Without Lifting A Finger

Filippo Tommaso Emilio Marinetti (22 December 1876 – 2 December 1944) was an Italian poet and editor, the founder of the Futurist movement. Marinetti and Fascism In early 1918 he founded the Partito Politico Futurista or Futurist Political Party, which only a year later merged with Benito Mussolini 's Fasci Italiani di Combattimento . Marinetti was one of the first affiliates of the Italian Fascist Party . In 1919 he co-wrote with Alceste De Ambris the Fascist Manifesto , the original manifesto of Italian Fascism . [8] He opposed Fascism's later exaltation of existing institutions, terming them "reactionary," and, after walking out of the 1920 Fascist party congress in disgust, withdrew from politics for three years. However, he remained a notable force in developing the party philosophy throughout the regime's existence. For example, at the end of the Congress of Fascist Culture that was held in Bologna on 30 March 1925, Giovanni Gentile addressed S...

Still, Marinetti says in his manifesto on the Ethiopian colonial war: "For twenty-seven years we Futurists have rebelled against the branding of war as antiaesthetic.... Accordingly we state:... War is beautiful because it establishes man's dominion over the subjugated machinery my means of gas masks, terrifying megaphones, flame throwers, and small tanks. War is beautiful because it initiates the dreamt-of metallization of the human body. War is beautiful because it enriches a flowering meadow with the fiery orchids of machine guns. War is beautiful because it combines the gunfire, the cannonades, the cease-fire, the scents, and the stench of putrefaction into a symphony. War is beautiful because it creates new architecture, like that of the big tanks, the geometrical formation of flights, the smoke spirals from burning villages, and many others.... Poets and artists of Futurism!.... remember these principles of an aesthetics of war so that your struggle for a new lite...

Reflection shows us that our image of happiness is thoroughly colored by the time to which the course of our own existence has assigned us. The kind of happiness that could arouse envy in us exists only in the air we have breathed, among people we could have talked to, women who could have given themselves to us. In other words, our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of redemption.

Fell onto this researching the old English ballad that Carey Mulligan and Michael Sheen sang in the film.

Made for a good movie but not sure I need to read the book (never say never). Swear I saw the earlier Julie Christie version, though I didn't remember the storyline a bit. * Far From the madding crowd's ignoble strife Their sober wishes never learn'd to stray ; Along the cool sequester'd vale of life They kept the noiseless tenor of their way .

This quote comes from the very end of Benjamin's essay on Proust: As it was, however, this malady was destined to have its place in the great work process assigned to it by the furor devoid of desires or regrets. For the second time there rose a scaffold like Michelangelo's on which the artist, his head thrown back, painted the Creation on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel: the sickbed on which Marcel Proust consecrates the countless pages which he covered with his handwriting, holding them up in the air, to the creation of his microcosm.

     The concept of the aura which was proposed above with reference to historical objects may usefully be illustrated with reference to the aura of natural ones. We define the aura of the latter as the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be. If, while resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with your eyes a mountain range on the horizon or a branch which casts its shadow on you, you experience the aura of those mountains, of that branch. This image makes it easy to comprehend the social bases of the contemporary decay of the aura. It rests on two circumstances, both of which are related to the increasing significance of the masses in contemporary life. Namely, the desire of contemporary masses to bring things "closer" spatially just as ardent as their bent toward overcoming the uniqueness of every reality by accepting its reproduction. Every day the urge grows stronger to get hold of an object at very close range by way of its likeness, its rep...

It has quite justly been said of him that he photographed them like scenes of crime. The scene of a crime, too, is deserted; it is photographed for the purpose of establishing evidence. With Atget, photographs become standard evidence for historical occurrences, and acquire a hidden political significance.

Eugène Atget ( French:  [adʒɛ] ; 12 February 1857 – 4 August 1927) was a French flâneur [ 1 ] and a pioneer of documentary photography , noted for his determination to document all of the architecture and street scenes of Paris before their disappearance to modernization. [ 1 ] Most of his photographs were first published by Berenice Abbott after his death. [ 2 ] An inspiration for the surrealists and other artists, his genius was only recognized by a handful of young artists in the last two years of his life, and he did not live to see the wide acclaim his work would eventually receive. [From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eug%C3%A8ne_Atget ] ***                     [Atget's photos also from Wikipedia] 



                        

Have been dreaming about a visit. Have been dreaming. I saw it from a boat last I was in Venice (did I take a photo?), but didn't visit. I'm hoping to bump into Uncle Ezra and a few other distant relatives. * San Michele is an island in the Venetian Lagoon , northern Italy . It is associated with the sestiere of Cannaregio , from which it lies a short distance northeast. History Along with neighbouring San Cristoforo della Pace, the island was a popular place for local travellers and fishermen to land. Mauro Codussi 's Chiesa di San Michele in Isola of 1469, the first Renaissance church in Venice, and a monastery lie on the island, which also served for a time as a prison. San Cristoforo was selected to become a cemetery in 1807, designed by Gian Antonio Selva , when under French occupation it was decreed that burial on the mainland (or on the main Venetian islands) was unsanitary. The canal that separated the two islands was filled in during 1836, and subseq...

