Rene Bard > Recent Status Updates

p710 "...his wife [Nora] went on: 'I never get but three words out of him all day these days, with that chop suey he's writing.

'In the morning, "The papers!" At lunch, "What's that?" And the third - Jim, what is the third? I can't remember it. Ah yes, about his bottle of water on the floor, "Don't touch that!" Goodness.' "

p700 "...Joyce proposed to him [Nino Frank] that they translate "Anna Livia Plurabelle" into Italian. 'We must do the job now before it is too late,' he said;'for the moment there is at least one person, myself, who can understand what I am writing. I don't however guarantee that in two or three years I'll still be able to.'...to the sense [meaning] he [Joyce] seemed indifferent and unfaithful..."

p649 "...he [Joyce] dictated a bit of Finnegans Wake to Beckett...in the middle of one such session there was a knock at the door which Beckett didn't hear. Joyce said, 'Come in,' and Beckett wrote it down. Afterwards he read back what he had written and Joyce said, 'What's that "Come in"?' 'Yes, you said that,' said Beckett. Joyce thought for a moment, then said, 'Let it stand.' "

p480(footnote):"[Ezra] Pound said however in the first number of New Review, 1931, 'I respect Mr. Joyce's integrity as an author in that he has not taken the easy part. I never had any respect for his common sense or his intelligence, apart from his gifts as a writer.'"

p445"Nora Joyce suffered under this ambiguity [whether she had cuckolded James]. She was in tears one day because, as she confided to Frank Budgen, 'Jim wants me to go with other men so that he will have something to write about.' She seemed to have failed him in this wifely duty."

Discussing Joyce's germinating thoughts on what would turn out to be his great novel "Ulysses", the author Ellmann opines:

pg362 "Nor is he [the character Bloom] concerned with the conception of a personal god. The divine part of Bloom is his humanity..."

My response: "Oh really? Humanity equals divinity? Okay,Richard,I disagree with you on that point...but that does not diminish the excellence of your biography."

The further I get into this the more disillusioned with Joyce I become. I grant to him that, like Poe, his art always came first, but I would amend myself to say His drunken stupidity preCeded Everything.

p289 Paul has certainly not provided neat answers to the baffling questions which arise....He has...not swept away all the difficulties. But...we may well feel that he has given us enough to [know]...that the deep mystery p290 which surrounds us is neither a nightmare mystery of meaninglessness nor a dark mystery of arbitrary omnipotence but the mystery...of the altogether good and merciful and faithful God.

p411 "but he [screenwriter Marzursky] touches so many women's-liberation bases that you begin to feel virtuous, as if you'd been passing out leaflets for McGovern."

[Can vegetables feel virtuous?]

Reviewing Ridley Scott's "The Duellists", Kael's backhanded compliment comparing the imagery of his camera work to "...the sentences of a writer whose flow of feelings is richer than any explicit statement he can make" captures EXACTLY the reason why I enjoy her work. PK was a talented writer with a vast repertoire of movie knowledge but little-to-no process of logical assimilation, a fatuous Marxist intellectual.

p291-cont'd [about Star Wars] "In a gesture toward equality of the sexes, the high-school-cheerleader princess-in-distress talks tomboy-tough-Terry Moore with spunk. Is it because the picture is synthesized from the mythology of serials and old comic books that it didn't occur to anybody that she could get The Force?"

[Kudos to Kael, using her caustic tone, for guessing that Princess Leia might have The Force.]

p291 Star Wars is "a film that's totally uninterested in anything that doesn't connect with the mass audience. There's no breather in the picture, no lyricism....Even if you've been entertained, you may feel cheated of some dimension–a sense of wonder, perhaps. It's an epic without a dream. But it's probably the absence of wonder that accounts for the film's special, huge success."

yup, Ms. Kael said that.

p284"He [Richard Baskin] sings like someone trying to play the double bass who doesn't know how; the quavering anal growl on the sound track might be Kissinger serenading NBC"

[lol! Brutal, Pauline, brutal!]

dnf

p182"Theyre silly,yet theyre no sillier than the people I know in Berkeley,who are probably the brightest people I know.In life,bright
people can bore one senseless..and so it's a giddy surprise to discover how charming they are here on the screen.When this..movie gets its group of eight linked up..and Jonah the savior is born out of the whale of the old society.This is an Easter fable..but with a dialectical bunny."

p167 "...a good-girl artist is a contradiction in terms." [about the movie Sparkle]

p179"America at the Movies represents the potentates' scrubbed-up side and the establishment status they aspired to. They were tough men;they lived a long time,and their strength is reflected in their movies-which still have money in them,because they still have life in them.What those men did will literally influence mankind forever.It's a worldwide culture (virus?) that can't be destroyed-perhaps the first."

p146 [about verse 6:23] "God...does not pay wages, since no man can put Him in his debt."

p90 "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is one hell of a good film, but it works emotionally only because of its story and acting; it lacks the excitement of movie art."

p72"Since the only thing about reviewing movies that makes me unhappy is that I can't get to the opera often enough,Ingmar Bergman's film version of The Magic Flute is a blissful present....[p76]His cutting to the reactions of that princessy little girl,whom one wants to strangle,suggests that the production is designed to introduce opera to children....[which] devalues the opera and what he has done with it."

p89cont'd"Since the objection to the presence of this Greek word on the ground of the sense of the passage is thus confirmed by the thoroughly objective fact of its inconsistency with the grammar of the sentence (a point not often noticed), it would seem that we are justified in regarding it as a simple mistake,whether of a very early copyist or of Tertius or of Paul himself, and ignoring it in translation."

p89"A puzzling feature of v.[4:]12 is...the definite article before the Greek word...[for] 'walk', which has the effect of implying a different group of people altogether from that just mentioned is intended. But this in not only contrary to...the clear sense of the sentence; it is also ruled out grammatically by the position of the previous definite article...in relation to the words represented by 'not' and 'only'.

"what I am experiencing is The Flip..a change in power..occurred and neither of us realized [it]..it happens in relationship[s] that fail[s]..Jen..wouldnt leave me alone in the very beginning..[3 1/2 mo. later], something shifted.I became the person who was more interested..She became the manager of Us–I would ask..she would grant..Because the person who is in charge in a relationship is the one who loves the least."

p52 "The film [The Mystery of Kaspar Hauser] is a double fable – intermingling the deadening effects of bourgeois society and the cruelty of the universe."

Hey, Pauline (R.I.P.), what might you have said about the "deadening effects" & cruelty of implemented Marxism which slaughtered over 100 million people in the 20th century?

Appendix p29 of 1864 version: "I owe nothing to Protestantism; and I spoke against it even when I was an Anglican"