Raymond Federman was born in Paris on May 15, 1928, the son of Simon and Marguerite Federman. In 1942, when Raymond was 14, the Gestapo came to the family’s door. Telling him not to make a sound, his mother shoved him into a tiny closet on a stairway landing. Raymond huddled there, listening, as his parents and sisters, Jacqueline and Sarah, were marched down the stairs.
Raymond spent the war in hiding on a farm in the South of France. His parents and sisters died in Auschwitz.
Mr. Federman came to the United States in 1947; in the Korean War, he served with the United States Army in Korea and Japan. He earned a bachelor’s degree in French from Columbia in 1957, followed by master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Before joining the faculty at Buffalo in 1964, Mr. Federman taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He retired from Buffalo, where he also taught French and comparative literature, in 1999.
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Sunday, October 11, 2009
Jung,Federman and a Lot of News
Raymond Federman, 81, died last week. He immigrated to the US in 1947, just after the war and was a bilingual writer, teacher, and co-founderof the Fiction Collective, which has published some of the best experimental avant- garde fiction of the last two decades. More inportantly,his novels, Take it Or Leave it (considered one of the great road novels and the first major post- structuralist novel), and the legendary Double or Nothing,a "concrete" novel, much like concrete poetry where the words are used as physical material and on each page assume a different shape, are masterpieces of modernist writing.You couldn't do this quite as easily without an advanced computer program these days.We mourn the death of a great writer, who hopefully will be read more in retrospect.
C.G. Jung. The Philemon Foundation has been granted permission to publish the unpublished masterworks of Carl Jung, beginning with Liber Novus, the Red Book, where Jung wrote down over a period of 16 years (1914-1930) the results of his dialogues with the self and visions of spirit beings encountered therough an active use of the imagination supported by dramatic dialogue spoken out loud by Jung. These visions were to form the core of much of Jung's later writings, and are accompanied in the Red Book by Jung's own illuminated paintings of the visions and calligraphy- in a text and in a format that is as gorgeous as a medieval Book of Kells.Held close to Jung's intimates for 80 years, the release of the Red Book(published by WW Norton at $195 )is the publishing event of the year.
The release is accompanied by a major exhibit at the Rubin Museum of Art in NY City , which is also presenting a 3 month program of lectures, interviews with persons in the arts and films. On Friday night, Oct. 9, the head of the Philemon project, translator and essayist whose work appears in the Red Book, Dr Sonu Shamdasani gave a lecture with slides and Q and A at the NY Academy of Medicine to an assembled and entranced crowd, primarily consisting of authors, and Jungian analysts. It was a memorable event as it was to be surrounded by such an intellectually distinguished audience.I took a cab to GCS with a couple of Alabama Analysts( no it's not an oxymoron) in the afterglow.
The book itself is a magnificent production and is likely to revive popular interest in the importance of Jungian psychology(beyond the archetypes that comprise the basis of most screenplays and the personality types that Jung reported on- extroverts, introverts, those with highly developed intuition-- These are the basis of much of our common scientific knowledge-
What may flow as well is a reconsideration of the role and importance of alchemy as a symbolic basis for understanding the nature of humanity and life. That becomes clear as one reads the Red Book and compares it to Jung's great late-life texts.
C.G. Jung. The Philemon Foundation has been granted permission to publish the unpublished masterworks of Carl Jung, beginning with Liber Novus, the Red Book, where Jung wrote down over a period of 16 years (1914-1930) the results of his dialogues with the self and visions of spirit beings encountered therough an active use of the imagination supported by dramatic dialogue spoken out loud by Jung. These visions were to form the core of much of Jung's later writings, and are accompanied in the Red Book by Jung's own illuminated paintings of the visions and calligraphy- in a text and in a format that is as gorgeous as a medieval Book of Kells.Held close to Jung's intimates for 80 years, the release of the Red Book(published by WW Norton at $195 )is the publishing event of the year.
