text:
Antonio Gramsci

Antonio Gramsci (23 January 1891 – 27 April 1937) was an Italian writer, politician and political theorist. A founding member and onetime leader of the Communist Party of Italy, he was imprisoned by Mussolini's Fascist regime.

Quotes

 * To tell the truth, to arrive together at the truth, is a communist and revolutionary act.
 * Letter from Prison (21 June 1919), translated by Hamish Henderson,.

 * History teaches, but it has no pupils.
 * Letter from Prison (21 June 1919), translated by Hamish Henderson,.

 * The history of education shows that every class which has sought to take power has prepared itself for power by an autonomous education. The first step in emancipating oneself from political and social slavery is that of freeing the mind. I put forward this new idea: popular schooling should be placed under the control of the great workers’ unions. The problem of education is the most important class problem.
 * Cited in Davidson's (1977) Antonio Gramsci: Towards an Intellectual Biography. London: Merlin Press., p. 77.

 * It is all a matter of comparing one’s own life with something worse and consoling oneself with the relativity of human fortunes. When I was eight or nine I had an experience which came clearly to mind when I read your advice. I used to know a family in a little village near mine: father, mother and sons: they were small landowners and had an inn. Very energetic people, especially the woman. I knew (I had heard) that besides the sons we knew, this woman had another son nobody had seen, who was spoken of in whispers, as if he were a great disgrace for the mother, an idiot, a monster or worse. I remember that my mother referred to this woman often as a martyr, who made great sacrifices for this son, and put up with great sorrows. One Sunday morning about ten, I was sent to this woman’s: I had to deliver some crocheting and get the money. I found her shutting the door, dressed up to go out to mass, she had a hamper under her arm. On seeing me she hesitated then decided. She told me to accompany her to a certain place, and that she would take delivery and give me the money on our return. She took me out of the village, into an orchard filled with rubbish and plaster; in one corner there was a sort of pig sty, about four feet high, and windowless, with only a strong door. She opened the door and I could hear an animal-like howling. Inside was her son, a robust boy of 18, who couldn’t stand up and hence scraped along on his seat to the door, as far as he was permitted to move by a chain linked to his waist and attached to the ring in the wall. He was covered with filth, and his eyes shone red, like those of a nocturnal animal. His mother dumped the contents of her basket – a mixed mess of household leftovers – into a stone trough. She filled another trough with water, and we left. I said nothing to my mother about what I had seen, so great an impression it had made on me, and so convinced was I that nobody would believe me. Nor when I later heard of the misery which had befallen that poor mother, did I interrupt to talk of the misery of the poor human wreck who had such a mother.
 * Gramsci, 1965, p. 737 cited in Davidson, 1977, p. 35.

 * When I was a child the boys of the town never came near me except to make fun of me. I was almost always alone. Sometimes, finding me by chance among them, they hurled themselves against me, and not only with words. One day – and while he told me this his great eyes shone with an inner light - … they started to throw stones at me with more violence than usual, with the evilness which is found among children and the weak. I lost patience, and grabbing stones I too started to defend myself with such energy that my attackers were put to flight. Mario, I succeeded in beating them: I terrified them to such an extent that from that day they respected me and no longer annoyed me. I ran to my mother … and told her of my first victorious battle: she kissed me tenderly and it was the best prize that I could have wanted.
 * Gramsci cited in Garuglieri's Garuglieri, 'Ricordo di Gramsci.' Societa, 691-701., 1946, p. 700.

 * I can’t think why Delio [son] has not been told that I’m in prison, and why no one reflected that he might then find out about it indirectly, that is, in the most disagreeable way for a child, who then begins to doubt the truthfulness of those educating him, to think about it on his own account and draw apart. At least, that was my experience as a child: I remember it perfectly . . . I believe in treating children as rational creatures with whom it is possible to discuss even the most serious matters. This makes a very profound impression on them, it strengthens their character and above all it avoids leaving their development at the mercy of random environmental pressures and casual, impersonal encounters. It really is very strange how grown-ups forget they were children themselves, and make no use of their own experiences. For my part, I recall vividly how offended I was at every discovery of a subterfuge, even if it was meant to keep painful facts from me, and how this shut me up within myself and made me withdraw.
 * Gramsci cited in Fiori, 1970, pp. 22-23.

 * For two years I have lived outside the world: in a dream world. One by one, I let each strand tying me to the world and to my fellow men be cut. I live entirely for the mind, for the. heart not at all …. I turned myself into a bear, inside and outside … other people did not exist for me. For perhaps two years, I didn’t laugh once and I didn’t cry … but I never hurt anyone but myself.
 * Gramsci cited in Davidson, 1977, p. 70.

 * I’m a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will.
 * Letter from Prison (19 December 1929); also attributed to Romain Rolland.

