tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6907693919565256102011-11-26T07:34:25.144-08:00"Eternity is in love with the productions of time" --W.B.Chethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10273786971120329655noreply@blogger.comBlogger341100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-690769391956525610.post-954567008007900642011-11-20T08:00:00.000-08:002011-11-20T08:05:59.097-08:00

I call this a "film" review in honor of my friend Kyle Grady, who mocks the distinction between film and movie when I make it, because he's a Heideggerian and they are above high-low culture distinctions. "The Trip" is not a story of some intrepid soul's experimentation with acid and the adventures that followed thereupon. Such a film was made in 1967 by Roger Corman, starring Peter Fonda. I saw

Chethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10273786971120329655noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-690769391956525610.post-76011949819445763812011-07-13T20:34:00.000-07:002011-07-13T20:34:01.101-07:00

Do you also do this when you teach, trott(ha)ing out ideas from your undergraduate education that have been with you, that perhaps you have not developed in the slightest regard, like miniscule seeds that somehow brought you to the present but which seem to remain in the infantile stage of development ...? (there is a question there). For me, the course was "Cold War Lit", taught by Prof. Daniel

Chethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10273786971120329655noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-690769391956525610.post-31953396383929819432011-07-13T09:16:00.000-07:002011-07-13T09:16:10.874-07:00

"Monsters" is a poorly titled film about aliens that inhabit the "infected zone" of northern Mexico. This area, all along the border of United States and Mexico, extends south for a hundred miles or so, and not coincidentally, cohabits the same space that is presently contaminated by Mexican drug cartels. Not a word is spoken of the latter, because "Monsters" is set in contemporary America, six

Chethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10273786971120329655noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-690769391956525610.post-47540997245146797682010-10-22T12:40:00.000-07:002010-10-22T12:40:14.038-07:00

@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; } For those who haven't been to the Film Forum, it is a movie theater in SoHo (literally on the south side of Houston) that specializes in second run and art films. I have always loved it and I

Chethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10273786971120329655noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-690769391956525610.post-82081631880405684752010-10-20T23:25:00.000-07:002010-10-20T23:25:44.425-07:00

Because it is unfortunately that time of year and the state of the world is what it is, I am going on the market. This activity requires revising a "teaching dossier" in which I talk about my teaching style and pedagogical principles, etc. This year, in revising it, I am treading the same path that I have pursued in the past by defining philosophy ... and I find this task making me wonder, in a

Chethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10273786971120329655noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-690769391956525610.post-23744811429784072572010-10-13T12:52:00.000-07:002010-10-20T23:35:59.128-07:00

Why has Barton Fink (1990) not weathered time well? This may be a completely subjective and/or personal question and among film historians or theorists the film may still hold its worth.  But I suspect that many of the later works by the Coen brothers, particularly Fargo (1996) and No Country for Old Men (2007), have eclipsed this film.  One reason simply may be that the latter won Oscars for

Chethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10273786971120329655noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-690769391956525610.post-2834790235463888382010-07-07T08:14:00.000-07:002010-07-07T08:14:15.923-07:00

I have never begrudged the idiot man-childs ("childs" not "children") the numerous advantages they have enjoyed at the expense of civilized persons such as myself. I met this fellow in Memphis TN.  His name is Jeffrey and claimed that he spelled it with a P-A-R-K-E-R. I laughed nervously and stepped back, in part because of the foul air of mediocrity wafting slowly, like the gentle violence of

Chethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10273786971120329655noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-690769391956525610.post-12247879557993011482010-06-23T07:53:00.000-07:002010-06-23T10:32:01.239-07:00

I read about The Kindly Ones in a review in NYRB (which I strongly recommend everyone to peruse regularly (as a close friend recently asked, "how have I lived without this?" after receiving the first issues of her subscription, to which I glibly responded, "in ignorance")), but I cannot say now what in particular it was in the description there that made me so interested in the book. But I was

Chethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10273786971120329655noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-690769391956525610.post-88128144724617816432010-04-22T06:39:00.000-07:002010-04-22T06:44:00.449-07:00

