The first cantrelles of the season

Sakura-Con --- Seattle (3) (with Alfred Hitchcock in a cameo appearance (the yellow pants))

No, we don't post cat and dog pictures (3) --- Happy New Year

This morning

Monday matinée (Glenn)

Buy it, use it, break it, fix it,

Trash it, change it, mail – upgrade it,

Charge it, point it, zoom it, press it,
Snap it, work it, quick – erase it,
Write it, cut it, paste it, save it,
Load it, check it, quick – rewrite it,
Plug it, play it, burn it, rip it,
Drag and drop it, zip – unzip it,
Lock it, fill it, call it, find it,
View it, code it, jam – unlock it,
Surf it, scroll it, pause it, click it,
Cross it, crack it, switch – update it,
Name it, rate it, tune it, print it,
Scan it, send it, fax – rename it,
Touch it, bring it, pay it, watch it.
Technologic.

"That's not enough!" (French for beginners)

Please read this...it's only one paragraph  from the London Review of Books connecting our recent Foucault post (by Mr. E.) with our own faux-French background with our quest for happy endings (just so that you know, Alain Robbe-Grillet was the inventor of the nouveau roman)...please read this:

Alain Robbe-Grillet

"By now, most readers in France had ceased to care [about Robbe-Grillet]; even his intellectual champions lost interest, although  [Roland] Barthes stood by him. ‘Transgression’ had come to mean l’écriture féminine and gay erotica; Robbe-Grillet’s hetero-sadist fixations looked decidedly démodé, quite possibly reactionary. (Fredric Jameson wondered whether his books had become ‘unreadable since feminism’.) At the party for  Barthes’s 1977 inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, Foucault confronted Robbe-Grillet: ‘I have told you this already and I will say it again, Alain: when it comes to sex, you are, and always have been misguided!’ Barthes rose to his defence, reminding Foucault that Robbe-Grillet was, at the very least, a pervert. Foucault replied: ‘Ça ne suffit pas!’"

Thursday matinée

Celebrity deficiency?

Not famous enough? Go public with your ménage (à trois):

Tuesday matinée

(Bobby Jones)

Find a caption (Jacki)

Sirrr --- "Couldn't agree more"

More Sirrr-wise, this time as a comment on the Daily Beast (scroll down). Let us explain. Andrew Sullivan has a post on Philip Roth, who, in a NY restaurant, got accosted (if that's the word) by young, budding (and handsome) author Julian Trepper, who has just published his first novel "Balls" (balls). Trepper presents Roth with a copy of said Balls, Roth jumps up, and shoots into a tirade against writing:

“I would quit while you’re ahead. Really, it’s an awful field. Just torture. Awful. You write and write, and you have to throw almost all of it away because it’s not any good. I would say just stop now. You don’t want to do this to yourself. That’s my advice to you.”

Julian has reported on this in the Paris review and on the pages of the Daily Beast, where he's speculating about Roth's career as a bored ex-writer (Roth announced recently he had quit writing), and posits that writing is a very practical way out of boredom. 

Julian Trepper, Philip Roth

And her's our Sirrr-letter:

  Sirrr --- couldn't agree more. Boredom is the alternative to writing, or, more precisely, writing is the alternative to boredom. I'm a retired academic living in a retirement community in the south of France, and people here are bored, bored, so bored it could actually kill them. You need an inner life in order to live a good life, and while there might be other things to help you find it or live it, writing, as Julian so coyly explains, provides a practical and pragmatic way to get one, an inner life.

Folks, as an academic, I always knew about "writing," and I can tell you from experience now that there isn't much difference between writing an academic paper and writing gay pornography, especially when it’s the first draft, when the creative juices really need to flow.

OK, so. Let me tell you. The day I decided to write fiction, I found Jesus. Since I'm writing gay pornography, I'm wearing the flaccid smile of the truly reborn, my wrinkles have disappeared, my hair has grown, my penis has grown, Jesus it is. 60% of the time I'm on a high, the high people normally reach only after three glasses of champagne. And the first novel is almost finished. The first draft was finished in under five month (the first draft of my Ph.D. took two years).

French for beginning poets (1) --- On se fout de nous

(lyrics)

Et passent [pass], passent, passent, passent, passent, passent les jours [days (as in journal)],
Et rien [nothing], non rien, rien ne change [changes] sur le parcours [parcours],
Ce sont les mêmes [same] pages [pages] qui défilent,
Les mêmes vers [verse] qu'on récite,
Le même vieux [old]  film [film] que depuis cent [hundred] fois [times] on rembobine, [replay, sort of]
Et on s'accroche [acroach] et on s'acharne [acharne], et on s'abime [abime] et on se gâche [spoil], on s'épuise [epuise] et on s'entame [entame], on s'enlise [enlise] et on s'éloigne [eloin],
Et on s'accroche et on s'acharne, on se brise et on s'attarde, ne soyez pas si cons.

Good Morning!

"Now I get it!"

No shit (Will.I.Am ft. Eva Simons)

(and the lyrics:)

if you love it like i love it
and you feel what i feel inside
if you want it like i want it
then baby let's get it tonight

if you feel it say hell yeah
(hell yeah)
say hell yeah
(hell yeah)
and say hell yeah
(hell yeah)
this is love, this is love, this is love

Bürchen in Switzerland (reposted)

Milka milk chocolate, with the milk from happy cows---that was the slogan of a chocolate commercial during my youth in Germany. And there we are, in Bürchen, Switzerland, and it's true.

Near Bürchen, Bietschhorn in the background (peak in the clouds)

Bürchen is located on the southern side of the Valais valley, near the side valleys of Zermatt and Saas Fee, at 1600m altitude. The ski lift begins right in front of our settlement, the Chalet zone.

Shall I compare thee to a summer day?

Since we are a literature blog now, we have to do serious stuff, like posting some serious pictures, like. Like this one...

Tyson Beckford

...which brings to mind Shakespeare's 18th sonnet...


Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course untrimmed:
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,
Nor shall death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st,
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee. 


...(you don't want to look at the HTML code underneath)...

...but you might want to look at this clip, eternalizing David Gilmour, the singer of Pink Floyd, when he set the sonnet to his music, because that's what aging rock stars, like us, do, when, they, have, their, reflective, moments...





...and judge yourself.

Hold on, here are a few pointers to Sonnet 18:

Isn't it awfully nice to have a penis (2) (Monty Python)

And here's the clip:



For a full transcript, see our earlier post here.

Isn't it awfully nice to have a penis (Monty Python)

"Isn't it awfully nice to have a penis? Isn't it frightfully good to have a dong? It's swell to have a stiffy; it's divine to own a dick...from the tiniest little tanger, to the world's biggest prick! So three cheers for your willy or john thomas...hurray for your one-eyed trouser-snake...your piece of pork, your wife's best friend, your percy or you cock...you can wrap it up in ribbons, you can slip it in your sock...but don't take it out in public or they will stick you in the dock, and you won't come back. Uuh thank you very much." (Hat tip: Urban Dictionary)