L'humeur vagabonde (11/24)"I would have wished that this birthday go unnoticed, because for the 90th birthday there is something a little hypocritical in way, because we think that for the 100th we will no longer be able to celebrate. And also because, I feel that birthdays at this age don't really have a place because there is no reason to celebrate one more step down toward physical and intellectual degeneration. At birthdays I always remember what I think Anatole France said: he regretted that life didn't take place in the other direction and that we would begin our life as an old person and finish bursting with youth. So, if I have a regret to express today it is certainly that" - Clause Levy Strauss in 1998.
"As for my don quichotisme, which dominated me since childhood, it is very different from what you normally think. I see in Don Quihote an obstinate effort to discover the past behind the present."
"Humanity is not entirely different from weevils who develop inside a sack of flour and begin to poison themselves from their own toxins long before they lack food and physical space."
"I'm watching the destruction of all that is dear to me, nature, diversity of species, diversitiy of cultures..."
With these quotations, his oeuvre starts to sound triste, but I'm putting Mythologies on my wish list.
As Catherine Clément explains: "he takes a myth and then takes a variant, then a variant of a variant and from variant to variant, at the end of 800 myths from North and South America, he arrives at a global tissu of American myths. That's why we have to understand that this analysis of myths resembles a musical score, and specifically Wagner."
I didn't follow that, and Kathleen Evin (host) decided it was time for a break and put on Caetano Veloso singing Paloma, from the dream sequence in Talk to Her, which seemed appropriate.
