Le plaisir littéraire n’est pas d’exprimer sa pensée
tant que de trouver ce qu’on n’attendait pas de soi.
Paul Valéry
I really don’t know how to translate this. It’d be : “The literary pleasure is not to express your thought but to find what you didn’t expect from yourself“. Satisfactory idea, no?
Pokemon (Pocket Monsters) is a media franchise managed by a Japanese consortium between Nintendo and others.
Yesterday in the store I work in, I saw a kid who bought for $70 of Pokemon cards. His papa had his credit card, that’s pretty cool! I said to the boy, who was smiling holding his ten little packs : “Will you open them like… one each day?”. “Nooooo : some cards have POWER, you know!”.
Power!
Two students asked for “Discourse on Voluntary Servitude” a few minutes later. Which, I told the girls, is about how to be free or how to be submissive and obey.
Who is powerful here? Nintendo, the Pokemons, the kid, the father? Where is the power “acting” IRL?
Will the kid buy Pokemon ring binders at 35 years old, like many adults I see? Therefore what? At the Pokemon marketing (cattle displacement) time, will your son chase Pokemons, or will he find anything else, by himself, out of the obedience area?
It’s been Thanksgiving. Have you been grateful? To…?
To build ways out.
Ulysses resisted the song of the Sirens by having his ship’s crew tie him up, because their singing is so beautiful that it drives men mad.
He heard. The song was beautiful, and it offered “new knowledge about the world”. Well, I think so!
Céder aux chants des sirènes, we say in French : yield to the Sirens’ songs. It’s not “to succumb” (which is you lost), it “to yield to” (which is you decide to lose and let go).
In mythology, sirens are women-fish or women-birds (see the vase)…
This classic image of the guy tied to the mast because he wants to hear something dangerous is like an itching metaphor, don’t you think? Where could we apply that?
When do you “go even if you know it’s a mess”, and how to you protect yourself, then?
To drive is to ignore plenty of things. There a great article about what is attention on Wikipedia : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention
It’s worth an article but I’m lazy. Nevertheless : I will explore this a little, later.
In France, some guys were chasing Pokemons in cemeteries with their phones – or in people’s properties and gardens. What does that “mean”?
You don’t understand : some Pokemons have powers, they are RARE. You’ll never understand, right?
Nope.
Bazin says that The Complex of Nero is when you have pleasure in the sight of urban destruction.
There are two kinds of movies, those who shows, those who tells.
In Ryan’s Daughter, a husband is walking in a quiet sunny morning on a seashore. He smiles because he noticed steps in the sand, the steps of his wife. He knows she had a walk there. He follows the path. And he sees another set of steps, of a man of course, getting to the path, reaching her. Now it’s two pairs of shoes. This “feetprint” turns around a huge rock on the sand, and shows that they stopped behind it.
For a kiss
Here, two events are showed at the same time, without a single word. 1/The new romance, and 2/the discovery of the now broken hearted husband. On the image, you see what the spouse guesses…
Do you prefer this, or hear him crying on a chair telling a friend what he discovered?
Show, or tell?
Thanks for reading!
a french toolbox 