On Getting The Ball Rolling

Titian's Sísifo (1548-1549)

Finally, it's time to blog. I've committed to posting at least something about every film and book I look at, that is, sit in front of and watch or open and read. It is, however, unlikely. I'm inconsistent at the best of times and anyway this first post, perhaps the entire motivation behind this blog, is procrastination, distraction. This alternative to doing other is bound by the same laws of inadequation, I'm sure. In addition, I would like to expand the promised mission to include a reflection, however brief, on every piece of art I see, but this promise, already likely to be broken, most certainly will not be maintained. If this account promises to be a complete record of the aesthetic life, or at least the one aesthetic life feel I can claim to be privy to, it is doomed to infidelity. This is good, because who would want, like Borges' Funes of the perfect memory, to be paralysed in the stammering pursuit of a mirror-life perfect in every detail? Such projects cancel the possibility of living. So. I'll keep you posted. That is all.

Lies.

To begin, to set the clock running, one must act before time. Always posterior, that's a motto, and so the first post is to be about the last book I read, as I suppose all posts from now shall be. Tonight, or rather, tomorrow: it's the excellently placed Albert Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus (1942, English translation by Justin O'Brien, 1955), in which auto-crash-victim Albert takes the story about the guy condemned to push a rock up a mountain, let it fall, rinse and repeat forever and ever, as the springboard for a philosophy that breaks from the existential tradition but manages to wrest nobility from the sublime tragedy of the growing up absurd. Onward, like a rolling stone!

Pulling the plug from worlds unbound to dreams and the absurd. Fellini's Juliet of the Spirits (1965).