Bloggers/Writers : Let it rest!

Bloggers/Writers : Let it rest!

I read an interview of Arcadi Volodos, a pianist.

He says that when he works on a record, he makes it during the night. When it’s done, the tapes are abandoned for a few weeks.

Then he listens to them, weeks later, with a new ear. Sound montage, then? The less possible.

When you write on something, it must flow. The beginning is sometimes hard, but then, here you go! When it flows, it’s so good, right?

Si vous pataugez dans la semoule (if you “wade in semolina”), you get nowhere (fast or slow). Let it rest, then. Forget it. Write some else. Go for a walk (these times : around your room).

Drafts are gold. Forget about all of them. Let them rest. For weeks.

One day you open something, you…

1. wade in more
2. have a spark

 

I don’t know how it works. Maybe you have a new eye and you wonder how you could be stuck like that. Maybe it’s magic. Maybe your brain works alone when you sleep, haha. The reason why it works sometimes is a mystery, there you and me don’t care about it. So there.

 

Have fun!

https://afrenchtoolbox.wordpress.com/tag/writing/

WordPress Categories & Tags : my tips

Hi! I have one tip for your blog (I personally don’t follow it) :

If you want followers, choose a little field and stick to it.

Photos of cats, fashion in Italy, collecting forks, French painters, whatever.

I do the contrary, my blog talks about :

• “Things have many faces”.
• “Subtlety is better than false simplicity”.
• “Disillusions are part of the game”.
• “Rules are mostly movable/beware of mindsets”.
• “It’s funny/useful to compare or weave separated things”.
• “Art is a great buoy”.
• “Watch in the now/around you/the propensity of things”.
• “Finding structures as intelligence”.
• “You can quit the surface of new things”.
• “No one is a prince in every Kingdom”.
• “Keep aspects hidden/Be a Waldgänger”.
• “Consider other ways to change/Know how to wait”.
• “We need to be disturbed/There are many ways to deal with problems”.
• “Stay a dilettant/Slide and don’t bear down”…

…therefore I don’t have many followers. A few hundreds, in… years.

• Finder Keeper Sharer, “What is my blog about?”
• Constantly Random is an Instagram flaw

 

Your work will be found if you share it on Social Medias, but most of the time it’ll come from Google and other web search engines. You need to choose your Categories & Tags.

https://en.support.wordpress.com/posts/tags/

It’s never been easy for me to choose. Here’s what I learned :

1. WordPress limits the number of tags & categories (combined) to 15.
2. Invent only a few big categories, it’s useless to be subtle here.
3. For an article, check one to three categories, not much.
4. For tags, use the obvious (ex : France, Recipe, Cake), enlarge (ex : Culture, Traveling), then be more specific (ex : Chocolate, Paris). It’s about combine-harvesting larger!
5. Conclusion : focus on TAGS.

 

You wrote an article about Hemingway?

• Category it : USA, Literature – that’s it.
• Tag it : Hemingway, Author, Books, Reading, Literature, USA, Novels, Writer, etc…

 

Think “hook”. Use Google to find other hashtags if you need.

 

Thanks for reading!

 

Instagram : clairemahoney

Picasso & how to glean the best from letters.

Some Picasso‘s exes were writing him letters, sometimes daily, for years. I read that he loved these a LOT.

I’m writing an article about “Types of Muses”, idea given by his life & wives. Instead of giving a list of names with a few labels on each (intellectual/innocent, tortured/happy, silent/talkative) let’s say he met very different persons – which is common, but means maybe a lot more for a artist.

Daily stories, thoughts, attacks, melancholia, gossips, hopes or life moments, anything : Picasso opened the envelopes and loved them all with gourmandise, like love of good food, it “made his honey”, like we say in France (“Faire son miel”) : He knew how to glean the best from these letters.

Why, what for?

This leads me to some ideas or tools :

• Keeping bonds with personalities that count.
• A way to make excellent use of everything, extract or invent seeds of them.
• A form of happiness – to be a “best gleaner”, a happy amor fati person, a dancer with what “comes”.
• It also shows a strength. Knowing what he wants in his life, what he’s worth, in a way : “…but words will never break me”.
• What would one do else with daily letters? Trash them? It’s a pressure, right? Some likes pressure from others, because it’s life?
• Knowing that these persons think about him?
• Simple entertainment?

