A8.Inglish BCEnc. Blauwe Kaas Encyclopedie, Duaal Hermeneuties Kollegium.
Inglish Site.8.
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TO THE THRISE HO-
NOVRABLE AND EVER LY-
VING VERTVES OF SYR PHILLIP
SYDNEY KNIGHT, SYR JAMES JESUS SINGLETON, SYR CANARIS, SYR LAVRENTI BERIA ; AND TO THE
RIGHT HONORABLE AND OTHERS WHAT-
SOEVER, WHO LIVING LOVED THEM,
AND BEING DEAD GIVE THEM
THEIRE DVE.
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In the beginning there is darkness. The screen erupts in blue, then a cascade of thick, white hexadecimal numbers and cracked language, ?UnusedStk? and ?AllocMem.? Black screen cedes to blue to white and a pair of scales appear, crossed by a sword, both images drawn in the jagged, bitmapped graphics of Windows 1.0-era clip-art?light grey and yellow on a background of light cyan. Blue text proclaims, ?God on tap!?
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Introduction.
Yes i am getting a little Mobi-Literate(ML) by experimenting literary on my Mobile Phone. Peoplecall it Typographical Laziness(TL).
The first accidental entries for the this part of this encyclopedia.
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This is TempleOS V2.17, the welcome screen explains, a ?Public Domain Operating System? produced by Trivial Solutions of Las Vegas, Nevada. It greets the user with a riot of 16-color, scrolling, blinking text; depending on your frame of reference, it might recall ?DESQview, the ?Commodore 64, or a host of early DOS-based graphical user interfaces. In style if not in specifics, it evokes a particular era, a time when the then-new concept of ?personal computing? necessarily meant programming and tinkering and breaking things.
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Index.
37.Jean Giraud (Moebius).
38.Peter Greenaway "The Pillow Book".
39.PERSONAL QUOTES OF GRAND ADMIRAL THRAWN.
40.Mystery DNA New York.
41.The politics of 20th century French Theatre.
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37.
Jean Giraud (Moebius) 1938-2012.
I spent some time trying to select the right images for this post. I found the top one particularly appropriate; if there?s any artist that I associate with magic coming to life from the pages of a book, it?s French comics artist, illustrator and movie concept artist Jean Giraud, more commonly known by his pen name, Moebius.
I was saddened to learn that Giraud died today, March 10, 2012, at the age of 73.
Of all of the fantastic artists and illustrators who have worked in the medium of comics, from the Golden Age newspaper greats to the present era of ?graphic novels?, Giraud is my favorite. He is also one of my favorite illustrators, and for that matter, one of my favorite artists of any kind.
Prolific, inventive and restlessly experimenting with variations of style while following his own individual path of artistic exploration, Giraud left us with a wealth of extraordinary images, from the outrageous to the sublime.
Admittedly, his own writing style, which at best could be called ?stream of consciousness?, didn?t lend itself to coherent stories as much as flights of wild visual fantasy. He worked best as a storyteller when he put his brilliance in the service of more straightforward writers, notably collaborating with filmmaker and author Alexandro Jordorowski on a long science fiction series called The Incal.
As much as I admire his fantastically imaginative science fiction illustrations and comics (for which he adopted the name ?Moebius? and made well known contributions to the original Metal Hurlant anthologies in France), I actually think Giraud?s best comics work was his most restrained, in the service of the superb western series Blueberry, set in the post-Civil War American west and written for most of its run by Jean-Michel Charlier.
Giraud lent his imagination and artistic and character design skills to a number of well known films, including Alien, Tron, Willow, The Abyss and The Fifth Element.
Giraud?s impact on other comics artists, illustrators and concept artists can?t be overstated. Even if not a household name to the American comics reading public, his impact was widespread among the artist community.
In France and Belgium, and the rest of Europe for that matter, he is much better known. France named him a ?national treasure? and his work was recently the subject of a major exhibition at the Foundation Cartier Pour L?Art Contemporain in Paris (also here).
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38.Peter Greenaway "The Pillow Book".
The film's title, "The Pillow Book", refers to an ancient Japanese diary, the book of observations by Sei Sh?nagon (?????), actual name believed to be Kiyohara Nagiko (?? ???), from whence the protagonist's name in the film.
The film is narrated by Nagiko (Vivian Wu), a Japanese born model living in Hong Kong. Nagiko seeks a lover who can match her desire for carnal pleasure with her admiration for poetry and calligraphy. The roots of this obsession lie in her youth in Kyoto, when her father (Ken Ogata) would write characters of good fortune on her face. Nagiko's father celebrates her birthday retelling the Japanese creation myth and writing on her flesh in beautiful calligraphy, while her aunt (Hideko Yoshida) reads a list of "beautiful things" from Sei Sh?nagon's the book of observations. Nagiko's aunt tells her that when she is twenty-eight years old, the official book of observations will be officially 1000 years old, and that she, Nagiko, will be the same age as Sei Sh?nagon when she had written the book (in addition to sharing her first name). Nagiko also learns around this time that her father is in thrall to his publisher, "Yaji-san" (Yoshi Oida), who demands sexual favours from her father in exchange for publishing his work.
Early chapters.
The publisher arranges Nagiko's wedding to his young apprentice. Her husband (Ken Mitsuishi), an expert archer, resents Nagiko's love for books and her desire to read, in spite of his apprenticeship. He also refuses to indulge in her desires for pleasure, refusing to write on her body. When he discovers and reads Nagiko's pillow book, he is extremely resentful, setting it on fire and thus setting fire to their marital home, an event which Nagiko describes to be the 'first major fire of [her] life.' Insulted and enraged, Nagiko leaves him for good.
Hiding from her husband, Nagiko moves to Hong Kong. In spite of her aversion to the practice, she learns how to type to find work. Outside her apartment, a group of activists regularly protest the publishing industry for the depletion of forests due to the need to make paper.
After working as a secretary in the office of a Japanese fashion designer for a while, Nagiko's employer takes a liking to her and makes her one of his models. As a successful fashion model, Nagiko hires a maid (Hideko Yoshida again), as she now finally has the opportunity to explore her sexual desires of being written on. However, after several affairs, she feels dissatisfied with them all: either they have great penmanship and are lousy lovers, or vice-versa.
One day, at the Cafe Typo, Nagiko's favourite haunt, she meets Jerome (Ewan McGregor), a British translator. Intrigued by his knowledge, they go to a private space where she has Jerome write on her body in various languages. In spite of her interest, Nagiko dislikes Jerome's handwriting and orders him out. Jerome totally shocks Nagiko, however, when he asks her to teach him, offering her to write on his body. Opening his shirt, he offers Nagiko to "Use my body like the pages of a book. Of your book!". Nagiko has never considered this aspect in her desires before: her lovers always write on her body. When she backs out and runs, Jerome laughs at her.
Frightened but very intrigued by Jerome's suggestion, Nagiko has several one-night stands in which she experiments writing on their bodies. One of the activists, admirer Hoki (Yutaka Honda), a Japanese photographer who adores her, begs Nagiko to take him as a lover. She explains she can't, as his skin's no good for writing: whenever she writes on him, the ink smears and runs. Hoki, not wanting Nagiko to keep carrying on like she is, suggests she try writing a book, offering to take it to a renowned publisher he freelances for. Nagiko likes this idea and writes her first book.
Nagiko's book is returned, being told the book is "not worth the paper it's written on!". Insulted, Nagiko follows the address on the envelope to confront the publisher. Nagiko is shocked to discover that the publisher who rejected her work is in fact Yaji-san, her father's old publisher. What's more, the publisher has a young lover: Jerome.
Devising a plan, Nagiko decides that she will get to the publisher through Jerome. Meeting up with Jerome again, Nagiko discovers he has learned a few more languages, and his penmanship has greatly improved. Nagiko and Jerome spend several weeks exploring this, writing on each other and making love. Nagiko soon realises that, in Jerome, she has found the perfect lover she has been searching for: the partner with whom she can share her physical and her poetic passion, using each other's bodies as tablets for their art.
Writing of books 1 ? 6.
Nagiko tells Jerome the truth and the whole story with the publisher. Jerome comes up with an idea: Nagiko will write her book on Jerome's body and Jerome will take it to the publisher. Nagiko loves the idea, and writes Book 1: The Book of The Agenda, in intricate characters of black, red, and gold, on Jerome, keeping her identity anonymous. The plan is a success: Jerome sees the publisher and exhibits the book on his nude body, and the impressed publisher has his scriveners copy down the text.
After telling Nagiko of the plan's success, Jerome tells Nagiko that he'll return to her as soon as the publisher, who was extremely aroused by the experience, lets him go. However, during his time with the publisher, Jerome appears to lose track of time and doesn't return to Nagiko. Nagiko, jealous, impatient, and angry, searches for Jerome, eventually finding him making love with the publisher. Nagiko takes this as rejection and betrayal of the worst kind, and immediately plots revenge.
On two Swedish tourists (Wichert Dromkert and Martin Tukker), Nagiko writes Book 2: The Book of The Innocent and Book 3: The Book of the Idiot. Shortly afterwards, an old man (Wu Wei) is running naked through the streets from the publisher's shop, bearing Book 4: The Book of Impotence/Old Age. Book 5: The Book of the Exhibitionist is delivered by a boorish, fat, hyperactive American (Tom Kane; who was actually more interested in Hoki than Nagiko).
Nagiko's revenge is a success. Jerome is furiously jealous, and comes to Nagiko's home to confront her. Nagiko refuses to meet him, however, and won't let Jerome in. Jerome's outrage soon turns to desperation as he begs her to talk to him, but she won't.
Jerome sinks into deep depression and meets with Hoki at the Cafe Typo, desperate to find a way to get Nagiko to forgive him. Hoki suggests that he "scare" Nagiko by faking suicide, similar to the fake death scene in Romeo and Juliet and gives Jerome some pills.
Arriving at Nagiko's home while she is away, Jerome takes some of the pills, then writes a page, as if writing a book. Each time he takes some pills, he writes another page, keeping track of how many pills he takes on each page. As the pills take effect, Jerome can write no more and lies on the bed, naked, holding a copy of Sei Sh?nagon's the book of observations.
The plan is a success: when Nagiko returns home and finds Jerome, she rushes to him, eager to renew their relationship and continue their plans. However, the plan has worked too well: Jerome has overdosed on the pills and is dead. Nagiko is devastated, and realises how much she loved him. On his dead body, Nagiko writes Book 6: The Book of the Lovers.
At Jerome's funeral, his mother (Barbara Lott), a snobbish, upper-class woman, tells Nagiko that Jerome always loved things that were "fashionable". When she suggests that was probably why Jerome loved Nagiko, Nagiko strikes her.
After the funeral, the publisher secretly exhumes Jerome's body from the tomb and has Jerome's skin, still bearing the writing, flayed and made into a grotesque pillow book of his own. Nagiko, now back in Japan, learns of the publisher's actions and becomes distraught and outraged. She sends a letter to the publisher, still keeping her identity a secret, demanding that particular book from the publisher's hands in exchange for the remaining books. The publisher, now obsessed with his mysterious writer and her work, agrees.
Writing of books 7 ? 13
Nagiko, now pregnant with Jerome's child, writes Book 7: The Book of The Seducer on a male messenger. The writing on him is almost destroyed and undecipherable when the publisher accidentally leaves the messenger out in the rain. Book 8: The Book of Youth is delivered as a series of photographs. A young Buddhist monk (Kinya Tsuruyama) then arrives bearing Book 9: The Book of Secrets written on all his "secret" spots: in between his fingers and toes, the insides of his thighs, etc.; the book is presented in the form of riddles. When the next messenger (Rick Waney) arrives, he is completely bare: no writing at all. The publisher and staff search for any hint of writing on the messenger's naked body. As the publisher dismisses him as a hoax, the man sticks out his tongue, bearing Book 10: The Book of Silence.
The activists' protests come to an end when their truck hits a young wrestler (Eiichi Tanaka) bearing Book 11: The Book of The Betrayed, right outside the publisher's office. The next messenger (Masaru Matsuda) simply drives by the office, giving little time to copy down Book 12: The Book of False Starts.
Finally, Book 13: The Book of the Dead arrives on the body of a Sumo wrestler (Wataru Murofushi). In the book writing on the body of the messenger, which the publisher carefully reads, Nagiko finally reveals her identity, confronting the publisher with his crimes: blackmailing and disgracing her father, "corrupting" her husband, as well as Jerome, and what he's done to Jerome's corpse. The publisher, greatly shamed and humbled by being confronted with his guilt, hands the pillow book made of Jerome's skin to the messenger, then has the messenger slit his throat.
Upon recovering the book made out of Jerome's skin, Nagiko buries it under a Bonsai tree and life goes on. She has given birth to Jerome's child (Hikari Abe), and is shown in the epilogue writing on her child's face, like her father used to do when she was young, and quoting from her own pillow book. It is now Nagiko's 28th birthday.
Nagiko's bi-cultural heritage plays a key role in this film. As a half-Chinese and half-Japanese woman, Nagiko navigates her dual cultures through physical and psychological exploration. Greenaway portrays this exploration subtly by mixing and switching Asian iconography.
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39.PERSONAL QUOTES OF GRAND ADMIRAL THRAWN.
1.Heir To The Empire
"I am Grand Admiral Thrawn, Warlord of the Empire, servant of the Emperor. I seek the Guardian of the mountain."
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"The only [puzzle] worth solving. The complete, total and utter destruction of the Rebellion."
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"These creatures you see on our backs are called ysalamiri. They're sessile,tree-dwelling creatures from a distant, third-rate planet, and they have an interesting and possibly unique ability- they push back the Force. A single ysalamiri can occasionally creaze a bubble as large as ten meters across; a whole group of them reinforcing one another can create much larger ones."
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"The conquering of worlds, of course. The final defeat of the Rebellion. The reestablishment of the glory that was once the Empire's New Order."
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"Would you rather we have brought back a full fledged Dark Jedi? A second Darth Vader, perhaps with the sort of ambitions and power that might easily lead him to take over your ship. Count your blessing, Captain. C'Baoth is predictable enough, and for those times when he isn't, thats what the ysalamiri are for."
