FINAL EXAM

Using any of the short stories we've read by John Collier, answer the following questions: how does he achieve a sense of dread, horror, misgiving in what seem to be fairy tales for adults? and to what extent do his tales resemble children's stories?

In Knipfel's Unplugging Philco, is the main character a hero? If so, why? If not, why not?

Is Bataille's Story of the Eye art or porn?

Note - please be sure to ALWAYS define your terms (hero, porn, art and so on).

reading assignment

HI ALL:

PLEASE READ COLLIER'S THE BOTTLE PARTY.

-D

bataille

Formless

A dictionary begins when it no longer gives the meaning of words, but their tasks. Thus formless is not only an adjective having a given meaning, but a term that serves to bring things down in the world, generally requiring that each thing have its form. What it designates has no rights in any sense and gets itself squashed everywhere, like a spider or an earthworm. In fact, for academic men to be happy, the universe would have to take shape. All of philosophy has no other goal: it is a matter of giving a frock coat to what is, a mathematical frock coat. On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit.

???

Please pardon my taking shots at Noam Chomsky of all people. These glaring, even bizarre contradictions in his thinking have me vexed. (Not surprisingly, they arise in connection with his "positive" agenda moving forward.) The Left can claim great critics of capitalism, but few visionaries in the sense of articulating (and actually building) a better world.

Chomsky is an Anarchist... an Anarchist who supports strong centralized government... Now I understand that he sees government as a temporary bulwark against corporate tyranny, and that ultimately he envisions overthrowing the shackles of all authority -- corporate power, government power, etc. But how can I bolster government against the corporate form if I follow Chomsky's oft-repeated encouragement... NOT TO VOTE?

I'm asking... and rethinking all this lefty b.s.

Hey All - here's tomorrow's program...

REPORT AND MARILYN X 5 by Bruce Connor

STORY OF THE EYE by Brian Gonzalez

BAD RONALD by Buz Kulik

AMBULANCE by Larry Cohen

The Fascist Impulse After Fascism

http://www.fascismusa.com/ http://www.rense.com/general59/ein.htm

the ballad of sacco and vanzetti

Father, yes I am a prisoner
Fear not to relay my crime
The crime is loving the forsaken
Only silence is shame.

And now I'll tell you what's against us
An art that's lived for centuries
Go through the years and you will find
What's blackened all of history
Against us is the law
With its immensity of strength and power
Against us is the law!
Police know how to make a man
A guilty or an innocent
Against us is the power of police!
The shameless lies that men have told
Will ever more paid in gold
Against us is the power of the gold!
Against us is the racial hatred
And the simple fact that we're poor.

My father dear, I am a prisoner
Don't be ashamed to tell my crime
The crime of love and brotherhood
And only silence is shame.

With me I have my love, my innocence,
The workers and the poor
For all of this I'm safe and strong
And hope is mine
Rebellion, revolution, don't need dollars
They need this instead
Imagination, suffering, light and love
And care for every human being
You never steal, you never kill
You are a part of strength and life
The revolution goes from man to man
And heart to heart
And I sense when I look at the stars
That we are children of life
Death is small.

Guys: Thanks for the Sleeping Beauty papers. They look good. Tomorrow, we'll be watching SOME CALL IT LOVING as promised. Be prepared to discuss the curious relationship the film bears to the story...

-D

COLLIER ASSIGNMENT

Hi Everyone:

Due next week is a one-page paper on the Collier story, SLEEPING BEAUTY.

Explore a theme or metaphor that interests you, while discussing the structure, tone and word choices that make the story "come to life." No plot synopsis, please -- any reference to the plot should support an IDEA.

Good Luck,

D

ASSIGNMENT

Write a 250-word essay addressing alienation in Knipfel's U.P. - feel free to supply your own definition or use Marx's definition (cited in class). How does the theme play out? That is, discuss tone, atmosphere, plot, your own empirical experience as a reader...

