Roman Wall Blues

Over the heather the wet wind blows,
I've lice in my tunic and a cold in my nose.

The rain comes pattering out of the sky,
I'm a Wall soldier, I don't know why.

The mist creeps over the hard grey stone,
My girl's in Tungria; I sleep alone.

Aulus goes hanging around her place,
I don't like his manners, I don't like his face.

Piso's a Christian, he worships a fish;
There'd be no kissing if he had his wish.

She gave me a ring but I diced it away;
I want my girl and I want my pay.

When I'm a veteran with only one eye
I shall do nothing but look at the sky.

W. H. Auden, W. H. Auden, A selection by the author, The Penguin Poets, 1958

Encore un pédé, je sais. De toute façon, comme l'écrivait Jünger dans Eumeswil :

Ce qu'on pratique au lit, ou même dans son écurie, c'est l'affaire de chacun ; nous ne nous en mêlons pas. Bien manger, bien boire, bien foutre... si nous y ajoutons notre bénédiction, nous déchargeons la police et les tribunaux d'une charge écrasante. Nous n'avons plus alors, mis à part les crimes grossiers et les coups de folie, qu'à nous occuper des maniaques du bonheur universel, qui sont plus dangereux encore.

D'ailleurs, même si ça n'a pas un rapport immédiat avec le sujet, j'ai toujours eu du mal avec le délicat usage catholique de l'Index (supprimé dans les années 60). Pour moi, un des moments décisifs de prise de distance avec la soi-disant Église de toujours a été cette découverte : figurez-vous que dans les années 50, on avait trouvé le moyen de mettre Graham Greene à l'Index. Vous avez bien entendu : Graham Greene. (Il va sans dire que c'est, avec Bernanos, le plus grand romancier catholique du siècle). Pourquoi ? Parce que le héros de La Puissance et la Gloire est un curé ivrogne ? Parce que celui du Fond du problème commet un sacrilège avant de se suicider ? Je vois l'interdiction faite aux catholiques de lire ces livres-là comme le symptôme d'une décadence. Et même d'une décadence très profonde. C'est une des multiples raisons pour lesquelles, même si depuis Vatican II, esthétiquement, on en bave, je ne vois aucune raison de regretter l'avant. (Bien sûr, dans la pratique tout le monde se foutait de l'Index, et heureusement ; mais là n'est pas la question).

We all have access to this one thing called our very own personal timetable. Almost all of us have a love-hate relationship with ours. Our timetable is unique to every college-going individual, from the ungodly morning econometrics lectures (where besides a few suck-ups, nobody shows up until the few weeks leading up to the final exams) to the godly late night astronomy tutorials (where you get to cosy up to that cute Physics major guy sharing a telescope and observing Venus together).

I personally had the unfortunate experience of having lectures and tutorials back to back for eight hours, where lunch for me meant swallowing sandwiches at breakneck speed in between classes for one entire semester! Not fun at all, if you asked my stomach. I didn't even have time to stop and stare at my cutie -- I know exactly along which hallway he sits, at what time and in between which classes I have. 

Some days,  timetable-permitting and if I'm lucky enough, he'll appear completely off schedule at the same place, and I'll take a long, sweet moment pretending to grab a drink at the vending machine...admiring the way he runs his fingers over his head in a frustrated manner, thumbing through pages after pages of thick, intellectual-looking thread-bound books. After all the bitching about our timetable, you can't deny that there are some nice moments we can thank our schedule for.

You may disagree with me, but I am undoubtedly certain that everyone's favourite part of the timetable is, yes you guess it, the parts where it's blank, says nothing, and could only mean one thing: endless ridiculous gossipy conversations, lunching with buddies plus scoping out cuties in the cafeteria, curling up with a book in your corner in the library, doing the dirty with your latest conquest in your dorm room, catching much needed Zs...basically an extremely valuable add-on to your social calendar.

You have to make this work yourself, because like I said, everyone has their own classes, own schedules, own things-to-do (including secret rendezvouses with Miss X in the empty stairwell in between astrophysics and Descartes). Go through the classes that you want to take for the next semester carefully, making notes on when the lectures and tutorials are, and map them out. You may find a timetable builder program on your college website, or if you're nifty enough, create your own program to plot out your schedule.

