STAR WARS, THE RISE OF SKYWALKER : SHAKESPEARE REDUX

Two heroes:

One reclaiming his family, and going home after all.

One rejecting her ancestors, and finding a new home after all.

Ghosts and apparitions.

The intrusion of the supernatural instead of just the magic of science fiction.

The space opera takes a Shakespearean turn:

The visit of a Hamlet-like father claiming the son back, away from the dark side;

The mother conjuring up Ben out of Kylo Ren.

The ingredients of tragedy:

Conflicts and dilemmas, hesitations and choices, murders and sacrifices.

Human passions at war with themselves

Courage and fear, forgiveness and resentment, anger and peace.

A departure from the technological and robotic galore.

An episode clearly refocusing on what makes the human story an epic one: Journeys undertaken to articulate an identity for yourself even if it means rejecting your original bloodline,

Or to uphold your name (some viewers might remember John Proctor in The Crucible)

Or to claim one.

Against all odds, and expectations,

Reverse the course of destiny,

And turn flaws into strengths.  

The blood family and the family you create through loyalty and fighting for the common good.

Betrayals and intrigues conjuring up Macbeths and other Richards or Iagos of the Dark Side.

With the occasional lightness of Twelfth nights and porter scenes comic relief.

Shouts and murmurs, whispers and screams.

Hands that kill, or give life.

Rey and Kylo Ren: twins of some sort after all—a dyad in the Force.

Romeo and Juliet-like, fighting on the same side, after all,

Delivering a better world for others.

Together.

Death held at bay by Love,

An ultimate sacrifice and gift.

A life redeemed, after all.

The urgency of ethical imperatives clearly situated against the backdrop of our overall moral bankruptcy.

Enter natural elements and climatic protagonists:

Glaciers, lush forests or raging seas.

Tempests to come, and be feared.

Tiny humans strut and fret about the stage in the face of an adversity greater than what they can imagine—with or without the stars, other players that have their exits and entrances.

The proper scale of our humanity in the galaxy,

Brief candles that can be put out indeed.

And the proper measure of our greatness too: mercy, compassion and Love,

And their sound and fury

Signifying something.

Marie Lienard-Yeterian

C’est à la limite où disparaissent les arbres. Quand on s’est suffisamment élevé sur les sentiers rocailleux, sous le soleil, à l’ombre des sapins, chênes, aulnes ou autre espèce, selon le lieu, selon le climat. Un peu de vent qui agite les cimes au-dessus du regard, et après un certain temps, au détour d’un virage, derrière une roche, soudain, comme par surprise, on perce, et l’immensité se fait.

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THE SHORT STORY : A DOUBLE BILL/ REGARDS CROISÉS SUR LA NOUVELLE

Two collections of short stories :
Teasing generic conventions,
Conjuring the artistic worlds of painting and cinema into their narrative imagination.

Deux recueils de nouvelles :
Jouer avec les conventions du genre,
Convoquer l’univers de la peinture et du cinéma dans leur imaginaire narratif.

TRAJECTORY
By Richard Russo (2017)

Four short stories, four thresholds ushering uncanny guests into the house of fiction.
Four cardinal points directing us to unchartered narrative continents, Following the lead suggested in the title.

A range of characters faced with different dilemmas and crises—decisions to be made in spite of fear, resentment, or just the weight of life:
To face up to a student who plagiarizes.
To decide to accept oneself and the other, and rejoice in the feeling that the current winter will not be the last.
To reject, or accept, a brother in the midst of emotional turmoils, and existential queries.
To launch into script writing, and undertake the journey—physical and mental— between Los Angeles and New York.

Circumstances to address.
Possibilities to articulate.
Designs to sketch.
Films on the move.

The narration conjures poetic and novelistic tricks, and proposes forays—or trajectories—into alternative storytelling modalities, and unexpected modes of the imagination.

A choreography of bold yet determined gestures on the stage of narrative conventions.

And a polyphony of sort.

OMBRES ET MURMURES : QUAND LA SCÈNE DEVIENT UN MONDE
De Thomas Thérèse (2018)

Une série de courtes nouvelles en prose à vocation poétique— autant d’anachorèses créatrices, de « retirements » (à l’instar du personnage dans Le Maitre de Santiago) dans un contexte saturé d’images.

Comme les peintures de David Hockney : regarder le moment, et faire prendre conscience au lecteur de l’activité de regarder.

Une invitation double : voir et re-voir.

Une dimension méta-fictionnelle réitérée par les textes consacrés au cinéma, où l’activité du spectateur est également donnée à voir.

Compléments et déclinaisons de certains thèmes à travers la récurrence des sections en alternance avec des sections uniques.

Digressions filmiques qui proposent d’autres « visions » et constituent autant de « suppléments » de l’acte de voir, à travers le détour par un autre art.

L’acte de voir et ses limites, interpellations à poursuivre pour découvrir dans l’avènement du texte suivant un prochain point de vue. Pointillisme à la Seurat.

Le retour de certains titres—comme l’on peut parler du retour des personnages pour les romans balzaciens et faulknériens, par exemple—rythme cette invitation.

La ponctuation et la mise en page ébauchent autant de convocations à voir la page comme espace de mise en regard—espace de jeu avec les images et les mots. Et avec notre curiosité.

Telle la couverture et son blanc à remplir, écrire, ou peindre. A habiter.

Marie Liénard-Yeterian

TAKING A WALK THROUGH DIFFERENT LANDSCAPES
DAY 7

From Louise Erdrich’s novel Future Home of the Living God:
“The deep orange-gold of the sun is pure nostalgia. An antique radiance already sheds itself upon this beautiful life we share. I grow heavy, rooted in my lawn chair. Everything I say and everything my parents say, the drift of friends, the tang of lemonade, the wine on their tongues, the cries of sleepy birds and the squirrels launching themselves…all of this is terminal. There will never be another August on earth, not like this one”

Blessed gifts of time:

Flow, change and mortality
An active physical and mental engagement with the world
A readiness to respond to circumstance
The awe and wonder of the child’s gaze indeed.