 * La crisi consiste appunto nel fatto che il vecchio muore e il nuovo non può nascere: in questo interregno si verificano i fenomeni morbosi piú svariati.
 * The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.
 * § (34). Passato e presente., Quaderni del carcere, «Ondata di materialismo» e «crisi di autorità », volume I, quaderno 3, p. 311, written circa 1930
 * English translation Selections from the Prison Notebooks, “Wave of Materialism” and “Crisis of Authority” (NY: International Publishers), (1971), pp. 275-276.
 * Prison Notebooks Volume II, Notebook 3, 1930, (2011 edition) SS-34, Past and Present 32-33

 * My practicality consists in this: in the knowledge that if you beat your head against the wall it is your head which breaks and not the wall … that is my strength, my only strength.
 * quoting a letter to his sister, as reproduced in "Gramsci in Prison: 1926–1937: Introduction" from The Modern Prince and other Writings trans. Louis Marks (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1957; New York: International Publishers, 1968), p. 56.

Selections from the Prison Notebooks (1971)

 * Translated & edited by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (London: Lawrence and Wishart; New York: International Publishers, 1971).

 * All men are intellectuals: but not all men have in society the function of intellectuals.

 * Economy and ideology. The claim (presented as an essential postulate of historical materialism) that every fluctuation of politics and ideology can be presented and expounded as an immediate expression of the structure, must be contested in theory as primitive infantilism, and combated in practice with the authentic testimony of Marx, the author of concrete political and historical works.

 * History is at once freedom and necessity.

 * We can see that in putting the question "what is man?" what we mean is: what can man become? That is, can man dominate his own destiny, can he "make himself," can he create his own life? We maintain therefore that man is a process and, more exactly, the process of his actions. If you think about it, the question itself "what is man?" is not an abstract or "objective" question. It is born of our reflection about ourselves and about others, and we want to know, in relation to what we have thought and seen, what we are and what we can become; whether we really are, and if so to what extent, "makers of our own selves," of our life and of our destiny. And we want to know this "today," in the given conditions of today, the conditions of our daily life, not of any life or any man

 * Revolutionaries see history as a creation of their own spirit, as being made up of a continuous series of violent tugs at the other forces of society - both active and passive, and they prepare the maximum of favourable conditions for the definitive tug (revolution).

Misattributed

 * To tell the truth is revolutionary.
 * The first number of L'Ordine Nuovo, edited by Gramsci, appeared in 1921 with this motto of on the first page. It is often misattributed to Gramsci.

 * The long march through the institutions.
 * Due to leader, who coined it in 1967 as „Der lange Marsch durch die Institutionen“.
 * See Strategy, Hegemony & ‘The Long March’: Gramsci’s Lessons for the Antiwar Movement, by Carl Davidson, April 06, 2006.
 * It was popularized in the, and Dutschke’s posthumous 1980 work is titled Mein langer Marsch (My long March).
 * See Marsch durch die Institutionen at German Wikipedia for extensive discussion.
 * A reference to the of the Chinese Communist Red Army in 1934 & 1935; note that Gramsci died in 1937.
 * Various corruptions include “through the culture” or “slow march”.
 * Widely attributed to Gramsci, Joseph A. Buttigieg, the editor of the English critical edition of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks asserts that the phrase does not originate with Gramsci.
 * Footnote 21, page 50, reads: [“long march through the institutions”21] “This phrase is not Gramsci’s, even though it is ubiquitously attributed to him.”
 * The idea is connected with Gramsci's theory of, but does not originate with him – he called the concept a “war of position”.
 * The idea is connected with Gramsci's theory of, but does not originate with him – he called the concept a “war of position”.

 * The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.
 * Loose translation, commonly attributed to Gramsci by Slavoj Žižek, presumably formulation by Žižek (see below).
 * Presumably a translation from a loose French translation by Gustave Massiah; strict English with cognate terms and glosses:
 * Le vieux monde se meurt, le nouveau monde tarde à apparaître et dans ce clair-obscur surgissent les monstres
 * The old world is dying, the new world is slow to appear and in this chiaroscuro (light-dark) surge (emerge) monsters.
 * “Mongo Beti, une conscience noire, africaine, universelle”, Gustave Massiah, CEDETIM, août 2002 (archive, 2016-03-04)
 * “Mongo Beti, a Black, African, Universal Conscience”, Gustave Massiah, CEDETIM, August 2002
 * Collected in: Remember Mongo Beti, Ambroise Kom, 2003, p. 149.
 * Original, with literal English translation (see above):
 * La crisi consiste appunto nel fatto che il vecchio muore e il nuovo non può nascere: in questo interregno si verificano i fenomeni morbosi piú svariati.
 * The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.
 * Similar sentiments are widespread in revolutionary rhetoric; see: No, Žižek did not attribute a Goebbels quote to Gramsci, Ross Wolfe, 2015-07-03

About Gramsci

 * The international disputes which united and divided Luxemburg, Lenin, Lukács, Gramsci, Bordiga or Trotsky on these issues represent the last great strategic debate in the European workers’ movement. Since then, there has been little significant theoretical development of the political problems of revolutionary strategy in metropolitan capitalism that has had any direct contact with the masses. The structural divorce between original Marxist theory and the main organizations of the working class in Europe has yet to be historically resolved. The May-June revolt in France, the upheaval in Portugal, the approaching dénouement in Spain, presage the end of this long divorce, but have not accomplished it. The classical debates, therefore, still remain in many respects the most advanced limit of reference we possess today. It is thus not mere archaism to recall the strategic confrontations which occurred four or five decades ago. To reappropriate them, on the contrary, is a step towards a Marxist discussion that has the—necessarily modest—hope of assuming an ‘initial shape’ of correct theory today. Régis Debray has spoken, in a famous paragraph, of the constant difficulty of being contemporary with our present. In Europe at least, we have yet to be sufficiently contemporary with our past.
 * Perry Anderson, "The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci", New Left Review (1976)

