Michel Pastoureau

L'humeur vagabonde (12/18)

Noir: Histoire d'une couleur

also in English:  Black: The History of a Color

"Black: is it a color or a non-color? An ambiguous color, color of contrasts, of morning and of celebrations, of poverty and of sumptuosity. Color of the devil and of witches, color of the humility of saints and of the poor's younger brothers. Color of filth and of writing, color of the rocker and of the elegant. Color of the night that evokes fear and intense vibration of light with Soulages. We can discuss black. But how do we describe it?"

During the Middle Ages, says Pastoureau, it wasn't uncommon for people to dress entirely in yellow, which is unthinkable today. It was from the Reformation and the Counter Reformation that we inherit the notion of "honest" colors and "dishonest" colors.  And red, green and yellow fall into the latter category, while black, grey and white are the honest ones.

Michel Pastoureau is a "marvelous repeat offender" and Black is the latest of his books about color.

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Claire Gallois

Du jour au lendemain (12/18)

"The imprint of broken things may be what we hide from ourselves and what keeps us going.

"Writer and woman, the narrator is accepted into the Académie française. Her acceptance speech is unusual. Insolent. Abrubt. Moving. Ferocious. With an unexpected conclusion. She reviews the episodes of a life, without false modesty, mocks the culture of appearances, confronts her own doubts and doesn't fail to hit her targets. 

"Claire Gallois' talent lies in the biting freedom with which she brings together the real and imaginary, the serious with the frivolous. A novel about time and vanity that begins with a joke and ends with a tear in the eye."

Du jour au lendemain for iTunes

Nicolas Grimaldi

Du jour au lendemain (12/4).

Proust et les horreurs de l'amour

"It seems to me that the most original experience of consciousness, or at least that of those who become philosophical, is disappointment. For, if things delighted us, fulfilled us, we would not question why they were this way and not another. We would find that things were fine as they were. (long silence) If we are disappointed, it is because we were expecting something. The problem then becomes how to know where that expectation comes from. A large part of my analysis ...  consists of understanding that expectation is consciousness itself.  ...this is in a way the key that I have tried to turn in the proustian lock. Because it seems to elucidate the entire enterprise and most of the experience that Proust relates."

Du jour au lendemain for iTunes

Claude Levi-Strauss at 100

L'humeur vagabonde (11/24)

"I would have wished that this birthday go unnoticed, because for the 90th birthday there is something a little hypocritical in way, because we think that for the 100th we will no longer be able to celebrate. And also because, I feel that birthdays at this age don't really have a place because there is no reason to celebrate one more step down toward physical and intellectual degeneration. At birthdays I always remember what I think Anatole France said: he regretted that life didn't take place in the other direction and that we would begin our life as an old person and finish bursting with youth. So, if I have a regret to express today it is certainly that" - Clause Levy Strauss in 1998.

"As for my don quichotisme, which dominated me since childhood, it is very different from what you normally think.  I see in Don Quihote an obstinate effort to discover the past behind the present."

"Humanity is not  entirely different from weevils who develop inside a sack of flour and begin to poison themselves from their own toxins long before they lack food and physical space."

"I'm watching the destruction of all that is dear to me, nature, diversity of species, diversitiy of cultures..."

With these quotations, his oeuvre starts to sound triste, but I'm putting Mythologies on my wish list.

As Catherine Clément explains: "he takes a myth and then takes a variant, then a variant of a variant and from variant to variant, at the end of 800 myths from North and South America, he arrives at a global tissu of American myths. That's why we have to understand that this analysis of myths resembles a musical score, and specifically Wagner."

I didn't follow that, and Kathleen Evin (host) decided it was time for a break and put on Caetano Veloso singing Paloma, from the dream sequence in Talk to Her, which seemed appropriate.

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Julie Wolkenstein

L'humeur vagabonde (11/13)

"I should have realized from the beginning: the first time I saw her, the evening she landed on the island with my mother and appeared in the French window blinded by jet lag and the sunset, everything matched up, everything coincided. We were already unknowingly repeating the first scene in that old book by James that, like all American students, I had read in college a few years earlier. At the time I didn't get it. But now I'm sure of it: her personality, her life, her travels, her friends, the men that loved her, the man she married, her children, her sorrows, it was all written, imagined a century ago. I am not superstitious. I'm not crazy. I don't believe in destiny. But hers repeats to the letter that of a character in a novel that she had never even read. And which ends with my death - I mean the death of my model, Ralph. As for her, the heroine, we don't know what becomes of her. But I may be able to foil this sort of misfortune. I don't have much time, I know what I have to do."