The release is accompanied by a major exhibit at the Rubin Museum of Art in NY City , which is also presenting a 3 month program of lectures, interviews with persons in the arts and films. On Friday night, Oct. 9, the head of the Philemon project, translator and essayist whose work appears in the Red Book, Dr Sonu Shamdasani gave a lecture with slides and Q and A at the NY Academy of Medicine to an assembled and entranced crowd, primarily consisting of authors, and Jungian analysts. It was a memorable event as it was to be surrounded by such an intellectually distinguished audience.I took a cab to GCS with a couple of Alabama Analysts( no it's not an oxymoron) in the afterglow.
The book itself is a magnificent production and is likely to revive popular interest in the importance of Jungian psychology(beyond the archetypes that comprise the basis of most screenplays and the personality types that Jung reported on- extroverts, introverts, those with highly developed intuition-- These are the basis of much of our common scientific knowledge-
What may flow as well is a reconsideration of the role and importance of alchemy as a symbolic basis for understanding the nature of humanity and life. That becomes clear as one reads the Red Book and compares it to Jung's great late-life texts.
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Ted Kennedy- An Appreciation
He's been shadowing our lives
with a vision of dark stars
painted nightly in the firmament
like some glorious lit up bars
If the canvas must break up now
let it all be cosmic dust
spreading love's truth and passion
fueling up where justice rusts
with a vision of dark stars
painted nightly in the firmament
like some glorious lit up bars
If the canvas must break up now
let it all be cosmic dust
spreading love's truth and passion
fueling up where justice rusts
Friday, August 21, 2009
Desert by LeClezio Explains the Nobel
Desert by Nobel- prize winner J.M.G. Le CLezio, which was cited by the academy in its presentation of the award,more than rewards its readers. The academy called "Desert" his breakthrough novel,one which examined both a lost African culture and also treated Europe and its hard-edged cities from the perspective of a Moroccan immigrant.
Desert is published by the award-winning publisher David R.Godine, who also published "Life, A User's Manual",one of the great works of the 20th century by Oulipo author Georges Perec(and shortly to be reissued in a corrected format this fall).
"Desert" consists of two intercut stories,one the story of a doomed rebellion of Ma el Ainine, the sheik known as Water of the Eyes and his Tuareg warriors , their women and children, on a death march away from colonial soldiers across the barren desert they love in the first decade of the 20th century. Le Clezio pairs this story with a tale of one of the descendants of the group, an orphaned girl named Lalla who lives with her aunt in a shantyown on the edge of the desert in the last half of the century.
Le CLezio, who started his career with postmodern sagas of the wars and diseases of civilization and the rigors of existential life, now turns to a prose poem of lived experience and oral storytelling ,which is long on beauteous description of people and their environs , but short on character development and traditional plot. But you feel so strongly the sensuous lived experience that you can imagine yourself picking sand grains out of your skin listening to some griot as the sun boiled down the horizon-
The writing is exquisite, as is the concern with humanity and suffering and the idelible portrait drawn of the desert and its nuanced radiant life in the midst of barrenness. The fact that Lalla was taken places in the desert by the speechless orphan the Hartani that no other human had occasioned to go, presages her return to the desert after she escapes to Marseilles to avoid a forced marriage, becomes rich from being a photographer's model, and then is impregnated.
The money is thrown aside - for a return to the wind blown harsh environment where free men live.
For otherwise, in the words of the nomad song--"One day,one day,the crow will turn white, the sea will go dry,we will find honey in the desert forever, we will make bedding of acadia sprays,oh, one day, the snake will spit no more poison,and the rifle bullets will bring no more death, for that will be the day I will leave my love..'
No book I have ever read has captured the love and the blood passion for such raw and impassioned existence. The wind and sand and stars are veritable characters in this absolutely stunning novel, which returns humanity to all of us.
Desert is published by the award-winning publisher David R.Godine, who also published "Life, A User's Manual",one of the great works of the 20th century by Oulipo author Georges Perec(and shortly to be reissued in a corrected format this fall).
"Desert" consists of two intercut stories,one the story of a doomed rebellion of Ma el Ainine, the sheik known as Water of the Eyes and his Tuareg warriors , their women and children, on a death march away from colonial soldiers across the barren desert they love in the first decade of the 20th century. Le Clezio pairs this story with a tale of one of the descendants of the group, an orphaned girl named Lalla who lives with her aunt in a shantyown on the edge of the desert in the last half of the century.
