Showing posts with label Paul Giamatti. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Paul Giamatti. Show all posts

Tuesday, April 17, 2012

Whom Did DeLillo Name Benno Levin After?

Benny Levy
Paul Giamatti: Benno Levin Is Benny Levy?



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Mean in name of the character  - do it intentionally

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Name Benno Levin is the pen name of a character in the book. This character I used the name of a revolutionary of the early 20th century  (vague) - DeLillo says,"and that's all I'm going to say on it"

DeLillo Interview with Krasny for Cosmopolis Publication
DeLillo said:
... details, ideas, themes: the idea of a kind of confluence of technology and money... cybercapital, which seemed to be dominant in a very recent period in our history. Essentially the 1990's. ...

My idea was to end this era not over a period of weeks and months as happened, but in one day.


This Interview is in 7 Parts

Bernard-Henri Levy in a letter to Michel Houellebecq in their back and forth letter book entitled Public Enemies:

I am as fascinated now as I was when I was twenty by those great, inflexible figures who provided a sort of background music through the history of my generation and who as a joke I call our "hidden Imams"! Benny Levy, after his political season and his ascent to Jerusalem; Robert Linhart, who preceded him as the head of the Gauche proletarienne, and whose daughter has just described in a novel how one fine day he simply decided to stop talking;...

From wiki on Benny Levy whose pen name was Pierre Victor - nice inversion here of real and pen names.

Benny Lévy (aka Pierre Victor) was a philosopher, political activist and author. A political figure ofMay 1968 in France, he was the disciple and last personal secretary of Jean-Paul Sartre from 1974 to 1980. Along with him, he helped founding the French newspaper Libération in 1972.

Benny Lévy is known for his unusual itinerary from Maoism to Judaism, or "from Mao to Moses", which was also followed by a few other philosophers of his generation.

Lévy worked with Sartre, and the two men produced four books until Sartre's death. While working with Sartre, Lévy began to discover Judaism, initially through his research into the Kabbalah, which he conducted with his mentor. Their work together created a stir among the circle that surrounded Sartre, because Sartre had begun introducing new ideas and terms that evoked religious and, more specifically, Jewish concepts, such as Redemption and Messianism. ...

 Two months before his death, Sartre responded to these critics, claiming that he had indeed abandoned some of his earlier ideas.[citation needed] In 1978, Lévy encountered Levinas, and started learning Hebrew and beginning Talmudic studies....

Born in Egypt, Benny Lévy grew up without experiencing Judaism as a faith. He left Egypt after the 1956 war and immigrated to Belgium then France with his family. His elder half-brother, Eddy Lévy, stayed in Egypt, converted to Islam in 1956 and changed his name to Adil Rifaat.[1]...
Benny Lévy soon proved to be a brilliant student and completed his studies at the École Normale Supérieure, learning under such key intellectual figures as Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser and Jacques Derrida, founder of deconstruction. He entered the Union des étudiants communistes(UEC), a student communist group, and then at his foundation in 1966 the Maoist Union des jeunesses communistes marxistes-léninistes (UJC - ml). He became one of the main leader of this latter organization after Robert Linhart. Benny Lévy was an important figure during the May 68 Student Revolt. After these events, the direction of the UJC-ml was put in minority, and founded the Maoist Gauche prolétarienne (GP, Proletarian Left). Taking the pseudonym of Pierre Victor, Benny Lévy was one of its main leaders, along with Alain Geismar.

Richard Sheets (Rich Shits) aka Benno Levin: I am working on a journal while a man lies dead ten feet away. I wonder about this. 

I thought I would spend whatever number of years it takes to write ten thousand pages and then you would have the record, the literature of a life awake and asleep, because dreams too, and little stabs of memory, and all the pitiful habits and concealments, and all the things around me would be included, noises in the street, but I understand for the first time, now, this minute, that all the thinking and writing in the world will not describe what I felt in the awful moment when I fired the gun and saw him fall. So what is left that's worth the telling.


Benny Levy versus Emmanuel Levinas on “Being Jewish”

mj.oxfordjournals.org/content/26/1/15.full
by A Herzog - 2006 - Cited by 2 - Related articles
The late Benny Levy's last book, Etre juif, is a study of Emmanuel Levinas's ..... be correct one should say: from Moses to Mao, and from Mao to Moses, namely, ...

