how i wish i could have been at andrea's bachelorette party

failure

last time in french class, i learned the name for chess: échecs. its etymology traces back to the eleventh century, when it was first played by the persians. échecs derives from "shah," or king. checkmate is "échec et mat," dead king. the word also means "failure." that really got to me. that chess is really called failure. it felt, at that moment of discovery, that i'd learned something very essential, one of those inexorable things, not often spoken of, about being human.

i expressed this aloud in class. laure, our teacher, said "well, isn't it true that we learn more from our failures than our victories?"

and left it at that, moving on to the other linguistic mysteries inherent in etiquette and plumber...


image courtesy of here.

the joy of translation

how babelfish translates certain french idioms:

to drown in a water glass (make a mountain out of a molehill)

keep a pear for thirst (save for a rainy day)

it's not necessary to push yourself into the nettles (going a bit far)

to make a cinema of something (make a big deal of it)

to fall into the oubliettes (become obsolete: oublier is french for forget. an oubliette is a dungeon.)

all is not pink in life (life is not a bed of roses)

to cry one's coil dry (cry your eyes out)

to make a fatty morning (to sleep in--i love this one.)

to fall into the apples (to faint)

to have a puppet in the drawer (to be pregnant)

to search for the small beast (to nitpick)

occupy yourself with your onions (mind your own business)

the dress does not make the monk (don't judge a book by its cover)

and then there's window-licking, the french way of saying window shopping.

the man who wished he was a horse

sadly, the little films from yesterday have become mysteriously inaccessible. none of the shortlists from depict!'s 2006 or 2005 site are working. so i found this one, from 2003. see it quick, before it disappears too.

a couple more wonders before countdown

tsé & tsé associeés have THE most magical website. catherine lévy and sigolène prébois!! my heroines! go there and follow the fireflies.

be patient with all the secret contraptions and you'll be very rewarded. be sure to check their links page and click on all the light bulbs to hear the harry partch-esque music.


go here to read three layer cake's interview with them. here is a sample question from it:

How do you set your professional goals together?
We never have. Our goal is to be happy, have fun, and make enough money to live. When we look at where we are and think that we have managed to make a living doing what we love, we still think it’s a miracle.

don't you love them already?






when you've finished exploring there, you can go to the gallery of obscure patents at delphion. there you'll find instructions for:




the transparent color-coded intravenous tubing invention,







the self-containing enclosure for protection from killer bees,







and the highly impractical round chessboard.

i'll leave the rest for you to be surprised by.


happy 2007.

"if illusions are always illusions of a reality, reality, for its part, is never the reality of anything but an illusion."--baudrillard

in the vocabulary of wine terminology, there is something called the 'threshold of sensation: the smallest concentration of a stimulus that can produce a general but unidentifiable sensation. lower than the threshold of perception.'

from this sentence i became aware that the imperceptible quality of a thing arises from there being a scarcity of it. just enough to sense it but not enough to name it, to put it into words. the inexpressible is merely the world outside of language. you would think this world would have shrunk into nothingness by now; you'd think the sprawl of language would have spread over every square inch of perception. oddly, i think the reverse is true, as the inexpressible is infinite and the expressible is not. it seems to me at times that language is, at its root, a substitution of what we have for what we don't have.

i think i find myself so drawn to the french language because this idea is somehow innate within its structure. in english, we think 'about' something. in french, we think 'toward' it, away from ourselves as the center of thought, toward thought as a place outside of ourselves. in english we say 'i miss you,' but in french we say 'vous me manquez:,' it is you who i lack. i learned this difference earlier in my french study, but not in the same concentration as i learned it today. i got a very sudden sense of something vast that i could not hold onto. it was only a passing glimpse and then it was gone, irretreivable, like a blissful odor from childhood, or a name that was just on the tip of my tongue.