Please do not simply provide a synopsis!

Submit via email to: driccuito@yahoo.com.

Good luck,

-D

goals and visions by noam chomsky

Hi All:

Just ran across this article - an absolutely crucial work for anyone interested in Anarchism as a means of interpreting and changing the world.

-D

http://books.google.com/books?id=rF4bXdo10ZYC&pg=PA70&lpg=PA70&dq=noam+chomsky+goals+and+visions&source=bl&ots=-1IYP79dm5&sig=lFMEzSQTpbn2CgavujdNU0VGIrQ&hl=en&ei=C1fLSuCXDoiMMrqSpcED&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2#v=onepage&q=&f=false

Is this something that has been noticed before (endlessly)? There's a hotel-room scene 3/4 of the way into Vertigo that mimics Un Chien Andalou. Just before the final touches of Kim Novak's transformation back into Madeleine... (Even the Bernard Herman score suddenly riffs on Bunuel's use of Wagner - the same passage from Tristan and Isolde emphasized again and again in Chien.)


The weird dream-time, the same placement of the figures in relation to the window...

and, again, the Hermanized Wagner!

Why waste time with Lang's Metropolis,

when you could be watching BOOT HILL?

This is a fine spaghetti western featuring inexplicably gay cowboys.

In other words everything BROKE BACK MOUNTAIN was SUPPOSED to be...

Only with revolutionary dwarfs.

-D

Clarification: your final paper can be based on ANY of the the major texts (your choice) and is due at the end of the semester. Again the length is up to you, but there is a minimum requirement of 5 pages/1,250 words. Please include a word count; and submit the paper via e-mail - driccuito@yahoo.com - as no hard copies will be accepted. Paperless = wonderful!

Dear Mr. President http://mexfiles.files.wordpress.com/2007/05/marcos1.jpg

Hello All:

Wednesday, we'll take a look at two great films referenced by Knipfel's novel, Unplugging Philco.

The Conversation and Demon Seed are startling stand-alone works; but they're even more interesting to watch after U.P. - hope to see you there!

-D

Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise. For were the impulses of conscience clear, uniform, and irresistibly obeyed, man would need no other lawgiver.

-Thomas Paine (dreaming he was Emma Goldman)

Sept 23

Guys - I'll be absent tomorrow Sept 23 - sorry, bad cold. Please read another 100 pages of Knipfel's novel.

This blog is for SVA students currently enrolled in Film and Literature CTD-3130-B.

Assignments and announcements will be posted here.

Discussions and comments can be made here.

The course description is as follows:


Accidental Surrealism


In Film and Literature we will explore cinematic sub-genres and back alleys, long-forgotten chambers of the American psyche. Great art masquerading as trash, neglected science fiction, made-for-television masterpieces, “B” pictures… Not to mention scores of educational and industrial films, backfiring, ricocheting, inadvertently revealing otherwise hidden truths about the myths we live by.

Wrong-headed genius cropping up from margin to margin across the U.S. – yes – and yet we also crave art with a capital “A” from around the globe. (Herzog! Epstein! Kinugasa!) Rest assured that, integral to our agenda, monumentally important works abound.

Welcome, too, to obscure and lonely literature. Take our very own “Balzac of the bin,” Jim Knipfel, for example, a writer admired by Thomas Pynchon. Knipfel lives in the borough of Brooklyn, where his Unplugging Philco unfolds, a novel satirizing our post-911 world. The book is steeped in genre-horror movies (Remember C.H.U.D.?) as well as George Orwell’s 1984 – an idiosyncratic nexus of nihilistic humor and paranoid fear.

I hope the course leaves you all profoundly frustrated, utterly confused, not knowing whether to laugh or cry – anything but complacent…


Please purchase the following books immediately:


Jim Knipfel’s Unplugging Philco


John Courier’s Fancies and Goodnights


Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time


Georges Bataille's The Story of the Eye