De la traite

Two points to remember from Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau's thin pamphlet Nantes & la traite négrière (2007):

1. La mise-hors (ou capital nécessaire à l'armement d'un négrier) était relativement élevée, de l'ordre du prix d'un petit hôtel particulier parisien à la fin du 18e siècle.

2. Au 18e siècle, la noblesse bretonne était à la fois nombreuse et souvent désargentée. On sait que le père de François-René de Chateaubriand fut un négrier.

And maybe another:

3. Il fallait souvent dix à seize mois afin de boucler la totalité du circuit.

Not the best way to spend a year of one's life.

Veiller ensemble

I've been reading French rapper Abd al Malik's autobiography Qu'Allah bénisse la France (2004) and find it très passionante. A young outlaw, brilliant in his school, turns to embrace Islam. Some details are so interesting:

Chaque samedi soir, nous nous réunissons en outre à cinq ou six pour étudier, puis veiller ensemble. Ces veillées étaient ponctuées de cours sur la jurisprudence islamique, sur la vie du Prophète Muhammad (PSL) et d'autres sur l'islam en général. Nous lisions encore jusqu'à l'aube le Coran et des hadiths, le tout entrecoupé de prières et de discussions religieuses. Ces débats traditionnels (MUDAKARA) consistaient à se placer dans une situation fictive et à déterminer quelle était l'"attitude islamique" à adopter en pareil cas. Je me souviens m'être torturé l'esprit sur des questions aussi "fondamentales" que de savoir s'il était licite de serrer la main d'une femme pour la saluer, ou encore si le fait de regarder un film au cinéma ou à la télévision était compatible avec l'"interdit de la représentation". J'ai tellement été imprégné par cette atmosphère où la distinction du licite et de l'illicite (HALAL et HARAM) devient obsessionnelle qu'aujourd'hui encore, je dois l'avouer, il m'arrive d'être pris à l'improviste par ce genre de questions légalistes.

May be this kind of weekly veillée we should adopt (with our graduate students) to seriously talk about what is to be done... in art (in general). Such will be our seminar this year!

Herzog

Films this year:

12. Werner Herzog, Grizzly Man (2005)
13. Werner Herzog, The White Diamond (2004)

Re-watched with some friends two masterpiece documentaries from Herzog. Arresting, heart-breaking, subtle, and beautiful. This is my kind of filmmaker, like no one else in history.

Negrinha

B.D., graphic novel, manga, gekiga, whatever you may call it. This is a genre that's most sophisticated and synthesizing, yet individual and personal (more often than not).

Sometimes I come across an unforgettable work. Today it was Negrinha, written by Jean-Christophe Camus and rendered graphically by Olivier Tallac (Gallimard, 2009).

It's a lovely story of a morena girl (born from a Black mother) in Rio de Janeiro. Camus, himself a comic artist and a child of a Franco-Brazilian marriage, captures the light and atmosphere of the Rio in the 1950s like no one else could.

Some nice lines from Maria, the protagonist, to Joanna, a little white girl with whom she holds a sister-like intimacy:

Joanna, tout ça doit rester entre nous, c'est notre secret, d'accord? S'il est dévoilé, le Christ du Corcovado sera tellement triste que ses bras s'abaisseront.

The charm of Rio returns to me like a wave.

Tractatus, o meu coraçao

Wittgenstein to me is mostly impossible to understand, but he says a lot of interesting things. I only don't want to spend more time with him to grasp what he intends to say. It comes down to the economy of time and your taste, I mean all your intellectual endevour in the humanities. The following are from Tractatus:

2.012 In logic nothing is accidental: if a thing CAN occur in a state of affairs, the possibility of the state of affairs must be written into the thing itself.

2.014 Objects contain the possibility of all situations.

Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922)

These two bits match well with the premises of the concept of affordance.