 

It makes me wonder about the daily writers too :

• Was it a promise – to keep in touch?
• When you know you write to Picasso (even if he is your “ex”), you stand up differently, you have to be “up to the conversation partner”, which is great for steam and inspiration, of course…
• Therefore it gives you a force, ideas, attitude, and a desire to impress, probably.
• A displacement/substitution for love and conversation…

 

(Hmm sorry I’ll be Picasso-ed for a moment)

Thanks for reading!

JP

 

Paul Valéry about “writing for someone”?

Why I talk to my exes

You’re great / You’re not great anymore

 

Seeking Circuits

I found this in a Siri Hustvedt book :

Jaak Panksepp was a neuroscientist who said that what animates us is a “seeking system”, which pushes all mammals, a mouse or a human, to explore or understand what’s around, and to extract a meaning from every situation we meet.

A quick Google search lead me to this paragraph, which will make thinkers smile :

‘’For humans, this desire to search is not just about fulfilling our physical needs. Panksepp says that humans can get just as excited about abstract rewards as tangible ones. He says that when we get thrilled about the world of ideas, about making intellectual connections, about divining meaning, it is the seeking circuits that are firing.”

E. Yoffe

I think there are ranks here – from crazy seeking for useless lols on Internet to exploration of other cultures and areas of knowledge…

Some also say that depression is caused by a failure in our seeking system…

Thanks for reading!

One-Lined Ideas for Writers, Part II

The suites of transformations you need to express things, respecting the conditions your have to respect.

You write, you read what you just wrote, in a loop. A closed balanced between you and you. A pleasure can resonate.

Pull weapons out of other people’s work – to use you own resources.

Find the person you write for – even if this person does not really exist. Golem it.

Use what is made for use. Find a drawer : open it. Break what is fragile. Push what tilts.

Try what has never be done, but appears as possible.

Your work can always been gone back over. This is your job. Find your “until”.

Try a thousand ways to write an idea until you meet a favorable words figure.

Find a force. Find where to use it. Apply a force.

At one moment you are attracted by what is needed, by what goes forward to the goal.

You dream to write, you desire to write, you call. But it’s not to be confused with the state where you MAKE.

Our most precious states are unstable – the artist answers trying to stabilize them.

What you feel. What you do. What you want to make feel.

 

All these microseeds come from Paul Valéry‘s Poietis (Poïétique). They aren’t quotes, I kneaded them for your pleasure. Have fun.

One-Lined Ideas for Writers, Part I

Thanks for reading!

200 Followers! Thank you!!

Hey everybody! I salute you!

More than two years ago I began with this article :

https://afrenchtoolbox.wordpress.com/2015/08/07/a-matter-of-levers/

I had some great help from a WordPress blogger, and ONE follower…

Today I reached 200 “real” followers (197 + 3 “by email” – more than 350 with Social Medias)  and reached more than 1000 views in the month of January. Waow!

It’s little when you know some other blogs, but it’s a big satisfaction for me. Merci !

I love to blog. I stand up and I stood up thanks to it. It’s organizing my messy brain, and at the same time I love sharing little ideas (tools) with you.

Thank you for being there! Thank you for liking it when you do…

I invite you to steal anything from it and share it if you think it can be useful, or build your own text from this. Ideas are floating and they are free. Tools should be shared.

One day, someone told me that 40 followers was a classroom.

Well, it’s a bigger one today.

Bonne journée ! Have a nice day!

Ohh : 201 now 🙂

Proust : “Beautiful books are written in a kind of foreign language”

“Beautiful books are written in a kind of foreign language”.

 

Isn’t it true? What about other textfields? Articles? Theater plays? Dialogs in a movie? Blogs?

It’s about style, but not only. It’s about strangeization (adding little strange elements in the words flow to raise the reader’s eyebrows) but not only.

 

I blogged for eight years in French, and then now I write in English, precisely because it’s not my native language. I have to stay simple, to let go, I have to admit I’m not skilled enough to write as I would have liked to. I wrote an article about it : Writing in another language.

…until I realized it can be pleasant or funny for English readspeakers to read my warped little articles here :

1. I make mistakes (I’m sorry for that!)
2. I make mistakes on purpose
3. I add French words in the phrases (so there), et voilà !
4. I often hesitate between two words and then I aggregate them in a forfun way…

 

But I think Proust says more. I like this idea of inventing a slightly weird style in your own native language, when you write. This is a little string in the harp of writing creativity, I agree, but to me it’s an important string.

