Category: Culture

Everything cultural that interests me: music, reading, science, arts in general, news, photography…

A day in my life [en]

Before going for my last French exam this afternoon, I half-heartedly revised a few texts in the company of an over-excited cat (hungry and kept inside so I could monitor his tummy troubles).

I arrived at university early. My pre-exam nightmares usually have to do with having forgotten to prepare for the exam, or turning up late. So I usually arrive rather in advance. I waited in the sofas of the French department for an hour, feeling adrenalin accumulate in my body and my heart rate going steadily up.

My teacher greeted me with a sly grin: “So, we’ve picked a difficult subject for you – because if we give you a normal one, you’re going to be bored during the preparation time…” I winced and groaned of course, but in the same time felt quite relieved. She wouldn’t be doing that if there was the slightest chance of me failing my exams – and she had most certainly already had a look at Monday’s written performance (which, of course, I wasn’t happy about at all, as always).

After eating out with my brother to rejoice about the “end” of my exams, I went to listen to Eve Angeli’s free concert near the lake. The supporting act was a very young girl, eleven or twelve years old, with a very beautiful voice. At the end of the show, I went to buy Eve Angeli’s CD (it was on my “to buy” list, anyway, and I’ve finished my exams, haven’t I?) and queued for an autograph.

I was really astonished at how aggressive some people can become for a name on a postcard or a CD. I waited patiently while the crowd around me got more and more compact, and ended up carrying the weight of a fair amount of people on my right side. One woman was encouraging her children to push and squeeze to get in front. I finally gave my bag and umbrella to the mother next to me while I kept an eye on her young daughter and she left the crowd which was becoming frankly oppressing.

I got my autograph rather easily, as it was on a CD. Young Joanna was not so lucky, and I found myself doing something that makes me want to shrink into the earth in embarrassment when I think of it now.

I noticed that one of the bodyguards had picked up a dropped poster and told the owner he would get it back after. My misinterpretation of the situation made a bright idea flash through my head. I grabbed my protégée‘s poster and prodded the bodyguard: “Er, could you get this signed for Joanna, please?” The look he gave me as he answered “no” made me want to vanish on the spot and wish I hadn’t opened my mouth. My only consolation is that I would never have made such an inconsiderate request for myself, or anybody else than the nine-year-old girl whose head barely made it above the safety barrier, and who was desperately clutching a poster of her idol as she was trying to make her voice heard above the din.

I took the bus home. I usually go around by car, but tonight was an exception. I used to take the bus a lot before going to India, and I hadn’t realized how estranged I had got from the public transport system in my own town. A year ago already, when I had just landed home after a year abroad, little plastic cards had made their appearance in people’s wallets. You could use them to pay at the ticket machine instead of cash.

So this evening, I learnt that ticket machines do not return change anymore. I learnt that bus drivers no longer can sell you a ticket if you do not have change for the machine. And I chatted with the bus driver all the way home. About his job, about India and the strange time that country lives in. About being on time and buying tickets before getting on the bus. About 40-hour train journeys. About getting chastized for being one minute late on his schedule.

I got off the bus, took off my chappal (indian sandals, made of leather, do not like pouring rain) and walked home barefoot, to be greeted by a phone call from my brother telling me that the long-awaited contract from orange had arrived in his mailbox. Good news!

Mars and Venus [en]

After a long and fruitful phone call with my sister, we have reached the following conclusions:

  • we both are “John Grayish” in our way of viewing relationships
  • most women who think John Gray is a backwards machist keen on bringing relationships back to the previous century have enough anger stocked up against men to last them a rather long time; the same phenomenon can be observed for a certain type of “man-hating feminism”
  • most men who think John Gray is a brutish machist with no sensitivity have enough wagons of anger against women at their disposal to last them a rather long time; they also seem to have a healthy load of anger against men, too, and to have dismissed a good part of their masculinity
  • inspired by the previous observation, we notice that the women stated above tend to have a troubled relationship with their “inner woman”
  • all this brings us to believe that the healthy development of one’s inner man is dependant on one’s overall relationship with women, and vice-versa

The observations above are generalities based on our personal experience. There are (and will always be) exceptions. Please do not feel free to flame if you disagree.

; )

India [en]

One of the things I missed the most when I arrived in India was the long evenings. Today, at something past 10 pm, the sky has only just become black.

The first day I arrived in Pune, we went out to eat around 7 pm. My plane had landed at 5 o’clock, I had had time to dump my stuff in my room, have a bath, and get changed. We stepped outside and it was pitch black. All of a sudden,
it felt as though my internal clock had broken down: it couldn’t be dark already!

I learnt to live with it. Being closer to the equator, India sees less difference in night length throughout the year than a country like Switzerland. It’s logical, it makes perfect sense, but I never would have thought about it. Not before it hit me straight in the eyes. I guess
Switzerland sounds to Indians like Scandinavia sounds to us.

One thing Indians tend to find really weird is the fact that we don’t have a rainy season. “You mean it rains all year long?” Well, of course it doesn’t rain every single day here. But it can rain at any given date. Simply enough, the idea of living in a place where there is no monsoon must sound quite incredible to the indian mind – just as we have trouble
imagining what the monsoon can be like before we have lived (swam) through it.

Today was the last lesson of my class on “Visual Hinduism”. We explored architecture, iconography, miniatures, but also rituals (hence my presentation on indian weddings) and finally even cinema. The teacher, who was doing this kind of “visual” class for the first time, was curious about our feedback.