The earth came out of the ground, but it wouldn’t return. There just wasn’t enough room for the earth to fit back in the ground, what with the antique desk in there.That was the third day.The first day began after he left for the airport. She already had some notion where it would go. Behind their cozy home a couple of lovely acres stretched, covered with a thick fur of grass. How much time and

Chethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10273786971120329655noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-690769391956525610.post-60801595568893479732010-02-25T09:36:00.000-08:002010-02-25T10:34:11.870-08:00

"Red Riding" is a series of films, 1974, 1980, and 1983, which are based on a quartet of books by the British author David Peace. I saw the first two of these three films last night at the IFC Center at West 4th and 6th Ave.I'd been prepared for these movies by reading the piece on them in the New York Times, which made me want to see them, although in retrospect I wonder why. Perhaps it was

Chethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10273786971120329655noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-690769391956525610.post-87777906377442113352009-09-28T14:57:00.000-07:002009-09-28T15:00:10.285-07:00

In Plato’s Apology, one of the charges against Socrates is that he preaches about different gods than those of the city, and in this respect doesn’t believe in God and is impious. During his defense, he points out that if he believes and teaches certain divinities, but not those of the city, than he can’t be said to be an atheist.This episode was interesting to me, in part, because I encountered

Chethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10273786971120329655noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-690769391956525610.post-74111900070363577332009-09-11T15:19:00.000-07:002009-09-11T15:24:49.836-07:00

It goes:Language is a moral cloud-chamber, through which the world passes, emerging charged with desire.I love that line. It is lovely, perhaps for its imagery. I imagine that shiny earth passing into a mist, within staticky exchanges of electricity go back and forth. The earth comes out of the cloud, and the remaining films of the cloud pull away. But what does Hass mean my "moral" cloud-chamber

Chethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10273786971120329655noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-690769391956525610.post-69229266725391728562009-09-01T08:26:00.000-07:002009-09-01T08:46:15.529-07:00

Perhaps this will be the format for a number of soon-to-be blog posts, but since time is short, they will take the form of "quickly."Every now and again Y and I see children and I comment on their aptitude and say, oh, he's part of the bronze cast, or she's silver, recalling the "myth of the metals" described at the end of Book 3 of Plato's Republic. As you shall remember, according to the myth

Chethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10273786971120329655noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-690769391956525610.post-18747011981832626262009-06-18T14:40:00.000-07:002009-06-18T15:34:59.046-07:00

Having just spent more than two hours watching "In the Valley of Elah" (2007), there are many things that I feel. The movie is about the story of a father trying to determine what has happened to his son, who is discovered dead shortly after arriving back from a tour of duty in Iraq. Because of the grief presented in the film, I find myself touched by this grief. I am very sad because of the loss

Chethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10273786971120329655noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-690769391956525610.post-77572677801699377412009-04-20T11:17:00.000-07:002009-04-20T13:26:05.827-07:00

More than a month ago I began reading Roberto Bolaño's 2666, I suppose on a lark. In fact, my bookclub (perhaps presently defunct) selected it, after reading Atmospheric Disturbances by Rivka Galchen (which I strongly recommend, particularly for one quotation: "Peculiarity is fact rumpling the bedsheets of assumption"). Around the same time I bought The Savage Detectives on my friend Jeff's

Chethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10273786971120329655noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-690769391956525610.post-39952410669984209662008-12-17T17:33:00.000-08:002008-12-17T18:44:53.348-08:00

My attraction towards this film I have trumpeted, advertised, as a kind of funny thing that entertains my friends and gives them something quirky to identify with my strange character. Or so I tell myself. But in fact, both the opening credits and images and the closing line ("I wanted it to be you. I wanted it to be you so bad") thrill me.Like the previous film by Nora Ephron also starring Tom

Chethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10273786971120329655noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-690769391956525610.post-325040036002046762008-12-16T09:35:00.000-08:002008-12-16T10:17:39.195-08:00

The title of this film announces its trajectory, although it seems, in its content, to be more or less a story of cops that go bad in trying to do good.  This story-arch, namely up and then down--although in this film, really, things just get bad and then get worse--requires that the film absorb its actors within a grand scope in which they are merely events that occur.  But the real subject of

Chethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10273786971120329655noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-690769391956525610.post-6648037882062423222008-11-30T21:15:00.000-08:002008-12-01T09:06:08.961-08:00

In his famous second discourse, the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755), Jean-Jacques Rousseau preempts the vacuous call for “family values,” more than two centuries before the fact. That the family is merely a result of the unnatural socializing of human being, Rousseau concludes in his account of the transformation of human being from the state of nature to civil society. Because

Chethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10273786971120329655noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-690769391956525610.post-76363602703463550452008-06-24T13:20:00.000-07:002008-06-24T14:41:56.032-07:00

Folks, just so you know the sacrifice I'm making, I'm in NYC and supposed to be reading Schelling before heading tonight to the Spotted Pig to meet Yana and her friends, but as it happens the blogging conversation demands a response sooner than later (perhaps this means I should wake before noon ...).---Let me head off a few accusations.Leigh, first, diegesis vs. mimesis equals morality vs.

Chethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10273786971120329655noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-690769391956525610.post-27181384153781159352008-06-07T20:54:00.000-07:002008-06-07T21:59:40.984-07:00

Having all of this new found time ... at least for the immediate present (and perhaps primarily the absence of the burden of the dissertation), I am now catching up on all of the films that I have been meaning to see over the past couple years. This film stars Jean Gabin, who is on the account of all of the people who worked with him over the years, le Parisien le plus grand. In the film he

Chethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10273786971120329655noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-690769391956525610.post-82896156014073753832008-05-10T11:43:00.000-07:002008-05-10T12:32:38.400-07:00

Please forgive the pedestrian beginnings of my rebirth as a blogger, but I have to start somewhere. Went with Yana to see this film the other night (perhaps Kyle would insist on calling it a movie). Recalled seeing the trailer with excitement: a film that was about smart people and the kinds of things that they talk about, without being amounting to some silly drama about people that are

Chethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10273786971120329655noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-690769391956525610.post-35775293449602254592008-01-19T11:48:00.000-08:002008-01-19T13:17:11.232-08:00

So today I got involved in this discussion with my girlfriend's roommate, who in fact used to be a friend of mine from college. Back at Wooster, we had met each other in two different classes, the first being "Comparative Sexual Poetics," in which I read Genet for the first time, and "Postwar German Cinema" (I have a memory of watching "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" in that course, but I think

Chethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10273786971120329655noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-690769391956525610.post-60551480383614900142007-12-08T13:14:00.000-08:002008-12-10T16:57:58.328-08:00

One of my favorite films is Alfred Hitchcock's "Rear Window" (1954). I have the pleasure of teaching it again right now, which allows me to once more trot out my idiosyncratic interpretation.The film is not about whether or not Thorwald murdered his wife. That is actually a subtext. Rather, the film is about the relationship between Jeff and Lisa. This is the primary concern of the film. It

Chethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10273786971120329655noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-690769391956525610.post-78284225516708346382007-11-15T20:17:00.000-08:002007-11-15T21:39:03.800-08:00

Kyle's right. There are a couple of issues in the air here. But they do not come from some sort of overarching mechanistic view of social behavior. What a crass way to put that. What an invective. My heart skipped a beat when I first read that and I thought "et tu Kyle, Leigh" (and then I spent the day in bed crying). And I am not claiming that individuals are not capable of rational

Chethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10273786971120329655noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-690769391956525610.post-27400195312311188112007-11-13T15:59:00.000-08:002007-11-13T16:39:41.467-08:00

As many of you know, like some of my esteemed colleagues, I am a PK (preacher's kid). To me this doesn't ultimately mean a whole lot, other than providing an explanation for why I went to church camps for so many summers and why I have been drawn towards this seemingly eggheaded vocation. It is not something that I think about a lot. But I do occasionallly wonder about the influence of

Chethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10273786971120329655noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-690769391956525610.post-47972557182980236812007-10-20T20:06:00.000-07:002008-12-10T16:57:58.675-08:00

A few years ago, before they had their lovely daughter, Ammon and Heather and I sat down for a meal. Actually, I know exactly when this way: the fall of 2000. We all had a few drinks and somehow Heather developed (or perhaps it was already well developed) her theory of teen film noir. It was fascinating dinner conversation, really. I have a perverse fondness for talking about film and

Chethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10273786971120329655noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-690769391956525610.post-30138323411366876222007-10-09T10:13:00.000-07:002007-10-12T09:45:24.540-07:00

As far as I understand, the opposition stands as follows (comes out of Freud's Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, which I have recently had the pleasure of "professoring," pace Leigh):Perversion means that the sexual instinct has found "sexual" ways to express itself, which have not been affected by the resistances of guilt, shame, disgust or morality. Perverts adopt sexual objects or

Chethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10273786971120329655noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-690769391956525610.post-6921031903562573662007-09-24T20:04:00.001-07:002008-12-10T16:57:58.838-08:00

I write this without a particular provocation, except that I saw several parts of the Brideshead Revisited miniseries, a month or so ago, and it brought this topic to mind. In the book/miniseries (I'm proud to say I did read the book, no matter how Raoni and Mike derided me for reading a "romance novel"), our narrator, Charles Ryder, recounts meeting the amazing Sebastian Flyte, their "friendship

Chethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10273786971120329655noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-690769391956525610.post-65888688020560183842007-09-11T11:01:00.000-07:002008-12-10T16:57:59.002-08:00

Part 3: The undesired story continuesAfter the seeming disinterest in the first two posts, I thought maybe the issue was dead. And even I wondered what I meant in the latter, claiming the exhaustion of the event through images, its inaccessibility in words. I had typical doubts about if there was something meaningful in what I'd said. But today, the poignancy again appears to me, not necessarily

Chethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10273786971120329655noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-690769391956525610.post-77628931020101603102007-09-04T12:52:00.000-07:002008-12-10T16:57:59.191-08:00

One of the things I learned on my last trip to Paris was about this special group of individuals in French society. They have been called the "bricoleurs de l'angoisse," which, for those of you who don't speak French, means "the handymen of anguish." I learned this overhearing a conversation when I was in line at the Action Christine in Saint Germain-des-Pres, waiting to see the old Bogart film,

Chethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10273786971120329655noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-690769391956525610.post-48799480913282036352007-08-30T11:31:00.000-07:002008-12-10T16:57:59.892-08:00

Part 2: Can Images Silence Us?These questions might be addressed again through two contemporary examples. I restrict myself to literature, because I haven’t yet seen the cadre of films produced (United 93; 9’11’01; World Trade Center—the list is quite long): Don Delillo’s Falling Man (2007) and Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children (2006).I hope those who’ve read Delillo’s work will agree with

Chethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10273786971120329655noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-690769391956525610.post-73549319036837660432007-08-11T10:42:00.000-07:002007-08-11T14:32:30.015-07:00

Part 1: “Let’s not talk about it ever again.” That was my sentiment after it happened, after I heard too many conversations, jarring the ears and . Obviously a hyperbolism—a demand impossible and not really desired. But of a piece, I think, with the commonplace among literary circles that it is a subject not yet ripe for literary … representation. And what really does this mean?Glibly, we

Chethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10273786971120329655noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-690769391956525610.post-30998053783906601362007-06-22T08:44:00.000-07:002007-06-22T09:00:29.567-07:00

directly from the journals of chet (with mild expurgation):the inspiration to read it (Macbeth) came from the nyrb article on the play written by stephen greenblatt, I think. commending to our imaginations the anecdote of meeting bill clinton and him reciting, prodigiously, several lines, and then, in an instance, encapsulating the character of macbeth in less than tenwords: a man with ambition

Chethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10273786971120329655noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-690769391956525610.post-65646928537153149832007-05-03T22:52:00.000-07:002007-05-03T23:22:44.077-07:00

Hugh Kretschmer, “A Head for Detail,” Fast Company, 110 (November 2006), 72-.http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/110/head-for-detail.htmlThe article addresses several issues: how Bell’s memory works, through a SenseCam, a digital audio recorder, and a copy of all of the webpages that he visits; the problems that he has sorting through the incredible amount of information that he/it collects; the

Chethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10273786971120329655noreply@blogger.com1