Le CLezio, who started his career with postmodern sagas of the wars and diseases of civilization and the rigors of existential life, now turns to a prose poem of lived experience and oral storytelling ,which is long on beauteous description of people and their environs , but short on character development and traditional plot. But you feel so strongly the sensuous lived experience that you can imagine yourself picking sand grains out of your skin listening to some griot as the sun boiled down the horizon-
The writing is exquisite, as is the concern with humanity and suffering and the idelible portrait drawn of the desert and its nuanced radiant life in the midst of barrenness. The fact that Lalla was taken places in the desert by the speechless orphan the Hartani that no other human had occasioned to go, presages her return to the desert after she escapes to Marseilles to avoid a forced marriage, becomes rich from being a photographer's model, and then is impregnated.
The money is thrown aside - for a return to the wind blown harsh environment where free men live.
For otherwise, in the words of the nomad song--"One day,one day,the crow will turn white, the sea will go dry,we will find honey in the desert forever, we will make bedding of acadia sprays,oh, one day, the snake will spit no more poison,and the rifle bullets will bring no more death, for that will be the day I will leave my love..'
No book I have ever read has captured the love and the blood passion for such raw and impassioned existence. The wind and sand and stars are veritable characters in this absolutely stunning novel, which returns humanity to all of us.
Saturday, July 25, 2009
Pynchon Book/Obama Gates and Crowley Playing the Dozens
Lots of News- First of all, Pynchon's "Inherent Vice",Penguin $27.95, to be published August 4, really is a TRP "Beach read". It's a light psychedelic 60's LA doper noir story punctuated by a lot of raucous humor,surfing lore and with more than a few brilliant insights into our crazed culture, as it slipped form the activist 60's into the retrenched 70's. A lot of fun and probably the most "accessible"book ever written by a modern master.You're not likely to forget Doc Sportello as another classic P.I. in the museum of notable literary detectives.
I went back to Gravity's Rainbow after finishing "Against the Day" which I adored, and found it to be every bit the classic as I had when I first, on the 7th try, learned to read it with joy.
Inherent Vice is packed with sex, nefarious police goings-on and enough marijuana smoke that one can almost get a contact high from its pages.It recaptures Pynchon's spirit of resistance against the system, his love for "excluded middles" and his wisdom that some things are just inherent vice, a maritime term for unisurable risks, or glistening doubt, take your pick.The book is studded with the usual Pynchonalia of weird named characters, and tons of pop culture references to surf bands and John Garfield movies, among other waystations of our wacky culture. It's a quick read indeed that proves that Pynchon is the hippest post- 70 dude around.This is a real w--i--p--e--o--u--t!For shizzle.
Before we talk of Nobel Prize winner JMG LeCLezio's brilliant"Desert" ($25.95) to be published next week from David Godine(Long may he keep the faith)- here is a little aside about the recent Obama- Gates arrest controversy.
Obama Gates and Crowley: Playing the Dozens-C 2009
The raging controversy over the arrest of Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates by Cambridge Mass police after “breaking and entering “ his own home, followed by the media termed "unfortunate comment" of Pres Obama about stupid actions of police,has shaken the nation. The story is punctuated in part by a claim, denied by Gates, that when Officer Crowley asked him to discuss things outside , the Professor replied, I’ll talk to your mama outside.”
The “your mama” reference brings back “the Dozens”, the national children’s insult games, which include a litany of “Your mama ‘ is so stupid or so fat or so whatever that….(Here we attach the insult) Well maybe, if Gates and Crowley are going to accept the invitation to go to the White House this week, they could settle the affair by playing the dozens then and there.
Like this:
Crowley- Your mama so stupid she thinks Brittany Spears is a UK cavalry regiment.
Gates: Your mama is so dumb she believes a charge to the “Jewry” is a tax on temples.
Crowley:Your mama think waterboarding an Olympic sport
Gates:Your mama says Minni-sota is found in a vending machine.
