In the movies of the 1930s and 1940s, particularly old screwball comedies, language was an Event; a singular emotional truth. If you could say I love you, if you could get to that point—if you could figure out how to love someone—your life would change as a result, and that change was indicated through language. Language activated, actualized. In classic screwball comedies like TheLady Eve, The Awful Truth, The Philadelphia Story, An Affair to Remember, being rattled by the one you love or will love is a way of getting up the nerve to love that person. So the proclamation, I love you, marks that moment of recognition and capacity. Rarely does a character during that period of cinema say I love you and not mean it. Rarely does someone say I love you until they mean it. It’s the other way around: all other utterances are outtakes for the properly timed utterance. I love you is a moment of truth that the lover must be accountable for and to from then on. It’s less about fairytale and more about the responsibility of a real relation. If the main character does not mean their I love you it is because the structure or genre itself is compromised—false—like in noir, where the subject of the film is betrayal, so everything is under suspicion.
Matsuō Basho - Narrow Road to the Deep North
Agnès Varda, interviewed in Photogenies No. 5 (1984)
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Gisela Stuart, Labour MP for Birmingham Edgbaston, said she was pleased that her inbox has been full of messages from people telling her not to vote in favour of airstrikes. “I would be deeply troubled if my email inbox was full of people gung-ho saying ‘go and get them’,” she said, but she will still vote in favour of airstrikes.
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the so-called Islamic State, this twisted perversion of Islam that is to Islam what fascism is to nationalism, that is to Islam what communism is to socialism. This vile, Stalinist death cult, this dreadful regime must, I’m sorry to say, be stopped, and sadly the only way to stop it is not through talks.
Isis is to Islam what “what communism is to socialism” - a Stalinist death cult.
This is all out insanity here.
There are of course a whole range of much more subtle and pernicious techniques for silencing complaints and neutering resistance, which operate at the micro level of ‘collegial’ relations, as well as within the academic subject him or herself. One female lecturer told me: 'I was at breaking point. I went to see my mentor to complain about my workload. I mean, I’m really, really conscientious – you know that – and my mentor just said: “welcome to modern academia. We’re all working these crazy hours. I’m sorry to be blunt, but you know what you have to do: if it’s too hot, get out the kitchen”’
The 'kitchen’ of academia is, it would seem, too hot for almost everyone, but this has not resulted in collective action to turn down the heat, but instead to an overheated competitive atmosphere in which act s of kindness, generosity and solidarity often seem to continue only in spite of, rather than because of, the governance of universities. Increasingly, requests to perform activities that would once have been considered part of the ‘civic’ collegial responsibility of being a university lecturer (such as examining PhDs, refereeing articles or reviewing grant proposals) take on a tone of pleading desperation, as journal editors or course managers find no one prepared to do the necessary work. This is a collective, structural problem that is a direct result of workloads which leave many people with no 'slack’ to take on anything beyond that which is directly required of them. Yet once again there is no discussion of this as an institutional or organisational issue. Instead universities 'help’ staff to deal with these new intensified conditions with a barrage of 'training courses’ (most of which we have no time to attend) which cover topics such as 'time management’, 'speed reading’, and 'prioritising goals’ , and require each individual to work on the self to better manage proliferating workloads, as if there were a technical fix ( oh it’ll all be alright if I only check email once a day – why didn’t I think of that?! I’ll just pick all 115 of them up at 5 o’ clock then I can stay up all night answering them! ) while actively refusing any ‘reality check’ on the sustainability of contemporary academic workloads.
I reviewed the 3xCD reissue of John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme for Pitchfork. This is a record I’ve been listening to for more than 25 years so it was pretty exciting to gather my thoughts together and see if I had anything to add to the many words that have been written about this album. As part of my research for this review I listened to a ton of jazz in the 1964-66 period, esp. things that might have intersected w/ what Coltrane was doing. Included among this, of course, were a bunch of Coltrane records, and I developed a renewed appreciation for Crescent, really fell in love with Meditations for the first time, and firmly established the Live at the Village Vanguard stuff from 1961 as probably my favorite single release by him.
Almost as a postscript to my deep Coltrane immersion, I’ve been listening again to a bunch of Albert Ayler. Exploring his music is for me a very different thing b/c the vast majority of the music I really like of his was basically recorded during a four-year period, from 1964 to 1967. I’m pretty sure Ayler is my favorite jazz musician and I feel a connection to his music that is so deep I don’t think I’ve properly figured it out even though I’ve written about him in scattered places over the years. Hopefully I’ll be able to really lay it out at some point so it makes sense to me (and whoever might be reading.)
One of the things I think about all the time when listening to Coltrane or Ayler (esp. later Coltrane) is: what is this music trying to express? I’m thinking mostly of the albums and pieces that have sections that veer toward the super intense, often fast, overblown noisy stuff. It’s impossible to hear this music and not be aware of the tumult of the time, and so much free jazz was consciously connected to the radical politics of the civil rights era, so it’s tempting to hear these atonal blowing sessions as an expression of pain or anger or alarm. And there has to be some of that in there. But Coltrane and Ayler were both careful to remind listeners that they were playing in praise of God, and in attempt to channel something beautiful and direct people toward thoughts of peace. Ultimately I think this music is an expression of intense feeling that transcends the words we use to differentiate between specific emotions and there is something about that I find fascinating, of finding some kind of unity that incorporates beauty and ugliness and joy and sadness all at once.
I really agree with the final part of this, particularly ‘playing in praise of God’. It’s a really interesting and, I think, over-looked element of Coltrane and Ayler, but loads of other musicians too. I’m not religious in the least, but I find this idea of music as an offering really moving. It’s a well-worn idea that art is the pinnacle of human achievement, an expression of what’s best in us, but I think taking this achievement and offering it up to an ideal of something even more perfect, as if it’s a prayer, without real hope of an answer, is a great motivation to make work. It’s like: this is what I’ve got, all I’ve got - it’s not perfect, but I hope it’ll please the world.
I won’t go on because I wrote about this exact thing earlier this year, in relation to the films Ida and Whiplash.
I went over to France, with a view of prosecuting my studies in a country retreat; and I there laid that plan of life which I have steadily and successfully pursued. I resolved to make a very rigid frugality supply my deficiency of fortune, to maintain unimpaired my independency, and to regard every object as contemptible, except the improvements of my talents in literature.
David Hume - My Own Life