First things first, you've got to free up spacious prime real estate during lunchtime, that's when everyone will flood the food court and you'd have learnt in probability that chances are higher for you to see and be seen.

If you're much sneakier, try to source out where your eyecandy hangs out often and the watering holes of the cuties, and plan your routes between walking from the library to tutorial so that you'll pass by those places. You know as well as I do that one peek at your crush instantly brightens up your day.

Leave the evenings open as much as possible. Or deliberately plan FOR evening classes so you can casually ask the girl/guy from your class to "grab a bite" for dinner "or something"...you don't need me to teach you, you know how the game goes.

With that, I shall wish you guys good luck, and have fun planning your timetable for the new semester! :-)

Love, agentjade

Alright, so lets talk about morality and moral choices in games. There's obviously a lot of games out there that provide moral choices as a core game concept: the Fable series, Bioshock, almost all of Bioware's games... So all of these games are supposed to be centered around this idea of moral choices between good and evil.

And the basic way in which these games implement morality is with what basically accounts to a slider with good on one end and evil on the other. So in order to become an evil character you have to have a lot of evil points, or if you're wanting to play a good character you've got to have a lot of those points. But the problem is that in order for this to work, and for the game be able to determine where you are on this slider, every decision in the game has be reduced into a simple black and white decision; one choice will yield good points and the other choice yields evil points. Unfortunately, this also makes the most of the game's choices uninteresting and defeats the initial draw the whole moral choice idea had in the first place, because all of the choices are so easy to make.

Alignment comes from pen and paper role-playing games, but the difference is in a pen and paper game, that your alignment was something that you chose before you played and you attempted to play the game to represent that alignment. So if you chose chaotic evil as your alignment, you would attempt to play the game in a fashion that represented chaotic evil, and you would attempt to be as backstabbing and ruthless as possible. Whereas in games that offer these moral choices like Fable or KOTOR, usually what you're doing is not choosing your alignment before you play and attempting to make decisions based on that, you're choosing your alignment on a decision-by-decision basis. But the problem is that usually when people play these games, they decide early on in the game, that "I'm gonna be good", or "I'm gonna be evil," and then the game just gives you opportunities to reinforce that decision you made when you first started playing. And when the consequences of your choices are explicitly declared to you in this way, the choices lose their meaning.

Now I'm gonna bring up Fable. I know it's old, but I haven't played any of the more recent games like Bioshock, and Fable pretty clearly expresses what I think is wrong with morality in games. So the center theme of Fable is that you have these moral choices that you make that affect your character in a visual way. So as you play the game you develop a reputation, and the way your character looks changes, and the NPCs in the game are supposed to react in a way that represents this reputation you've developed. But when you actually play the game it becomes again just that basic reinforcement of an good/evil alignment choice.

So you start out the game as a kid and you do tasks for your dad and he rewards you for doing good deeds with money so you can buy your sister some stuff, and anyway... One of the tasks you do is that this guy who's guarding some barrels that he's keeping in his shed; he wants to go do something else, and he leaves you there to protect his stuff. So you have the choice of whether you want to guard his stuff like a good boy or just run in there and smash all the barrels and steal everything. And I imagine initially, that most players weren't aware they even had the ability to make a decision, so in order to counter that, they have this little kid run up and just scream at you the whole time that you should run in there and steal the stuff.

The problem is that what they've done is essentially a gross over-correction for a simple problem. The kid screaming for me to be bad didn't make me want to go destroy the barrels to express my freedom, it made me want to stand still and not decide anything because the game was trying to force this freedom of choice on me in an obnoxious way. So the guy gets back and he thanks me and a little bubble pops up telling me that I get good points, and immediately afterwards I run into the guys shed and I bust all the barrels and take his stuff.

So there's two problems: The first is that the decision isn't really interesting because the game forces it's choices on you, and the second problem is that it immediately rescinds that forcefulness after you've gotten the good points for staying there, because you can still go in and bust his barrels and get the bad points anyway. And doesn't really feel like you had much of a choice anyway because the good and bad points were immediately made trivial and insignificant. Even worse is that these "morality" games do this so often that it's sort of become a tradition to have this type of insignificance. And I think, If I'm really supposed be to playing a game about moral choices and dilemmas, then there should be some sort of real consequences to my actions, right?

