The Black Isle

My Youtube find of last evening:

From The New Yorker, Jill Lepore on Edgar Allan Poe’s survival in a time of economic collapse and panic, the 1830s:

… Gothic stories—supernatural tales set, often, in medieval ruins—had been popular for decades. They were fun to write on a rainy day, as Mary Shelley had discovered, and even more fun to parody, as Jane Austen found out (both “Frankenstein” and “Northanger Abbey” were published in 1818, when Poe was in England). The genre had since gone to seed, but it still sold well. A philosophy of composition? No, what Poe developed was a philosophy of the literary marketplace. He had little choice. “The general market for literary wares is in a state of stagnation,” he reported, during one of the worst years of the depression. …

This public service message from the L.A. collagist, prankster and ’80s icon LOU BEACH.

Fun-lovin’ Kafu frolicking with a Tokyo dancer, circa 1950.

Michael Hoffman on Japan’s little-known literary loner Nagai Kafu, in today’s Japan Times:

He looked on in despair as the geisha gave way to the cafe waitress, kabuki to the movies, street singers to radios. The Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 afforded him grim satisfaction. Modern Tokyo, he noted in his diary, is “a sham hallway, a grand facade with nothing behind it, a device for deceiving the foolish. There is no reason at all for regretting that it has been reduced to ashes.” …

Kafu never wavered in his faith that art redeemed even foulness — maybe especially foulness. Why, then, had Meiji Japan cast off its art? It is the question that resounds throughout his life and work, and the militarism rising in the 1930s deepened its resonance.

Kafu hated it. He had warned as early as 1912: “The morals of a country are in danger when they are cut loose from the beauty of its soul and its seasons. The makers of our new age have been careless in many ways.”

Full Article HERE.

I learned today, while doing one of those pointless Facebook quizzes, that I share a birthday with the wrestler Haystacks Calhoun! He was a man of the old school. I’m terribly impressed!

The Cannes list, unveiled today, is jaw-droppingly, heart-stoppingly, depression-liftingly FABULOUS. I am psyched. Crazy psyched. No, CRAZY psyched.

First of all, the feature film jury has an edgy madwoman slant: It’s headed by Isabelle Huppert and includes Asia Argento and Robin Wright Penn.

Then there are the MOVIES.
Some highlights:
Jane Campion’s BRIGHT STAR (about John Keats)
Pedro Almodovar’s BROKEN EMBRACES
Andrea Arnold’s FISH TANK
Jacques Audiard’s UN PROPHETE
Ang Lee’s TAKING WOODSTOCK (starring, of all people, Demetri Martin)
Lou Ye’s SPRING FEVER
Gaspar Noe’s ENTER THE VOID
Alain Resnais’ LES HERBES FOLLES
Park Chan-Wook’s THIRST (a vampire movie!)
Lars Von Trier’s ANTICHRIST (trashy horror — see trailer from last week)

PLUS: Tarantino’s INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS (starring Brad Pitt and Cloris Leachman!) and Terry Gilliam’s DOCTOR PARNASSUS movie (the one Heath Ledger never got to finish), and new works from Bong Joon Ho (the guy who made “The Host” and “Memories of Murder”) and my one-time festival co-juror Pen-Ek Ratanaruang.

Full list (including running times) here.

From Borges’ short story “Funes, His Memory”:

In the seventeenth century, Locke postulated (and condemned) an impossible language in which each individual thing–every stone, every bird, every branch–would have its own name; Funes once contemplated a similar language, but discarded the idea as too general, too ambiguous. The truth was, Funes remembered not only every leaf of every tree in every patch of forest, but every time he had perceived or imagined that leaf. He resolved to reduce every one of his past days to some seventy thousand recollections, which he would then define by numbers. Two considerations dissuaded him: the realization that the task was interminable, and the realization that it was pointless. He saw that by the time he died he would still not have finished classifying all the memories of his childhood.

Now, about that (so-called) Hipster Grifter…
Roberto Bolaño would SO have loved her!

Plain as an an pan, she fleeced young lambs, crossed state lines, and then she fleeced them some more! She wrote poetry (”I want to give you a handjob with my mouth” to a stranger, on a paper napkin)! She worked fictitious jobs! All this while using her real name! This is pure Savage Detectives, Part Dos: SLC, Greenpoint, Williamsburg.

But wait, there’s more! Her fans are legion, even as the rubbish site urges its supposedly hip, supposedly fun-lovin’, supposedly too-ironic-to-care readers to turn into outraged vigilantes and call in her whereabouts to the SLC police. For shame! Hipsters must die!

And then there’s her now-famous tat, which supposedly says: I LOVE BEARDS, but as one commenter wrote, looks more like I LOVE BURQAS. Priceless.

The only saving grace in all this, the thing that is saving my soul, is that I don’t know her photobucket password…

From Maldoror, p. 41:  

O octopus, with your silken look! whose soul is inseparable from mine; you most beautiful inhabitant of the terrestrial globe, who have at your disposal a seraglio of four hundred suckers; you in whom, linked indestructibly by a common accord, the sweet communicative virtue and the divine graces are nobly present, as if in their natural residence, why are you not with me, your mercury belly against my aluminium breast, both of us sitting on some sea-shore rock, to contemplate the spectacle I adore!