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

“The letter’s style is the receiver’s style”

Le style de la lettre, c’est le style de celui qui la reçoit :

“The letter’s style is the receiver’s style”, I saw this sentence today, from a specialist of Proust, quoting approximatively… Lacan.

Let’s pull this string :

When someone writed a letter, there’s a will to communicate, it’s an effort to ‘tell’. The writer bothers, the writer dares.

And it’s NOT the conversation dance. When we talk with someone, it’s a tango, an adaptative dance, constantly moving, meandering together, watching each other; tango.

A letter is written alone, thinking about the other. Empathy.

Words on paper become a letter, an object, a “localized structure of the signifier”, says Lacan.

You adapt a style to the reader. Therefore it’s interesting to read the letters written by an author you like. You see them… in many styles.

You write a letter to a neighbor, a lover, a mother, and you bend your spirit, trying to adapt to what you know about the receiver…

Mmhh, that’s all, what do you think?

I don’t know. There’s probably a scale to draw about written things, from the letter to the article, from the book to the tweet.

Or else, do you write for yourself, expecting it could touch the other?

It’s linked to this : Paul Valéry about “writing for someone”?

 

Thanks for reading!

 

Sea/Snow/Sky and their French friends

I opened a book about Proust and found this : “Le temps n’est pas passé sur le hall du Grand Hôtel de Cabourg au bout duquel on voit, par la porte-fenêtre, la mer”.

“Time has not passed on the hall of the Grand Hotel of Cabourg after which one sees, through the French door, the sea”.

Obviously, the author made a tracking shot for the eye, from the hall to the large window then the sea…

In French, “la mer” arrives deliciously at the end of the phrase, opening it to the vast sky. As you know, words have a genre in French, the sea is a she…

I said to myself that “la mer” sounds opened and grand and clear, a bit unlike “the sea”, which brakes a lot with its “S” – “Sea” sounds to me like a solid string.

Then I thought about the snow. Snow sounds GREAT for fallen, thick snow. But when it flies from the sky in magic light meandering flakes, I prefer the French one : La neige !

“Sky” is great for the sky. It sounds big and clear. The French word is “le ciel“… it’s more pale…

Pépite is greater than nugget. L’Or is brighter than gold. But wood is good, it’s sounds like wood. We say “bois“, alright. Some other words are cool in both languages : l’acier (steel), both are solid and almost blazing, right?

 

Of course, this means nothing. I touch here the infinite, fractal and subtle differences between your native language and the learned one. I can get the words, but I can’t really get their radioactivity, or tiny ones, through movies and conversations.

What do I see on this picture? Curtains/Rideaux. Plates/Assiettes. Clouds/Nuages. Candles/Bougies.

Candle makes me see the flame. Bougie makes me feel the wax. Ahhh it’s complicated!!

 

Thanks for reading!

(and sorry for my bad English)

 

Is the form imposed by… itself?

I asked a writer about the interesting “forms” of his books. One looks like two different territories separated by an event. The other is weaved with “devices” which acts like small intermissions or surprising dreams reports.

I’m interested by forms in literature, from style to tricks with narration or punctuation (who said Faulkner?), and I stay amazed by the american ways of using storytelling (like in Siri Hustvedt’s essays, which mix her personal life with ideas and concepts).

The writer told me that he doesn’t “think” about the form : it comes in the moment, it imposes itself.

That made me think about this photographer, who said :

“A photographer solves a picture, more than composes one.”

Stephen Shore

As if there was just ONE way to take the picture, in a given place.

That’s my tool today : is the form of a piece of work imposed by itself? As the artist, here, of course, only decides : what does that mean? Where do you know this? In other arts? How does this work?

Thanks for reading!

Photo : Stephen Shore

“Two Birds”, and other “long-range laconic details”

I took this picture, then, back home, I opened it on my Macintosh and discovered the two birds, which came as a little miracle. I thought the picture was good (roofs/landscape, the light, the funny road), but it became cool because of these two guys, right?

One could call this “small impressive things”. Borgès called it “long-range laconic details”…

We have in France an idiom for this, le je-ne-sais-quoi (“the I-don’t-know-what”), the little thing that can make something magic, and also can spoil everything. One philosopher even wrote a book about this “almost nothing” (V. Jankelevitch, Le je-ne-sais-quoi et le presque rien).

No doubt he was fond of music, which is almost a wizardry on this topic (thinking about unexpected (or hidden) dissonances or modulations).

