Vita Brevis

Pound of threshold

noreply@blogger.com (Vita Brevis) — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 14:51:00 +0000

Shy, this plant is not…

I bought two chayotes, tried to eat one but didn't like it. If there's anything delicious about the chayote, it isn't the taste. Left in the vegetable rack, the second one sprouted. I planted it and it miraculously thrived. Made me think of Jack's beanstalk.

In Taiwan, chayotes are widely planted for their shoots, known as lóng xü cài (龍鬚菜, literally "dragon-whisker vegetable").

In Haiti and Louisiana (Cajun, Creole, English): mirliton :- (kazoo) (I'm a gnu—a-g-nother gnu)

En langage familier, mirliton se dit de sons, d'airs de musique, de vers de mauvaise qualité.

Only translation I could find was "cheap verses".

Chayote reminds me of coyote and Shylock.

But the word that is titillating me at the moment is écueil.

Recif, rocher à fleur d'eau = reef

Difficulté, obstacle = pitfall = noun. 1. a lightly covered and unnoticeable pit prepared as a trap for people or animals.

The dictionary tells me it is a sharp rock under the surface of the sea, but in my mind it is a stagnant dead-end pool.

At first I can't understand how I could have associated such a wrong mental image with the word. I see sand and water lapping to the edge of a shallow pool, it can't go any farther (Bras mort = dead leg) and there is foam on it (l'écume des jours). As I explore the image in my mind the rocks appear, I am walking on rocks that emerge at low tide, and there is some sand and pools and crabs in the pools…

The sound of the word intrigues me. Maybe it is one of the most foreign sounds in French – I can't think of anything similar to it in English.

Écueil, écuyer, cuillère, écureuil, écurie, métayer, œil pour œil, recueil, recueillir, se recueillir et cueillir, Rangueil, orgueil, accueil, éconduire, éculé, veule, vile, écaille, Reuilly

Shale, grève, fange, quicksand, ladle…

Treuil, feuille, Montreuil… which is another story, without a shadow of a doubt...

Green feline

noreply@blogger.com (Vita Brevis) — Sun, 02 Oct 2011 18:34:00 +0000

"Shagreen is a type of leather or rawhide consisting of rough untanned skin, formerly made from a horse's back or that of an onager (wild ass), and typically dyed green. Shagreen is now commonly made of the skins of sharks and rays.

The word derives from the French chagrin and is related to Italian zigrino and Venetian sagrin, derived from the Turkish sāğrī/çāğrī 'rump of a horse' or the prepared skin of this part. The roughness of its texture led to the French meaning of anxiety, vexation, embarrassment, or annoyance."

I came across the word "galuchat" in a job I was doing and read the Wikipedia entry for it. Very interesting. I clicked on "English" and found the amusing word – shagreen – and when I clicked on French to go back I ended up with "chagrin". So the language links in wikepedia are not reciprocal, and words meanings are labyrinthine anyway. The last time I posted I suppose I was so frustrated at not taking the time to post I just loaded my notes "en vrac" – not a word about shagreen other than the word and the echo in "peau de chagrin".

I didn't even explain why I gave the title "evening in" – in opposition to the "evening out" that surprised me because it evoked restaurants and not the sense of "to even out". Just a slight difference in pronunciation. I love significant nuances.

Evening in

noreply@blogger.com (Vita Brevis) — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 12:13:00 +0000

Not writing is a way of letting time slip through my fingers exactly like the sand in an egg timer… funny how clichéd images are often the most appropriate.

otiose

If donjon is "keep" then what is "dungeon"?

mur d’enceinte

Why does 'pregnant' in French translate as “enclosed”? and how can the same word mean hi fi speaker?

Traduced - shame and traduce them - Inner sanctum - Trémie

Came across trémie for the first time in a translation about cement milling (translated it as 'hopper') and then immediately afterwards, the same day, in a press release about a department store ('atrium')!!!

Not insuperable. Pell mell

Emissaire = outlet stream

…the Financial Times How To Spend It magazine… muffled … Shagreen … Peau de chagrin … apocryphal)??

to play its part in evening out the imbalances in the global economy

Becoming increasingly allergic to the way women are depicted by male writers, even Nobel prize winning novelists... men seem to be described and judged by what they are and what they do and women described and judged by what they're wearing and what they look like. It feels like a very bad joke. An omnipresent very bad joke.

years ago before the Stade de France was built I saw a friendly rugby match between the British Lions and France. The atmosphere at the Parc des Princes was electric, they played Chariots of Fire on a glorious sound system and the event would have been worth it for just the crowd and the music. But there was a moment during the match when the ball travelled through a series of elegant passes right across the pitch, seemingly right across the team. It was very exciting and pleasing to witness. Later I found myself describing that moment as “poetry in motion”. Reading George Szirtes’ post made me want to think about what that actually meant for me... the thrill of things falling miraculously into place, a good poem is language at its most miraculous…

Still thinking about the film, Atonement.

The first time I have deliberately watched a film instead of reading a book to get at content.

The Day of Atonement. Leviticus 23:27, 32 (CEV) says "Everyone must go without eating from the evening of the ninth to the evening of the tenth on the seventh month which is the Day of Atonement."

And it works. This reader/viewer, at least, sort of 'excuses' the writer because they are the one to produce the cultural artefact… which brings us pleasure. This harks back to the killing fields and the journalist who wins a prize because he let someone die and the question of living or observing life. However, I think this is a false problem as far as writing's concerned because writing is not really a choice in the usual sense of the word. Something decides to write itself through someone and not the other way round.

I've just translated the subtitles for a documentary film. I found myself almost crying at the end of it. It's not a sad film. Nothing "tragic" happens. It's the story of one French woman's love for England. A crazy quilt is a Victorian quilt with no pattern… Françoise Lebrun says you just assemble bits of cloth of different sizes, shapes, textures and colours, and try to create a kind of harmony.

In the plink

noreply@blogger.com (Vita Brevis) — Fri, 20 May 2011 07:56:00 +0000

Cherries

Le temps des cerises.

Contrast between the usual connotations of an annual ritual that is aesthetic, poetic and nostalgic and has something languorous about it – Japan – take your time to drink tea – draw back the bow string, hold onto it, don't be impatient for the twang, admire time passing…

And the absolute urgency of eating the damn things as soon as they are ripe, in an extremely narrow window of time from the moment they become deep red and ripe enough to eat and the moment, very soon after, they turn brown and blue mould appears.

Wurds.

On radio 4 the other day I noticed that “interstices” is pronounced “Interstice-seize”. Reminds me of Tom & Jerry and “I hate these me-seize to pea-seize”

J’ai eu quelques frayères – at the spawning grounds?

