1. I can see that the extreme attention you’ve paid to precision and craft is met with a deep sense of rational order. 2. But rationalism is often myopic; it reaches for the severe, the logical or impossible semblance of balance to counter everything it hopes it isn’t. 3. In essence, rationalism is purely a facade and failure is inevitable. 4. Further, any aesthetic concerned primarily with itself is faulty. While it tries to uphold and maintain its beauty and form in the short term, it refuses to own or acknowledge its potential power in the long term. 5. What is materially seductive should always be seen as politically suspect. 6. How do you account for that? 7. How do you expect me to account for that when you do not?
We suddenly find ourselves empathizing with the blundering protagonist turned antihero, now unrequited admirer, as he grapples with his emotions. While Aschenbach aspires for self-possession through bourgeois attempts at correct living, he never claims to be a pillar of moral virtue. Mann makes us privy to his tone-deaf past, that he had made false moves, made a fool of himself, violating tact and good sense in word and deed. Yet our attachment to the morally ambiguous protagonist is automatic and affective. The problem is that we don’t know how to project it.
As with certainty and doubt, when we consider hate as a topic, we're really considering its opposite: love—or at least, not indifference. The attention, the energy, the exhaustion—all the erotics of anger or intimacy that form the desire to write in the first place—that is what this conversation is about.
From scene to scene, he traverses an industrially divided, religiously mired postwar society. Shot in 1963, twenty years after the fall of Mussolini’s Fascist regime and in light of the economic miracle, Pasolini’s documentary is an act of sly assessments with an inconclusive ending. By interviewing a cross-section of the populace at beaches, factories, universities, plazas, streets, fields, and a dance hall, he attempts to take the temperature of a rapidly modernizing Italy.
The subject is sex, but as always, sex is never about sex but about power.
Fascist infrastructure did not just have a technical motive, but it had an aesthetic one too: roads and railways not only provided logistical networks from place to place, but were themselves places to visually exploit the Italian landscapes. Here, along the Tyrrhenian, infrastructures became spaces where the seascape could be consumed, greatly aestheticized to support Fascist propaganda.
I had placed myself symmetrically in the middle of the six arches: three arches to my right, three to my left.
And then: on either side, the two equally serious-looking Neoclassical statues made of cream-colored marble, far larger than life. They evoke workers’ monuments just as much as they echo ancient Roman sculptures.
Only afterwards do I realize: Neoclassicism, as a style, is particularly absurd in Rome, the cradle of actual Classicism.