It can blossom in many discreet things, purposed mistakes or strange seeds.

This is important in Arts, where perfection is often boring.

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

In a poem, a single word can be strangely placed (or repeated, like in Gertrud Stein’s, “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose”) and a sensation appears :

“Now listen! I’m no fool. I know that in daily life we don’t go around saying ‘is a … is a … is a …’ Yes, I’m no fool; but I think that in that line the rose is red for the first time in English poetry for a hundred years.”.

It can be a single phrase in a whole song. The example of J. Denver :

Country roads, take me home
To the place I belong
West Virginia
Mountain mamma, take me home
Country roads

Seems a simple song about nostalgia, but hidden in the song you find “Driving down the road I get a feeling/That I should have been home yesterday”, which colors it differently, right?

“Everything that goes wrong… goes right” is one cool secret.

Details, games of subtleties, purposed mistakes, flakes of gold, unexpected elements, all are “je-ne-sais-quoi”s which put the audience into a state I love.

Thanks for reading!

Trente Parke

1. Strangeization Tool & Eyebrow Criteria
2. Intentional Maladjustments & Braiding Assessments
3. Wes Anderson, Edouard Manet and modernity
4. The “Brushstroke Pattern” & Progress in Arts : Offering Awareness

Passages of Valéry – from prose to verse; from speech to song; from walking to dancing

Paul Valéry plays :

The passage from prose to verse; from speech to song; from walking to dancing.
Le passage de la prose au vers; de la parole au chant; de la marche à la danse.

He found a structure, this “passage”. What is it, an elevation? Probably, right?

He notices something :

The purpose of dance is not to transport me from here to there.

The person who organizes or triggers the passage from 1 to 2 has obviously a will. A will for?

Speech tells details about things, it parcels out things, it labels things. A song adds a freedom-movement, brings other reasons for words, and make them mobile. As does poetry.

Dancing, poems, songs : all are rushing to feed a fire. What fire?

Let’s come back to the passage :

from prose to verse; from speech to song; from walking to dancing

It’s a tool. From A to B, bringing this, quitting that.

Where could we apply it? To other universes? Teaching? Photography?

What about meta? What would be the passage from prose to verse to (up again)?

Thanks for reading!

Vial & Stoop : Types of black holes in language

I’m French and I write in English – I make mistakes and I discover new words everyday.

When I read an article or a short story, I understand what happens, and I admit I don’t translate anymore.

But, well, I always meet new insects, which are really puzzling at times…

Today I met “Vial“. Never seen this word but I guessed. A little bottle. In French we call this “une fiole”, which I find funny. Same structure : vial/fiole. OK.

“Stoop” was trickier. First, it’s a noun AND a verb. A doorstep (“perron”, in French), and also “to bend”.

There, here am I questioning English Gods : why do you have to stoop, if you have to bend or even to bow?? Can stoop be replaced by to crouch or to squat?

Worse : as a metaphor or a figurative sense, to demean, to do something “below one’s status, standards, or morals”. “S’abaisser à”.

OK, but also to slant (to stoop a bottle of wine?) – then what is to lean? – to catch a prey for an eagle (“the bird stooped and seized a salmon” – un piqué), to submit (“stooped by death” or “this people does not stoop to Rome”) – even to degrade?

 

Thus, when you read “not your language”, you see holes. Little ones can be filled by contexts, other ones make you make a face, pick a dictionary, and go travel in language, in an awe, for twenty minutes. You should try French while I study the word “slew” (4 nouns, 7 verbs, pfff…).

 

At the end, I found : Stoop : “a vessel for holding liquids; a flagon”. Come on!

Hmmm. Fetch me a stoop of liquor, please. Two new words and I’m done. Back to bed. With my book!

Thanks for reading!

René Char quote : “The words which will emerge know…

“The words which will emerge know of us what we ignore of them”

“Les mots qui vont surgir savent de nous ce que nous ignorons d’eux”

René Char

 

Organic Storytelling?

Interviews between two movie directors are the best. It gets higher and it’s more interesting and complex, of course : pros are talking.

There’s an interview of Jeff Nichols (Shelter, Mud) by Martin Scorsese (Taxi Driver, The Age of Innocence), where they explain that they are both criticized because their movies “lack of intrigue”. In a way, like in the movies of the 70s, a more mature era…

It’s true that most movies are strongly driven by a scenario. Everything is well explained and you feel you hand held by the makers, who WANT you to think this and that, adding music where you have to cry, etc…

Nichols and Scorsese both use the same language : the narrative energy must be there of course, but it’s obtained by asking questions and answering them along the scenes, by the editing, the light, events, and their order. The movie moves forward without constantly telling you IT-IS-A-STORY. Nope : there are characters, and events (like in real life, right?) and hidden structures – of course.

