Mutt Case

 There is a tree in my father's garden that looks a bit wilted, maybe it is a weeping fir tree. It has always kind of annoyed me, because it looks as if it has been doused in acid rain, or is just somehow untidy. I felt the dangly top branches spoilt the view from my father's living room and wanted to go out and chop them off. When I mentioned this to my father he said "oh no, you wouldn't chop off the man and his dug". I looked again and sure enough I saw a man walking a dog, a bit like a retriever with a feathery tail. (click on the picture to enlarge it to see the colour of the dog's collar).  A nice reminder of how differently people can see the same thing.

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 When I started writing this I wanted to investigate something I read in the paper about "the belief formulated by Duchamp that 'All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone.'"  Imagine my surprise when the first Google search result gave - The Richard Mutt Case

Tooth and nail

Je vous lis en juillet, au bord de l'eau, quand il fait très chaud.

De temps à autre, je garde ma place avec un doigt,

planté sur un point comme un piquet de cerf volant,

ta phrase fait le tour de moi comme l'hirondelle fait le tour du ciel,

comme le vin fait le tour du palais

et quand je suis loin, très loin du point de départ, je reprends le fil de ma lecture,

mon regard re-penchant sur ta page comme un oiseau qui picore les signes, bibliophage sauvage, haletant entre les espaces et les paragraphes.

Parfois, ne trouvant rien, je cours, puis un mot me ralenti, et je te suis, et tuez moi.

Je vous ai lu en juillet, deux fois, autour de la cinquantaine.

Entre la première et la deuxième, vous avez oublié mon nom

C'est sans importance

On a le droit de n'exister pour personne

Être sans importance pour un autre…

Je vous lis, je vous ai lu en juillets,

l'écris vain jeté du lit, je vous le dis, jujitsu à ta virgule près ; lits crevants, juvénile jubilance,

vous, juillet, lu.

I bought a recording of Bach's Cello suites played by Yo Yo Ma on Itunes so I went to buy blank cds at the supermarket bookshop/multimedia outlet (which you may remember is called "l'espace temps").

As I waited for the sales attendant to finish her conversation with a friend and come and take my money, I noticed two copies of a book for sale, propped up on the counter, right in front of the cash register, some distance from the books. I noted the name of the author. BG.

In the evening I switched on the news and the main headline was that BG had died. The same day. I felt a sudden revulsion at the society we are living in. It couldn't be a coincidence. They put that book there because they knew it would have a good chance of selling because the author had just died. So we cash in on death. We are actually using death as a selling point. Do we have no scruples left? Or did we ever have any?


Amitiés bizarres…
The Heads of State and Government confirmed their determination to fight translational threats together.

I had never come across "nous" in English before...


A French question from a satisfied customer and an English sentence from the Guardian..
Ne vous ai-je pas encensée à la réception du document ?
Obama team 'incensed at being kept in the dark' as company denies underwater oil clouds

avoir les dents longues does not mean to be long in the tooth

Painting over the map.

People tattooed acupuncture pressure points on their bodies gazillions of years ago, but we have painted over them. The new layer hides the old layer which is eventually forgotten…

Dirty washing

I have just lost the post I wrote on Greece and ferries... blogger refused to save it because it had a meta link in it...

Got my knickers in a bit of a twist.

Translating sometimes feels a bit like ferrying meaning from one language to another. I frequently fall in the water in more ways than one.

When I came across the words "lingerie sale" on a website I was shocked to see what I thought was "dirty underwear" and then I realised it was "reduced in price"

speaking of underwear, thong in cheek:

French English
string thong
tongs/tongues flipflops

I can't get my mind round the way sanction means both punishment and approval…

And now for something completely different - Nougaro

Ex ante

Just realised with horror that I sometimes translate without thinking about the words

without thinking about what they mean

the way you drive a car without seeing the road – on automatic pilot.

The word that made me aware of this is "univers".

When I see it I think automatically "we don't say 'universe' in English we say world, sphere, domain, field…"

Today I actually stopped and imagined what the French was saying…

a warmer universe… are they one step ahead of us, living already in the multiverse?

a phrase I've been stumbling across is up the ante – to increase the stakes.


seems to be everywhere

antipodean = des antipodes

Come to the disco

Picture a March morning

I still find the sight of the snow-covered Pyrenees uplifting, awe-inspiring, in the same way as a vast expanse of open sea. Unfortunately it is impossible to ignore the irritating fact that when you can see the mountains clearly from my kitchen window it means rain is on the way. This reminds me of the cycling conundrum – there are those who enjoy pedalling uphill because they look forward to freewheeling down the other side and those who fail to enjoy freewheeling downhill because they can't bear the thought of having to cycle back up.

I really do feel now that my position towards words has shifted. There is something decidedly not new about the language, about language, about the language I use.

Laconic – lapidaire - scissors – scission – iconoclast - demotic (popular).

And the words are no longer mine. They don't belong to me in any way, I did not create them… putting them together in a particular sequence is not such a big deal… It's just like throwing a handful of sand up in the air and "reading" how it lands.

I feel like I've been barking up the wrong tree, or staring down the wrong well. This intellectual uncertainty is certainly related to the feeling of "uncanny".

And it is possibly related to a recent borderline experience … if that is how you describe the feeling of touching a limit. Last week my reading group "à livre ouvert" was invited to read some poetry during an aperitif in honour of the "Printemps des poètes" ... the theme was "couleurs de femmes". One of the colours we chose was black, and my take on it consisted in a list of words that rhyme with "noir" –

Voir, soir, croire, boire, foire, loir, poire

(see, evening, believe, drink, fair, dormouse and pear)

Not only did I read each word with my entire being, but I also mimed the word and the group (there were six of us) backed this up.

It was an extremely satisfying experience. And I definitely touched some kind of limit, my dégré zéro de l'écriture maybe. In any case, it made me feel that the words stand up by themselves. They don't need any fancy sentences to give them meaning.

Reading Zizek,

 I come across perspicuous, which I had never heard of. It is neither perspicacious nor conspicuous.

Zizek reminds me that the unconscious does not take negatives into account. I'm trying to write a short piece about the uncanny in psychoanalysis and I can't get past the fact that I'm a "canny Scot" – in fact, "canny" in my Scottish dialect means "can't". "Ah canny dae it" = I can't do it. "Cawnie" on the other hand means cautious. "Caw cawnie" means take it easy, don't do whatever you're doing quite so hard.

Audio, video, disco - I hear, I see, I learn