How often do you check your stats in WordPress?

Blogging is a whole thing. There are many good reasons why we blog. I tried one day to list them: Why do you blog?

When you blog, you have something in your brain that clicks when you read or hear things. Like an Instagrammer has an eye for it, your mind picks up ideas everywhere it can. So maybe it’s a way to be more… present, an acuteness.

There’s another thing: you publish, so you have to present it, to shape it, to frame it, whatever. It’ll be read (a little, I hope!), so you have to iron your shirt. And if you don’t, it’s also a style, right?

Then you have to find the balance between staying yourself in what you say and to please your audience. This balances a good structure to watch.

Blogging as Sowscattering Disorders

Well, it’s NOT about adding untidiness to the world – which is enough a mess.

But I ask myself about how to infiltrate a knowledge field, intellects and minds, to sow something, maybe to add seeds to this ground, to see what could blossom, what straight paths you could bend & twist… and then walk onto.

Thus it’s not about milestones, importance and revolutions.

Is it possible to think about this with the idea of blogging?

Imagine you want to blog about food, about fashion. You’d better be good at it, because there are always dozens of thousands of blogs about these. You could also, yes, infiltrate another domain… but with YOUR talents.You’re a food lover? Blog about programming (with your language).

Let’s pull strings :

1. Maybe you need to be original. Study a mega-niche, or a rare combination : “crossing Norway with my two cats to try restaurants”, or “purple winter dresses in South Dakota”.
2. Maybe you can arrange some concepts, put them together to create sparks, or to show an unexpected light… or to create monsters.
3. Invent a new machine from disparate tools and pieces.
4. Displace things and ideas, make them move, bend them.
5. Use an unappropriate discipline to study another. Study what’s in your plate as a colorist. Or bags trends with… what?
6. Focus on who are “positive nuisances”.
7. Find your own ideas studying something the wrong way.
8. Find empty boxes, find shortages, find imperfections. Then action.
9. Play. Look for processes. Twist them.
10. Take ideas, make’m jump on your own sieve.
11. Watch words. Jargon. Demolish. Or add squibs in it. Your squibs.
12. Accept drifts. Watch around.
13. Invent indeterminations. Use them randomly, unpredictably.
14. Make things proliferate. Explore. Play.
15. Make your readers wonder. Make your readers smile. Make your readers wanting to know more. Make your readers more curious.
16. Breathe. Watch appearances, meetings, plugs and unfoldings.

The point is multiple and unstable. Get your own ideas. Distribute seeds for who is able to see. Open new roads, and why not, get new followers!

Most advanced, yes acceptable.

Thanks for reading!

Finder Keeper Sharer, “What is my blog about?”

The Juxtaposition Principle

ONE

I’m a bookseller, and this morning I talked with a lady who needed books and inspiration to write something for a funeral.

It’s easy to find this, but always in “squares”. Wells.

I mean, you’ll find things from Catholics, from Philosophy, in Spirituality books, in Literature, Buddhism, etc.

But I know a book from a woman who helps the reader to cope with ordeal, in one single book, from texts and quotes from : journalists, priests, masters, buddhists, writers from other centuries, from today, etc…

It’s a great book because “help” seems to come from everywhere, and also because you feel these things are universal, and because it’s interesting to find links between different states of mind. It’s not a well, it’s an ocean…

TWO

I call the Juxtaposition Principle a way to (maybe casually, at least with a certain freedom) to present an heterogeneity.

Serve yourself.

THREE

In the bookstore I do this constantly :

If, for example, there’s an offer for pocket books, I will present 25 different books in a single front display, with : self help, sociology, philosophy, art, anthropology, music and history. Juxtaposition. I do it on purpose, and so there.

Usually, managers don’t understand that.

They want “massive bestsellers front walls”, with one single book presented by the hundreds. This says to the customers : “I’m huge, obey, don’t think : BUY!!”.

