amimetobios

Some open considerations of Bazin.  Long excursus on lumping vs. splitting.  A spiel I liked about truth-makers (as in Armstrong, and Davidson, just to give a couple of references.  Davidson's Tarski-style idea: if a sentence is true, there is something that makes it true).  All claims that A=B, if not tautological, are not strictly speaking true.  They need to be made true.  What makes something true if you lump: A and B are the same.  What makes something true if you split: A isn't really A.  Lumping: A is something else that is not A.  Splitting: A is not A.  Application to Film vs. Theater vs. verbal narrative vs.... TV.  Rear Window as emblematizing TV-watching.  Bazin on identification and resistance to identification in film and theater respectively.  Subjective camera in Rear Window.

Giving up on going through all of Out of the Past, class is confined to two more scenes and some discussion of the plot.  Then on to La Jetée and the way its fixed images work: as memory, as estrangement.  Some remarks on making lemonade, i.e. great art out of the foul rag and bone shop of various technical, economic, social, manufacturing constraints.

The puzzling -- even mysterious last lines of "Go and Catch a Falling Star."  How not to read them.  Their relation to "The Ecstasy" and the questions of bodies and minds, thus absence and presence.  And the odd presence in Donne of a third person there, in so many poems.

We turn to the secular Donne, in Songs and Sonnets, and look at his views of fidelity and his arguments against it.  "Woman's Constancy," "The Indifferent," "The Flea."  His way of story-telling: the backstory he expects his readers are sophisticated enough to pick up in his dramatic monologues or implicit dialogues.  Hilarity and subtlety combined.

Some remarks on Walter Benjamin's view of aura, and its disappearance in the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction.  Its return thematized in the maguffin.  Maguffin defined, with examples, from Pulp Fiction, Kiss Me Deadly, MI: 3, etc.  Women as maguffins, in La Jetée and a host of other films.  Then a close viewing of the first third of Out of the Past.  Continuities and discontinuities.  (NB: Marsellus, not Marcus, as I misspoke.)

Mainly a bare-bones exposition of salvation through faith (Protestant doctrine) vs. through works (Catholic): with the role that (double) pre-destination and the bondage of the will plays in the distinction, and the spirals of inwardness that arise for the Protestant poets, in particular Donne and Herbert.  Excursus on Luther's reading of the Lord's hardening Pharaoh's heart in Exodus. Herbert's

REDEMPTION

HAVING been tenant long to a rich Lord,             Not thriving, I resolved to be bold,             And make a suit unto him, to afford A new small-rented lease, and cancell th’ old. 

In heaven at his manour I him sought :             They told me there, that he was lately gone             About some land, which he had dearly bought Long since on earth, to take possession. 

I straight return’d, and knowing his great birth,             Sought him accordingly in great resorts ;             In cities, theatres, gardens, parks, and courts : At length I heard a ragged noise and mirth 

            Of theeves and murderers :  there I him espied,             Who straight, Your suit is granted, said, and died.

Excursus on the plurality of the heavenly powers, and the E and J writers of the first four books of Moses.

Pretty much a close reading of that poem, and its paradoxes, partly via Donne's paradox V that "All things kill themseluses."  We raised and thought about the question what makes death an appropriate punishment for sin.  What is it that Donne is "mourning for a space"?  I thought this was a pretty good discussion.

The idea of continuity -- of space, time, memory, self.  We were supposed to get to continuity of narrative, but didn't, because the class was a bit of a technical disaster: no sound to go with the video.  We watched a little of Marclay's The Clock -- from this clip starting at 10:15 (p.m., most likely, as will be seen), and talked about cultural cues for the time of day. Without sound we noticed the video more, but noticed less the interesting difficulty of seeing it as fragmented.  Interesting conversation about it, though, so perhaps worth the listening.

[URL of clip, if you need it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cOhWtyXGXQ]

Intro to the course: philosophical issues of representation, therefore of space and time, thence of will, and therefore of self.  Viewing and discussion of Christian Marclay's Telephones (1995) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yH5HTPjPvyE).

First class in a course called (not by me) "Exploring the Self in 17th Century Poetry."  But since that's pretty much what all my courses are (though I don't like the word "exploring" there: sounds a bit new-agey), it's an accurate enough name for the course.  Here we discuss general principles and a couple of Donne's Holy Sonnets (VII and XIX).  Correction to a mistake: when I said Dryden I meant (as many people do) Pope, who was of course the "versifier" of the Satires of Dr. Donne.