I was going to write something about The Proposition, and I did. Except that sometimes even only one day after you see a film, it has already become past, unreachable, fragments. I remember the conversation we had after the movie more than the movie itself.

Instead, via Antipopper, I’m listening to Emma Reverter, Don De Lillo and Paul Auster reading aloud about the state, the state of emergency, in an event in New York a couple of days ago run by PEN International. Paul Auster relates how a French couple during WWII, discussing the possibility of their children being deported to Germany and how they might tattoo their names and addresses on their chests, so they could be found after the end of the war. De Lillo speaks of dreams and the way the state has an ability to act out its fantasies, its dreams, unlike most of us who dream of changing the unchangeable. These are patient, weighted, practiced voices, the voices of the Great Writers, in the heartland of the Civilised World, with civilised, polite applause recorded to accompany each speaker. There is not an audible sense of ‘emergency’. I guess the Moody story is entertaining, and it does sound like he was sneaking in a critique of Liberals — and Americans! — while simply appearing strange. But my favourite is Heidi Julavits reading a story from Donald Barthelme’s Amateurs, “Some of us had been threatening our friend Colby”:

Some of us had been threatening our friend Colby for a long time because of the way he had been behaving, and now he had gone too far, so we decided to hang him. Colby argued that just because he had gone too far — he did not deny that he had gone too far — did not mean that he should be subjected to hanging. Going too far, he said, was something that everybody did sometimes. We didn’t pay much attention to this argument. We asked him what sort of music he would like played at the hanging.

(more…)