Scriptor.org

La regia di Kierkegaard

Kierkegaard se pregunta si es posible que a los artistas no les tiemble la mano al pintar el suplicio de Cristo. Y responde que si los artistas fueran capaces de hacernos ver algo vivo, situado en el presente de la crucifixión, en vez de mostrarnos algo ya pasado y muerto, nuestro lugar ya no sería el de simples espectadores, sino que -concluye el filósofo danés- estaríamos sobre la cruz, junto a Cristo... Estas palabras, leídas en el artículo de Maurizio Cecchetti que se recoge a continuación, hacen pensar en el sentido y la perspectiva que nos ofrecerá el discutido film de Mel Gibson: véase un dossier sobre The Passion, y otros articulos, ...más.

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Maurizio Cecchetti , Avvenire (Venerdì 28 novembre 2003):

Kierkegaard ha ispirato cineasti come Dreyer o Bergman. Il suo senso del tragico si riflette nel «Pranzo di Babette» e nelle «Onde del destino».

Scholarly Lecture

Cuando algún colega comienza una conferencia diciendo que será breve, o dice que se ajustará al tiempo previsto en una mesa redonda, nos sentimos tentados de apostar que no será así, con el 99,99 % de posibilidades a nuestro favor. Quizá por esto, ningún colega aceptaría esa apuesta. Todos sabemos que hablar del tiempo tiene su precio, y que quienes han venido a escuchar un razonamiento no quieren oir -además- un meta-razonamiento. William Germano, director de publicaciones en Routledge, ha escrito Getting It Published: A Guide for Scholars and Anyone Else Serious About Serious Books (University of Chicago Press, 2001). En el artículo que a continuación se menciona, razona 13 consejos (la mayoría son mandamientos negativos) de gran utilidad para -cuando menos- sobrevivir en el mundo académico. Dice su consejo nº 9, hablando precisamente del tiempo: "Never, ever, ever interrupt your lecture to say, 'I'm going to skip some pages here in the interest of time,' or, 'In the longer version of this paper, I will explain. ... '". Sin embargo, el que refleja mejor su credibilidad como experto -a mi juicio- es el 10º: "Don't apologize for your lapses as a speaker, for the paucity of your research, or for the fact that you couldn't get your hair cut that month." Ni hay que excusarse, ni tampoco darse un aire de humildad afectada con el que pretender ganarse la benevolencia del auditorio. Quienes escuchan están dispuestos a aceptar de entrada que no somos especialmente tontos, que hemos hecho nuestros deberes, que sabemos más que ellos del asunto que nos reune y -también- que probablemente sabemos exponerlo... Si no estamos seguros de esto último, conviene leer el artículo de Germano:

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The Chronicle of Higer Education
November 28, 2003

The Scholarly Lecture: How to Stand and Deliver
By William Germano

It's conference season again. All over academe, thousands of unsuspecting papers will make their way to the front of the lecture hall, where they will be read badly by scholars to fellow scholars who, slumped and glassy-eyed, will be wondering how late the dry cleaner stays open or whether The Sopranos is on that night.

Films about journalists

New York Times : In Journalism, Only the Good Die Poor
By CLYDE HABERMAN
Published: November 25, 2003

(...) Films about journalists are in fashion, sort of.

There was "Veronica Guerin," about a valiant Irish journalist gunned down by vicious drug dealers. But in New York, that movie came and went in a blink, sinking almost without a trace. Meanwhile, "Shattered Glass," about the faker Stephen Glass, draws them in at $10 a ticket.

Maybe it's just a case of audiences being accustomed to the idea of journalists as no-goodniks. "Shattered Glass" reinforces that impression. "There are so many show-offs in journalism, so many braggarts and jerks," the Glass character says in a voice-over.

He's right. But there are honorable souls, too, and sometimes they get their due, as several will tonight. The lesson this season, though, is that disgraceful behavior pays better.(...)

Recent on Films & Journalism: - Howard Good and Michael J. Dillon examine in "Media Ethics Goes to the Movies" (Praeger Publishers) how journalists are portrayed in the movies. - The "Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture (IJPC)" Project, directed by Joe Saltzman, associate dean and professor of journalism at the USC Annenberg School for Communication.

Umberto Eco - On books

Razonamientos inteligentes sobre los libros ("memoria vegetal"), que gustan a Eco, y los soportes digitales ("memoria mineral"), que Eco utiliza. Unos son más manejables y de uso amable y fiable que otros, para quienes usamos nuestra "memoria orgánica", que Eco dice "hecha de carne y sangre". Inteligentes también las consideraciones sobre el carácter lineal y no-lineal de la lectura y el sentido de lo publicado y recibido según esos distintos tipos de "memoria".

Vegetal and mineral memory: The future of books

The city of Alexandria played host on 1 November to the renowned Italian novelist and scholar Umberto Eco, who gave a lecture in English, on varieties of literary and geographic memory, at the newly opened Bibliotheca Alexandrina. Al-Ahram Weekly publishes the complete text of the lecture.

(...) The charm of tragic literature is that we feel that its heroes could have escaped their fate but they do not succeed because of their weakness, their pride, or their blindness. Besides, Hugo tells us, "Such a vertigo, such an error, such a ruin, such a fall that astonished the whole of history, is it something without a cause? No... the disappearance of that great man was necessary for the coming of the new century.Someone, to whom none can object, took care of the event... God passed over there, Dieu a passé."

That is what every great book tells us, that God passed there, and He passed for the believer as well as for the sceptic. There are books that we cannot re-write because their function is to teach us about necessity, and only if they are respected such as they are can they provide us with such wisdom. Their repressive lesson is indispensable for reaching a higher state of intellectual and moral freedom (...)

Un comentario interesante sobre el texto de Eco: el de Jerry Jenkins y los de quienes a su vez comentan lo dicho por él.