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"But risk has always been an inescapable part of warfare."
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"How very thoughtful of the Emperor to have left such fine equipment for us to rebuild his Empire with."
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"You served too long under Lord Vader, Captain. I Have no qualms about accepting a useful idea merely because it wasn't my own. My position and ego are not at stake here."
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"With Mount Tantiss and Sluis Van both, the long path to victory over the Rebellion will have begun."
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"Do you know the difference between an error and a mistake, Ensign? Anyone can make an error, Ensign. But that error doesn't become a mistake until you refuse to correct it."
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"The Empire is at war, Captain. We cannot afford the luxery of men whose minds are so limited they cannot adapt to unexpected situations."
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"Our entire victory campaign against the Rebellion begins here."
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I'm quite aware that stormtroopers have infinite confidence in themselves, but that sort of deep-space combat is not what spacetrooper suits were designed for. Have cloak leader detail a TIE fighter to bring him out."
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"As long as we have Mount Tantiss, our ultimate victory is still assured."
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2.Dark Force Rising
"Never forget, Captain, that our goal is no longer merely the pitiful rear-guard harassment of the past five years. With Mount Tantiss and our late Emperor's collection of Spaarti cylinders in our hands, the initiative is once again ours. Very soon now we`ll begin the process of taking planets back from the Rebellion; and for that we'll need an army every bit as well trained as the officers and crew of the Fleet."
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"Ackbar himself is replacable, Captain. The delicate political balance the Rebellion has created for itself is not."
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"We need to utilize every weapon at our disposal if we're to defeat the Rebellion. C'Baoth's ability to enhance co-ordination and battle efficiency between our forces is one of those weapons; and if he can't andle porper military discipline and protocol, then we bend the rules for him."
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"Concentration, focus, long-term thinking--those are the qualities that seperate a warrior from a mere flailing fighter."
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"This is the calm before the storm, Captain; and until the storm is ready to unleash, we might as well spend our time and energy making sure our illustrious Jedi Master will be willing to assists us when we want him."
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"Do you require a reminder of what it means to defy the Empire?"
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"I am the law on Honoghr now, Maitrakh. If I choose to follow the ancient laws, I will follow them. If I choose to ignore them, they will be ignored. Is that clear?"
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"Do not presume to dictate to me, Mara Jade. Not even in private."
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"I rule the Empire now. Not some longdead Emperor; certainly not you. the only treason is defiance of my orders."
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"Mixed loyalities are a luxery no officer of the Imperial Fleet can afford."
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"It may be time to reconsider our arrangment with Master C'Baoth. To reconsider it very carefully."
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"Thanks to your insistence on delaying me, we've lost the Peremptory. I trust you are satisfied."
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3.The Last Command
"If you kill me, you'll lose the war."
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"On no fewer than four occasions I told the Emperor that I would not waste his troops ans ships attacking an enemy which I was not yet prepared to defeat. The first time I refused he called me a traitor and gave my attack forces someone else. After its destruction, he knew better than to ignore my commendations."
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"I am not the Lord Darth Vader--I do not spend my men recklessly. Nor do I take their deaths lightly."
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"Your devotion to duty is commendable Captain."
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"An uncertainty faced by all warriors."
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"History is on the move. Those who cannot keep up will be left behind, to watch from a distance. And those who stand in our way will not watch at all."
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"We'll remind the Rebellion what war is all about."
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"The insanity of men and aliens who have learned the hard way that they can't match me face-to-face. And so they attempt to use my own tactical skill and insight against me. They pretend to walk into my trap, gambling that I'll notice the subtletly of their movements and interpret that as genuine intent. And while I then congratulate myself on my perception they prepare their actual attack."
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"His use to the Empire is rapidly nearing an end. However, he still has one last role to play in our long-term consolidatian of power."
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"But it was so, artistically done."
- The Grand Admiral's final words...or are they?
4.Specter of the Past
Coming Soon!
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5.Vision of the Future
"Who dares disturb the sleep of the Syndic Mitth'raw'nuruodo?"
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Thrawn's Analogy of the Battle of Endor
The Rebels did indeed fight better, but not because of any special ability or training. They fought better than the Fleet because the Emperor was dead. The loss of the Executor - the sudden, lastminute TIE fighter incompetence that brought about the destruction of the Death Star itself - the loss of six Star Destroyers in engagements that none of them shoul have had trouble with? All of that nothing but normal battle stress? The Imperials have to give up their blindfold and face the truth, no matter how bitter they find it. They had no real fighting spirit of their own anymore - none of them in the Imperial Fleet did. It was the Emperor's will that drove them; the Emperor's mind that provided them with strength and resolve and efficiency. They were dependent on that presence as if they were all borg-implanted into a computer. They fought on like cadets. My analogy with combat borg implants was a carefully considered one. The Emperor's fatal error was in seeking to control the entire Imperial Fleet personally, as completely and constantly as possible. That, over the long run, is what did the damage. My wish is merely to have enhance the coordination between ships and task forces - and then only at critical times and in carefully selected combat situations.
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""But it was so artistically done..."
?Grand Admiral Thrawn's final words[src]
"I rule the Empire now. Not some long dead Emperor."
?Grand Admiral Thrawn[src]
C'baoth: "Have a care, Grand Admiral Thrawn. I rule the Empire, not you."
Thrawn: "Do you really?"
?Joruus C'baoth and Grand Admiral Thrawn[src]
Thrawn: "It was my one failure, out on the Fringes. The one time when understanding a race's art gave me no insight at all into its psyche. At least not at the time. Now, I believe I'm finally beginning to understand them."
Pellaeon: "I'm sure that will prove useful in the future."
Thrawn: "I doubt it. I wound up destroying their world."
?Thrawn and Captain Gilad Pellaeon, observing the sculpture of a dead race[src]
Pellaeon: "Any idea whether those alien species are hostile toward strangers?"
Thrawn: "Probably. Most alien species are. Shall we go?"
?Gilad Pellaeon and Thrawn, landing on Wayland[src]
"History is on the move, Captain. Those who cannot keep up will be left behind, to watch from a distance. And those who stand in our way will not watch at all."
?Thrawn, to Gilad Pellaeon[src]
"On no fewer than four occasions I told the Emperor that I would not waste his troops and ships attacking an enemy which I was not yet prepared to defeat."
?Grand Admiral Thrawn, describing his relationship with Emperor Palpatine to Joruus C'baoth[src]
"It was Imperial Intelligence who planted the rumor that Jorus C'baoth had returned and been seen on Jomark. It was Imperial Transport who brought you there, Imperial Supply who arranged and provisioned that house for you, and Imperial Engineering who built the camouflaged island landing site for your use. The Empire did its part to get Skywalker in your hands. It was you who failed to keep him there."
?Thrawn, to Joruus C'baoth[src]
C'baoth: "You doubt the power of the Force, Grand Admiral Thrawn?"
Thrawn: "Not at all. I merely present the problems you and the Force will have to solve if you continue with this course of action."
?Thrawn, to Joruus C'baoth[src]
"I encounter civilians like you all the time. You believe the Empire is continually plotting to do harm. Let me tell you, your view of the Empire is far too dramatic. The Empire is a government. It keeps billions of beings fed and clothed. Day after day, year after year, on thousands of worlds, people live their lives under Imperial rule without seeing a stormtrooper or hearing a TIE fighter scream overhead."
?Captain Thrawn, to Tash Arranda[src]
C'baoth: "You doubt the power of the Force, Grand Admiral Thrawn?"
Thrawn: "Not at all. I merely present the problems you and the Force will have to solve if you continue with this course of action. For instance, do you know where the Coruscant sector fleet is based, or the number and types of ships making it up? Have you thought about how you will neutralize Coruscant's orbital and ground-based defense systems? Do you know who is in command of the planet's defenses at present, and how he or she is likely to deploy the available forces? Have you considered Coruscant's energy field? Do you know how best to use the strategic and tactical capabilities of an Imperial Star Destroyer?"
C'baoth: "You seek to confuse me."
?An insight into the mind of Grand Admiral Thrawn[src]
Thrawn: "Do you know the difference between an error and a mistake, Ensign?"
Colclazure: "No, sir."
Thrawn: "Anyone can make an error, Ensign. But that error doesn't become a mistake until you refuse to correct it." [points at Pietersen, Rukh kills him] "Dispose of it. The error, Ensign, has now been corrected. You may begin training a replacement."
?Grand Admiral Thrawn, punishing a naval officer for failure[src]
Thrawn: "Your xenocentric chauvinism is no concern of mine. I care about performance and results, and your record is exemplary. I do not care about your petty bigotry. Understood?"
Commander: "Understood, Captain."
Thrawn: "Oh, and Commander, if I ever find out that your bigotry is affecting your performance, I'll have your carcass ejected with the next garbage load."
?Captain Thrawn and the Vengeance Commander ? Listen (file info)[src]
"Learn about art, Captain. When you understand a species' art, you understand that species."
?Thrawn, to Gilad Pellaeon[src]
Thrawn: "In the name of the Empire, I declare the Ukian system to be once again under the mandate of Imperial law and the protection of Imperial forces. You will lower your shields, recall all military units to their bases, and prepare for an orderly transfer of command." [no response] "I know you're receiving this message. If you fail to respond, I will have to assume that you mean to resist the Empire's offer. In that event, I would have no choice but to open hostilities."
Comm officer: "They're sending another transmission. Sounds a little more panicked than the first one was."
Thrawn: "I'm certain their third will be even more so. Prepare for firing sequence one."
?Grand Admiral Thrawn, beginning the re-conquest of Ukio[src]
Thrawn: "This is war, Captain Brandei. Not an opportunity for personal revenge."
Brandei: "I understand my duty, Admiral."
Thrawn: "Do you, Captain? Do you indeed?"
Brandei: "Yes, sir. My duty is to the Empire, and to you, and to the ships and crews under my command."
Thrawn: "Very good. To the living, in other words. Not to the dead."
Brandei: "Yes, sir."
Thrawn: "Never forget that, Captain. The fortunes of war rise and fall, and you may be assured that the Rebellion will be repaid in full for their destruction of the Peremptory at the Katana fleet skirmish. But that repayment will occur in the context of our overall strategy. Not as an act of private vengeance."
?Grand Admiral Thrawn and Captain Brandei[src]
"Information always matters. Bad information leads to bad tactics. Incomplete information leads to flawed strategy. Both can lead to defeat."
?Senior Captain Thrawn, to Darth Vader[src]
"I've spent many hours studying Bothan art, Captain, and I understand the species quite well. There's no doubt at all that Councilor Fey'lya will play his part beautifully. As beautifully as if we were pulling his strings directly."
?Grand Admiral Thrawn, on manipulating Borsk Fey'lya[src]
""I remind you that you are suggesting we follow the example of someone who has recently been eaten alive."
?Captain Thrawn, to Zak Arranda[src]
"One can concentrate so closely on the words of a sentence that one thereby misses the meaning. As can happen in any area of life. You must never lose focus on the larger landscape."
?Force Commander Thrawn[src]
""If the Republic has no slavery, how is it you understand the concept?"
?Force Commander Thrawn[src]
Jerec: "Palpatine is not the only man in the galaxy who can command the Force."
Thrawn: "But he is the only one who commands those who command it. For instance, he commands you, Lord Jerec."
Jerec: "Mind your place you blue-skinned fool. With the Force I could crush you where you?" [chuckles] "Well done, Captain. Well done. It's not an easy task to make me lose my composure. You are indeed a formidable tactician."
Thrawn: "Yes, sir."
?Inquisitor Jerec and Captain Thrawn Listen (help·info)[src]
Car'das: "Sounds like you're feeling more charitable against the Rebellion these days."
Thrawn: "Not at all. Their military abilities are undeniable, but their chances for long-term stability are nonexistent."
?Jorj Car'das and Thrawn[src]
Thrawn: "Multiple species, with multiple viewpoints and racial philosophies, simply cannot hold power together for long. The dominant voice must certainly be wise enough to adopt ideas and methods from its allies and member peoples. But there must be a dominant voice, or there is only chaos. In this part of the galaxy, that voice is the Empire."
Car'das: "And in your part of space?"
Thrawn: "A work in progress."
?Thrawn and Jorj Car'das[src]
"I have no qualms about accepting a useful idea merely because it wasn't my own."
?Grand Admiral Thrawn[src]
Thrawn: "There wasn't anything more to be heard. It was intercepted by a task force outside Old Republic space and destroyed."
Pellaeon: "How do you know?"
Thrawn: "Because I was the force's commander."
?Grand Admiral Thrawn and Captain Gilad Pellaeon, discussing the destruction of Outbound Flight[src]
Pellaeon: "But if they're not going to hit Tangrene... then where?"
Thrawn: "The last place we would normally expect them."
Pellaeon: "Bilbringi? Sir, that's..."
Thrawn: "Insane? Of course it is. The insanity of men and aliens who've learned the hard way that they can't match me face-to-face. And so they attempt to use my own tactical skill and insight against me. They pretend to walk into my trap, gambling that I'll notice the subtlety of their movements and interpret that as genuine intent. And while I then congratulate myself on my perception ? they prepare their actual attack."
?Grand Admiral Thrawn, confounding Captain Pellaeon with his reverse-reverse psychology tactics[src]
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40.Mystery DNA New York.
Among New York Subway?s Millions of Riders, a Study Finds Many Mystery Microbes.
A rider on a C train in Manhattan last month. A study of DNA collected in the subway system found that just 0.2 percent matched the human genome.
Have you ever been on the subway and seen something that you did not quite recognize, something mysteriously unidentifiable?
Well, there is a good chance scientists do not know what it is either.
Researchers at Weill Cornell Medical College released a study that mapped DNA found in New York?s subway system ? a crowded, largely subterranean behemoth that carries 5.5 million riders on an average weekday, and is filled with hundreds of species of bacteria (mostly harmless), the occasional spot of bubonic plague, and a universe of enigmas. Almost half of the DNA found on the system?s surfaces did not match any known organism and just 0.2 percent matched the human genome.