As if I was writing a letter to a friend

Discussing Hans Erich Nossack, W.G.Sebald writes this:

In an essay of 1961 where Nossack speaks of the influence on his literary work, he writes that after reading Stendhal he was anxious to express himself 'as plainly as possible, without well-crafted adjectives, high-flown images or bluff, more like someone writing a letter in almost everyday jargon'. [...] Nossack experiments with the prosaic genre of the report, the documentary account, the investigation, to make room for the historical contingency that breaks the mould of the culture of the novel.

W.G. Sebald, Campo Santo, Anthea Bell trans., 2005


Viva Stendhal.

And each time I die...

You may think and say whatever you like, but to me Philippe Sollers is one of the writers who can really write. Not a dull page in his œuvre.

This sentence from his Carnet de nuit, back in the 1980s (?):

Il se voyait mourir, chaque fois sous une identité différente.

This is the truth about our relationship with a work of literature.

Image according to Proust

Roger Shuttuck explains what "image" meant for Proust:

Like Locke and Condillac (and later Sartre), Proust saw our image-making faculty as a means both for grasping the world and for detaching ourselves from it, the essentially double process of consciousness. Inevitably "image" spawns a large family of photographic terms: photographie, épreuve (proof), cliché (negative), instantané (still or snapshot).

Roger Shuttuck, Proust's Binoculars (1962)

In a reverse effect, so to speak, photography is essentially ambiguous; it mediates us to the reality of the world, and it profoundly separates us from the world as is.

Bowie was not a vampire (not only, at least)

Nicolas Ungemuth's Bowie (Librio Musique, 1999) clarified many points that I wasn't very sure about in the history of rock. Bowie's "vampirism," for one. He quotes Bowie's own words:

"Dès que je trouvais certaines qualités chez des gens que j'aimais, je me les appropriais. Je fais toujours ça aujourd'hui; tout le temps. C'est comme pour une voiture, on remplace les pièces petit à petit."

And people have accused Bowie of his vampirism. But then Ungemuth goes on to say:

Dans les deux cas, Lou Reed/Iggy, les soi-disant victims du vampire, se sont largement repus du talent de leur prétendu bourreau. Bowie, en fin de compte, a plus joué aux infirmiers qu'aux succubes.

An interesting way to put it!

This books describes well the centrality of Bowie in rock music for more than three decades. I loved Bowie as a highschool student in the 1970s; then lost interest in him in the 80s (definitely by the time of "Let's Dance") and moved on to so-called world music. Which was just and unjust at the same time. But rock by that time was mostly DEAD until a serious ressurrection is brought about by Nirvana in the early 1990s, for example.

I'll go back to Space Oddity and begin listening to the various aspects of Bowie's own histoire vécue!

"Je vis, non j'existe."

I live, not I exist, says Le Clézio. This from the top of France Culture's home page. I think this sentence nicely and profoundly describe Le Clézio's attitude. To say that I exist is way too abstract to be true. I live, in, with, within. I and I live. I have always already been we, with the living and the non-living surrounding me alike. A refreshing pause from a dangerous ego-centrism.

Meet you at the corner?

Here is a joke that I really liked about thirty years ago:

--Qu'est-ce qu'un mur dit au mur d'à côté? demanda-t-il d'un ton criard. C'est une devinette!
Je roulais des yeux pensifs vers le plafond et répétai la question tout haut. Puis je regardai Charles d'un air obtus et lui dis que je donnai ma langue au chat.
--Rendez-vous au coin! m'assena-t-il en hurlant.

J.D. Salinger, Nouvelles (tr. Jean-Baptiste Rossi)

But the problem is, why did I find it so hilarious then?

The NRF at 100

I didn't realize that the NRF has been around for a century this year. It was founded in 1909 by Gide, taken over by Jacques Rivière (whom Philippe Sollers regards very highly), then at his death in 1925 succeeded by Jean Paulhan. I read this article by Philippe Lançon in Libération:

A sa [Rivière's] mort, en 1925, Jean Paulhan, radical prince de l'esquive et de l'ironie, lui donne le ton et l'avant-gardisme qu'elle conservera jusque dans les années 60.

