- A story is told about the Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti, whose leg was broken in a traffic accident. While lying in the street, waiting for the ambulance, he was heard to say, “Finally, finally, something has happened to me.”
I have long liked this quote, recently rediscovered in Momma and the Meaning of Life, and I hope to remember to exclaim Enfin quelque chose m’arrive! if I am ever struck by a car. The source of the story is Jean-Paul Sartre's autobiography, The Words.
- One evening, more than twenty years ago, Giacometti was hit by a car while crossing the Place d’Italie. Though his leg was twisted, his first feeling, in the state of lucid swoon into which he had fallen, was a kind of joy: “Something has happened to me at last!” I know his radicalism: he expected the worst. The life which he so loved and which he would not have changed for any other was knocked out of joint, perhaps shattered, by the stupid violence of chance: “So,” he thought to himself, “I wasn’t meant to be a sculptor, nor even to live. I wasn’t meant for anything.”
- Il y a plus de vingt ans, un soir qu’il traversait la place d’Italie, Giacometti fut renversé par une auto. Blessé, la jambe tordue, dans l’évanouissement lucide où il était tombé, il ressentit d’abord une espèce de joie: «Enfin quelque chose m’arrive!» Je connais son radicalisme: il attendait le pire; cette vie qu’il aimait au point de n’en souhaiter aucune autre, elle était bousculée, brisée peut-être par la stupide violence du hasard : «Donc, se disait-il, je n’étais pas fait pour sculpter, pas même pour vivre; je n’étais fait pour rien».
Sartre goes on: “What thrilled him was the menacing order of causes … the act of staring with the petrifying gaze of a cataclysm at the lights of the city, at human beings, at his own body lying flat in the mud: for a sculptor, the mineral world is never far away.”
This description upset Giacometti, leading to a “rupture” between the two, according to the evocative lot notes on a Christie’s auction of “La Jambe” (sold for $11,282,500).
- On the night of 18 October 1938, eight days after he celebrated his 37th birthday, Giacometti had dinner with Isabel Delmer, a married Englishwoman with whom he was having an affair. He was unhappy with this relationship and was undecided on whether he should continue it or break off with her. After walking Isabel to her door, Giacometti was making his way home along the place des Pyramides when a speeding automobile emerged from the rue de Rivoli, sideswiped the sidewalk and knocked him down, before passing under an arcade and crashing through a shop window. His right shoe had come off; his foot appeared misshapen and had begun to swell. A police car took him to the nearby Bichat hospital, together with the driver of the car, an American woman from Chicago, Mrs. Nelson, who was drunk but unhurt (she immediately afterwards skipped town and was never heard from again).
- “Sartre told his story of my accident the way it suited him. But it was completely different…. I accompanied my girlfriend on foot from the Café de Flore to the other bank of the Seine. Our relationship had been so unsatisfactory for so long that I had decided that evening to break with her. ‘I am losing my footing completely,’ I had said to her among other things. On the way back I was crossing the place des Pyramides looking for a taxi. A car came rushing at me across the square. I ran to the traffic island but that didn't help. I was hit, thrown down. I didn't feel the slightest pain, it happened so quickly. But I knew all the same that something had happened to my foot, because it was sticking out from my leg like a part of my body that didn't belong to me anymore…. It took a long time to heal. But it was a good time for me; hadn't I predicted or anticipated what had happened? Isn't it strange how something you say can come true like that? And once again my life took care of bringing to an end a situation which had become unbearable for me.”
The ocean is a Turing machine, the sand is its tape; the water reads the marks in the sand and sometimes erases them and sometimes carves new ones with tiny currents that are themselves a response to the marks. Plodding through the surf, Waterhouse strikes deep craters in the wet sand that are read by the ocean. Eventually the ocean erases them, but in the process its state has been changed, the pattern of its swirls has been altered. Waterhouse imagines that the disturbance might somehow propagate across the Pacific and into some super-secret Nipponese surveillance device made of bamboo tubes and chrysanthemum leaves; Nip listeners would know that Waterhouse had walked that way. In turn, the water swirling around Waterhouse’s feet carries information about Nip propeller design and the deployment of their fleets – if only he had the wit to read it. The chaos of the waves, gravid with encrypted data, mocks him.
- Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon I only got a couple hundred pages in before it was back to textbooks :(
Fintan O'Toole: Shakespeare is Hard, but so is Life They are the mental equivalent of a cold shower; shocking. awful, but in some obscure way good for you, bracing you for the terrors of life and keeping your mind off bad thoughts about politics, society and the way the world changes. They are an ordeal after which you're supposed to feel better, a kind of mental muesli that cleans out the system and purges the soul. And, like muesli, they are boring, fruity and full of indigestible roughage.
The plays of William Shakespeare were written on the playing fields of Eton. Or, at least, the plays of Shakespeare as they have been taught in school, were. In the form in which most people first encounter them, Hamlet or Macbeth, King Lear or Othello are made to seem as if they have very little to do with the theatre, with the seventeenth century, with a man trying to create new rituals for a world that was changing at a frightening pace, and everything to do with building character, with the nineteenth century, with teaching us lessons about how we should behave.
Did you hear that the First Folio is on tour? I discovered this while reading an article in Wikipedia about literary cruxes, words or phrases in old texts that are unclear to modern scholars. For example, Falstaff is described in the First Folio with the words The intended words are believed to be "and 'a [he] babbl'd of green fields," but other phrases remain mysterious. Also discovered during that rabbit hole: Foul papers....his nose was sharp as a pen, and 'a Table of green fields
I didn't know that about the First Folio tour or all the goings on at the Folger. I spent the last while clicking around the Folger website... thx. The Foul papers gives the line from the witches in MacBeth a new twist: ALL Fair is foul, and foul is fair: Hover through the fog and filthy air.
Yes, he is saying that. He's arguing that the way Shakespeare was and is being taught has nothing to do with the complexity of an engaged artist trying to express the complexity of his own times (and thereby all other societies in dynamic alterations) --- He says that Shakespeare as it is studied in high school, and perhaps the majority of the Shakespeare productions are being reduced to a don't-rock-the-boat Victorian ideology. He believes most of us have encountered Shakespeare for the first time in school through the distorting theories of Victorians who wished most of all to tame the radical critique of the plays to sustain the colonial agenda of Empire -- and that, as he says in the quotation, the plays -- especially the tragedies -- are much more than that. As for how they could be presented differently -- good question. I have a friend who bit-torrented all the available Shakespeare he could find. One of these was a PBS version of Macbeth with Patrick Stewart (Star Trek the next gen) playing Macbeth and -- oh look: http://www.pbs.org/video/1604122998/ here it is all two hours and 41 minutes. This was DEFINITELY anti-Imperialist putting Macbeth into a WW 1 landscape. Something is really unhinged from the usual in this production. I just loved it. I think he really gets the truth of what Shakespeare was all about! XoJ