Superfétatoire – big Greek salad for party?

cudgerie

a large tropical rutaceous tree, Flindersia schottina, having light-coloured wood. Also called pink poplar.

the agalma

Europe's top banker calls for calm - Jean-Claude Trichet wants more… - Tricher means to cheat

invidious

Streets that follow like a tedious argument Of insidious intent...

So when your friends arrive with a huge bag of cherries and you take a bowl out of the cupboard (love that word) thinking to yourself oooooooooo yes, life is a bowl of cherries – but not just that, luckily - then you are already starting to feel guilty about not being able to eat them all quickly enough, as if it was somehow your shameful fault that they were going to rot.

Input as to tickle

noreply@blogger.com (Vita Brevis) — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 09:14:00 +0000

Not easy to start up again after stopping. The stop seems to get bigger and exert some kind of inertia, preventing me from starting again the longer I'm stopped. I jot down words that intrigue me or other things I want to write about and as the weeks pass some of them don't seem so relevant or important anymore.

Swinging the search beam away from content to process. A small trickle of a stream (the proverbial babbling Brooke) is somehow what I want now rather than a mass of water behind a dam I can't bust.

So here is a picture of an Iris, the first sign of spring, taken when it came into bloom ages ago.

oops ! wrong image...

and a picture of a map because I am still trying to find my way around my blog... euh... non, two pictures are enough for one post. I'll keep the map over for the next one, along with my backlog of lexicographic miscellanea.

Oh, and Thank You, anonymous, for sending me a message in response to Vitis Vinifera. This gave me the impetus to trickle.

Fenetre sur la lumière

noreply@blogger.com (Vita Brevis) — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 09:02:00 +0000

New Year Ditty

noreply@blogger.com (Vita Brevis) — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 11:34:00 +0000

Nothing could please me more than your submission.

In fact, your absolute reddition.

But you don’t even have to give in; just cooperate, as I’m sure you will, and all those years waiting for change to instil

a happening … will be taking root, getting ready to shoot.

Baby screams stop when the pram moves.

The words come and flow, the pitter-patter of the keys pleases my ego, strokes my self, takes me back to a place I have not yet been to,

like a lean-to at the bottom of an imaginary garden.

Shed your past, come on, you can do it, go the whole way, don’t be sacred…

As if I cake-red. No-one, but no-one would will no! Anonymous bliss, this.

Time marches on, time dances on, time rolls on and I am not in it.

Once boarded a train, but that was in another lifetime, and besides, the swain is married now.

Such high hopes, expectations all behind, the disappointment and the ledgers. Now it is a question of hear. All fear rolled away, quite gone.

At last a clear space. Light and room to zoom in on it or you or whatever, the time to choose, pick and ooze, tell it as it really will be. The lie of the land is flat. I think I could have been a bat, just for the ultrasonic guidance system. Withholding some of the evidence, she tried her best to scrape the lipstick off my vest in the interests of some greater test but it was too deeply encrusted by the time this all came a bout.

I scan the horizon.

Nothing.

A time.

The machine guns silent, no barbed wire to speak of, - if not peace, at least a truce. This is what you ran for, strove for, fought for. This piece of treaty. Armisticeness.

And now the chance to savour, feel and wallow not in victory, not in a war won, in a mere ceasefire, a lull from which to set off in search of something worth.

While such a thing, such a value may exist, perhaps it all just leads to this,

To safety, the no need to fight, struggle or strive, and the words, though live, just are, here, now, still.

Twingling in the aftermath, lolling around in the subtle distillate.

Neither hate nor love, but all-glowing souls. No rivals, enemies, prizes or goals to be sought, battles to be fought, causes to be wrought like iron clad leggings. Tom Sneddin said you would never make it. Well I’m here, now, whole and in one peace. The golden fleece, trail, grophies galore don’t mean anything anymore.

the words

are not bullets fired at targets

nor hooks hoping to pull in prey, flares to attract attention, vibrations to effect abstention.

the words are just words.

free of dare, free of the snares of animosity, reciprocity, agropophosy, lascivoscoty…

like pebbles plopped into the well to sound the depths, probe in ripples… frôlent some nipples

serendipity reigns down in a shower of gravitdas

Backbone

noreply@blogger.com (Vita Brevis) — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 09:13:00 +0000

Fatou Keita is a writer and English Literature lecturer at Abidjan University.

I met her in Caen, when we were both doing a postgraduate diploma (DEA) in English Literature. We are the same age.

Yesterday she sent me an email with a letter attached, an open letter to Laurent Gbagbo. When I had finished reading it I was scared for her. Today she is going to join the march to the television headquarters.

Here is the letter:

LETTRE OUVERTE AU PRÉSIDENT GBAGBO LAURENT

POURQUOI J’IRAI MARCHER SUR LA RTI

Demain Jeudi 16 Décembre 2010, s’il plaît à Dieu, j’irai marcher sur la RTI que certains ont surnommée RTMP (Radio Télévision Mouvance Présidentielle).

Non, ce n’est pas un acte de bravoure ni de défiance. Parce que oui, j’ai peur. Mais c’est un devoir.

Nous payons tous la redevance télé et ce que cette télévision nous donne à voir aujourd’hui est insupportable. Nous avons reculé au-delà de tout et les intellectuels, notamment, ne devraient pas l’admettre. Comment peut-on chercher à imposer la pensée unique, la manipulation, le mensonge, l’incitation à la haine et j’en passe ? Oublie-t-on que notre télévision est visionnée dans le monde entier ? Ce qui se passe aujourd’hui va au delà de tout ce qu’on aurait pu imaginer. Monsieur Ouattara Gnonsié, votre Ministre de la Communication commence son mandat avec un gros mensonge en affirmant haut et fort que la radio ONUCI FM incite à la haine et demande aux gens de descendre dans la rue. Il va jusqu’à comparer cette radio à la tristement célèbre Radio Mille collines. C’est un mensonge inacceptable et cela n’augure rien de bon pour la « communication » en Côte d’Ivoire. Le démocrate que vous disiez être alors que vous militiez dans l’opposition peut-il raisonnablement accepter que la télévision nationale soit ainsi caporalisée et confisquée au profit de vos seuls défenseurs, sans contradiction aucune ? Vous qui écriviez qu’il fallait libérer la parole ?

Comment peut-on nous infantiliser à ce point ? En filtrant ce que nous regardons, ce que nous lisons ! La RTI nous projetait, il y a quelques jours un film montrant les atrocités au Rwanda, on y voyait comment les gens se faisaient découper froidement à la machette. Quel était le message de la RTI ? Était-ce une menace à peine voilée ? A l’endroit de qui ? Si ce malheur nous arrivait ne serions-nous pas tous logés à la même enseigne ? Vous accusez ONUCI FM d’incitation à la haine mais c’est la RTI qui aujourd’hui semble adopter une position qui rappelle fort celle des extrémiste Hutus de 1994 au Rwanda. Tous les torts sont attribués à un seul camp sans aucune possibilité de réplique et cela est dangereux pour la paix à laquelle nous aspirons.

