Pierre Assouline has written a moving piece on poet Susan Sontag (1933-2004) on his blog La Republique des livres. Among the thoughts and emotions that accompanied Sontag as she lived her last days, Assouline points out this surreal denial of death: she kept drawing attention, in the pages of the New Yorker, to movies to see, restaurants to try, shows to attend, and books to read, even though she had only a few remaining days to live…
New York Times journalist Elaine Sciolino just published an article in which she explains that the Sarkozy presidency believes that the French should think less and do more. Sarkozy ran his campaign with the slogan “Work more to earn more;” apparently, it should have been “Work more to think less”:
France is the country that produced the Enlightenment, Descartes’s one-liner, “I think, therefore I am,” and the solemn pontifications of Jean-Paul Sartre and other celebrity philosophers.
But in the government of President Nicolas Sarkozy, thinking has lost its cachet.
In proposing a tax-cut law last week, Finance Minister Christine Lagarde bluntly advised the French people to abandon their “old national habit.”
“France is a country that thinks,” she told the National Assembly. “There is hardly an ideology that we haven’t turned into a theory. We have in our libraries enough to talk about for centuries to come. This is why I would like to tell you: Enough thinking, already. Roll up your sleeves.”
Outraged reactions did not take long:
“How absurd to say we should think less!” said Alain Finkielkraut, the philosopher, writer, professor and radio show host. “If you have the chance to consecrate your life to thinking, you work all the time, even in your sleep. Thinking requires setbacks, suffering, a lot of sweat.”
Bernard-Henri Lévy, the much more splashy philosopher-journalist who wrote a book retracing Tocqueville’s 19th-century travels throughout the United States, is similarly appalled by Ms. Lagarde’s comments.
“This is the sort of thing you can hear in cafe conversations from morons who drink too much,” said Mr. Lévy.
What is interesting is that both sides of the controversy seem to believe that there’s a zero-sum relation between work and thinking: More work allegedly entails less thinking and vice-versa. Perhaps this logic applies to some heavy manual tasks but certainly not to people in office and leading France. Or at least, I hope not…
Rue89.com has an interesting article on a French street photographer mysteriously called “JR.” He took shots of youths in the Parisian suburbs and then put huge posters of his pictures on the walls of Paris, so that people were forced to see these “others” that they try avoid. He did the same thing in Israel, putting large pictures of Palestinians on the Israeli side of the “security wall” and vice-versa. His technique is also quite original, for the pictures take the texture of the wall on which they are posted. Here’s a sample from the rue89.com website:
How would poets that built their names through the printed word use the internet? Would Shakespeare or Rimbaud create a blog? What would the surrealists do with the internet? How would they cultivate the art of transgression in a world with moving barriers and elusive taboos? Would Pablo Neruda write an “ode to the blog”? We’ll never know. In the meantime, here’s his “Ode to the Book”:
When I close a book
I open life.
I hear
faltering cries
among harbours.
…
No book has been able
to wrap me in paper,
to fill me up
with typography,
with heavenly imprints
or was ever able
to bind my eyes,
I come out of books to people orchards
with the hoarse family of my song,
to work the burning metals
or to eat smoked beef
by mountain firesides.
I love adventurous
books,
books of forest or snow,
depth or sky
but hate
the spider book
in which thought
has laid poisonous wires
to trap the juvenile
and circling fly.
Book, let me go.
I won’t go clothed
in volumes,
I don’t come out
of collected works,
my poems
have not eaten poems–
they devour
exciting happenings,
feed on rough weather,
and dig their food
out of earth and men.
I’m on my way
with dust in my shoes
free of mythology:
send books back to their shelves,
I’m going down into the streets.
I learned about life
from life itself,
love I learned in a single kiss
and could teach no one anything
except that I have lived
with something in common among men,
when fighting with them,
when saying all their say in my song.
As the Jewish proverb puts it: It is not the Jews that saved the Book, but the Book that saved the Jews. Could such words be written–even published–about blogging? Close your computer and open life…
Je me permets d’attirer votre attention sur la publication française de l’autobiographie d’André Schiffrin. Probablement inconnu de la plupart des Français, Schiffrin a longtemps été un vrai passeur entre les milieux de l’édition française et américaine. Ce Parisien d’origine juive, dont le père Jacques Schiffrin a fondé la Bibliothèque de la Pléiade et contribué à lancer la carrière littéraire d’André Gide au début du siècle précédent, est devenu newyorkais par la force des choses. Cela ne l’a pas empêché, cependant, de continuer dans la lignée de son père. Il a été éditeur pendant plus de trente ans à Pantheon Books pour ensuite fonder The New Press en 1990.
Sa sensibilité littéraire et politique s’est illustrée dans le choix des auteurs qu’il a publiés à Pantheon Books (Pasternak, Foucault) ainsi que dans l’engagement de New Press de publier des ouvrages contribuant au débat public indépendamment de leur rentabilité. Son expérience l’a également amené à publier en 2000 un petit essai (The Business of Books) dénonçant la dérive marchande du monde de l’édition américaine. Sa trajectoire transtlantique ne pourra que toucher ceux qui vivent à cheval entre les cultures française et américaine ou, du moins, qui sont fascinés par celles-ci.
Pierre Assouline has written a moving piece on poet Susan Sontag (1933-2004) on his blog La Republique des livres. Among the thoughts and emotions that accompanied Sontag as she lived her last days, Assouline points out this surreal denial of death: she kept drawing attention, in the pages of the New Yorker, to movies to see, restaurants to try, shows to attend, and books to read, even though she had only a few remaining days to live…
