le tiers livre, web & littérature

the technical image as flow, gesture and story

François Bon — 2019-09-01T04:58:00Z

• picture here over : Gustave Le Gray

In our actual time of transition, how the changes appearing in photography help us to build new models for literature. But how the changes appearing in photography induce also new models in the world of image by itself, and the gap between photographing, writing and filming. Twenty dots or open trails.

| 1 – if the image is a story |

First, how permanently remember that image has always and first been, from the start, a story. Literature and film have built their own story as an object of time. The still image, today widening to film without changing is nature, accepts to become time by itself, and we just are slowly becoming to understang the new story that begins. By changing ourselves to accept a renewed image, what new stories begin ?

| 2 – no image without duration – |

There has never been an image with no duration. Shoot people waiting on the platform from an Underground railway at a ten thousandth of a second, and it will become a strange sculptural issue. What lies under our temporal field of perception is also a significant space.

| 3 – we are ourselves a camera oscura |

Can we say we are ourselves the limit of the photography ? Beyond fifteen pictures a second, we can no longer see or read. The illusion of continuity which the movie creates was born of this principle. But certain experiences are evidences prove the contrary : launch a projection at 40 pictures second, and insert a single slide of an immediate danger, your central brain will respond, you will be able to press a red button – a classical experiment. So, when images and narratives become today a flow, how to be sure that our story keeps its grip on the world, where the invisible or abstract part grows with each new technology ?

| 4 – what is Baudelaire thinking about when being photographied |

In reducing the duration of the exposure, we used to produce the illusion that the image was – as a snapshot – instantaneous. But a constantly variable dimension : Baudelaire posing for Carjat's photographic chamber, it's several minutes of total immobility – what happens there in the poet's thoughts ? Do we enough practice and know, in our own brains, the pathes which turn back from the instantaneous to establish each one of our common photographic images as duration ?

| 5 – narratives without duration |

Consequence for the narrative technicality : a sentence (I would prefer to keep our french word phrase, as it's used for music) can be simultaneous of its referential time : the action of Joyce's Ulysses goes on 24 hours, and requires 24 hours to be read. But the narrative is able to amplify its referential time : add everything Flaubert's Bouvard and Pecuchet do, and they would live for two hundred forty five years. Odette, in Proust's Search of lost time, makes love despite being hundred and sixteen years old. Conversely, a whole narrative can apply to a referential time of no duration : a great Bernard-Marie Koltes's narrative for exemple – Solitude dans les champs de coton – is a full one hour and half play just refering to a single glance between two guys, one walking, the other one sitting. When our daily experience of the time – particularly with our digital uses – has considerably amplified our relationship with time (compared to one or two generations ago), and when for example we have to learn there is no longer distinction between the still and the moving image, how should it be possible to tell stories in the same way ?

| 6 – how to tell the speed changes the reading and the writing |

The speed as experience has been constitutive of the narrative's contemporaneity : writing the automobile speed sensation for Proust, the increase of the speed (and driving yourself, despite his missing arm) for Cendrars, apprehend mental speed when using drugs for Michaux. Paradoxically, in Faulkner's 1925 Pylon, the plane rocks the literature far more than all subsequent descriptions (landing in Chicago in the Fall of America of Ginsberg, and his flights descending on every greatest cities around the world after his Nobel prize in Le jardin des Plantes of Claude Simon). Two Japanese photographers teach us a language to tell the speed with an image protocole that stays independent from the image by itself : Hiroshi Sugimoto who filmed those wonderful old and empty aAmerican theaters, exposing his film only by the screening of the chosen movie in the empty hall, on the whole and exact duration of this movie), and the hand lifted photographs of Daido Morayama, where the transcription of the reality is reached by the transcription of his own mobility and movement to do his shooting. What a new and different relation to speed requires to be told, to increase the vocabulary of our photographical gesture. A photography from an aircraft window is an archetype : but telling what has changed in our speed perception has become a challenge both for the narrative and the image simultaneously...

| 7 – the still photography is already a movie |

So how to mentally get used to what the image has no more edge in time than in it's own frame (what we learned a long time ago). If image doesn't provide by itself it's sound context, we are accustomed to rebuild it mentally – our personnal sound library probably widened in the same scale, compared to our parents or grand-parents, than our internal picture library. Are we able to keep mentally the difference between micro-sequences often reduced to less than a second in the complex narrative constructions which are the vocabulary of the movie, video and clips, and an image that presents itself as a still photographic picture. Many flagship applications are based on such a displacement : video inserts in the sequential flows of Instagram or Twitter, even after Vine or Periscope have vanished, or how Facebook direct live becomes a political and communicational tool of primary importance or have a look at the recent Apple's ad about their new app where, by clicking on a still image, you get the video loop associated with it.

