My Brain Hurts

I'm trying to do notes for my cinema class tomorrow--summarizing Ernest Hartmann on dream as metaphor, Mark Blechner on dream as extralinguistic thinking, Medard Boss, Fritz Perls, and a lot of what is obviously too much stuff to cover in one session--and for some reason my mind keeps wandering back to De Qunicey's essay, "On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts." Maybe it's because when I am actually taking up an intellectual subject and making some pretense of treating it analytically, I slip into self-parody--and there isn't a better satire of the academic dilettante holding forth than De Quincey's essay.

It is a dry kind of humor:

My infirmity being notoriously too much milkiness of the heart, I find it difficult to maintain that steady equatorial line between the two poles of too much murder on the one hand, and too little on the other. . . . I believe, if I had the management of things, there would hardly be a murder from year's end to year's end.

My great discovery a few weeks back was that I'd really like to do a class on Sex and Sexuality in Cinema, so ideas about it pop into my head from time to time. My great discovery this week has been that I'd really like to do a class on The Uncanny in Film and Lit--not the Fantastic, as I've sometimes thought, but the Uncanny precisely because, to put it crudely, when theorists make the Fantastic their subject of study they begin with an idea of some class of things represented in lit or film--whereas I am interested in looking at the Uncanny, the sense of the uncanny, as a product of representation itself, not something represented. That is, the seeing the ghost, say, comes first, as a product of the problems in how we see, then the belief about ghosts. The perception of the fact of mortality necessarily creates the idea of immortality, as an idea one can play with in literature, art, belief systems. The problem, as in medieval proofs of the existence of God, is in a representational theory of thought and language--in assuming that the fact that something can be thought of is somehow an argument for even the possibility of its existence, rather than a feature of how representation works.

This would be much more interesting if one were applying it to Poe, or The Uninvited, or that very hit-or-miss TV show, Medium.

Shuffle function

Mahler's Sixth Symphony