Actually, I thought it was a great idea. Academic teaching often neglects the realm of the eye – unless you are studying history of art. And the visual world is very important for grasping indian culture.

I remember the first time I saw real pictures of India. My interest for India came late, as I was studying, so I had never spent much time looking at books, documentaries or other hippy friends’ photographs. All I had seen were photographs by Benoît Lange (or similar artists), which are
beautiful pictures but hardly prepare you for what you are actually going to see in indian streets.

So the first “real” indian photographs I saw were pictures of a pilgrimage that my teacher was giving a conference about. I had already started planning my trip to India, although it was still a long way off, and I can remember the surprise of seeing the stretch of brown earth, the
rickety stalls next to the road, and people scattered everywhere. “Gosh, it looks like that over there!?”

During my first days in India, my most intense culture shock was visual. I wasn’t prepared for it at all – I couldn’t have prepared myself, had I even wanted to. Everything I laid my eyes on was new and
unknown. Nothing made sense. All I could see was a mass of colours and shacks and rubbish and puddles and dogs and people. I just stayed there for hours on end, stunned, perched on my small terrasse above the street, looking at the strange world outside and trying to get over the
indigestion.

Paroles [en]

Depuis ma plus tendre enfance, j’ai la vicieuse
tournure d’esprit de me considérer comme différent du commun des mortels.
Cela aussi est en train de me réussir.

*

Les ânes voudraient que j’observe pour moi-même
les conseils que je proclame pour les autres. C’est impossible puisque moi
je suis complètement différent…

Salvador Dali, Journal d’un génie

Le fait que moi-même, au moment de peindre, je ne
comprenne pas la signification de mes tableaux, ne veut pas dire que ces
tableaux n’ont aucune signification: au contraire leur signification est
tellement profonde, complexe, cohérente, involontaire, qu’elle échappe à 
la simple analyse de l’intuition logique.

Salvador Dali, Oui

Paroles de Maeterlinck II [en]

Notre soif de justice vient uniquement de l’idée anthropomorphe que nous nous faisons de Dieu.

*

Le libre arbitre et la préscience divine sont ou universelle sont inconciliables.

*

Chercher Dieu, c’est se chercher sur les hauteurs.

*

Maurice Maeterlinck, L’ombre des ailes

Paroles [en]

Car il n’est pas normal d’être mort aujourd’hui, et ceci est nouveau. Etre mort est une anomalie impensable, toutes les autres sont inoffensives en regard de celle-ci. La mort est une délinquance, une déviance incurable. Plus de lieu ni d’espace/temps affecté aux morts, leur séjour est introuvable, les voilà  rejetés dans l’utopie radicale – même plus parqués: volatilisés.

Jean Baudrillard, L’échange symbolique et la mort

Paroles de Maeterlinck I [en]

[…] l’enfant qui se tait est mille fois plus sage que Marc-Aurèle qui parle. Et cependant, si Marc-Aurèle n’avait pas écrit les douze livres de ses Méditations, une partie des trésors ignorés que notre enfant renferme ne serait pas la même.

Maurice Maeterlinck, introduction à  “Fragments” de Novalis

Notes de lecture [en]

Mathématiques et logique, situées comme elles le sont au centre de notre organisation conceptuelle, tendent à  se voir accorder une telle immunité, conséquence de notre préférence conservatrice pour les révisions qui dérangent le système le moins possible; et là  réside peut-être la “nécessité” dont nous sentons que jouissent les lois des mathématiques et de la logique.

Finalement, il revient peut-être au même de dire, comme on le fait souvent, que les lois des mathématiques et de la logique sont vraies simplement en vertu de notre organisation conceptuelle. […]

Il faut toutefois remarquer à  présent que notre préférence conservatrice pour les révisions qui dérangent le système le moins possible a contre elle une force adverse importante, une force en faveur de la simplification. […]

Les lois logiques sont les énoncés les plus centraux et les plus décisifs de notre organisation conceptuelle, et pour cette raison les mieux protégés de la révision par la force du conservatisme; mais, toujours à  cause de leur position décisive, ce sont aussi les lois dont une révision convenable pourrait provoquer la simplification la plus radicale de notre système de connaissance tout entier.

W.V.O Quine, Méthodes de logique, p. 13

Notes de lecture [en]

Oswald Ducrot (en collab. avec M.-C. Barbault), dans La preuve et le dire (p. 85).

Cette étude est destinée à  illustrer la façon dont nous concevons la mise en rapport des opérateurs logiques et des mots du langage ordinaire. Il ne s’agit en aucun cas, on le verra, d’élaborer un code permettant de traduire automatiquement une langue dans l’autre. Au contraire, nous sommes persuadés que la traduction linguistico-logique (plus encore que celle qui va d’une langue naturelle à  une autre) exige, à  chaque fois, une réflexion spécifique, qui porte, d’une part, sur l’énoncé à  traduire, et, d’autre part, sur les possibilités d’expression de la langue dans laquelle on traduit.

Le projet de l’article présenté ici recouvre celui du travail de séminaire que je suis en train de rédiger. On ne s’étonnera donc pas que cet intéressant ouvrage de Ducrot soit une de mes sources principales.

Le point sur la traduction linguistico-logique me paraît tout à  fait pertinent. Certes, la nécessité de cette réflexion spécifique à  chaque cas frappera d’autant plus lors de la traduction d’une langue “organique” dans une langue artificielle (aux visées sémantiques plus précises et restreintes). Mais cette remarque reste parfaitement appliquable à  la traduction dans le cadre des langues naturelles.