 * We must prevent this brain from functioning for twenty years.
 * Prosecutor at Gramsci's criminal trial, quoted Prison Notebooks translated by Joseph A. Buttigieg

 * oftentimes prison writing is described as that which is produced in prison or by prisoners, and certainly Gramsci's prison notebooks provide the most interesting example.
 * 2003 interview in Conversations with Angela Davis Edited by Sharon Lynette Jones (2021)

 * I always think of a line from Gramsci, "living in the interregnum."
 * Nadine Gordimer Interview with Progressive Magazine (1992)

 * Antonio Gramsci wisely wrote: "When a politician puts pressure on the art of his time to express a particular cultural world, his activity is one of politics, not of artistic criticism. If the cultural world for which one is fighting is a living and necessary fact, its expansiveness will be irresistible and it will find its artists."
 * Margaret Randall Introduction in Only the Road / Solo el Camino: Eight Decades of Cuban Poetry (2016)

 * Antonio Gramsci wrote of the culture of the future that "new" individual artists can't be manufactured: art is a part of society-but that to imagine a new socialist society is to imagine a new kind of art that we can't foresee from where we now stand. "One must speak," Gramsci wrote, "of a struggle for a new culture, that is, for a new moral life that cannot but be intimately connected to a new intuition of life, until it becomes a new way of feeling and seeing reality and, therefore, a world intimately ingrained in 'possible artists' and 'possible works of art."
 * Adrienne Rich A Human Eye (2009)

title: Antonio Gramsci


text:
James Cagney

James Francis Cagney, Jr. (July 17, 1899 – March 30, 1986) was an American film actor who won acclaim for a wide variety of roles and won the Oscar for Best Actor in 1942 for his role in Yankee Doodle Dandy.

Quotes

 * I never actually said "Ooh, you dirty rat."
 * When receiving his AFI Lifetime Achievement Award in 1974; misattribution noted in Paul F. Boller, Jr., and John George, They Never Said It: A Book of Fake Quotes, Misquotes, & Misleading Attributions (1989), p. 11.

 * You don't psych yourself up for these things, you do them... I'm acting for the audience, not for myself, and I do it as directly as I can.
 * Cagney by Cagney, his autobiography (1976)

Quotes about

 * He can do nothing which is not worth watching. On his light hoofer's feet, with his quick nervous hands and his magnificent unconsciousness of the camera, he can pluck distinction from the least promising part.
 * Graham Greene, as quoted in The Filmgoer's Book of Quotes (1978) by Leslie Halliwell, p. 257

 * He can't even put a telephone receiver back on the hook without giving the action some special spark of life.
 * Time reviewer, as quoted in The Filmgoer's Book of Quotes (1978) by Leslie Halliwell, p. 257

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: James Cagney


text:
Clueless (film)

Clueless is a 1995 film starring Alicia Silverstone which was based on the novel Emma by Jane Austen. The film was written and directed by Amy Heckerling. Sex. Clothes. Popularity. Is there a problem here?taglines

Cher Horowitz

 * So, okay, you're probably going, "Is this, like, a Noxzema commercial or what?" But seriously, I actually have a way normal life for a teenage girl.
 * Dionne and I were both named after great singers of the past who now do infomercials.
 * [repeated line] As if!
 * Suddenly, a dark cloud settled over first period. I got a C in Debate?!
 * Isn't my house classic? The columns date all the way back to 1972.
 * Wasn't my mom a Betty? She died when I was just a baby. A fluke accident during a routine liposuction.
 * [arguing her way out of a tardy] Mr. Hall, I was surfing the crimson wave. I had to haul ass to the ladies'.
 * [to Dionne, about Mr. Hall and Miss Geist] Will you look at that body language? Legs crossed towards each other. That's an unequivocal sex invite.
 * [to Elton] You are a snob and a half.
 * So, okay. I don't wanna be a traitor to my generation and all, but I don't get how guys dress today. I mean, c'mon, it looks like they just fell out of bed and put on some baggy pants, and take their greasy hair—ew!—and cover it up with a backwards cap and, like, we're expected to swoon? I don't think so!
 * Searching for a boy in high school is as useless as searching for meaning in a Pauly Shore movie.
 * So, okay. The Attorney General says there's too much violence on TV, and that should stop. Even if you took out all the violent shows, you could still see the news. So until mankind is peaceful enough not to have violence on the news, there's no point in taking it out of shows that need it for entertainment value.
 * Anything you can do to draw attention to your mouth is good. Also, sometimes you have to show a little skin. This reminds guys of being naked, and then they think of sex.
 * [after she and Josh kiss] Well, you can guess what happened next. [scene changes to Mr. Hall and Miss Geist's wedding] As if! I am only 16, and this is California, not Kentucky.