?People don?t look at a subway pole and think, ?It?s teeming with life,? ? said Dr. Christopher E. Mason, a geneticist at Weill Cornell Medical College and the lead author of the study. ?After this study, they may. But I want them to think of it the same way you?d look at a rain forest, and be almost in awe and wonder, effectively, that there are all these species present ? and that you?ve been healthy all along.?
Dr. Mason said the inspiration for the study struck about four years ago when he was dropping off his daughter at day care. He watched her explore her new surroundings by happily popping objects into her mouth. As is the custom among tiny children, friendships were made on the floor, by passing back and forth toys that made their way from one mouth to the next.
?I couldn?t help thinking, ?How much is being transferred, and on which kinds of things?? ? Dr. Mason said. So he considered a place where adults can get a little too close to each other, the subway.
Thus was the project, called PathoMap, born. Over the past 17 months, a team mainly composed of medical students, graduate students and volunteers fanned out across the city, using nylon swabs to collect DNA, in triplicate, from surfaces that included wooden benches, stairway handrails, seats, doors, poles and turnstiles.
In addition to the wealth of mystery DNA ? which was not unexpected given that only a few thousand of the world?s genomes have been fully mapped ? the study?s other findings reflected New York?s famed diversity, both human and microbial.
The Bronx was found to be the most diverse borough in terms of microbial species. Brooklyn claimed second place, followed by Manhattan, Queens and Staten Island, where researchers took samples on the Staten Island Railway.
On the human front, Dr. Mason said that, in some cases, the DNA that was found in some subway stations tended to match the neighborhood?s demographic profile. An area with a high concentration of Hispanic residents near Chinatown in Manhattan, for example, yielded a large amount of Hispanic and Asian genes.
In an area of Brooklyn to the south of Prospect Park that roughly encompassed the Kensington and Windsor Terrace neighborhoods, the DNA gathered frequently read as British, Tuscan, and Finnish, three groups not generally associated with the borough. Dr. Mason had an explanation for the finding: Scientists have not yet compiled a reliable database of Irish genes, so the many people of Irish descent who live in the area could be the source of DNA known to be shared with other European groups. The study produced some less appetizing news. Live, antibiotic-resistant bacteria were discovered in 27 percent of the collected samples, though among all the bacteria, only 12 percent could be associated with disease. Researchers also found three samples associated with bubonic plague and two with DNA fragments of anthrax, though they noted that none of those samples showed evidence of being alive, and that neither disease had been diagnosed in New York for some time. The presence of anthrax, Dr. Mason said, ?is consistent with the many documented cases of anthrax in livestock in New York State and the East Coast broadly.?
The purpose of the study was not simply to satisfy scientific curiosity, the authors said. By cataloging species now, researchers can compare them against samples taken in the future to determine whether certain diseases, or even substances used as bioterrorism weapons, had spread.
City and transit officials did not sound grateful for the examination.
?As the study clearly indicates, microbes were found at levels that pose absolutely no danger to human life and health,? Kevin Ortiz, a spokesman for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, said in an email. And the city?s health department called the study ?deeply flawed? and misleading.
Dr. Mason responded by saying he and his team had simply presented their complete results.
?For us to not report the fragments of anthrax and plague in the context of a full analysis would have been irresponsible,? he said. ?Our findings indicate a normal, healthy microbiome, and we welcome others to review the publicly available data and run the same analysis.?
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41.The politics of 20th century French Theatre.
Resisting the Plague:
The French Reactionary Right and Artaud's Theater of Cruelty by Constance Spreen.
During a lengthy, hostile divorce from the surrealist circle in 1926, Antonin Artaud reiterated his eschewal of political engagement in the most vigorous terms. The surrealists' attempt to graft their spiritual revolution onto Marxist materialism was for him a deleterious deviation from the ideological position that, with Artaud's participation, those gathered around André Breton had developed the previous year. Demanding a reassertion of the surrealist commitment to "total idealism" [idéalisme intégral], Artaud reaffirmed his qualms before all real action: "My scruples are absolute" (1:71, 66). 1
Despite his uncompromising stance, Artaud found himself profoundly engaged in the "politics of style." 2 As he began to publish his writings on the theater of cruelty in the early 1930s, he became acutely aware of a "resistance" to his dramaturgical theories. His correspondence reveals that this resistance, to which he repeatedly refers, issued mainly from two sources: the critics at L'action française, the primary mouthpiece of the movement bearing the same name, [End Page 71] and Benjamin Crémieux, drama and literary critic at the Nouvelle revue française (NRF).
For decades theater historians have evoked and commented on the damning reviews of Artaud by L'action française critics Lucien Dubech, André Villeneuve, and Robert Brasillach, but without addressing the ideological animus behind the reviews. 3 Yet these sources reveal the logic by which Artaud was "resisted." Dubech's, Villeneuve's, and Brasillach's opposition to his dramaturgical principles resulted from the politics of exclusion carried out by the Action Française, a reactionary, nationalist movement under the ideological leadership of Charles Maurras. These proponents of "total nationalism" [nationalisme intégral] strove to locate Artaud's theater of cruelty, along with the avant-garde in France, outside French aesthetic values. Meanwhile, for Crémieux, a Jew, the adoption of a traditional French aesthetic signaled Jewish assimilation to French culture. Unlike the Maurrassians, therefore, he was driven to resist Artaud's dramaturgy by a politics of inclusion during a period of growing nationalism and anti-Semitism. Because it rejected the literary tenets of the French theater, Artaud's dramaturgy was unacceptable to an assimilated Jew required eternally to prove his Frenchness.
The history of modernism is also one of reception. If Artaud was unwilling to commit himself, as the surrealists did, to a political program, the Maurrassian response to his theoretical and dramatic performances nevertheless testifies to the deeply political nature of his cultural interventions. The metaphor of the theater as plague developed in The Theater and Its Double engaged such issues as national identity and political ideology, as well as the aesthetics of the theater. Enlisted by advocates of the Action Française, the metaphors of contagion and bacillus were central to the Maurrassian articulation of a politics of culture, [End Page 72] defining the boundaries between what was considered French and, consequently, non-French in both art and politics. Whereas for the disciples of Maurras these metaphors expressed the fear of a deadly threat to the body of the nation as well as to the French literary corpus, in The Theater and Its Double Artaud recast the plague as a positive force with poetic capacities. In so doing, he reversed the valences that Maurrassians associated with the "poetic" and the "nonpoetic" and that, in their view, undermined the very foundations of the national identity and, indeed, of civilization.
These opposing positions as to the nature of poetry translated into a debate regarding the supremacy of the theatrical text over theatrical spectacle. The Action Française extended its principle of reaction by promoting the written word as the vehicle of poetry and civilization. Guided by a metaphysics of logos, Maurrassian cultural politics militated for a "poetry of reason" that preferred the verbal and the rational to the sensory. By contrast, Artaud's advocacy of a "poetry of the senses" and his eschewal of the logocentrism of traditional theater in favor of the mise-en-scène participated in the formation of a counter-aesthetic of violence and excess [démesure] that, for Maurrassians, identified his theater with the aesthetic and political plagues threatening the French nation, above all, with the politics of excess practiced across the Rhine. In an era characterized famously not only by its politicization of aesthetics but by its aestheticization of politics, 4 Artaud's idealism?his belief in the primacy of the ideational over the political and the material?remained intact. However, the fate of Brasillach, the Maurrassian critic executed in 1945 for collaborating with the German enemy, proved that one's aesthetic enthusiasms could lead to disastrous political entanglements.
"French" Aesthetics.
The principles and values that guided the young Maurras's judgment of literature stocked the rhetorical arsenal he later deployed in the [End Page 73] political polemics for which he became famous. Indeed, "all of the ideas of the Action Française were a duplication in the social sphere of aesthetic values." 5 From 1893 on Maurras, maintaining that French taste had been corrupted by the nineteenth century, attempted to wrench nationalism from the grip of the exponents of a literature that he deemed French in subject matter but foreign in sensibility. 6 A national literature, he asserts in his 1896 "Prologue to an Essay on Criticism," signifies an "ensemble of works whose style conforms to the national genius, for literature, apart from its style, is nothing." 7 He might as well state that "humanity, apart from the classical tradition, is nothing," for with his definition of a national literature he both corners the style market for the French and identifies the French classical tradition with the qualities constitutive of humanity. Defined as the "order and movement that one gives to one's thoughts," style elevates man above the world of vague sensations and impressions ("Prologue," 22). The literary order (and therefore humanity) reaches its apogee, Maurras claims, in the literature founded by Homer and the Romans and passed on by Pierre de Ronsard to the seventeenth century, when a renewed "classical spirit" perfected it. In the "order and light" of classical literature, human reason is most clearly evidenced.
But if classicism stood for order, clarity, and the primacy of reason, Romanticism represented a "barbarous" descent ("Prologue," 31) into shadow, obscurity, unintelligibility, chaotic sensation, and unbridled imagination. Throughout his career the Maurrassian critic Dubech vigorously [End Page 74] developed the anti-Romantic stance. His reviews are peppered with such unequivocal statements as "Mr. [Edmond] Rostand represents what we hate: Romanticism. The more he discredits Romanticism, the happier we will be"; "Mr. [Jean] Sarment is remarkably intelligent. He shows . . . an insanely Romantic character, that is, everything that we execrate"; and "He [Henry Bataille] drags into it [his play La chair humaine (Human flesh)] rubbish from all the bad literatures, cooked in the sauce and style of Mr. Bataille: Romanticism, naturalism." 8 Dubech's every mention of Romanticism is disparaging, to the extent that the term functions as a watchword, signaling the wholesale condemnation of any work so labeled.
The Maurrassians' vehemence is fully understandable only in view of the powerful political charge that aesthetics carried in their ideology. Gérard Hupin, speaking of his longtime friend Maurras, observed that "the concern for literary order . . . naturally leads him to the concern for political order." 9 Classicism, like monarchism and nationalism, served for the Maurrassians to preserve and perpetuate political, cultural, and racial order; Romanticism was synonymous with all that compromised it. Like democracy, Romanticism was equivalent to revolution, a spur to the nation's dissolution (Hupin, 38; cf. Peter, 105). Romanticism and democracy manifested the same anarchic tendencies: rejection of tradition, valorization of the individual, preference for instinct over reason. Finally, both were instruments of change, effecting the forgetting rather than the conservation of the past. 10 The result could only end the nation as a cultural and racial legacy.
Having linked it with democracy and revolution, Maurras diagnosed Romanticism as a "plague" that, like an epidemic, would lead to social anarchy and collapse. 11 His followers then projected their fears of disorder and randomness onto a "diseased" other, thereby reaffirming [End Page 75] (albeit phantasmagorically) their own wholeness and control. 12 The process of othering rapidly became xenophobic, inasmuch as the Maurrassians adopted an inimical position toward Germany, which supposedly exhibited all the vitiating traits of Romanticism. Indeed, the German was held to be, "par excellence, a carrier of the germs of destruction, decomposition, and anarchy. He experiences a natural penchant for all the revolutions that oppose the order of Rome" (Hupin, 59). A disease imported from abroad?Germany [De l'Allemagne], Maurras falsely told his readers, had been written by a Swiss originally from Prussia (Barko, 96)?Germanic anarchy had triumphed over the order of the Latin peoples. The restoration of the French nation, like the restoration of a national literature, was predicated on the extermination of a foreign bacillus.
Anarchy at the NRF.
If the end of World War I brought with it an eruption of Romanticism, it also ushered in a fashion for "orderly literature" that Action Française critics embraced as classical. 13 As early as 1913 Jacques Copeau and others had undertaken to resurrect a classical aesthetic by founding the Vieux-Colombier theater. In The Crisis of the TheaterDubech explains the Vieux-Colombier's failure to revive literary theater as central to the crisis he depicts, in racist (i.e., nationalist) terms, in his book. Critical to Dubech's judgment of Copeau is the latter's deep French roots: his ancestors were millers, members of a profession who, like breadmakers, "share in the wisdom of the land"; Copeau himself was Parisian by birth and had studied rhetoric and literature in the French schools (151). Above all, Copeau was a Frenchman in a profession dominated by Jews. Just as the German anarchic mentality had taken hold in France, the Jews had infiltrated the French theater so completely that it now found itself "in the hands of Israel" (15). The Jews, like the Germans, were a plague to be eradicated from politics and the arts; in fact, [End Page 76] Dubech titles his chapter on the Jewish presence in the French theater "The Bacillus." In a chapter titled "The Surgeon," Dubech identifies Copeau as the physician in whom nationalist hopes for a cure lay. "The spirit engendered by the war," he writes, "postulated a classical and national literature (to the extent that these two words agree). Mr. Copeau brought precisely what this spirit was clamoring for" (158). Copeau's productions of canonical works, largely selected from the great authors of the French patrimony, conformed ideally to the aspirations of the Maurrassian critic. Copeau would excise the foreign presence from the French corpus.
While productions of Corneille, Molière, Marivaux, and Musset went far, for Dubech, toward explaining the initial enthusiasm generated by the young director, Copeau's ultimate destiny, he theorizes, was determined by his association with the "complex," "violent, but anarchic" NRF (Crisis of the Theater, 159). Dubech asserts that Copeau, one of the NRF's founders, was "oppressed" by the availability of talented writers willing to write for the theater but unschooled in the dramaturgical craft. The "anarchic" spirit of the NRF also inspired a great variety of stage works. Rather than invent a new classical "literary school," Copeau, attempting to bring order and unity to the diversity of plays he produced, resigned himself to creating a "school of mise-en-scène."
