Stallone in Sydney for Rocky Balboa opening:
“Everything you can do wrong, I did. I started to believe that I was this superior person and I was entitled to everything. You may have the ability to write or act, but it’s just a personal strength: it doesn’t make you any better than anybody else.
“You can’t make a movie without the electrician, make-up artist and transportation guys.
“Looking at the guy driving the truck and thinking you’re better than him because you’re the big actor – guess what? If he doesn’t drive that truck, you could be sitting under a tree all alone waiting for the crew.”
Ha! Nice.
Nothing to do with the topic (great quote, though), but just wanted to say thanks, glen, for coming to the defence of Niall and Steve’s book at LP.
Your comment about the book being for people who feel pain on a social level was sublime; it perfectly captured what’s at stake in the “debate”.
Cheers
rob! well, to paraphrase and condense McKenzie Wark’s point, criticism has to be worthy of the strengths of a text, not its weaknesses. Of course, regarding Wark’s specific comment, as they say in sport, he played the man, not the ball…
Indeed I am finding this with Hallward’s book on Deleuze. Hallward is a master of strategy and of positioning perfectly correct arguments in intensive, polemical ways. His readings are mostly spot-on but need to be extracted from the camouflaged intertextuality provided by Bergson, Spinoza and so on. The book should be read on its principle merit, and that is as a brilliant if disorganised reminder of Deleuze’s work for graduate students already familiar with it. We should thank the business model of graduate education in the US for producing a market for books such as Hallward’s. In fact, I would go as far to say it is a leading light in the new cultural industry of global education exported from the US and which I am an avid yet hapless consumer.
See what I mean? Viciously introduce the book’s strengths. 😉
ha! I think howard becker had this insight first but