Snoopdogg Bandana Clothing

All my friends are ....

Hello everyone!

This post is dedicated to Cune me pass the hot potato and Fashion Victim who always has ideas as exquisite as original. It is therefore to speak of my little snobbery. Obviously, if you ask me, I'm not a snob for a penny. I learned about the snobbery reading Proust and as you say that the painting he did of snobs did not really want to belong to their clique. But that does not stop at my hours ... Finally I have some specific requests and I want what I would call my "special". Here they are, therefore, since the forces me to admit!

1. I never read a book that advised me to read or forced to read ... I do know is enough air for me, but here I spend my time advising books hoping with all my heart that the contagion will spread! But it's a tough habit that comes from college, or even earlier. I always thought the literature as a private garden where I could roam in total freedom, without any kind of control. Tiny, I Planquais books under my bed and I would flush out those hiding in "hell" of the library of my great-grandmother ... when my teachers have advised me to read the Books "program", I found it quite silly, if not an act of authoritarianism unbearable.
So I always took pleasure in always read another book that was in the program. For example, if you forced me to read Germinal (second program, I've never read), I read Therese Raquin and The Belly of Paris . If you forced me to read under the threat of a weapon Red and black , I was flying over and read again The Charterhouse of Parma . Then I spent this quarter explain why The Charterhouse of Parma was as delicious as Red and black was unpleasant.

And still ... if you lend me a book or that I offer, I might read it ... but in several months in a year, in short, when we have forgotten it and I rediscover it on a shelf in my library! But of course it does not offer me that I love books and we'll recommend ... I am a rare independence, when it comes to reading. I simply do not bear the stress. I am an anarchist reading. And I admit it a bit snobbish.

2. My ideal man is a fictional character. You tell me, I'm sure I'm not the only .. alone among bloggers, see if there was a poll ...
One day I was eight, I opened a book that was lying around the house and whose presence at home was the least incongruous. (25 years of patient investigation later turns out that it belonged to my father ... what a shopgirl that one!) Was Jane Eyre .



And I experienced the real shock lover, whom you return the heart and transforms you forever. Edward Rochester become for me the epitome of soul-sister. If I had known that in real life, the Rochester are a species threatened with extinction and that this choice would earmark to me many disappointments ... I would have thought twice! But hey, you never change. Jane Eyre is the book that I reread the most between eight and seventeen years, some pages are still curled in tears of fifteen years old. And I still consider that the ideal man is a captivating character, deep, seemingly hostile but the rough surface lies a beating heart and be molten, and has a mad wife hidden in the attic, just to spice up the life. At the same time, the beauty of Brad Pitt has always left the most indifferent. Forever, I am touched by the charm of a man and I do not like the smooth beauty. I do not like the smooth at all. I love the personalities and hardened men who know how to love. Everything is the fault of Charlotte Bronte and Edward Rochester.
PS: I am no longer too mad woman stashed in the attic today. Neither the vicissitudes of life that make Rochester a cripple for the happy ending is not too happy.

3. I love the post-mortem. What is very snobbish. There are some who are content to be output with Patrick to CM2 which had braces, or Jean-Paul who was riding a red motorcycle and had a problem with saliva ... I have three post-mortem love that I cherish and will occasionally visit the cemetery (for those I know the grave). The first is Robert Desnos.



Oh, Robert ... I fell in love when I was sixteen, in French class (which contradicts my little one, but I'm not a contradiction. Desnos was indeed the program, but this was my excitement of the year ).

"Two mountains were similar in shape and size.
You're on one
And I on the other.
Is we recognize? What signs
we do we do?
We must hear and love.
Maybe you love me?
I love you already.
But these stretches between us, which crosses?
You do not say anything but you look at me
And for that look,
There is neither day nor extended
My only friend, my love. "

What do you, I read that and obviously, Since I was fired ... I followed Robert around. I borrowed a thousand times the routes he loved in the old Les Halles Paris, Quartier St Jacques de la Boucherie, neighborhood Clock the cloister and the Merri St Abbey St Germain l'Auxerrois ... His words escorted me for years and still with me like tongues of fire which burns and regenerates me soothes me.

Then there Albert Camus.







Well I know, Robert, Albert ... sounds a bit dated but I love post-mortem they are old. And Albert Camus, no less .... it crushes a lot easier for men of this planet, you will agree, both in personality than talent and not to mention the charm ...
And finally, Emmanuel d'Astier de la Vigerie, who founded at the beginning of the war of 40 a major resistance movements: Liberation North, alongside such Lucie Aubrac.




