Thursday August 12, 2004

Filming Dasein

And I thought adapting Naked Lunch was a feat. Two Australians with useless graduate degrees — not unlike my own^* — have made a three-hour film based on Martin Heidegger’s reading of Holderlin. Dread to follow.

^*A PET THEORY: When all the grad students of the early nineties — during the last recession, before the Internet boom, when even MBAs weren’t getting jobs and a teaching assistantship seemed like a sweet, sweet deal — are dispersed back into the world and have reached the age — about 60 — when firing off crotchety letters to the local papers becomes a full-time obsession, the letters pages of small town gazettes and shoppers will suddenly be packed with references to Walter Benjamin, Jacques Lacan and the all important Aufhebung. No one will have any idea what we’re talking about.

(via Arts & Letters Daily.)