzzing with overly-detailed blips and rhythm huffs that sound at times like Tangerine Dream’s work on Risky Business. Calm down!

This is all perhaps a way of saying that the “synthesis” many critics have detected in Prince Avalanche is not particularly satisfying. It’s true that the film is smaller and more intimate than Green’s last effort, the execrable and indefensible into-the-night film The Sitter, but Prince Avalanche is just as much a product of formula as that film.

In most of his films, Green retells the same core story about a lonely young man with communication troubles who really just wants a friend (this is Paul Schneider in All the Real Girls or James Franco in Pineapple Express or Danny McBride in Your Highness). Prince Avalanche is no different, but it seems unsure of pulling off its emotional impact without all the indie-quirk baggage. It feels bloated at a scant 96 minutes and would be a far better film if, like the burned and beautiful world it depicts, it was willing to strip away more of its protective layers. (It doesn’t help that Kelly Reichardt told a similar story far better in 2006 with her film Old Joy).

Perhaps I’m being too harsh on the film—I’ll confess I wanted it to be great, something that could transcend the self-seriousness of All the Real Girls and surpass the final, perfect diner scene of Pineapple Express (the single moment where Green best combines his Malick-tinged naturalism with his sense of bromance-up-too-late humor).

Of course I could be dead wrong—I might catch the film on cable in a year and see something there that I missed the first time. Like most viewers, I had no love for Your Highness on first viewing but have since sat through it at least four times—it’s a failure, to be sure, but a compelling, bizarre failure, one that I find funnier and more self-aware each time. And the same promise that Green has always shown in all his work (okay, not The Sitter) shines brightly throughout Prince Avalanche. The final shot of the film shows us children joyfully chasing a chicken. It’s one of the finest moments in the film, and I wish Green’s lens lingered there longer—I’d like to see what happens next.

“Portrait of a Lady” — William Carlos Williams

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Suicide — Andy Warhol

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“Genius and Virtue” — Arthur Schopenhauer

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“Genius and Virtue” by Arthur Schopenhauer

When I think, it is the spirit of the world which is striving to express its thought; it is nature which is trying to know and fathom itself. It is not the thoughts of some other mind, which I am endeavouring to trace; but it is I who transform that which exists into something which is known and thought, and would otherwise neither come into being nor continue in it.

In the realm of physics it was held for thousands of years to be a fact beyond question that water was a simple and consequently an original element. In the same way in the realm of metaphysics it was held for a still longer period that the ego was a simple and consequently an indestructible entity. I have shown, however, that it is composed of two heterogeneous parts, namely, the Will, which is metaphysical in its character, a thing in itself, and the knowing subject, which is physical and a mere phenomenon.

Let me illustrate what I mean. Take any large, massive, heavy building: this hard, ponderous body that fills so much space exists, I tell you, only in the soft pulp of the brain. There alone, in the human brain, has it any being. Unless you understand this, you can go no further.

Truly it is the world itself that is a miracle; the world of material bodies. I looked at two of them. Both were heavy, symmetrical, and beautiful. One was a jasper vase with golden rim and golden handles; the other was an organism, an animal, a man. When I had sufficiently admired their exterior, I asked my attendant genius to allow me to examine the inside of them; and I did so. In the vase I found nothing but the force of gravity and a certain obscure desire, which took the form of chemical affinity. But when I entered into the other—how shall I express my astonishment at what I saw? It is more incredible than all the fairy tales and fables that were ever conceived. Nevertheless, I shall try to describe it, even at the risk of finding no credence for my tale.

In this second thing, or rather in the upper end of it, called the head, which on its exterior side looks like anything else—a body in space, heavy, and so on—I found no less an object than the whole world itself, together with the whole of the space in which all of it exists, and the whole of the time in which all of it moves, and finally everything that fills both time and space in all its variegated and infinite character; nay, strangest sight of all, I found myself walking about in it! It was no picture that I saw; it was no peep-show, but reality itself. This it is that is really and truly to be found in a thing which is no bigger than a cabbage, and which, on occasion, an executioner might strike off at a blow, and suddenly smother that world in darkness and night. The world, I say, would vanish, did not heads grow like mushrooms, and were there not always plenty of them ready to snatch it up as it is sinking down into nothing, and keep it going like a ball. This world is an idea which they all have in common, and they express the community of their thought by the word “objectivity.”