D'Astier early took the opposite view of his family to go and fight during the English Civil War, then joined the Resistance. Again, I fell in love while reading his book: seven times seven days. Since then, I do not miss the opportunity to go to offer my thoughts when I go to the cemetery Pere Lachaise.
I know is very snobbish to force his lover to succeed year after year to three exceptional men, each in its kind, two outstanding artists. And he can say anything or show of jealousy without fear of ridicule. Nor erase their cuffs ... they are little known. Otherwise, the great advantage of post-mortem love that they are easy going, always agree with you (although Camus shows sometimes quite twisted in political discussions), still available but a rare discretion when you want to have peace.

4. When I am depressed, I have some good remedies to me. Instead of reading the latest novel in time of chick lit '(although I also have a weakness for "Sex and the City"), I prefer to immerse myself in the example log Bashkirtseff. Do you know? This extraordinary young girl lived in the nineteenth century in Paris and died at twenty-six years of tuberculosis.



Meanwhile, she was a painter, sculptor, and she wrote this diary is a marvel, and when we read, for example:

"Apart from the laughter and songs, so I translated my thoughts with the brutality that characterizes me, I'd say I can not wait to get married to become the mistress of M. de Cassagnac. "
Or:

"It was in February that I was most in love with the Duke is also the month of February that I fell in love with Audiffret is the month of February as well as I was and still is Antonelli in February as I became Alexander. In my place I would take care because we are in the month of February. "

Read the emotions and joys of this young person spicy and irresistible things that remind me of life and love never ceased be complicated, not to mention the female psyche and its depths. It's comforting. Mary, wherever you are, thank you!

5. In my view, be grown is one of the essential charms of a person. So it's true that I also enjoy spending an evening with friends who only interested in football and going to the movies for which boils down to see Spiderman III (which I also saw), who would not understand that I arrived to see Chinese films length of three hours or a festival of Polish films in VO (we were both in the room and it was VERY long). But anyway, I prefer to exchange for hours with someone (or someone!) Of curious, cultured, and for whom Kristallnacht is not the last animated Christmas windows of Galeries Lafayette. And a man reading, believe me ... is much more attractive than the acute adoptionnite Brad Pitt.

6. I have a little trouble with anything that is "super popular" in terms of literature. For example, the Elegance of the Hedgehog I read maybe ... in four, five years. Or
Beigbeider, which I find very overrated. Or all the posers who think writing is the step to be invited to private parties by Karl Lagerfeld, and you write well after several lock boxes be returned to the VIP and haggard at four in the morning . Indeed, among the glamorous and literature, you often choose. There is something quite monastic in writing, let us admit word, although I understand that to be dredged, saying that spends his days writing within four walls and that night we winnowed ... is not the clincher.

7. Nothing to do with literature ... but I do not like the bronzes. It never made me laugh, just smile, and I find that over time they became heavy like a rum baba which would have soaked in molasses and then stayed in the whipped cream a little too long. And when I see they have found a way to kill a small movie that I loved when I was little, L'Auberge rouge Claude Autant-Lara, with their laughter and their cattle big shoes ... I wonder when they finally leave at retirement, we can laugh funny things. It is unfair that the British aileurs have Monty Python when we have the Bronzés, do not you think? And if you have the comic you deserve, what did we do in heaven?
(I make my apologies to my favorite cousin who loves them and is able to recite entire movies, rejoinder by rejoinder.)

8. Last one. I have a bias towards snobbish Prison Break . I refuse to see him and every time you speak to me, I retorted: "Well ... I loved Oz Nothing to see. An outstanding series, brilliant actors, scenarios blacks in black, deep ... Anyway, I could never bring myself to Prison Break ", with air skeptical and jaded to whom we will never believe that Beaujolais Nouveau arrives at the thigh of a Pernand Vergelesses.



Similarly, I explain to anyone who will listen that all pale before series Twin Peaks . So sweet that I look and am totally addicted to Dexter, Medium, Desperate Housewives, Dr. House, etc., etc., etc.. But hush ... if you question me, I will in one word: David Lynch.


Finally, if you look closely I could still bring a few, the snobbery ... So thank you girls forced me to face my true nature. And because this questionnaire seems to have been created for them, I expect Thom and Gael they stick them in turn.

Good evening and if I do not post back before then, Merry Christmas to all!

Gaëlle

PS: Oops, my apologies to Magda who first launched the provocative claim of snobitude ...

