by giacometti
From the earliest notebooks, Musil displays a concern with erotic feeling and the relations between the erotic and the ethical. The education of the senses through a refining of erotic life seems to him to hold the best promise of bringing humankind to a higher ethical plane. He deplores the rigid sexual roles that bourgeois society has laid down for women and men. “Whole countries of the soul have been lost and submerged” as a consequence, he writes.
In asserting the sexual relation as the fundamental cultural relation, and in advocating a sexual revolution as the gateway to a new millennium, Musil is curiously reminiscent of his contemporary D.H. Lawrence. Where he differs from Lawrence is in not wishing to exclude the intellect from erotic life—indeed, in seeking to eroticize the intellect. As a writer, he is also capable of an unmoralizing brutality of observation that is simply not in Lawrence’s repertoire. He watches a young woman watching her mother kiss a younger man. “Up till now she has only known a woman’s kiss as a tentative gesture; but this is like a dog sinking its teeth into another.”
José Luis Guerin discusses his recent film Guest, based around the year-long itinerary of the director visiting many film festivals and cultures.
Apart from the patently nonreality-based dissent of its Republican members, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission could hardly have expected the report it issued in January to arouse much excitement. After a year and a half of research and the testimony of academics and other economic experts, it came up with no more than the already conventional wisdom that the economic downturn that burst into public view in 2007 might have been avoided, having been caused by a combination of lax governmental regulation and excessive risk-taking by lenders and borrowers, particularly in the housing market. The same conventional wisdom assures us that swift government action prevented the Great Recession from turning into a full-blown depression, and that the downturn has given way to recovery, albeit a “fragile” one. No matter how often it is repeated, however, this wisdom remains unconvincing.
Hitchcock had an unusually large set constructed to represent the interior courtyard of a New York City apartment complex in a lower middle-class neighborhood. The array of characters visible to the peeping Jeffries exteriorize the tensions and dynamics of his sexual fantasies. They are known to us by the names he assigns them: Miss Torso, a scantily dressed dancer attracts his prurient interest as she exercises or entertains her many suitors; the Newlyweds carry on behind a drawn shade, but when the husband appears at the window for a respite his insatiable wife calls him back for more activity; a middle-aged Miss Lonelyhearts comes to the verge of suicide in her failure to find a suitable companion; an older couple sleep on the fire escape hot summer nights, head to foot; a father is briefly seen dressing his very young daughter. At opposite ends of the courtyard are two artists, of image and sound, corresponding to the two tracks of a film. A middle-aged woman at one side makes modernist sculpture: her annular creation, Hunger , suggests sexual as well as gastronomic need. Her opposite is a young male composer of songs, who drinks too much until his music brings him together with Miss Lonelyhearts.
In the center of this psychic microcosm, a row of windows like a strip of cinematic frames looks in on the apartment of the unhappily married Lars Thorwald (Raymond Burr) and his bedridden wife. When Mrs. Thorwald disappears, Jeffries convinces himself, his doting girlfriend, Lisa (Grace Kelly), and eventually his visiting nurse, Stella (Thelma Ritter), that Thorwald has murdered her, dismembered her body in the bath-tub, buried some of her limbs in the courtyard, and mailed the rest in a trunk.
Most of the drama is concentrated in the confines of Jeffries’s small apartment. Lisa, an affluent fashion designer, is so eager to get a permanent commitment from the reluctant Jeffries that she has his meals catered from the Stork Club, and ignores his discouragement when she comes to spend the night in the apartment. Stella, a voice of earthy common sense, insists that there must be something wrong with Jeffries to reject the attention of someone like Lisa. Although she puts up a formidable resistance to his “ghoulish” fascination with the Thorwalds, she too enters his fantasy and joins Lisa in a hunt for limbs under flower beds in the yard.
Crash, Ballard’s most controversial and second most famous book, explores the idea that there is ‘a strong connection between sexuality and the car crash, a fusion largely driven by the cult of celebrity’: just think of James Dean, Grace Kelly, Mark Bolan, President Kennedy (‘a special kind of car crash’) or Princess Diana. In 1970, shortly before he began writing the novel, Ballard decided to ‘test my hypothesis about the unconscious links between sex and the car crash by putting on an exhibition of crashed cars’. On the opening night ‘there was a huge tension in the air, as if everyone felt threatened by some inner alarm that had started to ring.’ People got drunk and behaved badly, and over the following weeks further acts of vandalism were inflicted on the exhibits. Ballard’s ‘suspicions had been confirmed about the unconscious links that my novel would explore’. The hostile responses that the book provoked when it was published, and which David Cronenberg’s film version reanimated 25 years later, are on this view further evidence of its deep ‘psychological and emotional truth’. The only possible explanation for such fiercely negative reactions, Ballard says, is denial: it’s the classic Freudian ‘no means yes’ defence.