My way says :

1. Let yourself be surprised
2. There are many levels on this knowledge ladder : choose your stair
3. It can be fun to find the links between the books
4. You can be curious if you want
5. I’m a bookseller and I present these to you, you can follow or not
6. Maybe theres’s a message here : do you find it?
7. What is the common trait here?
8. These are NOT new books, but classics, or different ones : explore
9. Disobey advertising, find your way into this tree!
10. Be smart
11. Etc

FOUR

I wrote an article about this Juxtaposition Principle about my Instagram. Because, evidently you see me coming : Constantly Random is an Instagram flaw

And I absolutely and willingly and by choice do this for my blog.

It’s not about fashion, or traveling, or IA. It’s about MANY things. Juxtaposition.

And of course, I know you know that there’s a little music hidden in this Juxtaposition here.

It doesn’t work that well, but I reached “real” 251 followers today, which gives me 430 followers in total. Not thousands, but I’m happy though. You my followers are curious explorers. And I love you.

Have a great day!!

Instagram : tashaenpapier

Miracle Mornings (for bloggers and duck hunters)

Well… this book (who tells you that it’s good to wake up early) is also a success in France. I just checked on ze Internet to discover they printed dozens of more, like Miracle Morning for writers, families, executives, whatever. Money is good, take it where it is!

We could offer a bigger variety, like MM to pee, MM mindfulness, MM for single fathers, MM sex and MM for photographers who like poetry, or MM for those who work on a thesis about Middle Age in Finland. Well, they did MM for Real Estate agents!

Well, it says : Wake up early. That’s all! The “not-so-obvious” blurb is wrong. It is. You just have to pull the idea-string to do it. Wake up early means… you have to jump into bed early (or you’ll be like a craving coffee sleepy slipperhead). It also means this :

You’ll have time in the quiet morning for yourself.

After all, in evenings, we all are drunk and exhausted by our day, right? Kids, noise, schedules, commuting, TV bullshittery, errands erranding, and so on : this is all melt and stuck in our head like a boule of grease, and at 8 PM you just look like an incoherent irritated dead hive.

Pill or no pill : Go to bed and sleep at 9 PM. At 5 in the morning you’ll be like a jumping happy zebra. Coffee, shower, then do what you like : blog, read, breathe, make love slowly, then go biking, or watch the sun waking up in colors, naked feet in the grass (if it’s summer – or all year long if you live in Califloridania).

Sshhhh…

Almost all my blogs articles are written hours before I go to work. I can’t do any good things in evenings – or maybe articles which are in need to be very casually written (yes, some of them need that).

Well, if you HAVE to wake up at 5 to commute & work immediately, that’s not fun anymore. I’m sorry! I lived like that for a year. I was back home at 3:30 PM and crashed in sleep anywhere in a minute, like a bovine patty-chip-dung : schplaff.

Not good for any creativity, I agree. The only thing I could do with this brain is to collect forks or avant-garde screwdrivers. Swell!

If you wake up at 4 AM because you are a hunter, I don’t like you. Killing ducks and deers is not cool. It hurts them. Not miracle morning at all! Gunshots during dawn, come on! It’s bad morning for animals, you disturb birds chirping, and it’s bad for your kharma. I wish you walk into a huge French cow chip, so there!

Have a nice day, everyone!

Poiesis & Craftman’s Task : two seeds for bloggers (and others)

In philosophy, poiesis is :

“The activity in which a person brings something into being that did not exist before”.

So what?

In itself, nothing, but I sensed around it a possible source of tools.

Paul Valéry – a French poet – in 1937, used this word in a more precise way :

To study the conditions of the generation of a work of art.

Ain’t it interesting? There’s meta here, of course. And I love to blog about… how, when and why we blog.

 

On Wikipedia I found this intriguing thing :

Dreyfus and Dorrance Kelly urge each person to become a sort of “craftsman” whose responsibility it is to refine their faculty for poiesis in order to achieve existential meaning in their lives and to reconcile their bodies with whatever transcendence there is to be had in life itself:

“The task of the craftsman is not to generate the meaning, but rather to cultivate in himself the skill for discerning the meanings that are already there.”

 

Ooohhh! Well, this could be one string of my harp, here, right? Seeking patterns and showing/sharing them is this.