| 8 – reality is never an image |

Which opens to a parallel consideration on the media as supports, the suite of technologies that transform the real into a material image. If, from its very origin, the image is never separated from our own reading and what we reconstruct from it, if we have to re-project internally what it is supposed to represent as real. And what has always been constitutive of the history of the image, but takes a new dimension in our times of transition : to question this reading itself, recognize what it expresses from what we have inherited mentally, and the effort it takes to think pragmatically what has established there that we can not know in advance, and offers to see the real in a new way – what would be the mark of our time, in a major and unpredictable transition, where their technical nature affects all media, is how this protocol is now tied to photography, image and text together, each inseparable from the medium by which they manifest through your own uses, and flows that bring them to us. To read an image or read a text is also, nowadays, to read the media that embodies them, and the circuit that makes them accessible – neither photography nor the film nor the text can no longer be considered as « representation », this is perhaps precisely what allows their to be fiction, invention, or at least gives them their autonomy as objects, and makes us able to not submit ourselves to reality. Have we begun to learn to behave in the real without the old need to represent it, knowing that no representation can no longer be relevant ?

| 9 – becoming algorithms ourselves |

One of the Vilém Flusser's axis, in Philosophy of the photography, long before the advent of digital cameras, is to think about how the technical device has been from the first an active system, interacting with the person using it. The technological change has radicalized this autonomy of the device, independently of the image itself : the image is no longer as a standalone file, but primarily an algorithm, treated as such by the software set as circulation or fixed materiality (screened or printed). These algorithms are submitted, as other computer equipments, to a globalized standard that includes predetermined archetypes : it concerns Instagram filters as well as compression terms of the best sensors, and the various viral publishing contexts. Even in RAW format, the most complicated and elaborated sensor is always related to the specific algorithm, depending of each brand, who produces the image as a visible frame. And it has to be a specifical part of a critical education to the making of images – how do we deal, upstream of our capture, to counter this own algorithmic activity. And knowing the growing role of algorithms in the economic and social organization of the reality, and the information we receive from the world by the flows with which we interfere, or even how the smallest requests we make of a book or music, the algorithmic understanding of the image is obviously an essential workshop also for the narrative.

| 10 – do the space has colors ? |

Immediate corollary : this preliminary and mental making of an image, conscientized or not, just before the shooting, applies to the image in our full relationship and process of its making, thus including two dimensions that were not as affirmed in pre-digital times : images data banks, including FlickR that was at a time their most symbolic figure, and now replaced by another very complex mechanics : the images queries Google search algorithm, and no need to recall the huge pan of artistic invention which today has its camp in these banks of found images – and an other dimension, apparently more objective where the images result from devices without direct human intervention, surveillance cameras or body images (from the 3D modeling of the brain used by surgeons, to the use of prenatal ultrasound scans which has become socialized pictures. What telescope has ever seen the color of the space ? Certainly not Hubble visual reconstruction of galaxies, and even the surface of Mars, is never free from the projection of archetypes from our representations historically constituted on the collected data banks.

| 11 – about image without camera |

The image without camera comes long before the first technological appearance of the photographic chamber, whose story (see the invention of the portable device by Nadar, his « Detective »– used for example by Zola, who will leave 7000 photographic plates without ever writing on his photographic practice), supports the history of photography and still a very active core practices in art schools. Surprisingly, a more and more skilffull capacity of our miniaturized devices has enabled the survival of dedicated cameras, where music has for long lost its own specific equipments. Yet at every stage of the photographic history, this relative dissolution – miniaturization, integrated picture function – creates practical areas whose aesthetic is unique to each, without any possible hierarchy in their impact. The freehand photography with a simple iPhone has become the best notebook to the author or the filmmaker, as it allowed the painter to relay watercolor as instant capture and documentation. And opened new creative spaces, where the relative poverty of the devices and media can be part of the project by itself.

| 12 – how to paint a movie |

How to grasp the still image as duration ? Just think how the movie and even the painting has already explored it : static shots of Chris Marker in La jetée, and the formal novelty of Hopper's paintings on the inside of a cinema in New York, the snapshot set by the body position of the opener at rest, while the duration of the film is transcribed by the grayscale variations on the screen corner. When literature works on time, it integrates the expanded vocabulary of image playback for those she built with her own sentences material.

| 13 – the photography as the books are social objects |

The art of Madame Bovary (which is not entitled novel but manners, provincial manners – as well as Stendhal's Le rouge et le noir is simply called manners, and Balzac entitled his books social studies, or philosophical studies, or scenes of private life), to build that on which the novel works – these gnaws inside human beings in their friction with the world – must also build what the novel represents : the school, the village, the pharmacy, the coach, the operation of the clubfoot. The issue of documentation, and the emancipation of the representation, is the same in the novel than in the image as art. Nowadays, these representations are not only available, but saturating : Flickr or YouTube are not only flows, but encyclopedias. Integrate them into the story would crush it, they would be redundant. Follows a double movement : we are so familiar with these images encyclopedias they in turn become fiction, by their mere attendance and description – and so are the multiple literary projects proceeding from the arbitrary recordings of Street View. Or the possibility of holding an entire novel about a mall escalator, since everyone can instantly restore critical data we need to represent it.

