…and the “horror short stories” lost writer.

Yesterday in the bookstore I met an author, an unknown man who wrote and self-published a little book of “horror short stories”.

He asked for a book signing day.

I answered that we only do that, since a few years, for really published bigger authors, and also that he shouldn’t regret it : nobody probably would have come for him to our big store to have their book signed…

I know : not cool.

As he was talkative I suggested he asked to do this in smaller human-size bookstores, but also said that he’d probably see no line in front of the table.

We then talked about the writer’s disillusion of Level 2. The first is when he desperately want to be published. The other one is when he IS published, but nobody cares about his book.

We talked : sending his book to influencers & editors, about blogging, writing fan-fictions to get a name. We also talked about losing time – as he was – trying being a press secretary, an attaché.

I have no advice to tell to writers, but this man was a bit lost, obviously. Thus I asked him :

– What do you like?
– Writing.
– What don’t you write, then?

 

Is it the good path to get published with no audience, when you write horror short stories? What for? Hoping for money? Really?

Isn’t self editing a no-man’s land between putting the text online and having your book on tables in every store?

(Well, there’s this little pride when your brother-in-law buys you one to please you…)

Or is it better to just write, develop a talent and possibilities, find your music and determine something important : are you good, or not? Do you want to sell, or do you want to be read?

What happens when you work out of your skills, just besides, where you feel lost, untalented, and bored? Do you have to recenter, or do you learn things while you do it – thinking about the time you’ll be back to what you love and where you’re good?

 

Have a nice day!

 

 

Paul Valéry about “writing for someone”?

Paul Valéry writes in one of his Notebooks a dozen lines about… writing. I translate it – sorry for my English :

One must work for Someone; and not for unknowns. One must aim somebody, and the more you aim this someone clearly, the best is the work and the yield of the work. The work of spirit is entirely determined – only if someone is in front of it. The one who addresses, aims at someone, addresses to all. But the one who addresses to everybody addresses to nobody.
It is all about finding this someone. This somebody gives the tone to the language, gives the extent to explanations, measures the attention one can ask.
To picture someone is the great skill of the writer.

Again : sorry for my English. It’s very hard, here. I bolded the bold.

This declaration has a strange effect on me. It’s like being inside the head of a thinker (and in fact, that’s it).

• You want to say “Noooo that’s NOT that simple”.
• You want to say : “One must care about an audience”.
• Or maybe “You must write to please yourself, and the audience will come”.

Questions for bloggers, right?

But somewhere there’s a bell in my head saying “He’s right”. Some of us maybe invent a human someone, aggregating people we know, people we imagine, followers and readers, old friends, until we have this strange modeled golem : our Reader.

 

Thanks for reading, and have a nice day!

Jean-Pascal

Instagram : _bodylanguage_

 

Il faut travailler pour Quelqu’un ; et non pour inconnus. Il faut viser quelqu’un, et plus nous le visons nettement, meilleur est le travail et le rendement du travail. L’ouvrage de l’esprit n’est entièrement déterminé que si quelqu’un est devant lui. Celui qui s’adresse à quelqu’un, s’adresse à tous. Mais celui qui s’adresse à tous ne s’adresse à personne.
Il s’agit seulement de trouver ce quelqu’un. Ce quelqu’un donne le ton au langage, donne l’étendue aux explications, mesure l’attention qu’on peut demander.
Se représenter quelqu’un est le plus grand don de l’écrivain.

 

“#Blog for yourself and not to please an audience” – wait a minute…

I read many times about big success youtubers who “lost their soul” because they stopped being themselves – instead of it, they began to blog to “please the audience”. That’s baaad! This makes sense, right? Bending their style or their personality to what they supposed to know about the viewers is probably wrong. And each time, the article I read told it this way. Bad bad bad. Nah. On the naughty step!

When I think of that, though, I hear a bell in my head. That’s so precisely evident that my senses are on alert. I know, it’s a reflex.

There’s something similar in poetry. The “poet” is supposed to be “inspired” (by what?), and peeing gorgeous metaphors because… he’s a genius. BUT even the greatest poets agree to say that there’s probably a critic inside their magic brain. Like “another guy” inside, who analyzes and channels/canalyzes the flow.

Let’s listen to Baudelaire :

I pity those poets who are guided by instinct alone: I regard them as incomplete. In the spiritual life of the former a crisis inevitably occurs when they feel the need to reason about their art, to discover the obscure laws in virtue of which they have created, and to extract from this study a set of precepts whose divine aim is infallibility in poetic creation. It would be unthinkable for a critic to become a poet; and it is impossible for a poet not to contain within him a critic. Therefore the reader will not be surprised at my regarding the poet as the best of all critics.