 

Tools :

What do you think? Where is your “skill to discern meaning that are already there”? Do you use it? Why? What can it bring? Why is it interesting to study the way you work? Progress of course, but what else? Extension? Limitation? Effectiveness? Teaching it?

Thanks for reading!

 

Stand up Blogging : “What begins commands” & Lost Branches

There are many ways to blog. You can write a novel chapter by chapter, or you can “react” to news in the world, or comment fashion, or new trends in food. You’re good.

My article talks about bloggers who needs ideas and inspiration. This is what I try to do, and I like this way, because it puts your brain in alert. You glean…

Gleaning in loop : the “Gathering Seashells” Type

Finder Keeper Sharer, “What is my blog about?”

Blogger’s Words Horniness & consequences

You read a magazine, you talk with a friend, you got and email, you have a walk around the block, you bake, or you take a shower : Bim! (this is the sound of an idea coming to you).

Bim!

(The symbol is a bulb over your head, right?)

You hurry to sit in front of your computer. You click on “Write”, while your brain is already organizing things…

What begins commands. We all have our patterns, and when you start you more or less know where you’re going.

My tool here is :

Dial : Beware of “What begins commands”, because it’s too easy. You follow one path but :

1. you could lose branch points
2. you could ignore good bypasses
3. your steam can hide possibilities.

Lever : Stand up, for blog’s sake! Finish your article if you’re too excited, but at one point, don’t publish. Stand up. I mean for real! Stand up and go away. Open a window. Wash a cup and a fork. Pet a cat. Breathe.

 

 

Flaubert, the French author who wrote Madame Bovary, had “un gueuloir”, a “scream room”. He was walking and yelling his texts in this room. It’s crazy? Not that much. You’ll have to find your own way. Just do something else while you think about your article or your page. Maybe print it and take a pen. You’ll find ideas, “furthers”, new branches, words, style nuggets, inversions, interesting bypasses, etc.

OK, go back writing now, you fool 😅

Thanks for reading!

 

All your blog articles are translated

Building words
It’s a strong energy

 

When you write a blog article, you use a combination of processes, which are all similar to translation.

• You have a confused “big picture” idea you need to put into an article
• You have a necklace of confused ideas you need to put into sentences
• You have the words and they go fast, you don’t type fast enough
• You are, while typing, parasitized by the process of shaping it
• While you write and shape, the critic into you judges what’s written
• All these are disturbed and jostled by new spurting ideas pushing in the back
• You have to link your paragraphs
• You have to check your spelling
• You have to work through your reasoning, from beginning to end

 

All these (and I forgot probably a dozen more) are a like a translation between your boiling brain AND the words you see dancing on your screen.

 A big part of writing is choosing…

Therefore what?

I don’t know!

What do you think? Do we need to be aware of that? What levers are available? What can we change? What for?

 

Have a nice day!

Instagram : ninoleone60

A thinktool for bloggers : Intertextuality (“the meaning of a text does not reside in the text”)

In this article I chose the French way, Barthes’ interpretation :

“An intertextual view of literature, as shown by Roland Barthes, supports the concept that the meaning of a text does not reside in the text, but is produced by the reader in relation not only to the text in question, but also the complex network of texts invoked in the reading process” (Wikipedia)

Barthes always attacked the notions of “stable meaning and unquestionable truth” : any text offers a plurality of meanings and is also weaved out of numerous already existing texts – Barthes probably hated being told to sit still!

Thus there are two types of readers :

1. Consumers who read the work for stable meaning
2. Readers who are productive in their reading

 

Worse (or better, depends on you) :

“It is language which speaks, not the author; to write is… to reach the point where only language acts, “performs”, and not “me””

plus :

“The author has the role of a compiler, or arranger, of pre-existent possibilities within the language system”.