Pensez-vous qu’il était opportun, avec cette diffusion, d’effrayer ainsi une population de Côte d’Ivoire déjà traumatisée par la situation actuelle ?

Les télévisons et radios étrangères nous sont interdites et pourtant c’est sur ces dernières que vos défenseurs s’expriment régulièrement. Pour qui nous prend-on ?

Monsieur le Président, je remets ma vie entre vos mains. Non je ne me sacrifie pas, non je ne veux pas mourir. Je veux tout simplement revendiquer mon droit de vivre dans une nation juste. Je ne veux pas mourir, ma vieille Maman, mes enfants et petits-enfants, tous ceux qui m’aiment et ont besoin de moi ne s’en remettraient pas, et d’avance je leur demande pardon pour cette décision….

Protégez-moi, protégez les enfants de Côte d’Ivoire, protégez-les tous puisque l’armée est à vos ordres.

Je prends le monde entier à témoin, je dis à mes amis du monde entier que je ne veux pas mourir et que demain, inch’Allah, je sortirai, en pleurant certainement, et en tremblant car j’ai en mémoire Mars 2004…. Mais je sortirai.

Fatou Keïta

Écrivain

Reign on snow

noreply@blogger.com (Vita Brevis) — Sun, 14 Nov 2010 19:39:00 +0000

The Balinese girl - Vladimir Tretchikoff

This is the picture that was above the fireplace in the living-room of the house I grew up in. I can't imagine how many times I must have seen it – and not seen it. I also remember wallpaper patterns I saw an infinite number of times. And clothes. Images create lasting impressions, some when only seen for a brief moment – and even some from dreams… or the ones we create.

There are no blank slates however much we meditate but I was a bit shocked to read that you can be charged for:

"George Harrison became the first Beatle to get a solo number one single in 1971 with My Sweet Lord. However, similarities to the 1963 Chiffons' song, He's So Fine, led to a lengthy legal battle, ending five years later with the singer paying damages of $587,000 after being found guilty of "unconscious plagiarism"."

An ironic tilt to the belief formulated by Duchamp that "All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone."

A "caisse noire" in English is a slush fund.

Neither expression had anything hanky panky about it originally, though the French black box was used to collect money from railway workers for a clandestine sickness fund – which the authorities outlawed for fear of cooperation between workers…

The word slush to me means dirty melted snow, walking home through, getting feet wet.

Source of term

The term "slush fund" was originally a nautical term; the slush referred to the fat or grease that was obtained by boiling salted meat, the sale of which could then be used to provide the crew with special luxuries. The money obtained from this sale was placed into the so-called "slush-fund".

Translating an article about coal mining in Africa, looking for information in English I came across the following snippet:

"President Rupiah Banda on Thursday urged Zambians not to condemn Chinese managers for shooting 12 workers at Maamba Collum coal mine, saying other people also shoot their employees."

"Guardian survey of Whitehall departments reveals plans to cut 103,000 posts as part of effort to reduce administration costs by a third"

This headline prompted me to ask myself what the purpose of government is. Throwing 100,000 of its citizens out of work to make itself what? Less costly? More profitable? For who?

"La raison d'état de soi-même" – tickled me, I had a sudden vision of grabbing power over myself… I was wondering how to translate it when I noticed a film on TV called "Raisons d'état" with Mat Damon and so looked for the original title, which is The Good Shepherd. Sometimes something intriguing or exciting in an expression can melt away when you start to look into it.

Mutt Case

noreply@blogger.com (Vita Brevis) — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 21:57:00 +0000

There is a tree in my father's garden that looks a bit wilted, maybe it is a weeping fir tree. It has always kind of annoyed me, because it looks as if it has been doused in acid rain, or is just somehow untidy. I felt the dangly top branches spoilt the view from my father's living room and wanted to go out and chop them off. When I mentioned this to my father he said "oh no, you wouldn't chop off the man and his dug". I looked again and sure enough I saw a man walking a dog, a bit like a retriever with a feathery tail. (click on the picture to enlarge it to see the colour of the dog's collar). A nice reminder of how differently people can see the same thing.

When I started writing this I wanted to investigate something I read in the paper about "the belief formulated by Duchamp that 'All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone.'" Imagine my surprise when the first Google search result gave - The Richard Mutt Case

Tooth and nail

noreply@blogger.com (Vita Brevis) — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 11:18:00 +0000

Je vous lis en juillet, au bord de l'eau, quand il fait très chaud.

De temps à autre, je garde ma place avec un doigt,

planté sur un point comme un piquet de cerf volant,

ta phrase fait le tour de moi comme l'hirondelle fait le tour du ciel,

comme le vin fait le tour du palais

et quand je suis loin, très loin du point de départ, je reprends le fil de ma lecture,

mon regard re-penchant sur ta page comme un oiseau qui picore les signes, bibliophage sauvage, haletant entre les espaces et les paragraphes.

Parfois, ne trouvant rien, je cours, puis un mot me ralenti, et je te suis, et tuez moi.

Je vous ai lu en juillet, deux fois, autour de la cinquantaine.

Entre la première et la deuxième, vous avez oublié mon nom

C'est sans importance

On a le droit de n'exister pour personne

Être sans importance pour un autre…

Je vous lis, je vous ai lu en juillets,

l'écris vain jeté du lit, je vous le dis, jujitsu à ta virgule près ; lits crevants, juvénile jubilance,

vous, juillet, lu.

I bought a recording of Bach's Cello suites played by Yo Yo Ma on Itunes so I went to buy blank cds at the supermarket bookshop/multimedia outlet (which you may remember is called "l'espace temps").

As I waited for the sales attendant to finish her conversation with a friend and come and take my money, I noticed two copies of a book for sale, propped up on the counter, right in front of the cash register, some distance from the books. I noted the name of the author. BG.

In the evening I switched on the news and the main headline was that BG had died. The same day. I felt a sudden revulsion at the society we are living in. It couldn't be a coincidence. They put that book there because they knew it would have a good chance of selling because the author had just died. So we cash in on death. We are actually using death as a selling point. Do we have no scruples left? Or did we ever have any?

Amitiés bizarres…
The Heads of State and Government confirmed their determination to fight translational threats together.

I had never come across "nous" in English before...