So maybe a good/evil slider isn't the best way to do morality in a game. Not to say that giving a player the choice to do something clearly good or bad is wrong. I'm all for as many choices as possible in a game, and sometimes good and evil are really that clear. But maybe there's a way to implement moral choices in a game without having it pop up "You gained 5 Good Points!", or "You got 12 Evil Points!" because you shot some dude in the head with an arrow. If you're proposing a game where the main draw is issues of morality, then your choices need to have more depth and impact in how you continue to play the game.

Really I believe that games should be giving us more open-ended moral questions, which aren't so much good or bad, because you don't know the real consequences of your actions when you're making the choice. GTA IV is a good example of this. Although it is clearly not a role-playing game or a morality centered game with good and evil points, it actually provides some very interesting moral choices. On an early mission in the game, you are directed to go kill someone, which is a pretty common mission objective for a GTA game, but when you arrive, the person tries to prove to you that they're innocent. Now, as the player, you haven't been given any proof that this person is guilty or innocent. So this creates this interesting choice where you're not quite certain of the consequences of what you do choose until much later in the game when either the person comes back to stab you in the back or to lend a helping hand. But the thing is, it creates this feeling of moral choice without ever popping up a icon, or giving me a hint at where my character is on the good and evil slider. I mean, looking at this type of decision, think of how trivial and pointless the decision would feel if the game popped up a window telling me I did the right thing by not killing him, and then gave me some points for it. I think it's enough of a reward if you feel like you've done the right thing, even if the game doesn't tell you so. I mean, it could just as much be the right thing to kill the guy.

So I think the point I'm making is that these simple moral choices, by which I mean picking a good or evil alignment option continuously, are not the same as real moral dilemmas. A moral dilemma can only happen when you don't have the information neccessary to be entirely informed about your decision. A moral dilemma is picking the lesser evil. If I'm playing a game about morality, I want to come out of the experience thinking, "Wow, that was tough!", without having to fight a boss or kill some tough guy I had to beat up with a stick. I should be genuinely filled with doubt about what right and wrong really means to me. I want to be genuinely affected by emotions that came from the game. And I think that's something that's really difficult to do with games, because people typically play games to escape reality, to escape consequences. "I don't realy want to shoot my boss, so I go play Half-Life 2," or something. But if I'm playing a game about moral choices, in order for me to feel genuine emotions about something I've done, there have to be consequences that are real to me. I have to lose the ability to do something if I make a bad choice, I have to pay the price of staying in jail for a while when I kill somebody, because the guards caught me, or I get benefits for doing something that those around me appreciate. I mean there should be games that provide a fantasy world, that give you an escape. I'm not going to deny the thrill of being able to just do whatever you want and nobody can say anything. So, I'm definitely not saying that morality is the end-all be all of game design. We certainly shouldn't all run out and make our gamers feel sorry because they jumped on a goomba and killed him in the next Mario game. But if you ARE making a game about morality and serious issues, and trying to push it as something new and exciting, (which most games of this type do. ) then you really need to consider whether what you're putting into your game are simple black-and-white choices or real moral dilemmas.

Hikaru no Go, où comment faire un manga sur un sujet que presque personne ne maîtrise (le go) et vous intéresser. C’est l’histoire d’un jeune garçon, Hikaru, collégien et à milles lieu des préoccupations du monde du go. Un jour, alors qu’il joue dans le grenier de son grand-père il découvre un vieux goban, il ne le sait pas encore mais ce goban est hanté par l’esprit d’un joueur de go de génie de l’ère Heïan (VIII-XII siècle),

A bientôt,

P.E.