And then:

Jamais l'opacité elliptique de Paulhan, dressant un mur de liège entre lui et chacun au profit de tous, n'a mieux révélé sa nécéssité. Il ne sortirait de l'ambiguïté qu'aux dépens des autres. C'est en manipulant par omission leurs talents immenses, capricieux, égoïstes, haineux, capables du pire pour exister, qu'il permet à la littérature qu'il aime d'entretenir ses vices et ses vertus. (Libération, Jeudi 19 février 2009)

Ah, Paulhan. The politics of literature is rife around him. But then, no editor can be totally innocent. Often tactics are mandatory for making things interesting and keeping them alive.

My friend Naoko Kasama has just completed her translation of Paulhan's collection of very short proses. I am hoping to see it materialize, under a book form, this year.

Films

Films this year:

9. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, David Fincher (2008)
10. Musée haut, musée bas, Jean-Michel Ribes (2008)
11. Al otro lado, Gustavo Loza (2005)

I watched 9 at Gaumont, Montparnasse. It's a masterpiece with a lot of stunning moments and another victory from Fincher. What I particularly liked (just like anyone else, it seems) was an episode of a man who was struck seven times by lightning. This alone proves the director's well-established sense of humor. Tilda Swinton is breathtaking, as always.

10 is so silly one could only watch it in the trans-Eurasia stratosphere with less than regular oxigen level. But I watched it twice, thanks to Air France. Quite nonsensical, and not in the Ubuan or Dalian or even Lewis-Carolian sense. By the way I was surprised to find that Air France doesn't serve Stella Artois anymore! All they have is Heinekken. Tant pis!

Keisuke Dan showed me 11 which was not bad at all. Three parallel stories of children's border crossings that happen in Michoacan, La Habana, and Morocco/Maraga. Often melodramatic, deserted wives too beautiful, characters stereotypical. yet one can't help loving the film. It's got some "it." The best actress of the show award goes to the little girl from Morocco.

I am well behind my video days... Will try to catch up!

Paris Dogs

In Paris and off the Seine, I came across a very nice big dog. Magnificent. I said, "C'est un chien superbe que vous avez. J'adore les grands chiens." And the old man responded in English, "Thank you, it's a Scottish Deer Hound." Oh. I thought it was an Irish Wolf Hound.

Strange but these two breeds are identical to my eyes. The same breed given different names in Ireland and Scotland?

I wonder if they have this kind of dog in Wales, and how they call it. But it's unlikely that they have such enormous dogs; Wales is where corgis are from!

In Paris

Just back from Nantes and je me trouve de nouveau a Paris... Nantes was wonderful, much more so than I had expected. But the memory of the trans-Atlantic slave trade is everywhere, when you look at it. Met a very nice Brazilian anthropologist, Denise, and she said she was rather sad about the new Quai Branly museum. I knew what she meant, I guess. Still it's an interesting, one-of-a-kind place and I am planning to go there again tomorrow.

Thanks all for your mail but please wait a couple of more days before I can respond. I am writing this from an internet cafe... my own computer couldn't get connected at the hotel. Maybe it's not compatible with the Wi-Fi protocol. I did't even know that!

On soul

One night in 1979 Derrida was listening to his son Pierre talking with Paul de Man; they were discussing musical instruments after a jazz concert in Chicago. Here is what Jackie recalls:

It was then I realized that Paul had never told me he was an experienced musician and that music had also been a practice with him. The word that let me know this was the word "âme" when, hearing Pierre, my son, and Paul speak with familiarity of the violin's or the bass's soul, I learned that the "soul" is the name one gives in French to the small and fragile piece of wood--always very exposed, very vulnerable--that is placed within the body of these instruments to support the bridge and assure the resonant communication of the two sounding boards.

Jacques Derrida, Memoires for Paul de Man (1989); this part trans. by Kevin Newmark

Always a piece on the fringe that attract Derrida's attraction. And generally speaking, soul resides on the edge of things, it seems!

Teaching in grade school

What did Wittgenstein and Derrida have in common? They were both (at one stage of their lives) elementary school teachers!