Crowley:Your mama say Helmand, Afghanistan is where people get killed for mayonnaise.
Gates: Your mama says police “brew” tality is the precinct beer bill.
It’s only a short distance of course before they both turn on the President with…..
Gates and Crowley to Obama: Your mama think Yes We Can” is a sardine company slogan…..
But isn’t this is much better way of ending a dispute,a children’s game followed of course by a gourmet meal and a walk in the Rose garden, and so appropriate for a nation, which is so childish as to believe it can actually win wars in Afghanistan and Iraq at the same time it transacts the nation's real business of heading off a depression , bailing out the banks and establishing national health care.
ps- For those who want to read more on the dozens,pick up the books by Bruce Jackson or trace the world-wide history of children's insult games in the once and perhaps still published Maledicta -the Journal of Vituperative Expression compiled by university scholar Reinhold Aman- He has a website but the resource material is best found in that discredited institution, the public library.
I went back to Gravity's Rainbow after finishing "Against the Day" which I adored, and found it to be every bit the classic as I had when I first, on the 7th try, learned to read it with joy.
Inherent Vice is packed with sex, nefarious police goings-on and enough marijuana smoke that one can almost get a contact high from its pages.It recaptures Pynchon's spirit of resistance against the system, his love for "excluded middles" and his wisdom that some things are just inherent vice, a maritime term for unisurable risks, or glistening doubt, take your pick.The book is studded with the usual Pynchonalia of weird named characters, and tons of pop culture references to surf bands and John Garfield movies, among other waystations of our wacky culture. It's a quick read indeed that proves that Pynchon is the hippest post- 70 dude around.This is a real w--i--p--e--o--u--t!For shizzle.
Before we talk of Nobel Prize winner JMG LeCLezio's brilliant"Desert" ($25.95) to be published next week from David Godine(Long may he keep the faith)- here is a little aside about the recent Obama- Gates arrest controversy.
Obama Gates and Crowley: Playing the Dozens-C 2009
The raging controversy over the arrest of Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates by Cambridge Mass police after “breaking and entering “ his own home, followed by the media termed "unfortunate comment" of Pres Obama about stupid actions of police,has shaken the nation. The story is punctuated in part by a claim, denied by Gates, that when Officer Crowley asked him to discuss things outside , the Professor replied, I’ll talk to your mama outside.”
The “your mama” reference brings back “the Dozens”, the national children’s insult games, which include a litany of “Your mama ‘ is so stupid or so fat or so whatever that….(Here we attach the insult) Well maybe, if Gates and Crowley are going to accept the invitation to go to the White House this week, they could settle the affair by playing the dozens then and there.
Like this:
Crowley- Your mama so stupid she thinks Brittany Spears is a UK cavalry regiment.
Gates: Your mama is so dumb she believes a charge to the “Jewry” is a tax on temples.
Crowley:Your mama think waterboarding an Olympic sport
Gates:Your mama says Minni-sota is found in a vending machine.
Crowley:Your mama say Helmand, Afghanistan is where people get killed for mayonnaise.
Gates: Your mama says police “brew” tality is the precinct beer bill.
It’s only a short distance of course before they both turn on the President with…..
Gates and Crowley to Obama: Your mama think Yes We Can” is a sardine company slogan…..
But isn’t this is much better way of ending a dispute,a children’s game followed of course by a gourmet meal and a walk in the Rose garden, and so appropriate for a nation, which is so childish as to believe it can actually win wars in Afghanistan and Iraq at the same time it transacts the nation's real business of heading off a depression , bailing out the banks and establishing national health care.
ps- For those who want to read more on the dozens,pick up the books by Bruce Jackson or trace the world-wide history of children's insult games in the once and perhaps still published Maledicta -the Journal of Vituperative Expression compiled by university scholar Reinhold Aman- He has a website but the resource material is best found in that discredited institution, the public library.
