The Death Of Trotsky: Difference between revisions

0:30: 'The bus leaves in the evening&hellip;' Joe describes what he sees on a bus ride from Mexico City, ends with, 'I'll take you to the prison, to the fortress on the hillside, where the martyrs of the movement gaze out into the plain, scarlet blossoms warm and bleeding, falling in the courtyard, are gathered by the wind and washed by the rain and the nails are for the body and the body for the tree and the tree is deeply rooted at the bottom of the sea.' <ref>Joe re-uses this again at 41:10 and the end. I don't know what it means. </ref>

2:10: Joe tells a fictionalized account of Trotsky's assassination, beginning with the assassin's arrival by ship in Vera Cruz. He calls the assassin 'Jackson Mornard'. <ref>Trotsky's assassin, Ramón Mercader, had used the pseudonyms 'Jacques Mornard' (son of a Belgian diplomat) and 'Frank Jackson' (a Canadian engineer) on this mission, was sometimes referred to as 'Mornard-Jackson', a double last name, retrospectively, so as to make sure everybody knew whom they were talking about.

8: 'The nausea never leaves...' Joe tells receiving radiation treatment. <ref>This could have been like the treatment for testicular cancer Joe had in his 20s.</ref>

9:10: Joe visits the grave of his father in Barcelona. <ref>Mercader was born in Barcelona.</ref> Joe imagines being buried.  

11:50: Mornard makes the acquaintance of Trotsky's personal secretary, Sylvia Adelman. <ref>Mercader got into a relationship with a Trotskyite New Yorker, Sylvia Ageloff, whose sister Rita was one of Trotsky's personal secretaries in Mexico City, through whom he hoped to get to Trotsky.</ref>

21:10: Joe goes to his therapist; Joe fears nothingness; the therapist tells him he thinks too much; Joe recites the 'nada' poem again. The therapist then takes off on Macbeth's 'Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow' soliloquy <ref> which Joe quoted at the end of [[Tomorrow]]</ref> and complains of how badly therapists are treated.  

28:30: Joe tells us about (S&oslash;ren) Kierkegaard <ref>the 19^th-century Danish philosopher. Among other books, he wrote <i>Either/or</i>, was the source of the title for that episode of Joe's shows.  He's also mentioned in [[At The Border]], [[Mystery]], and [[Bitter Pill]]</ref> and the dilemma of whether he should marry the woman he loves.<ref>This was a significant dilemma for Kierkegaard.</ref> He works out to develop the strength to make the necessary leap of faith to believe in God. It fails.  

42:40: Joe goes to the golf club with his grandfather, a survivor of the Holocaust. <ref>Fictional; Joe's mother's father died in 1936; his biological father's father must have been long dead; his stepfather's father was an American.</ref>  They both play poorly.  

46:40: Joe says all the accused in the Soviet show trials 1936-8 confessed. <ref>True, I think. Koestler's <i>Darkness at noon</i> captures the psychology of this.</ref>  Joe talks about the value of confession, that we have a compulsion for it greater than any other, because we all want redemption. <ref>The President rehearses this notion in [[Tour Of The City, A (Part 1)]]; Vorst does in [[Nightride]].</ref>

49:10: Dostoevsky once said that if God didn't exist, everything would be possible. Joe attributes Nazi Germany's nihilism to this, quotes a letter Camus wrote to a German friend that concludes, 'human beings created by their very despair at their not existing'. <ref>I can't find this quote, don't think it sounds like Camus, but more like Sartre.</ref>