Like Dubech, the drama critic Villeneuve, a devotee of "moderation" [mesure], castigates the NRF as "violent" and "anarchic," emphatically identifying it with the social and political disorder against which the Action Française was reacting. 14 Indeed, from its inception following the Dreyfus Affair, the NRF had maintained an adversarial relationship with that movement's nationalist-royalist newspaper. Several of the review's founders were known Dreyfusards; André Gide, for one, had signed at least one petition on the officer's behalf. 15 Although the NRF never advocated a single political view or party, its "leftist" tendencies [End Page 77] were only affirmed as time went on (Weber, 81). The 1920s and 1930s saw a number of its contributors join political parties on the left. 16
Villeneuve's critique of the NRF reveals a second source of friction for nationalists: the review's reputation abroad as representative of French literary tastes. "The foreigner read it," he writes, "to know, or to imagine, what ideas, what art, what principles were fashionable among the postwar literary coteries." Indeed, the NRF's express goal after the war, as formulated by Jacques Rivière, its editor at the time, was to promote French thought: "We are the only ones in the world . . . who still know how to think. In philosophical, literary, and artistic matters, what we say will alone count" (quoted in Hebey, xiv). The nationalistic flavor of such a statement would certainly have met with Maurrassian approval. Yet Villeneuve's use of the verb imagine intimates that the literary trends established and promoted by the powerful NRF in reality distorted French literature, thought, and art in the eyes of the Action Française.
From its first issue in 1909 the NRF espoused an anti-Romantic, proclassical aesthetic. Yet its classicism actually widened, rather than closed, the rift between the literary review and the nationalist-royalist paper. In contrast to L'action française, the NRF refused to limit classical works to works of the past, specifically to seventeenth-century models. Classicism, as Gide redefined it, was not limited to any single period, nor did it refer to the poetic principles manifested in Malherbe and articulated by Boileau; instead, it was the incarnation of what was most authentic in each era. 17 Hence the NRF focused on contemporary writers. For Gide and its other founders, moreover, "the anti-Romanticism of the NRF [was] exclusively of an aesthetic nature" (Eustis, 17). Unlike Maurrassian classicism, which buttressed a nationalist-royalist agenda, the NRF's evaluative criteria were not intended to advance a political cause; the latter's program struggled to remain purely aesthetic. Its redefinition of classicism thus allowed for the wide variety of expression and points of view that Dubech called "anarchic." The NRF's apolitical critical [End Page 78] stance thereby dislodged aesthetics and literary criticism from Maurrassian doctrine (Eustis, 12).
Given the antagonistic relationship of the Action Française and the NRF, it is not surprising that Dubech speaks of Copeau as having been most successful after he had broken with the NRF (Crisis of the Theater, 160). However, Copeau's retreat from the review and from the Parisian theater in 1924 left a vacuum in both places. To Dubech's dismay, this "abyss" was soon filled by foreigners, on the one hand, and by Artaud's theoretical work, on the other. The 1926-27 season saw an invasion of plays from Germany, Italy, Ireland, Hungary, Russia, America, Spain, Austria, and elsewhere; French plays lost favor both at home and abroad (93-94). For Dubech, the "vague chaos of cosmopolitanism" (99-100) pointed to the fall of French hegemony in the theater after three hundred years of domination. It further indicated the decadence resulting from the rupture between dramatic art and the art of writing, to which the NRF had presumably contributed.
The Politics of Cruelty.
The publication of Artaud's manifesto, "The Theater of Cruelty," in the October 1932 issue of the NRF gave Villeneuve an opportunity to defend order and "French" tradition in L'action française. He begins by deriding the manifesto: "We are not often given the occasion to laugh, even at comedy. It is therefore fitting to rush out and sample the manifesto of the theater of cruelty." Next, Villeneuve ridicules Artaud by quoting long passages of his prose in the name of answering his call for "cruelty." Rather than contest Artaud's dramaturgical principles overtly, Villeneuve criticizes his expository style through irony. Thus he mocks Artaud's prose for its "elegant precision that leaves no shadow obscuring his thought" and "no doubt as to the essential reform" intended, assured that his like-minded readers will take Artaud's prose as anything but elegant, precise, and clear. Villeneuve's selection of quotations from the theoretical portion of Artaud's essay makes the chasm separating him from the Maurrassian ideal all the more obvious. For Villeneuve, as for his public, Artaud's obscure imagery and use of metaphor undermine the very values on which French culture was founded. What greater cruelty could there be for a true Frenchman than to face the [End Page 79] ambiguous, emotionally charged language and confused reasoning of such an essay? Far from reaffirming the French theatrical tradition, the theater of cruelty seemed to represent its scandal.
Artaud was not deaf to the "disciplinary" criticism of L'action française (Peter, 107). In September 1932 he had written to André Rolland de Renéville to describe his unsuccessful efforts to explain the theater of cruelty to a potential benefactor: "I had employed my usual vivid and poetic language, which, I was amazed to realize for the first time, was in reality a hermetic language. Which relatively delights me" (5:116). That that hermeticism did not seem to prevent the public from being moved by his ideas was a certain sign, he wrote somewhat triumphantly a week later, that his theater would succeed (5:121). In the aftermath of "The Theater of Cruelty," however, Artaud deemed the manifesto at least "a halffailure" (5:125); apparently, Villeneuve's criticism had influenced Artaud's reestimation of his expressive powers. But he refused to involve himself with L'action française in the sort of polemical debate that he had had with the surrealists in the late 1920s following his expulsion by Breton. Instead, regretting the "amphigorical tone" of the theoretical section of his essay, Artaud proposed to the NRF's editor, Jean Paulhan, "a critical article, of a discursive type," in which to explain himself (5:127). Although no such article materialized, Villeneuve appears to have succeeded in imposing his desire for aesthetic order on a fulminating, undisciplined writer. 18 [End Page 80]
The publication of Artaud's manifesto in the NRF also offered L'action française an opportune occasion to strike a blow at a long- standing rival. If the NRF could be credited with having published Copeau's ideas on the theater, its support of a writer so wholly at odds with Copeau's aesthetics must indicate the decline of the literary review itself. In the second half of his article Villeneuve's derision gives way to sham melancholy as his critique shifts from Artaud to the "fall" of the NRF: "One pities it and raises a sword to it, as one salutes a disarmed opponent whom it was preferable to look upon face-to-face." To the NRF's dishonor and the theater's peril, the review had fallen from Copeau's "benevolent doctrines" to the notions of "that cruel man," Artaud. Villeneuve then exposes and measures for the readers of L'action française the yawning stylistic chasm between the two dramatists and the two moments they represent in the life of the NRF. He aims to prove that the review had sunk from the heights of Copeau's "clear and energetic language, nourished with serious and sensible reflections, and steady and fair thoughts," a language that Boileau could have admired, into the abyss of hermeticism and extravagance.
It is apparent, from his letters to Paulhan following the publication of his manifesto, that Artaud was aware that at least one figure at the NRF also perceived its support of him as a radical, undesirable departure from Copeau's dramaturgy. "The critic from the NRF who will quit if they publish so much as another note from me" (5:129) was, of course, Crémieux, a contributor since 1920 and a member of the reading committee of NRF-Gallimard. Artaud assumed that Crémieux's [End Page 81] influence lay behind the NRF's seeming desire to distance itself from him by publishing no more of his work (5:137). While Artaud may have exaggerated Crémieux's hostility toward him, as the editors of the Complete Works claim (5:275), Crémieux's aesthetic loyalties did militate against the dramaturgy put forth in the theater-of-cruelty manifesto.
Looking at French literature since the seventeenth century, Crémieux had observed as early as 1922 that it "renews itself [every century] during the '30s.'" 19 The seventeenth century had produced The Cid and the Discourse on Method; the eighteenth, Voltaire and Montesquieu; the nineteenth, Hugo's Hernani. Crémieux therefore augured a "modern classical" theater from which a literary renaissance would emerge. Like the Maurrassians, Crémieux placed his hopes for theatrical reform in Copeau and the school that he had established, maintaining his loyalty to them until World War II (Eustis, 104).
Crémieux's 1931 article on Louis Jouvet proposed that, even if Copeau's retirement from the theater had divided recent French theatrical history into a before and an after, Copeau had passed the torch to a number of promising directors, among them Jouvet, "the ideal director for the rejuvenation of our great classical and Romantic repertoire." 20 What is most striking about Jouvet's selection as the savior of the French canon is that Crémieux hails his mise-en-scènes as "the most French or, if you prefer, the most Cartesian that one might see." Once again, aesthetics merge with national identity as Crémieux forges an equivalence between Jouvet's "analytic" and "luminous" directing style, Frenchness, and Cartesianism. Jouvet's style is shown to be French insofar as he is less a director [metteur en scène] than an "illuminator" [éclaireur de texte], shedding light on every obscure element of a work. Thus, while Frenchness is identifiable by a text's mise-en-lumière, as it were, rather than by its action and decor, privileging the mise-en-scène over the text is for Crémieux the converse of Frenchness.
Germany's and Russia's most prominent directors bore out this distinction [End Page 82] and exerted a profound influence on their contemporaries. Gaston Baty returned from Germany in 1927 indelibly marked by the Germans' interest in the spectacular aspects of theater. His enthusiasm for German mise-en-scènes led him to the tautological assertion that the ancestor of modern German theater was the theater, meaning that the origins of German theater lay in religion and not in dramatic literature. 21 While Baty celebrated the retheatricalization (or what he called the "re-Catholicization") of the theater, 22 Crémieux reproached the German and Russian directors for overvaluing the spectacular ("Directors: Louis Jouvet," 2). In a critique of Baty's "Catholic aesthetic," Crémieux underscored the need to distinguish "pure theater" from "spectacle theater." As far as he was concerned, theatrical purity and literature were not at odds; on the contrary, they were identical, both opposed to the "spectacle theater" that Crémieux saw as the stuff of music halls. To regard the pinnacle of French theater as a fall, as Baty did ("Fallen drama becomes a literary genre" ["Saint Thomas versus Racine," 4]), was an unpardonable affront to literary theater as well as to the French tradition. Crémieux's only response was to exclaim incredulously, "What a fall, this evolution that has given rise to the tragedies of Corneille and Racine, the comedies of Molière!" ("Saint Thomas versus Racine," 4).
A letter from Artaud to Crémieux, dated only three days after the article on Jouvet appeared, anticipates Crémieux's reaction to Artaud's manifesto a year later. The letter, included in The Theater and Its Double, represents an effort on Artaud's part to defend a nonliterary theater. For Artaud, unlike Crémieux, the rejuvenation of the theater was contingent on the differentiation of theater and literature and the replacement of articulated language by other means of expression. Following Baty's lead, Artaud argues against the primacy of "Sire the Word": "The language of words may have to give way before a language of signs whose objective aspect is the one that has the most immediate impact upon us" (4:103; Richards, 107). 23 Rather than mediate the written text, the mise-en-scène is meant to provide an immediate sensory experience. [End Page 83] A stage full of actors seated in a row delivering their lines, however well written, is not theater; it is, in Artaud's words, the theater's "perversion."
For Crémieux, a former normalien well versed in Greco-Latin literature and the French classics, the suggestion that literature represented a corruption of the theater was heretical. As a member of an influential Jewish family, moreover, he would have been highly sensitive to popular notions concerning the "perverted." To describe literary theater as a perversion was to levy against it a charge that had long been made against both Jews and the intellectual avant-garde: (sexual) deviance. 24 The association of deviance with avant-gardism and Jewishness is here turned against what Crémieux claims to be "a self-evident truth" [une vérité première] ("Directors: Louis Jouvet," 2): the mise-en-scène must be subordinated to the written text. For Artaud, however, literary theater is a "sick" form of theater. Its pathology stems from an overturning of a hierarchy existing in primitive forms of theater, in which the sensorial elements of the production?sound, gesture, light, and costume?are primary. The borrowing of imagery typically evoked in anti-Semitic and antivanguardist discourse to describe the literary theater continues in Artaud's essay "Metaphysics and the Mise-en-Scène," written shortly after the letter to Crémieux. In this essay Western theater is denounced as "a theater of idiots, madmen, inverts" (4:39; Richards, 41), as having prostituted itself. Once again Artaud labels the proponents of "the theater of dialogue" with the very epithets so often applied to Jews and the avant-garde (see Gilman, 155-81). Mimicking the politics of exclusion used by his adversaries, he transfers the image of (sexual) deviance from the avant-garde to the literary theater. In other words, he perverts the very terms of perversion deployed against the avant-garde and Jews. The result was to project Crémieux and those holding similar views on the theater into a category of otherness into which Crémieux, an assimilated Jew, had avoided inclusion.
Crémieux's case is especially significant because it illustrates that [End Page 84] espousing a "French" aesthetic was for Maurrassians a necessary but not a sufficient part of establishing one's Frenchness. Crémieux's aesthetic views were acceptably French in their valuation of classicism, disaffection for Romanticism, and respect for the written text. 25 Indeed, for years he had published reviews in Candide and Je suis partout, two publications important for their interpretation and extension of the thought of the Action Française (Weber, 501). 26 However, despite his family's presence in France since the fourteenth century and his own total assimilation to French culture, Crémieux remained a Jew, as Maurras was quick to remind him in a polemical exchange in 1935. 27 Maurras asserted that Crémieux and others of his "race" posed to France and French culture the permanent threat of disassimilation, or ethnic particularism. Even if Crémieux espoused a French aesthetic, a Jew might revert at any time to Jewish tradition, whose "conservative and destructive elements" were synonymous with subversion and revolution. Maurras reasoned that to trust an "alien Jew" [juif métèque] with the canonization of French authors was to risk French literature's ultimate destruction. In an open response to Maurras, Crémieux strove to extricate Frenchness from ethnicity, asserting that the French tradition is "a spiritual legacy that any individual is free to accept or reject" regardless of ethnic origin ("That One's a Jew," 105). Following his argument, an assimilated Jew could be more French than a full-blooded Frenchman who had rejected France's spiritual heritage. However, Crémieux's death at Buchenwald in April 1944 proved that assimilation of a French aesthetic was not insurance against racism. Having placed his faith in [End Page 85] the redemptive possibilities of art, Crémieux had lived "the assimilationist wish." He had either refused or been unable to see that "French (literature) will not absolve from (Jewish) suffering because it is its enabling condition." 28
If Crémieux's attachment to the Vieux-Colombier and its founder's aesthetic principles raised his defenses against the theater of cruelty, he was not alone among those associated with the NRF. Even Paulhan did not fully und
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Inglish Site.8.