Charles Baudelaire

This is a perfect pattern, a tool for this article :

Here, we’re searching for a frontier between “I write for myself” and “I write for my audience”.

• If you write 100% for yourself and you’re successful, good to you! You can stop reading this article and have subtle sex with your muse. Take your time, she likes it.
• If you write for your audience, you’re a backwoodsman losing yourself on the paths of wrongness and your audience will sense it. You forgot why they loved you. Kill yourself.

BUT

Think about Baudelaire, our French poet. You are probably aware that you never REALLY write for yourself : you, from the beginning, took care of the readers TOO. You analyze, you think, you weave your words, YOU are your first audience, this is it. It’s a radioactive pattern. You write, you work daily, you throw a bunch of arrows, you write for you AND you take care of your audience. You want to be loved, that’s all! You know the trees, and you also know there’s a forest. You’re great, because you dance with both. That’s great!

Thanks for reading!

 

Instagram : mariakdolores

 

Writers & Bloggers : Pleasure of bad books?

(Sorry for my wobbly French today…)

Bad books (and blogs) can be useful for a writer – but I suppose it’s a low level thing.

• It (possibly) can make your brain move, like this :
  • I would have written it better,
  • in another way,
  • I would have added this and that, etc…
• It makes you angry, and you can try to use this strange gas-oil which is anger.
• You can say that the author is a spirit-enemy (the useful thing of feeling or “inventing an enemy” is an old trick), it triggers your mobilization. Fight him… and write.
• Any negative feeling (next to anger is bitterness, hate, sarcasms, etc) can be used too. Your clockworkbrain is activated. Some guys (in your head) will step into the breach. Geronimo!
• After all, you could maybe find a good idea or a pleasant formulation in a bad book or a bad blog, it’s really the idea of a seed found within dust and rocks. Steal it and make it grow your own way, haha!

 

I suggest you prepare and foresee an antidote (a good book) – to clean your head, by Jove!

This, of course, is an exercise. You can not separate books and blogs between “good ones and bad ones”. It’s all relative, silly. It depends.

You have to consider that what YOU write can also be considered the same way by another reader. Your wordings as a bad place, as a bad example, inspiring better things? Awwweee! That’s a good (low level) thing, right? 🙂

 

Thanks for reading!

 

 

 

 

 

“Say your Say” – when a thinker’s tension needs a relief

Everybody knows this tension when you have to say something to someone.

You can write a letter to this person and then destroy it. You can organize a conversation because you “have to say your word”.

You can also read this article : “Venting of Paper“.

You “prepare” what you have to say for hours, hours, and days, overthinking your future monolog. And the day you’re on it, it’s even richer than what you prepared. Your mind is propelled by the tension you had in yourself for so long. You reach the end of your say with a feeling of relief.

Until next time, right?

It’s a similar process when you have to think how to write a blog article. You found the idea, you’re in front of your Macintosh, and… some days, it’s impossible : you don’t find the proper way to do it, you don’t find your first sentence, it simply does not move along.

Then you know what? Instead of watching the wall or your lamp like a dead louse, act like when you have to say something so somebody : find a random person around (your mother, your cat, a friend you can call), and explain to him/her what you would like to explain in this article, how you don’t succed, or maybe just ask a few questions, then jump through the first window which will appear in the person’s response. Blah blah time.

Your mind, propelled by the tension of “I have an idea I’d like to blog about but don’t know how to do it”, will do the rest : you’ll monolog, discovering probably new ideas along, et voilà. Then, say thanks to the poor headshaking listener, and write.

You can also read this article : “Get some help from an ignorant“.

Thanks for reading!

Instagram : bodylanguage

 

A woman’s hat on the table – Behaviorism in literature

In a Hemingway short story, the only visual information we have of a couple talking is that she took off her hat and put it on the table. Though, you can almost SEE them when you read the text, because of what they say.

Question :

In a book, do you prefer to read

1. “She was sad, and about to disconnect herself from reality”
2. An inner monologue as if she had a microphone in her head
3. A description of her movements, her mouth, her actions

…showing her disconnected sadness.

Well it’s the same for movies. Do you want to see someone act slowly, randomly and break something, or do you prefer a narrator explaining that “This day, she was bored, sad and electric”?

