getting on and contemplating death (the public intellectual)

'it started when michel foucault died...'

marguerite duras (getting on and contemplating death) complains about the tv news. the great figure has died. we are shown footage of the great figure talking and are told (in the voice over) that we are hearing the voice of the great figure. but of course we can no longer hear them because the news casters voice is much louder. this is particularly ironic for foucault, the one who wanted his voice to join with the voice of his predecessor. but here he is his voice joined with the voice of the public intellectual.

against the people with reasons for their actions (who are a part of history or politics or philosophy), foucault and duras placed les faits divers, the people in the true crime shows, the sensational murderers, the hopeless suicides, the senseless accidents (georges figon, lech walesa's wife, the cutter-off of the water), the events of her own life.

and she travels even into death (sending us messages back from her deathbed). of course no magical insight arises from the moments before death, merely that the organism stops working and the spirit departs.

in other readings horsemouth read of worker's research in italy in the early sixties - the quaderni rossi,  the red notebooks.

‘as I remember it, the group of young people who gravitated towards the quaderni rossi in 1961-62 were characterized first and foremost by a desire to understand the profound transformation that both productive facilities and the urban environment were undergoing; the need to master a theoretical-systematic framework by which to interpret what was happening in accordance with a marxian logic came second.’ - sergio bologna

‘each writer-speaker seems to me to be fully aware that there is something special in the telling of their life stories’ - pasolini.

yet here something will come of the work. the stories do not stay faits divers. 

horsemouth started reading hamlet (he found it on a bin in the neighbourhood). then he watched it. the lines you know as commonplaces came thick and fast. if these were poor people the story would be faits divers, but, because they are kings and queens there's the story, tyranny and usurpation. 

swear! says the ghost from beneath the floorboards, an old mole made blind in the libraries. how to overcome these times out of joint. (and so horsemouth should probably go back and read derrida's spectres of marx again). 

over in the gagarine estate outside paris (named after the cosmonaut yuri gagarin) there is a film crew. they are there to film a hopeful movie of renewal through art as the days count down the estate's demolition. (once we had dreams of going to the moon, now we have netflicks). la haine, horsemouth guesses, it's not. 

horsemouth (and his co-workers) have attempted something similar (the fall of the house of fitzgerald) but on a much smaller scale. it cannot work because the wrecking ball is coming, the estate cannot be saved. by being made in the location the film becomes complicit in its destruction. (still if you point a camera at something there may be something to see).

a friend (robert lawson) has a new album out (he has expanded himself to become a trio). it's good. as far as horsemouth can tell it continues to be inspired by the work of michael o'shea (great phasing zithers batman!) there's some nice bass work going on (at least that's what horsemouth thinks it is).