Sunday, July 12, 2009
Methland, The Dumbest Generation, Empire of Illusion
Methland by Nick Reding,(Bloomsbury 2009) which was saved from possible oblivion by a front page article in last week's Sunday NYT Book review, is a terrific piece of journalism that tells two stories- the decay of a small town, Oelwein Iowa, killed by big agriculture, and globalism and whose residents turned to methampetamine to stay up all day working or escaping from road-kill reality,and viewed through the lenses of its doctor, prosecutor, and chief of police as well as some of its meth lab operators. It's a brilliant synthesis of investigative journalism and a nuanced portrayal of American life as more and more communities start to resemble developing nations and not the prosperous middle-class America we grew up with. A page-turning read as well.
The Dumbest Generation by Mark Bauerlein,Tarcher pb$15.95) and Empire of Illusions, by Pulitzer-Prize winner Chris Hedges(just out from Nation Books ($24.95)both treat of the triumph of spectacle and the decline of literacy in America.
Dumbest Generation uses multiple federal and state studies to prove that the advance in computer intelligence, and spatial understanding of our youth has been accompanied by an appalling decline in their respective reading and writing skills, as well as civic education,visits to museums etc.The author calls for a return to the traditional values, liberal arts education and more emphasis on learning. Yes, there are too many choices,'tis true, too much infotainment,and useless screen time, but the answer remains clouded- Turning in the last chapter to the Daniel Bells and Irving Kristols of the world, whose sorry propping up of a failed establishment in the late 60's ,funded by the same defense research that overwhelms universities today, is not the solution either. Maybe no one has the answer.
Empire of Illusions,whose author wrote the polemic War is a Force that Gives us meaning, and American Fascists( a book on the Christian radical right) examines the decline of literacy and the replacement by spectacle, the growth of violent porn, the decline of wisdom and replacement by elite business schools catering to a generation of money- hungry uneducated business school graduates and finally the decline of America, a subject covered by Chalmers Johnson and others equally well. It's an unrelenting course in misery, punctuated by the author's pleas for a love saves all solution at the end- Don't get me wrong- Hedges is right on target throughout this book and remains a great moral voice in the wildernesss of our lives. But it was hard springing up with joy in the morning after staying up at night to read its bitter truths.
Two passages stand out though- the comparison of Orwell's dystopian 1984 to Huxley's Brave new World. Orwell's was a society that relied on coercion and control, and Huxley's on a surfeiting of happy, irrelevant trivia to dope the populace.With the growth of mobile screen culture(we love it ok!) offering thousands of soporific alternatives to reading the morning newspapers, to the endless housewives and business commuters mindlessly playing sudoku we are truly, in the words Of George HW Bush, "in the deep doo-doo".Huxley, after all, was the visionary here.
The other passage contains a pungent quote from Andrew Lahde,a Santa Monica hedge fund manager,who made an 850 percent gain by betting on the subprime mortgage collapse,then abruptly shut his fund down in 2008 and took the profits before the crash. Said he ,in a farewell letter to investors:
"The low-hanging fruit,ie idiots whose parents paid for prep school, Yale, and then the Harvard MBA, was there for the taking" and speaking of the oligarchic class- he went on:
"These people who were (often) truly not worthy of the education they received...rose to the top of companies such as AIG, Bear Stearns, and Lehman Brothers and all levels of our government.All of this behavior supporting the Aristocracy ended up only making it easier for me to find people stupid enough to take the other side of my trades. God Bless America."
Well. someone has to keep the Hopium flowing - who can that be?
The Dumbest Generation by Mark Bauerlein,Tarcher pb$15.95) and Empire of Illusions, by Pulitzer-Prize winner Chris Hedges(just out from Nation Books ($24.95)both treat of the triumph of spectacle and the decline of literacy in America.
Dumbest Generation uses multiple federal and state studies to prove that the advance in computer intelligence, and spatial understanding of our youth has been accompanied by an appalling decline in their respective reading and writing skills, as well as civic education,visits to museums etc.The author calls for a return to the traditional values, liberal arts education and more emphasis on learning. Yes, there are too many choices,'tis true, too much infotainment,and useless screen time, but the answer remains clouded- Turning in the last chapter to the Daniel Bells and Irving Kristols of the world, whose sorry propping up of a failed establishment in the late 60's ,funded by the same defense research that overwhelms universities today, is not the solution either. Maybe no one has the answer.