Others

 * Travis: I would like to say this. Tardiness is not something you can do all on your own. Many, many people contributed to my tardiness. Uh, I'd like to thank my parents for never giving me a ride to school, the LA city bus driver for taking a chance on an unknown kid, and, uh, last but not least, the wonderful crew at McDonald's for spending hours making those Egg McMuffins, without which I might never be tardy.
 * Amber: [about Tai] She could be a farmer in those clothes.
 * Tai: Cher, I don't wanna do this anymore. And my buns, they don't feel nothing like steel.

Dialogue

 * Cher: [looking at Dionne's hat] Shopping with Dr. Seuss?
 * Dionne: [picks up Cher's backpack] Well, at least I wouldn't skin a collie to make my backpack.
 * Cher: It's faux!

 * Cher: So. Okay. Like, right now, for example, the Haitians need to come to America. But some people are all, "What about the strain on our resources?" But it's like, when I had this garden party for my father's birthday, right? I said RSVP because it was a sit-down dinner. But people came that, like, did not RSVP, so I was, like, totally buggin'. I had to haul ass to the kitchen, redistribute the food, squish in extra place settings. But by the end of the day, it was, like, the more the merrier. And so, if the government could just get to the kitchen, rearrange some things, we could certainly party with the Haitians. And in conclusion, may I please remind you that it does not say RSVP on the Statue of Liberty?
 * [Class breaks into applause]
 * Cher: Thank you very much.
 * Mr. Hall: Uh, Amber? Replying?
 * Amber: Mr. Hall, how can I answer that? The topic is Haiti and she's talking about some little party.
 * Cher: Hello?! It was his 50th birthday!
 * Amber: Whatever. If she doesn't do the assignment, I can't do mine.

 * [Josh changes the channel from Beavis and Butt-head to the news]
 * Josh: Hey! In some parts of the universe, maybe not in Contempo Casual, but in some parts, it's considered cool to know what's going on in the world.
 * Cher: Thank you, Josh. I so need lessons from you on how to be cool. Tell me that part about Kenny G again?

 * Mel: So, Josh, have you given any thought to our little discussion about Corporate Law?
 * Josh: Yeah, you know, but I think I'd really like to check out Environmental Law.
 * Mel: What for? Do you wanna have a miserable, frustrating life?
 * Cher: Oh, Josh will have that no matter what he does.
 * Mel: At least he knows what he wants to do. And he's in a good college. I'd like to see you have a little bit of direction.
 * Cher: I have direction.
 * Josh: Yeah, towards the mall.

 * Dionne: "Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, but thy eternal summer shall not fade." Phat! Did you write that?
 * Cher: Duh, it's, like, a famous quote.
 * Dionne: From where?
 * Cher: Cliff's Notes.

 * Josh: Hey, James Bond, in America we drive on the right side of the road.
 * Cher: I am. You try driving in platforms.

 * Josh: We might get Marky Mark to plant a celebrity tree.
 * Cher: How fabulous. Getting Marky Mark to take time from his busy pants-dropping schedule to plant trees. Josh, why don't you just hire a gardener?
 * Josh: You know, maybe Marky Mark wants to use his popularity for a good cause, make a contribution. In case you've never heard of that, a contribution is the giving of...
 * Cher: Excuse me, but I've donated many expensive Italian outfits to Lucy...
 * Josh: Time... funds...
 * Cher: And as soon as I get my license, I fully intend to brake for animals, and I have contributed many hours to helping two lonely teachers find romance.
 * Josh: Which I'll bet serves your interests more than theirs. You know, if I ever saw you do something that wasn't 90% selfish, I'd die of shock.
 * Cher: Oh, that'd be reason enough for me.

 * Cher: Would you call me selfish?
 * Dionne: No. Not to your face.

 * Cher: Ms. Stoeger? I would just like to say that physical education in this school is a disgrace. I mean, standing in line for 40 minutes is hardly aerobically effective. I doubt I've worked off the calories in a stick of Carefree gum.
 * [The other girls cheer]
 * Ms. Stoeger: Well, you certainly exercised your mouth, Cher. Now, hit the ball.
 * [Ball flies by, inches from Cher's nose]
 * Cher: Ms. Stoeger, that machine is just a lawsuit waiting to happen!
 * Ms. Stoeger: Thanks for the legal advice.

 * Ms. Stoeger: Dionne, you're up.
 * Dionne: Uh, no. Ms. Stoeger, I have a note from my tennis instructor, and he would prefer it if I didn't expose myself to any training that might derail his teachings.

 * Amber: Ms. Stoeger, my plastic surgeon doesn't want me doing any activity where balls fly at my nose.
 * Dionne: Well, there goes your social life.

 * Tai: I could really use some sort of a herbal refreshment.
 * Dionne: Oh, well, we do lunch in ten minutes. We don't have any tea, but we have Coke and stuff.
 * Tai: No shit! You guys got coke here?
 * Dionne: Well, yeah.
 * Cher: Yeah, this is America.