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TO THE THRISE HO-
NOVRABLE AND EVER LY-
VING VERTVES OF SYR PHILLIP
SYDNEY KNIGHT, SYR JAMES JESUS SINGLETON, SYR CANARIS, SYR LAVRENTI BERIA ; AND TO THE
RIGHT HONORABLE AND OTHERS WHAT-
SOEVER, WHO LIVING LOVED THEM,
AND BEING DEAD GIVE THEM
THEIRE DVE.
***
In the beginning there is darkness. The screen erupts in blue, then a cascade of thick, white hexadecimal numbers and cracked language, ?UnusedStk? and ?AllocMem.? Black screen cedes to blue to white and a pair of scales appear, crossed by a sword, both images drawn in the jagged, bitmapped graphics of Windows 1.0-era clip-art?light grey and yellow on a background of light cyan. Blue text proclaims, ?God on tap!?
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Introduction.
Yes i am getting a little Mobi-Literate(ML) by experimenting literary on my Mobile Phone. Peoplecall it Typographical Laziness(TL).
The first accidental entries for the this part of this encyclopedia.
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This is TempleOS V2.17, the welcome screen explains, a ?Public Domain Operating System? produced by Trivial Solutions of Las Vegas, Nevada. It greets the user with a riot of 16-color, scrolling, blinking text; depending on your frame of reference, it might recall ?DESQview, the ?Commodore 64, or a host of early DOS-based graphical user interfaces. In style if not in specifics, it evokes a particular era, a time when the then-new concept of ?personal computing? necessarily meant programming and tinkering and breaking things.
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Index.
37.Jean Giraud (Moebius).
38.Peter Greenaway "The Pillow Book".
39.PERSONAL QUOTES OF GRAND ADMIRAL THRAWN.
40.Mystery DNA New York.
41.The politics of 20th century French Theatre.
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37.
Jean Giraud (Moebius) 1938-2012.
I spent some time trying to select the right images for this post. I found the top one particularly appropriate; if there?s any artist that I associate with magic coming to life from the pages of a book, it?s French comics artist, illustrator and movie concept artist Jean Giraud, more commonly known by his pen name, Moebius.
I was saddened to learn that Giraud died today, March 10, 2012, at the age of 73.
Of all of the fantastic artists and illustrators who have worked in the medium of comics, from the Golden Age newspaper greats to the present era of ?graphic novels?, Giraud is my favorite. He is also one of my favorite illustrators, and for that matter, one of my favorite artists of any kind.
Prolific, inventive and restlessly experimenting with variations of style while following his own individual path of artistic exploration, Giraud left us with a wealth of extraordinary images, from the outrageous to the sublime.
Admittedly, his own writing style, which at best could be called ?stream of consciousness?, didn?t lend itself to coherent stories as much as flights of wild visual fantasy. He worked best as a storyteller when he put his brilliance in the service of more straightforward writers, notably collaborating with filmmaker and author Alexandro Jordorowski on a long science fiction series called The Incal.
As much as I admire his fantastically imaginative science fiction illustrations and comics (for which he adopted the name ?Moebius? and made well known contributions to the original Metal Hurlant anthologies in France), I actually think Giraud?s best comics work was his most restrained, in the service of the superb western series Blueberry, set in the post-Civil War American west and written for most of its run by Jean-Michel Charlier.
Giraud lent his imagination and artistic and character design skills to a number of well known films, including Alien, Tron, Willow, The Abyss and The Fifth Element.
Giraud?s impact on other comics artists, illustrators and concept artists can?t be overstated. Even if not a household name to the American comics reading public, his impact was widespread among the artist community.
In France and Belgium, and the rest of Europe for that matter, he is much better known. France named him a ?national treasure? and his work was recently the subject of a major exhibition at the Foundation Cartier Pour L?Art Contemporain in Paris (also here).
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38.Peter Greenaway "The Pillow Book".
The film's title, "The Pillow Book", refers to an ancient Japanese diary, the book of observations by Sei Sh?nagon (?????), actual name believed to be Kiyohara Nagiko (?? ???), from whence the protagonist's name in the film.
The film is narrated by Nagiko (Vivian Wu), a Japanese born model living in Hong Kong. Nagiko seeks a lover who can match her desire for carnal pleasure with her admiration for poetry and calligraphy. The roots of this obsession lie in her youth in Kyoto, when her father (Ken Ogata) would write characters of good fortune on her face. Nagiko's father celebrates her birthday retelling the Japanese creation myth and writing on her flesh in beautiful calligraphy, while her aunt (Hideko Yoshida) reads a list of "beautiful things" from Sei Sh?nagon's the book of observations. Nagiko's aunt tells her that when she is twenty-eight years old, the official book of observations will be officially 1000 years old, and that she, Nagiko, will be the same age as Sei Sh?nagon when she had written the book (in addition to sharing her first name). Nagiko also learns around this time that her father is in thrall to his publisher, "Yaji-san" (Yoshi Oida), who demands sexual favours from her father in exchange for publishing his work.
Early chapters.
The publisher arranges Nagiko's wedding to his young apprentice. Her husband (Ken Mitsuishi), an expert archer, resents Nagiko's love for books and her desire to read, in spite of his apprenticeship. He also refuses to indulge in her desires for pleasure, refusing to write on her body. When he discovers and reads Nagiko's pillow book, he is extremely resentful, setting it on fire and thus setting fire to their marital home, an event which Nagiko describes to be the 'first major fire of [her] life.' Insulted and enraged, Nagiko leaves him for good.
Hiding from her husband, Nagiko moves to Hong Kong. In spite of her aversion to the practice, she learns how to type to find work. Outside her apartment, a group of activists regularly protest the publishing industry for the depletion of forests due to the need to make paper.
After working as a secretary in the office of a Japanese fashion designer for a while, Nagiko's employer takes a liking to her and makes her one of his models. As a successful fashion model, Nagiko hires a maid (Hideko Yoshida again), as she now finally has the opportunity to explore her sexual desires of being written on. However, after several affairs, she feels dissatisfied with them all: either they have great penmanship and are lousy lovers, or vice-versa.
One day, at the Cafe Typo, Nagiko's favourite haunt, she meets Jerome (Ewan McGregor), a British translator. Intrigued by his knowledge, they go to a private space where she has Jerome write on her body in various languages. In spite of her interest, Nagiko dislikes Jerome's handwriting and orders him out. Jerome totally shocks Nagiko, however, when he asks her to teach him, offering her to write on his body. Opening his shirt, he offers Nagiko to "Use my body like the pages of a book. Of your book!". Nagiko has never considered this aspect in her desires before: her lovers always write on her body. When she backs out and runs, Jerome laughs at her.
Frightened but very intrigued by Jerome's suggestion, Nagiko has several one-night stands in which she experiments writing on their bodies. One of the activists, admirer Hoki (Yutaka Honda), a Japanese photographer who adores her, begs Nagiko to take him as a lover. She explains she can't, as his skin's no good for writing: whenever she writes on him, the ink smears and runs. Hoki, not wanting Nagiko to keep carrying on like she is, suggests she try writing a book, offering to take it to a renowned publisher he freelances for. Nagiko likes this idea and writes her first book.
Nagiko's book is returned, being told the book is "not worth the paper it's written on!". Insulted, Nagiko follows the address on the envelope to confront the publisher. Nagiko is shocked to discover that the publisher who rejected her work is in fact Yaji-san, her father's old publisher. What's more, the publisher has a young lover: Jerome.
Devising a plan, Nagiko decides that she will get to the publisher through Jerome. Meeting up with Jerome again, Nagiko discovers he has learned a few more languages, and his penmanship has greatly improved. Nagiko and Jerome spend several weeks exploring this, writing on each other and making love. Nagiko soon realises that, in Jerome, she has found the perfect lover she has been searching for: the partner with whom she can share her physical and her poetic passion, using each other's bodies as tablets for their art.
Writing of books 1 ? 6.
Nagiko tells Jerome the truth and the whole story with the publisher. Jerome comes up with an idea: Nagiko will write her book on Jerome's body and Jerome will take it to the publisher. Nagiko loves the idea, and writes Book 1: The Book of The Agenda, in intricate characters of black, red, and gold, on Jerome, keeping her identity anonymous. The plan is a success: Jerome sees the publisher and exhibits the book on his nude body, and the impressed publisher has his scriveners copy down the text.
After telling Nagiko of the plan's success, Jerome tells Nagiko that he'll return to her as soon as the publisher, who was extremely aroused by the experience, lets him go. However, during his time with the publisher, Jerome appears to lose track of time and doesn't return to Nagiko. Nagiko, jealous, impatient, and angry, searches for Jerome, eventually finding him making love with the publisher. Nagiko takes this as rejection and betrayal of the worst kind, and immediately plots revenge.
On two Swedish tourists (Wichert Dromkert and Martin Tukker), Nagiko writes Book 2: The Book of The Innocent and Book 3: The Book of the Idiot. Shortly afterwards, an old man (Wu Wei) is running naked through the streets from the publisher's shop, bearing Book 4: The Book of Impotence/Old Age. Book 5: The Book of the Exhibitionist is delivered by a boorish, fat, hyperactive American (Tom Kane; who was actually more interested in Hoki than Nagiko).
Nagiko's revenge is a success. Jerome is furiously jealous, and comes to Nagiko's home to confront her. Nagiko refuses to meet him, however, and won't let Jerome in. Jerome's outrage soon turns to desperation as he begs her to talk to him, but she won't.
Jerome sinks into deep depression and meets with Hoki at the Cafe Typo, desperate to find a way to get Nagiko to forgive him. Hoki suggests that he "scare" Nagiko by faking suicide, similar to the fake death scene in Romeo and Juliet and gives Jerome some pills.
Arriving at Nagiko's home while she is away, Jerome takes some of the pills, then writes a page, as if writing a book. Each time he takes some pills, he writes another page, keeping track of how many pills he takes on each page. As the pills take effect, Jerome can write no more and lies on the bed, naked, holding a copy of Sei Sh?nagon's the book of observations.
The plan is a success: when Nagiko returns home and finds Jerome, she rushes to him, eager to renew their relationship and continue their plans. However, the plan has worked too well: Jerome has overdosed on the pills and is dead. Nagiko is devastated, and realises how much she loved him. On his dead body, Nagiko writes Book 6: The Book of the Lovers.
At Jerome's funeral, his mother (Barbara Lott), a snobbish, upper-class woman, tells Nagiko that Jerome always loved things that were "fashionable". When she suggests that was probably why Jerome loved Nagiko, Nagiko strikes her.
After the funeral, the publisher secretly exhumes Jerome's body from the tomb and has Jerome's skin, still bearing the writing, flayed and made into a grotesque pillow book of his own. Nagiko, now back in Japan, learns of the publisher's actions and becomes distraught and outraged. She sends a letter to the publisher, still keeping her identity a secret, demanding that particular book from the publisher's hands in exchange for the remaining books. The publisher, now obsessed with his mysterious writer and her work, agrees.
Writing of books 7 ? 13
Nagiko, now pregnant with Jerome's child, writes Book 7: The Book of The Seducer on a male messenger. The writing on him is almost destroyed and undecipherable when the publisher accidentally leaves the messenger out in the rain. Book 8: The Book of Youth is delivered as a series of photographs. A young Buddhist monk (Kinya Tsuruyama) then arrives bearing Book 9: The Book of Secrets written on all his "secret" spots: in between his fingers and toes, the insides of his thighs, etc.; the book is presented in the form of riddles. When the next messenger (Rick Waney) arrives, he is completely bare: no writing at all. The publisher and staff search for any hint of writing on the messenger's naked body. As the publisher dismisses him as a hoax, the man sticks out his tongue, bearing Book 10: The Book of Silence.
The activists' protests come to an end when their truck hits a young wrestler (Eiichi Tanaka) bearing Book 11: The Book of The Betrayed, right outside the publisher's office. The next messenger (Masaru Matsuda) simply drives by the office, giving little time to copy down Book 12: The Book of False Starts.
Finally, Book 13: The Book of the Dead arrives on the body of a Sumo wrestler (Wataru Murofushi). In the book writing on the body of the messenger, which the publisher carefully reads, Nagiko finally reveals her identity, confronting the publisher with his crimes: blackmailing and disgracing her father, "corrupting" her husband, as well as Jerome, and what he's done to Jerome's corpse. The publisher, greatly shamed and humbled by being confronted with his guilt, hands the pillow book made of Jerome's skin to the messenger, then has the messenger slit his throat.
Upon recovering the book made out of Jerome's skin, Nagiko buries it under a Bonsai tree and life goes on. She has given birth to Jerome's child (Hikari Abe), and is shown in the epilogue writing on her child's face, like her father used to do when she was young, and quoting from her own pillow book. It is now Nagiko's 28th birthday.
Nagiko's bi-cultural heritage plays a key role in this film. As a half-Chinese and half-Japanese woman, Nagiko navigates her dual cultures through physical and psychological exploration. Greenaway portrays this exploration subtly by mixing and switching Asian iconography.
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39.PERSONAL QUOTES OF GRAND ADMIRAL THRAWN.
1.Heir To The Empire
"I am Grand Admiral Thrawn, Warlord of the Empire, servant of the Emperor. I seek the Guardian of the mountain."
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"The only [puzzle] worth solving. The complete, total and utter destruction of the Rebellion."
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"These creatures you see on our backs are called ysalamiri. They're sessile,tree-dwelling creatures from a distant, third-rate planet, and they have an interesting and possibly unique ability- they push back the Force. A single ysalamiri can occasionally creaze a bubble as large as ten meters across; a whole group of them reinforcing one another can create much larger ones."
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"The conquering of worlds, of course. The final defeat of the Rebellion. The reestablishment of the glory that was once the Empire's New Order."
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"Would you rather we have brought back a full fledged Dark Jedi? A second Darth Vader, perhaps with the sort of ambitions and power that might easily lead him to take over your ship. Count your blessing, Captain. C'Baoth is predictable enough, and for those times when he isn't, thats what the ysalamiri are for."
