WHIM

No essay today: I'm just too beat, which is something that I feel reluctant to mention but want to, if only to ruin this past week's "streak". I'm suspicious of streaks. They're superstitious and inevitably lead to non-streaks, especially for worriers like me. Anyway, blogging is (god willing) a complicated and ongoing failure and I'm really just shooting myself in the foot by pretending otherwise. So there it is: WHIM (on my forehead).

We can even imagine that Mr. Hulot himself disappears for ten months of the year and then reappears spontaneously, in a kind of jump cut, on the first of July, when the alarm clocks finally stop and, in certain privileged places on the French coast and in the countryside as well, a provisional time creates itself, between parentheses as it were - a duration softly whirling, closing in upon itself, like the cycle of oceanic tides. This is Time for the repetition of useless gestures, for minimal mobility, and especially for stasis at the siesta hour. But it is also ritual Time, given a rhythm by the vain liturgy of idle pleasure more rigorous than the work of any office hour. (Andre Bazin writing about Jacques Tati's Les Vacances, as translated by Bert Cardullo)

I'm excited about this week of blogging and have a few ideas for the blog going forward. Ideally, I'd like to continue with the poetics and add more personal stuff, while at the same time working in more discussion of translation as a process, not to mention translations themselves (my own and others). Please let me know if you have any suggestions or comments, either by leaving comments on the individual posts or contacting me via email at josh.billings@gmail.com. And of course thank you for reading, whoever you are.

Oh yes, and I did some heavy edits on yesterday's essay on parody, which I think improved and deepened it. Have a look!