 * Murray: Woman, lend me five dollars.
 * Dionne: Murray, I have asked you repeatedly not to call me "woman"!
 * Murray: Excuse me, Miss Dionne.
 * Dionne: Thank you.
 * Murray: Okay, but street slang is an increasingly valid form of expression. Most of the feminine pronouns do have mocking but not necessarily misogynistic undertone. [hops away]
 * Tai: Wow! You guys talk like grown-ups.
 * Cher: Oh, well, this is a really good school.

 * Cher: I've got an idea. Let's do a makeover!
 * Tai: No. No.
 * Dionne: Oh, c'mon! Let us! Cher's main thrill in life is a makeover. Okay, it gives her a sense of control on a world full of chaos.
 * Cher: Please?
 * Tai: Sure. Why not? Shit, you guys! I've never had straight friends before.

 * Cher: I wanna do something good for humanity.
 * Josh: How about sterilization?

 * Mel: So, uh, what'd you do at school today?
 * Cher: Well... I broke in my purple clogs.

 * Tai: [pointing at Amber] Cher, ain't that the same dress that you was wearing yesterday?
 * Cher: Say, Ambular.
 * Amber: Hi!
 * Cher: Was that you going through my laundry?
 * Amber: As if! Like I would really wear something from Judy's.
 * Cher: Do you prefer "fashion victim" or "ensemble-y challenged"?

 * Cher: [after Tai is hit in the head by a flying clog] If it's a concussion, you have to keep her concious, okay? Ask her questions.
 * Elton: What's 7 times 7?
 * Cher: Stuff she knows!

 * Heather: It's just like Hamlet said, "To thine own self be true."
 * Cher: Ah, no, uh, Hamlet didn't say that.
 * Heather: I think that I remember Hamlet accurately.
 * Cher: Well, I remember Mel Gibson accurately, and he didn't say that. That Polonius guy did.

 * Dionne: Cher is saving herself for Luke Perry.
 * Tai: Cher, you're a virgin?!
 * Cher: God! You say it like it's a bad thing.
 * Dionne: Besides, the PC term is "hymenally challenged."
 * Cher: I am just not interested in doing it until I find the right person. You see how picky I am about my shoes and they only go on my feet.

 * Amber: [after Cher's oral on violence in the media] Hello?! Was I the only one listening? I mean, I thought it reeked.
 * Cher: I believe that was your designer imposter perfume.

 * Mel: Cher, get in here.
 * Cher: [walks in; wearing a Calvin Klein dress] What's up, daddy?
 * Mel: What the hell is that?!
 * Cher: A dress.
 * Mel: Says who?
 * Cher: Calvin Klein.

 * Tai: [referring to Amber] Do you think she's pretty?
 * Cher: No, she's a full-on Monet.
 * Tai: What's a Monet?
 * Cher: It's like the painting, see? From far away, it's okay, but up close, it's a big old mess. Let's ask a guy. Christian, what do you think of Amber?
 * Christian: Hagsville.
 * Cher: See?

 * Cher: That's Ren and Stimpy. They're way existential.
 * Josh: Do you have any idea what you're talking about?
 * Cher: No. Why, do I sound like I do?

 * Murray: Are you bitches blind or something? Your man Christian is a cake boy!
 * Cher and Dionne: A what?!
 * Murray: He's a disco-dancing, Oscar Wilde-reading, Streisand ticket-holding friend of Dorothy, know what I'm saying?
 * Cher: Uh-uh, no way.
 * Murray: He's gay.
 * Cher: Not even.
 * Murray: Yes, even.
 * Dionne: He does like to shop, Cher, and the boy can dress.
 * Cher: Oh, my God. I am totally buggin'. I feel like such a bonehead.

 * Cher: We got another notice from the fire department saying we have to clear out the bush. You said you were going to get Jose to do it.
 * Lucy: He your gardener. I don't know why you don't tell him.
 * Cher: Lucy, you know I don't speak Mexican.
 * Lucy: I not a Mexican! [storms off]
 * Cher: Great, what was that all about?
 * Josh: Lucy's from El Salvador.
 * Cher: So?
 * Josh: It's an entirely different country.
 * Cher: Oh, what does that matter?
 * Josh: You get upset if someone thinks you live below Sunset.

 * Tai: Why am I even listening to you to begin with? You're a virgin who can't drive.
 * Cher: [pause] That was way harsh, Tai.

 * Josh: [while watching news about a war in Bosnia] You look confused.
 * Cher: Well, uh, I thought they declared peace in the Middle East.

 * Josh: You look like Pippi Longstocking.
 * Cher: Well, you look like Forrest Gump. Who's Pippi Longstocking?
 * Josh: Uh, someone Mel Gibson never played.

Taglines

 * Sex. Clothes. Popularity. Is there a problem here?
 * Sex. Clothes. Popularity. Whatever.

Cast

 * Alicia Silverstone – Cher Horowitz
 * Stacey Dash – Dionne Davenport
 * Brittany Murphy – Tai Fraiser
 * Paul Rudd – Josh Lucas
 * Donald Faison – Murray
 * Elisa Donovan – Amber Mariens
 * Breckin Meyer – Travis Birkenstock
 * Jeremy Sisto – Elton Tiscia
 * Dan Hedaya – Mel Horowitz
 * Wallace Shawn – Mr. Wendell Hall
 * Twink Caplan – Miss Toby Geist
 * Justin Walker – Christian Stovitz

title: Clueless (film)


text:
Edward Burns

Edward Burns, American psychologist and Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington.