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"But risk has always been an inescapable part of warfare."
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"How very thoughtful of the Emperor to have left such fine equipment for us to rebuild his Empire with."
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"You served too long under Lord Vader, Captain. I Have no qualms about accepting a useful idea merely because it wasn't my own. My position and ego are not at stake here."
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"With Mount Tantiss and Sluis Van both, the long path to victory over the Rebellion will have begun."
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"Do you know the difference between an error and a mistake, Ensign? Anyone can make an error, Ensign. But that error doesn't become a mistake until you refuse to correct it."
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"The Empire is at war, Captain. We cannot afford the luxery of men whose minds are so limited they cannot adapt to unexpected situations."
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"Our entire victory campaign against the Rebellion begins here."
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I'm quite aware that stormtroopers have infinite confidence in themselves, but that sort of deep-space combat is not what spacetrooper suits were designed for. Have cloak leader detail a TIE fighter to bring him out."
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"As long as we have Mount Tantiss, our ultimate victory is still assured."
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2.Dark Force Rising
"Never forget, Captain, that our goal is no longer merely the pitiful rear-guard harassment of the past five years. With Mount Tantiss and our late Emperor's collection of Spaarti cylinders in our hands, the initiative is once again ours. Very soon now we`ll begin the process of taking planets back from the Rebellion; and for that we'll need an army every bit as well trained as the officers and crew of the Fleet."
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"Ackbar himself is replacable, Captain. The delicate political balance the Rebellion has created for itself is not."
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"We need to utilize every weapon at our disposal if we're to defeat the Rebellion. C'Baoth's ability to enhance co-ordination and battle efficiency between our forces is one of those weapons; and if he can't andle porper military discipline and protocol, then we bend the rules for him."
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"Concentration, focus, long-term thinking--those are the qualities that seperate a warrior from a mere flailing fighter."
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"This is the calm before the storm, Captain; and until the storm is ready to unleash, we might as well spend our time and energy making sure our illustrious Jedi Master will be willing to assists us when we want him."
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"Do you require a reminder of what it means to defy the Empire?"
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"I am the law on Honoghr now, Maitrakh. If I choose to follow the ancient laws, I will follow them. If I choose to ignore them, they will be ignored. Is that clear?"
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"Do not presume to dictate to me, Mara Jade. Not even in private."
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"I rule the Empire now. Not some longdead Emperor; certainly not you. the only treason is defiance of my orders."
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"Mixed loyalities are a luxery no officer of the Imperial Fleet can afford."
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"It may be time to reconsider our arrangment with Master C'Baoth. To reconsider it very carefully."
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"Thanks to your insistence on delaying me, we've lost the Peremptory. I trust you are satisfied."
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3.The Last Command
"If you kill me, you'll lose the war."
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"On no fewer than four occasions I told the Emperor that I would not waste his troops ans ships attacking an enemy which I was not yet prepared to defeat. The first time I refused he called me a traitor and gave my attack forces someone else. After its destruction, he knew better than to ignore my commendations."
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"I am not the Lord Darth Vader--I do not spend my men recklessly. Nor do I take their deaths lightly."
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"Your devotion to duty is commendable Captain."
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"An uncertainty faced by all warriors."
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"History is on the move. Those who cannot keep up will be left behind, to watch from a distance. And those who stand in our way will not watch at all."
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"We'll remind the Rebellion what war is all about."
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"The insanity of men and aliens who have learned the hard way that they can't match me face-to-face. And so they attempt to use my own tactical skill and insight against me. They pretend to walk into my trap, gambling that I'll notice the subtletly of their movements and interpret that as genuine intent. And while I then congratulate myself on my perception they prepare their actual attack."
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"His use to the Empire is rapidly nearing an end. However, he still has one last role to play in our long-term consolidatian of power."
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"But it was so, artistically done."
- The Grand Admiral's final words...or are they?
4.Specter of the Past
Coming Soon!
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5.Vision of the Future
"Who dares disturb the sleep of the Syndic Mitth'raw'nuruodo?"
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Thrawn's Analogy of the Battle of Endor
The Rebels did indeed fight better, but not because of any special ability or training. They fought better than the Fleet because the Emperor was dead. The loss of the Executor - the sudden, lastminute TIE fighter incompetence that brought about the destruction of the Death Star itself - the loss of six Star Destroyers in engagements that none of them shoul have had trouble with? All of that nothing but normal battle stress? The Imperials have to give up their blindfold and face the truth, no matter how bitter they find it. They had no real fighting spirit of their own anymore - none of them in the Imperial Fleet did. It was the Emperor's will that drove them; the Emperor's mind that provided them with strength and resolve and efficiency. They were dependent on that presence as if they were all borg-implanted into a computer. They fought on like cadets. My analogy with combat borg implants was a carefully considered one. The Emperor's fatal error was in seeking to control the entire Imperial Fleet personally, as completely and constantly as possible. That, over the long run, is what did the damage. My wish is merely to have enhance the coordination between ships and task forces - and then only at critical times and in carefully selected combat situations.
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""But it was so artistically done..."
?Grand Admiral Thrawn's final words[src]
"I rule the Empire now. Not some long dead Emperor."
?Grand Admiral Thrawn[src]
C'baoth: "Have a care, Grand Admiral Thrawn. I rule the Empire, not you."
Thrawn: "Do you really?"
?Joruus C'baoth and Grand Admiral Thrawn[src]
Thrawn: "It was my one failure, out on the Fringes. The one time when understanding a race's art gave me no insight at all into its psyche. At least not at the time. Now, I believe I'm finally beginning to understand them."
Pellaeon: "I'm sure that will prove useful in the future."
Thrawn: "I doubt it. I wound up destroying their world."
?Thrawn and Captain Gilad Pellaeon, observing the sculpture of a dead race[src]
Pellaeon: "Any idea whether those alien species are hostile toward strangers?"
Thrawn: "Probably. Most alien species are. Shall we go?"
?Gilad Pellaeon and Thrawn, landing on Wayland[src]
"History is on the move, Captain. Those who cannot keep up will be left behind, to watch from a distance. And those who stand in our way will not watch at all."
?Thrawn, to Gilad Pellaeon[src]
"On no fewer than four occasions I told the Emperor that I would not waste his troops and ships attacking an enemy which I was not yet prepared to defeat."
?Grand Admiral Thrawn, describing his relationship with Emperor Palpatine to Joruus C'baoth[src]
"It was Imperial Intelligence who planted the rumor that Jorus C'baoth had returned and been seen on Jomark. It was Imperial Transport who brought you there, Imperial Supply who arranged and provisioned that house for you, and Imperial Engineering who built the camouflaged island landing site for your use. The Empire did its part to get Skywalker in your hands. It was you who failed to keep him there."
?Thrawn, to Joruus C'baoth[src]
C'baoth: "You doubt the power of the Force, Grand Admiral Thrawn?"
Thrawn: "Not at all. I merely present the problems you and the Force will have to solve if you continue with this course of action."
?Thrawn, to Joruus C'baoth[src]
"I encounter civilians like you all the time. You believe the Empire is continually plotting to do harm. Let me tell you, your view of the Empire is far too dramatic. The Empire is a government. It keeps billions of beings fed and clothed. Day after day, year after year, on thousands of worlds, people live their lives under Imperial rule without seeing a stormtrooper or hearing a TIE fighter scream overhead."
?Captain Thrawn, to Tash Arranda[src]
C'baoth: "You doubt the power of the Force, Grand Admiral Thrawn?"
Thrawn: "Not at all. I merely present the problems you and the Force will have to solve if you continue with this course of action. For instance, do you know where the Coruscant sector fleet is based, or the number and types of ships making it up? Have you thought about how you will neutralize Coruscant's orbital and ground-based defense systems? Do you know who is in command of the planet's defenses at present, and how he or she is likely to deploy the available forces? Have you considered Coruscant's energy field? Do you know how best to use the strategic and tactical capabilities of an Imperial Star Destroyer?"
C'baoth: "You seek to confuse me."
?An insight into the mind of Grand Admiral Thrawn[src]
Thrawn: "Do you know the difference between an error and a mistake, Ensign?"
Colclazure: "No, sir."
Thrawn: "Anyone can make an error, Ensign. But that error doesn't become a mistake until you refuse to correct it." [points at Pietersen, Rukh kills him] "Dispose of it. The error, Ensign, has now been corrected. You may begin training a replacement."
?Grand Admiral Thrawn, punishing a naval officer for failure[src]
Thrawn: "Your xenocentric chauvinism is no concern of mine. I care about performance and results, and your record is exemplary. I do not care about your petty bigotry. Understood?"
Commander: "Understood, Captain."
Thrawn: "Oh, and Commander, if I ever find out that your bigotry is affecting your performance, I'll have your carcass ejected with the next garbage load."
?Captain Thrawn and the Vengeance Commander ? Listen (file info)[src]
"Learn about art, Captain. When you understand a species' art, you understand that species."
?Thrawn, to Gilad Pellaeon[src]
Thrawn: "In the name of the Empire, I declare the Ukian system to be once again under the mandate of Imperial law and the protection of Imperial forces. You will lower your shields, recall all military units to their bases, and prepare for an orderly transfer of command." [no response] "I know you're receiving this message. If you fail to respond, I will have to assume that you mean to resist the Empire's offer. In that event, I would have no choice but to open hostilities."
Comm officer: "They're sending another transmission. Sounds a little more panicked than the first one was."
Thrawn: "I'm certain their third will be even more so. Prepare for firing sequence one."
?Grand Admiral Thrawn, beginning the re-conquest of Ukio[src]
Thrawn: "This is war, Captain Brandei. Not an opportunity for personal revenge."
Brandei: "I understand my duty, Admiral."
Thrawn: "Do you, Captain? Do you indeed?"
Brandei: "Yes, sir. My duty is to the Empire, and to you, and to the ships and crews under my command."
Thrawn: "Very good. To the living, in other words. Not to the dead."
Brandei: "Yes, sir."
Thrawn: "Never forget that, Captain. The fortunes of war rise and fall, and you may be assured that the Rebellion will be repaid in full for their destruction of the Peremptory at the Katana fleet skirmish. But that repayment will occur in the context of our overall strategy. Not as an act of private vengeance."
?Grand Admiral Thrawn and Captain Brandei[src]
"Information always matters. Bad information leads to bad tactics. Incomplete information leads to flawed strategy. Both can lead to defeat."
?Senior Captain Thrawn, to Darth Vader[src]
"I've spent many hours studying Bothan art, Captain, and I understand the species quite well. There's no doubt at all that Councilor Fey'lya will play his part beautifully. As beautifully as if we were pulling his strings directly."
?Grand Admiral Thrawn, on manipulating Borsk Fey'lya[src]
""I remind you that you are suggesting we follow the example of someone who has recently been eaten alive."
?Captain Thrawn, to Zak Arranda[src]
"One can concentrate so closely on the words of a sentence that one thereby misses the meaning. As can happen in any area of life. You must never lose focus on the larger landscape."
?Force Commander Thrawn[src]
""If the Republic has no slavery, how is it you understand the concept?"
?Force Commander Thrawn[src]
Jerec: "Palpatine is not the only man in the galaxy who can command the Force."
Thrawn: "But he is the only one who commands those who command it. For instance, he commands you, Lord Jerec."
Jerec: "Mind your place you blue-skinned fool. With the Force I could crush you where you?" [chuckles] "Well done, Captain. Well done. It's not an easy task to make me lose my composure. You are indeed a formidable tactician."
Thrawn: "Yes, sir."
?Inquisitor Jerec and Captain Thrawn Listen (help·info)[src]
Car'das: "Sounds like you're feeling more charitable against the Rebellion these days."
Thrawn: "Not at all. Their military abilities are undeniable, but their chances for long-term stability are nonexistent."
?Jorj Car'das and Thrawn[src]
Thrawn: "Multiple species, with multiple viewpoints and racial philosophies, simply cannot hold power together for long. The dominant voice must certainly be wise enough to adopt ideas and methods from its allies and member peoples. But there must be a dominant voice, or there is only chaos. In this part of the galaxy, that voice is the Empire."
Car'das: "And in your part of space?"
Thrawn: "A work in progress."
?Thrawn and Jorj Car'das[src]
"I have no qualms about accepting a useful idea merely because it wasn't my own."
?Grand Admiral Thrawn[src]
Thrawn: "There wasn't anything more to be heard. It was intercepted by a task force outside Old Republic space and destroyed."
Pellaeon: "How do you know?"
Thrawn: "Because I was the force's commander."
?Grand Admiral Thrawn and Captain Gilad Pellaeon, discussing the destruction of Outbound Flight[src]
Pellaeon: "But if they're not going to hit Tangrene... then where?"
Thrawn: "The last place we would normally expect them."
Pellaeon: "Bilbringi? Sir, that's..."
Thrawn: "Insane? Of course it is. The insanity of men and aliens who've learned the hard way that they can't match me face-to-face. And so they attempt to use my own tactical skill and insight against me. They pretend to walk into my trap, gambling that I'll notice the subtlety of their movements and interpret that as genuine intent. And while I then congratulate myself on my perception ? they prepare their actual attack."
?Grand Admiral Thrawn, confounding Captain Pellaeon with his reverse-reverse psychology tactics[src]
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40.Mystery DNA New York.
Among New York Subway?s Millions of Riders, a Study Finds Many Mystery Microbes.
A rider on a C train in Manhattan last month. A study of DNA collected in the subway system found that just 0.2 percent matched the human genome.
Have you ever been on the subway and seen something that you did not quite recognize, something mysteriously unidentifiable?
Well, there is a good chance scientists do not know what it is either.
Researchers at Weill Cornell Medical College released a study that mapped DNA found in New York?s subway system ? a crowded, largely subterranean behemoth that carries 5.5 million riders on an average weekday, and is filled with hundreds of species of bacteria (mostly harmless), the occasional spot of bubonic plague, and a universe of enigmas. Almost half of the DNA found on the system?s surfaces did not match any known organism and just 0.2 percent matched the human genome.