The audience doesn’t “feel the author”. Their intelligence is active, and it can blossom in many ways. It gives a rhythm, a more organic one, a more unique way of unfolding the movie.

 

In French, we call Organic Farming : “L’agriculture Bio” – from biological.

The word “Organic” is interesting. It means :

1. Without chemical (for food)
2. Living organisms
3. Unified (an organic whole)
4. Flowing, natural (an organic development)

 

 

Therefore it’s a structure I love. We could call “Organic Storytelling”, in a movie, in an article, a book, a novel, a way of making things grow and evolve without the chemical (but effective, too) processes of tricks and pushes and manipulation.

 

There’s a good example in sex and pleasure : every evolved adult knows that if you can bring and orgasm to your partner (man or woman) in many ways, you can separate these two paths :

1. In the appropriate moment, stimulations and proper movements brings your lover a good orgasm. It’s as if you were pulling a bucket of pleasure with a string, from the top of the well…
2. And there’s this other way, where you partner gets so aroused that he/she becomes a sphere of electricity : anything can bring her/him to explosion. It’s as if the bucket of pleasure were levitating up in the well, delicately guided by you and your string, from the top of the well…

What’s the best?

 

 

Intention of effect kills effect, says the wise man, and I agree with the wise man.

With this “organic building” structure, what would be photography, painting, poetry, blogging, teaching? Do your audience really need to know what you want them to feel? Is it a good question? Hmmm need a conversation, I know…

Vocabulary as seeds : what is control here? What are propositions?

 

Thanks for reading!

Lecture or Aphorism?

Like some children have an imaginary friend, I have an imaginary reader, built like a golem from all of you, my followers : helloooo!

This person is smart and fast, and curious. She (let’s call this person a she) would be able to ask questions like : “From the books you read in the last year, who brought you this feeling of being too much, offering you like a feast of ideas – and what structure do you find there?”.

I thanked her for this question, and answered quickly : Valéry’s notebooks and Bourdieu’s lectures about Manet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Val%C3%A9ry
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Bourdieu

1. Valéry’s notebooks are arranged by themes : humans, poetry, dreams… His paragraphs are very short, a few lines at the most. He’s the best thinker I’ve ever read. The result is, like with Nietzsche sometimes, like a huge tank of crystals, crystals of thoughts. Therefore it’s very slow to read these notebooks : each line almost stops you for a day…
2. Bourdieu was a French sociologist, at the end of his life, he gave a bunch of lectures in the Collège de France about Edouard Manet, the painter. It became a big book, which is exhausting (in the good way) to read : it’s like hearing him constantly exploding with thoughts, ideas, patterns, about art, society, painting, psychology, history, etc.

 

With one you get a piece of complex, smart, fascinating jewelry. With the other you get a river.

Thus, I wanted to write this article with a rotation. You, who wants to share something, what do you do? You blog or you write a book? Do you concentrate or do you flow? To you build a little thinking toy model, or do you offer a one hour firework? How is the quality presented, displayed? A weaving of string arrows which envelops you like a blanket of ideas, or a ring of twelve words, changing you forever?

What is the most effective for an audience? Lecture or Aphorism?

How do you blog? Do you think about your audience, about their time, their mood? Are you too short, too long? What is an article of yours? A box? A current? Jewelry or map?

Thanks for reading!

instagram : _bodylanguage_

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coll%C3%A8ge_de_France

Writing forestalls us

I just found this concept in a book written by a singer, Dominique A. He writes his songs, and he knows what every writer knows : L’écriture nous devance…

Writing forestalls us

What you write becomes a text. This text knows things you don’t know. It’s ahead.

How does it work? Do you have an idea?

(Because it’s true, right?)

Prescience? Does the fact of writing activate something? Does the writing process use some parts of our brain who… know things?

Did it happen to you?

 

Thanks for reading!

 

 

 

Paul Valéry with Stendhal : Shunning the poetic style & Unreached cruxes

Let’s listen and daydream with Paul Valéry‘s seeds (sorry for my English, it’s pretty hard to translate this sharp spirit)…

ooo

“Mais la vérité et la vie sont désordre; les filiations et les parentés qui ne sont pas surprenantes ne sont pas réelles”.