When I discover a new blog, I explore the ideas it presents, of course, but I really LOVE to find little leaning elements, the raising eyebrows kind…

…written in a kind of foreign language

Yes sometimes it goes a bit far. I remember my shock when I began to read Faulkner, with his risky unpunctuated flows of conscience pages. Or Joyce, of course.

 

In France, the infinite, complex and delicious pages of Marcel Proust, the false spoken style of Céline, the gorgeous style of Colette or Jean Giono, the toxic pleasures of Marguerite Duras. I’m French. I read them in an awe, surprised and amazed by how they dare to write.

I do wonder how translators try to… transmit this in English!

 

Tools :

Is it a tool? Do you think about it when you write? How?

 

I could hands can see cooling fingers invisible swan-throat where less than Moses rod the glass touch tentative not to drumming lean cool throat drumming cooling the metal the glass full overfull cooling the glass the fingers flushing sleep leaving the taste of dampened sleep in the long silence of the throat I returned up the corridor, waking the lost feet in whispering battalions in the silence, into the gasoline, the watch telling its furious lie on the dark table.

Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

 

(yes it’s about a guy in the night searching of the carafe of water in darkness)

 

 

 

<< Virginia Woolf would sit down to thank a friend for sending her a slab of nougat from Saint-Tropez, but, put in mind of France by the package, she soon found herself talking only of the novel. “My great adventure is really Proust,” she wrote, “I am in a state of amazement; as if a miracle were being done before my eyes. How, at last, has someone solidified what has always escaped—and made it too into this beautiful and perfectly enduring substance? One has to put the book down and gasp. The pleasure becomes physical—like sun and wine and grapes and perfect serenity and intense vitality combined.” >>

 

 

First Ever & Hitherto Unheard, a words combination game

Fool’s dew – Heartened letterbox – Heavy-headed butterfly

Well that’s an easy game, keeping in mind that a little minibell could ring somewhere each time you pronounce a new combination of words. Ding!

Today you can even check with Google. Then you could be surprised : I googled “grapes in fire” and I found one. And I was wrong to imagine a Ding! with my “heavy-headed butterfly” : there’s one in a poem – by a Kathy Walden – with this one.

You get easier unheards when you :

1. stick words together
2. watch names on a “not my country” map and translate each
3. combine words from different languages
4. try to invent titles
5. random play with a dictionary
6. poetize
7. combine three remote-fields words

 

What’s the purpose, dear?

Invention? A game to be “aware” of words? Seeds for poetry? A tool to find good article titles? An invitation to learn other languages?

Butterfly (flying butter, really??) in French is Papillon, in Spanish Mariposa. Play, combine, invert, etc…

 

Let write a poem (or a country music song, lalère) :

Hey heavy-headed butterfly
Grapes are on fire in the West

My heartened letterbox awaits
The fool’s dew for y’all

And a caterpillar cheek kiss

Are you all safe?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Non Finito : Inchoateness in #Art

There’s a Wikipedia page about sculpture : Non Finito. We could begin with this.

Non finito is a sculpting technique meaning that the work is unfinished. Italian in origin, it literally means “not finished”. Non finito sculptures appear unfinished because the artist only sculpts part of the block, the figure sometimes appearing to be stuck within the block of material.

An unfinished piece of Art can be caused by the death of the artist, obviously, but now it’s also an esthetics purpose. You can imagine many ways of reading it :

• Showing you a little of the act of creation
• A failure, fatigue
• No more money/no more inspiration
• A refusal to decide it is “done”
• A way to say it could be improved indefinitely
• Impossibility to find perfection
• Something finished or “too beautiful” is exhausting, disagreeable
• It makes the audience think and wander within the “what could have happened”

 

In some fields, the “never finished” thing is constant : there are, for example, no finished Cathedrals in France. And I should explore it about Orson Welles, for example, who constantly seemed to be away and off with the idea of finishing and editing a movie.

Of course, there are problems with that concept. The “unfinished” thing can make the artist appear as a smart-ass doing is “non finito” thing. If it’s a trend to do this, what’s the point?

“This can be finished later” : some composers (or theater plays writers) constantly work on their stuff, and Proust, the French writer, is well known for his “quillings” : he added and added hundreds of little papers, adding fragments of texts to the existing text, and, as says Wikipedia : Proust died before he was able to complete his revision of the drafts and proofs of the final volumes.

In fact, it’s difficult for an artist to know, therefore to decide, when a piece of art is DONE. Some artists, like the painter Turner, decided to come back to work after a long time, and to put it further. Thus, you can finish is… many times.