A French question from a satisfied customer and an English sentence from the Guardian..
Ne vous ai-je pas encensée à la réception du document ?
Obama team 'incensed at being kept in the dark' as company denies underwater oil clouds

avoir les dents longues does not mean to be long in the tooth

Painting over the map.

People tattooed acupuncture pressure points on their bodies gazillions of years ago, but we have painted over them. The new layer hides the old layer which is eventually forgotten…

Dirty washing

noreply@blogger.com (Vita Brevis) — Mon, 31 May 2010 21:34:00 +0000

I have just lost the post I wrote on Greece and ferries... blogger refused to save it because it had a meta link in it...

Got my knickers in a bit of a twist.

Translating sometimes feels a bit like ferrying meaning from one language to another. I frequently fall in the water in more ways than one.

When I came across the words "lingerie sale" on a website I was shocked to see what I thought was "dirty underwear" and then I realised it was "reduced in price"

speaking of underwear, thong in cheek:

French English
string thong
tongs/tongues flipflops

I can't get my mind round the way sanction means both punishment and approval…

And now for something completely different - Nougaro

Ex ante

noreply@blogger.com (Vita Brevis) — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 06:10:00 +0000

Just realised with horror that I sometimes translate without thinking about the words

without thinking about what they mean

the way you drive a car without seeing the road – on automatic pilot.

The word that made me aware of this is "univers".

When I see it I think automatically "we don't say 'universe' in English we say world, sphere, domain, field…"

Today I actually stopped and imagined what the French was saying…

a warmer universe… are they one step ahead of us, living already in the multiverse?

a phrase I've been stumbling across is up the ante – to increase the stakes.

seems to be everywhere

antipodean = des antipodes

Come to the disco

noreply@blogger.com (Vita Brevis) — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 15:53:00 +0000

Picture a March morning

I still find the sight of the snow-covered Pyrenees uplifting, awe-inspiring, in the same way as a vast expanse of open sea. Unfortunately it is impossible to ignore the irritating fact that when you can see the mountains clearly from my kitchen window it means rain is on the way. This reminds me of the cycling conundrum – there are those who enjoy pedalling uphill because they look forward to freewheeling down the other side and those who fail to enjoy freewheeling downhill because they can't bear the thought of having to cycle back up.

I really do feel now that my position towards words has shifted. There is something decidedly not new about the language, about language, about the language I use.

Laconic – lapidaire - scissors – scission – iconoclast - demotic (popular).

And the words are no longer mine. They don't belong to me in any way, I did not create them… putting them together in a particular sequence is not such a big deal… It's just like throwing a handful of sand up in the air and "reading" how it lands.

I feel like I've been barking up the wrong tree, or staring down the wrong well. This intellectual uncertainty is certainly related to the feeling of "uncanny".

And it is possibly related to a recent borderline experience … if that is how you describe the feeling of touching a limit. Last week my reading group "à livre ouvert" was invited to read some poetry during an aperitif in honour of the "Printemps des poètes" ... the theme was "couleurs de femmes". One of the colours we chose was black, and my take on it consisted in a list of words that rhyme with "noir" –

Voir, soir, croire, boire, foire, loir, poire

(see, evening, believe, drink, fair, dormouse and pear)

Not only did I read each word with my entire being, but I also mimed the word and the group (there were six of us) backed this up.

It was an extremely satisfying experience. And I definitely touched some kind of limit, my dégré zéro de l'écriture maybe. In any case, it made me feel that the words stand up by themselves. They don't need any fancy sentences to give them meaning.

Reading Zizek,

I come across perspicuous, which I had never heard of. It is neither perspicacious nor conspicuous.

Zizek reminds me that the unconscious does not take negatives into account. I'm trying to write a short piece about the uncanny in psychoanalysis and I can't get past the fact that I'm a "canny Scot" – in fact, "canny" in my Scottish dialect means "can't". "Ah canny dae it" = I can't do it. "Cawnie" on the other hand means cautious. "Caw cawnie" means take it easy, don't do whatever you're doing quite so hard.

Audio, video, disco - I hear, I see, I learn

Leap forward

noreply@blogger.com (Vita Brevis) — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 13:58:00 +0000

I bit into the bergamot, that cross between a lime and an orange that is yellow, and the next day the skin round my teeth marks had turned orange. Decidedly strange. Had only ever heard of it before in tea.

The word has a ring of “Bergman” to it, which is German for miner. My mother was a “krankenschwester”.

Now, I'm not an anchorite.

Nor am I shipwrecked – naufragée (je suis navrée…)
Stranded - marooned (macaroon) seranora – serendipity.

mangrove (twas brillig)
mongoose
corrigected.

The crocuses have flowered yellow and spring is on its way and so am I. I walked down to the village feeling extremely light-hearted and fell heavily on the pavement. Pride before a fall.

I broke off a dead geranium stem and was surprised at the distinctive smell.
Poetry is a kind of web of mnemonic devices… I see a dead geranium. The distinctive smell tells me it’s a geranium. This reminds me of TS Eliot’s dead geranium and from there to the rest of Eliot’s poetry –

“I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.”

So there. So here. As I am about to write “So what” I hear the music … And I’m surrounded.

I am surrounded by a web of poetry, music, literature. Other people have created harmony, beauty and new combinations of signifiers… And I am grateful for that. There is something reassuring in depth.

Today is February 28th. Tomorrow will be March 1st. What about the people who should have had a birthday on February 29th? There is a slight problem with the seamlessness of our reality. The world is not 100% round. Our systems do not 100% work. We live in an approximation that we mistake for an absolute.

Lime, lights

noreply@blogger.com (Vita Brevis) — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 17:34:00 +0000

"We should quickly seize enlightenment while we still have the chance. In much less than a century all of us will be dead. We cannot be sure that we will be alive even tomorrow. There is no time to procrastinate. I who am giving this teaching have no guarantee that I will live out this day."

His Holiness the Dalai Lama

So I write on. … most of the words have already been high jacked by bandits…

I don't often come across a use that feels wrong, but I couldn’t hide my surprise when I read:

“There, he whipped out a tiny knife he had secreted in his underwear and plunged it into his throat.”

in the Guardian.

In my inner dictionary, "secreted" goes with "secretions" and not with "secrets”. As the Dalai Lama eloquently points out, there is no time to check.

Strategise as a verb, and I stumbled on another new verb:

“Their reply brooks no argument.”

If I was paranoid I would think there was a connection between my analyst’s name and what she has to put up with.

And for the first time I set eyes on a Bergamot. The peel is indeed very tasty – is tasty the word, or maybe aromatic? Pungent? Funny how a cross between a lime and an orange turns out yellow.