Je n’ai pas le courage d’interroger les raisons motivant réellement l’ouverture de ce type d’interfaces. Il s’agira ici d’un blog wic(c )an type. J’y consignerai ce qui me semble avoir trait à cet art, incluant les longueurs biographiques, les points de vue à la pertinence relative, les auto-découvertes communes et cætera. Il y aurait à noter, premièrement la relecture du liber umbrarum original, cette fois ci dans ma langue maternelle (que cette expression sait parfois être dégoûtante) dont on peut à juste titre interroger la pertinence de réédition. Les éditions du Camion Noir ne l’ont par ailleurs pas édité dans une autre perspective, je suppose, que de revenir sur l’escourge, les gens qui dansent tout nus et le grand-rite, n’apportant rien de plus qu’une introduction générale revenant sur les origines du mouvement.  Néanmoins l’apposition des versions datées des formulaires rituels reste intéressante puisqu’elle souligne, à mon sens, le caractère évolutif de la trame léguée par G.Gardner. Le caractère archaïque et lacunaire, comme le souligne cet article, reste à mon sens un des aspects les plus intéressants de l’œuvre gardnerienne ouvrant aux discutables mutations américaines subies depuis une quarantaine d’années capables du meilleur comme du pire. Ce n’est là qu’une opinion de non initié, ceci dit.

Des rêves seraient aussi à consigner, tous interrogeant la bipolarité divine. Notons l’apparition d’un genre de Marie Laveau rieuse dont j’ai oublié le jargon pour désigner ses pratiques (une expression en particulier qui, par le décalage que son emploi à la matière générait me paraissait contenir une arcane sorcière à lui tout seul. J’ai du mal à expliquer semble t il, mais cet oubli me paraît important et me renvoyer à un rêve sur lequel je reviendrai plus tard, je suppose). D’autres encore importants aussi, je crois, puisque je culpabilise de les oublier. Voilà donc la première note exécutée.

Une note de blog wic(c)an type.

J'ai lu pendant mes concours le Prince de Machiavel, vous pouvez voir combien la prépa dérange l'esprit... Toutefois c'est un livre que je vous recommande à tous quelque soit votre pensée politique. Les exemples sont principalement historiques ce qui permet en même temps que nos idées politiques évoluent, d'enrichir un peu notre ridicule petite culture (que tous le monde ne se sente pas visé^^). Bon sans vouloir entré dans les détails (ce qui serait un peu long), je vous livre en quelque mot se que j'ai retenu de l'idée du livre. Intéresse avoir présenté les différents types d'états et s'être occupé plus particulièrement de ce qu'il nomme les principats (c'este à dire les états avec un prince à leur tête), Machiavel s'intéresse au moyen d'obtenir ces états et de les conserver. Ce sont surtout les manières dont on peut les conserver qui m'a intéressées. On voit par exemple l'intérêt d'une armée propre plutôt que celle d'une alliance ou de l'emploi de mercenaires ou encore comment un prince doit trouver l'équilibre entre libéralité et parcimonies. Enfin Machiavel conclue son essai par le rôle de la fortune dans l'avènement puis le destin d'un Prince et de son état. Il affirme que le Prince malgré toute la prudence dont il doit faire "preuve" en respectant les conseils que fourni l'essai n'est pas à l’abri des aléas de la fortune.

A lire et à méditer...

P.E.

http://share.ovi.com/media/DawudWalid.mymedia/DawudWalid.10104?sort=3

Je ne m'attendais pas à quelque chose d'extraordinaire. Et pourtant. Les Décombres n'est pas vraiment un roman, mais tout le monde en a entendu parler, au moins par l'intermédiaire de livres d'histoire. Les Deux Étendards est grandiose, et réédité régulièrement par Gallimard. Mais Les épis mûrs, personne n'en parle. Et c'est tout à fait injuste.

Certes, si vous n'avez aucun intérêt particulier pour la musique dite classique, et en particulier pour celle composée entre 1800 et 1920, vous risquez de vous emmerder ferme : elle occupe une bonne moitié du roman. Néanmoins, je trouve ce roman digne d'être lu. C'est une sorte de Bachelier de Vallès, en mieux, en moins geignard. Ne serait-ce que pour le style vigoureux de Rebatet - pour une fois sans interminables disgressions théologico-politiques, qui peuvent charmer, mais aussi lasser. Magnifique peinture du milieu petit-bourgeois dans lequel est né le personnage principal.

Vraiment, lisez-le. Et puis il se trouve qu'un petit malin en a mis une version PDF à votre disposition. Loin de moi l'idée de cautionner des pratiques illégales, mais il serait dommage de se priver.