Of course, this makes you think about the way it’s done. You can work back on a poem, even on a movie, but it’s harder to do it on an album – I read an interview of Peter Gabriel who was telling that he would love to redo some of his CDs. It can be remixed, remastered, but the record companies would unlikely allow him to change them really.

Mike Oldfield did it with Tubular Bells. He said in an hilarious interview that the original album was full of mistakes and flaws, so he redid it completely with a perfect sound and digital recording. Decades after the 1973 one, the new version was a success, but after a few months, the good old one was back on the shelves…

Tools & Dials :

What about YOUR art? How do you blog? How do you write? When do you know it’s over? Do you ask someone? Do you think about it if you paint?

Thanks for reading!

(So sorry for my bad English)

Instagram : pleasesoft

 

 

 

 

 

Gleanpickupping seeds & tools in a Gidon Kremer interview

In a French grey morning of August, I’ve had my coffee with two good slices of brioche, frame window staring, in front of an ominous sky, at the cut out moving trees in the wind, shhhh.

Mind wandering…

According to your job, your availability, your passions, you have different way of “entering contact with reality” :

• A photographer type will watch around him with the “Can I take a picture here, when, from where?”.
• A musician type will analyze some new song he hears, decorticating it like an alarm-clock.
• A poet type will find a good word in a book then might begin to weave a poem in his head.
• The climber type will watch these city walls… etc…

You… just have to put your “mode on” (and YES, you can have many “modes on” ready in your head, haeccity oblige).

 

I read an interesting interview of Gidon Kremer, violonist, in a classical music magazine. I read this interview with two modes on.

1. First was : “Find maybe some music to listen to” (I found Schumann, Weinberg, Arvo Pärt, and a Prokofiev melody)…
2. The other one was my blogger mode : “What little structure, what tool, what tropism can I find in his interview?”.

 

So, well, I learned things about Gidon Kremer himself, his friends, career, evolutions, wonders, etc. He’s an interesting person, the typical clever artist (for me he’s a cousin of Bill Bruford, the drummer).

Eventually, my second “mode on” found quotes, wonders, seeds to plant (here or there) and to meditate on :

• We live a physical house, but also in some spiritual homes, other “places” we belong to.
• Playing very few notes is more difficult than pure virtuosity.
• When you find difficult to play or understand something, you maybe need to find parallel structures in other artists or situations : comparison enrichment.
• You can explore a field (movies, music) with artists, eras, but also labels or studios, producers, etc. Let’s write something about ECM.
• Should an artist listen or study what he did in his past? (Kremer never listens what he recorded in previous years).
• When an artist collaborates, there’s a need of “mutual listening”.
• Sometimes we miss something. Friends around us indicate things or persons but we don’t listen – when we maybe should.
• Then and therefore : what is to catch up? How do we? What is “to redeem”, how?
• “Seeking perfection is the enemy of beauty”

 

Etc etc. I found a few more. Whatever. Each line is a door to a new room, which is full of questions. How to drive “mutual listening”? What becomes virtuosity with very little notes to play? Where the frontier to find between catching up and letting go? Etc…

I found this too : when you have one or many “modes of exploration”, it becomes difficult sometimes to be in direct contact. You ALWAYS have a filter on, and that can be exhausting!

We have to find back a way to quit our introvert-analyzer inner computer to… touch things. I suppose it’s what great artists can do, having the great ability to move it like a lever, a slider, from 0 to 100%, from “I know this without any words” to “Analyze and peel it off to understand it”. Where is yours?

 

Thanks for reading!

 

To write this article, I needed music. I chose Weinberg by Kremer – of course. The YouTube link is under the sleeve, downstairs :

I wrote every single 510 articles of this blog from a porch in Santa Rosa, California. And you?

Our brain has its own topology.

I wrote for 4 years for a Swiss company in Zurich. I translated texts from English to French, almost on a daily basis. When I was writing these, I remember VERY CLEARLY that my mind was on a very precise place : a field, next to the house I grew up in. Grass.

As a kid, I played on this field for years – maybe from 2 to 16 years old,  you see? Frisbee, soccer, hide and seek. I remember the light in summer nights, in cold October. I remember playing with my brother with a polystyrene-winged glider. I remember watching Epeira spiders, playing with firecrackers, model cars or marbles in the sandox which was behind the privet hedge…

I wrote for four years for this company in my apartment, but my mind – I really don’t know or understand why – was in the lights of this little field. Childhood linked. Every paragraph.

