Friday, December 4, 2009

German mystics, cigarettes, watermelon sugar, etc.

Anna Mahler: True art reflects 'the true essential reality - in the language of the medieval German Mystics - the Ground of all Being.' (1962)

Mike Wallace interviewing Bennett Cerf in 1957: 'Bennett, I shall confront you with the charge that book publishers are wantonly exposing young readers to obscene trash. My name is Mike Wallace, the cigarette is Philip Morris. ... today's Philip Morris has what I call a man's kind of mildness.'

John Madera has a blog post in which many authors list their favourite novellas. Certain titles and names recur in these lists, esp. that of Richard Brautigan. Sarah Hall wrote a note on Brautigan last June. All this has convinced me to read something by Brautigan. I've ordered a collection of three of his stories and will probably begin with In Watermelon Sugar.

A lengthy piece on Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's doctoral work gave him expert knowledge of 'neurosyphilis', knowledge which influenced at least three of his stories.

Another list of New Wave tunes. I guess the New Wave bands from my own humble shire (Canada) didn't get much exposure elsewhere, since none of them make this list. I made a short list of them several days ago.

This is not New Wave but I really like it:

2 comments:

Archambeau said...

Wow. That Mike Wallace/Philip Morris thing is worth three volumes of Adorno on the culture industry.

praymont said...

Good point, Archambeau. There's more neat footage from Wallace's 1950's show at that Univ of Texas at Austin site: http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/collections/film/holdings/wallace/