Mental 📸: Derrida, Mailer, Putty Hill, Algren

A snapshot of where my mind has been during the last week of this unseasonably warm April in Bogota:

 

📚The Work of Mourning by Jacques Derrida (2001)

I’d previously read this around 2010 when I was in grad school, but I had the idea of revisiting it. I’d been picking at it for the last month or so and finally finished it off. I remember once seeing David Krell give a talk, and he mentioned that it was one of his favorites of Derrida. I agree. It’s a collection of diverse documents (e.g., letters, essays, funeral orations) that serve as tributes to his friends while directly or indirectly addressing what it means to mourn. As is often the case with Derrida, it implicitly questions the boundary or what does and doesn’t count as a philosophical text. The piece on Roland Barthes is obviously the centerpiece, but I particularly liked the ones on Lyotard and Louis Marin.

 

📚The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer (1948)

I just started this one. I’m listening to the audio book when I do things around the apartment and reading the physical book the rest of the time. I haven’t done much Mailer before this. Someone said the best character Mailer came up with is “Norman Mailer,” and there’s no question that the “Mailer” character is not in step with the current zeitgeist, so I’m curious to see what I make of this one.

 

🎬The Man with the Golden Arm (1955)

Went in expecting to hate this; I know Algren was excluded from the creative process and Ray Bradbury turned down a huge sum of money by choosing not to work on it. I’m not a big Frank Sinatra guy. Still, while it could have been a thousand times better with Algren’s help, and it lacks the verisimilitude, poeticism, and depth of the novel, I thought it shaped up to be surprisingly solid.   

 

🎬Putty Hill (2011)

Absolutely incredible and heartbreaking. The film casts mostly non-actors in an interview format as it tracks the days leading up to the funeral of a young man (Cory) who has just died of an overdose. It nicely succeeds as sociology and doesn’t patronize its working-class subjects, but it also works on a much deeper level by emphasizing the solitude and banality of death; we learn almost nothing about Cory and never hear directly from him. The scenes of his funeral are suitably impersonal. Bleak stuff, but it very much resonates with my experience. It was a nice counterpoint to the Derrida, which takes much more seriously the ethics and importance of mourning along with the unique singularity of a human life.

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