What Happens To Dawn In Pokemon

I'm jealous ...

... all art forms that are not mine. I know it's small, like attitude. I try to correct me but nothing to do, I'll always be jealous of a cartoonist who in two strokes of the pen, expresses what I need ten pages to touch. From a musician who twists my heart with one note held long enough, with a harmony that makes the tears beading at the corner of my eye. From a filmmaker who knows how to combine a camera angle and special lighting to highlight a whisper.

And even a song, hold ... a song, it has the air of nothing is the same incredibly easy: a few words in general not complicated some rhyming three verses, a chorus, a melody ... it seems harmless but time to say, the song came into you and mixed with the fabric of your life, permeated, sometimes so lasting that years later you just heard to be transported in spite of yourself in a memory. Even more dangerous than Proust's madeleine.

So obviously, the songs stick to you "again and again", to paraphrase Voulzy (which I'm not particularly a fan) does not mean they are good. Some are downright null, irritating the possible, even the bulk of the battalion, just listen to a few major music stations to be convinced. Whoever was already awake, like me, led by the generic Dora the Explorer or " Leeward " sung by Celine Dion and Garou (the duo who kills, I'm sure the number of dead is smothered in high places) will understand what I mean ...

And sometimes a song is a marvel. Is it a wonder universal or just me? Maybe some people, applying a formidable technical criteria grid, would explain that it is not good, but ... I do not care. She caught me one day because I spent there or just because this time I was living and deserved to be immortalized as the chance offered him a soundtrack for eternity. I like that in my I pod, hundreds of songs that are dangerous to listen to, I avoid that often ... because if I'm ready to hear music, I'm not always ready for some time travel. However, I keep them for the day I am again able to able to listen to one or the other and to find myself thrown into the winter day when I heard this song in a cafe in falling in love, or this sunny day when I walked to the rhythm of music by feeling a baby moving in my belly.

Thom launched a crossover, there's this one moment, and it is high time that I participate. What I wake up a little later? The important thing is to wake up, right? .. I could mention

Barbara but Sandra it was already loaded with infinite talent and sensitivity. It is true that Barbara was the singer who rocked my adolescence. I knew by heart all her repertoire, I was singing by taking up his intonations skinned bright ... ah, " My most beautiful story of love is you "," Marienbad "," Merry Christmas "... it is very simple, I was sixteen and my teeth were still bleeding but it was my life, my injury, my love, my future as I listened to the voice of Barbara. A true budding actress, I was somewhere between Sarah Bernhardt and Camille Claudel

... I could also have to mention all the stuff ashamed that I liked at certain times of ... Didier Barbelivien (salute my courage to dare to admit it at the risk of all your esteem, hard-earned shot at Michel Faber and Chandler falling into dust) to Michel Delpech . Ah, " geese ", " divorced" ... Even then, I told myself that this was not normal at all to get along so well with his former wife, to the point of writing a song as marshmallow. And you know what? I still do. It was weird. I hope his ex-wife did not flinch. Breaking

unbearable suspense: I decided to talk about some songs that I love tremendously, each in their own way. The selection was very tough, I know that many pieces are upset and it will not I wonder if they derailed the next play, I will not get it stolen. But never mind, it choose to give up, it seems, although this definition has always grieved. Ah, I said that my songs are not arranged in order of preference but of an entirely random and capricious.

1. The gold digger , Arthur H.

One fine day, fnac, I fell in love with Arthur H and his album, "Goodbye Sadness . I loved everything, the warm husky voice, text, duets, sensual with Feist (beautiful song that " Satie's song"), happy with M, moving with his father ... Higelin But my favorite song has always been the gold diggers. I like songs that tell a story. It contains a world in itself, warm and poignant. I can not hear this song without feeling my heart thrashing hugged by a violent emotion.



The Gold Prospector


San Francisco, May 3, 1880
Your Eugene
Dear Mary does not worry most
The surgeon said yesterday that gangrene has
What
not taken the chance is with me
course I lose a leg
But I still have many other ...
Oh Mary, you knew if I dug the rock

As bare hands
Surrounded miserable
Pole and also some French
Oh Mary, we, The wanderers
, gold seekers,
If we not live by it
Mountain devours us


Everything is good here it goes I'm alive

Here's good I'm saved

Here it goes I'm alive


daybreak resonates
The thunder of dynamite
blocks slide down the rocks collapse
along gullies
Oh Mary, every second
The Avalanche wants me and touches me
That morning, she lavishes His
milder caresses it lovingly embraces me