| 14 – have a look but quickly |

Everyone can do this exercise : looking for what are the five photographs that you watched the longest. Personly, certainly Baudelaire's portrait by Carjat, and the waves of Gustave Le Gray. If Le Gray amazes me so, of course it's due to the scarcity of images issued from his time, but also because they show the invention, the crossing : images which invent their technology (Le Gray makes separate shootings of the sky and the water to fix photographically the moving waves in a chemical processes) and included this technological leap in its very expression. I first used Instagram as a propulsion tool for my Facebook wall : for a few months, I use it as a fully aesthetic medium – the choice of my subscriptions, expansion and refinement of the accounts that I follow, and of course questionning what I'm myself propelling. The linear flow of Instagram, reported to the quantitative but still flow of FlickR, places the image in a delivery method that is more akin to the radio. I never watched an Instagram picture as long as Le Gray, certainly not. But for every photographer that I follow, the time the multiplicity of images is worth the time spent on a small collection of images. What in ten years has revolutionized the world of photography, text is following it by now – widespread access, propulsion algorithms and social virality as part of its organic constitution as narrative. Overall, the movie has not yet taken this path : YouTube virality is not the fact of the filmmakers but has already got the ability to replace them, overturning the status of the author as for photographs or authors in the digital age. Reading quickly, reading more profusely and fragmentedly, is not reading less – by what mental work, meditation, slowness or otherwise – should we compensate ?

| 15 – how many photographies you do remember |

We have been the contemporaries of a new paradigm : the image includes as one of its own content its broadcast mode and accumulation mode – in France, the founding approach of Andre Gunthert – makes the image becoming stream, and our own use and perception of the image another stream. It was latent in the history of photography before the digital era, but when virality and the database become the own image elements, it provides us a new indication for the fate of texts in the digital age. Three generations, two or a single generation from ourselves, of how many images is made photographic memory of our parents or grand-parents ? And based on what main archetypes ? And if we see this growing pool of stored images, what become the stories and legends associated with them ? And are they sorted in our brain as in our hard drives ? Do we memorize them as single shots, series ? Is our brain infinitely extensible, and how proceeds he to classify the non verbal information that constitutes an image ?

| 16 – what images do we dream |

Meanwhile, what our own mind change, for storing and sorting of images, changes our memorization of writings ? What our own mental change for storage and sorting images changes and interacts with our immediate perception of reality ? How what the movies and pictures we have memorized, becoming matter of our own reality, modifies the territory and ways of our stories ? What we act in the world, becoming desire and form of fixed or filmic images, moves our imagination concerning the world ? What images do we dream, and how do they move the texts and stories we also dream ?

| 17 – how Arthur Rimbaud failed his first photography |

The very long list of writers who have early practiced photography : Hugo, Nerval, Gautier, du Camp, Rimbaud, Zola. And yet have not written about photography. How could it interfere, including Lovecraft or even Julien Gracq – all amateur photographers –, or Claude Simon, art photographer, with the operation mode of their sentence in its assault on the world ? Zola photography mopeds, or the construction of the Eiffel Tower – when he died in 1902, he has just received from Seattle the very last new Kodak, leaving behind him 7 000 glass plates. And the question for today : when the image gets into the writer's notebook, into the writer's story (Sebald), what do we have to cross in our head so that it is no longer separable ? We know what event is the essential breaking off : when he went to Harar, Rimbaud, who overthrew our french literature, no longer intended to write. Hardly he gets a little money, a few months later, he sent his mother a requirement for a photographer full equipment. He also needed a topography manual, to map the routes that allow him to join the tribes to which he selled guns and cartridges. His mother sends him a photography manual. The stingy Rimbaud grumbles : the photography manual, he already has it. He left Europa without photography equipment, but with the book that explains how to – Photography for dummies, sort of. To apologize, four weeks later, he sends his mother the first photograph he achieved : a self-portrait. But he erred in fixing doses, photography is missed, all white. He accompanies his sending by a letter explaining what she would see in the picture, if it was not missed : that truely day – we are in may 1884, only hundred and thirty years from now –, a photograph (not present) becomes genesis and matter of a text.

