The Consequence of Matters

  Milan Kundera died this week. He was a Czech writer who was prominent back in the Cold War and seems to have been slotted permanently into that increasingly antiquated niche. He's most famous for The Unbearable Lightness of Being, but my favorite of his works is The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. It begins with a meditation on a photograph of a party apparatchik as he is slowly erased from history. That's certainly a Cold War image, but it hides a deeper concern. Kundera was deeply concerned with the relationship between culture, history, memory and identity. He believed nations, especially small ones, needed to preserve their culture and language. The identity of a people and a civilization is reflected and concentrated in what has been created by the mind, and that is culture. But, as with everything Kundera wrote about, there are ambiguities. Kundera was also deeply hostile to the idea of cultures being confined by national boundaries. The nations of central Europe, unde...

I watched "I'm Not There" yesterday, a film about the many sides and lives of Bob Dylan, played by 6 actors (it's art). It isn't a biopic, it's an abstract Dylan. Childhood Dylan is a small black child who tells everyone his name is Woody Guthrie and sings songs about unions and racism but in 1959. He's Dylan the faker. Outlaw Dylan is Richard Gere playing Billy the Kid. Rock and Role Dylan is played by Cate Blanchett in a stunning performance. The origin story of Cate Blanchett Dylan is Dylan going electric. It is explained by the notion that Dylan turned jaded and skeptical on protest, it is useless to try to change things because you can't change things. I think Cate Blanchett Dylan has a point. In the early 19th century, it was Catholics instead of Muslims who were going to force Papal rule on us rather than Sharia law. An influx of Irish, Italian and German Catholics changed the demographics in Protestant America and Protestant America didn't ...