{"id":406,"date":"2007-06-16T22:53:00","date_gmt":"2007-06-17T06:53:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=406"},"modified":"2007-06-16T22:53:00","modified_gmt":"2007-06-17T06:53:00","slug":"paris-readings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/paris-readings\/","title":{"rendered":"Paris Readings"},"content":{"rendered":"
A fair amount (more than usual) of jetlag, plus the nigthclub that spews out 200+ singing and screaming drunks between 4 and 5 a.m. a bit further up on my street, have allowed (or forced) a fair amount of 3 to 6 a.m. reading these last ten days. Here’s a bit of it:<\/div>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Carnet de Nuit<\/span><\/a> by Philippe Sollers<\/span><\/a>, an aptly named (see above) small compilation of PS’s night jottings. My favorite is the follwing one:<\/p>\n

Il n’y a ni crise, ni d\u00e9faite de la pens\u00e9e, ni apocalypse des valeurs, il n’y a que la paresse: oubli de se lever t\u00f4t, de noter sa mort.<\/p>\n

There is neither crisis, nor defeat of thought, nor apocalypse of values, there is only lazyness: forgetting to get up early, to note one’s death. (page 69)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Forbidden Territory <\/span>and<\/span> Realms of Strife<\/span><\/a>, by Juan Goytisolo, translated by Peter Bush. A compilation of two distinct but linked autobiographical narratives by the greatest of contemporary Spanish writers, who in his early thirties quit a very successful career as public intellectual in Paris (writing engaged novels and political commentary for the major French left-wing magazines) to move to Morocco and write those major pieces of fiction that start with Count Julian<\/span><\/a> :<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

\n

From a certain age, one learns to strip oneself of all that is secondary or incidental in order to bind oneself to the areas of experience which apportion greater pleasure and emotion: writing, sex, and love will henceforth be the deepest and most authentic configurations of your territory: all else is a pure substitute that an elemental principle of purely selfish economy advises you to do without and which you will do without entirely: as you will see from your own example, whoever aspires to become a public figure sacrifices his most intimate truth to an image, an external profile: literary favor is a chance and subtle matter and it usually takes vengeance on those who rush in search of recognition by distancing itself and then abandoning them: from your publishing watchtower you will witness over the years numerous examples of literary and moral erosion: that process of self-advertisement by the writer who, because of unfaithfulness to the most genuine sources of being, finally loses, unawares, his pristine state of grace.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A fair amount (more than usual) of jetlag, plus the nigthclub that spews out 200+ singing and screaming drunks between 4 and 5 a.m. a bit further up on my street, have allowed (or...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-406","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/406","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=406"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/406\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=406"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=406"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=406"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}