(Aquesta nota conté detalls que poden ser considerats spoiler)

Als llibres, sovint només els demano que en acabar-los em deixin alguna cosa: un regust amarg o un somriure beatífic, una sensació de dessassossec o una mica d'alegria. Massa sovint, però, l'únic que em deixen és la constatació d'haver llegit un llibre més. Aquest no és, tanmateix, el cas i és d'agrair, encara que el que me'n resti sigui un nus a la gola i aquell sentiment tan contradictori que acostumem a explicitar dient alguna cosa semblant a «que trist, que bonic».

Perquè cap història que tracti d'una malaltia és alegre si no hi ha al final una esperança, per petita que sigui, de guariment; i quan es parla de la sida, malauradament, aquesta esperança desapareix. Tot i això, no es pot dir que aquesta novel·la sigui un drama, perquè no recorre —o almenys no m'ho ha semblat— a la llàgrima fàcil ni a excitar la compassió del lector: els personatges que la protagonitzen exposen, expliquen la seva història de mica en mica, i de mica en mica els anem coneixent i comprenent els seus motius, les seves pors, les esperances que tenen. És més aviat una novel·la d'emocions intenses, algunes de les quals força punyents.

Tot comença amb Helen, que viu amb el seu marit Hugh i llurs fills Manus i Cathal, allunyada de la seva família, amb la qual no manté bona relació. Un dia apareix a casa seva un amic del seu germà Declan per avisar-la que el noi és a l'hospital i la vol veure. Declan té una petició: que Helen expliqui a llur mare i a llur àvia que està malalt, i que demani a aquesta que li deixi passar uns dies a la casa que té prop del mar. Tots aquests personatges, més un altre amic de Declan, acabaran junts a la casa de l'àvia vora al mar, i allí aquestes sis persones hauran d'enfrontar-se no només a la malaltia, a l'homosexualitat, a les diferències generacionals, sinó també als conflictes que van separar, en un moment donat, Helen de la resta de la família.

De fet, el pes del conflicte recau en les tres dones: Dora Devereux, l'àvia; Lily, la mare; i Helen, la filla, a través de les paraules de les quals es van revelant les complicades relacions entre els diferents membres de la família. Tampoc Declan en queda al marge, ja que també té alguns retrets amagats. Durant els dies que passen a casa de Dora, el sis personatges no deixaran de parlar, i mica en mica els anem coneixent una mica més. Sempre amb el rerefons angoixant de la malaltia.

El llibre:

• Colm Tóibín. The Blackwater Lighsthip. Londres: Picador, 2000.273 p. ISBN 978-0-330-38986-0.

Enllaços relacionats:

• Colm Tóibín.

Technorati Tags: llibres — literatura — Colm Tóibín — The Blackwater Lightship

Immigration is the topic today, Wednesday 2nd July. Frank Couvares started telling us about his and his wife's parents and grandparents' origin. He is a "mango", his grandparents came from Italy (from one side) and Greece and Germany (from the other). This is a very common story in America, there are only very few that come from the first colonists without any mixture. In fact that is almost impossible.
Last evening we were watching the film "El Norte". Most of it was in Spanish what makes a more moving experience for me. I ended up crying.
Here are some statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau: Region of Birth of the Foreign-Born Population: 1850 to 1930 and 1960 to 1990. In the first of those periods, the biggest cities in America are 60% - 80% immigrants.
There was no regulation on immigration until 1917 in the immigration Act. List of United States immigration legislation.
The most significant number of immigrants in 1990 is 44.3 % people from Latin American, and at present "Latinos" are the largest plurality.

The democratic party is also split in relation to immigration, but the split is less than in the republican party.
The Green card allows you to work in the States, but even if you don't have it you can be paying taxes, this is really complicated to understand, but that is.

