This from “David Foster Wallace: An Appreciation by David Gates (Newsweek Books).

I suspect that Wallace was a genius who happened to be a writer, rather than a writer who happened to be a genius-Hemingway, for instance. You can’t imagine Hemingway writing, as Wallace did, a treatise called “Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity” (2004), or winning an undergraduate prize at Amherst College for a thesis on “modal logic,” whatever that may be, or going on to Harvard for graduate study in philosophy after his well-reviewed first novel, “The Broom of the System” (1987) was published-this after getting an MFA in fiction at the University of Arizona. Like Wallace, Hemingway worked as a journalist (in his case, primarily as a war correspondent), but he was an observer while Wallace was an explorer.

This idea of being a genius who happened to be a writer reminds me of a certain person I know, who is/was a math and computer genius but “rebelled” against this side of him and decided, at one point in his early 20s, to pursue an MFA in poetry, which he did, and published some books, did some translation, etc. I don’t know if he is still a writer, or whether or not he has become an architect or something…but anyhow, David Green expounds a bit more on the idea later:

The writer who happens to be a genius—the archetype is Shakespeare—is in love with his words, his story and his people. Wallace-the reverse archetype-surely knew as much about words, stories and people as any writer would ever need to know, but he gave his deepest love to his ideas about them. If the endlessly self-analytical Hamlet had been a writer (aside from that “speech of some twelve or fifteen lines” he composes to insert in “The Murder of Gonzago,” the play within the play), he would have written far more like Wallace than like Shakespeare. Hamlet says that “I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams”; it’s a line that the author of “Infinite Jest” must have taken deeply to heart. Wallace’s encyclopedic self-reflexiveness made his work, at its best, a wonder of the literary world, and at its worst, nearly unreadable.

david foster wallace, writer, novelist, suicide, america, books

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《恐怖分子》影评：杨德昌的手术刀-搜狐娱乐 via kwout

Edward Yang is, by any measure, a master of the cinema. Like his other films from this era (late 1980s and early 1990s), Terrorizers is a merciless dissection of the lives of the Taiwanese urban middle-class. I’ve been reading a Chinese review/essay on the film, and I think it brings out some interesting concepts. For
one, it mentions that one of the major themes of the film is the middle-age crisis, especially as it revolves around the Li Lizhong and his wife Zhou Yufen. He’s a doctor obsessed with trying to get a promotion by hook or crook, and Zhou is a writer who seems to have lost her creative spark. What at first seem like minor speed bumps, over the course of the film,
get magnified into something else–a crisis of meaning. Their marriage is on the rocks, there is adultery, both real and imagined, and soon Zhou wins a literary award and moves out just to shack up with her old/new lover.

Of course, things go pear-shaped for Li and he goes on a murderous rampage–or at least we think he does. It turns out this is just a dream. It’s a strange thing: a dream sequence in the film that for the most part remains staunchly on the outside of the characters, observing them from afar. However, when we get back to reality, we find that
instead of killing others, Li has blown his own brains out. The Chinese reviewer’s point is that the emotional cruelty inflicted upon us by “modern society” , so that it is impossible to just take Li Lizhong’s self-destruction as individual tragedy–the lives of all the characters, not just Li’s, are comments on or representations of what Yang thinks of life
in the present society. The reviewer also claims that the two younger characters–Xiao Qiang, the scion of a rich family who slums it as a photographer, and Shu An, the girl involved in the criminal underworld–are rebelling against the strictures of society; they do what they do because they are, each in their own way, rebelling against their lot in life, running away from the clutches of middle-aged meaningless that would no doubt overtake them otherwise.

This whole theory seems a bit too pat for me, but I think that the overall gist is right, if only because the overall gist of Yang movies is really hard to miss. I don’t know if it really amounts to some broadside against modern society per se–I think that like anyone, Yang sees both the good and bad things about the times we live in–but I think, like a trust artist
Yang has made it his mission to take an unflinching look at the darker side of things: the anomie, the desperation, the specter of meaningless that lurks inside and around even the most normal of lives. Anyhow, I think this essay is also quite interesting for the way that it discusses not only the movie but Yang himself: Yang, he says, takes a surgical knife
to modern society, peeling away its layers, exposing what lies inside and beneath. He/she claims that the title of the film refers not only to Shu An, the most regularly “violent” of the characters, but to all those characters who stand in opposition –or perhaps find themselves, unwillingly perhaps, thrown into a situation where they must go against grain. They are the “terrorizers” because they terrorize us into seeing what is normally repressed. In some sense, the darkness that exists beneath the calm veneer of the middle-class ego and middle-age stability and position is even darker than naked violence between say rival gangs or mafia families. That kind of violence is open, and in some ways, transparent–people know the rules, there is a ample cause and effect, but the kind of violence that erupts from the relatively staid and normal people in Yang’s films is altogether something different. It’s inchoate, and unpredictable. The victims aren’t even aware of
the fact that they are targets.

One last digression. The author of the review says that the first ten minutes of The Terrorizers reminds him of Antonioni’s Blow-Up, but says that the contrast between the two directors lies in the fact that MA explores the philosophical nature of things and existence, whereas EY takes his surgical knife and exposes the core of Taiwanese society for what it is .

影片的前10分钟让我想起了安东尼奥尼的《放大》，同样行尸走肉一般的社会环境，同样带有悬念的故事，还有同样以照相机记录事件的人物。两部影片为了达到纪实的效果自始至终都没有配乐，但安东尼奥尼的主题是想探讨事物存在与真实的哲学命题，展示社会情境只是他加入其中的附属品；而杨德昌的镜头就像一把外科医生的手术刀，抽丝剥茧层层递进地揭示出台湾社会的内核。

Interesting food for thought.