Last night I saw the moon rise over the motorway as I drove into Toulouse. It seemed huge and orange. Almost touching the road. I felt as if I could reach out and touch it, it seemed so close. I was mesmerised by the sight. It was so beautiful, and I felt that what was so powerfully attractive about it was the contrast between its naturalness and the artificiality of the electric lights, cars and tarmac on the ground. As if the moon was soft and the man-made landscape was hard. Yet the fact is, unless the earth is destroyed to make way for an intergalactic highway as Douglas Adams predicted, the moon will still be there when those lights have long since gone out and weeds have ousted the tarmac… Realising my confusion between hard and soft, long-lasting and ephemeral (for the moon was only a beautiful sight for a very short time) reminded me of another confusion. My first classical singing lesson included exercises to work on the difference between soft, low notes and loud, high notes. In my mind (and in my singing up till then) I equated low notes with loudness and high notes with softness. My teacher pointed out that my perception was upside down. Low notes are soft and high notes are high-energy and strident. I reasoned that it could have been because in my childhood I heard drunk men shouting and women singing very softly but really I have no idea how it happened. It is not a problem having faulty perception. It would be a problem to assume that all our perceptions are accurate representations of the world.

This one is fresh, but sometimes it takes a long time to be able to recount an experience. Last night I went to see some musician friends perform. The night was never-ending and memorable. Their music is highly original and spontaneous, but most of all they are great people. A few years ago these same musicians, in another formation, a fanfare whose speciality was to play outside and be able to mingle and involve the audience, did a series of spectacle-concerts in a theatre with a stage director.

LFM

The back and sides of the stage had sheets of thin clear plastic hanging, a couple of feet from the walls. When we went in the musicians were all chatting and walking about doing things very casually, almost as if they were at a party. Moving along the back behind the plastic and up and down the sides, and some of them on stage. The beginning was really exciting. There was a weird stool with a pole on the back of it. The musicians went off, someone came on and hung a plastic torso with a head on it on the pole, then went off again. Somebody else then came in and fitted a tube to the torso, and went off again. We could hear the musicians playing in the distance and suddenly belches of smoke came out the nostrils of the torso. This went on for a long time. A bear walked very slowly along the back behind the plastic and down the sides then back to the back and pressed its nose against the plastic and looked in at the audience through the plastic looking very sad. Then the musicians started to come on stage and MS made bear sounds with his soubassophone. Then the singer broke into Berlioz and the musicians played and it was so good I was aux anges. His voice is fantastic and I could feel the song move the skin on the back of my head.

After the Berlioz they did a very cacophonic number I recognised because MD had given me a tape to translate the words for him. It lasted a long time and when W started growling through a loudhailer, Billy started to put his hands over his ears. The friend I went with said why are they doing the same tune four times? Then FD, who had not said a word to the audience till then (in other settings he normally provides a lot of warm, funny interaction with the audience) proclaimed "Mesdames Messieurs, le merle" and they all whistled. There were side effects on the plastic after that and light effects that looked nice on the instruments but the whole thing was so cold I wanted to go home.

After more than an hour, during which time the only 'contact' with the audience was that at one point they faked not being able to end a piece and ended up coughing and clicking and eventually snapping their fingers, and FD came forward to the audience and held his hand up snapping his fingers and of course, we all started snapping our fingers. Later on FD took a microphone that was hanging from a wire on the ceiling and started off very serious about "Well, you must be wondering why we're here, and why you're here. Well, I'm going to tell you in a very precise and clear manner” (which was supposed to be funny because he kept repeating himself and it wasn't precise or clear). He went on "it's all about time, and about being in the present moment. There can't be any continuity because the past is separate from the future and you can't get two moments to join together". His voice is fabulous and the sound quality was excellent and I could have listened to him all night. While he was going on about time and the moment and why we were all there, he let go of the microphone and the speech continued, so we could see it had been a recorded message. The effect was, in a very clichéd way, like the bursting of a bubble.

Then more cacophony that lasted a long time. They were all obviously moving in the precise way their metteur en scène had rehearsed with them. Later, FD took the mike again and started talking more nonsense as if he was cracking jokes. He said "there was a duck and a cow (for example, don't remember exactly) and the duck said putain je ne sais pas ce que j'ai je suis toujours nase and the cow answered c'est parce que tu bouquines trop le soir chérie”. Then he repeated the same thing using different animals, and then a third time. Then more music, either I was by this time devastated or the music just didn't take off the way it usually does or it was the cold atmosphere but it was painful and at the end when they stopped, a child in the audience was crying. Then FD thanked the Théatre de la Garonne. He walked back on very slowly and apologised for forgetting to thank the Théatre de la Digue (where the gig was). By this time I was so desperate to get out I just left, along with a lot of other people, and we could hear them announcing they would do a morceau for an encore and it lasted 30 seconds. I don't know what happened after that I was out the theatre.

Oh what a tangoed web...

noreply@blogger.com (Vita Brevis) — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 21:38:00 +0000

At my first session of psychoanalysis I said “I have this image of myself as being stuck in a well.” Because of my accent, my analyst thought I had a Jonah complex. Yesterday a friend sent me a link to a George Orwell essay called Inside the Whale. Very interesting. Written in 1940; and therewithin I find “cold snap”.

I am used to brief bouts of intensely cold weather which I had alway referred to as cold spells, and I had the impression that I had only come across the expression “cold snap” recently. I decided it was somehow “wrong” and not to be adopted, or at the very least suspect because recent. Interesting to see the brain at work, rejecting the unknown, even in someone who rationally and consciously embraces it.

I was thinking about Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea as a metaphor for desire, which, according to BM, is either prohibited or impossible. When part of you goes all out to get what you want, natural forces are unleashed against you. The old man caught the huge fish, but the sharks ripped it apart before he could get it home.

Prendre une décision in French, but in English, do we take them or make them?

Google is beginning to annoy me. I started to find strange cases of synchronicity; I searched for an article to buy online and the next day I was working away and saw adverts for that article on my screen… What a coincidence, I thought, until I realised that my browser was constantly spangled with articles I had looked at in online stores.

To make matters worse, be it Google or Firefox, someone has “enhanced” the search function. Used to be when I searched for a word or expression, the search box offered me up my previous similar searches which served as a useful aide-memoire. Now the search box offers me other people’s searches, or searches that it deems useful, which are of no use to me at all and further pollute my working environment. Because I am fascinated by the written word, I see combinations of words in their proposed search phrases and think really? Does that exist? Or what does that mean? And off I go on somebody else’s search, neglecting my own and wasting time...

... which, as we all know, is of the essence… As a translator, my main, bread & butter bulk per word rate has dropped 30% since the euro was introduced. Which means that to maintain a similar standard of living I should be working 30% faster… But I grow old. I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers, etc. The competition seems somehow unfair.