| 18 – the writer as bad photographer |

So there is a dead body, the writer becoming amateur photographer – which of us refuses nowadays to use the photographical funtions of his smartphone but without even having to consider himself as a photographer ? And a new settler : the photographer who writes as well as he films (in France Raymond Depardon's La Ferme des Garets is a wonderful narrative as well as a photographic work, elsewhere Allan Sicula's Fish Story or Daido Moriyama's urban notes). Or the emergence of a third party : photography and text proceeding from the same gesture. What a strange story that Let us praise famous men, the book James Agee wrote not on the photographs of Walker Evans, but about his trip with Walker Evans in the farms they explore together. The writer's notebook has always involved drawing and sketches, prints, reproductions – at least from the sixteenth century. The writer's notebook today includes a composite material – links, films, e-mails, Google Book excerpts, and of course the image that we said documentary image, photographed by himself or tapped into databases. The revolution is only in the concept of publication. A large part of the history of the text (but which does not cover the entire history of writing), which is called « book » was done by constructing the narrative according to its future projection on a support dedicated to writing, where the image has an illustrative or supplementary role. But the video is also apt nowadays to integrate the same composite elements, and even index them. So , what are the narratives we can invent in these new forms of publication, where the image, still or moving, as well the texte and the code are only primary components in a larger entity ? In this transition period, we are in the prehistory of a new pact between text and images : reason to be attentive to what is actually born, fragile, insufficient, but outside the traditional text and image report in and by the book.

| 19 – writing larger than the book |

A switch amplified by the digital age : literature is no longer limited to books. As the technical image (using the Vilém Flusser's definition, to separate photography and painting) is not more limited to photography. For example, we have often described the film as assembly of still images, made possible by the flexible support first invented by Kodak. But the moving image, as narrative exists as the magic lantern since the seventeenth century, and the Cinematheque in Paris has 15,000 of them in its collections : the cinema as a moving story was not born of photography, he only integrated it into its technical development. So, in our own heads, how make the mental leap that challenges the concept of technical image without predetermining it through photography ? Vine or Periscope, or the perfect equality of the fixed or film images on Instagram or Facebook, can we apprehend them with the same inner receiving process – and how it affects our idea of the world – that what the photography has accustomed us ? What challenge then for the short, the fragment, the sentence, the kinetics of the sentence in contemporary literature ?

| 20 – YouTube as literature |

And such a chance that we can always learn backwards : there are one hundred ninety eight references, quotations or interventions of photography in Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust, written between 1906 and 1923. Paradoxically, it passes next to the cinema, while very well mark the importance of the technical reproduction of the voice. This is also an indication for the unpredictability of the new and complex mental leap that we face. Remember Roland Barthes's last book, La chambre claire (Camera Lucida), who in 1982 distinguished forty two different modes for photography : Proust, already fifteen archetypes (portrait, posing session, the body X-ray work photographed by art, the landscape, the robbed photography) as it integrates telephone, air and electricity. Each of these uses was still in its awkward begininnings, or was already sentenced to a near technical obsolescence. How can we inherit this approach, in a context where all indicators are moving so fast, but where text, image, and the experience leading to them, as well as publication and propulsion are inseparable, as historically they have never been ? In other terms, is YouTube the future of literature ? (It's about two years than I have chosen to say yes – what do I lose or win ?)

english | the author as ecosystem, the case of H.P. Lovecraft

François Bon — 2018-06-11T06:30:00Z

À l'invitation de Lionel Ruffel et Annette Gilbert, se tiendra à la Haus der Kulturen der Welt de Berlin, les 13 et 14 juin, un événement intitulé The publishing sphere – ecosystems of ontemporary literatures.

Ma propre intervention interrogera ce que le numérique déplace à l'approche d'un auteur, et je prendrai bien sûr pour exemple H.P. Lovecraft.

Pour répondre à la demande des organisateurs, je tiendrai ici, jusqu'à l'événement lui-même – où cela sera restitué sous forme de performance interactive –, une tentative de simple cartographie contextuelle de cette approche, mais que je souhaite rendre, en ligne et pour les 2 mois à venir, la plus exhaustive possible.

Donc désolé si les commencements sont minces – et style télégraphique–, mais ça devrait vite se densifier. J'ouvre d'autre part les commentaires, serai plus qu'heureux si c'est l'occasion d'un atelier collectif et ouvert.

Vous pouvez télécharger ici le PDF « abstract » de l'événement :

Parmi les autres invités, lire en ligne les mêmes notes de recherche de Marcello Vitali-Rosati (super heureux de le retrouver, l'italiano-montréalais !) – les autres dès que.

mapping an author
a progressive cartography of an author as ecosystem

lifetime, an incomplete inventory _ 1st circle, the published ecosystem _ around or about HPL, 2nd circle of the same ecosystem _ HPL, translated & published in France _ the web ecosystem _ how to write about Lovecraft - Lovecraft, from crossmedia to transmedia _ what about that mess and why ?

prliminary notic : problm with the e key of my MacBook and no money to gt a nw on
sorry for th inconvninc, not at all a tribut to Mr Gorg Prc

description and extension of an author as ecosystem
(and the parallel dream to apply it on ourselves)

| lifetime, an incomplete inventory |

– 1.1., point of departure : how one of the most considerable and productive american writer of the 20th century didn't published a single book in his lifetime ;

– 1.2., the tin metal box with his non-published manuscripts (attested in a New York letter, requiring his aunt Lilian to send it with other items left in Providence, no further description nor archive) ;