The second lecture of the day was Latino identity by Rick Lopez . Latinos are becoming active and are creating an identity that before didn't exist like that.
The face of the Latinos in the present days: they are not an invisible minority now, they are more unified and united as Latinos, the question they are facing nowadays is in terms of civil rights.
Some links to explore later on:
Texas rangers and n 1924 the petrol border was created.
LULA League of united Latino American citizens
The bracero program.
1960s, The Chicano movement started. It has 4 branches and represents the struggle for the right to have rights, they claim their part in the community. Chicano Movement in Washington State, History Project
Puerto Ricans are the second group of Latinos in the States, they are American, but they are also Latinos because of the language. (1917 Jones act-citizenship). Cuban-American are the 3rd group of Hispanic (this term was invented in the 1960s and the term Latino was created with a market target).

Latinos are going to be very influential in this election, as a guess Frank says that 70% Mexican American will go for democrat as well as 90% of Puerto Ricans. Cuban used to be 90% republicans, but this tendency seems to be changing and he guesses they could vote 50/50.
In the afternoon we went to visit the CNA, Center for the New Americans. We had a long talk with the director James Ayres. We were asking questions for more than an hour or more. Can you believe that? This is the way we are :-). He has invited us to join him and his family in Chesterfield for the 4th of July Parade.
As a conclusion, everybody in America, except the Native American Indians, could be considered an immigrant though not everybody remembers that now.

I use this slideshare about humour in religions because el tema del día es "American Religious Pluralism and Tolerance", en este grupo hay gente de varias religiones, que yo sepa al menos católicos, musulmanes, protestantes y anglicanos, muchos de ellos fueron el domingo a misa o a la celebración correspondiente de su iglesia. Es muy interesante ver cómo reflejamos cada uno lo que creemos y lo que ocurre en nuestros distintos países. Por otra parte lo que más me gusta es ver que a veces alguien se sorprende mucho de alguna cosa que hacen los demás (or even gets shocked) pero a la vez todos vamos abriendo la mente a nuevas formas de ver la realidad. Por ejemplo yo ya sabía que en India o Pakistán los matrimonios son en la mayoría de los casos concertados entre los padres, pero sorprende conocer a alguien que está comprometida de esa forma y que está esperando a casarse para conocer y poder ver a su futuro esposo. Este por ejemplo es el caso de mi compañera de habitación cuando salgamos de viaje. No puedo opinar mucho sobre esto, por lo visto los matrimonios que se hacen de esta forma en la India tienen menos índice de divorcios (según me comentaba Rajendran), y ya sabemos que al final uno tiene que aprender a amar con el paso del tiempo, aunque claro está me sería muy difícil estar en su situación por no decir imposible.

Me he salido del tema de las religiones y me he metido en el de la cultura, lo cierto es que el día me ha gustado mucho. No voy a extenderme solo a poner las ideas principales y los links. Otherwise I won't have time to do my homework, go to the gym, etc. (+ we are going to a movie session tonight to watch "El Norte" a film about immigration.

The irony of religious separation from the state is religious intensity because no one is afraid of other religions becoming the official religion of the state.
But this is different to separation of religious and politics. Politicians have their own religious believes and these are clearly exposed and reflected in their opinions.

Anne Broadbridge from University of Massachusetts gave us a talk about Islam in America or, as she said, about "How to teach students about others and how to do it when they know something about the topic but you know it is wrong " or it is not without prejudices. It was a very clear lecture.
In the afternoon we had a panel discussion, again lot of information. There were 4 people:
Jules Chametsky, a Jewish Rabbi.
An article about Jewish humor by him.. He recommended to have a look at the religious report by the Pew forum.
Another panelist was a Reverend from the Episcopal Church (they belong to the Anglican Church). He says that once he spent sometime in France and what surprised him was that there was many kind of cheese but only one predominant religion, just opposite to what happens in the United States. And on the Muslim side Anne Broadbridge and Nevine, a Muslim woman from Egypt who has lived for 10 years in America. Jules talked about the orthodox Jews and the non orthodox ones that even accepted homosexual Rabbis. The Episcopal Church also accepts that now. This was one of the points that raised some controversy in the room. The reverend also talked about the market side of religions in this country, as they depend on the money from the practitioners they need to sell themselves well.

Demain, sortie en kiosque du troizième numéro de XXI, magazine de reportages qui collabore également avec d'excellents illustrateurs. J'attends, en particulier, le récit de Philippe Lançon sur le village de Gabriel Garcia Márquez et ses "cents ans de solitude".