Prosody, Phrasé

Phrasing, Prosaic (the antonyms include pedestrian (belisha beacon) and I want to include poetic).

Typo of the day: pubic relations

Unfortunately, I learnt the meaning of a new French word:

détonner = chanter faux

Now, chanter faux = to sing out of tune, or off-key, but I can’t actually find that as a straight definition for détonner, and instead I find "to jar, to be out of place… " Oops! Some of my notes were slightly out of place. There are no grey areas in singing – it is either in tune or it isn’t. Our choir mistress made me laugh after a particularly laborious passage of a rehearsal when she said “c’est presque ça”. Which means we were rubbish.

I’ve always been proud of my heritage and the pivotal role Scots affirm they have played in everything, but even I found this amusing:

“In another attempt to circumvent its dependence on Chinese tea, the East India Company sent Scottish botanist Robert Fortune to

China

to steal and smuggle out of

China

tea plants, which were then taken to

India

, where by the end of the 19th century they matured and produced Indian tea.”

I watched Merrill Streep in The Devil Wears Prada. Sad to say I worked for and with a woman like that in Paris once. I admired her energy and precision until one day I heard her demolishing someone on the phone to save her skin.

"la raison d’état de soi-même"

“The national interest, often referred to by the French term raison d'État, is a country's goals and ambitions whether economic, military, or cultural.”

Simple longing

noreply@blogger.com (Vita Brevis) — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 09:12:00 +0000

The sky is so blue I wish I were alone with it

Swish wish this.
Here I am knuckling under to the obligation to work
And part of me wishes it could be ideal
That’s not good enough for a poem.

You need images, abstraction, more feeling

I really really want this.
This is no indistinct yearning but a gut desire

a chain saw snores. I remember the smell of the sap.

later, I wander out into you
I’m no fool
lie back under your vast canopy and dream around the tree tops
singing of distant places
the beauty of the spot
appeases my spirit

is it the best I can hope for?

*************************************

a love of my own

Keith Jarret playing over the ocean sailing, the wind the spray the freedom the openness the sheer beauty of the music

takes me back to the first time I heard it and I blame you

in the story I tell myself, you introduced me to Keith Jarret and when I hear a single, immediately recognisable bar I remember how much I loved you, how much I longed for you, how much I yearned for you, how much I concentrated all of my longing and all of my yearning onto you

and I didn’t have you
which is why I could do that

and I lived in constant lack of you, to this day I miss you, I am lacking you, I never succeeded in making contact with you

I wanted you to be my man
I wanted you to be my lover
I wanted you to be mine

And you walk away oblivious
You live on oblivious

And I listen to the Köln concert and I scream my longing out over the sea

It is no longer a longing of you
It is no longer a longing of the past or for sex or for love
It is the anguish of a human being caught in mid-life, realising it is alive and has lived and still not knowing what it’s all about

And that music is too beautiful to have existed, it makes a mockery of the rest of life and yet no-one, not even Keith Jarret can live in a piano solo, improvised or not, one-off or not

Fascination

noreply@blogger.com (Vita Brevis) — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 16:59:00 +0000

While I work, I occasionally listen to the podcasts of Eckhart Tolle talking about his book – A New Earth, Awakening to your life’s purpose – with Oprah Winfrey. I find it helps to keep me in an English-language word-order frame of mind to have English in the background, but as I’m concentrating on other words I don’t hear all of what they say. Every time I listen I hear different snippets.

Last time the words that caught my attention were Oprah saying “lead me to the rock that is higher than I”.

These words reminded me of the opening words of a story I wrote, called What did the spider say to the elephant?

“She is sitting on the soft grass, near my rock, looking up at me. I love my rock. It is too hard for her, too high.”

I got that once more uncanny feeling of magical undercurrents, things being connected, not being free to write just anything but that every word counts. Every word is connected to every other.

Webs and networks, hypertext patchworks and links, quantum leaps and simultaneously being everywhere. Or nowhere. The collective unconscious that anyone can dip into. The structure which is rendered dynamic by the fact that there is a missing link, an empty box, a blind spot. A weakness, an imperfection. Something I have that you don’t have and vice versa. Something human, living. In a mechanical system, there is nothing missing but there is no stopping it…

Claude Levy Strauss has just died, and that makes me want to read him again. He spoke on television and it was such a delight to listen to him, so wise is he. I didn’t understand a word about how mythology reads like a musical score but it made me want to understand…

In the meantime, there is

lucre

the excess of revenues over outlays in a given period of time (including depreciation and other non-cash expenses); net profit; earnings

and

sedulous

picked up from Lionel Shriver

I am now singing in two choirs. Practising "O come all ye faithful", I was sitting in silence with the sopranos listening to the other voices when I found myself whipped away back to childhood, singing hymns at school or at school ceremonies in the church. I didn't want to but couldn't stop myself and ended up with tears streaming down my face...

That moment when you decide not to allow yourself to feel an emotion because it is simply scarily too big.

Potentially overwhelming.

At the prize-giving ceremony we were arranged in rows and had to go up and receive our prize and then go back into the wooden pew and shuffling along one place at a time it feels like being part of a mechanical process that can't stop...

peristaltism.

“Ecritures silencieuses”

forêt sempervirante – evergreen forest

choc pétrolier = oil crisis

< people starve not because there isn’t enough food, but because they lack the money to buy it. Rising prices reflect the anarchy of the capitalist system. Jean Ziegler, the United Nations’s special rapporteur on the right to food, said last weekend, “Hunger has not been down to fate for a long time – just as Marx thought. This is silent mass murder.”>>

“…to be a worker you have to lack the economic independence to support yourself out of your own resources.”

own resources. owned resources.

"Also each device added to this milieu must not unnecessarily or unintentionally contribute spurious emissions that do not perform any particular function."

There was a documentary about some underwater river system in

Mexico

and divers going in with tanks and following a rope (they call it Ariadne’s rope in French) and getting to a place 30 minutes away from natural light. Obviously I am struck by this because my father was a coal miner till he retired and I was always horrified at his stories of having to walk 5 miles underground to the next pit to keep the right of egress open.

This makes me think of fascination and the character at the end of Le Grand Bleu who swims off into the void with the dolphins (oops! sorry, hope you've seen the film and I haven't spoilt it for you!) that to get anywhere, do anything, we need to feel a tug, a pull, to want to follow, find out, go further… but just when does healthy curiosity turn into morbid fascination?

