Holidays

New Year's Day

 Rummy

Birthday

Poker

Syllogiser

... savoir joindre à un tempérament de vampire la discrétion d’une anémone.

 (Syllogismes de l’amertume)

Un musicien philosophe

C'est un penseur très original qui a développé une intuition sublime qui l'a accompagné toute sa vie : l'ouïe est à l'origine de l'entendement parce que le son est le véhicule physique de la conscience, de sorte que c'est en analysant la structure fondamentale du son que l'on peut dévoiler les clés qui ont permis la naissance des idées, le développement des civilisations, l'émancipation des sciences et des arts. Porté au départ au pinacle par les philosophes des Lumières (Diderot, D'Alembert), Rameau sera ensuite déjugé - notamment par Rousseau -, dès que ses intuitions contrarieront l'agnosticisme en vogue.

littératurite

Il y a fort à parier qu’on va vers une rupture,

Même si dans ces affaires le pire n’est jamais sûr.

La droite aime les chefs, sans vouloir les choisir.

Elle se donne aux hussards qui forcent ses désirs.

C’est pourquoi mes amis, si les deux sont hors-jeu,

Si le coq et le bouc se tuent à petit feu,

Je parierais plutôt sur un vrai carnivore

Que sur une antilope, une poule ou un castor…

Skepticism

Traditional definitions, at least as commonly portrayed in contemporary discussions of the definition of art, take artworks to be characterized by a single type of property. The standard candidates are representational properties, expressive properties, and formal properties. So there are representational or mimetic definitions, expressive definitions, and formalist definitions, which hold that artworks are characterized by their possession of, respectively, representational, expressive, and formal properties. It is not difficult to find fault with these simple definitions. For example, possessing representational, expressive, and formal properties cannot be sufficient

essentials inessential

'Perhaps the greatest legacy is not in any specific thing, but in the relations between parts of our lives. I believe that modernity and its freedoms and benefits emerge from the never-ending tension caused by separating and balancing parts of our lives. England was the first country which successfully held the demands of the State, the Church, the Family and the Economy in some kind of balance where none came to dominate. This leads to personal responsibility and freedom. It also leads to endless contradictions and confusions. So perhaps the great contribution of England is to show that muddle, confusion, contradiction and paradox should be welcomed.'

synthetic phase

'...Thus did Constantin Brancusi describe the ceaseless accrual of detail in the realist tradition in its terminal phases, immediately before its fracture by the movement that has come to be called modernism. So what was the alternative to such unfocusing proliferations? ‘Simplicity,’ said the Romanian sculptor, ‘is complexity resolved’. Not evaded then, but resolved. Such resolution required dynamic and expressive form, a form that could cut through the infinite attenuation of detail of late realism and naturalism. It occurred to the most radical artists of modernity that there was a precedent here: not their immediate precursors in the western artistic tradition, but those from ages before, who had not even been known as artists. The ‘primitives’, whose vision was unconstrained  by any protocols involving single vanishing-point perspective or three-dimensional illusionism.'

barbarous gold

'Cutting the lemon
the knife
leaves a little cathedral:
alcoves unguessed by the eye
that open acidulous glass
to the light; topazes
riding the droplets,
altars,
aromatic facades.'

contradictory features

'..., the essence of the modern world is that there is no defining infrastructure. Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold. Mere anarchy is not loosed upon the world, but certainly chaos and confusion is often there. Basically the four spheres of our life are constantly in productive tension – politics, religion, economy and society. So there is an everlasting struggle, with no sphere triumphant. In such a situation adults have to live in a world of endless compromise, of endless situations where the best is the enemy of the good, in an Einsteinian world of relativity where all principles can be bent by some other force. It is a Dirac or Schrödinger quantum world where a cat can be both alive and dead at the same time. It is a world perfectly caught by the Oxford mathematician Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) when he took a child, full of absolutes, into the magical world down the rabbit hole and through the looking glass..

figuratively

'An art, I believe, of which most male smokers are true masters only when either they don't care a hoot whether or not the butt goes into the basket or the room has been cleared of eyewitnesses, including, quite so to speak, the cigarette snapper himself. I'm going to try hard not to chew on that illustration, delectable as I find it, but I do think it proper to append - to revert momentarily to curb marbles - that after Seymour himself shot a marble, he would be all smiles when he heard a responsive click of glass striking glass, but it never appeared to be clear to him whose winning click it was. And it's also a fact that someone almost invariably had to pick up the marble he'd won and hand it to him.'

Ritournelle

Le Boléro n'est pas une pièce musicale comme les autres. Il est une prophétie. Il raconte l'histoire d'une colère, d'une faim. Quand il s'achève dans la violence, le silence qui s'ensuit est terrible pour les survivants étourdis

Französischer Garten

Duminícă

Wisdom is the power to put our time and our knowledge to the proper use.

(Thomas J. Watson)