Now I’m 50 and I blog as I can, in English, on WordPress, since a couple of years. I really like it and I’d say it’s really the only way I found to stay alive, standing up, a buoy. It’s very little, but it is what it is : I have a little more than 110 real followers.

When I write, in English, for this blog, I’m in Santa Rosa, California. I have never been in this place. I just saw a few dozen pictures of it. It’s a porch, behind a house. When I write, there’s nobody around, I’m alone. But I see it constantly. I see the sky. The flowers. The wooden floor, the lanterns. A little round table. Doors which lead to the inside. I’m here, writing, mostly in the sun. It’s a GREAT place, and I’m happy to live here… when I write.

In reality I am in a good apartment in the North of France. It’s quiet and full of light. Thank you.

My mind, though, is in California. Why? I don’t know! It’s my brain who decides that. It puts me there. And it STAYS here. Probably an ideal place to be happy?

 

Do YOU also have a place where your brain sits when you write? Am I alone?

Thanks for reading!

 

 

 

“#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!

 

 

 

 

 

Use a baaad feeling as gasoline to write?

GRRRRRrrr !

Use anger to write? It’s an advice I got from a good friend, one day. Why not?

Let’s think about it…

Find a subject which makes you angry. Politics? An artist you dislike? An enemy? Oh, better : a bad moment of the past. And then you go girl!

Use bitterness to write? Use problems to write? Sorrow? Jealousy? Hopelessness? Disappointment? Frustration? Why not?

William Boyd (or maybe it’s David Lodge, I can’t remember) answers NO. He says one doesn’t need to be in despair, drunk or bored to write a novel. He says he strongly needs calm, coffee and his slippers, in a warm home, to write. Well… Good to him, right?

We all know that we write to be loved, it’s the undercurrent. Then, you have the things we say (see this article about bloggers motivations) : “I write” – to share, to explain, to express myself, to make money, to meet people…

Many of us write to stay busy, to stand up, to do something else than overthinking. Our brain needs a bone to gnaw on, oui? Therefore I consider OK to use bad feelings to write.

The reader will know, probably. He’ll read the unsaid. He’ll feel your tone. He’ll try to guess what happened “in broad strokes”. Let’s hope he’ll smile. “Hey, he’s been offended or what?”, or “Woah, this person has been betrayed!”.

The reader… he’ll forgive you.

Ok, you go.

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

 

It’s difficult to #blog when you’re a conversationalist

Hey, how do you keep yourself together?

Well, I blog. That’s all I found. It works, in a way…

If I find a seed in my head, in my life (or in a funny draft I forgot to trash), I make it grow, I write, I transfuse, or weave it in my French way (serious, but a bit casual), I… wash the dishes, find other ways to “say”, I go back in front of my Macintosh, and there it is. OK, coffee helps. Un autre café?

I often read other blogs, and I can feel, sometimes, the pleasure of the authors, the infinite pleasure they have to “work on it”, putting words together. Errr, yes, it’s sometimes too long, but whatever.

Do you write for you, or for the audience? That’s a real question!

The new generation… they “vlog”, as you know, they YouTube, they have to like it, though : talking alone in front of a camera, cutting edges, etc. That’s great!

I found out recently that my preferred way to think, to put together a concept, is not to write, is not to be a teacher, a journalist, but it’s to weave a conversation.

Dialog. Presence. Pleasure. Togetherness.

THERE is the place I love. C O N V E R S A T I O N.

Oohhhh, writing this article, I just found a goal in my life!!

Find a conversationalist – a partner, a thinker, a good listener, a questions asker, a sidekick -, talk, be happy, and write. That’s a little better than to blog alone, right?

Thanks for reading! Bonne journée !

 

yes this little boy is me

 

 

 

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!

 

 

 

 

 

“A model is a lie that helps you see the truth” – H. Skipper

“A model is a lie that helps you see the truth” is a quote by Howard Skipper, an American doctor.

Here I try to extend this pattern, replacing “model” by cousin ideas : “pattern”, “structure”, “map”, etc.

So what? A “model” is not the real world, it’s a construction made to help us to understand the real world.

A MAP IS NOT THE TERRITORY, right? A map is a LIE, it doesn’t give you changes, colors, moods, light, temperature and life. But it’s a useful, thought, for a purpose…

You can be very serious while modeling things (in Science) and an architect will build models (in cardboard or on computers), but you can also be a little casual “just to see what you’ll see”.