Quotes

 * The most likely reason for the adoption of a relatively small number of discrete intervals as the tonal material for music is that discretization or categorization is a typical, if not universal, strategy used by animals in order to reduce information overload and facilitate processing when subjected to the high-information-conetent signals and/or high information rates from a highly developed sensory system (e.g., Estes, 1972; Terhardt, 1991). An obvious example is the processing of speech information by humans, wherein each language selects a relatively small portion of the available timbral-differences that can be produced by the vocal tract as information-carrying units (phonemes) in the language. A related reason for discrete scales, and another obvious analogy with speech perception, lies in the social aspect of music. Music first developed as, and still largely remains, a social phenomenon associated with religious or other rituals that, like language, necessitated an easily remembered common framework.
 * Burns, Edward M. (1999). "Intervals, Scales, and Tuning", 'The Psychology of Music second edition, p. 218. Deutsch, Diana, ed. San Diego: Academic Press. ISBN 0122135644

title: Edward Burns


text:
Eugène Ionesco

Eugène Ionesco (26 November 1909 – 29 March 1994), born Eugen Ionescu, was a Romanian playwright and dramatist, one of the foremost playwrights of Theatre of the Absurd.

Quotes

 * That's not it. That's not it at all. You always have a tendency to add. But one must be able to subtract too. It's not enough to integrate, you must also disintegrate. That's the way life is. That's philosophy. That's science. That's progress, civilization.
 * The Professor in The Lesson (1951)

 * There are now many invisible people on stage.
 * Stage directions in The Chairs (1952)

 * All the plays that have ever been written, from ancient Greece to the present day, have never really been anything but thrillers... Drama's always been realistic and there's always been a detective about... Every play's an investigation brought to a successful conclusion.
 * Victimes du Devoir [Victims of Duty] (1953)

 * We are all Victims of Duty.
 * Victimes du Devoir [Victims of Duty] (1953)

 * I didn't mean you were stupid. It's just that you're not logical, which isn't the same thing at all.
 * Amédée from Amédée or How to Get Rid of It (1954)

 * Oh words, what crimes are committed in your name!
 * Jacques from Jacques  or the Submission (1955)

 * I believe that what separates us all from one another is simply society itself, or, if you like, politics. This is what raises barriers between men, this is what creates misunderstanding. If I may be allowed to express myself paradoxically, I should say that the truest society, the authentic human community, is extra-social — a wider, deeper society, that which is revealed by our common anxieties, our desires, our secret nostalgias. The whole history of the world has been governed by nostalgias and anxieties, which political action does no more than reflect and interpret, very imperfectly. No society has been able to abolish human sadness, no political system can deliver us from the pain of living, from our fear of death, our thirst for the absolute. It is the human condition that directs the social condition, not vice versa.
 * "A Reply to Kenneth Tynan: The Playwright's Role" in The Observer (29 June 1958)

 * Every work of art (unless it is a pseudo-intellectualist work, a work already comprised in some ideology that it merely illustrates, as with Brecht) is outside ideology, is not reducible to ideology. Ideology circumscribes without penetrating it. The absence of ideology in a work does not mean an absence of ideas; on the contrary it fertilizes them.
 * "A Reply to Kenneth Tynan: The Playwright's Role" in The Observer (29 June 1958)

 * Logician: A cat has four paws. Old Gentleman: My dog had four paws. Logician: Then it's a cat. Old Gentleman: So my dog is a cat? Logician: And the contrary is also true.
 * Rhinoceros (1959)

 * Good men make good rhinoceroses, unfortunately.
 * Berenger from Rhinoceros (1959)

 * I am not capitulating.
 * Berenger's last sentence from Rhinoceros (1959)

 * ‘It was a lot of fuss about nothing, wasn’t it?’
 * Exit the King, 1962, Marguerite to Bérenger, the King, as he dies.

 * I have no ideas before I write a play. I have them when I have finished it ... I believe that aritistic creation is spontaneous. It is for me.
 * Notes and Counter-Notes (1964), as translated by Donald Watson, p. 33

 * I am told, in a dream ... you can only get the answer to all your questions through a dream. So in my dream, I fall asleep, and I dream, in my dream, that I'm having that absolute, revealing dream.
 * Speaking of a dream not fully remembered, in Fragments of a Journal (1966)

 * It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question.
 * Découvertes (1970), as quoted in Choosing the Future : The Power of Strategic Thinking (1997) by Stuart Wells, p. 15

 * But History was against me. History is right, objectively speaking. I'm just a historical dead end. I hope at least that my fate will serve as an example to you all and to posterity.
 * Candor from Macbett (1972)