 

OK, that’s enough. Here we are with a pattern which can be examined and played by bloggers :

1. Do you write to say your say, do you aim stable meaning, or do you wish your readers to be the second kind, the “producers”, who will take your ideas/tools and use them THEIR way?
2. Of COURSE you stole all your articles from others : books, magazines, articles, conversations. What did you do with this material? You simplified? You combined? You linked? You melted? What are the engines you use in your writer’s brain?
3. “It is language which speaks, not the author”, what does that mean? How (and why) would you try to reach that curious and magic state? Where’s the balance between your logic and your flow?
4. Do you draw maps? What stays opened in your articles? Do you “close” all of them at the end? Do you offer fishes, or ways of fishing?

 

“The role of the artist is to ask questions, not answer them.”
― Anton Chekhov

 

Thanks for reading!

Instagram : wjtk_o

 

A possible Machine-Manifesto for afrenchtoolbox

Here’s to the ones who dream
Foolish as they may seem
Here’s to the hearts that ache
Here’s to the mess we make

She told me
“A bit of madness is key
To give us new colors to see“

 

I could use a deleuzian concept for this blog : Machine… a word Gilles Deleuze used for S/Z of Roland Barthes, too. Those who know, will know.

My blog is a Machine, an entity which swallows things, ideas, concepts, memories, sights, life, quotes, website. Anything can enter my blog and will potentially come out a few paragraphs later like a little candypoo.

The machine itself is a bit quirky :

• It’s changing all the time
• It’s casual (because I’m an amateur, and… “I’ve seen things…”)
• It’s multi-faceted
• It contains plenty of little engines

 

Many little engines are indeed running in operation here.

• Recycler (I use old letters, emails, diary, even my own blog)
• Thief (I steal concepts from many books or articles, and I built up two bookshelves of “books with seeds” for this purpose).
• Many mouths (sociology, music, art, psychology, parenting, etc).
• Antennas. To guess.
• Combiner that links ideas that should never be linked.
• Microscope that searches tools, structures, patterns, skeletons.
• Translation : I’m French and I write in English on purpose. Like a “necessary displacement”, an important decenterization. I needed it.
• Collecting : I like to gather ideas like seashells, which will in the end draw something, globally.
• Blender mixing concepts or domains to see what spillspurts out.
• Frenchiness : I don’t work that much, I’m casual and I like to define my own rules. I’m disobedient. And certainly not steady. And I judge. Ohlalaaaaa.
• A bunch of tools : a map drawer, a mirror, a fences jumper, a rules eroder, a veiled referencer.
• Hydra : A child having fun. A storyteller. A thinker. A lover. A father. A bookseller.
• Inchoater (“don’t finish, please, and let it opened”).
• Grid : most of the time unappropriate, to see what it can see.
• Energy. It’s been provided – at the beginning – by the golden knowledge that a splendid high-level of conversation can exist. It stayed in the machine, like a burning core. This core radioactivate a wave : SHARE.

 

This machine held me alive for a long time! Today it’s a part of me. A daily one. I’m this machine. I like to blog!

Most of the time, everything I put in it helps me to know who I am, what I want, what I’ve been through, what I wish, what makes me smiles.

This article was the meta-article of the month, yeyyyy.

Is your blog a machine too? What is YOUR machine made of? Do you need to decenter too? Why?

 

Have a great day!

 

Here’s to the mess we make

Instagram : bodylanguage

 

Pecking ways & means of apprehend a work of art

#French #Blogging in #English : un Songe

Finder Keeper Sharer, “What is my blog about?”

 

 

Everybody’s talking about “golden voices”. But don’t you hear, when Emma Stone speaks at the beginning of the clip, that her voice is made of silver?? There’s a veil. It’s silver. Period.

Dwindling Ideas & Wobbly Recoveries for bloggers

Hi everyone!

In this penultimate day (and maybe article) of the year, I discovered this verb : “To peter out” (never heard this before); then “to dwindle”. That’s so charming that I played with them (aweeee “dwindling“) for my title.

Look at this Nietzsche quote :

A Sigh. I caught this notion on the way, and rapidly took the readiest, poor words to hold it fast, so that it might not again fly away. But it has died in these dry words, and hangs and flaps about in them and now I hardly know, when I look upon it, how I could have had such happiness when I caught this bird.

Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Fourth Book, 298

 

We bloggers sometimes catch a great idea at the weirdest moments : at work, when we drive, when we shower. Darn it!

And we all know this feeling : this idea is mixed up with a rush, a fast and blossoming urge to write it down, to develop it in a cool article to share. It’s a sigh, a wind, a light, a force. You are so happy you caught it…

Well, the most common event is that you will totally forget what it was about, as soon as you’re ready to write. You then have this terrible moment : you’re stuck in immobility, closing your eyes in silence, trying to find in your mind any string to pull, a path to it, anything. But the marvelous idea stays hidden in the deepest waters of your worn out brain…

Hopefully it’ll grow bigger until you catch it back, like the fish. Unlikely, right?

All petered out, off, down, whatever.

But the subject of this article is different : it’s when you remembered your weaved “idea & rush”, you drove this pack down into words on your computer, but… it’s parked dead in the end. It dwindled into a “WTF I don’t care anymore”. You lost it. The idea is there, but the steam is not. No life. You lost something but you don’t know what. Dry words. Article incompleteness.

In the end, you can trash it, or let it macerate in your draft section on WordPress. Maybe wait the day after? Sometimes it works. Next morning, jump up from your bed, have a coffee and read over your mess. Maybe (maybe) you’ll hear the engine pre-roar… You go girl!

What will happen likely is that you will publish this wobbly and patched article, like it is. A bit bitter unhappy, but hoping it’ll inspire something to someone somewhere.

 

If you’re lucky, an hour later, while you commute to work, you’ll feel a lightbulb over your head, une ampoule électrique : you found the rush back, it’s now full of light, at least!

Until you’re back in front of your computer?

 

Thanks for reading! Have a nice day!

Instagram : jasonnocito666

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.

 

Blogger’s Words Horniness & consequences

Yesterday I wrote an “inspired” long article about Genesis and Progressive Rock. I was listening to Firth of Fifth and I was very excited.

But after finishing it, and publishing it, I stayed unsatisfied, I knew it was written in a rush, the building was not OK, something was bothering me. So I polished it endlessly, adding this, cutting that, quoting lyrics… I was like “Yes, but”.

Happily, later in the evening I had an idea to prolong it. I found tools, ideas, common patterns. Thus I fixed my article, I added a paragraph and published it.

I read over it this morning : it was all bouleshit – despite all the dressings I had added there and here. I trashed it immediately.

 

Every blogger knows that there are two kinds of “words horniness”.

1. When you’re in the flow, you write fast and clear, and that’s delightful. You go girl.
2. When you’re excited and you go in many directions at the same time, happy like a fool : you don’t hold your wheel vert smartly (or you invented three wheels and you don’t know what to do with them), you have good ideas but the result is too long, you ask yourself if you shouldn’t divide it in more articles based on this one, you run after a structure you feel you’re about to find, etc.

It’s like a rush. You’re too excited, you look like a leaping mountain baby goat.

 

It’s really like when you have this : “Let’s pretend” and other as if games…

When you feel this little nausea after you just say with someone you “want to believe it’s true but fuck it’s really not” : “Yeah, we are strong !”, “Yeah, we will beat them all”, “Yeah, it will be simple and beautiful !”. Yeahhhh.

 

Every serious author knows this : you have to be cautious with “inspiration”, it can loose you into nothing.

Sloterdijk wrote : “To be sovereign is to choose what will you be overwhelmed with”, which contains the idea of sovereignty : you decide what you do with energy. You canalize it, you organize it.

Baudelaire wrote : “It is impossible for a poet not to contain within himself a critic. Therefore the reader will not be surprised that I consider the poet as the best of all critics”. This is exactly my point. Inspiration alone is nothing. You have to study and change what your write. And if you’re a genius, it’s the same!

Valéry wrote a lot about this aspect. He says that to write you have to find the “singing”, the little wind, easy to handle, the good temperature – But nervous freedom, fury or impetus are waste and loss. Stay a child, let it spurt, hear the gods, but then be a chief, take your brain, your tools, watch and clean it, build your thing. TAME.