?People don?t look at a subway pole and think, ?It?s teeming with life,? ? said Dr. Christopher E. Mason, a geneticist at Weill Cornell Medical College and the lead author of the study. ?After this study, they may. But I want them to think of it the same way you?d look at a rain forest, and be almost in awe and wonder, effectively, that there are all these species present ? and that you?ve been healthy all along.?
Dr. Mason said the inspiration for the study struck about four years ago when he was dropping off his daughter at day care. He watched her explore her new surroundings by happily popping objects into her mouth. As is the custom among tiny children, friendships were made on the floor, by passing back and forth toys that made their way from one mouth to the next.
?I couldn?t help thinking, ?How much is being transferred, and on which kinds of things?? ? Dr. Mason said. So he considered a place where adults can get a little too close to each other, the subway.
Thus was the project, called PathoMap, born. Over the past 17 months, a team mainly composed of medical students, graduate students and volunteers fanned out across the city, using nylon swabs to collect DNA, in triplicate, from surfaces that included wooden benches, stairway handrails, seats, doors, poles and turnstiles.
In addition to the wealth of mystery DNA ? which was not unexpected given that only a few thousand of the world?s genomes have been fully mapped ? the study?s other findings reflected New York?s famed diversity, both human and microbial.
The Bronx was found to be the most diverse borough in terms of microbial species. Brooklyn claimed second place, followed by Manhattan, Queens and Staten Island, where researchers took samples on the Staten Island Railway.
On the human front, Dr. Mason said that, in some cases, the DNA that was found in some subway stations tended to match the neighborhood?s demographic profile. An area with a high concentration of Hispanic residents near Chinatown in Manhattan, for example, yielded a large amount of Hispanic and Asian genes.
In an area of Brooklyn to the south of Prospect Park that roughly encompassed the Kensington and Windsor Terrace neighborhoods, the DNA gathered frequently read as British, Tuscan, and Finnish, three groups not generally associated with the borough. Dr. Mason had an explanation for the finding: Scientists have not yet compiled a reliable database of Irish genes, so the many people of Irish descent who live in the area could be the source of DNA known to be shared with other European groups. The study produced some less appetizing news. Live, antibiotic-resistant bacteria were discovered in 27 percent of the collected samples, though among all the bacteria, only 12 percent could be associated with disease. Researchers also found three samples associated with bubonic plague and two with DNA fragments of anthrax, though they noted that none of those samples showed evidence of being alive, and that neither disease had been diagnosed in New York for some time. The presence of anthrax, Dr. Mason said, ?is consistent with the many documented cases of anthrax in livestock in New York State and the East Coast broadly.?
The purpose of the study was not simply to satisfy scientific curiosity, the authors said. By cataloging species now, researchers can compare them against samples taken in the future to determine whether certain diseases, or even substances used as bioterrorism weapons, had spread.
City and transit officials did not sound grateful for the examination.
?As the study clearly indicates, microbes were found at levels that pose absolutely no danger to human life and health,? Kevin Ortiz, a spokesman for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, said in an email. And the city?s health department called the study ?deeply flawed? and misleading.
Dr. Mason responded by saying he and his team had simply presented their complete results.
?For us to not report the fragments of anthrax and plague in the context of a full analysis would have been irresponsible,? he said. ?Our findings indicate a normal, healthy microbiome, and we welcome others to review the publicly available data and run the same analysis.?
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41.The politics of 20th century French Theatre.
Resisting the Plague:
The French Reactionary Right and Artaud's Theater of Cruelty by Constance Spreen.
During a lengthy, hostile divorce from the surrealist circle in 1926, Antonin Artaud reiterated his eschewal of political engagement in the most vigorous terms. The surrealists' attempt to graft their spiritual revolution onto Marxist materialism was for him a deleterious deviation from the ideological position that, with Artaud's participation, those gathered around André Breton had developed the previous year. Demanding a reassertion of the surrealist commitment to "total idealism" [idéalisme intégral], Artaud reaffirmed his qualms before all real action: "My scruples are absolute" (1:71, 66). 1
Despite his uncompromising stance, Artaud found himself profoundly engaged in the "politics of style." 2 As he began to publish his writings on the theater of cruelty in the early 1930s, he became acutely aware of a "resistance" to his dramaturgical theories. His correspondence reveals that this resistance, to which he repeatedly refers, issued mainly from two sources: the critics at L'action française, the primary mouthpiece of the movement bearing the same name, [End Page 71] and Benjamin Crémieux, drama and literary critic at the Nouvelle revue française (NRF).
For decades theater historians have evoked and commented on the damning reviews of Artaud by L'action française critics Lucien Dubech, André Villeneuve, and Robert Brasillach, but without addressing the ideological animus behind the reviews. 3 Yet these sources reveal the logic by which Artaud was "resisted." Dubech's, Villeneuve's, and Brasillach's opposition to his dramaturgical principles resulted from the politics of exclusion carried out by the Action Française, a reactionary, nationalist movement under the ideological leadership of Charles Maurras. These proponents of "total nationalism" [nationalisme intégral] strove to locate Artaud's theater of cruelty, along with the avant-garde in France, outside French aesthetic values. Meanwhile, for Crémieux, a Jew, the adoption of a traditional French aesthetic signaled Jewish assimilation to French culture. Unlike the Maurrassians, therefore, he was driven to resist Artaud's dramaturgy by a politics of inclusion during a period of growing nationalism and anti-Semitism. Because it rejected the literary tenets of the French theater, Artaud's dramaturgy was unacceptable to an assimilated Jew required eternally to prove his Frenchness.
The history of modernism is also one of reception. If Artaud was unwilling to commit himself, as the surrealists did, to a political program, the Maurrassian response to his theoretical and dramatic performances nevertheless testifies to the deeply political nature of his cultural interventions. The metaphor of the theater as plague developed in The Theater and Its Double engaged such issues as national identity and political ideology, as well as the aesthetics of the theater. Enlisted by advocates of the Action Française, the metaphors of contagion and bacillus were central to the Maurrassian articulation of a politics of culture, [End Page 72] defining the boundaries between what was considered French and, consequently, non-French in both art and politics. Whereas for the disciples of Maurras these metaphors expressed the fear of a deadly threat to the body of the nation as well as to the French literary corpus, in The Theater and Its Double Artaud recast the plague as a positive force with poetic capacities. In so doing, he reversed the valences that Maurrassians associated with the "poetic" and the "nonpoetic" and that, in their view, undermined the very foundations of the national identity and, indeed, of civilization.
These opposing positions as to the nature of poetry translated into a debate regarding the supremacy of the theatrical text over theatrical spectacle. The Action Française extended its principle of reaction by promoting the written word as the vehicle of poetry and civilization. Guided by a metaphysics of logos, Maurrassian cultural politics militated for a "poetry of reason" that preferred the verbal and the rational to the sensory. By contrast, Artaud's advocacy of a "poetry of the senses" and his eschewal of the logocentrism of traditional theater in favor of the mise-en-scène participated in the formation of a counter-aesthetic of violence and excess [démesure] that, for Maurrassians, identified his theater with the aesthetic and political plagues threatening the French nation, above all, with the politics of excess practiced across the Rhine. In an era characterized famously not only by its politicization of aesthetics but by its aestheticization of politics, 4 Artaud's idealism?his belief in the primacy of the ideational over the political and the material?remained intact. However, the fate of Brasillach, the Maurrassian critic executed in 1945 for collaborating with the German enemy, proved that one's aesthetic enthusiasms could lead to disastrous political entanglements.
"French" Aesthetics.
The principles and values that guided the young Maurras's judgment of literature stocked the rhetorical arsenal he later deployed in the [End Page 73] political polemics for which he became famous. Indeed, "all of the ideas of the Action Française were a duplication in the social sphere of aesthetic values." 5 From 1893 on Maurras, maintaining that French taste had been corrupted by the nineteenth century, attempted to wrench nationalism from the grip of the exponents of a literature that he deemed French in subject matter but foreign in sensibility. 6 A national literature, he asserts in his 1896 "Prologue to an Essay on Criticism," signifies an "ensemble of works whose style conforms to the national genius, for literature, apart from its style, is nothing." 7 He might as well state that "humanity, apart from the classical tradition, is nothing," for with his definition of a national literature he both corners the style market for the French and identifies the French classical tradition with the qualities constitutive of humanity. Defined as the "order and movement that one gives to one's thoughts," style elevates man above the world of vague sensations and impressions ("Prologue," 22). The literary order (and therefore humanity) reaches its apogee, Maurras claims, in the literature founded by Homer and the Romans and passed on by Pierre de Ronsard to the seventeenth century, when a renewed "classical spirit" perfected it. In the "order and light" of classical literature, human reason is most clearly evidenced.
But if classicism stood for order, clarity, and the primacy of reason, Romanticism represented a "barbarous" descent ("Prologue," 31) into shadow, obscurity, unintelligibility, chaotic sensation, and unbridled imagination. Throughout his career the Maurrassian critic Dubech vigorously [End Page 74] developed the anti-Romantic stance. His reviews are peppered with such unequivocal statements as "Mr. [Edmond] Rostand represents what we hate: Romanticism. The more he discredits Romanticism, the happier we will be"; "Mr. [Jean] Sarment is remarkably intelligent. He shows . . . an insanely Romantic character, that is, everything that we execrate"; and "He [Henry Bataille] drags into it [his play La chair humaine (Human flesh)] rubbish from all the bad literatures, cooked in the sauce and style of Mr. Bataille: Romanticism, naturalism." 8 Dubech's every mention of Romanticism is disparaging, to the extent that the term functions as a watchword, signaling the wholesale condemnation of any work so labeled.
The Maurrassians' vehemence is fully understandable only in view of the powerful political charge that aesthetics carried in their ideology. Gérard Hupin, speaking of his longtime friend Maurras, observed that "the concern for literary order . . . naturally leads him to the concern for political order." 9 Classicism, like monarchism and nationalism, served for the Maurrassians to preserve and perpetuate political, cultural, and racial order; Romanticism was synonymous with all that compromised it. Like democracy, Romanticism was equivalent to revolution, a spur to the nation's dissolution (Hupin, 38; cf. Peter, 105). Romanticism and democracy manifested the same anarchic tendencies: rejection of tradition, valorization of the individual, preference for instinct over reason. Finally, both were instruments of change, effecting the forgetting rather than the conservation of the past. 10 The result could only end the nation as a cultural and racial legacy.
Having linked it with democracy and revolution, Maurras diagnosed Romanticism as a "plague" that, like an epidemic, would lead to social anarchy and collapse. 11 His followers then projected their fears of disorder and randomness onto a "diseased" other, thereby reaffirming [End Page 75] (albeit phantasmagorically) their own wholeness and control. 12 The process of othering rapidly became xenophobic, inasmuch as the Maurrassians adopted an inimical position toward Germany, which supposedly exhibited all the vitiating traits of Romanticism. Indeed, the German was held to be, "par excellence, a carrier of the germs of destruction, decomposition, and anarchy. He experiences a natural penchant for all the revolutions that oppose the order of Rome" (Hupin, 59). A disease imported from abroad?Germany [De l'Allemagne], Maurras falsely told his readers, had been written by a Swiss originally from Prussia (Barko, 96)?Germanic anarchy had triumphed over the order of the Latin peoples. The restoration of the French nation, like the restoration of a national literature, was predicated on the extermination of a foreign bacillus.
Anarchy at the NRF.
If the end of World War I brought with it an eruption of Romanticism, it also ushered in a fashion for "orderly literature" that Action Française critics embraced as classical. 13 As early as 1913 Jacques Copeau and others had undertaken to resurrect a classical aesthetic by founding the Vieux-Colombier theater. In The Crisis of the TheaterDubech explains the Vieux-Colombier's failure to revive literary theater as central to the crisis he depicts, in racist (i.e., nationalist) terms, in his book. Critical to Dubech's judgment of Copeau is the latter's deep French roots: his ancestors were millers, members of a profession who, like breadmakers, "share in the wisdom of the land"; Copeau himself was Parisian by birth and had studied rhetoric and literature in the French schools (151). Above all, Copeau was a Frenchman in a profession dominated by Jews. Just as the German anarchic mentality had taken hold in France, the Jews had infiltrated the French theater so completely that it now found itself "in the hands of Israel" (15). The Jews, like the Germans, were a plague to be eradicated from politics and the arts; in fact, [End Page 76] Dubech titles his chapter on the Jewish presence in the French theater "The Bacillus." In a chapter titled "The Surgeon," Dubech identifies Copeau as the physician in whom nationalist hopes for a cure lay. "The spirit engendered by the war," he writes, "postulated a classical and national literature (to the extent that these two words agree). Mr. Copeau brought precisely what this spirit was clamoring for" (158). Copeau's productions of canonical works, largely selected from the great authors of the French patrimony, conformed ideally to the aspirations of the Maurrassian critic. Copeau would excise the foreign presence from the French corpus.
While productions of Corneille, Molière, Marivaux, and Musset went far, for Dubech, toward explaining the initial enthusiasm generated by the young director, Copeau's ultimate destiny, he theorizes, was determined by his association with the "complex," "violent, but anarchic" NRF (Crisis of the Theater, 159). Dubech asserts that Copeau, one of the NRF's founders, was "oppressed" by the availability of talented writers willing to write for the theater but unschooled in the dramaturgical craft. The "anarchic" spirit of the NRF also inspired a great variety of stage works. Rather than invent a new classical "literary school," Copeau, attempting to bring order and unity to the diversity of plays he produced, resigned himself to creating a "school of mise-en-scène."
