My process almost always begins with a camera, but I’m not really a photographer. I have always been more interested in the noise around a photograph. All of the subliminal things happening around the moment of photographing that don’t make it into the image…
A: We’re French, we had to put wine in the story. And so life had champagne parties.
B: Well, a party without champagne…
A: —Is a war without weapons. You know, if I was younger, we’d have had a great passionate affair for two years and been friends the rest of our lives. I can tell you that frankly. That said, if you violate my airspace, there will not be a funeral!
What an amazing and weird piece it must have been. Six live snakes, strung up from the pipes of some loft space, played five custom string instruments made of wood. Each snake had a soft white collar around its head and tail, and string was tied to each of these collars; the top string led to the roof, the bottom string to the instrument…
Quietly composed for France’s Fata Morgana Press in the aftermath of The Kindly Ones—a monumental study on human baseness and Nazism—Mr. Littell’s new book at first appears to bear little resemblance to its precursor. Where The Kindly Ones is an exuberant historical novel, a 992-page behemoth of rape, incest, and murder, The Fata Morgana Books is a spare, 184-page collection of four short novellas, comparatively light, until the end, on physical violence, and stripped of the ornamental graces of period, geographical location, name, gender…
“I am not what I am.” Wait, what? No Fear Shakespeare—the Sparknotes guide that translates Shakespeare into “the kind of English people actually speak today”—graciously glosses this as “I am not what I appear to be,” but he doesn’t really say that does he? No, he doesn’t; he says he is not who he is. This is not a question of weird/scary Elizabethan English.
A decent strategy with TED might be to reclaim our teenage capacities and treat these videos as hopelessly passé—ignore them to death. Critiquing them, even as I have done, will do what criticism has done for television: creating an added enjoyment as you go on consuming the crap you despise…
A: What if I believe in this, just because it is beautiful?
B: One should not try so crudely to make everything suit their interests, calling the same thing white today and black tomorrow.
It’s like walking down the street and seeing someone fall over—we react to that because it’s another body in space, like our own body in space…
Fundament represents a radical desublimation of the obsession with sex and death. In its unflinching presentation of the twin poles of mortality, what was previously obscene has shifted to center stage, to the stomach’s chagrin…
A: Didn’t mind so much if it was inaccurate.
B: People didn’t mind so much if it was inaccurate? Well, they need some basic plumbing lessons. And they have clearly lost all human morality. They’re setting fire to the future… There is no greater freedom than the right to survive.
A: Listen, I hear you: Muenster is Muenster, no matter how you slice it.