For example you can see each of these things : a school, a couple, or a battle, as : a machine, a living creature, a computer, a kingdom or a business company. If you “apply” your model, you’ll rule out something, but you’ll find interesting things too. Then, trash the model. Because it’s a LIE, of course!

A model is a construction made to help us to understand the real world.

It can be using a structure and also “a way to explain how it works”, moves and evolves. Let’s use the model of “a business company” to study “a married couple”. Who’s the CEO, how does the money flow, what are the goals, etc…

It can be more like a skeleton, a complex map of “what it is”, or a single archetypal word :

• Mauss studied suicide or gift and made entire books about these. A way to search for “what is common”, the “fundamental characteristics”.
• Simmel studied the bridge : it links two territories, it is a territory itself, it “shows itself” as a bridge, and it is a “will of connection” (over a river, for example).

Yes, this leads to Archetypes (Jung)

a statement, pattern of behavior, or prototype (model) which other statements, patterns of behavior, and objects copy or emulate

To Forms in philosophy (Plato)

pure forms which embody the fundamental characteristics of a thing in Platonism

and to the most precious diamond : the Symbol.

a symbol is a mark, sign, or word that indicates, signifies, or is understood as representing an idea, object, or relationship. Symbols allow people to go beyond what is known or seen by creating linkages between otherwise very different concepts and experiences.

(All quotes from Wikipedia – I bolded some words)

Questions :

Who’s right? Skipper who uses the word “lie”, or Plato and Jung who seem to seek a “pure form”? Is all this a search for a link, common aspects in different things, or are these just tools to explore a concept , moving aside difficulties and details? Are you more interested in details, or structures? Why do we say that there are only a few ways to tell a story (Google : Seven Basic Plots)? What are the “order” games like MBTI, Zodiac or Enneagrams? Is a symbol the tiniest and more radioactive possible model?

Let’s say you’re introvert, fast, jealous, a father, a murderer or a valet. Is it a lie, because it’s true but way too simple (and a label on your face) – then you list the subtilities, the movements, the reasons, etc -, or is it a funny truth which could lead you to make decisions, or find other archetypes to think about?

You can also read : Ecceity

Yeahh, overthinking, I know…

Thanks for reading!

 

 

 

About ze #French accent

OK I’m French, and my English is complètement full of erreurs.

It’s not that I don’t give a frog’s fat ass (an elegant idiom I learned about yesterday) : when I began this blog, I asked a friend to fix my mistakes, and she said that she could almost HEAR mon accent Français in the text!

But yesterday I had un choc. I watched un documentaire HBO about Vogue (ze magazine). One of the French fashion lady was from France…

I’m pretty sûr that she lives in America since years, but she visiblement had pleasure to “spik like ZAT”, like with a level 7 French casualness.

However, it’s really not hard to say “a dress” instead of “a drrress”, like we “R” the “Rs” in Frrrance, as you know. No effort here…

Yes it’s like… charming, right? Yet I wonder : what should I do if I one day come to the USA? Do I try to speak like American people, or do I lower my tonguework to casually stay “morrre French”?

Thanks for reading! Bonne journée !

 

Those who type “fast” with two fingers hahaha #dactylo #writing

In France like in many countries, people use computers all the time, at work and at home. But you will barely find one human being who learned how to type. It’s not even deliberate, they just don’t think about it, voilà!

When I was about 25, I bought a little app on my Macintosh Plus and I worked like half an hour, daily. It’s been a little painful (no lesson could be climbed until I got a certain ration mistakes/speed), but after two months I was able to use all my fingers without looking at them.

Yeaaah I’m always a little proud when I see the jaw of a “I type fast I’m a geek” colleague who watches me writing an email three times faster, without quitting my bond eye/screen, “How do you do that?”.

They think I am fast, voilà. Of course I am, that’s the point : 10 fingers against 2! But…

It’s difficult to tell them that typing gives you a much more important power :

As you don’t have to continuously watch your fingers, as you see the text unfolding on the screen, it’s as if your brain was connected to the letters’ appearance. You go fast (there is no more “finger interface” : your hands work alone as they don’t need control from you, it’s a dance they do, like your feet when you walk) PLUS you pour your ideas into letters.

No, it’s impossible to tell them. Jaw up, Joe. It’s not that hard.

Tool : Learn how to type! It’s more than a speed issue, much more.

Merci et bonne journée!

Instagrammer : colin.dodgson