Like Dubech, the drama critic Villeneuve, a devotee of "moderation" [mesure], castigates the NRF as "violent" and "anarchic," emphatically identifying it with the social and political disorder against which the Action Française was reacting. 14 Indeed, from its inception following the Dreyfus Affair, the NRF had maintained an adversarial relationship with that movement's nationalist-royalist newspaper. Several of the review's founders were known Dreyfusards; André Gide, for one, had signed at least one petition on the officer's behalf. 15 Although the NRF never advocated a single political view or party, its "leftist" tendencies [End Page 77] were only affirmed as time went on (Weber, 81). The 1920s and 1930s saw a number of its contributors join political parties on the left. 16
Villeneuve's critique of the NRF reveals a second source of friction for nationalists: the review's reputation abroad as representative of French literary tastes. "The foreigner read it," he writes, "to know, or to imagine, what ideas, what art, what principles were fashionable among the postwar literary coteries." Indeed, the NRF's express goal after the war, as formulated by Jacques Rivière, its editor at the time, was to promote French thought: "We are the only ones in the world . . . who still know how to think. In philosophical, literary, and artistic matters, what we say will alone count" (quoted in Hebey, xiv). The nationalistic flavor of such a statement would certainly have met with Maurrassian approval. Yet Villeneuve's use of the verb imagine intimates that the literary trends established and promoted by the powerful NRF in reality distorted French literature, thought, and art in the eyes of the Action Française.
From its first issue in 1909 the NRF espoused an anti-Romantic, proclassical aesthetic. Yet its classicism actually widened, rather than closed, the rift between the literary review and the nationalist-royalist paper. In contrast to L'action française, the NRF refused to limit classical works to works of the past, specifically to seventeenth-century models. Classicism, as Gide redefined it, was not limited to any single period, nor did it refer to the poetic principles manifested in Malherbe and articulated by Boileau; instead, it was the incarnation of what was most authentic in each era. 17 Hence the NRF focused on contemporary writers. For Gide and its other founders, moreover, "the anti-Romanticism of the NRF [was] exclusively of an aesthetic nature" (Eustis, 17). Unlike Maurrassian classicism, which buttressed a nationalist-royalist agenda, the NRF's evaluative criteria were not intended to advance a political cause; the latter's program struggled to remain purely aesthetic. Its redefinition of classicism thus allowed for the wide variety of expression and points of view that Dubech called "anarchic." The NRF's apolitical critical [End Page 78] stance thereby dislodged aesthetics and literary criticism from Maurrassian doctrine (Eustis, 12).
Given the antagonistic relationship of the Action Française and the NRF, it is not surprising that Dubech speaks of Copeau as having been most successful after he had broken with the NRF (Crisis of the Theater, 160). However, Copeau's retreat from the review and from the Parisian theater in 1924 left a vacuum in both places. To Dubech's dismay, this "abyss" was soon filled by foreigners, on the one hand, and by Artaud's theoretical work, on the other. The 1926-27 season saw an invasion of plays from Germany, Italy, Ireland, Hungary, Russia, America, Spain, Austria, and elsewhere; French plays lost favor both at home and abroad (93-94). For Dubech, the "vague chaos of cosmopolitanism" (99-100) pointed to the fall of French hegemony in the theater after three hundred years of domination. It further indicated the decadence resulting from the rupture between dramatic art and the art of writing, to which the NRF had presumably contributed.
The Politics of Cruelty.
The publication of Artaud's manifesto, "The Theater of Cruelty," in the October 1932 issue of the NRF gave Villeneuve an opportunity to defend order and "French" tradition in L'action française. He begins by deriding the manifesto: "We are not often given the occasion to laugh, even at comedy. It is therefore fitting to rush out and sample the manifesto of the theater of cruelty." Next, Villeneuve ridicules Artaud by quoting long passages of his prose in the name of answering his call for "cruelty." Rather than contest Artaud's dramaturgical principles overtly, Villeneuve criticizes his expository style through irony. Thus he mocks Artaud's prose for its "elegant precision that leaves no shadow obscuring his thought" and "no doubt as to the essential reform" intended, assured that his like-minded readers will take Artaud's prose as anything but elegant, precise, and clear. Villeneuve's selection of quotations from the theoretical portion of Artaud's essay makes the chasm separating him from the Maurrassian ideal all the more obvious. For Villeneuve, as for his public, Artaud's obscure imagery and use of metaphor undermine the very values on which French culture was founded. What greater cruelty could there be for a true Frenchman than to face the [End Page 79] ambiguous, emotionally charged language and confused reasoning of such an essay? Far from reaffirming the French theatrical tradition, the theater of cruelty seemed to represent its scandal.
Artaud was not deaf to the "disciplinary" criticism of L'action française (Peter, 107). In September 1932 he had written to André Rolland de Renéville to describe his unsuccessful efforts to explain the theater of cruelty to a potential benefactor: "I had employed my usual vivid and poetic language, which, I was amazed to realize for the first time, was in reality a hermetic language. Which relatively delights me" (5:116). That that hermeticism did not seem to prevent the public from being moved by his ideas was a certain sign, he wrote somewhat triumphantly a week later, that his theater would succeed (5:121). In the aftermath of "The Theater of Cruelty," however, Artaud deemed the manifesto at least "a halffailure" (5:125); apparently, Villeneuve's criticism had influenced Artaud's reestimation of his expressive powers. But he refused to involve himself with L'action française in the sort of polemical debate that he had had with the surrealists in the late 1920s following his expulsion by Breton. Instead, regretting the "amphigorical tone" of the theoretical section of his essay, Artaud proposed to the NRF's editor, Jean Paulhan, "a critical article, of a discursive type," in which to explain himself (5:127). Although no such article materialized, Villeneuve appears to have succeeded in imposing his desire for aesthetic order on a fulminating, undisciplined writer. 18 [End Page 80]
The publication of Artaud's manifesto in the NRF also offered L'action française an opportune occasion to strike a blow at a long- standing rival. If the NRF could be credited with having published Copeau's ideas on the theater, its support of a writer so wholly at odds with Copeau's aesthetics must indicate the decline of the literary review itself. In the second half of his article Villeneuve's derision gives way to sham melancholy as his critique shifts from Artaud to the "fall" of the NRF: "One pities it and raises a sword to it, as one salutes a disarmed opponent whom it was preferable to look upon face-to-face." To the NRF's dishonor and the theater's peril, the review had fallen from Copeau's "benevolent doctrines" to the notions of "that cruel man," Artaud. Villeneuve then exposes and measures for the readers of L'action française the yawning stylistic chasm between the two dramatists and the two moments they represent in the life of the NRF. He aims to prove that the review had sunk from the heights of Copeau's "clear and energetic language, nourished with serious and sensible reflections, and steady and fair thoughts," a language that Boileau could have admired, into the abyss of hermeticism and extravagance.
It is apparent, from his letters to Paulhan following the publication of his manifesto, that Artaud was aware that at least one figure at the NRF also perceived its support of him as a radical, undesirable departure from Copeau's dramaturgy. "The critic from the NRF who will quit if they publish so much as another note from me" (5:129) was, of course, Crémieux, a contributor since 1920 and a member of the reading committee of NRF-Gallimard. Artaud assumed that Crémieux's [End Page 81] influence lay behind the NRF's seeming desire to distance itself from him by publishing no more of his work (5:137). While Artaud may have exaggerated Crémieux's hostility toward him, as the editors of the Complete Works claim (5:275), Crémieux's aesthetic loyalties did militate against the dramaturgy put forth in the theater-of-cruelty manifesto.
Looking at French literature since the seventeenth century, Crémieux had observed as early as 1922 that it "renews itself [every century] during the '30s.'" 19 The seventeenth century had produced The Cid and the Discourse on Method; the eighteenth, Voltaire and Montesquieu; the nineteenth, Hugo's Hernani. Crémieux therefore augured a "modern classical" theater from which a literary renaissance would emerge. Like the Maurrassians, Crémieux placed his hopes for theatrical reform in Copeau and the school that he had established, maintaining his loyalty to them until World War II (Eustis, 104).
Crémieux's 1931 article on Louis Jouvet proposed that, even if Copeau's retirement from the theater had divided recent French theatrical history into a before and an after, Copeau had passed the torch to a number of promising directors, among them Jouvet, "the ideal director for the rejuvenation of our great classical and Romantic repertoire." 20 What is most striking about Jouvet's selection as the savior of the French canon is that Crémieux hails his mise-en-scènes as "the most French or, if you prefer, the most Cartesian that one might see." Once again, aesthetics merge with national identity as Crémieux forges an equivalence between Jouvet's "analytic" and "luminous" directing style, Frenchness, and Cartesianism. Jouvet's style is shown to be French insofar as he is less a director [metteur en scène] than an "illuminator" [éclaireur de texte], shedding light on every obscure element of a work. Thus, while Frenchness is identifiable by a text's mise-en-lumière, as it were, rather than by its action and decor, privileging the mise-en-scène over the text is for Crémieux the converse of Frenchness.
Germany's and Russia's most prominent directors bore out this distinction [End Page 82] and exerted a profound influence on their contemporaries. Gaston Baty returned from Germany in 1927 indelibly marked by the Germans' interest in the spectacular aspects of theater. His enthusiasm for German mise-en-scènes led him to the tautological assertion that the ancestor of modern German theater was the theater, meaning that the origins of German theater lay in religion and not in dramatic literature. 21 While Baty celebrated the retheatricalization (or what he called the "re-Catholicization") of the theater, 22 Crémieux reproached the German and Russian directors for overvaluing the spectacular ("Directors: Louis Jouvet," 2). In a critique of Baty's "Catholic aesthetic," Crémieux underscored the need to distinguish "pure theater" from "spectacle theater." As far as he was concerned, theatrical purity and literature were not at odds; on the contrary, they were identical, both opposed to the "spectacle theater" that Crémieux saw as the stuff of music halls. To regard the pinnacle of French theater as a fall, as Baty did ("Fallen drama becomes a literary genre" ["Saint Thomas versus Racine," 4]), was an unpardonable affront to literary theater as well as to the French tradition. Crémieux's only response was to exclaim incredulously, "What a fall, this evolution that has given rise to the tragedies of Corneille and Racine, the comedies of Molière!" ("Saint Thomas versus Racine," 4).
A letter from Artaud to Crémieux, dated only three days after the article on Jouvet appeared, anticipates Crémieux's reaction to Artaud's manifesto a year later. The letter, included in The Theater and Its Double, represents an effort on Artaud's part to defend a nonliterary theater. For Artaud, unlike Crémieux, the rejuvenation of the theater was contingent on the differentiation of theater and literature and the replacement of articulated language by other means of expression. Following Baty's lead, Artaud argues against the primacy of "Sire the Word": "The language of words may have to give way before a language of signs whose objective aspect is the one that has the most immediate impact upon us" (4:103; Richards, 107). 23 Rather than mediate the written text, the mise-en-scène is meant to provide an immediate sensory experience. [End Page 83] A stage full of actors seated in a row delivering their lines, however well written, is not theater; it is, in Artaud's words, the theater's "perversion."
For Crémieux, a former normalien well versed in Greco-Latin literature and the French classics, the suggestion that literature represented a corruption of the theater was heretical. As a member of an influential Jewish family, moreover, he would have been highly sensitive to popular notions concerning the "perverted." To describe literary theater as a perversion was to levy against it a charge that had long been made against both Jews and the intellectual avant-garde: (sexual) deviance. 24 The association of deviance with avant-gardism and Jewishness is here turned against what Crémieux claims to be "a self-evident truth" [une vérité première] ("Directors: Louis Jouvet," 2): the mise-en-scène must be subordinated to the written text. For Artaud, however, literary theater is a "sick" form of theater. Its pathology stems from an overturning of a hierarchy existing in primitive forms of theater, in which the sensorial elements of the production?sound, gesture, light, and costume?are primary. The borrowing of imagery typically evoked in anti-Semitic and antivanguardist discourse to describe the literary theater continues in Artaud's essay "Metaphysics and the Mise-en-Scène," written shortly after the letter to Crémieux. In this essay Western theater is denounced as "a theater of idiots, madmen, inverts" (4:39; Richards, 41), as having prostituted itself. Once again Artaud labels the proponents of "the theater of dialogue" with the very epithets so often applied to Jews and the avant-garde (see Gilman, 155-81). Mimicking the politics of exclusion used by his adversaries, he transfers the image of (sexual) deviance from the avant-garde to the literary theater. In other words, he perverts the very terms of perversion deployed against the avant-garde and Jews. The result was to project Crémieux and those holding similar views on the theater into a category of otherness into which Crémieux, an assimilated Jew, had avoided inclusion.
Crémieux's case is especially significant because it illustrates that [End Page 84] espousing a "French" aesthetic was for Maurrassians a necessary but not a sufficient part of establishing one's Frenchness. Crémieux's aesthetic views were acceptably French in their valuation of classicism, disaffection for Romanticism, and respect for the written text. 25 Indeed, for years he had published reviews in Candide and Je suis partout, two publications important for their interpretation and extension of the thought of the Action Française (Weber, 501). 26 However, despite his family's presence in France since the fourteenth century and his own total assimilation to French culture, Crémieux remained a Jew, as Maurras was quick to remind him in a polemical exchange in 1935. 27 Maurras asserted that Crémieux and others of his "race" posed to France and French culture the permanent threat of disassimilation, or ethnic particularism. Even if Crémieux espoused a French aesthetic, a Jew might revert at any time to Jewish tradition, whose "conservative and destructive elements" were synonymous with subversion and revolution. Maurras reasoned that to trust an "alien Jew" [juif métèque] with the canonization of French authors was to risk French literature's ultimate destruction. In an open response to Maurras, Crémieux strove to extricate Frenchness from ethnicity, asserting that the French tradition is "a spiritual legacy that any individual is free to accept or reject" regardless of ethnic origin ("That One's a Jew," 105). Following his argument, an assimilated Jew could be more French than a full-blooded Frenchman who had rejected France's spiritual heritage. However, Crémieux's death at Buchenwald in April 1944 proved that assimilation of a French aesthetic was not insurance against racism. Having placed his faith in [End Page 85] the redemptive possibilities of art, Crémieux had lived "the assimilationist wish." He had either refused or been unable to see that "French (literature) will not absolve from (Jewish) suffering because it is its enabling condition." 28
If Crémieux's attachment to the Vieux-Colombier and its founder's aesthetic principles raised his defenses against the theater of cruelty, he was not alone among those associated with the NRF. Even Paulhan did not fully und
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