– 1.3., the diaries, a new one each year, a quote per day, and the related utilities (the diary from 1925 at the John Hay Library, binding partially destroyed and not fixed, no other ones keeped, but a mention of the 1928's one, when his bag is thiefed on a boat in Albany, and the 1927's one, probably a Sonia's gift, used in 1933 for his notes about imaginary and composition ;

– 1.4., the letters : number estimated 35 000 (minimum), approximately 5 000 keped at the John Hay Library, approximately 1 800 actually published (ST Joshi/David Schultz), of witch a lot of postcards, but only one face copied (despite HPL's care of chosing the image sent) – definitely lost : all letters to Sonia, after the false divorce ;

– 1.5., audio archives : no record of phone calls (regular use from 1924 up to 1937), no audio recording (despite use of the tool in his narratives), no radio broadcasting (despite the incredible expansion of the media, particularly in his New York years) (to compare with Algernon Blackwood, even his elder) ;

– 1.6., library : approximately 1 000 books owned, exhaustive inventory done (and published by S.T. Joshi) after his death by a neighbor, at the request of the surviving aunt, and scattered after her death ;

– 1.7., manuscripts and typescripts : all the manuscripts given to Barlow in return for typescripts, both setted down to the John Hay Library after HPL's death, with some exceptions (incredible fate of In the shadow of time manuscript, found in Hawai in 1999) ; all the manuscripts sent to Derleth, or typescripts and carbon papers published by Weird Tales and others ;

– 1.8., a total of 70 photographies with HPL identified on them, alone or with other relative or friends, very improbable to find nw ones ; some photographies lost : shooting made when living at Barlow's house in Florida, 2nd stay ;

– 1.9., photographies made by HPL himself : th first weeks in New York, 1924, astounded by the city, he borrows Sonia's Kodak – images destroyed or disappeared ;

– 1.10., drawings and maps : the recurrent and precise description of his room, writing desk, tools and utilities books ; how HPL's drawings, in scenarii or notes, are so poor compared to the richness of the words...

back to summary

| 1st circle, the published ecosystem |

– 2.1., eBooks : annotated and critical editions, and how Joshi's digital version The Lovecraft Encyclopedia furnishes another dream, but uncompleted (or : the digitalized media insufficient by itself, if producing a new enclosure) ;

– 2.2., the Hippocampus unique CD-Rom (non-fiction only) : how we read by occurrences and not by the titles table ;

– 2.3., an exceptional experience : I am Providence by ST Joshi, a fixed printed book but a digital work in progress on Kindle – the possible dream of a fully exhaustive biography ? (and my own dream of a biography made of what we can't know) ; corollary : my rage not to find any french publisher ready to launch the translation...

– 2.4., of what use is a print (and partial) publication of the letters, instead of a full and collaborative digital tagged version ?

– 2.5., question about publishing : when HPL and his circle of friends (Loveman, Kirk, Belknap-Long, Morton) write a 4 carbons letter and send each letter to the 4 others, is it a published or a private act ?

– 2.6., question about publishing : when the same improvisation is written again, identical or similar version, in 3 different letters to 3 different persons, would it be called « published » or not, in our actual social network ecosystem ?

– 2.7., as for Baudelaire, Proust or Kafka, the total impossibility to conceive a Lovecraft's Complete works – « the annotated Lovecraft« , published in 2015, concerns only the main narratives – do our « complete works » dream is a simple projection of our impossible grief about the printed work, and the difficulty to conceive the work as ecosystem ?

– 2.8., parallel copyright ecosystem : every text published or partially published during lifetime elevated in public domain ; every text published after his death (Derleth), copyrighted by the Lovecraft fundation (request 500€ to publish the 1925's diary, 25 pages), each translation copyrighted by the foreign publisher : strict controls on Amazon CreateSpace, absolutely no control on Amazon Kindle, dozen of worn translations on eBooks without the translator's name, most of them hacking the Bouquins version, without any claim from the publisher... no request to my own request to buy a copyright for Sonia's memoir...

back to summary

| around or about HPL, 2nd circle of the same ecosystem |

– 3.1., an echoing ecosystem : how we have to reinvent the american story of literature, the importance of Lovecraft leading to open again Bierce, Blackwood, Dunsany, Machen, Rhode James and others, and why so neglected ?

– 3.2., the direct testimonies of Frank Belknap-Long, George Kirk, Willis Conover, Galpin and many others : an ecosystem by itself ? the particular case of Sonia's Private Life of HP Lovecraft, written 10 years after the death of her husband ;

– 3.3., Lovecraft as meme : a character that seems born in HPL's fictions and narratives becomes the idea or the representation of the author and his life – Lovecraft as depressed, solitary, stuck in Providence and how it had could become the main figure of the author (Houllebecq's book for example) ;

– 3.4., Cthulhu's fan fictions : how Lovecraft didn't invented any mythology, but how Derleth invented Lovecraft by using his mythology – would Lovecraft have existed without the false Lovecraft posthumously built ?

