Holy Thursday

If you could press a button and do away with all biographies past and future once and for all, what would you do? I have found them quite helpful, but I’d press the button nonetheless, without pangs of guilt despite the impulse to post an entry called ‘Holy Thursday.’

In high school at a few minutes past eight a.m. we were grouped according to the alphabetical order of our last names in what was called ‘home room.’ That conjured an image of a ‘home room’ trio when I saw this sequence a while back in the index to Edmund White’s ‘Genet: A Biography’:

God, 26, 200, 211, 547, 604
Godard, Jean-Luc, 548
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 74, 198

Jean-Luc raises his hand and complains: "Why do you have to put me in with these punks?"

The Godard reference btw was about the fact that he bought the first video camera sold in France, and Genet, through a relatively affluent couple he knew, bought the second. Because of Genet and others from his generation who stated the passion but never got the chance to film (Artaud, Cartier-Bresson, etc.) it pains me to see celluloid wasted on junk. It is now of course when we start to see video images that contrast almost like celluloid.

There’s that scene in the recent Notre Musique, when Godard is asked something to the effect of "will video replace film" and he responds silently with a high contrast closeup on his face in celluloid.

I remind the reader that I am not in the least religious, but the other night I returned to this index and found a quite jovial Last Supper cast, extending the three out to 14 (with Madeline Gobeil, a student, as Mary Magdeline):

Giscard d’Estaing, Valery, 580, 581, 582, 586
Glas (Derrida), 564-7, 641 n. 4
Glucksmann, Andre, 571
Gobeil, Madeline, 469
God, 26, 200, 211, 547, 604
Godard, Jean-Luc, 548
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 74, 198
Goldgar, Harry, 295
Goldmann, Lucien, 424
Gombrowicz, Witold, 355-6
Gordone, Charles
Gospel According to Saint Matthew, The (film), 393
Gossett, Louis, 438
Gotham Book Mart, 347

Think what you wish of this, but I like Glas, Pasolini's Gospel According to Saint Matthew, and the Gotham Book Mart as apostles.