In the second part of the morning C. Pyle talked about “free speech and national security”. In 1970 he disclosed the military's surveillance of civilian politics that led to the Watergate era.

Explaining everything he told us about this would take too long, but he promised he will send his speech and then I will copy some of the paragraphs here. Let just say that it was by far very interesting.
A few links more:

The Intelligence Revolution by Christopher Pyle and he suggested the book "Civil Islam: Muslims and Democratization in Indonesia" by Robert W. Hefner.

My conclusion is that Americans are more aware of their rights than we are in Spain or at least that is my perception
After lunch we worked on ESL methodology with Barbara Madeloni and Nicole Graves. What does it mean to learn and to know a language?
Creo que voy a hacer el project final usando material de los Simpsons:

La condition génératrice des oeuvres d'art, c'est-à-dire l'amour exclusif du Beau, l'idée fixe. Baudelaire

[...] On ne peut qu'applaudir et que s'incliner devant des idées si saines exprimées dans un style si ferme, si précis et si simple, vrai modèle de prose et vraie prose de poète.

Oui, l'Art est indépendant de la Morale comme de la Politique, comme de la Philosophie, comme de la Science, et le Poète ne doit pas plus rendre de compte au Moraliste, au Tribun, au Philosophe, ou au Savant, que ceux-ci ne lui en doivent.

Oui, le but de la Poèsie, c'est le Beau, le Beau seul, le Beau pur, sans alliage d'Utile, de Vrai, ou de Juste. Tant mieux pour tout le monde si l'oeuvre du poète se trouve, par hasard, mais par hasard seulement, dégager une atmosphère de justice ou de vérité. Sinon, tant pis pour M. Proudhon. Quant à l'utilité, je crois qu'il est superflu de prendre davantage au sérieux cette mauvaise plaisanterie.

Verlaine. Article publié dans L'art, 1865.

L'occasion de vous présenter à nouveau cette scène du chef-d'œuvre Barton Fink :

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Nous sommes les derniers. Presque les après-derniers. Aussitôt après nous commence un autre âge, un tout autre monde, le monde de ceux qui ne croient plus à rien, qui s’en font gloire et orgueil.

Aussitôt après nous commence le monde que nous avons nommé, que nous ne cessons pas de nommer le monde moderne. Le monde qui fait le malin. Le monde des intelligents, des avancés, de ceux qui savent, de ceux à qui on n’en remontre pas, de ceux à qui on n’en fait pas accroire. Le monde de ceux à qui on n’a plus rien à apprendre. Le monde de ceux qui font le malin. Le monde de ceux qui ne sont pas des dupes, des imbéciles. Comme nous. C’est-à-dire : le monde de ceux qui ne croient à rien, pas même à l’athéisme, qui ne se dévouent, qui ne se sacrifient à rien. Exactement : le monde de ceux qui n’ont pas de mystique. Et qui s’en vantent. Qu’on ne s’y trompe pas, et que personne par conséquent ne se réjouisse, ni d’un côté ni de l’autre. Le mouvement de dérépublicanisation de la France est profondément le même mouvement que le mouvement de sa déchristianisation. C’est ensemble un même mouvement de démystication. C’est du même mouvement profond, d’un seul mouvement, que ce peuple ne croit plus à la République et qu’il ne croit plus à Dieu, qu’il ne veut plus mener la vie républicaine, et qu’il ne veut plus mener la vie chrétienne, (qu’il en a assez), on pourrait presque dire qu’il ne veut plus croire aux idoles et qu’il ne veut plus croire au vrai Dieu.

Charles Péguy.

Suite et source...

beys... Tous se monde baigne dans cet orient lointain à l'époque de Louis XIV.

Déjà la couverture ci-contre m'a mis l'eau à la bouche: regardez le visage de cet homme, ses yeux dans le vague mais pleins de force, la noblesse de son port, la volonté guerrière qu'on lit dans son attitude et le calme qui pourtant s'en dégage. Est-ce lui le héros? Qui d'autre peut endosser ce rôle s'il le côtoie. Tous cela à la fois, c'en étais trop je commençait ma lecture. Je vous tiens au courant...

A bientôt,

P.E.