“But the truth and the life are messy; the filiations and the kinships which are not surprising are not real”.

ooo

List of what Stendhal hated the most in his life :

…pettiness, absence of all whims, terror of opinion, terror of loving what we love, traditions, the little city, the local vanity, inflicted mediocrity…

ooo

“Spéculation sur le lecteur futur” : Speculation on the future reader

…is maybe what bloggers do, hmm? I’m not really read now but one day I will…

Something in the way we write (dry, fast, casual) implying an unknown person who will read it one day…

Paul Valéry about “writing for someone”?

ooo

About Stendhal’s style :

1. Negligences, the willpower of negligence, disdain of all formal qualities of style.
2. Diverse pillagings and quantities of plagiarisms : the essential for the accused is to become infinitely more interesting than his victims – “from other’s bleak possessions, he rebuilds work one can read, because it’s weaved with a certain tone.”

Oohhh that’s baaaad, right?

ooo

• “Fuir le style poetique, et faire sentir qu’on le fuit”
• “To shun the poetic style, and make feel that we shun it”

ooo

“Nous savons bien qu’on ne se dévoile que pour quelque effet”

“We know well that we unveil ourselves only for some effect”

ooo

There are two ways to falsify : to embellish, and the application to sound true.

ooo

“La confidence songe toujours à la gloire, au scandale, à l’excuse, à la propagande”

“A confidence always dreams for glory, scandal, excuse, or propaganda”

ooo

Fears : fictional and wished

ooo

The “worse” is the food of critical temperaments

ooo

Those who want to detect, define and administer the whole social filth

“Toutes les fois que nous accusons et que nous jugeons, le fond n’est pas atteint”

“Each time we accuse and judge, the crux is not reached”

ooo

To live. To appeal. To be loved. To love. To write. Not to be duped. To be myself. To achieve…

ooo

Hmm : pick one, write an article, OK?

Have a nice day!

The Cahiers/Notebooks of Paul Valéry are a unique form of writing. They reveal Valéry as one of the most radical and creative minds of the twentieth century, encompassing a wide range of investigation into all spheres of human activity. His work explores the arts, the sciences, philosophy, history and politics, investigating linguistic, psychological and social issues, all linked to the central questions, relentlessly posed: ‘what is the human mind and how does it work?’, ‘what is the potential of thought and what are its limits?’

“One does not fit” & describing styles

ONE

We have a very well known writer in France named Annie Ernaux. She’s big enough to be translated in English, and I suggest you read her : you’ll learn about daily France in the second half of the XXth Century… if you find it interesting! 🙂

They are not novels, but “autobiographical narratives”. She combines stories (her childhood, the story of her parents, who had a café-grocery store. Her books are “poignant social history of a woman and of the evolving society she lived in”.

The pattern I would like to describe here is this one :

Someone describes a childhood and growing into adulthood, with a constant and growing gap between the narrator and the society or family around. One does not FIT.

TWO

It seems that we have a literary pattern here. I found it in the last Jacques Drillon‘s book. Instead of having poor parents, he had wealthy ones, but the gap was the same, if not worse : he criticizes his parent’s minds and their… mediocrity. And in fact, he is much more cruel than Ernaux!

One big best-seller book here was Edouard Louis‘s “En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule” (who is translated in English : “The End of Eddy”) – which is… an autobiographical novel about growing up gay in a working-class town in Picardy.

Same (worse) gap : a sensitive boy is pestered for years by idiot uncultivated assholes, then becomes an adult and describes this hell in a… book.

THREE

Our Pulitzer prize is called le Prix Goncourt. This year, the Prize was Leurs Enfants Après Eux, a novel about the 1990s in a working class valley in the east of France.

I talked with a bookseller colleague today about this :

She prefers an author who “describes” people with a well-made style (like Annie Ernaux, who is calm and seems to never judge) than like the Goncourt prize, where the author tries to imitate the daily dialogs of people who never read, who drink too much, who watch TV all day long – which sounds vulgar and very… you know, they are our trash TV stuffed rednecks, in these books.

FOUR

If you feel the same (you’ve been raised by parent you really don’t understand), how would you write about it?

1. Would you place yourself in a distance, well writing, describing calmly about the non-sense of your childhood life?
2. Would you “re-create” the messy world you lived in, with all dialogs and so on, plunging the reader into your hell?