Inspired by Benjamin's essay, I will probably read Leskov next (unless the blind librarian hands me another book). * Nikolai Semyonovich Leskov ( Russian : Никола́й Семёнович Леско́в ; 16 February [ O.S. 4 February] 1831 — 5 March [ O.S. 21 February] 1895) was a Russian novelist, short story writer, playwright, and journalist who also wrote under the pseudonym M. Stebnitsky. Praised for his unique writing style and innovative experiments in form, and held in high esteem by Leo Tolstoy , Anton Chekhov and Maxim Gorky among others, Leskov is credited with creating a comprehensive picture of contemporary Russian society using mostly short literary forms. [ 1 ] His major works include Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (1865) (which was later made into an opera by Shostakovich ), The Cathedral Clergy (1872), The Enchanted Wanderer (1873), and The Tale of Cross-eyed Lefty from Tula and the Steel Flea (1881). [ 2 ] Leskov received his formal education at the Or...



From "The Task of the Translator" (a bit wrenched from context): Art, in the same way, posits man's physical and spiritual existence, but in none of its works is it concerned with his response. No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener.

Just three souvenirs. Will look for the name of the beautiful groundcover (it was there a month or so ago, has always been there, but it seemed redder than before and had a small, white flower).         

Really enjoyed "Scholem on Benjamin" so I've decided to reread Benjamin's Illuminations . Last read it when I was still "tied to paper," but this time I'm taking it on via Kindle. Should "take me home" re the semester finale. * A single clip from Hannah Arendt's Intro re Benjamin: To describe adequately his work and him as an author within our usual framework of reference, one would have to make a great many negative statements, such as: his erudition was great, but he was no scholar; his subject matter comprised texts and their interpretation, but he was no philologist; he was greatly attracted not by religion but by theology and the theological type of interpretation for which the text itself is sacred, but he was no theologian and he was not particularly interested in the Bible; he was a born writer, but his greatest ambition was to produce a work consisting entirely of quotations; he was the first German to translate Proust (t...

Cottonwoods and Mourning Cloaks. Not many knight-errants yet, but they're riding on a few walls and trying to write their erotemes.     





In my Selected Non-Fictions (Penguin, Edited by Eliot Weinberger) it appears on p. 215 (in "The Total Library") and is the second of only two footnotes for the very short text. I also reread Total's fiction counterpart, "The Library of Babel," and, alas, the busy primate is missing (but I'll perhaps check again -- he may be in the john of one of the unspotlighted hexagons). "Strictly speaking, one immortal monkey would be sufficient."

A single clip (from a letter to Benjamin from Scholem): I have of course already had "individual thoughts" about Kafka, although these do not concern Kafka's position in the continuum of German literature (in which he has no position of any sort, something that he himself did not have the least doubt about; as you probably know, he was a Zionist), but his position in the continuum of Jewish literature. I advise you to begin any inquiry into Kafka with the Book of Job, or at least with a discussion of the possibility of divine judgment, which I regard as the sole subject of Kafka's production [worthy of] being treated in a work of literature.

Bucks. Scholem on Benjamin. Lagoon and Marine Stadium. *         

Two clips: That others were impressed, indeed entranced, by the imaginative verve of Goldberg's interpretations of Torah and sometimes even by their rather sinister aspects is evidenced not only by the writings of the paleontologist Edgar Dacque but above all by Thomas Mann; the first novel of the latter's Joseph tetralogy, The Tales of Jacob , is in its metaphysical sections based entirely on Goldberg's book. This, to be sure, did not keep Mann from making Goldberg the target of his irony a few years later in a special chapter of his novel Doctor Faustus . There Goldberg appears as the scholar Dr. Chaim Breisacher, a kind of metaphysical super-Nazi who presents his magical racial theory largely in Goldberg's own words. Benjamin's interest in this Jewish sect, if I may so describe it, accompanied him right into the Hitler period. ***      Shortly thereafter Benjamin came to Munich on his way to visit Dora on the Semmering. On that occasion he bought Klee...

Very playful. Flips and fins. But rarely came up for long. Probably why she's still legend.   

Three clips: The origin of the constellations as configurations on the sky surface was, so he asserted, the beginning of reading, and writing, and this coincided with the development of the mythic age. The constellations were for the mythic world what the revelation of Holy Writ was to be later. *** Buschor had spoken about the archaic torso of Apollo in the museum at Naples and at the end of his lecture had recited Rilke's poem by that title, whereupon he burst into tears -- not an everyday occurrence in an academic lecture on archaeology. I told Benjamin about this, and he said, Yes, it really is an extraordinary poem. *** This is when I first noticed Benjamin's basic melancholy, the incipient depressive traits that later became more pronounced. (I never noticed anything manic about him.) At the same time I began to grow aware of the hysterical elements in Dora's behavior, which were sometimes suddenly triggered by the most insignificant events. Often eno...