Although the play was never published or performed, the third act became the basis for a film, Pull My Daisy, starring Allen Ginsberg...
Kerouac even sent the play to Marlon Brando, Mr Lord said. Kerouac was desperate to collaborate with the actor, and wrote a letter to him in 1957 urging Brando to appear in a play adaptation of On the Road.
Brando never responded, and the two only met once, in 1960, when Kerouac enrolled in the Actor's Studio. But his foray into acting was shortlived. After 15 minutes he asked, "Don't they give you any drinks in this place?" Spotting Brando he invited him for a drink. Brando refused.
Just so this isn't a complete waste of a post (how many blogs, sadly enough, seem motivated primarily by such a tired, impotent regret as this—Resisting Left Melancholy anyone?): there's a new Foster Wallace coming as well (his earlier stuff was better); a new issue of Foucault Studies deals largely with Agamben; Infinite Thought hasn't posted anything on Long Sunday yet but she reports on Zizek's Birkbeck lecture (where he continued, predictably enough, his habitual cutting, sloganizing and pasting of Derrida's corpus; lots of people are pretending to eat and cry at the same time on the Internet, Terry Eagleton reviews something or other, and Tariq Ali has been busy saying the obvious and necessary, such as that Chritopher Hitchens may have a future as Wolfowitz's bodyguard, and etc..
Update: Terry Eagleton's piece is really quite good, and I may try to do it better justice in another post shortly if others don't hop to it. Something of an about-face on Derrida (if not a discreet apology?) runs through the review, even, and he strengthens a certain crucial point—one apparently rather unpalatable to liberals—that Zizek dared to make not so long ago. An excerpt quoted from the tail:
Jacoby, like almost everyone else on the planet, assumes that the imagination is an entirely positive power, rather than something that can cut both ways. The planning of genocide, for example, involves a fair degree of imagination. He is also rather too inflexible about the distinction between utopia and dystopia (or utopia gone bad). He argues cogently against the prejudice that all "total" or ambitious social change leads directly to totalitarianism and mass murder. On the contrary, as he points out, most of the great dystopian literary works of the modern age are by no means anti-utopian. Orwell's 1984 is not in the least an antisocialist text, as its author was at pains to point out. It is true that some utopian authors were rather less than utopian in their actual lives: Thomas More, who invented the word "utopia," was, we are reminded, a zealous burner of heretics. In general, however, the idea that utopian thought is inevitably totalitarian is a myth...
...It is precisely the fact that Stalinism is utopia gone sour that distinguishes it from fascism, whatever those who airily lump the two together as "totalitarian" might suppose...
Picture Imperfect does a useful hatchet job on three robustly anti-utopian Jewish philosophers (Karl Popper, Isaiah Berlin and Hannah Arendt) before turning to a remarkably rich, suggestive excavation of a Jewish, poetic, "iconoclastic" utopian tradition, one that embraces Ernst Bloch and Gustav Landauer, Jacob Talmon and Martin Buber, Fritz Mauthner and Hermann Cohen.
In retrieving for our troubled times a precious heritage threatened with oblivion, it takes its cue from Walter Benjamin's comment that the image of the past that matters is the one that swims up to us at times of crisis. The future may or may not turn out to be a place of justice and freedom; but it will certainly disprove the conservatives by turning out to be profoundly different from the present. In this sense, it is the hard-nosed pragmatists who behave as though the World Bank and caffe latte will be with us for the next two millennia who are the real dreamers, and those who are open to the as yet unfigurable future who are the true realists.
No comments:
Post a Comment