God help the eugenicists who believe they can eradicate cruelty from mankind. If I've said it once I've said it a thousand times: a human being who's not possessed of cruelty might as well have four legs. Of course the implications run deeper, as Adorno wrote in 1944, "The admonitions to be happy, voiced in concert by the scientifically epicurean sanatorium-director and the highly-strung propaganda chiefs of the entertainment-industry, have about them the fury of the father berating his children for not rushing joyously downstairs when he comes home irritable from his office. It is part of the mechanism of domination to forbid recognition of the suffering it produces, and there is a straight line of development between the gospel of happiness and the construction of camps of extermination so far off in Poland that each of our own countryman can convince himself that he cannot hear the screams of pain. That is the model of an unhampered capacity for happiness. He who calls it by its name will be told gloatingly by psycho-analysis that it is just his Oedipus complex." Yeah, tell me something I don't already know. The chariots mentioned made me think of a poetic image as old as Plato, in The Phaedrus to be exact. Which Wallace Stevens used as a springboard for his essay, The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words. Also, that quote, "Like a men's Saucony sneaker from the 90's or an overnight maxi-pad", took me back thirty years in an instant.
I wish I could read Coeur de Lion again for the first time.
This conversation felt like a treat to read. Thank you both.
BOTH OF YOU ARE SO BRAVE
God help the eugenicists who believe they can eradicate cruelty from mankind. If I've said it once I've said it a thousand times: a human being who's not possessed of cruelty might as well have four legs. Of course the implications run deeper, as Adorno wrote in 1944, "The admonitions to be happy, voiced in concert by the scientifically epicurean sanatorium-director and the highly-strung propaganda chiefs of the entertainment-industry, have about them the fury of the father berating his children for not rushing joyously downstairs when he comes home irritable from his office. It is part of the mechanism of domination to forbid recognition of the suffering it produces, and there is a straight line of development between the gospel of happiness and the construction of camps of extermination so far off in Poland that each of our own countryman can convince himself that he cannot hear the screams of pain. That is the model of an unhampered capacity for happiness. He who calls it by its name will be told gloatingly by psycho-analysis that it is just his Oedipus complex." Yeah, tell me something I don't already know. The chariots mentioned made me think of a poetic image as old as Plato, in The Phaedrus to be exact. Which Wallace Stevens used as a springboard for his essay, The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words. Also, that quote, "Like a men's Saucony sneaker from the 90's or an overnight maxi-pad", took me back thirty years in an instant.
An excellent interview. Thank you, both.