Comments on: your own private quatre bras

By: koganbot

koganbot — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 04:04:40 +0000

Waterloo reenacted. Children of some friends of mine like to go to Civil War (American) era dances. By my reading of Scott (= Ivanhoe and The Heart Of Midlothian), all old people are unreconstructed idealist crackpots.

By: alext

alext — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 14:19:30 +0000

+ what is your source for the Hazlitt comment? I am intrigued by Hazlitt but have never got very far through his essays :-(

By: alext

alext — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 13:55:57 +0000

Also I ought to say I enjoyed reading this immensely! I think for years I have been trying to keep hem hem big theory apart from cultural history and C19th lit and all the other things that interest me, on the grounds that it’s hard to talk about it without going ‘oh look — Browning is doing something a bit like Derrida, how odd!’ but the stuff I’m teaching at the moment is showing me that a) all the connections are real and not made up and b) it’s possible to put them back in and think them all together at once. Which I had concluded during my Arnold class this morning, and then came back and found you were already at it!!

By: pˆnk s lord sükråt cunctør

pˆnk s lord sükråt cunctør — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 13:53:14 +0000

ahem i shd probably have found another context for my “zizek = last man in the academic telephone book gag” as it sets him up v.unfairly here

(also it kinda depends on you the reader havin an intimate knowledge of the 1970 Guinness Book of Records) (which i know only some of you do)

By: Admin

Admin — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 13:18:47 +0000

Slavoj Zizek on Military PC games (scroll to the bottom)

By: pˆnk s lord sükråt cunctør

pˆnk s lord sükråt cunctør — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 13:06:12 +0000

haha wiedling GOD BLESS THE GO-GOs!

By: pˆnk s lord sükråt cunctør

pˆnk s lord sükråt cunctør — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 13:05:24 +0000

yes mea culpa also on wiedling the word “theory” as my shorthand for the baddies (shorthand to rush to publication, not shorthand to clarify analysis): i guess i mean ‘non-fiction writing” but it is clearly not even this cut and dried

obviously i am v.aware of what happens when you oppose “writing” and “live-action activity” — so another bit of my shorthanding/cowardice is to avoid getting straightaway deep into the derrida weeds w/o a saddle

By: pˆnk s lord sükråt cunctør

pˆnk s lord sükråt cunctør — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 13:01:33 +0000

scott also brings up the issue of re-enactment of the deep past vs re-enactment of the recent present — and the slight feeling that where the first can be an unleashing of upsetting ghosts (scott was a tory but it was the radicals who were most invested in anglo-saxon, ie pre-norman, values); whereas the latter is a laying (or “recuperation”) of not-yet-dead conflict?

(haha rereading this this morning i have unleashed the upsettting ghost of why i laid it aside before: the topic is big-giant-huge and requires a patient unpicking of ALL OF DEBORD et al; ALL OF S.REYNOLDS et al; and plus also THE ENTIRE HISTORY of 19th century quasi-gothickal kid-it and phantasmagoria — and i have notes-to-self which say the same… in my hurry to post before deadline i just cut and pasted them into my “idea offcuts” file)

By: alext

alext — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 12:54:13 +0000

I guess I’m trying to say that I don’t really see who the big bad theorists who are in denial about this actually are: don’t you really mean snobs?

By: alext

alext — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 12:51:45 +0000

Isn’t the mass appeal of Scott’s novels the whiff of re-enactment (hence enormous critical disdain from all the worst novelists of early C20th at just the same point where all the best novelists are growing up reading Scott! (TS Woolf vs Graham Greene))? Scott is interesting because his work — like lots of the early historical novels — is clearly deeply serious about being BOTH historical nerd-fest (endless footnotes about swords and tunics) and imagination-catching excitement (i.e. there can’t be an either / or), whereas I assume part of the sniffing at reenactment is that it isn’t clearly ‘proper’ history because it shows the extent to which all history depends on imaginative reconstruction and (however scholarly) threatens to unleash the past on the present. Scott’s books are all about both of these too, of course. Anyway, after you with Scott’s Life of Napoleon…

By: jeff w

jeff w — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 15:52:31 +0000

Waterloo has had a long resonance I think because:

i. a lot turned (or is assumed to have turned) on the outcome
ii. the battle itself was played out over a (relatively) short timespan
iii. tactical decisions by W and N played a major part in the outcome (OK there was Blucher turning up in the nick of time as well)

all of which lends itself to both study and the dramatic => it is an ideal subject for theatre.

At the battle site in Belgium, in addition to real life reenactments (once a year?), there is a museum where you can watch, any day of the year, a now rather wheezy-looking, computerized “son et lumiere”-style (flashing lights on a map, slide show, sound FX) recounting of the battle. Waterloo reenacted by space aliens!

By: Tom

Tom — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 15:09:02 +0000

This will at least delay the apocalypse for a while.

The actual post meanwhile may (or may not) spur me to the dreaded LIVE ROLE-PLAYING section of “I Was A Goblin”.

By: pˆnk s lord sükråt cunctør

pˆnk s lord sükråt cunctør — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 15:06:13 +0000

ulp i think there are ELEVEN horsemen currently — not all of them have actually arrived on the draft page tho :(

(i once found a note to myself of projects i ought to be working on: it just said “BUBBLE”)

By: Tom

Tom — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 15:00:30 +0000

This is the second of the four horsemen!

(May in fact be three horsemen)

By: pˆnk s lord sükråt cunctør

pˆnk s lord sükråt cunctør — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 14:59:23 +0000

hurrah! “finished” with hours to go! i am so useless!!