 * I thought that it was strange to assume that it was abnormal for anyone to be forever asking questions about the nature of the universe, about what the human condition really was, my condition, what I was doing here, if there was really something to do. It seemed to me on the contrary that it was abnormal for people not to think about it, for them to allow themselves to live, as it were, unconsciously. Perhaps it's because everyone, all the others, are convinced in some unformulated, irrational way that one day everything will be made clear. Perhaps there will be a morning of grace for humanity. Perhaps there will be a morning of grace for me.
 * The Hermit (1973)

 * It isn't what people think that's important, but the reason they think what they think.
 * As quoted in Peter's Quotations : Ideas for Our Time (1977) by Laurence J. Peter, p. 468; also in The Quantum Dice (1993) by Leonid Ivanovich Ponomarev, p. 50

 * Why do people always expect authors to answer questions? I am an author because I want to ask questions. If I had answers, I'd be a politician.
 * As quoted in The Writer's Quotation Book : A Literary Companion (1980) by James Charlton, p. 44

 * Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together.
 * As quoted in Sunbeams : A Book of Quotations (1990) by Sy Safransky

 * It's not a certain society that seems ridiculous to me, it's mankind.
 * As quoted in Encyclopedia of World Biography (1998) edited by Suzanne Michele Bourgoin, Paula Kay Byers, Gale Research Inc, p. 132

 * ''Dieu est mort, Marx est mort et moi-même je ne me sens pas très bien
 * Un homme en question, Gallimard, 1979, p. 164
 * God is dead. Marx is dead. And I don't feel so well myself.
 * As quoted in Jewish American Literature : A Norton Anthology (2000) by Jules Chametzky, "Jewish Humor", p. 318

 * Prier le Je Ne Sais Qui J'espère : Jesus-Christ.
 * Pray to the I don't-know-who I hope : Jesus Christ.
 * Inscription on his tombstone.
 * Variant translation: Pray to the I don't-know-who: Jesus Christ, I hope.
 * As quoted in Parasuicidality and Paradox : Breaking Through the Medical Model (2007) by Ross D. Ellenhorn, p. 55

 * Everything that has been will be, everything that will be is, everything that will be has been.
 * Attributed in The Little Book of Romanian Wisdom (2011) edited by Diana Doroftei and Matthew Cross

The Paris Review interview (1984)

 * "Eugene Ionesco, The Art of Theater No. 6" interviewed by Shusha Guppy, in Paris Review (Fall 1984), No. 93

 * We moved back to Romania when I was thirteen, and my world was shattered. I hated Bucharest, its society, and its mores — its anti-Semitism for example. I was not Jewish, but I pronounced my r’s as the French do and was often taken for a Jew, for which I was ruthlessly bullied.… It was the time of the rise of Nazism and everyone was becoming pro-Nazi — writers, teachers, biologists, historians … It was a plague! They despised France and England because they were yiddified and racially impure.

 * I remember one day there was a military parade. A lieutenant was marching in front of the palace guards. I can still see him carrying the flag. I was standing beside a peasant with a big fur hat who was watching the parade, absolutely wide-eyed. Suddenly the lieutenant broke rank, rushed toward us, and slapped the peasant, saying, “Take off your hat when you see the flag!” I was horrified. My thoughts were not yet organized or coherent at that age, but I had feelings, a certain nascent humanism, and I found these things inadmissible. The worst thing of all, for an adolescent, was to be different from everyone else. Could I be right and the whole country wrong?

 * It was quite fashionable to poke fun at Hugo. You remember Gide’s “Victor Hugo is the greatest French poet, alas!” or Cocteau’s “Victor Hugo was a madman who thought he was Victor Hugo.” Anyway, I hated rhetoric and eloquence. I agreed with Verlaine, who said, “You have to get hold of eloquence and twist its neck off!” Nonetheless, it took some courage. Nowadays it is common to debunk great men, but it wasn’t then.

 * Beckett shows death; his people are in dustbins or waiting for God. (Beckett will be cross with me for mentioning God, but never mind.) Similarly, in my play The New Tenant, there is no speech, or rather, the speeches are given to the Janitor. The Tenant just suffocates beneath proliferating furniture and objects — which is a symbol of death. There were no longer words being spoken, but images being visualized. We achieved it above all by the dislocation of language. … Beckett destroys language with silence. I do it with too much language, with characters talking at random, and by inventing words.

 * None of us would have written as we do without surrealism and dadaism. By liberating the language, those movements paved the way for us.

 * The most implacable enemies of culture — Rimbaud, Lautréamont, dadaism, surrealism — end up being assimilated and absorbed by it. They all wanted to destroy culture, at least organized culture, and now they’re part of our heritage. It’s culture and not the bourgeoisie, as has been alleged, that is capable of absorbing everything for its own nourishment. As for the oneiric element, that is due partly to surrealism, but to a larger extent due to personal taste and to Romanian folklore — werewolves and magical practices. For example, when someone is dying, women surround him and chant, “Be careful! Don’t tarry on the way! Don’t be afraid of the wolf; it is not a real wolf!”—exactly as in Exit the King. They do that so the dead man won’t stay in infernal regions.

 * We exist on several different planes, and when we said nothing had any reason we were referring to the psychological and social plane.

 * The Pataphysique is not dead. It lives on in the minds of certain men, even if they are not aware of it. It has gone into “occultation,” as we say, and will come back again one day.

