“Twice everything has already taken place that our personality or destiny is like a roll of negative film— already printed but unrevealable until it has found a camera to project it—and a surface to throw it upon.‘“ Mina Loy fragment.

Rowling, Rushdie and Atwood rally against ‘cancel culture’: 150 authors and academics sign open letter denouncing ‘public shaming’ and ‘intolerance’

The Harry Potter author has joined Sir Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood and other prominent individuals from the arts in signing a letter warning open debate is being weakened in favour of ‘ideological conformity’.

The 150 signatories say recent protests for racial and social justice are a ‘needed reckoning’ but fear freedom of speech is becoming ‘more constricted’ every day. The letter, published in Harper’s Magazine, comes amid a debate over so-called cancel culture, where public figures are boycotted and shamed for perceived offensive acts.

It states: ‘The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: An intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty.’

from Mail+

LOOKS GIVE IN EVERY DEPARTMENT

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/david-simon-interview-the-wire-creator-on-turning-philip-roths-novel-about-a-fascist-becoming-president-into-a-devastating-tv-series-k6f30tgnc

‘It can’t happen here’: the horrifying power of The Plot Against America https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2020/mar/30/the-plot-against-america-philip-roth-tv-hbo?CMP=share_btn_tw

Sinclair Lewis laid claim to It Can’t Happen Here back in 1935 with a novel that imagined a populist demagogue whipping the United States into a fascist dystopia, complete with internment camps for dissidents and paramilitary goon squads.

 The Trump parallels come early and often, and while the writing occasionally prints its subtext in font a couple of sizes too large, it’s all in order to make the point that much more forcefully.

“The Senator was vulgar, almost illiterate, a public liar easily detected, and in his “ideas” almost idiotic, while his celebrated piety was that of a traveling salesman for church furniture, and his yet more celebrated humor the sly cynicism of a country store.
Certainly there was nothing exhilarating in the actual words of his speeches, nor anything convincing in his philosophy. His political platforms were only wings of a windmill.”

― Sinclair Lewis, It Can’t Happen Here

O Hell by Mina Loy

To clear the drifts of spring
Of our forebear’s excrements
And bury the subconscious archives
Under unaffected flowers

Indeed —

Our person is a covered entrance to infinity
Choked with the tatters of tradition

Goddesses and Young Gods
Caress the sanctity of Adolescence
In the shaft of the sun.

The towering musical maestro composed more than 400 scores for cinema and TV, as well as more than 100 classical works. His score for The Good, The Bad And The Ugly (1966), one of a handful of successful collaborations with director Sergio Leone, is considered one of the most influential soundtracks in history.

His glittering filmography includes more than 70 award-winning films, including all Leone’s films, all Giuseppe Tornatore’s films from the much-loved Cinema Paradiso onwards, The Battle Of Algiers, Dario Argento’s Animal Trilogy, Days Of Heaven, The Thing, The Mission, The Untouchables, Bugsy and Ripley’s Game.

Ennio Morricone – The Spaghetti Western Trio – Sergio Leone, Clint Eastw… https://youtu.be/mfRFET2UZok via @YouTube

Director Edgar Wright said: “Where to even begin with iconic composer Ennio Morricone? He could make an average movie into a must see, a good movie into art, and a great movie into legend. He hasn’t been off my stereo my entire life. What a legacy of work he leaves behind. RIP.”

One of my favourites – Ennio Morricone – (2002) La Misión [Suite Orquestal] https://youtu.be/3dLxy4jn_vI via @YouTube

It is a harsh word but still I say it, because it is the truth; I can think of no people more fragmented that the … craftsmen you see, but no humans, thinkers but no humans, priests but o humans, lords and servants, boys and established people but no humans – is this not like a battlefield, where hands and arms and all limbs lie chaotically in pieces, while the spilled  blood of life runs into the sand. (from Holderlin’s ‘Hyperion’ (The Hermit of Greece) 1797 and 1799.

Truly, my friends, I wander among men as among fragments and limbs of humans. This is what is horrifying to my eyes, that I find men in ruins and scattered about as on a battlefield and butcher field. And if my gaze flees from the present to the past: it finds always the same thing: fragments and piles of limbs and grisly accidents – but no humans! (from Nietzsche’s ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra,’ XLII On Redemption (1883).

This is part of the world of ‘The Fugitive Stag’ …

A second idiosyncrasy of philosophers confuses the last with the first.

The rationalist philosophers begin with the “highest” concepts, when they would be at the end if they could be reached at all. The good. The true. The perfect.

Since being is static for these philosophers, the “highest” concepts could not have emerged from the “lower” ones.

Because they cannot come to be, they must be treated as causes in themselves.

Since these “highest” concepts must conform perfectly with one another, they are all located in a single being, the “most real being,” “God.”

The human race has paid dearly for this web-spinning by the philosophers.

Nietzsche

Do you realize that the past, starting from yesterday, has been actually abolished? If it survives anywhere, it’s in a few solid objects with no words attached to them, like that lump of glass there.

Already we know almost literally nothing about the Revolution and the years before the Revolution. Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.

George Orwell, 1984

The dog of madness must be the mad god himself; transform these dogs into gods. In heroic frenzy, the great hunter sees, and he himself becomes the prey. Actaeon, who with these thoughts, searched for wisdom, beauty, and the wild beasts outside himself, attained them this way: once he was in their presence, ravished outside of himself by so much beauty, he became the prey of his own thoughts and saw himself converted into the thing he was pursuing. Predator of the marvellous, searching for wisdom, beauty, the wild beast.

Myths re-imagined in the tale of The Fugitive Stag