I'm her lover

Everything is good
here it goes I'm alive

Here's good I'm saved

Here it goes I'm alive


Oh my dear Mary
Finally it's time for secrecy
You see under my sheets
ago a small black leather bag ...
What It brightens my hand
of gold dust, Marie
Look how I shine
Looks like we're rich

Directions on your face
This wind wash you
And that swells the sails of this vessel
leaving the bank
Oh Mary, goodbye Goodbye death
America


Everything is good here it goes I'm alive

Here it's hot I'm saved

Here it goes I'm alive




2. From Sepia full fingers , Vincent Delerm .

I just love this album, " spider bites " he survived a loop listening for months. A rare performance in my case, especially since I did that very moderately Vincent Delerm far. Still, excellent on this album, this song is a gem in itself: relevant, provocative, a miracle of balance between melody and text. If you listen, the only risk is that it does not want to leave your head. I know what I mean, it's been months since I woke up one morning in two with the chorus on the tongue, when it is not a verse that embeds the tape out of the blue, all because I'm having lunch in a restaurant where the decor looks straight out of "Choir", or that I just heard someone cry out that education is lost ... Briefly, this song is dangerous and I have a bad conscience to participate in the contagion. Too bad, I say three and four Pater Ave, for the trouble.






From Sepia full fingers


Hey hey, residential
singers to cross wood, floats, the blows of cudgel, the Third Republic


Look like , beautiful pictures,
Children of the swamp,
the true taste of real fruit in a real grocery

Hold that r'part back
black and white poster. Marshal
we come! From sepia
full fingers
What she thinks she fell asleep,
this beautiful France, Bonne Maman jam
.
think she thinks like that, like yesterday
Before Simone Veil, before Badinter.

Hey hey, we
breathing jasmine and lily of the valley
air to his lungs in coal mines.
The pre-war songs, that we knew them
Come Pony, Giddy Pépette, then squeaker squeaker's Up ... Hold that

r'part upside,
penholder schoolgirl. Marshal
we come! From sepia
full fingers
What she thinks she fell asleep, this pretty
France, Bonne Maman jam
.
think she thinks like that, like yesterday
Before Simone Veil, before Badinter ...


And finally, keep ... a little simple song, a song of nothing, that will not mark the history of music, that most of you will forget quickly. In fact I'm surprised it has remained that way to me in the head ... Two years that it lasts! Deliver me, please.

So of course it Sandrine Kiberlain singing and I'm not sure that all good actors should decide they are also singers. But here, in this case I really like Sandrine Kiberlain and the fact that it was she who sings with a voice that is not really worked, imperfect to the max, playing its role in how this song touches me.






I liked by Sandrine Kiberlain

I liked ...
I know is I liked especially

His skin stuck to mine,
For days and days
In several weeks ...

I liked I liked


Sure I felt,
And more than one night
In my little life ... I liked


I 'know that I particularly liked

This man, his eyes on me
For several months
More than a year I think ... I liked



I 'know I liked it especially

His hands that hid my eyes
To dare games
games lovers. I liked


I 'know that I particularly liked

Yes I liked her looks
From Cuz
seem To want to please me I

I liked
the know is not singular
I liked
I 'know is particularly


I liked this man so much and so hard
That I still love
That I still loves

I liked ....

So yes, I'm jealous of this musical alchemy that makes a simple sentence you into the heart, never to leave. Jealous, because I'd be hard pressed to tell you, like that hot, what sentences of novels which made me cry or laugh. But I can find on the field - and I am sure you too - a good thirty pieces of songs that are closely tied to my life and my memory.

Good evening everyone, and thank you for this great idea Thom crossover.

Gaëlle

What Objects Can Be Used To Masyurbate

alone against all, the hero by Polanski

Hello,

I take a little free time to write and this time I am here to talk about movies for a change!

In recent weeks I have seen several movies in quick succession by Polanski. It is a filmmaker I like especially since my tender age. I have often wondered why, but I think I can now move forward a few reasons: first because it has dabbled in all genres, from horror to psychological drama, the film suits the pure comedy Each of his films bears a particular mark and all these impressions, a film to another, creating a powerful work, talented and unique. I often watch a movie to tell me that it would could be done by someone else without that it shows ... but some filmmakers, including Lynch, Scorsese, De Palma, Polanski could not be exchanged. Some films
Polanski I entered the head and I was never left. Their images are there, intact, when I close my eyes. So it is with those of Tenant . I saw him recently but many of its sequences were still imprinted on my retina, almost fifteen years after seeing it for the first time. The strength of this film is writer in me a willing prey, such as the bewitched victim offering his neck. I accept the credits soon to follow where it leads me his camera, knowing that the journey will be neither easy nor always happy surprises that will be gruesome and that I will not reach the shore in the serenity of the generic end. I accept all this by playing a spectator, but mostly because he manhandles his audience, Polanski moved him more. If I tell you so you remember to Pianist and the poignant figure of a man stumbling through the gaunt ruins of Warsaw.