On L'humeur vagabonde, Kathleen Evin calls L'Excuse a "literary, love and linguistic thriller. The narrator, Lise, returns at the end of her life to a beautiful house on Martha's Vineyard where as a young woman she'd had a secret passion for her cousin Nick who had an incurable disease. There she finds a posthumous manuscript in which he has told their story, in parallel with the one written by Henry James in The Portrait of a Lady."

James said that the best scene in his book consisted of Isabel sitting motionless in a chair. This is why the movie fell so short of telling the story. It will be interesting to see how Wolkenstein reproduces James' action. 

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Jean-François Vézina

Et si on parlait d'amour (11/2) 

Vézina, who is a psychologist at Maison de Psychologie Salaberry in Québec, explains his cartography of love as mapped out in his book, L'aventure amoureuse, which sounds something like the instructions to a board game.

"I wanted the voyage to take place from East to West, the metaphor being that, going into love today is sort of the equivalent of rediscovering the new world. For me it's really the equivalent of creating a new world in order to arrive at the destination: Durable Love."

It all begins with a vast "Ocean of Meeting",  the heart of the Lover's Adventure, and the goal is to arrive on the solid ground of Nascent Love.  In this ocean we have the desire to discover a new universe and on the map it is represented by rivers flowing with dopamine. It's a little like Club Med, all services included, it's all marvelous.  Then we arrive at the next stage which is the Valley of Everyday and that is usually where we get lost, we lose imagination, dopamine is less abundant and we are calmer. Beyond this is the Desert of Ennui, which provides a necessary pause, but those who need intensity at any cost will move on to the Island of Independence. Within this region there is also the Abyss of Impossible Loves. Especially given the vast Ocean of Meeting that exists today, the possibility of meeting people who are far away is much greater and this creates this abyss.  As Jan Bauer said in his book Les amours impossibles: "those who have never been there have not lived, but those who stay [in the Abyss] don't get it."

The moral is to have self awareness and not to want to carry the baggage of the other, and then to learn how to play.  The way to arrive at Durable Love is the Path of Play where there is space, because when the body gets stiff it needs to go to an open place and play. When we don't play together , we end up in the Jungle of Power Play where 75% of couples run aground as their relationships become polluted by blame. 

The trick is to regain the Land of Recognition where we rediscover the partner, who is not all the same person we started out with.

Et si on parlait d'amour for iTunes.

Michael Lucey

"The child conceived during the marriage has, as a father, the husband" - Napoleonic Code. 

Alain Veinstein spoke to Michael Lucey (Du jour au lendemain 10/22) about his book, The Misfit of the Family, which has just been translated into French (Les ratés de famille).

Lucey pored over the Code civil ("an extraordinary literary work") as a prerequisite to his close look at some of the relationships in Balzac's novels, especially those that depicted diversity. "Homosexuality" was not part of the lexicon, and anyway for Balzac the term would define a narrow category for the varieties of interactions that his characters experience. Lucey cites as examples two late novels: Cousin Bette and Cousin Pons, both characters leading single, and therefore suspicious, lives. 

Du jour au lendemain for iTunes

Bernardo Carvalho

Kathleeen Evin (L'humeur vagabonde - 10/22) interviews the Brazilian auther Bernardo Carvalho whose book, Le soleil se couche à San Paulo, has just come out in French (translated by Geneviève Leibrich). 

Near closing time in a restaurant in Sao Paulo, the owner asks one of the lingering customers if he is a writer, and the customer, Setsuko, becomes the narrator of a story that begins in Japan during WWII and leads to Brazil. The love triangle between Masukichi, Michiyo and Jokichi is just the backdrop to another story, which is the history of Japan at war and the consequences that this has on the Japanese community living in Brazil. The narrator realizes, as he recounts the Brazilian adventures of Tanizaki and the Emperor's cousin, that it's also his own story - that of second generation Japanese immigrants coping with humiliation and exile.

Carvalho talks about his fascination with Japan, while claiming to know next to nothing about it, and shares his thoughts on Tanizaki, Mishima and the notion of national identity.

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Eric Holder

Monday's episode of L'humeur vagabonde was an interview with Eric Holder and a poetic portrait of Médoc where life is too short to drink bad wine.

