GRGR (8) 155.6-157.22

[Michael D. Workman]

155.6 "Kinos" German: "cinema houses"

155.6 "German October" (GRC): "Kracauer reports that in the twenties German
production companies, and Ufa in particular, kept steadfastly away from
depictions of Bolsheviks or leftist revolutionaries of any kind. This is
why German cinema would not produce anything like _October_, the 1927 film
by Russian director Sergei Eisenstein, a film made especially to
commemorate the tenth anniversary of the Russian Revolution and subtitled
"Ten Days That Shook the World" in honor of John Reed's book." 

On John Reed (from http://www.teleport.com/~samc/Curtis/8-Reed.html): "Reed
burst across the culture and politics of the early 20th century like a
rocket. His first-hand accounts of the Mexican and Russian revolutions,
Insurgent Mexico (1914) and Ten Days That Shook the World (1919), founded
modern journalism. He was a journalist willing to risk his life for a story."

"Instead of romanticizing war, he portrayed horrifying conditions with
vivid detail and wit. He would die in soviet Russia of typhus in 1920, a
victim of the Cold War, an American citizen refused entry into his own
country."

"Reed, who spent half his life in Oregon, was born in the palatial Green
family estate in Portland's West Hills in 1887. The Oregon Cultural
Heritage Commission plans to erect a memorial to our most internationally
acclaimed author, near his birth site, at the edge of Washington Park. His
father, a US Marshall who prosecuted timber interests for land fraud, sent
his son to Harvard. In Greenwich village, he was tutored by America's great
"muckraker", Lincoln Steffens. All his life, John Reed would work for
social justice."

Here's a capsule on the film from
http://onfilm.chireader.com/MovieCaps/O/OC/06573_OCTOBER.html: "Sergei
Eisenstein was given a free hand and a mammoth budget to re-create the
October Revolution for its tenth anniversary (1927), but the results
displeased the authorities--for reasons both political (Trotsky, suddenly
banished from the Soviet Union, had to be hurriedly eliminated from the
final cut) and aesthetic (Eisenstein's extreme formalism, here at its most
abstract and theoretical). Much of the montage plays better in analytical
retrospect than it does on the screen, but much of the film is genuinely
stirring--when he wasn't theorizing, the man really could cut film."

155.10-11 "reincarnated Luxemburg" Mentioned again at 158.18; Rosa
Luxemburg: March 5, 1871 - January 15, 1919. On Rosa's capture and death:
Captured together with Karl Liebknecht and Wilhelm Pieck. All three,
leaders of the freshly founded Communist Party of Germany, were brought to
the Adlon Hotel, in Berlin (recently reopened). There Pieck escaped, while
Liebknecht and Luxemburg where killed by Army Officers. The possibility of
such an attack was known several days before. A number of samples of her
writing can be seen at http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxembur (GRC):
"Disparagingly known as "Red Rosa," she was jailed for three years during
the World War I. After her release she was a leader of the Berlin uprisings
of January 1919. Arrested during them, she and KPD founder Karl Liebknecht
were taken to Berlin's Eden Hotel, clubbed nearly to death, then shot in
the ehad. Luxemburg's body was thrown into an icy canal from the
Lichtenstein Bridge and not recovered until April 1919." 

155.12 "AN ARMY OF LOVERS CAN BE BEATEN" Mentioned again at 158.24

155.13-15 "Nobody can track down author or painter for any of them, leading
you to suspect they're one and the same. Enough to make you believe in a
folk consciousness." This is somewhat amusing in light of the
Salinger-Pynchon mixup, and the collusion of ideas which draw us as
Pynheads to the fold--there is a sort of underlying reality that makes more
sense, and it is enough to convince us of those ties which bind. This is
also an example of disparate-elements-that-may-be-a-whole which are
prototypical of GR. TRP doesn't say whether he wants us to believe in
nothing-in-particular, but leaves us with a choice as to whether it is
believable or not of our own accord.

155.19 "Pornographies:" OED: a. Description of the life, manners, etc., of
prostitutes and their patrons; hence, the expression or suggestion of
obscene or unchaste subjects in literature or art; pornographic literature
or art. Also qualified by hard or soft, with reference to hard core (b)
s.v. hard a. 23 b, soft core s.v. soft a. 29, to denote pornography of a
more, or less, obscene kind. Also transf. 

It sounds like the irresolution of love is what has become of the childhood
ideal here. Comments?

155.23 "Absolute Comfort...the self-induced orgasm." Autonomy,
independence. The idea of freedom as a result of control, even to the level
of unproductive intercourse.

155.28 "Two people are what we are told." Duality. Other and self.
Objectivity. 

155.30 "male supremacy" The patriarchal Society, makers of the Opposition.
Comments?

155.33 "I know there's coming together." Is there? Mutual ejaculation or
intersubjectivity? 

155.35 "some embarrassing appeal to faith" Ah, yes. That which is based on
appropriation. Let's be wrong once in a while, shall we?

155.40-156.2 "It got more comfortable: she could dream such tendernesses
between them (presently she was dreaming also of other men)-but it became
more solitary."

156.40-156.41 "Richard Hirsch, from the Mausigstrasse" Translated as "Mousy
Street" (fictional).

157.22 "trudging home down the gassen" German side streets or alleys.


Cheers,

Michael Workman, Proprietor
Underworld Used Books
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