Uncannily like vivacious

noreply@blogger.com (Vita Brevis) — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 14:48:00 +0000

Vivace = perennial

Oh do not ask what is it
let us go and make our visit…

You would hardly believe this… I was listening to TS Eliot on the net, reading his poems, and finding fault with his reading… I had a “superior” voice in my mind. When we read silently I suppose we use the perfect voice of the Big Other.

picayune – minutiae - the time catcher. Rather like the feather structures designed by Red Indians to catch dreams, I imagine a fine net that would catch time as it flees too fast through our lives…

I continue to describe my milestones as they turn up regularly or irregularly. Irreducible parts of experience, the nuggets. I enjoy them, no matter if I'm repeating myself – I should apologise but I'm tired of apologising, and we never apologise for the right thing, anyway - the only way to be sure to mention them all is to mention them as they arise and you know you have come full circle when you see one for the second time… they say you have to hear something three times to assimilate it. This is a restful feeling. No need to shout or emphasise anything in the moment. Because it is all going to have to be said again, and again... until...

This reminds me of the thrill of reading Cortazar’s Hopscotch. From a few pages into the book you never know where you are, how much you have read, how many pages are left. It is a totally disorienting experience. Suddenly, just when you are wishing the book would go on forever so that you can stay inside it like in a friend’s company you realise that what you are reading is familiar to you and so you check and yes, you have already read that chapter, the book is over. A cruel ending, but an unforgettable, inimitable one.

Some books hang around, though, and I often drink maté, nowadays.

… though like a stone, unbothered by it…

About the difference between séduire in French = attract, and “seduction” in English, which is bad. (Laura Says Frank Sinatra was arrested for it!)

seduce
To lead away from duty, accepted principles, or proper conduct.
What chance have we got? The rest of the world is at it, playing the game and we British are worrying about the political correctness of being sexual.

and we run away from it all in the the passion to own…

jobsworth, noun
1. (context, mostly, British) A minor clerical worker who refuses to be flexible in the application of rules to help a client or customer.
Etymology: From the phrase "It's more than my job's worth . . ."

I have come up against or stumbled into the semantic minefield of the uncanny in analysis. The frightening aspect of the familiar.

“He ascribes the essential factor in the production of the feeling of uncanniness to intellectual uncertainty; so that the uncanny would always, as it were, be something one does not know one's way about in.”

Being lost at home.
An African painter (Joël Mpah Doo) I was translating used the expression "exiled inside himself..."
Sometimes, I see an English word in French – on my shopping list on the kitchen wall I had scribbled “pain” which stayed bread for a while then suddenly one morning I saw it in English and wondered why I had written douleur on my shopping list
The other day it was towards the end = vers la fin… and I saw fin as nageoire.
fish-ends
.aleas = contingencies – fringencies – sitges – singe – singer - someone who sings when looked at through French eyes becomes someone acting the monkey…

and death shall have no dominion
dylan thomas

Magpies make a helluva racket!

compunction

"The morning segues into the afternoon." "they didst this"
and I'll end with a nice typo - translitted - and some sunny pictures... October and the weather is glorious.

plants 0909

Green and brown

noreply@blogger.com (Vita Brevis) — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 18:07:00 +0000

The things that strike me most about Ayrshire are how green everything is, with even pavements and walls colonised by green moss, how brown the river is, and how much the water looks like beer.

I absorb the damp greenness when I'm there. When I see it I feel ravenous for it, it fills me up, it hits a spot. But I don't miss it when I'm away. I love the bright dryness of where I live.

The first picture shows the driechness of concrete bars on a bridge, browbeaten by the weather to a dull, dirty grey, expressing a capture attempt, me trying to capture the river, the river and the countryside having captured me, owning me through a bond that can never be broken, a birth bond. That I ignore most of the time but that grabs me when I come close...

Green and brown. So green, so brown.

The salmon ladder which was built to make it easier for the fish to swim upstream to their spawning grounds, back to where they came from, and which actually makes it easier for the locals to poach the fish, by covering the end with wire, the salmon are like sitting ducks, and can be wheeched oot the watter using a big hook called a gaffe.

Pictures 16 and 17 show what looks like a precision-cut leaf line, 16 from under the branches, seventeen from across the field. Why do the branches of all these trees stop in such a straight line? Did the farmer shave them?

Sorn bridge, from whence my mother's ashes were strewn.

Rowan berries for a touch of orange. Green and brown are rich and lush and ok but after a while a bit, err, boring.

Not mushroom for these celtic chanterelles... I have never seen such crowds of fungi.

Talking about sitting ducks, I took some stale toast along to feed the little quackers, but along came this nasty big white bird and chased the ducks away. Try as I might, I couldn't get crumbs to the ducks, the swans commandeered all the food. I used to think of the phrase "I AM a swan" (from the ugly duckling) as a marvellous realisation of being beautiful, but in fact these creatures are very aggressive and being one is nothing to boast about.

In Augustus extremis

noreply@blogger.com (Vita Brevis) — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 10:58:00 +0000

At the beginning of the month, I signed up for an intensive classical singing course in the village. It was an incredible experience. Music and song resounding all over the place, inside and outside my head. I was shocked by the sheer physicality of the activity – it is rather like a sport.

One of the highpoints was hosting a rehearsal of a Polish tango in my living room (see picture). With Norwegian-born Swiss residing Alto Agnes Martin, Bruno Dottin playing cello and Laurent Bourreau on piano (Christine Box listening enthralled). Another was when I invited everybody back for a drink and was rewarded with a Schubert Impromptu from Laurent and some incongruous combinations of improvisations till 3 am.

For the final concert, being the least classical of the singers, I opened the show in the cathedral with Mary Magdalene’s theme from Jesus Christ Superstar – I don’t know how to love Him. The last day we did a concert at the local retirement home and with the pressure to perform replaced by the opportunity to entertain, I did my best rendition of Memory, based on Rhapsody on a windy night by TS Eliot.

I learnt as much listening to and watching the other singers as I did in the lessons and classes. I had my moment of fame when one of the girls at the supermarket check-out recognised me and told me my singing was "sublime"...

Then I went to Scotland (more later) and found myself singing “Funiculi, funicula” whilst stirring risotto for my father. But it was the piano accompaniment to a piece the choir sang by Brahms (How I sprang up in the night) which seems to have imprinted itself most deeply. It comes back to me in quiet moments.

First tango in Graz

noreply@blogger.com (Vita Brevis) — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 21:29:00 +0000

“Police are not treating the case as foul play” I read in an online newspaper. Foul play somehow amused me. I hadn’t come across the expression for a long time. It reeks of Sherlock Holmes. From Sherlock to Shylock and the pound of flesh no-one wants to pay.

In Shakespeare I find:
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

Was that allowed, even in His day? Is there a name for writing in a mixture of two or more languages?

Marseille turned out to be an astonishing city, with lots of shops and sea air. In parts it seems quite similar to Paris, but with people who give the impression they don’t mind you being there.