But I could also talk about the plight of Trelkowski screaming, too nice tenant stifled by the wickedness of its neighbors, or Tess, bravely following the road that destiny soap for her.



I could even add the look of Carol at bay, the young manicure Repulsion , although when she committed the first murder and we know the danger, the compassion that it inspires the troubled ... repulsion, exactly.

Polanski is certainly one of the best filmmakers have talked about the loneliness and anxiety it generates.



Vertigo around in circles in an apartment, look out the window hoping that someone will speak kindly, will seize the silent signals that your body emits unnecessary. His heroes are often deeply alone, eaten from within by the silence of the soul that just decide suddenly strange and frightening sounds of objects, animated or inert matter: the young and Carol will it with more more deeply into the sounds that surround it, the drop of tap water not closed to the echoes of the street.
If they are alone, these characters are not only emotionally. Sometimes they even have someone in their lives, as Rosemary in Rosemary's Baby , or someone who wants to enter, as the boy who loves Carol patient and pay dearly ... Their solitude is complete. She is social, psychological, emotional and sometimes political. Their situation cutting more ... or would do such other malicious confining them in themselves to madness, even robbing them of the urge to flee?

What is certain is that the hero is most often polanskien alien status in the community where he lives. In Repulsion, Carol manicure lives in London with a French accent while his sister spoke perfect English, and her dread of men shut up in distress without words. Trelkowski is a naturalized French Polish everyone insists on dealing in foreign accent and brands. American tourists Frantic is even more desperate than nobody understands in Paris. About Wladyslaw Szpilman, the pianist, the Nazis made him an outcast in his country. Status of foreign natural consequence of misunderstanding, contempt, rejection. But sometimes, the character is a hacker community of which he understands how these mechanisms because the shudder ... Rosemary is the case, discovering slowly that its neighbors are nice a gang of Satan worshipers who were trapped.



Or Gittes, the detective Chinatown, which advances the plot in which all have rotten related party a real swamp.

As the film progresses from one revelation to another negative, the hero joins polanskien solitude where he is confined to the malevolence of the group that rallied around him and against him. From there the plot takes shape: they want to silence, reduce to thank you, to steal her baby, raped again and again, to exterminate. But the Machiavellian genius the filmmaker is almost always to preserve the ambiguity: his character is he mad? He slipped, you it imagines the conspiracy, or is he the only one to hold a truth unbelievable? On one film to another, Roman Polanski has more or less always the same story: an individual is manipulated by a group within which he is abroad. More or less naive when the film begins, his eyes are opened slowly and he understands the full scope of the trap in which he struggles. But according to the film, the camera hovers like a needle between these two poles: real conspiracy from the outside, schizophrenic delusions the hero. In Repulsion , it is clear that the balance from the beginning to the madness, even if madness can not be hard to explain everything to Carol. There are things we know, White led the tragic young woman at the stage where the audience got to know him, at which point it is probably already too late. This film has everything from a clinical case study, even if it misleads the viewer to design a scenario of horror movie.




In most movies, however, Polanski plays perfectly the ambiguity by using the subjective camera: everything we see could be seen by the hero. We discover the plot through his eyes, which has two advantages of size for a filmmaker adept at outwitting of the viewer: first, we position ourselves instinctively "side" of the hero: we are with Rosemary, with Gittes, with the pediatrician Frantic , including when it took the runway most likely (that of a kidnapping) to explain the disappearance of his wife in a hotel in Paris. We are willing to believe what they believe. But in a second time, this identification allows suspicion to burst at a time selected by the director, and in Rosemary's Baby , we convince ourselves that gradually Rosemary is manipulated by his neighbors with the help of her husband.