In the face of this vision I felt as if I were Ardschuna when Krishna appeared to him in his true majesty, with his hundred thousand arms and eyes and mouths. Continue reading ““Genius and Virtue” — Arthur Schopenhauer” →

Don Quixote Reads a Sonnet — Gustave Doré

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More at Gustave Doré’s Don Quixote

 

Detail from The Temptation of St. Anthony — Hieronymus Bosch

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“Whenever I look at people, I look at unhappy people” (Thomas Bernhard’s Gargoyles)

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“Whenever I look at people, I look at unhappy people,” the prince said. “They are people who carry their torment into the streets and thus make the world a comedy, which is of course laughable. In this comedy they all suffer from tumors both mental and physical; they take pleasure in their fatal illness. When they hear its name, no matter whether the scene is London, Brussels, or Styria, they are frightened, but they try not to show their fright. All these people conceal the actual play within the comedy that this world is. Whenever they feel themselves unobserved, they run away from themselves toward themselves. Grotesque. But we do not even see the most ridiculous side of it because the most ridiculous side is always the reverse side. God sometimes speaks to them, but he uses the same vulgar words as they themselves, the same clumsy phrases. Whether a person has a gigantic factory or a gigantic farm or an equally gigantic sentence of Pascal’s in his head, is all the same,” the prince said. “It is poverty that makes people the same; at the human core, even the greatest wealth is poverty. In men’s minds and bodies poverty is always simultaneously a poverty of the body and a poverty of the mind, which necessarily makes them sick and drives them mad. Listen to me, Doctor, all my life I have seen nothing but sick people and madmen. Wherever I look, the worn and the dying look back at me. All the billions of the human race spread over the five continents are nothing but one vast community of the dying. Comedy!” the prince said. “Every person I see and everyone I hear anything about, no matter what it is, prove to me the absolute obtuseness of this whole human race and that this whole human race and all of nature are a fraud. Comedy. The world actually is, as has so often been said, a stage on which roles are forever being rehearsed. Wherever we look it is a perpetual learning to speak and learning to walk and learning to think and learning by heart, learning to cheat, learning to die, learning to be dead. This is what takes up all our time. Men are nothing but actors putting on a show all too familiar to us. Learners of roles,” the prince said. “Each of us is forever learning one (his) or several or all imaginable roles, without knowing why he is learning them (or for whom). This stage is an unending torment and no one feels that the events on it are a pleasure. But everything that happens on this stage happens naturally. A critic to explain the play is constantly being sought. When the curtain rises, everything is over.” Life, he went on, changing his image, was a school in which death was being taught. It was filled with millions and billions of pupils and teachers. The world was the school of death. “First the world is the elementary school of death, then the secondary school of death, then, for the very few, the university of death,” the prince said. People alternate as teachers or pupils in these schools. “The only attainable goal of study is death,” he said.

—From Thomas Bernhard’s novel Gargoyles.

“Harbor Town” — Yasunari Kawabata

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New Trailer for Hayao Miyazaki’s Forthcoming Film, The Wind Rises

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This one’s a lot more substantive than the teaser that came out earlier this year.

At the Coffee Table — Edvard Munch

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Coffee Etymology

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DEALING WITH THE ETYMOLOGY OF COFFEE — from William H. Ukers’s All About Coffee (1922)

Origin and translation of the word from the Arabian into various languages—Views of many writers

THE history of the word coffee involves several phonetic difficulties. The European languages got the name of the beverage about 1600 from the original Arabic  qahwah, not directly, but through its Turkish form, kahveh. This was the name, not of the plant, but the beverage made from its infusion, being originally one of the names employed for wine in Arabic.

Sir James Murray, in the New English Dictionary, says that some have conjectured that the word is a foreign, perhaps African, word disguised, and have thought it connected with the name Kaffa, a town in Shoa, southwest Abyssinia, reputed native place of the coffee plant, but that of this there is no evidence, and the name qahwah is not given to the berry or plant, which is called  bunn, the native name in Shoa being būn.

Contributing to a symposium on the etymology of the word coffee in Notes and Queries, 1909, James Platt, Jr., said:

The Turkish form might have been written kahvé, as its final h was never sounded at any time. Sir James Murray draws attention to the existence of two European types, one like the Frenchcafé, Italian caffè, the other like the English coffee, Dutch koffie. He explains the vowel o in the second series as apparently representing au, from Turkish ahv. This seems unsupported by evidence, and the v is already represented by the ff, so on Sir James’s assumption coffee must stand for kahv-ve, which is unlikely. The change from a to o, in my opinion, is better accounted for as an imperfect appreciation. The exact sound of ă in Arabic and other Oriental languages is that of the English short u, as in “cuff.” This sound, so easy to us, is a great stumbling-block to other nations. I judge that Dutch koffie and kindred forms are imperfect attempts at the notation of a vowel which the writers could not grasp. It is clear that the French type is more correct. The Germans have corrected their koffee, which they may have got from the Dutch, into kaffee. The Scandinavian languages have adopted the French form. Many must wonder how the hv of the original so persistently becomes ff in the European equivalents. Sir James Murray makes no attempt to solve this problem.

Virendranath Chattopádhyáya, who also contributed to the Notes and Queries symposium, argued that the hw of the Arabic qahwah becomes sometimes ff and sometimes only f or v in European translations because some languages, such as English, have strong syllabic accents (stresses), while others, as French, have none. Again, he points out that the surd aspirate h is heard in some languages, but is hardly audible in others. Most Europeans tend to leave it out altogether.