Walking in the rain, singing.
A glistening sidewalk. Rain dropping wetness and discomfort. An empty space. Walking and singing, non plussed by the storm, enjoying a newly-gained sense of freedom and the cleared-up space. Feeling of joy, like a child at play in the newly discovered snow. Seeing the place as familiar and yet experiencing it for the first time. Its texture, its surface, its urban beauty. Without the crowd, moveable or not. But with the feast.

Many years later, on the Brittany coast
Beautiful sunset. Generous nature.
The sky, the sea. A giant tea party in red.
Scuttling of the clouds. Scudding across the distance.
Scribbling on the beach. Tiny birds scurrying the surface of the sand. Calling out
To retrieve what was written and has been lost
To the tide coming in, to the occasional longer wave, to human erasure.
Every second bringing change
Experiential and empirical.
The urgency of time.

Drinking the instant like water.
Clinging to every moment:

Existe et meurs avant de mourir

« Lorsque les dieux faisaient l’homme, ils étaient de corvée et besognaient: considérable était leur besogne, leur corvée lourde, infini leur labeur. Car les grands Anunnaku aux Igigu, imposaient une corvée septuple! Leur père à tous, Anu, était leur roi; Enlil-le preux, leur souverain; Ninurta, leur préfet, et Ennugi, leur contremaître. Tombés d’accord, les grands-dieux avaient tiré au sort leurs lots: Anu était monté au ciel; Enlil aviat pris la terre pour domaine, et le verrou qui barricade la mer avait été remis à Enki-le-prince. »

Poème D’Atrahasis, ou Poème du Supersage, vraisemblablement XVIIIème siècle avant J.C., trad Jean Bottéro in Lorsque les dieux faisaient l’homme, mythologie mésopotamienne, J. Bottéro, S.N. Kramer, Gallimard

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TAKING A WALK THROUGH DIFFERENT LANDSCAPES
DAY 5

Andrew Motion reviewing Andy Goldsworthy’s works in a piece titled “The Pencil of Nature” (The New York Review of Books Feb. 8, 2018, p. 17-18):

“They are also works that impressively extend the expression of themes that have obsessed Goldsworthy from the beginning of his career. At the same time they let us hear the silence produced by the deadlocked confrontation of equally weighed and weighed opposites, they allow the earth to have its say. Not just by giving close attention small and insignificant-seeming things such as thorns and leaves and nettles and petals, but by embracing the fact of their own transience while also reminding us that everything in nature involves a past and future, as well as the present in which we regard it”.

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VOYAGE A TRAVERS LES PAYSAGES
JOUR 4

« In the new order, there was not so much space left for the Guugu Yimithirr. The farmers resented their burning of grass and chasing the cattle away from the waterholes, so the police were employed to remove the natives form the settler’s land. The Aborigenes reacted with a certain degree of antagonism, and this in turn provoked the settlers to a policy of extermination. Less than a year after Cooktown was founded, the Cooktown Herald explaines in an editorial that ‘when savages are pitted against civlisation, they must go to the wall; it is absolutely necessity for such a state of things, it is absolutely necessary, in order that the onward march of civilisation may not be arrested by the antagonism of the aborigenes’. The threats were not empty, for the ideology was carried out through a policy of ‘dispersion’, shich meant shooting aboriginal camps out of existence. »

Guy Deutscher, Through The Language Glass

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TAKING A WALK THROUGH DIFFERENT LANDSCAPES
DAY 3

For H.P. Lovecraft, the weird conveys « a subtle attitude of awed listening, as if for the beating of black wings or the scratching of outside shapes and entities on the known universe’s utmost rim. »

Uncanny whirls and winds
Snatching our lives with the roofs over our heads.
Estranging sounds and screams
Piercing the comfort of our sleep.
Trees collapsing and branches breaking
Cluttering the space of our dreams and horizons.
Uninvited guests to the table of our feasts.
Black wings beating ceaselessly on our thresholds
Weirdness paired up with the sublime
Awe-inspiring vistas
Turned into predatory shapes.
Rim of the universe
And other unfathomable borders.
Frontiers to be imagined.

VOYAGE A TRAVERS LES PAYSAGES
JOUR 2

« Un matin de la fin du mois de mars 2007, au lever du soleil, j’effectuais des enregistrements le long de la frontière sud du parc provincial Algonquin, à environ 300 kilomètres au nord de Toronto. Je venais d’installer mon matériel sur le bas-côté d’un chemin quand, à ma grande surprise, je me suis retrouvé entouré par deux meutes de loups, l’une devant moi et l’autre derrière. »
B. Krause, Le Grand Orchestre des Animaux

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TAKING A WALK THROUGH DIFFERENT LANDSCAPES
DAY 1

“The planet: We just live on it” David Attenborough

Round shaped
From above and from beyond.
Flat to our feet
With gaps, and ups, and downs.
A life of its own
Whether we are aware or not
Whether we care or not.
It lives in spite of us
Bearing the brunt of our latest ways of ‘inhabiting’
Negotiating the cost of our invasive (technological) addictions.

“It is crucial to remember that digital ideologies are filled with myths: Not ‘everything’ is or will be digital. Digital files are not archival or permanent. Digital technology is ephemeral and vulnerable. And digital networking has very high ecological and political costs. Not only is digital not immaterial, it is complexly, contingently, and expensively material”
Johanna Drucker (from “An Interview with Johanna Drucker on Poetry” Revue Française d’Etudes Américaines 151 Winter 2017, p. 97).