It seems clear that she was drugged, raped, made pregnant by dark forces. We convince ourselves that it is surrounded by wizards, and even her obstetrician belongs to the sect. It was then that Rosemary is trying one of these "false leaks" cherished heroes polanskiens, ie a leak that proves a cul de sac. She takes refuge with another gynecologist, who receives it. She begins to explain in detail everything he arrived, the whole plot, and suddenly his words seem the most crazy, crazy, here we are in the skin of the doctor who listens and says she suffers from a paranoid depression linked to maternity. The question then arises in the minds of viewers: they have been abused? Rosemary is she crazy? She thinks these things?



In Lessee , this ambiguity between insanity and paranoid conspiracy is even more striking. Take a shy young man with Polish accent, charming and uneventful. He rented an apartment and tries to gain acceptance by a community of hostile residents. But little by little, he is convinced that people want to put the building in the shoes of the previous tenant, Simone Choule, which ended up defenestrate. Everyone seems to conspire against him, the nice bartender coffee opposite its owner intransigent. Spy on the people, the bully. Then he starts seeing things that do not exist, the real and the delirious mix so intrinsically at the end of the film, the viewer confused would be hard to decide what caused the loss of Trelkowski , malice concerted its neighbors or its own psychosis.




Fiction is by far the best way to tell a conspiracy. Take a crowd that says "white" and one who yells "black!". In terms of objective truth, the majority tends to prevail ... unless, by means of a work of fiction, you take the viewer (or reader) by the hand and have attached the beginning of the poor not to "fool" who swears that others are lying. So you are willing to believe that this man is right against all. And even if this truth is stifled by the powerful, it will forever remain between one who has ... and you. After the last image Chinatown, the bitterness that now you share with Detective Gittes drag on in your mouth.



And you complain of poor Rosemary, his lucidity and courage have done more than tie a doom.

To conclude, I could not but speak of Pianist . For if there is a truth that was most difficult to believe, and some still are bent on denying, it is that a conspiracy to eradicate an entire people, to the point that it remain no trace of the millions of victims. This perfect crime, we known, experienced some failures that allowed the truth to gush. But again, only fiction has the power to bind us to one of those people who were gradually excluded from society, ghettoized increasingly narrow, private rights and dignity, before being driven to the cul de sac of Auschwitz.



As if all his films had to lead us to it, and all the plots to the Holocaust, The Pianist staged the first polanskien hero who manages to truly escape: through music, but especially for the first time, thanks to the solidarity of other positive human brothers.


that, I leave you, and if you want to see some movies that I just mentioned, do not be shy! Except Frantic , which is a bit dated, Polanski's filmography through time without a wrinkle and it is a pleasure to revisit it.

soon ...

Gaëlle

2006 Fleetwood Niagra

From poetry instead of the heart beat message

Hello!

You dared to dream but I'm back at last for a ticket worthy of the name. You Seaver in these pages I prefer authors who I am excited and make me feel very small ... and though I read like a turtle, I even brought one in as my luggage!
You surely know. But if. If I tell you The Hours, Nicole Kidman viewing decked out with a nose impossible (if indeed Virginia Woolf looked like this I pity her twice: for his unhappiness and his nose), but behind this film there is one book and its author, Michael Cunningham. That here.



There are writers whom I turn around time (I'm slow but determined) before I venture into their work. That was the case for it, with this nuance I read the Hours and I did not like. I feel that some people are outraged but Virginia Woolf was not my cup of tea and three portraits of women left me ice. Believe me, I regret it but at the same time I like Proust, but never caught on Henry James is like that, my brain is forging connections with one or that one, at will. Not that it's snobby, it just tastes good to him. The Hours therefore left me on my hunger and I decided that Michael and I were not yet ready for regular attendance. But now, I succumbed to his latest novel, The Book of Days . A funny thing indeed.





this point of my post, please introduce some drums, bagpipes and Irish voice singing "Paddy's Lament " in Gangs of New York . Because we are going back in time in one direction, then another, wandering Manhattan in the 1850s to a future which I hope will not resemble the vision of Michael Cunningham ... Three stories, three times, a specific place - Manhattan - and a metaphorical place: America, the pilgrims, outcasts, those that greeted the American dream in a mocking spin before dinner at Pierpont Morgan, Malcolm Forbes and George Bush. The hours were so infused Woolf, days The book exudes poetry of Walt Whitman. And I think it wins! Not only because Walt has a nose proportionate to the rest of his face ... (I'm bad ... I will do penance, stand, I shall reread walk to the lighthouse ... someday.). Mainly because it exchanges a writer who could not stand life against a poet who celebrated in all its forms ... and finally, because the book we Cunningham useful reminder that Walt Whitman was the poet of the poor before being rescued by private school students for whom the height of the rebellion was to stand on a table, tearing textbooks or read some poems in the night Timber!



