Date: Wed, 18 Jul 2001 08:10:53 +1000
From: Reg Mifflin <regm-AT-space.net.au>
Subject: Re: ethics - Levinas


Some interesting comments below made me think ...
To steal an old line - there's something about a good copy that the
original never can quite match.
I thought Baz Luhrmann's Romeo and Juliet was just gaudy so I haven't seen
M.R. - now perhaps I shall. After all, My Own Private Idaho made a splendid
move on Henry 5, and Apocalypse Now stepping on Conrad even better.
What ways are these moves and steps evaluated. Is it the poncy dancing
masters L. calls 'transavantgardist'. And the good parologist the uncanny
knack of uttering the perfect gag without even thinking - the parologist
surprises even himself.
The perfect utterance is ephemeral, everything is, decadence indeed follows
the sublime moment. Yet the moment was sublime for all that and it seemed
to emerge from nowhere. But these are not just happy accidents, not quite.
Like the golfer said, the harder you work the luckier you get.
Reg


At 11:04 PM 7/16/01 -0500, Mary Murphy&Salstrand wrote:
>Glen Fuller wrote:
> 
>> Hey that is really cool, I am going to use that in some of my fiction
>> writing (Oh! The irony). 
>
>I wish you well in your efforts. One master thief you may want to
>empulate is Joyce who sample hundreds of songs in Ulysses and did it
>long before sampling was even a term and he did it in a literary work to
>boot!
>
>
>I know this is going off on a tangent, but...Is that what we face now,
>in the (re)production of creative works (eg the ensemble of forms that
>constitutes Moulin Rouge)? When does the theft become merely using
>cliche?
>
>In TPC Lyotard makes the point that paralogy must be distinguished from
>innovation: "the latter is under the command of the system, or at least
>used to improve its efficiency; the former is a move (the importance of
>which is often not recognized until later) played in the pragmatics of
>knowledge."
>
>Along these lines, I remember a essay from Octavio Paz in which he
>compared the various movements of modern art with the need of the
>corporation under capitalism to innovate to stimulate consumer demand.
>In this sense, theft or innovation is merely a new product line. Cliche
>is merely an indicator that the item has reached the end of its product
>cycle.  The way Hollywood operates is no different in principle from
>Detroit or Silicon Valley.
>
>Every once in a while a movie comes along that makes moves that redefine
>the game. Some of these moves simply make the old appear new and can be
>seen as a kind of theft or something illegitimate, but that is usually
>because others never thought to make these moves themselves. 
>Afterwards, they seem so obvious. That is paralogy.
>
>
>