 

OK, I trashed my article. But I liked it, in a way, this ugly child… Therefore, I re-published it, thanks to WordPress, in the past. November 1st. My bad.

 

Thanks for reading! Have a nice day!

 

 

Proust was a blogger…

“Remembrance of things past
is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.”
― Marcel Proust

 

 

Proust is a well known French writer, renowned for his… difficult style. You’ll Google it if you want to try, OK?

Thus, in France (and probably elsewhere) you often hear this “I tried Proust, but I couldn’t finish it”, with a little funny face.

Well, OK, I never finished it either! Reading Proust is like eating a feast everyday. It’s exhausting!

• Worse : you can not really read something else, because every writer looks like a dumb moron after Proust. Too much intelligence pulls you in an awe, where air is rare.
• Worse : you want to grab anyone you know to scream “Read Proust, it’s amazing!”. No, come on, it’s impossible to read him.
• Worse : Proust’s style, made of long, complex phrases, with an absolute lack of concessions (for the reader), is like dive into it, or else…

Therefore : you have to make an effort. Each time you plunge in Proust you have to. You’re like “OMG it’s dense!”, then you find the marvels. A bit like opera, you see? If you don’t make an effort, an opera is a boring story with people singing like crazy about stupid dramas. Make an effort to find your own pleasure : voices, performance, music, comparing, etc…

Once you did it, here it is : Proust is a blogger.

One day I explained it to my best friend. She was like “Meh”. OK, I said. I picked up the book, read a page (randomly), and we found an idea. So good it filled the evening in conversations.

The only secret is this : do not take it too solemnly. It’s not a cathedral. La Recherche (“In Search of the Lost Time”) is just a huge great book. If you’re bored, breathe and pass a page. YES. Go on. You’ll find emerald & pearls. It’ll kill you (it’s soo good). One day, it’s enough. Read something else.

In each page you’ll find one or more ideas. Each one could let you thinking smiling watching the sky, like “Ohh, that’s true!”.

He’s a blogger. But he’s better than you, I warn you…

 

Have a nice day!

 

“Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer’s work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. The reader’s recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book’s truth.”
― Marcel Proust, Time Regained

 

 

“Now there is one thing I can tell you: you will enjoy certain pleasures you would not fathom now. When you still had your mother you often thought of the days when you would have her no longer. Now you will often think of days past when you had her. When you are used to this horrible thing that they will forever be cast into the past, then you will gently feel her revive, returning to take her place, her entire place, beside you. At the present time, this is not yet possible. Let yourself be inert, wait till the incomprehensible power … that has broken you restores you a little, I say a little, for henceforth you will always keep something broken about you. Tell yourself this, too, for it is a kind of pleasure to know that you will never love less, that you will never be consoled, that you will constantly remember more and more.”
― Marcel Proust

 

 

 

 

“To take dust for gold” : Chronicle 21

If you obey all the rules you miss all the fun.
Katharine Hepburn

 

I talked ten minutes with an old man, an organ maker. I bombed the poor man with so many questions! One was : “As the organ’s sound is made with pipes, how do you standardize the sound?”. Well it was interesting. He was really happy to tell me these things, and admitted he was writing a book. “Organs & Frigates”. Boats?? He gave me some hints :

1. In the 18th Century, the two more complex machines were organs and sailboats
2. These needed complex building and craft
3. Both use the wind to run on

Write a short story of a person, after a break up, who is angry to be stalked on the Internet – but he/she is not.
Similar pattern : a TV star is stuck in an elevator with another person… who never watches television and thus has NO CLUE the first one is a celebrity expecting to be recognized.

My father had a first aid certificate. He taught me that a wounded person absolutely needs a beautiful dressing, a clean and well done bandage. A real need.

“Words are nothing. Actions are everything. Don’t tell me. Show me.”

Ahhhh we like that, right? Dumbsimple and satisfying! I found another outrageous quote about that :“Don’t talk, just act. Don’t say, just show. Don’t promise, just prove”.