Empire of Illusions,whose author wrote the polemic War is a Force that Gives us meaning, and American Fascists( a book on the Christian radical right) examines the decline of literacy and the replacement by spectacle, the growth of violent porn, the decline of wisdom and replacement by elite business schools catering to a generation of money- hungry uneducated business school graduates and finally the decline of America, a subject covered by Chalmers Johnson and others equally well. It's an unrelenting course in misery, punctuated by the author's pleas for a love saves all solution at the end- Don't get me wrong- Hedges is right on target throughout this book and remains a great moral voice in the wildernesss of our lives. But it was hard springing up with joy in the morning after staying up at night to read its bitter truths.
Two passages stand out though- the comparison of Orwell's dystopian 1984 to Huxley's Brave new World. Orwell's was a society that relied on coercion and control, and Huxley's on a surfeiting of happy, irrelevant trivia to dope the populace.With the growth of mobile screen culture(we love it ok!) offering thousands of soporific alternatives to reading the morning newspapers, to the endless housewives and business commuters mindlessly playing sudoku we are truly, in the words Of George HW Bush, "in the deep doo-doo".Huxley, after all, was the visionary here.
The other passage contains a pungent quote from Andrew Lahde,a Santa Monica hedge fund manager,who made an 850 percent gain by betting on the subprime mortgage collapse,then abruptly shut his fund down in 2008 and took the profits before the crash. Said he ,in a farewell letter to investors:
"The low-hanging fruit,ie idiots whose parents paid for prep school, Yale, and then the Harvard MBA, was there for the taking" and speaking of the oligarchic class- he went on:
"These people who were (often) truly not worthy of the education they received...rose to the top of companies such as AIG, Bear Stearns, and Lehman Brothers and all levels of our government.All of this behavior supporting the Aristocracy ended up only making it easier for me to find people stupid enough to take the other side of my trades. God Bless America."
Well. someone has to keep the Hopium flowing - who can that be?
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
Werner Herzog and The Spell of the Sensuous
Werner Herzog, the acclaimed German director of Aguirre The Wrath of God, Fitzcarraldo, Nosferatu, Encounters at the Edge of the World, and dozens of other films, including a large number of documentaries and shorts, spoke Friday night, June 26 before a packed crowd of 150 or more persons at the McNally Robinson bookshop in Soho.
Herzog, known for his extraordinary film making voyages through the Amazon, to the edge of a volcano in Guadeloupe about to explode , to Antarctica,and numerous other remote corners of the world, gave the audience a trip instead through his mind while making Fitzcarraldo. This is the film about an obsessive early 20th century entrepeneurial dreamer who wants to build an opera house in the jungle town of Iquitos so Enrico Caruso can sing there. In a cracked effort to corner the rubber market,he attempts to pull a 320 ton steamboat across the jungle hills and an isthmus separating two rivers. The film starred Klaus Kinski in one of his memorably insane roles with Herzog as director and the film was itself the basis of a documentary by Les Blank about its making entitled Burden of Dreams.
Now 30 years later, Herzog has written a memoir of those days, entitled Conquest of the Useless, following the pattern of diary entries from his unique mind- It is witty, profound and surreal- and was sold along with a copy of a newly translated short prose work "Of Walking in Ice", first published thirty years ago about a walk Herzog took from Munich to Paris in the late fall snows of 1974 because he had convinced himself it would help save his friend Lotte Eisner, who was seriously ill in Paris at the time.(He reached her and she lived for many years afterward) Herzog , who is a self-taught scholar,writes powerfully descriptive,almost surreal passages, but as his mother once said, his powers of description dwarf his abilities to explain-Never mind- he is a genius at what he does.
Herzog was brusquely funny in his repartee about our"bastardized culture"- he deplores shamans,ayuahasca(the legendary tryptamine on the vine), loathes the drug culture, and cinema verite and believes his documentaries are "fiction in disguise."He spoke of the famous scene in Nosferatu, when he convinced the city of Delft, Netherlands to allow him to release 11000 painted rats upon the arrival of Dracula(Nosferatu's) boat-This was done upon the payment of substantial sums and the promise to recapture all of them- Actually 11400 were captured as they had rapidly propagated in the interim.(This film, by the way, is so good it creates the illusion it is presenting almost an anthropolgical view of the gypsy settlements depicted in thevampire-savaged countryside.)