“Behaviorism is a school of psychology that studies that only behavior that can be observed or measured. It does not include the study of emotions or motives”.

Of course, there are behaviorist writers, who like to SHOW what’s happening instead of EXPLAIN the psychology of characters, as if they were a god.

Tool : What could YOU do about this tool, this pattern, in another field, in poetry, photography, marketing? Show or explain? Do you consider you audience as ignorants you have to tell everything to, or do you trust their mind, their intelligence?

she took off her hat and put it on the table – what does it mean?

Thanks for reading!

 

 

 

 

 

“The best way to take all people is to take them for what they think they are” #Faulkner

“I’d have wasted a lot of time and trouble before I learned that the best way to take all people is to take them for what they think they are.”

― William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

 

Instagram : mabelmorrison

Patterning Unusual : thus my own casual #blogging #French #poetry – #ESL #meta

“It’s what I do that teaches me what I’m looking for”, says Pierre Soulages (painter). This is exactly what I felt when I began to blog in English.

Well, I’m French, and if I’m able to write in English, I’m still and stay an ESL (English as Second Language) guy. It’s a strange way to stay focused, I can tell you!

I thus know I make little mistakes everywhere. At the beginning I asked some friend to fix them, then I had to think about it and decided to let go, and forced to learn a certain form of casualness.

There are mistakes left – I hope it’s a little charming (?)…

I add some French words here and there, voilà, your turn to learn!

I have to make it short too, because

• 1/ I know you don’t have time
• 2/ I’m not skilled enough, and my vocabulary is poor

I learn new words and idioms in each article, though, because I have to dig for them (I use Word Reference now, my neighbourtab all day long). Call it “ESL stairs”.

I also don’t care about inventing new words (I often aggregate two), most of the time because I hesitate between two.

As I present tools, dials and levers here (which are usable concepts, right?) in one-paged-articles, I really have to forget to be rigorous, and I know I take many shortcuts. That’s fun (or funny?) –

I catalog here all the tools I found useful in my life, and it makes me explore my shelves, which is a source of good bliss and reassessment – oh a new word!). I hope some of you will peck the seed…

I really observed and gazed at some other people’s blog to understand how to pattern and structure articles, and how to title them. I did it my way, then…

 

All this produce a sort of “Poetic License”. My few norms are strong (produce a short tool minilecture), but I really acquired a freedom I had to learn… from being an ESL.

Some neuroscientists say that having another language is good for the brain. Why wouldn’t you try to blog in French, ehhh?

Thanks for reading! Bonne journée !

 

 

The Importance of rumunchewminating #Drafts in #WordPress #Blogging

 

Bonjour !

Someone one day explained me WordPress and its tools (thanks, dear). I needed time to notice, though, that instead of writing my blog ideas on a notebook, I could use the DRAFTS. As I’m writing this, I have… 86 drafts. Sometimes it’s just a Title, sometimes it’s a whole article… without the last sparkle or the binder that would allow me to publish it.

For “Draft”, we say “Brouillon” in French (and oh I already guess this word will be a total mess to pronunce for you), which implies a sheaf of meanings.

A draft is a draft. If a person is muddled, we also say “he is draft” (il est brouillon), which makes sense. You could say this person is drafty, but I just discovered it means “uncomfortably breezy”, how sad. I love your “drafted” or “draftee” words, though. OK.

Drafts are like external little brains or memories. I suggest you read over a few of them, from time to time, putting back some of their seeds in your mind, in a useful Le Corbusier Effect. Your brain will rumunchewminate them like a little cow it is.

Sometimes a draft will stay sleepy for months. One good morning though, you’ll open it, add a paragraph and bingo, idea deedee, une idée ! The whole package disembarks and you can click on “Publish”. How come?

Another day of brain-silence, try this : go down to your last and 110th draft, open it, add something, a word, two lines. If it doesn’t unfold, close it back, that’s all. Next! Make them climb back up!

Have a nice day. Thanks for reading!

 

Simmering & Fermenting Ideas of #LeCorbusier #creativity

Le Corbusier was a French architect. I just found a quote and I try to translate in English. It’s a good tool you can use to be creative (if you need to) :

When a task is given to me, I use to put it inside my memory, which mean I don’t allow myself to draw any sketch, for months. The human head have a certain independence : it is a box in which you can pour loose elements of a problem. One let then “float”, “simmer”, “ferment”. Then, one day, on a spontaneous initiative of the inner being, a click happens : one takes a pen, one gives birth on the paper. The idea comes out, the baby comes out : he comes into the world, he is born.

