Les Mots Justes

Les Mots Justes:

 
Isabelle Regnier's opening sentence in her news report about Chantal Akerman in Le Monde on October 6 was as follows: "Chantal Akerman s’est donné la mort, lundi 5 octobre au soir." I have no first-hand or even second-hand knowledge of the particulars. I'm just speculating on the choice of words here. It strikes me that Regnier's formulation is gentler, might suggest that in some instances death could be more like a gift, a relief ie something that you give yourself, Keats' easeful death. The possible English translations have different implications: "took her own life" (more aggressive) "died at her own hand" (kind of neutral but a bit too specific).The Englsih language reports I've seen referred to "suicide" or "suspected suicide". The Latinate -cide suffix is both more abstract and more violent with its affinities to homicide, patricide, fratricide and so on." We don't know the circumstances, and at this point it would seem inappropriate and indiscreet to ask. But to me, the natural corollary to "s'est donné la mort", which actually both Isabelle Regnier and most other writers in the press seem to have embraced, is immediately to segue to an appreciation of "les filmes qu'elle nous a donné" 
the works that she has given us, her stellar cinematic legacy. LB

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Chantal Akerman on JEANNE DIELMAN

Tuli Kupferberg 92 birthday party

POCKETS a New York street story

POCKETS

There’s nothing that ruins your day quite like the helplessness you feel, walking home from the store wheeling your bike on the sidewalk in your ‘hood on a sunny breezy almost-last-day of summer, especially when a cop directing traffic has just retrieved your cell phone from the tarmac to which it dropped through an unkempt hole in your pocket, and you are thinking, well, that was nice—there’s nothing that will ruin your day quite like the sight of two white rookie cops, still wet behind the ears, patting down and going through the blue jeans of a tall, kind-looking mild-mannered older black man in front of the TD bank, hands cuffed behind his back, from whose pockets they extract crumpled kleenex and half a dozen reddish-purple plums. The man pleads with them to give him a break from whatever I assume, if any, minor infraction of the penal code he had committed in the subway; when asked by a bystander, the man mouthed that he’d done nothing. The cops wouldn’t say. They are transit cops and maybe they hadn’t heard, as I did on the radio, police commish William Bratton’s injunction that officers should use discretion in the arrest and prosecution of individuals for minor misdemeanors.

© copyright Liza Béar 2015

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Beit Hanoun, Northern Gaza

Photo from the eastern border of  Beit Hanoun, in the north of the Gaza Strip, captured by Palestinian Photographer Talal Hwaihi copyright 2015

Gary Indiana "I CAN GIVE YOU ANYTHING BUT LOVE" Launch

Having been to Cuba and having read the first twenty pages
of Gary Indiana's memoir, part of which is set there, I can
concur that the writing is evocative and brilliantly astute.

New York Welcomes Refugees