The film festival was a wondrous mixture of pellicules. Some were moving, some left me indifferent and some made me want to vaporise the author with a Martian heat ray. I can be quite categorical at times. If I don’t like something I tend to think it shouldn’t be allowed to exist, until I remember that people can have different tastes and mine doesn’t necessarily hold good for the known universe.

I was laughing with the team about the fact that the previous year no fewer than two out of the four films whose subtitles I converted into English had very long sequences of spiders playing with flies stuck in their web – an apt metaphor for the subtitle translator, thought I. The audience is free to stand up and walk out of the cinema, but the translator has to watch every frame. Just as we are sometimes the only people who REALLY read what we are translating because translation requires a grasp, a take on what is intended. Skimming doesn’t cut it.

English subtitles are required for the films entered in the international competition. The format was two lines of 35 characters each. It’s not a question of straight forward translation because the eye reads at a slower pace than the ear deciphers so the words have to be summarised if there is a lot of dialogue.

*
Naples is the last city
to hang out sheets on balconies.
*

There was washing on the balconies opposite my town centre hotel window. We subtitlers discussed this and someone said there were gated communities in America where hanging washing outside is prohibited.

tabula rasa. Guenon – this is a female monkey and a French surname but I could not establish a connection between the two.

Imbroglio - This word came to mind as im-brogue-lio but in fact the “g” is not supposed to be pronounced.
“Word History: The history of today's word has been through a bit of an imbroglio itself. It was borrowed recently from Italian. It is related semantically to embroil, taken from the French embrouiller "to tangle, confuse", a cousin of Italian imbroglio. In fact, in Old English, broil meant "to brawl". It only began to surrender that meaning in Middle English when French brûler "to burn" was borrowed and converted into broil, now with its current sense of baking.”

In primary school my two problem words were foliage – I picked it up as foilage and couldn’t get rid of the pronunciation for a while – and rogue – which I imagined was pronounced “rogg-ewe” until I heard it spoken for the first time at the headmaster’s daughter’s birthday party and realised I was very wrong.

The headmaster taught me to fold a letter.

There was a film about pigs flying and the French translator was flummoxed – quand les poules auront des dents is the rough equivalent. And there was a brilliant title for the narcissist, a lady who had stuck a camera down her throat to film her vocal chords and called the film something like "pictures of my voice going round in my head".

There was tango in front of the Opera House and on Tuesday nights tango in the alley in front of the Gymnase Theatre. The shoes are absolutely fascinating… I tried to draw them - the result was painful.

When I recently went to visit Sylvia in Graz, she took me to her tango club, and I spent a pleasant evening foot spotting – ankle spotting. Dietmar suddenly announced that the music had slowed down and I could try, and before I knew it I was “walking” a tango. It is a great feeling. The people in the Graz club travel to cities like Berlin or Barcelona to tango in the street.

Coincidentally, today, Thomas, who set off from Lombez with Phebus to walk sur les traces du rideau de fer is at Sylvia’s house in Graz.

Rush job...

noreply@blogger.com (Vita Brevis) — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 20:18:00 +0000

My analyst has erected gateposts to divert the traffic in front of her house off her lawn. I feel good about her re-defining her limits and protecting her patch. We both enjoy her garden. Sometimes I think I feel good about any kind of positive change.

This is a field not far from my house, which I discovered when I was out walking last Thursday. It is said to be “en jachère fleurie” – floral fallow?

I had to translate “audition” in the legal sense, which in English is “hearing”.

It made me think of the musical sense of audition which I suppose is “casting” in French.

Much as I would love to see myself as “good-natured” I have to admit when I try to do too many things at once I become churlish.

I like to take my time over blog posts, and tend to put off writing till I have a reasonable space of time to spend putting them together. However, the world is speeding up, things are becoming crazy, it is very hot, I have a l_o_t of work to do, last night there was a French Canadian storyteller in Lombez, Robert 7 Crows (who says Crow = Corneille and Corbeau = Raven… Mmm. For me, corbeau has always been crow but I have no time to check this ...) On Saturday night I’ll be singing (my workshop has a 6 minute slot) at the end of year extravaganza of Music’Halle and the next day it seems I’ll be off to Marseilles for a week on "business". (nudge nudge wink wink).

so this one is rushed.

Went to the seaside this weekend and when we got to Gruissan we found by sheer coincidence there was a vernissage of an exhibition containing a painting of Françoise. (Exhibition of paintings by Emma Boutin). So here is a very serendipitous snapshot of the subject having stepped out of the frame.

Words, words, glorious words

noreply@blogger.com (Vita Brevis) — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 21:24:00 +0000

Words that come up in the course of my work or reading, words that call out to me either because I’ve never seen them before, or because I have taken them for granted and never taken the trouble to look up what they mean.

Pipistrelles are bats. Pulchritude means physical comeliness. Molten seems to always go with rocks. Unbridgeable gaps. Led by their desire to know.

Psephology.

One day last week General Motors declared bankrupt. An abortion doctor was shot dead in an American church by an anti-abortionist. In France, the RMI became the RSA, to encourage people to work by making sure they earn more when employed than when unemployed. This incentive is being implemented against a background of rising unemployment, which is expected to reach 10% next year. I don’t know if anyone will benefit from it.

I believe that if wealth was redistributed, each member of the human race could live decently, have food and clean drinking water, be given a living wage.

The mayor of London is going to put 31 pianos around the capital for three weeks from the end of June, “with only a couple of metal chains and a laminated songbook for protection against the wiles of vandals and metropolitan musicophobes.”

An Air France plane from Brazil to Paris disappeared off the radar. No trace of it was found for fully a week.

For what it’s worth, I realised that there is “frique” in “Afrique”.

Going back slightly further, Anna Gavalda’s book Je l’aimais was released as a film starring Daniel Auteuil. I watched incredulously as he was interviewed and the film summarised as an account of the experiences of the character he played. That is not how I perceived the book at all. To me, the “Je l’aimais” clearly meant that she was saying that she had really loved him, and not the other way round, where the ambiguity would be about which woman - wife or mistress – he was finally admitting to loving. Or, rather, having loved.

I couldn’t believe that the interview was not with the leading lady rather than the leading man, whose role, to my mind, was secondary. The real love in the book is his mistress’, for she loves him exclusively, even moving to Paris to be near him. But he didn't let her "in".

I fondly remember reading Bertrand Russel’s In Praise of Idleness when I was an avid reader in my youth.

“Naipaul is Conrad's heir as the annalist of the destinies of empires in the moral sense: what they do to human beings. His authority as a narrator is grounded in the memory of what others have forgotten, the history of the vanquished.”