The pace and tone of the interview was set first by the deep médocain accent of one of Holder's neighbors describing the estuary, and then by Alela Diane singing Oh My Mama.

Holder just published De loin on dirait une île (From a Distance, You'd Think It Was an Island) in which he describes the natural beauty, the people smiling at each other candidly as they pass one another, but also the "inherited distrust" of outsiders. The cafes would fall silent when he would enter them at first, like a saloon in the wild west when a stranger throws open the swinging doors, and it took him some time to adjust his habits to the local pace and tone and etiquette. You must never, for example, interrupt a conversation, even if you are waiting at the cash register and the conversation is long.

Soapkills opens the last segment. Asked if he felt he'd arrived at "port", Holder responds that he prefers to think he has arrived at the last place before eternity, the last saloon before the desert.

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Valentine Goby

In her novel, Qui touch à mon corps je le tue, Valentine Goby retells the true story of Marie-Louise Girard who was a faiseuse d'anges, or avorteuse who was guillotined in 1943 by the Vichy government which had just one year before made abortion a capital offense. 

On Du jour au lendemain (10/6), Goby discusses the three characters of the book: Marie G, the faiseuse d'anges who is one of the last women guillotined, Lucie L., the woman having the abortion, and Henri D., the executioner. 

I remember walking out of Claude Chabrol's Une affaire de femmes, also based on Marie-Louise Girard, and I wouldn't want to read a book that left me with that feeling. But the novel, and Goby, sound intriguing. 

Du jour au lendemain for iTunes

Martin Page

Page discusses his fifth novel, Peut-être une histoire de l'amour, with Alain Veinstein on Du jour au lendemain (10/2).

The main character of the novel is Virgil, a name inspired both by the Roman writer and the Woody Allen character in Take the Money and Run. Virgil is excentric, slightly obsessed with yoga, and won't watch films in color (he adjusts his tv to black and white). 

Though he is used to women leaving him, he is confounded when "Clara" leaves him a message telling him that she would "prefer" that they break up, because he doesn't recall having a relationship with anyone named Clara. Inspite of this detail, he decides that he must strive to win her back. 

Page has written children books as well as an essay on rain which opens with this sentence:

Rain is the password for those who have a taste for a kind of suspension of the world. To say that you like rain is to affirm difference.

And Gwenaël Jeannin writes on Buzz-littéraire that his characters are "raindrops traumatized by their fall and infused with light."

Du jour au lendemain for iTunes

Atiq Rahimi

Both Affinités électives (10/2) and Du jour au lendemain (9/25) interviewed Atiq Rahimi last week to talk about Syngué Sabour. 

Though the book is written in French, the title is Persian. It means "patience stone" and is the name of a magic black stone that absorbs the stress of those who believe. Some, in the book, say it is the stone at Mecca, around which millions of pilgrims walk. One day it will explode, overloaded with human misfortune, and that will be the apocalypse.

But in the book, Syngué Sabour is an Afghan man who has been paralyzed by a bullet in his neck. His wife resents his bellicose nature that has left him a vegetable, but she cares for him, and talks to him, never knowing if he can hear. Her confessions become increasingly unfettered by the social, religious and conjugal oppression of Afghanistan. Until one day the stone explodes.

Rahimi depicts the oppressive reality of everyday life in Afghanistan, and especially that of women living with a particular notion of Islam.

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or

Du jour au lendemain for iTunes

Elie Wiesel turns 80

and publishes: Le cas Sonderberg (written in French)

In this interview, Elie Wiesel describes (Du jour au lendemain, Sept 24) the night he read Kafka's The Trial. He started in the evening and finished at dawn. He recalled greeting the normally annoying early garbage collectors with a sense of glee, so glad to still be living in a world where there were garbage collectors.

Le Cas Sonderberg is about a New York journalist, Yididyah, who is asked to cover the trial of Werner Sonderberg. The accused is a young German living in the US and who went hiking in the Adirondacks with his elderly uncle. And came back alone. The journalist is fascinated by the story, searches his own past, ends up on a mission in Israel... (Amazon.fr)

Du jour au lendemain for iTunes

Clara Malraux

The guest on last Tuesday's L'humeur vagabonde was Claude-Catherine Kiejman who just published Clara Malraux l'aventureuse.

Clara Malraux described her husband as a merveilleux spectacle, only, she was not a very good spéctatrice. 

