NOTES 3.7.16

After the 1960s, the battle for personal liberty seemed to be mostly won. The achievements have been great – and yet, in the 21st century, we find ourselves less sure than ever about how far our freedom includes the right to offend or transgress, and how much of it we want to compromise in return for convenience, entertainment or an illusion of total security. Freedom may become one of the great enigmas of our time, and the existentialists’ radical take on it may be worth a second look.
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Wells on the set of Chimes at Midnight

But his story begins in May 1937, when Welles met Hemingway at a screening of Joris Ivens’s The Spanish Earth. Welles was to narrate Hemingway’s commentary, decided to edit it a little, and Hemingway was offended. He accused Welles of being gay, Welles hammed up the role appropriately, and the two men swung at each other with a couple of chairs. They ended up laughing and drinking and becoming friends. “Welles told this tale time and again,” Karp says, and by 1958 he had in mind a film based on the incident. He was calling it The Sacred Beasts, and it involved bullfighting. Was it about Hemingway or about Welles himself? “It’s about both of us,” he said.
- Looking for Citizen Welles, Wood, NYRB


Shields is obsessed with the big problems that obsessed me when I was in college: death, meaninglessness, loneliness, metaphysical uncertainty. But Adorno argued that such big problems are just ways of (at best) ignoring actual problems or (at worst) contributing to them. When people discuss “the human condition” or “human nature,” Adorno argued, they tend to mistake currently “existing” empirical facts for “existence” as a whole. (It’s as if I, a resident of Los Angeles, said that the human condition involves being a Lakers fan.) Whereas the real problems, the hard problems, are not part of some inescapable condition. They’re historically specific injustices, and they’re our fault.


He is like a man who builds a prison around himself and then complains about the guards.
 -  Justin Evans, The lonely Intellectual, The Point Mag