This is a great tool, and it can be mixed with other “common sense” plans (creative people know, for example, that they “work” in front of their blank page, but also that they get “ideas” elsewhere, walking in the street, washing the dishes or after making love). So, think about your problem and go talk to the birds, or bake a cake!

Also Google : Serendipity

Thanks for reading!

#cat #kingcat #Bidou

 

Marguerite Duras – #quote

“Soudain, tout d’un coup, elle sait, elle sait qu’il ne la comprendra jamais, qu’il lui manque la capacité de comprendre une telle perversité. Et il ne pourra jamais aller assez vite pour l’attraper”.

 

“Suddenly, all at once, she knows, knows that he doesn’t understand her, that he never will, that he lacks the power to understand such perverseness. And that he can never move fast enough to catch her”.

 

Marguerite Duras

Brian Eno & Steve Reich : Music to listen to while writing

When you write, you have to focus.

If you are one of these young people, you have to listen to the music you love, you put TV on, you check your phone and your Facebook Instagram Twitter whatever accounts, you open the window to hear the cars passing by and you Skype your best friend while you work on your exams. Perfect multitask.

I do not own this kind of brain. I really have to focus!

If you write, sometimes you need music, but music is too much. Music is CALLING you. It goes :

“Hey! Listen! I’m interesting! There’s a change here! Listen to meee!”

But no music and closed window, it’s silence. Sometimes, it’s too much. It’s a no.

I thought about this a lot. When I have to work, I ban singers, because, errr, they sing. Pfff. They talk to you, right? They talk about problems, mainly. OK : no singers.

I pick up instrumental musics for the mood. Röyksopp or any electro dancing music are great. Classical is a whole kingdom : I choose Brahms if I want powerful brown thick thinking, Prokofiev if I want triangles and fast drive, or Debussy if I wanna be impressionismistonic. You can push to Boulez (complex rotating-moving architectures) or Hindemith or Chopin for other “moods”.

• Between watching TV and watching nothing, you can evolve around a painting.
• Between listening to music and silence, you can write on Eno or Reich.

Both are enough “neutral” to let you work. Both are enough “full” to feed you.

Eno’s Thursday afternoon is a one hour piece. It’s not really music (and it NOT new age music), it’s more like a PLACE. Listen at a low level. Layers of sounds passing by. Quiet like a cloister, a convent. It’s a bit aquatic, slowly evolving like if you were watching clouds. You have a place to think, to work. You will notice it’s a set of loops. Some sounds come back. You’re in a fresh air coil…

Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians is a one hour piece. It’s a strong fast weaving of notes. They call it “repetitive music” because of the pulses, but it changes constantly. It’s also a “decor” for you to work, but more intense, with more DRIVE. Energy. The 1978 ECM recording is the best. It’s more like you were watching a land from a moving train.

Put them in “loop”. Eno has been in my place, sometimes, a whole day. It’s like a painting. Reich makes you wait, pushes your brain to fast mode. It’s more clever than that. Each piece makes you move. It triggers something.

Find your own tools (Phil Glass? JS Bach? The Field?).

Thanks for reading !

 

 

Present Participles and “Stream of Consciousness” – Part II

To

In Part I we saw how French translators played with the “present participles” used by some authors like James Joyce of William Faulkner to invent a poetic style.

It has been enormously studied here (and I suppose in America too!). The use of “ing”, say the connaisseurs, is like painting an action, making it eternal, or fixed like a photography. Mainly, it’s poetry in prose!

This article is about French writers, though. French traductions of Faulkner and Joyce had such an impact here that some of our best writers wanted to use this music.

This first page of Belle du Seigneur, by Albert Cohen, is a marvellous example (I bolded the participles to show you) :

“Descendu de cheval, il allait le long des noisetiers et des églantiers, suivi des deux chevaux que le valet d’écurie tenait par les rênes, allait dans les craquements du silence, torse nu sous le soleil de midi, allait et souriait, étrange et princier, sûr d’une victoire. À deux reprises, hier et avant-hier, il avait été lâche et il n’avait pas osé. Aujourd’hui, en ce premier jour de mai, il oserait et elle l’aimerait.