He apparently told her that she would be better off marrying him than becoming a second-rate writer.  "That didn't really encourage me," she said. Her daughter gave her a book about Zelda Fitzgerald where she found a similar phrase and where it was made clear that this attitude was what drove Zelda insane. Clara Malraux said she sympathized, but she simply didn't have the time for that: the events in Indochina, poverty, The Spanish Civil War, World War II, being Jewish, fighting in the Resistance, bringing up here child, left her no time to go crazy.

She stayed with André for  15 years and learned this:

« Aimer une femme, pour un homme, c’est peut-être la vouloir semblable à l’image qu’il s’est fait d’elle. Aimer, pour une femme, c’est vouloir que l’homme choisi ressemble à l’image qu’il s’est fait de lui-même, et souvent, plus simplement encore, à être ce qu’il est ».

("Loving a woman, for a man, is perhaps wanting her to resemble the image that he himself has of her. Loving, for a woman, is wanting the chosen man to resemble the image that he has of himself, and often, even more simply, to be what he is.")

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Watch Malraux's tribute to Jean Moulin for a sample of the merveilleux spectacle.

Jacques Attali

On L'humeur vagabonde, Jacques Attali's discusses his play, Du cristal à la fumée, which is based on notes that were discovered after the Russian archives were opened. They include the minutes of a meeting that took place on November 12, 1938, two nights after Kristallnacht. 

In the second act of the play, Goering, Himmler, Goebbels, Heydrich and others discuss the need to deny any insurance claims made by Jews for damage to their property. The conversation expands to other topics and points toward the Final Solution: denying the right to work, to teach or be taught, to frequent shows or go to Aryan markets.

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Oliver Poivre d'Arvor

qui publie Le voyage du fils, chez Grasset.

"J'aime cette absence de mots qui empêche le mensonge, car c'est toujours par les mots que les amants se mentent. j'aime ce  mystère de nos regards qui ne savent rien de l'autre. Là est l'humanité,  la possibilité de la rencontre, par delà les mots, par delà les langues."

(I like this absence of words that prevents a lie, for it's always through words that lovers lie to each other. I like this mystery of glances that know nothing about the other. Therein is humanity, the possibility of a meeting, beyond words, beyond languages.)

Du jour au lendemain for iTunes

Michel Onfray on Home Household Management

Even when I'm not really listening to Michel Onfray's rapid fire lectures, when I'm daydreaming or looking at the scenery, I always pick up on the etymologies that pepper them. Aug. 15 was a question/answer session and when one of the students asked about Adam Smeess and the influence of the invisible hand, Onfray entered into somewhat of a diatribe against the notion that the free market would lead to general wealth. He pointed out that the word "economy" comes from the Greek word meaning "household management." So I learned, at least, that my "home economics" class in 7th grade was based on a redundancy, at least in terms of etymology.

Conférences de Michel Onfray for iTunes

Pour la littérature - NRF

Pour la litterature has had a series of shows about the NRF (Nouvelle Revue Française). I've been listening to Philippe Sollers and Angie David chat about the Revue in the 50s when it reappeared after a hiatus that began with the war and continued afterwards because it was proscribed for it's collaboarationisme.

Jean d'Ormesson considers the NRF to be a prominent literary figure of the 20th century and accordingly devotes a chapter to it in his Une Autre histoire de la litterature français (every other chapter is devoted to actual writers).

As usual, I don't hang on every word as I listen to these podcasts, but I especially like to hear Sollers talk. He recounts the involvement of Dominique Aury, the author of l'Histoire d'O. She wrote the book for her lover, Paul Paulhan, who was then the director of the NRF (and also 30 years her senior). Sollers recalls afternoons in the 90s at the comités des lectures at Gallimard where she would read her carefully taken notes and then slip into a peaceful slumber as the day gave way to crépuscule.

Pour la littérature on iTunes
Philippe Sollers - l'Infini
Angie David - Dominique Aury

Michel Onfray

This summer, Michel Onfray, the popular philosopher who founded the Université Populaire, has a series of lectures available on France Culture. As the site says, "he invites you to delve into the thought of radical existential philosophers and the formation of modern individualism with Emerson, Thoreau, Stirner and Schopenhauer." I listened to all of the lectures on Thoreau and they are all worth it. Start with the podcast of August 1 where he takes questions from his audience. The first student asks him to explain Hegel, which takes about 20 minutes, then someone asked if the idea of manifest destiny couldn't be blamed, in a way, on Thoreau. The answer, 30 minutes long, is no.
Onfray for iTunes.