Ah yes, thanks to the Book of Days - which bears the English name of a collection of prose Whitman, Specimen Days - I reread Leaves of Grass . Yes, I admit, the first time I had read, I was fifteen and I came out of Dead Poets Society ... I take this opportunity to move to drag a message to Vincent Delerm: he forgot to mention the impact of this film about high school girls swooning in his song about the girls of 1973. For there was Big Blue AND The Dead Poets , and my girlfriends were going to class again loop before writing poems in red ink to say how life was ugly and beautiful at the same time celebrate the beauty of the revolt, the absolute and suicide, all that. (Even those with a nose of a reasonable size.)
So I read Whitman but I missed out on.



Once I read it carefully and a bilingual version please, in order to recite the stanzas in English like this:

"My call Is the call of battle, I nourrish active rebellion, He going with me
must go well arm'd, He going with me
Often spare diet, poverty, angry enemies, desertions. "

The active rebellion, poverty, angry enemies ... as you say it is far from the kind of film students and their teacher misty eyes. But the good news is that Whitman is also great! Michael Cunningham has not chosen any poet. This bearded protester, cantor of a transcendent moral life, a spirituality freed of religion, a powerful vision of the world came together life and death, living and ghosts, animals, humans and plants in a symphony transgenerational. .. remains today one of the most accurate voice when it comes to talking about America. His most famous book, Leaves of Grass , completed and edited his entire life, carries thousands of voices: that of the famished pilgrims landing on the New York Harbor, the exhausted workers in factories in the first Industrial Revolution ... happy or tormented voice, voice young or old, innocent or condemned, all lancinent the reader in a single stroke to claim a better life: that famous "pursuit of happiness " that Americans inscribed at the heart of their Constitution, and which was constantly undermined by the wars of independence or secession, slavery, inequality of opportunity that did nothing but widen and widen, glorifying the American dream back the initiative and individual achievement.




For pariah, America has always said he was in their power to change fate, that their determination and courage were their social ladder and at the same time, they wandered over the surface of the earth or did not fare by combining three jobs, was their fault.

Celebration of winners, contempt for the losers who have failed to transform the tenacity of gold. Those to whom the world end without murmuring: "You do not want to hard enough. You did not get up early. It was the fate we deserve." And amid these fragments of broken dreams that tread the city worse off than the triumphant looks down, walking Walt Whitman, feeling the pulse in his footsteps a country integer:

" Through me many long dumb generations,
Voices of the interminable generations of prisoners and slaves, Voices
sick and desperate thieves and dwarfs,
And [...] rights of those that trample on the other foot,
Some poorly trained, insignificant, stupid, the despised, Fog
in the air, beetles rolling balls of dung. "



The Book of Days opens on this first picture, that of Whitman's time. Times are hard and machinery carnivorous who devour the workers' arms and sometimes entire men, without shame. Simon has just died as well. In the factory. He leaves on the floor helpless father, mother slipped into madness, an impoverished young brother, a beautiful fiancee, Catherine, now deprived of the status of a widow and pregnant by him. Suffice to say a future pariah. Lucas takes the place of his elder brother at the plant. It's a weird boy, ugly and sickly, who lives in the company of Leaves of Grass and recites verses when he opens his mouth

" Lucas had no soul at all. He was a foreigner, a citizen of nowhere hand, came from County Kerry but failed to New York where he grew up as a potato riddled with mildew; where he sang nor cried like other Irishmen was not living as a foreigner but not an empty soul filled here and there with painful outbursts of affection, to map the stars and the reflection of flames on the glasses Mr. Mulchady; for Catherine and her mother and a horse on wheels. "

Lucas wants to support his family alone to help Catherine he loves. Every day he works on the machine that killed Simon. He knows she is watching, she is hungry another body. The machines are predatory, it is in their nature. In the world of Lucas, the poor are everywhere and they are ghosts in the making, that poverty has been cut off from life:


"Gradually, he realized that the days at the plant were so long, made a gesture so often repeated that in the end they became a world inside the world, and that those who lived in this world, all men from the factory, would spend most of their lives, making short visits to the other world, where they ate, slept and were preparing to leave. The men at the plant had renounced their citizenship; they had migrated to the factory as Lucas's parents had emigrated to New York after leaving County Kerry. Their past lives were the dreams they did every night, they awoke every morning at the factory. "



a hospital for the needy at a fire scene in a sewing workshop is all America in rags who seizes the reader by the throat. At the heart of a crowd watching helplessly burn brightly poor workers, Lucas feels the presence of ghosts, which tightens the grip each time around Catherine and him