Unfortunately, scrolling up and down, I can’t seem to find a name attached to it. You can see the original link here.

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I think it was a happy coincidence that I watched Mike Leigh’s Naked and Louis Malle’s Le Feu Follet (The Fire Within) in succession, on the same day. Both are character-driven movies about men who, on the surface, appear to live in the same world as us. Sure, they’re troubled—but only temporarily so.

Of course, it turns out that this isn’t the case. Johnny (from Naked) and Alain (from Le Feu Follet are in various states of Sartrean nausea. They’ve lost existential traction but no one seems them slipping, at least not in the way they really are. The inner context is a secret we all possess, but they so more than others, more than the rest of us. They are outsiders—it could not be otherwise.

Maurice is about to commit suicide. No one sees it coming. Everyone thinks there is hope for him. Everyone thinks that he’s been down, but he’s a plucky and resilient type of guy. From what we can surmise from the film about his past—he was a socialite, maybe a playboy, and most certainly the life of the party. He used to have it so together. And yet, something happened to him. It seems to be something more than issues with his estranged American wife. Surely, a failed relationship is no reason to commit suicide, right? His suicide doesn’t come at the end of some vicious mood—it’s premeditated, methodical.

Johnny is a bit different—we first get acquainted with him as he’s raping a woman. He’s not instantly likable, and it would hardly beggar the imagination call him an emotional parasite. He seems to play with people, goading them, leading them on, a demonic actor-director of dramas in his mind that we (and the other characters) cannot even begin to fathom. There’s something inherently vengeful and misogynistic about how he treats the women in the film, even including the ones he supposedly cares for.

His emotional vampire act left me bewildered. How can someone sustain themselves like, that for long. My answer is that most people cannot, and that’s why Johnny is at the end of his tether. The real source of his angst is not Y2k, and it’s not his exile from Manchester, and it’s even more not the feelings that stirred by being around old flame Louise. The source of his angst is his aloneness and outsider status.

There are tender moments in both films, where old friendships seem, at least for awhile, to offer the possibility of redemption. But in the end, neither Alain or Johnny can dally too long. In the case of Alain, I was never under much illusion that he would change his mind, it seemed a foregone conclusion that he would die on the 23rd of July, and the only question left was how. On the other hand, when Johnny and Louise are having that conversation in the bathroom, and she decided to go back to Manchester that very day, you wonder or not if this is the happy ending that we had all hoped for. Actress Leslie Sharpe, who plays Louise, is resplendent in this deceptively simple scene—the shots of her face as she talks with Johnny and they find out that they still have feelings for each other and might go back to Manchester together. That scene left a deep impression on me, if only because it the ONE bright light in the bleak landscape of the film. I had seen the film before but had forgotten how it ended, so the scene and the end of the film still hit me as if I’d been watching it for the first time. So when you see Johnny taking the money and limping away, the sun behind him, it’s a bit devastating. It’s as if he knew that he couldn’t really make good on his promise to Louise. It’s as if he knew that getting close to another human being—opening to them to the point that you might become an integral part of their happiness—was just something he couldn’t hack. And so he drifts, yet again. The selfish impulses of the man are nothing if not consistent.

Alain, never seems to waver. You begin to admire the man for being so methodical. He ends a visit to his old friend by lambasting the fellow for choosing the path of mediocrity. The says in reply that although outwardly he might seem mediocre, with his nice apartment and kid and bourgeois lifestyle, but that his passion is still there. It’s that he lives without passion, but that his passion has been transferred to these extremely mundane things. Throughout the film you don’t get the sense that Alain is killing himself out of artistic principle—that is, there is no great ideology behind his suicide, it’s just an intractable sadness that transforms him, a huge glitch in the neurons that throws everything off. Yet in this scene, with his friend, you really hear him speak out, about the choices that people make, the ramifications of those choices, for him, for the friends who made those choices, for their lives, for their friendship. It’s one of the more rare “outbursts” that Alain has during the film.

I’m not sure where to end this. These are both excellent films that etch themselves in my mind in a way that ensemble pieces or movies with dense plots lines cannot—I suppose that there is just something inherently more captivating about movies that deal with the inner depths of the individual.

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See that building above? That’s what people in the Yingquan district of Fuyang City in Anhui
province sarcastically call the “white house” and is the building wher ethe local government
does its work. The local party secretary is named Zhang Zhi’an and was one of the people
responsible for the construction of this building. Earlier this year, in March, one of the people
that worked under him�Li Guofu�was found dead, from apparent suicide, in the prison
where he was being held. Why was he in prison? Because he’d done a bad thing: he
ratted on his superior, Zhang Zhi’an�and made several trips to Beijing to do so.
Li, in several reports/letters he wrote to Beijing authorities, claimed that Zhang had taken
bribes, forcefully reclaimed land from peasants, and taken public money to finance his “white
house” among other projects (golf courses, race tracks, etc.) and in general was a bad apple.

Danwei had a good post about it called Darkness in the “White House” which can you read for the rest
of the background…well, it turns out that three of the top officials in the district�Zhang and two others�have been suspended over the dubious suicide. Those guys spent
1/3 of the district’s revenue building their copycat “white house”/Capitol Building…even
without a probable murder to mix things up, these guys deserved their comeuppance long ago.

Technorati Tags: white house, fuyang, anhui, corruption, li guofu, zhang zhi’an, peasants, land, property, real estate, crime, suicide, chinese

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Amazon.com: Elliott Smith: Books: Autumn de Wilde,Beck Hansen,Chris Walla via kwout

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