Where does this lead? What’s the best choice? How do people grow up out of this? Going away? Inner retreating?

 

Elbowing the Audience by killing the Suspension of Disbelief

Thanks for reading!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Words, loops, and Picasso

Yeyyy I bought a new book about Picasso. Like Manet, Valéry, Chekhov, Mahler or Faulkner. Little feasts. Emerald and pearls. Each time.

Why would I quit good guys like these, even if some are real toxic (Faulkner is so great that it kills me, Picasso is too prolific and multiple, Mahler too difficult, too subtle, Valéry impossibly clever)? I won’t. I’m hungry all the time – and to be disturbed is interesting!

These artists (and the books about them) made like… a free reservoir of ideas! In a way, this is generous, right?…

For an example, I chose here… Picasso, found a pattern, a seed to think about.

Watch this : when he was 15 he painted the church scene, at 19 the second one, at 21 he painted the blue one, at 26 the lady with the fan, the cubist mandolin at 29, and the running ladies at 31 years old. And he lived 91 years!

One of the funny magnifier to use with art is progress. We see here a man being a great artist as a teen, learning how to forget how to paint, to use his mood (sad blue), influences (African masks), analysis (deconstructing with cubism), then here… going back to representing things, but in another way : joyously, with exaggeration of gestures and bodies, with a clever way to be childish too.

Picasso always said he spent his life to unlearn how to draw.

I wanted to write an article about this structure :

Once you navigated into avant-garde, how do you come back to good old forms? I mean HOW? With a new freedom? Casualness? Science?

Life?

Why would you do that? A restart? A milestone? A pause? (It’s an article, right?)

Where do you see this pattern? In music? In cinema? Teaching? Learning? Writing?

What’s the structure? Pushing a lever then pulling it back? Taking risks then no more?

What kind of a LOOP (quit academicism, go back to it with something else. What?) is it? What are loops (oh, another article!)?

I like to read about Art, maybe more than watching it. Maybe yeah I’m an astronomer, not an astronaut… I love to talk about all these. Sometimes I have The Rilke Syndrome – Familiarity Problem.

OK I’m sorry. This is not an article, this is a mess. Sharing brings joy. Now I go back to my book. Or to Mike Oldfield’s Amarok (oh, another article!).

To your good health!

Thanks for reading.

“Filled Flat Storage Space”, a story to write

I had a dream, it could be a beginning.

I’m a woman in a yellow room of an hospital or asylum. I’m locked with two other women with no importance.

A visitor comes, a woman too, who brings me a couple devices : strange spectacles with a blocked (but removable) eye, a blazing metallic spiral. I’m very interested in those.

These are things she brought me to “make me think”. As if I was desperately hungry of “things to think about”.

She was also talking to me in a mysterious and smiling way, giving me ideas to munch, as gifts.

Then I had the sight of a row of notebooks, on a shelf.

In a way, thanks to this friend from the outside world, I get ideas, I munch’em, and transform them into words.

 

What do we do with this? A strategy to escape the asylum? Or like in Silence of the Lambs, does the friend use me to investigate on complex things? What happens when one day she doesn’t come anymore? What are these devices? Who were these persons before the locking up?

Thanks for reading! Have fun!

 

 

 

Tropes & Clichés and other blocks of storytelling

I write this because I believe that English uses the word “trope” in a different way than in French. It’s a rare word here, and I had to check in dictionaries to understand it.

I hear that in the world of telling stories, a trope is like a “little structure”, linked to other words : conventions, stereotypes, clichés, but also “twists and turns”.

1. Big tropes, archetypes with capitals like : The Chosen One. The Artifact of Power. The Damsel in Distress. The Knight in Shining Armor.
2. Typical narrative structures like : enemies to lovers, tough guy secretly sensitive, forbidden love,
3. Situations or plot elements : “there’s only one bed”

 

It leads to many questions & paths :

• Tropes by categories (ex : Fantasy Tropes : quest, dark lord, hero, good vs evil, blah blah)
• Clichés are boring, aren’t tropes boring?
• New tropes?
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clich%C3%A9 Clichés are irritating, right?
• Platitudes. Stereotypes.
• Tropes are good because familiarity.
• When tropes are predictable to the point of boredom.
• Are predictable tropes clichés?
• Tropes as metaphors.

 

Well, it’s too big. Creativity and storytelling, finding the frontier between good tropes and boring ones, etc. I need a book. You have an idea?