– 3.5., the Cthulhu's role play : how to play Lovecraft and not to read him :

back to summary

| HPL translated, published and studied in France|

– 4.1., role acted by Cocteau, Breton et other surrealists : an intellectual affair, as for Edgar Poe ?

– 4.2., the 1st french essay (Maurice Levy) and his action on US reception in return ;

– 4.3., shortened texts, shortened translations, recomposition of volumes, sci-fi context, who is the french Lovecraft ?

– 4.4., what does it mean, in the book economy and its symbolic values, to be classified as an horror writer ?

– 4.5., the very strange story of Julien Gracq visiting August Derleth by force : how I knew someone who knew someone who knew Lovecraft ?

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| the web ecosystem |

– 5.1., The Lovecraft Archive – but who is Donovan K Louks ? – on the web, seniority coming before scienticity ? – and note the last actualization of this 1st ranked and most complete web site is from summer 2011...

– 5.2., researchers blogs and websites, some examples : The Cthulhu Files, S.T. Joshi's website, and blog, David Haden's TentaclII, Lovecraft and his Legacy...

– 5.3., a broadcast and films ecosystem : torrents, forums – see Mega or Mega (other type of ecosytem : stability of the resources, unstability of their prmannt moving)...

– 5.4., communities : the french Facebook groups, the Lovecraftothèque ;

– 5.5., find his grave (how it creates an archetypal image, but impossible to find it at Swan Point Cemetery without using a connected device)

– 5.6., creative writing : invented forms rooted on the Commonplace Book ; and particularly this e-generated Lovecraft : not trying to generate short-stories, but using the Commonplace Book ideas as support : HP Lovecraft bot on Twitter, far better than the title bot, an Innsmouth bot, Cthulhu bot ;

– 5.7., the digital pictures archives and libraries as an opened inventory : buses, bridges, books ; very important : we learn to contextualize the narratives, and their grammar of invention, as th library of available sources grow vith the free digital access : for example, to read each morning, during the whole year 2015, what happened in the 1925's New York Times, same day of the week, in 1925, knowing that HPL also read the same news at the same hour, everyday ?

– 5.8., how the web learns us to read the past : YouTube as a contextual tool, for example The 24 dollars island (13' documentory of New York in 1927, by Robert Flaherty), or The last laugh, (Murnau, 1924, with Emil Janning) a film seen by Lovecraft, and showing us how he lives in Brooklyn ;

– 5.9., Google Street View as a witness of the unknown – Lovecraft writing about places, and how today the places help to write our Lovecraft ? example of the Ladd Observatory in Providence ;

– 5.10., is the mystery of the author by himself who helps the biographical approach in french as crossmedia : - for example this portrait polyphonique de H.P. Lovecraft by David Collin at the Swiss radio, or Le cas Lovecraft, a french documentary based on archives, by Patrick Mario Bernard and Pierre Trividic ;

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| how to write about Lovecraft |

– 6.1., axiom : is it possible to write about a foreign author without retranslating him ? corollary : the paratext of the single translations as part of an essay, the tree structure (arborescence) as the study by itself ?

– 6.2., a website attempt (2013-2015), my defunct thelovecraftmonument.com

– 6.3., if a direct experiment (visiting a city, exploring a cavern, urban walks, bus travels) precedes and get ahead the writing, how documenting this experience adds to our knowledge of the main work ? – very important concept for us, since Debord or Perec, but numerous intersection points in HPL (He, Whisperer in darkness) ;

– 6.4., how to contextualize a diary : 1925-2015, please live daily 90 years ago

– 6.5., an economical challenge : some amounts, and the misery of actual times

back to summary

| Lovecraft, from crossmedia to transmedia |

– 7.1., Providence as a fiction : immersive perspectives in Virtual Reality, a new way to include the author in his narrative – an example with Philip K Dick, I Philip

– 7.2., « l'instant Lovecraft » : about the impossibility to caracterize myself what I'm doing, how and why, except to do it ;

– 7.3., the translation as permanent work in progress, on digital as well on print

– 7.4., the Print On Demand as an ecosystem by itself : a) no more difference between main stream publishers and slf publishing, b) the software behind the POD is fully the digital ecosystem (same as eBooks), c) Hippocampus Press printed in UK or Germany, my Commonplace Book printed in California : the water comparison used by Kenneth Goldsmith ;

– 7.5., strange similarities with what brought HPL to fiction writing : 1st printed meteorological chronicle at 14, then amateur journalism... other very potent figures en HPL's life : the magazine publishing (Weird Tales among many others), the permanent use of public libraries and 2nd hand bookshops, writing as a collective adventure ;

– 7.6., important to notice how HPL, the writer without a book, has a permanent reading experience outside of the book domain (newspapers, magazines, reeceived letters or phone calls) : a user ecosystem as a background to the ecosystem he's building, invisible to himself ?