There is an altogether more superficial problem with Crash, however. It’s not all that hard to accept that in the postmodern world there is a strong and complex connection between cars, sex and death, if only because cars are forever being both advertised and interpreted as extensions and expressions of their owners’ libidos; car accidents are by far the most common cause of injury and violent death in the West; and we don’t need Freud to tell us that we’re all deeply confused about sex, death and whatever it is that they may or may not have in common. It’s not the general truth of Crash that’s the problem, then, so much as the particular untruths; not the tenor of the metaphor, but – sorry – the vehicle. Before Ballard introduced readers in Miracles of Life to Bobby Henderson, few would have thought to doubt the authenticity of Jim’s parentlessness in Empire of the Sun. But Crash doesn’t even seem to have persuaded the novel’s own characters that car accidents could be a turn-on. Despite all the bodily fluids spurted and smeared onto wrecked dashboards, the problem isn’t that it’s too pornographic but that it isn’t pornographic enough: the novel is too conscious of the deeper meaning of the sex and violence for the sex and violence to work as elements in themselves. As Baudrillard put it in his celebrated 1976 essay on the novel (translated into English by Arthur Evans in 1991), ‘gone are the “erogenous zones”: everything becomes a hole for reflex discharges.’
These are the qualities that run through many Brando films, from A Streetcar Named Desire on: until he turns into a patriarch himself in The Godfather and a rambling sage in Apocalypse Now. And these are the qualities Bertolucci picks up in Last Tango in Paris and rests the whole movie on. He certainly can’t rest it on the sulky Maria Schneider, who makes a great belated image of the 1960s but can’t really do anything but pout and undress. ‘Vous êtes américain?’ she asks when they meet, but we already know the answer. He is not only American, and not only Paul, the bereaved character in the film seeking to find a renewal of life in Schneider’s youth and weirdly submissive attraction to him. He is Marlon Brando, a man who has made a career out of not saying what he wants, perhaps even not knowing what he wants, and getting it all the same. Bertolucci, like the great cineaste he is, made a hymn to old movies, and to an old movie star, before they were even that old.
End para, double-space. Isn’t that just how it should have gone between Frédéric Moreau and Madame Arnoux? It’s the ending that Freedom deserves, since the book is, among other things, possibly the most lachrymose novel of modern times. There are, in its 560 pages, 26 separate instances of weeping, not counting the many blinked-back tears or suppressed sobs or ‘Tiny pearls of tear … clinging to her eyelashes’ (a formulation so heartfelt it is recycled from page 421 of The Corrections). Meanwhile the final results for our ensemble have come in: Republican go-getter Joey has seen the error of his ways and become an importer of ethically grown coffee. Jessica is a junior editor at a literary publishing house in Manhattan, excited to be publishing ‘an earnest young novelist’. Patty’s rotten sister Abigail has become a successful art-clown in Italy. Patty’s less rotten sister Veronica is an unappreciated but possibly genius-level painter. Patty works with kids; Walter, one supposes, with birds. Richard, ‘busy and successful’, has just completed ‘one of those avant-garde orchestral thingies for the Brooklyn Academy of Music’ and is currently working on scores for art-house movies. And pretty much everyone lives in New York. Now, that’s how life oughta be! At last the question ‘How to live?’, posed throughout the novel, has been answered: we should live like they do in Hannah and Her Sisters. It’s around now that it may dawn on the reader that Freedom has more in common with Richard’s country-tinged, Grammy-nominated middlebrow hit record than Franzen might have intended. This book is ‘Nameless Lake’.
Bernhard’s parallel career as a playwright began in 1970, as did his long collaboration with the director Claus Peymann, who directed Bernhard’s first full-length play, A Party for Boris, at Hamburg’s Schauspielhaus. A number of prestigious Austrian theaters soon adopted this play for their own programs. Popular interest in Bernhard’s theatrical work of this period was demonstrated by the fact that, in 1974, Vienna’s Burgtheater performed his new play The Hunting Party, while the Salzburg Festival presented The Force of Habit. Other important productions directed by Peymann included Der Ignorant und der Wahnsinnige (The Ignoramus and the Madman) at the Salzburg Festival in 1972, the premiere of The President at the Burgtheater, Minetti in 1976, with the actor Bernhard Minetti in the title role, and, in 1979, the premiere of Der Weltverbesserer (The Universal Reformer).
Nineteen seventy-five, an especially important year in Bernhard’s evolution, saw the publication of one of his fictional masterpieces, the novel Correction, as well as An Indication of the Cause, the first volume of the autobiographical work, the writing of which would continue for another seven years and which would eventually be collected in one volume as Gathering Evidence (where it appears as the second chapter). The accelerating rhythm of Bernhard’s literary production was marked in 1978 by the publication of four new works, including a play entitled Immanuel Kant, the second volume of his autobiography, and two major works of fiction, The Voice Imitator and Yes. In 1979 Erzählungen (Stories) gathered together the major short fiction that Bernhard had produced over the previous decade.
The final decade of Bernhard’s prematurely concluded career began in 1980 with a novel, The Cheap-Eaters, followed in 1981 by the arrival of a new volume of his autobiography, two plays—Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh (O’er All the Treetops Is Repose) and Am Ziel (The Goal Attained)—and Ave Vergil. Nineteen eighty-two saw the publication of the final volume of the autobiography and two novels, Concrete and the much-admired Wittgenstein’s Nephew, whose title alludes to Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew and which drew heavily on his actual friendship with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s cousin Paul.
Each year, the American Library Association’s (ALA) Office for Intellectual Freedom receives hundreds of reports on book challenges, which are formal written requests to remove a book from a library or classroom because of an objection to the book’s content.
“Not every book is right for each reader, but we should have the right to think for ourselves and allow others to do the same,” said ALA President Roberta Stevens. “How can we live in a free society and develop our own opinions if our right to choose reading materials for ourselves and our families is taken away? We must remain diligent and protect our freedom to read.”
Below is a list of 10 popular Graphic Novels that have faced removal.
