Word: schwartz
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...name on her doorbell is S. Schwartz. Which is a FIT name for her because it answers to both sides of her. The "Schwartz" being the name for her ordinary parts, and the S. being the name for her more MYSTERIOUS side. I call her "Sandra." Because she reminds me of Visconti's "Sandra"-being opaque like that...
...conventional narrative, this sort of passage would be called a set-up. S. Schwartz can now be expected to play a later role in David's story-perhaps to kill him, or to sleep with him, or (with sledgehammer irony) to turn up being his long-lost trampy-heiress half-sister. But placing that demand on an item in a narrative is the result of our Pavlovian response to rhetorical conventions. Interesting people float into our real lives, and just as arily float away, but in hard-core art we demand that major plot details assemble themselves into discernible constellations...
...Schwartz is important in David's life, although she never does turn up with money bags, or screw him. She is a human being on whom David can project fantasies, and the sum of those projections recapitulate in some way the workings of David's head. Anyone and anything that David chooses to single out with his lens or his microphone takes on importance precisely because the diarist has picked it out as an essential object of his attention...
...problem, though, is that a fundamental feature of lived life is the appallingly low density of things that actually leap out into our consciousness as being significant. David doesn't know exactly what S. Schwartz means to him, but he knows that she means something, and putting her on film is his way of capturing whatever that something is. Only later, with great pain, does he realize that things are important only in relation to one another, and meaningful only as they are singled out and consequently allocated significance; that it isn't just S. Schwartz, or S. Schwartz...
...Committee will readily talk about that issue. But Martin Kilson, a Faculty representative, also discussed the matter candidly. "There is no doubt we are political, because we are in a situation which arose in a political context," Kilson said. "Our findings will also have political implications." At the Schwartz interview, annoyed by complaints of the radical students that Schwartz was being asked questions on his political beliefs and that such questions were irrelevant to his case for readmission, Kilson said, "Come on, don't kid yourself, this is a political tribunal, and it's relevant if he's politically acceptable...