– 7.7., my own ecosystem : a black carboard suitcase of manusripts up to 1992 – serie initiated in 1977, but the whole bunch of notebooks voluntarily destroyed in 1983) ; digital archives transposed from Atari to Mac since 1991 (1988-1991 : lost), exhaustive bibliography ceased in 2000 ; computer hard drive, external hard dive with images, another one for manual backups and heavy datas, another one for Time Machine ; a back up on Dropbox ; my website on ovh.com : one main data base and 4 secondary ones ; list of lost datas : long list ; defunct blogs and sites, under my own name or not : long list ; my own site on webarchive ; since 1997, and later at the BNF/Heritrix, public access, but not the private section of the site ; no more notebooks of any kind since 1994 (except briefly for Paysage Fer) ; on my computer : mails and agenda available approximately since 2005 (data base) ; absolutely no hand written letters since 2007 (since Julien Gracq's death, who remained my last and lone correspondent) ; material files on my computer approximately 9 000 (on my hard drives and on Dropbox) ; other datebases : Ulysses database for my drafts and notes (Ulysses is my main tool for notes and drafts) ; a material archive for all my Tweets from 2011 to 2015 (no archive for my Tweets from 2008 to 2011, nor since 2015), no downloaded archive for my status or images on Facebook (since 2006) or Instagram ; important : the lone reference for my printed work, since the origin, are the text files, scanned or revised, in my computer or private part of the web site – so no need to build an archive for the POD work ; only one thing serious : this web site (but no backup outside ovh, no possibilty to keep it alive after an eventual or accidental death (I asked their CEO, kind answer but nothing done) ; the fact that I always forget to mention my 700 videos on YouTube as a proof of their ephemeral life, no backup ; in the garage, approximately 4 dead laptops, but most of my old ones erased and given to my children – a good bunch of dead hard drives, but don't know why I keep them ;

back to summary

| what about that mess and why ? |

– 8.1., why are the US people so dumbs and deafs about HPL ? how is it possible that I've been the first to publish – in french and not in english, the 1933's diary ?

– 8.2., the task to build a new story of literature as a retrospective look (already in Proust) ;

– 8.3., the task to understand our own word, in a state of deep mutation or transition : the technical transition of the 20's (telephone, radio, airplanes, cosmos, relativity, travels) as the vocabulary of the unknown ; Lovecraft against anticipation ;

– 8.4., working on an author : what Barthes called préparation du roman (the novel making up) as we wait for our writing, or the writing by itself, non-fiction now more powerful than fiction, but same stuff same aim ?

back to summary

Daewoo « French Voices Award 2016 »

François Bon — 2017-02-28T07:20:02Z

• Daewoo vient de paraître en Argentine, dans une traduction de Sol Gil et Nicolás Gómez, chez l'éditeur EXTREmCONTEMPORÁNEO. Suis bien sûr très fier, et aussi qu'ils m'aient transmis quelques exemplaires de ce beau livre (Mécanique est aussi paru au Mexique et en Argentine, mais j'ai jamais reçu). D'où cet échange, dont j'ai écrit les réponses directement en anglais (excuses d'avance) avec Milena Heinrich, de Telam News Agency.

• Mais bonne nouvelle transmise il y a quelques jours sur mon Facebook, l'attribution du prix French Voices 2016 à l'éditeur de la Nouvelle-Orleans, Bill Lanvender, Lavender Ink / Dialogos, et à la traductrice Youna Kwak (poète elle-même, et j'aimerais tant lui rendre la pareille...) pour le livre à paraître début 2019. Raison de plus de mettre en ligne et échange.

About Daewoo as a novel – interview with Milena Heinrich

1) At the beginning of the book explain why to call "Daewoo" as a novel and say that it is the attempt to reconstruct an experience. How did the reconstruction of this experience operate from the literary point of view ? Does that element imply a certain degree of fiction ? Why argue that it is a novel ? And more specifically : how did "Daewoo" come about ?

It's a novel because it's essentially built at my table, with a computer and an Internet access. I don't use categories as fiction or non-fiction : writing is an experience by itself, and its main stuff is what we do with it in our own brain. The chosen form, a diary and interviews, are both fictional, used because they create a strong illusion of reality.

2) It says that "if the workers no longer have their place anywhere, let the novel be memory." How do you think literature and memory are articulated ? Does literature have the power to officiate or guarantee memory ? Does it give you some kind of role in that regard ?

Sure, in all ages, the function of narratives and stories deal with memory, and arts of the memory. But the task of the writer stays subjective. We don't choose what has to join into, or stay in the collective memory. Just do our own job, which is to obey. The law is the reality, and the law is the syntax and composition.

3) The novel is published in Argentina twelve years after its publication in France. In the light of the passing of time, what does it represent in Daewoo ?

No idea about that. This book has been written as a live inquiry. But the status of the work (as a concept) remains strongly and permanently as an issue in our society, a permanent look from the society on or about itself. We are dealing today about a society without work, this is somewhat new, but a new face of the same old question. Factories closed or deserted, or simply demolished, are a permanent and sad event nowadays too.