Wittgenstein between 1922-26 (the years when he was between 33 and 37) famously taught in a primary school before he was forced to quit after hitting a student on his head for the child to lose consciousness. W only had two books published during his life time: the Tractatus and a vocabulary book for elementary school students. What a glorious and muy enloquecido teacher to have.

Derrida, instead of a compulsory military service, taught at a primary school in Algeria for two years when he was 27, 28 or thereabouts. This was around 1957, the hottest years in Algeria before independence. What kind of teacher he was, I can't tell.

I find it quite interesting, for me at this age, to teach in grade school along with my university position, if that's possible at all. A forced circulation of the teaching body among institutions of different age groups can only do good for the educational system in general. Themes out of school would be the only interesting and immediately pertinent in our collective survival.

Cowley on Cary

Sometimes you come across a paragraph (by any author) that's as good as a short story in itself. A minimum story.
One such is this from Malcolm Cowley's splendid And I Worked at the Writer's Trade:


In the case of one story by the late Joyce Cary, the "precious particle" was the wrinkles on a young woman's forehead. He had seen her on the little boat that goes around Manhattan Island, "a girl of about thirty," he says, "wearing a shabby skirt. She was enjoying herself. A nice expression, with a wrinkled forehead, a good many wrinkles. i said to my friend, 'I could write about that girl...'" but then he forgot about her. Three weeks later, in San Francisco, Cary woke up at four in the morning with a story in his head---a purely English story with an English heroine. When he came to revise the story he kept wondering, "Why all these wrinkles? That's the third time they come in. And I suddenly realized," he says, "that my English heroine was the girl on the Manhattan boat. Somehow she had gone down into my subconscious, and came up again with a full-sized story."

Malcolm Cowley, And I Worked at the Writer's Trade (1978)

The whole mechanism (of producing such a minimalist story) resides in the function of summarizing through retelling of somebody else's experience. This tells quite a bit about the genesis of the narrative genre.

Benjaminian translation, history, and natural history

Here is what Tom Cohen writes on Benjamin's peculiar "translation":

Walter Benjamin makes reference to a concept of history that breaks with the familiar notions of the term. As we know, he was given to taking familiar terms (allegory, cinema, dialectics, translation) and submitting them to a process of disinvestment. He called this "translation" : a site where the word passes through its own formal properties, emptied of "meaning" or interiority, and is then returned (unmarked) to usage in a sabotaging form void of subjectivity. Allegory becomes the other of the literary historical term; "materialistic historiography" dispels any ECHT Marxian hue; dialectics is unprogressive and anti-narrative, and so on.

And then, the following interesting remark on history:

Typically, "history" survives this procedure--which aims to empty out all interiorist traces--only to re-emerge within a different referential order. Rather than implying historicist echoes, Benjamin invokes a non-human "history" that will be gestured to under the misleading rubric of "natural history"--a history, we may add again, with different, proactive folds of time.

Tom Cohen, Ideology and Inscription (1998)

This kind of coalition

The name of Alan Liu I only knew as a Wordsworth specialist, and a very good one. Then, today on reading Katherine Hayles' Electronic Literature, I learned of his recent interestingly sounding book The Laws of Cool. Here is what Hayles writes:

Liu urges a coalition between the "cool" --designers, graphic artists, programmers, and other workers within the knowledge industry--and the traditional humanities, suggesting that both camps possess assets essential to cope with the compexities of the commercial interests that currently determine many aspects of how peope live their everyday lives in developed societies. Whereas the traditional humanities specialize in articulating and preserving a deep knowledge of the past and engage in a broad spectrum of cultural analyses, the "cool" bring to the table expert knowledge about networked and programmable media and intuitive understandings of contemporary digital practices.

N. Katherine Hayles, Electronic Literature (2008)

This sounds already like a truism, but this is, objectively speaking, exactly what we have been attempting in our Digital Content Studies program, gathering all the fields of the humanities and contemporary media practices alike. No conspicuous output, not yet. But it will surely happen soon. From a desolate corner of Akihabara...