Welcome to Bookmarker!

This is a personal project by @dellsystem. I built this to help me retain information from the books I'm reading.

Source code on GitHub (MIT license).

224

Film was already one of my abiding passions. It seemed to me the most innovative of the modern arts. I had always had a passionate addiction to the movies, and as a youth in Kingston I saw on Saturday afternoon matinees at the Carib Theatre everything from Hollywood that found its way to Jamaica: westerns, melodramas, thrillers, musicals and film noir; Bogart and Bacall, Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Gary Cooper, Cary Grant, Henry Fonda, John Garfield, the lot. This passion continued in Oxford. We went to the cinema two or three times a week. My first experiences of Continental cinema included Eisenstein and Pudovkin, Italian neo-realism and the French New Wave. They were a revelation. I realize now that this combination of arguing about literary criticism, reading modern literature, especially with the Americans, following the Caribbean novel and poetry, going to the movies, listening to and playing jazz meant that I began to construct a sort of intellectual counter-life to Oxford, more appropriate to my growing sense of being a radical outsider, a feeling which deepened as I came to the end of my time as an undergraduate.

<3

—p.224 by Stuart Hall 2 years, 8 months ago

Film was already one of my abiding passions. It seemed to me the most innovative of the modern arts. I had always had a passionate addiction to the movies, and as a youth in Kingston I saw on Saturday afternoon matinees at the Carib Theatre everything from Hollywood that found its way to Jamaica: westerns, melodramas, thrillers, musicals and film noir; Bogart and Bacall, Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Gary Cooper, Cary Grant, Henry Fonda, John Garfield, the lot. This passion continued in Oxford. We went to the cinema two or three times a week. My first experiences of Continental cinema included Eisenstein and Pudovkin, Italian neo-realism and the French New Wave. They were a revelation. I realize now that this combination of arguing about literary criticism, reading modern literature, especially with the Americans, following the Caribbean novel and poetry, going to the movies, listening to and playing jazz meant that I began to construct a sort of intellectual counter-life to Oxford, more appropriate to my growing sense of being a radical outsider, a feeling which deepened as I came to the end of my time as an undergraduate.

<3

—p.224 by Stuart Hall 2 years, 8 months ago
228

From 1956 until I made the move to Birmingham in 1964, ‘normal’ life was suspended by my political activity: by my editing ULR and, from 1960, New Left Review (NLR); by the larger attempts to build around these publications social movements, eventually organized by the creation of the New Left Clubs; by the long and arduous struggle to get the ideas we were generating mobilized, and by our attempt to activate them inside the Labour Party. At the same time, as we experienced what felt to us as a thaw in the Cold War, we invested great energies in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), which represented a strategic social movement in its own right. Suez and Hungary had fractured the old politics, and the carapace of the Cold War had been – temporarily, as it turned out – shattered. Out of this emerged our ‘between/against both camps’ position and the hope for the creation of an independent, popular Left politics.

—p.228 by Stuart Hall 2 years, 8 months ago

From 1956 until I made the move to Birmingham in 1964, ‘normal’ life was suspended by my political activity: by my editing ULR and, from 1960, New Left Review (NLR); by the larger attempts to build around these publications social movements, eventually organized by the creation of the New Left Clubs; by the long and arduous struggle to get the ideas we were generating mobilized, and by our attempt to activate them inside the Labour Party. At the same time, as we experienced what felt to us as a thaw in the Cold War, we invested great energies in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), which represented a strategic social movement in its own right. Suez and Hungary had fractured the old politics, and the carapace of the Cold War had been – temporarily, as it turned out – shattered. Out of this emerged our ‘between/against both camps’ position and the hope for the creation of an independent, popular Left politics.

—p.228 by Stuart Hall 2 years, 8 months ago
248

I am in the middle of my discussion about politics and I’m having to explain my shifting relations to the concept of culture. I make no apology for this. This journey took me to an understanding of culture as the signifying dimension of human practice. In Althusser’s terms, culture exists as one of the founding instances of every social formation, without which societies cannot exist as such.

—p.248 by Stuart Hall 2 years, 8 months ago

I am in the middle of my discussion about politics and I’m having to explain my shifting relations to the concept of culture. I make no apology for this. This journey took me to an understanding of culture as the signifying dimension of human practice. In Althusser’s terms, culture exists as one of the founding instances of every social formation, without which societies cannot exist as such.

—p.248 by Stuart Hall 2 years, 8 months ago
263

From the vantage of today, for a different generation, our investments in ULR and then the founding of the NLR might seem parochial. But it didn’t feel like that at the time. We laboured long and hard to seize the moment, as it were, and to recast the Left so that we weren’t left behind by history. We endeavoured to keep our eyes on the prize.

—p.263 by Stuart Hall 2 years, 8 months ago

From the vantage of today, for a different generation, our investments in ULR and then the founding of the NLR might seem parochial. But it didn’t feel like that at the time. We laboured long and hard to seize the moment, as it were, and to recast the Left so that we weren’t left behind by history. We endeavoured to keep our eyes on the prize.

—p.263 by Stuart Hall 2 years, 8 months ago
264

By then I knew the traditions of socialist politics in England. But I hadn’t been formed in them, like Raymond Williams or Edward Thompson. I was a neophyte among them. Can anyone imagine what it must have been like being alongside these luminaries? Editorial boards were a nightmare for me. I’d indicate the possible contents of the next issue and then hold up my hands before the storm broke and the fathers spoke!

<33

—p.264 by Stuart Hall 2 years, 8 months ago

By then I knew the traditions of socialist politics in England. But I hadn’t been formed in them, like Raymond Williams or Edward Thompson. I was a neophyte among them. Can anyone imagine what it must have been like being alongside these luminaries? Editorial boards were a nightmare for me. I’d indicate the possible contents of the next issue and then hold up my hands before the storm broke and the fathers spoke!

<33

—p.264 by Stuart Hall 2 years, 8 months ago