And now here is the Mao reference, DeLillo's Mao II novel.

“They called me Benno after Benito Juarez,” said Archimboldi, “I suppose you know who Benito Juarez was.” - Bolano 2666



Friday, January 27, 2012

Cosmopolis LIterary Conference - DeLillo: Riddled with Epiphanies


Information for “’Riddled with Epiphanies’: DeLillo, New York”
April 20-21, 2012

Presented by the College of Mount Saint Vincent & the DeLillo Society
6301 Riverdale Avenue   Riverdale (Bronx) New York 10471

2nd International Literary Conference devoted to the work of  American author, Don DeLillo
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Calls for Papers:  http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/
Deadline for Paper/Panel Proposals Feb. 28, 2010

            “’Riddled with Epiphanies’: DeLillo, New York” is a conference based on conversation.  Presenters’ papers will be circulated amongst the participants and summarized during the conference itself.  We are looking to foster an atmosphere of intellectual play and a kind of collaborative inquiry long known to the sciences.  In foregoing the customary model of twenty-minute presentations, we hope to create a more lively atmosphere  which we hope will foster a fruitful dialogue about DeLillo’s work and inspire even more scholarship.  Thus, we encourage fully developed work on the author as well as more tentative projects.

The College of Mount Saint Vincent is especially beautiful in the spring, with its rolling- hills campus and flowering trees, sitting on a broad expanse of  the Hudson River.  It is located in the very northwest corner of the Bronx,  a short distance to DeLillo’s old neighborhood in the Bronx and very close to Manhattan and Yonkers as well. Accessible by all forms of public transportation as well as by car (right off the Henry Hudson Parkway), the Mount is a perfect venue for this event. 

 Festivities include a tour of “DeLillo, New York,” – Arthur Avenue to Great Jones Street – as well as a  staged reading of Love-Lies-Bleeding.

Please send a check or money order made out to the College of Mount Saint Vincent and send to Dr. Zubeck c/o the English Department.
$100  for presenters; $ 65 for guests and graduate students

For information, please contact Dr. Jacqueline Zubeck:
jackie.zubeck@mountsaintvincent.edu      718 405 3310

Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Cronenberg's Cosmopolis Wins MTV Movie Brawl: Robsessed Fangirls Packer An Implosion Voting



A victory in Eric Packer style. MTV voting allows multiple voting with no limits. This ensures multiple hits, increased revenues from advertisers,eh.

Certainly Dark Knight and Hunger Games have funneled multi $$$$$$ into MTV: trailers, movie stills, all that hoopla stuff. Already these franchises have spent a fortune and the movies are not even in the theatres yet.

Cronenberg's Cosmopolis has no trailer yet, and no movie stills with the exception of Caitlin Cronenberg's photo. What is the meaning of this win by the underdog, the Seabiscuit of a movie race?

A Baudrillardian/Nietzschean example of an excess of voting carried beyond limits, over the edge in an excess so tumultuous that the voting machinery was turned on its head, defeating its purpose, which was to garner votes for their advertising giants, create an award for them, and promote their franchises.

They got fooled big time by ladies at robsessed who voted day and night all weekend long for Rob Pattinson and brought Cosmopolis to victory.

This is what Eric Packer does to the yen in Cosmopolis. He buys vast amounts of yen, creating a vast demand for yen by everyone who follows him. The higher the yen goes, the lower the dollar falls.

Like gas prices. Gas doesn't go up. The dollar goes down. 


The yen goes so high that all other currencies in the speculative global circulating currency market crash to nothing.

Baudrillard through Nietzsche calls this IMPLOSION. The destruction of the mass marketing tool which is MTV for its advertisers to give the win to The LIttle Engine That Could - Cronenberg's Cosmopolis.

And who imploded MTV? Women from robsessed who love Rob Pattinson. And who also hold a deep grudge against Scummit Summit/now Lionsgate for messing up Twilight, thus beating their next hopeful multi-billion enterprise franchise The Hunger Games.

A pity says Jane.

The fangirls showed how you can beat the big machine. They voted all day and all night all weekend. Nothing but love as motivation.