 * The theater chose me. As I said, I started with poetry, and I also wrote criticism and dialogue. But I realized that I was most successful at dialogue. Perhaps I abandoned criticism because I am full of contradictions, and when you write an essay you are not supposed to contradict yourself. But in the theater, by inventing various characters, you can. My characters are contradictory not only in their language, but in their behavior as well.

 * I found ancestors, like Shakespeare, who said, in Macbeth, that the world is full of sound and fury, a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing. Macbeth is a victim of fate. So is Oedipus. But what happens to them is not absurd in the eyes of destiny, because destiny, or fate, has its own norms, its own morality, its own laws, which cannot be flouted with impunity. Oedipus sleeps with his Mummy, kills his Daddy, and breaks the laws of fate. He must pay for it by suffering. It is tragic and absurd, but at the same time it’s reassuring and comforting, since the idea is that if we don’t break destiny’s laws, we should be all right. Not so with our characters. They have no metaphysics, no order, no law. They are miserable and they don’t know why. They are puppets, undone. In short, they represent modern man. Their situation is not tragic, since it has no relation to a higher order. Instead, it’s ridiculous, laughable, and derisory.

 * You can stay in society and be alone, as long as you can be detached from the world. This is why I don’t think I have ever gone for the easy option or done things that were expected of me.

 * The French Revolution liberated people from the power of the aristocrats. But the bourgeoisie that took over represented the exploitation of man by man, and had to be destroyed — as in the Russian Revolution, which then degenerated into totalitarianism, Stalinism, and genocide. The more you make revolutions, the worse it gets. Man is driven by evil instincts that are often stronger than moral laws … there is a higher order, but man can separate himself from it because he is free — which is what we have done. We have lost the sense of this higher order, and things will get worse and worse, culminating perhaps in a nuclear holocaust — the destruction predicted in the Apocalyptic texts. Only our apocalypse will be absurd and ridiculous because it will not be related to any transcendence. Modern man is a puppet, a jumping jack.

 * You know, the Cathars believed that the world was not created by God but by a demon who had stolen a few technological secrets from Him and made this world — which is why it doesn’t work. I don’t share this heresy. I’m too afraid! But I put it in a play called This Extraordinary Brothel, in which the protagonist doesn’t talk at all. There is a revolution, everybody kills everybody else, and he doesn’t understand. But at the very end, he speaks for the first time. He points his finger towards the sky and shakes it at God, saying, “You rogue! You little rogue!” and he bursts out laughing. He understands that the world is an enormous farce, a canular played by God against man, and that he has to play God’s game and laugh about it.
 * canular refers to hoaxes, humorous deceptions.

 * Béranger represents the modern man. He is a victim of totalitarianism — of both kinds of totalitarianism, of the Right and of the Left. When Rhinoceros was produced in Germany, it had fifty curtain calls. The next day the papers wrote, “Ionesco shows us how we became Nazis.” But in Moscow, they wanted me to rewrite it and make sure that it dealt with Nazism and not with their kind of totalitarianism. In Buenos Aires, the military government thought it was an attack on Perónism.

 * I have never been to the Right, nor have I been a Communist, because I have experienced, personally, both forms of totalitarianism. It is those who have never lived under tyranny who call me petit bourgeois.

 * People always try to find base motives behind every good action. We are afraid of pure goodness and of pure evil.

 * I let characters and symbols emerge from me, as if I were dreaming. I always use what remains of my dreams of the night before. Dreams are reality at its most profound, and what you invent is truth because invention, by its nature, can’t be a lie. Writers who try to prove something are unattractive to me, because there is nothing to prove and everything to imagine. So I let words and images emerge from within. If you do that, you might prove something in the process.

 * To introduce people to a different world, to encounter the miracle of being, that is important. When I write “The train arrives at the station,” it is banal, but at the same time sensational, because it is invented.

 * People who don’t read are brutes. It is better to write than to make war, isn’t it?

 * My work has been essentially a dialogue with death, asking him, “Why? Why?” So only death can silence me. Only death can close my lips.

Quotes about Ionesco

 * Over the past thirty years, Ionesco has been called a “tragic clown,” the “Shakespeare of the Absurd,” the “Enfant Terrible of the Avant-Garde,” and the “Inventor of the Metaphysical Farce” — epithets that point to his evolution from a young playwright at a tiny Left Bank theater to an esteemed member of the Académie Française.
 * Shusha Guppy, in "Eugene Ionesco, The Art of Theater No. 6", in Paris Review (Fall 1984), No. 93

 * Most people readily exchange their nightly dreams for what passes as reality in the morning papers. Not Eugéne Ionesco. The celebrated playwright of the absurd prefers to dwell on his own private late late shows.
 * Review of Fragments of a Journal in "The Forgetful Dreamer" in Time magazine (6 September 1968)

 * Ionesco believes that the irrational is man's intuitive form of vision. Everything that claims to be rational and realistic is a distortion of that vision, a shield raised against the absurdity of existence.
 * T.E.K. in "Oedipus Hex" in Time magazine (9 August 1982)

title: Eugène Ionesco