Those Hats!

'The only individual I feel any affection for is the frowzy-but-admirable Queen Elizabeth II, aka Brenda. Her Maj is known as Brenda to the generations of Brits who read Private Eye magazine, wherein she has been pseudonym'd, to avoid legal action, since the 1960s. Regarding Brenda, and her legendary anti-fashion: Years ago I interviewed Sir Hardy Amies, the hilarious and tart-tongued old poof who created Queen Elizabeth's iconic "look." I refer to those brightly hued outfits with the matching dress, coat and hat—like the yellow number she had on today. When I asked Sir Hardy if he had ever tried to squeeze Brenda into anything more stylish, he admonished me sternly. "Young man! Her Majesty must never appear to be chic. That would be disastrous, for there is an unkindness to chic [paging Wallace Simpson!] and her Majesty must never appear to be unkind. She must always appear friendly and approachable."'

cutting out

"Because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of some one else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly--that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one's self. Of course, they are charitable. They feed the hungry and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked. Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never really had it. The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion-these are the two things that govern us. And yet-"

arpégiu

Tat Tvam Asi

L’attitude héroïque est le privilège et la damnation des désintégrés, des suspendus, des laissés-pour-compte du bonheur et de la satisfaction. Être un héros, dans le sens le plus universel du mot, signifie désirer un triomphe absolu, qui ne peut s’obtenir que par la mort. Tout héroïsme transcende la vie, impliquant fatalement un saut dans le néant. Tout héroïsme est donc un héroïsme du néant, même si le héros ne se rend pas compte que son élan procède d’une vie privée de ses ressorts habituels. (Sur les cimes du désespoir)

Q&A

quête de sens

Régis Jauffret et Amandine Pudlovska : "N’attendez pas que Régis Jauffret soit mort pour le lire." from La Quinzaine littéraire on Vimeo.

New Travels

As it turned out, he never did settle down, exactly. Instead, he spent his last years planning on “speaking from the grave”—his phrase for the memoir that has now appeared upon the centenary of his death. With the excusable vanity of genius, he had high expectations for its reception. It will “live a couple of thousand years without any effort,” he told Howells, and will “then take a fresh start and live the rest of the time.” In one way or another, he worked at it for much of his life. “The truth is,” he told a friend, “my books are simply autobiographies” in the sense that they are stocked with fictional versions of people he had known, including himself. But starting around age forty, he made some tentative attempts at a memoir of a more conventional kind.

The Question is

But that the dread of something after death,

The undiscover’d country from whose bourn

No traveler returns, puzzles the will

And makes us rather bear those ills we have

Than fly to others that we know not of?

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all

în a fi şi a nu fi

The Aleph

.."On the back part of the step, toward the right, I saw a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brilliance. At first I thought it was revolving; then I realised that this movement was an illusion created by the dizzying world it bounded. The Aleph's diameter was probably little more than an inch, but all space was there, actual and undiminished. Each thing (a mirror's face, let us say) was infinite things, since I distinctly saw it from every angle of the universe. I saw the teeming sea; I saw daybreak and nightfall; I saw the multitudes of America; I saw a silvery cobweb in the center of a black pyramid; I saw a splintered labyrinth (it was London); I saw, close up, unending eyes watching themselves in me as in a mirror; I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me; I saw in a backyard of Soler Street the same tiles that thirty years before I'd seen in the entrance of a house in Fray Bentos; I saw bunches of grapes, snow, tobacco, lodes of metal, steam; I saw convex equatorial deserts and each one of their grains of sand;"

couleur des choses

Stadium

The sea was wet as wet could be,
The sands were dry as dry.
You could not see a cloud, because
No cloud was in the sky:
No birds were flying over head --

There were no birds to fly.

Reasoning

"shift mental pathways and open possibilities for what the brain can do."