Thanks for reading!

 

Instagram : _bodylanguage_

 

 

Montaigne, skepticism & casual forms (does it work for bloggers?)

Skepticism questions the possibility of certainty in knowledge.

Montaigne was a French philosopher (1533-1592), his “Essays” (the word “Essai” in French means “attempts” or “tests”).

I know you won’t read Montaigne (988 pages in translated English, paperback, $27) – I once read an interview of Orson Welles who said it was the book of his life, and he had one copy next to his bed all along.

This guy was a mess, and he wrote his essays for years, in French (in this time, you had to use Latin if you were a serious scholar), like… thinking all along.

 

With the goal of describing man with complete frankness and using himself as his most frequent example, Michel de Montaigne first published his “Essays” in 1580. This collection of 107 chapters encompasses a wide variety of subjects – he saw the most basic elements of man as variety and unpredictability. “What do I know?” This embodies the spirit of the entire volume, for it reflects both the inquisitory search for intellectual knowledge as well as the more personal anecdotal quality of a work that has had an enduring impact on both French and English literature for hundreds of years.

 

He flits around, from a thought to another. No rigor, no plan. Really!

• “I love the poetic gait, by leaps and gambols”
• “I lose myself, more by permit than by inattention”
• “My ideas follow each other, but sometimes from far away”
• “Wisdom has its excesses, and has no less need of moderation than folly”

 

So : breathe! Life is short! Your blog is not perfect, it’s bricolage and brain odd jobs. Who cares? Share! If Montaigne can do it, you can do it!

Is this casualness French? Nope : wisdom & folly, there are everywhere, little soul, right?

 

Thanks for reading!

 

Mrs Fahndrich & The Cliff House

I don’t even remember how I found this little picture of the Cliff House. First I saw this woman in a dress, meditating about the sea on the sand, and liked this big strange house in the background… I was sure it was a painting.

The same morning, watching portraits made by Hugo Erfurth, I met this young woman, a romantic dreamy face, like an old Virginia Woolf cousin.

Two haunting pictures the same day. Two ladies, watching in the same direction… Maybe thinking to each other?

 

 

Hugo Erfurth (1874-1948) was a German photographer known for his portraits of celebrities of early twentieth century. I never found who Mrs Fahndrich was, but this picture was taken around 1930 (I think).

The Cliff House was a hotel near San Francisco, who survived many incidents, including explosions (!) and the big Earthquake, but burned – in 1907 (I think).

 

Well, nothing else, sorry. I just wanted to share what I’d call two “romantic seeds”. You get two old photographs and your imagination begins to run. Mine did anyway. What’s the story behind? What caused the fire? Who are these women?

I want to read a book on each. I want to write a book with Mrs Fahndrich visiting the hotel. Maybe causing the fire. Because of a terrible love affair. With another woman. Or her mother. Also, I find the way the hotel was build was like…. calling for disaster. Too cliffy, right?

 

Have a nice day!

http://scribol.com/anthropology-and-history/history/the-night-san-franciscos-cliff-house-burnt-to-a-cinder/

https://mashable.com/2015/05/07/cliff-house/

 

 

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

Artists Unawareness & Prolificity

The single idea of “How we all create” and invent in art is fascinating. It’s a territory, where we can discuss about genius, work, inspiration, ideas, seeds, growing, building, speed, movements, failure, discoveries and bliss.

I could invent a whole blog about this – but it seems I like my “constantly random” thing. My French Toolbox is not a blog about this or that, but a state of mind…

I just read a Simenon interview (he’s a Belgian writer) who talks about “states” he crosses when he’s about to write a novel. He says that the story and the characters grows and simmers in himself for days, weeks, until he can’t restrain anymore and has to write.

Then he has to stay in that state for days, without interruption. He says that he has to be the more empty possible. Not thinking. As if he had to “receive” the story, without using his intelligence.

Simenon is considered as a master of crime novels. He wrote almost 200 books, and was said to be able to write 60-80 pages a day.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Simenon

Well, prolific artists (like Picasso or Victor Hugo) are maybe linked to this fast-non-thinking process, a trance. I have also often seen the other side : where “inspiration” is like a necessary wind which have to be used, criticized, canalized and judged during the whole process of creation. The critic inside the writing poet, says Baudelaire…

Also, we all confusedly know something else : there can be no start, in creativity, without a little burst, a little rush of EMOTION.

Thanks for reading!

Herb List / Todd Hido