Dans la forêt aux éclats dispersés de soleil, immobile forêt d’antique effroi, il allait le long des enchevêtrements. Beau et non moins noble que son ancêtre Aaron, frère de Moïse, allait, soudain riant et le plus fou des fils de l’homme, riant d’insigne jeunesse et amour, soudain arrachant une fleur et la mordant, soudain dansant, haut seigneur aux longues bottes, dansant et riant au soleil aveuglant entre les branches, avec grâce dansant. Suivi des deux raisonnables bêtes, d’amour et de victoire dansant tandis que ses sujets et créatures de la forêt s’affairaient irresponsablement, mignons lézards vivant leur vie sous les ombrelles feuilletées des grands champignons. Mouches dorées traçant des figures géométriques, araignées surgies des touffes de bruyère rose et surveillant des charançons aux trompes préhistoriques, fourmis se tâtant réciproquement et échangeant des signes de passe puis retournant à leurs solitaires activités, pics ambulants auscultant, crapauds esseulés clamant leur nostalgie, timides grillons tintant, criantes chouettes étrangement réveillées.”

If I just try to “put it in English”, you’ll see how Cohen makes music with that, pushing it too far in a process of strangeization.

…suddenly laughing and the craziest of man’s sons, laughing of notable youth and love, suddenly pulling up a flower and biting it, suddenly dancing, high long booted lord, dancing and laughing at the blinding sun between the branches, with grace dancing.

See? Music! Repetitions, participles, and an unappropriate way of using words. It’s not “dancing with grace”, but “with grace dancing”. This is a lover coming to see his lady !

Here’s Claude Simon now. This extracts happens during WWI :

mais comment savoir, comment savoir ? les quatre cavaliers et les cinq chevaux somnambuliques et non pas avançant mais levant et reposant les pieds sur place pratiquement immobiles sur la route, la carte la vaste surface de la terre les prés les bois se déplaçant lentement sous et autour d’eux les positions respectives des haies des bouquets d’arbres des maisons se modifiant insensiblement, les quatre hommes reliés entre eux par un invisible et complexe réseau de forces d’impulsions d’attractions ou de répulsions s’entrecroisant et se combinant pour former pour ainsi dire par leurs résultantes le polygone de sustentation du groupe se déformant lui-même sans cesse du fait des incessantes modifications provoquées par des accidents internes ou externes

…where we see five somnabulic horses walking so slowly that they seem to stay, each step making the land around them moving, their combination of silhouette slowly changing like a geometric grid…

If you’re interested, play with Google with this. Albert Cohen and Claude Simon (in La Route des Flandres – see here!) used this tool like masters. They invented something which was between narration and description… but that’s another article!

Tools :

• It’s your time. I think you got the Pattern of all this. You could maybe apply this pattern in another era : baking? management? politics?
• In literature, what if you… examine the English translation of one of these books? To… extend the process of course. Bending it your way…

Thanks for reading!

The Yoknapatawpha Rule

This is not a French Tool, but an American one.

When he was a young writer, William Faulkner was fascinated by France and by planes. He wanted to be a pilot, he wanted to fight the Germans in the war.

One day he understood that, instead of searching inspiration around the world, he should write about the land he knew, his land, the South. So he invented the Yoknapatawpha County “based on, and nearly geographically identical to, Lafayette County, in Mississipi”. From this time, almost everything he wrote happened around this place.

Tool :

The Yoknapatawpha Rule states (or should I say “stipulates”, like “stipule”, in French ?) that you can write your blog with your experience. Seeds are provided by the events of your life. Of course you can dance with concepts and weave with other things. It’s just a tool, a seed provider…

Nietzsche, in another time, said the same thing in a more… grandiloquent style, but that looks good :

Il faut avoir du chaos en soi pour accoucher d’une étoile qui danse

One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star

 

 

Constantly Random is an Instagram flaw

Instagram is a great funny app to use and to watch.

I noticed that if you want many followers, you have to be… persistent. If you take pictures of street art, or portraits of homeless people, or pot plants in black and white, dancers in NYC or “I see beauty in dirty ruins”, macro insects or abstract pieces of wood minimalism, you will get many followers.

If, like me, you take “constantly random” pictures and you wander in all kind of “styles”, you’re done. Many people won’t understand what you’re doing, and the few followers you get will quickly unfollow because they dislike you post a happy bee after a blu-ray movie, a wall texture before a black & white dead tree, a HDR sky next to a symmetrical French architecture.

There are some tools, dials and levers to pick, here.

Dial : What kind of spirit are you ? Are you, like a deep-sea diver, exploring a small territory, or are you, like a bee-air forager, smelling and exploring all that you find (from the art of warfare to linguistics, electronic music to Prussia history, American painters to Russian short stories) ?

