Pasolini Is Me
See me in New York! and various
Creatures, it’s Mardi Gras! I have little to say today—I’ve been on the road, and the work has been great, and the sun is shining, and I would like to lie around in an armchair today, reading my own book for the first time in a while.
But I did want to tell you to come see me in New York!
NYC and adjacent film freaks, cinema saints, paisans of the picture palace… this Thursday at KGB Bar I’m discussing “the degradation and redemption of masculinity in the films of Pasolini” with Cracks in Pomo. Pasolini is my favorite queer Italian director (sorry Visconti, you’ll never be) and I expect we will range widely through this celluloid philosopher’s sensual, idea-driven body… of work. From “The Gospel of Matthew” to “Accatone” to “Salo” and more… come and crack postmodernity like a safe, and steal its treasures, doors at 7pm. Tix here.
Pre-reading: “Is Everyone Female?”
“The hopeless (yet Christian) world of Pasolini’s ‘Salo, or The 120 Days of Sodom’” (more)
My interlocutor on why Fr Luigi Giussani, founder of Communion & Liberation, called Pasolini “the only Catholic intellectual”
Shooting a Donkey
I also read Khirbet Khizeh. This novella of the Nakba has been assigned in Israeli schools; it’s a first-person account, by “S. Yizhar,” which is a pseudonym for Yizhar Smilansky, who went on to serve in the Knesset. It’s fictional but in the sense of “this is the only way I can write about what really happened and what I did,” of the clearing of a Palestinian village.
It’s hard to know how to describe it. At first it did seem to be drawing on what I guess I would call familiar tropes of war writing: boredom, bad conscience, things unspoken. The waste of animal life and human work. But it also has so much strange lyricism, especially lyricism of the landscape. Rabih Alameddine made fun of all those Arab poems about the destroyed olive groves of the ancestors, oh once more sing of the olive groves… but it’s startling to encounter that same poetry of the olive groves from the perspective of someone whose job it is to destroy them. The soldier knows the land is beautiful—not only because it is natural but because it is cultivated. He knows that they’re all committing a double desecration.
The turning point, I think, comes when the soldier finally says it: when he realizes that what he is seeing, and therefore what he is doing, is exile. I don’t know if anyone raised Jewish can read that passage without feeling the horror of it. Exile is the existential loss—the total, identity-shaping loss, the thing that names loss of home and selfhood and right relationship with God; the Babylonian conquest and the expulsion from Eden. Exile is the loss that has shaped his life. It’s the loss whose meaning the Jewish people exist (we learn) to remember and in some as-yet-unseen way redeem. It never occurred to him that Jews could unleash this thing on somebody else.
The afterword (by David Shulman) talks about the way Yizhar’s Hebrew weaves in immediately-recognizable Biblical phrases. Most of these were not recognizable to me, I’m sorry to say, so if you know the Hebrew Bible and you can read this in the original I would say you should do that. The final lines were the only place where I really knew that I was reading a phrase from Scripture, distorted by anger and shame, and fear of what will come as the result of what was done that day.
Links Lenten Losers Like
Attention, creatures! For the month of FEBRUARY my day job, Building Catholic Futures, is partnering with The Modern Saints. Sign up here for BCF’s newsletter (be sure to click “yes” to “email me with news”) and you will get a discount code for 20% off all holy cards and other artworks at The Modern Saints. We have two TMS holy images in our home and I love to pray with Gracie’s work. Consider who in your life might want both diverse images of our friends in Heaven, and updates on gay missionary discipleship here on Earth.
This beautiful book of Night Prayer for Children, by my friend Bo Bonner
An extraordinary museum in Kansas City, MO, where you can step inside of children’s books
I review a history of dandyism
And I’d forgotten that my recent post is actually the third time I’ve written about The Glass Bead Game! The first and second essays show very different angles on this phenomenal book. I think all of them make sense as readings of the novel. There are many subtle shades to the Castalian light!
Pasolini Pietà by Ernest Pignon-Ernest, and I believe also photographed by the artist; via Wikimedia Commons and used under a Creative Commons license.
Was David Byrne in the Big Suit, then, the last living dandy?
Terrific, here: "And also something poignant. Adam, expelled from Eden but not from high school, slouched into gym class the next day in a cravat." Thank you.