Col. W.F. Prideaux, another contributor, argued that the European languages got one form of the word coffee directly from the Arabic qahwah, and quoted from Hobson-Jobson in support of this:

Chaoua in 1598, Cahoa in 1610, Cahue in 1615; while Sir Thomas Herbert (1638) expressly states that “they drink (in Persia) … above all the rest, Coho or Copha: by Turk and Arab calledCaphe and Cahua.” Here the Persian, Turkish, and Arabic pronunciations are clearly differentiated. Continue reading “Coffee Etymology” →

Hot Summer Day — Fyodor Vasilyev

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John Huston’s Film Adaptation of Under the Volcano (Full Film)

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(Here’s my review of Malcolm Lowry’s novel Under the Volcano).

“…the Mask’s desire was to be invisible, unthreatening, transparent yet mercilessly deceptive…” / Another Pynchon Riff

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Capture

IT WAS MIDAPRIL, Carnevale had been over for weeks, and Lent was coming to a close, skies too drawn and pallid to weep for the fate of the cyclic Christ, the city having slowly regained a maskless condition, with a strange dull shine on the paving of the Piazza, less a reflection of the sky than a soft glow from regions below. But the silent communion of masks was not quite done here.

On one of the outer islands in the Lagoon, which had belonged to the Spongiatosta family for centuries, over an hour away even by motor craft, stood a slowly drowning palazzo. Here at midnight between Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday began the secret counter-Carnevale known as Carnesalve, not a farewell but an enthusiastic welcome to flesh in all its promise. As object of desire, as food, as temple, as gateway to conditions beyond immediate knowledge.

With no interference from authority, church or civic, all this bounded world here succumbed to a masked imperative, all hold on verbatim identities loosening until lost altogether in the delirium. Eventually, after a day or two, there would emerge the certainty that there had always existed separately a world in which masks were the real, everyday faces, faces with their own rules of expression, which knew and understand one another—a secret life of Masks. It was not quite the same as during Carnevale, when civilians were allowed to pretend to be members of the Maskworld, to borrow some of that hieratic distance, that deeper intimacy with the unexpressed dreams of Masks. At Carnevale, masks had suggested a privileged indifference to the world of flesh, which one was after all bidding farewell to. But here at Carnesalve, as in espionage, or some revolutionary project, the Mask’s desire was to be invisible, unthreatening, transparent yet mercilessly deceptive, as beneath its dark authority danger ruled and all was transgressed.

1. Okay—I know it’s been like forever since I riffed on Thomas Pynchon’s novel Against the Day (here, “forever” = a few weeks), but I took a week off from the novel, which turned into two weeks, which is a bad habit, yes, but here we are, and I’m nearing the end of the shaggy beast. I don’t think Pynchon is going to tie all the loose threads  into some perfect picture for me, but I don’t think I’d want that anyway.

2. Where I am in the book: Cyprian, Cyprian, Cyprian. The beginning of The Great War. Just waaaaaay too much going on to even bother to begin to try to summarize.

3. Cyprian is surely the most fascinating character of Against the Day, but his somewhat late arrival in the text feels, I don’t know, lumpy or something. Something about reading such a long book—we make a kind of investment in certain plots, figures, characters, and Pynchon here sort of moves them into the background, or disappears them completely, for long, long stretches. I’m thinking about The Chums of Chance in particular, but also Lew Basnight, the Tunguska event, the Vibes vs. the Traverses, etc. Thematically it’s all there, but this stretch with Cyprian’s dark adventures, while fantastic, also feels almost like a novella shoehorned into the final chapters of an epic. This is not a complaint.

4. I’ve shared a few citations from Against the Day since my last riff, but the one above (my Kindle tells me its at the 82% mark, if that means anything to you) seems to resonate with what I take to be the major themes and motifs of the novel.

I’m thinking specifically of the final line: “But here at Carnesalve, as in espionage, or some revolutionary project, the Mask’s desire was to be invisible, unthreatening, transparent yet mercilessly deceptive, as beneath its dark authority danger ruled and all was transgressed.”

Invisible is obviously a key word in Against the Day, and the novel turns on concepts of doubling, masking, transgression, themes that the Carnevale-Carnesalve disjunction highlights (flesh vs. spirit, visible vs. invisible, etc.).

5. Actually, now that I think about it, Cyprian probably most embodies, or, rather, embodies most complexly, Pynchon’s themes of doubling, masking, and transgression. He’s his own doppelganger. (Even the name suggest a kind of bilocation — Cyprus, that ancient crossroads of East and West).

6. And —

The Carnesalve chapter culminates in a truly salacious sex scene, an S&M-fueled ménage à trois that somehow simultaneously punctures the novels structure of doubling (cause, uh, a three-way) at the same time it reinforces it (Cyprian as self-double). I’m not sure if any of this that I’m saying makes any sense at all.

7. The image at the top of this riff is a detail from The Fight Between Carnival and Lent by Pieter Bruegel.