Have I said anything I started out to say about being good? God, I don’t know. A stranger is shot in the street, you hardly move to help. But if half an hour before, you spent just ten minutes with the fellow and knew a little about him and his family, you might just jump in front of his killer and try to stop it. Really knowing is good. Not knowing, or refusing to know, is bad, or amoral, at least. You can’t act if you don’t know. Acting without knowing takes you right off the cliff.
wordsperminute
10
Jan 12
Words per minute #27: Bradbury on Acting
24
Nov 11
Words per Minute #26: Simon on Existential Economy
“We pretend to educate the bottom 10 to 15 percent of American society to join the ranks of the existing economy, but it’s all pretense. We’re not really giving them a good enough education to make that leap into the service economy. We’re really preparing them for the corner and ultimately for the prison complexes. And they may not be educated, but they’re damn sure not stupid. They get it. So if they get it, what do you fucking expect? They understand that they’re being built for the corners. Every dope fiend I ever met knew what he was supposed to do when he woke up in the morning in just the same way that anybody with any other profession ever does. He was supposed to get $10 in a world that didn’t want to give him shit. He was supposed to get high and he needed $10 at the end of the day at a minimum. And that guy had no existential crisis.”
31
Jan 11
Words per minute #24: Marker on Mutability
Q. Why have you agreed to the release of some of your films on DVD, and how did you make the choice?
A. Twenty years separate La Jetée from Sans soleil. And another 20 years separate Sans soleil from the present. Under the circumstances, if I were to speak in the name of the person who made these movies it would no longer be an interview but a séance. In fact, I don’t think I either chose or accepted: somebody talked about it, and it got done. That there was a certain relationship between these two films was something I was aware of but didn’t think I needed to explain – until I found a small anonymous note published in a program in Tokyo that said, “Soon the voyage will be at an end. It’s only then that we will know if the juxtaposition of images makes any sense. We will understand that we have prayed with film, as one must on a pilgrimage, each time we have been in the presence of death: in the cat cemetery, standing in front of the dead giraffe, with the kamikazes at the moment of take-off, in front of the guerillas killed in the war for independence. In La Jetée, the foolhardy experiment to look into the future ends in death. By treating the same subject 20 years later, Marker has overcome death by prayer.” When you read that, written by someone you don’t know, who knows nothing of how the films came to be, you feel a certain emotion. “Something” has happened.
3
Dec 10
Words per minute #23: Sloterdijk on Sound
We have created an artificial sound environment that has no parallel in the history of human societies. Until the 19th century, voices had to be produced and perceived in situ – the source of sound had to be quite close to the receiver. It is only through radio technology that the phenomenon of long-range acoustic communication has been made possible and through sonospheric coherence that Postmodern reality is created. World War I was a print war – the mobilization of soldiers could only be achieved through print technology, which is relatively close to radio technology, in that reading means to hear or hallucinate voices from different speakers – for instance, you hear the voice of the German emperor who sent you to the Front. There is constant movement from the Gutenberg world to the radio world: the world of waves and the world of print are systematically linked by a common feature, which, to put it in classical terms, is actio in distans – action at a distance.
28
Sep 10
Words per Minute #22: Merwin on Evening
I am strange here and often I am still trying
To finish something as the light is going
Occasionally as just now I think I see
Off to one side something passing at that time
Along the herded walls under the walnut trees
And I look up but it is only
Evening again the old hat without a head
How long will it be till he speaks when he passes
- Evening, W. S. Merwin
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Aug 10
Words per Minute #21: McCarthy on Signals
In his excellent book Aberrations of Mourning: Writing on German Crypts, Rickels points to the advent in the west of recording devices such as phonographs and gramophones before infant mortality rates had been reduced by mass inoculation, even among the better off. Many middle-class parents, following the fad for recording their children’s voices, found themselves bereaved, and the plate or roll on which little Augustus’s or Matilda’s voice outlived him or her thus became a kind of tomb. “Dead children,” Rickels writes, “inhabit vaults of the technical media which create them.” Bereavement becomes the core of technologics; what communication technology inaugurates is, in effect, a cult of mourning… Alexander Bell, who grew up playing with mechanical speech devices (his father ran a school for deaf children), lost a brother in adolescence. As a result of this, he made a pact with his remaining brother: if a second one of them should die, the survivor would try to invent a device capable of receiving transmissions from beyond the grave – if such transmissions turned out to exist. Then the second brother did die; and Alexander, of course, invented the telephone. He probably would have invented it anyway, and in fact remained a sceptic and a rationalist throughout his life – but only because his brothers never called: the desire was there, wired right into the handset, which makes the phone itself a haunted apparatus… the belief that the airwaves crackled with the dead was widespread, even among rationalists. If, as we moderns now knew, our “soul” – what animates us – is a set of electric impulses, does it not make sense that these should pass into the air and be detectable, “receivable” by wireless? Oliver Lodge, distinguished physicist and frequent lecturer at the Royal Institution – no crackpot outfit, but the very seat of British scientific research – thought so. He wrote a whole book about “communications” he’d had, via psychic “operators”, with his own son Raymond, who’d died in the war. Séances grew exponentially in popularity (millions had, after all, lost their own Raymonds) and “upgraded” their vocabulary: where 19th-century mediums had used a rhetoric of “spirits”, new ones talked of “frequencies”, “signals” and “reception”.
- Tom McCarthy, Technology and the Novel, from Blake to Ballard