And as for nature,it is not there to be venerated but feared-it is erotic , obscene and murderous..no pastorals here.
Compare this wild work with David Abram's Spell of the Sensuous,where Abram treats of ecological magic and demonstrates that our truest human attributes spring as in oral culture from our relationships wth the senses and the elements and the earth and animate natural world. We have lost a great bit when we solely depend on written language and alphabets- even as we have in Kabbalah the concentrated and refined magic of the written word , compared to the wild and multiplicitous magic of the natural intelligent world.
Abram, who is associated with the Alliance for Wild Ethics, is one of the greatest teachers on the planet- I cannot too highly recommend his text..You read the book with the sense that all life, rocks, and plants are charged with the life force. You will likely feel very different about bird song as well after you dabble in its pages.
More of Abram and of Jay Griffiths, and The Welsh writer's brilliant study "Wild' in the near future.
Herzog, known for his extraordinary film making voyages through the Amazon, to the edge of a volcano in Guadeloupe about to explode , to Antarctica,and numerous other remote corners of the world, gave the audience a trip instead through his mind while making Fitzcarraldo. This is the film about an obsessive early 20th century entrepeneurial dreamer who wants to build an opera house in the jungle town of Iquitos so Enrico Caruso can sing there. In a cracked effort to corner the rubber market,he attempts to pull a 320 ton steamboat across the jungle hills and an isthmus separating two rivers. The film starred Klaus Kinski in one of his memorably insane roles with Herzog as director and the film was itself the basis of a documentary by Les Blank about its making entitled Burden of Dreams.
Now 30 years later, Herzog has written a memoir of those days, entitled Conquest of the Useless, following the pattern of diary entries from his unique mind- It is witty, profound and surreal- and was sold along with a copy of a newly translated short prose work "Of Walking in Ice", first published thirty years ago about a walk Herzog took from Munich to Paris in the late fall snows of 1974 because he had convinced himself it would help save his friend Lotte Eisner, who was seriously ill in Paris at the time.(He reached her and she lived for many years afterward) Herzog , who is a self-taught scholar,writes powerfully descriptive,almost surreal passages, but as his mother once said, his powers of description dwarf his abilities to explain-Never mind- he is a genius at what he does.
Herzog was brusquely funny in his repartee about our"bastardized culture"- he deplores shamans,ayuahasca(the legendary tryptamine on the vine), loathes the drug culture, and cinema verite and believes his documentaries are "fiction in disguise."He spoke of the famous scene in Nosferatu, when he convinced the city of Delft, Netherlands to allow him to release 11000 painted rats upon the arrival of Dracula(Nosferatu's) boat-This was done upon the payment of substantial sums and the promise to recapture all of them- Actually 11400 were captured as they had rapidly propagated in the interim.(This film, by the way, is so good it creates the illusion it is presenting almost an anthropolgical view of the gypsy settlements depicted in thevampire-savaged countryside.)
And as for nature,it is not there to be venerated but feared-it is erotic , obscene and murderous..no pastorals here.
Compare this wild work with David Abram's Spell of the Sensuous,where Abram treats of ecological magic and demonstrates that our truest human attributes spring as in oral culture from our relationships wth the senses and the elements and the earth and animate natural world. We have lost a great bit when we solely depend on written language and alphabets- even as we have in Kabbalah the concentrated and refined magic of the written word , compared to the wild and multiplicitous magic of the natural intelligent world.
Abram, who is associated with the Alliance for Wild Ethics, is one of the greatest teachers on the planet- I cannot too highly recommend his text..You read the book with the sense that all life, rocks, and plants are charged with the life force. You will likely feel very different about bird song as well after you dabble in its pages.
More of Abram and of Jay Griffiths, and The Welsh writer's brilliant study "Wild' in the near future.
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