-An adjective is made into a verb: 'thick my blood' (The Winter's Tale)

-A pronoun is made into a noun: 'the cruellest she alive' (Twelfth Night)

-A noun is made into a verb: 'He childed as I fathered' (King Lear)

Read the four sentences below, and ask yourself which one you like the best. 1. A father and a gracious aged man: him have you enraged. 2. A father and a gracious aged man: him have you charcoaled. 3. A father and a gracious aged man: him have you poured. 4. A father and a gracious aged man: him have you madded. The first sentence should elicit a normal reaction. The brain recognizes that it makes sense, unlike the next two lines, which the brain rejects. The fourth line is an example of functional shift, which is taken from King Lear. Your brain is now thanking Shakespeare.

S’acheminer

"Dacă unii pulverizează realitatea privită ca lucru în sine, alţii o lărgesc până la obiecte ideale sau imposibile, în acest sens sunt reale şi ideile întrucât determină voinţa noastră şi chiar plăsmuirile închipuirii. Nu discutăm aici dacă noi construim lumea sau o reflectăm, mai ales când e vorba de o modalitate estetică. Artistul este mult mai liber faţă de obiectul contemplat de el decât omul de ştiinţă. Cel puţin în stadiul actual al culturii. Am spus mai înainte că artistul proiectând certitudinile lui interioare ne oferă o libertate iluzorie. Artistul poate fi: simplu, complex, clar, confuz, lucid, naiv, paradoxal, absurd şi uneori stupid, închipuirea îi permite să populeze universul cu mituri noi, iar luciditatea îi permite să facă un joc paradoxal sau absurd. Prin categoria lucidităţii ne explicăm formula lui Cioran care situează pe acelaşi plan, ca fiind identice, ideile: Dumnezeu, infinitul şi neantul."

athlete of language

...phrases like "drive carefully!" and "I can't wait for Spring!" and "Dude!" outnumber "meaningful" exchanges. These supposedly meaningless phrases in everyday talk are the equivalent of literary style in writing. Just as you don't read Ulysses as a guide to Dublin or Lady Chatterley's Lover as a gardening manual, so you don't talk to your friends and acquaintances to exchange information or commands. You talk for the pleasure of knowing another person, and being known in turn. Pragmatic language is what marks you as you. Therefore it's important in all exchanges in which your identity—the fact that it's you talking—matters more than the formal information you're communicating. For your sake, I hope that's most exchanges. Then too, if you want to explain how language evolved (a subject shunned by many students of idealized language), you have to consider what this complex and expensive cognitive system could do for creatures that didn't, at first, exchange formally defined information.

power transcending

Indeed, the film can be read as a study of our relationships with symbols. We are what Terrence Deacon called the symbolic species, and our symbols can inspire fear as naturally as confidence. The film’s newsreel footage of Hitler and his followers prods our deep anxiety over the implications of fascism. We see a salute – a mere gesture, multiplied many thousandfold – and we cringe at the fragility and dark potential of our kind. Speech – and radio – brings people together; towards what end is up to us. It can help unite a nation, or, as Orson Welles learned in 1938, it can amplify paranoia. “Is the nation ready,” Albert asked, “for two minutes of radio silence?” Before the prince’s first speech in the film, his painful pause is punctuated by the whinny of a horse. It doesn’t break the ice. Years later the prince has become a king, on paper and in his heart; and as he goes to deliver his country’s declaration of war, a dog barks, and the sound prompts a small joke. The world is made of moments of sound. Six transcendent minutes await, and he will be ready.

outright invention

“Nearly everything that happens in this narrative is based on factual sources”, he tells us, “‘based on’ in the elastic sense that includes ‘inferable from’ and ‘consistent with’.”He wants us to feel that what we are reading really happened. Thoughts, feelings and talk, he assures us, have merely been lightly embroidered over the factual scaffolding; imagination here is closely aligned with empathy and intuition, rather than outright invention. And by staying so close to the facts Lodge does secure a certain amount of blind faith from the reader. He is determined not to forfeit “the great advantage of writing a novel about a real person, namely, the reader’s trusting involvement in the story”, as he puts it in The Year of Henry James; yet at times he also seems anxious that he has not distanced his work from conventional literary biography.

Uzurpațiúne

Experience is not what happens to a man;

• it is what a man does with what happens to him.

(Aldous Huxley)