"The air tasted. Lucas turned it into his mouth and he recognized him.
the dead had penetrated the atmosphere. He understood as surely as he had felt the presence of Simon in the pillow. With each breath, he would enter the dead in him. He felt the bitter taste, so it was that they were - earthy and warm - on the tongue. "

A woman burning speaks to him without words, speaking on behalf of all those beings who have surrendered after a battle of the most unequal:

"She said (without saying the words ): This what we are now. We were exhausted and operated, we live in reduced, we ate sweets in secret, but today we are radiant and glorious. We are no longer insignificant. We're part of something larger and more wonderful than imagine the living. "

Thus it appears the death as the doorway to freedom forfeited. And even as ironic as it may seem, to life, as if the rogue could not hope to regain full control of their lives ... and in death.

Second time: we are in contemporary America, the one after September 11 2001, that the Patriot Act and paranoia omnipotent. Cat, a black woman of about forty years, working in standard font. She receives calls from all stamped oozing rage, those who want to set fire to the apartment of their neighbor, eradicate homosexuals or librarians. Most are content to issue threats, but now a teenager who blew himself called, hugging a businessman, not far from Ground Zero. The panic that keeps New Yorkers since Sept. 11 is reactive flows back into the blood vessels, accelerates blood

"The danger which had poisoned air a few years earlier resurfaced and people breathed in the smell. Today, they were reminded - we reminded us - a truth that the world had known for centuries: we could easily, at any time, commit a fatal error. We walked all safe on the streets because nobody had decided to kill us that day. It was impossible to know, as we deal, if we walk away from the blast or if we rush into it. "

And the tension up a notch when a second teenager called Cat. It trying to make him talk. He replied by strange sentences:

Nobody really dies. We perpetuate the grass. We perpetuate the trees. [...] Each atom is mine is yours as well.

Cat is grown, it recognizes the poetry of Whitman.



A second attack took place, this time beating a black man and poor. As the noose tightens around Cat, a third boy seems to have chosen as confidant and as a target, is emerging profile of these young suicide bombers: the lost boys raised by a crazy, brainwashed and fed to the poetry of Whitman. Kids injured and without heart, inaccessible and disempowering. Wild creatures out of control, who grew up without the knowledge of society, on the low side, and who now choose to embrace the victim they take with them into death. Again, this attempted possession of live by the "ghosts", these creatures that cross each day without looking at them as they exist, so to speak. Again this desperate search for life, that this escape is through death as a corridor through which the brotherhood would again become possible, this song brought the pariahs by the poet.

The third story takes us into the Manhattan of the future: a totalitarian world where the sinister and outcasts come either from another planet (as Catareen, a 'dian' green-skinned one reduced to menial tasks), experiments carried out either on the machine by idealists. The first time Lucas had suspected the machine that killed his brother Simon to be animated. In the future, Simon is a robot whose circuits are mixed with human tissue. His appearance is that of a man but did not affect. To replace feelings, its creator has injected a "circuit Poetry. "In the poetry of Walt Whitman, of course. Simon is supposed to have no heart, but he focused on Catherine the dian and both try to escape certain death. On their way they will meet a teenager named Luke and an inventor who has injected the poetry inside his robots and now runs a community bizarre about to leave the land.

Three times, three genres (ghost story, thriller, science fiction) Three stories linked by powerful echoes and by the poetry of Whitman.



In each, a character in whom the poem takes place heart or soul, and who sees the world as a symphony in which death and life are intimately linked, as are all beings that breathe and suffer with those who went to the other side. You did I want to dive into the book days? Reading or rereading Walt Whitman? I hope. I predict that you will be captivated and troubled, you believe in ghosts. Anyway poets ghosts that haunt the great writers of today.

And if we left a few verses of Walt Whitman, like, for the road?


" The words of true poems give you more as poems,
They give you enough to train yourself poems, religions, policy, war, peace, your driving history, testing, everyday life and everything else [... ]

They prepare for death, yet they are not the end but rather the beginning, they
n'amènent person, man or woman, at the end of his journey, or to consider themselves happy and satisfied, one
they bring, they took him into space to show the birth of stars, to teach him one of the meanings,
They took him for he soars with absolute faith, so that traverses the endless circles and would never be off. "



Good evening to you all and see you soon!