Blah blah blah. My sarcastic mind agrees, nods, and immediately jumps over the fence of fake simplicity to see what happens “really” in life. The facets of plain stupidity are innumerable… because :

Words are nothing? Ah lalaaaa… These motivational quotes are so moronic that I want to die. Or to hit the author on the head with a good hammer. BIM. Then I die, scouic.

Talk to your lover, silly. Don’t be that “He’s silent” type! Act when necessary. If your spouse is like “Don’t tell me show me”. Well : climb a ladder if you like…

If you hide a Family Secret, it will seep out messily and everywhere in your story…

She puts her hand on her heart, to show she is wounded
Montherlant

 

Bonne journée, messieurs dames !

(filthyratbag)

 

 

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.” >>

 

 

“This” Tropism : what you read understands you

The King of Kings of the world, for this, is Marcel Proust.

Buy, one day, a good translation of “A la Recherche du Temps Perdu” (In Search of Lost Time). If you want to explore Proust, buy first How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain De Botton, it’s a really great book, and a great key to this author. Buy it for your birthday! Say it’s from Jean-Pascal, OK?

I try, here, next to my little tools, to talk about “very little movements of the minds”, what we call here “Tropismes”.

There is ONE tropism you know pretty well, you blog reader, it’s this one :

When you read an article and you jump off you chair saying : “It’s true! I feel that too! Never seen it written though!”.

It’s lovely to suddenly see someone who struggles with the same tiny mind movements as you, right?

Someone wrote one day that

We read to know we’re not alone

Isn’t it true?

 

Jean-Pascal

 

 

Minuscule Patron or Sponsor

When you become rich, you wonder what to do with your Scrooge McDuck money. Of course, it’s smart to invest most of it to… make more money, right? That’s what people do.

If I had millions, I have a fantasy, though : minuscule patronage.

I have a problem of vocabulary here. In France we call “un mécène” a person who has money and decides to help a cause or an artist. In the old times, Queens and Kings were helping musicians and painters. Dictionaries give me “patron” or “sponsor“, maybe “donor” or “granter“. Come on! What do I choose here?

I earn millions every month. Instead of putting my money in BIG causes, I spend 15 minutes a day looking for a good person. A small restaurant, a cook beginner, a smart blogger, a broken heart, a photographer without a good camera, etc…

When I find him/her, I give $5000. Once. Then goodbye, I go in my day. Until the day after. Or the week after, it depends on the money you want to give!

OK, I volunteer (to receive, or to help choose-and-give) 🙂

 

Have a  nice day!

Instagram : __bodylanguage__

“#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!

 

 

 

 

 

Finder Keeper Sharer, “What is my blog about?”

From time to time, meta-blog.

We all at times ask ourselves why we blog (to document a crisis, to seek approval, to gather knowledges, to get love?). “It’s what I do that teaches me what I’m looking for”, says Pierre Soulages (painter).

Reasons we blog. How we get motivation to blog. And what’s the subject of the blog… all are good questionings.

It’s simple when you have a good simple subject, right? Food, fashion, traveling, poetry. You’d better be good not to be lost in the ocean of the same-subject-blogs.

Then you have the combination-of-subjects blogs : Veggie in Dakota, anorexic bipolars, Turkish poems of the 13th Century, traveling Asia with my cat, photos of cars under the rain, etc… Document your passion or your crisis, and you’ll have interesting followers.

 

My blog has no subject, really. I gather ideas like seashells. I like to share and I work a lot. When I find, I’m happy, I keep, I write, I make it short, in a nut. I want people to read it fast.

My blog has no subject, BUT I hope that you, my readers, little by little, in my collection of “tools”, will find a few patterns to help them, something to use.

• “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”…

 

Finder, keeper, sharer. I suppose all this draws a subject for my toolbox, a skeleton at least?…

What about your blog? Do you have a simple subject? Is it about a crisis or a passion? What do you seek? Do you blog for you or for your followers? If “for yourself”, how do you take care about your audience? Is there something you build under, a way of life, a vision, a pack of tools? Do you blog to try to change something, or just to offer a few seeds?

Thanks for reading!