Lever : Where do you put the lever, from “I show what I love to show” (with the random effect consequences) to “I focus on one thing only” (with the purpose to be more readable and get more audience) ? What is your blog about ? Food ? Or poetry, images, weather, books, music and politics ?

Tool : Play this game : try to find the hidden pattern behind the apparent randomness. Yeah, dear, bend over this caldron and detect it. The forager bee draws interesting patterns in the air.

https://www.instagram.com/jprobocat/

Exploring movies from Tennessee Williams’s plays…

Once you decided to go under the surface of “news”, there are many ways to explore the movie history. I once imagined I explored a year of cinema : let’s begin with 1960. Let’s watch Psycho, l’Avventura, La Dolce Vita, Elmer Gantry, Exodus and The Magnificent Seven…

There’s another way. Which is to find the author. My best choice (from far) has been Tennessee Williams. You can watch : A Tramway Named Desire, The Night of the Iguana, Suddenly Last Summer or Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Rose Tatoo, This Property is Condemned or Baby Doll (there are more, but these are masterpieces).

Check the Internet Movie Database !

For a month, forget Netflix and shows. Watch these movies. Read about T. Williams, his life, etc. You’ll plunge, then, in a strange world with a taste of the South.

Something between William Faulkner and Anton Chekhov. One days I read that these two were, for him, the two best writers of history.

There is no “tool”, here. Just a map. An idea. Make a step aside. Stop reaction on “what they propose you”. Choose your territory.

Moite, complexe, adulte : it’s clever-South, clammy adult movies for adults… You’ll have problems to go back to average shows, I can promise you…

 

 

 

 

The Art of “Pause with Seeds”

You are a writer and you’re happy because it’s late in the evening and you just finished a chapter. You’re good !

You can go to bed, you’re tired after all ! You deserve it, and so on…

But don’t.

Just go on, for a few minutes. Add ideas, little words, drop them on the page. Draw something. More : write shite here, and there. Anything.

The day after, you will find all these. Oh ! You will trash most of it, of course. BUT, maybe, you will find one seed, or two. Seeds for the mind.

It will (maybe) give you a sparkle, une étincelle, a little little flame, with maybe you could start a big new fire.

But there is more. Seeds were in your head TOO. Your brain worked and played with them all night long. Who knows ? Maybe you’ll find a whole tree in your head in the morning, full of fruits, et voilà pour vous !

Tool : Think about the “Pause with Seeds” concept. Where could you use it ? Writing ? Creativity ? Music ?

#tulip #monochromatic #abstraction

 

“Keep 100 books”, or the impossible cure of Bibliopathie…

OK I’m french. My english is a frenglish, it’s rusty and wobbly, et voilà. Try me, though. I’ll do my best. I promise. If sometimes it’s too bad, just laugh at me or roll you eyes.

Imagine one day you could fall in love with a human being afflicted with a strange funny disease I call Bibliopathie – which is of course the “too many books syndrome”. Noooo not to the point of bibliomania…

You love, OK. You sea the disease (or, err, you sea the symptoms, which are causing a mess in your eyes and spirit : THERE ARE BOOKS EVERYWHERE IN THIS PLACE !). You wanna help.

Good to you.

Talk to him (or to her, but let’s say it’s a “him”), and try to find a way to get rid of… some of them. Observe. He’ll think. He’ll say “You are sooo right”. He will give three books to friends… and buy four.

He will probably sell a whole lot of Napoleonic Wars books of eBay, and buy biographies of Bartok, Brahms and Debussy with the money. Plus this little pocket hardcover of Witches of Shup, which was so cute you know ?

So you invent the magic Lever : “Just think, and keep 100 books !”. Tadaa ! Easy !

He will agree, fascinated. And you will see him plonger dans cette idée stupéfiante et magique.

Great ! OK !

Then, he begins. These Faulkner ? I keep. These Thomas Bernhard ? I keep them all, right ? This bios (Losey, Kazan, Mike Oldfield, Marianne Faithfull and Churchill and Abraham Lincoln), well, I just need them. Etc… Of COURSE etc !

You just discovered this : there is no cure for bibliopathie. Just let go.

Buy new shelves.

 

Duras

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Marguerite #Duras – L'Amant. Made with @instaquoteapp #instaquote

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“I need authority, although I do not believe in it.”

“Although I am an anarch, I am not anti-authoritarian. Quite the opposite: I need authority, although I do not believe in it. My critical faculties are sharpened by the absence of the credibility that I ask for. As a historian, I know what can be offered.”
Ernst Jünger