Reading Eric Packer Through Erik Satie

Erik Satie "Trois Gymnopédies"

How to Play Gymnopedie No1 by Erik Satie on 

Piano Lesson Pt1

If you listen to this music while you are reading this you will feel what Eric Packer says this music does for him. If you have access to a piano you can play it yourself with this fine tutorial. No previous music knowledge needed.

He rode to the marble lobby in the elevator that played Satie. (C 8)

I have two private elevators now. One is programmed to play Satie's piano pieces and to move at one-quarter normal speed. This is right for Satie and this is the elevator I take when I'm in a certain, let's say, unsettled mood. Calms me, makes me whole. (C  28-29)

In the Krasny youtube interviews DeLillo emphasizes that Eric Packer is not a normal Wall Street cyber financier. He reads poetry in different languages, he appreciates the art of Rothko, he listens to Satie and rap music. He has turned Satie into his very own musak musik elevator music. 

DeLillo's emphasis here is to project a character who is a  consumer of high avant garde culture. An aesthete perhaps. This contrasts with his Philip Dick sexual seduction dialogue with Elise. The paradox makes the dialogue very sexual indeed. 

I am equally sure that The Cronenberg did not include Eric Packer's ride down on his own elevator listening to Satie. 

Again we turn to Babette Babich, and a chain of signifiers floating all through Cosmopolis:

Nancy Babich, Nietzsche, excess, limits, implosion, aphoristic writing, musical writing, discontinuous, non linear, non- descriptive, non-explaining writing, writing that is all short, choppy dialogue even more so (Baudrillard) than the choppy, start and stop in quarter inches Foucauldian grid of New York City traffic and the power/knowledge/capital grid of our world where "there is no outside".

New York City Street Map

Agnes Martin

Nancy Babich: Code For A Smart Gun: Babette Babich Is A Smart Gun

Babette Babich

Babette Babich - what a name. Straight out of Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, eh.

Nancy Babich BAM!

Nancy Babich is CODE 


In Cosmopolis Nancy Babich is CODE for a smart gun.


Babette is Jack Gladney's wife in DeLillo's White Noise.


Jack Gladney is THE international specialist in Hitler Studies.


Babette Babich is THE international specialist in Nietzsche.


Nietzsche is the philosopher that Hitler pressed to his bosom. 


Nietzsche is the philosopher that Ayn Rand memorized and read from age 16 until her late 30's. Beyond Good and Evil was her first book in English and she underlined all her favorite passages says Barbara Branden quoting her in her book The Passion of Ayn Rand.


Nancy Babich is CODE for Babette Babich. Babette Babich is CODE for the entire book. 


Babette Babich is the "smart gun" who shoots soft and deadly bullets that shatter masks.


Nietzsche: Words written in blood are not to be read but learnt by heart

Babette Babich wrote Words In Blood, Like Flowers - Philosophy and Poetry, Music and Eros in Holderlin, Nietzsche, and Heidegger

The Blogs of Babette Babich - Profile

Click on her pic on the far right for details of her profile and blogs

WORDS IN BLOOD - DeLillo writes a sentence or paragraph on one sheet of paper.He then reads it and edits it.He rewrites it.He keeps doing this until he gets it exactly the way he wants it to be. 
Cosmopolis was WRITTEN IN BLOOD. 
"Words written in blood are not to be read but to be learnt by heart" - Nietzsche
The Cronenberg read Cosmopolis in one sitting, pasted the dialogue into screenplay software in 6 days.Shot the film in 6 weeks.Edited it on the quick.Showed it in Cannes one year later.
Wham bam thank you ma'am!
ROB PATTINSON LEARNED THE WORDS BY HEART. He says they still echo in his inner ear. Rob Pattinson is following Nietzsche's urging. 
Cronenberg probably didn't even know Nietzsche said what he said.

1 day ago

AlteredbyaVampire(ABV Kiri) posted: I always find myself going back to *The Nancy Babich* part of the story.....

1 day ago

Lydia posted:  I've always wondered where Delillo came up with the name.

Für Elise - a non-review

“It came to me…that I didn’t want to be anywhere else in the world at that moment, that what I was feeling at that moment justified all I had been through, because all I had been through was my being there. I was experiencing…a new self-acceptance, a sense that I had to be this mind and this body, its vices and its virtues, and that I had no other chance or choice.”
― John Fowles, The Magus

"Without everything just as it was, with nothing altered and holding nothing alterable, nothing at all - not even the most transient, ecstatic moment of happiness or joy - can have been. Causality works forwards in this kind of passionate affirmation only by working backward like the ray of sunlight Nietzsche sees shining on his life: “I looked backwards, I looked forwards, never did I see so many and such good things at once.” Nietzsche’s account, telling his life to himself, thus works upon his life as a benediction. And it is this benediction which transfigures the glance, transfiguring
what was into what was willed as such, which is the meaning of what it is to will backwards, declaring: “how could I fail to be thankful to my life?” (EH Epigraph,KSA 6, p. 263)"
- in Babich, Nietzsche's Imperative as a Friend's Encomium: On Becoming the One You Are, Ethics, and Blessing

"Everything in our lives has brought us to this moment".
Benno to Eric in Cosmopolis (the book and the movie!)

Without Elise, there's no all of Eric in the movie. Without Elise, this everything Benno talks about is NOT everything, it's just what's in Eric's world. Elise is not in Eric's world, she is Gradiva, Euridice taking him out of the limo, seducing him who has it all and wants nothing but a haircut into having no choice in the end. Having no choice but to accept the irreversibility of his Destiny and not look back on destroying the circulating capital, his money, her money because of a yen. And not just to accept it, but to love it seeing it for what it is.

What is money to a poet, she says, love the world and trace it in a line of verse. Without Elise there's no love of the world. No Elise makes the movie as detached as Eric is in it. Cosmopolis the book is a verse. Cosmopolis the movie is not, it's a movie.

Instead of words from the book, Cronenberg says he gives an actor's face.
This post is for Elise's face missing in the movie when Eric realizes he loves her and she slips away.
For Elise, the face of love. The kind of love which sprungs out mysteriously in unexpected places; which enables, is not selfish, makes one do foolish things and wear turbans, which supports and understands without asking, which gives and makes one free to be a gull at dawn, anything and everything one can be. Which makes one an overman. Even if everything and anything one is, is dead in the end. Precisely because that which one ultimately is in the end is dead .

Amor fati, nothing altered, nothing alterable.