4) We speak of novel but "Daewoo" also seems a chronicle on capitalism, the consequences of the economic order, the emotions (the anguish of those workers), the work, the working class... And it can also be read as an ethnography that recovers the voice and gestures of its protagonists and tries to disarm a collective history to tell it as a kaleidoscope. I wonder then motivated by the reading of the book : what is a testimony ? What is a testimony ?

I don't pretend to any testimony. My work is to deal with reality. Which is a concept of high complexity and a plurality of dimensions. What concerns money, power games, economic flows, territorial policies are some of these dimensions. Which are partly abstract and invisible too. Balzac and Karl Marx have educated us in this way. The field of literature can't be reduced to nice stories between nice fellows.

5) If we think of it as an ethnography, in which the researcher implies his field, "Daewoo" is the expression of a researcher who is involved with his subjects of study. What does Daewoo mean to you ? (I think of some passages of the narrator that talk about their own feelings of anguish / sadness). And in this case, does Bon narrator dissociates with the more personal Bon, who was there listening and collecting the words of those women ?

That the narrator is a part of his narrative, we learn that primarily by Marcel Proust. The narrator, as the writing of the inquiry itself, is obviously one of the gearwheels in the novel mechanism. Other questions are old moons. In the first beginning, it's not a planned book : this social drama, the sacrifice of a modern and viable factory, established in a valley dominated by the ruins of steel industry, was incredibly documented. This is a new fact : how the reality produces it own documentation, it hasn't ceased to increase these last years. Literature, as a gesture, doesn't have to invent this documentation, but to knock it over, to find again a little germ of the oldest human story. We had first decided to produce a theater performance, a truck, some benches, and to play it with four actresses in this valley itself. To play the existing facts, statements, words taken from this compact and massive documentation during the original struggle of these women. My first file in my computer has been made of my own notes about this performance in progress (which we have done, with Charles Tordjman as director, at Avignon festival, and a large tour, obtaining a Moliere prize). The most difficult event has been the day, before the coffee machine of the Nancy's dramatic center, when I told Charles : “These notes are a book by themselves, I've to handle them as a story.” I refused all this time to produce the text of the play by itself : the play is included in the book as an echo. Fictional interview of a character is a classical tool if you need an actor to talk right or acurate. In another field, some pure datas may appear as a specific field for imaginary. Another very disturbing fact came at the publication, once confronted to the real persons, which has been out of reach for us before : when you hear real stories that are already in your book, but you didn't know them.

(6) It is a fragmented book, made up of pieces, with different genres. How did you think the structure of the novel ? Does it respond to an attempt to renew literary genres ?

Nothing new here. A symphonic and fragmental composition, there are dozens of books, Proust included, to show us the way. Henri Michaux for exemple (which has often traveled in Argentina, and met Borges in 1935, both of them perfectly unknown). The use of the dialogue comes mostly from Nathalie Sarraute. But, in a totally different sense, what we've learned about narrative is that the story is firstly the story of the narrative by itself. The linear composition is directly my own path to take a grip on a fragment of a very complex, even if limited, and ephemeral reality. The main question in this book has been what deals with time and temporality. For example, during two years (even if it's a permanent tentation), the use of violence to answer another violence. Destroying your working tools, confining your boss. Another question is the change of the society by itself. Internet was at his beginning when I achieved this work, it was so easy to hack a lot of archives. What relies work to other components of the society : education, police, illicit economy ? How a society deals with suicidal (the suicidal recalled in the book has a real source), or depression caused by a decision taken at the other end of the world, only due to financial approach. What signification takes the end of a factory when the use of it productions remains with a dimension of desire (television set) or utility (microwave owen) ? What does it mean for a young woman alone with his child, to find a new job as dog cleaner ?

7) In reference to the previous question, and at the risk of sounding excessively broad, what is literature for you ? What do you think about when you think of literature ?

Literature, for me, as the simplest view, is language as reflection. Maurice Blanchot learned us that way. It's not about what you think. It's about how you sing and dance in the fire of reality. Daewoo has been my first book written essentially wit Internet tools. If I learned something for this book, which has been, with the enquiry and the theater adventure, a very tough period of my life, it's how you permanently have to walk through the real, face it, make words and sentences whose the unique law is this reality. The experience of web literature, which is my main path today, takes his roots in what this book changed for me then.

autobiographie des objets | try it in english ?

François Bon — 2016-08-14T02:30:00Z

Au département de français de la New York University, les étudiants en master de traduction travaillent avec Emmanuelle Ertel sur des textes d'auteurs contemporains.

Brigitte Giraud, Eric Chevillard, Pierre Autin-Grenier, Cyrille Martinez... Le paradoxe est que ce travail nous reste invisible, alors qu'il y aurait tant à imaginer pour un dialogue tout souple via le web, directement auteur à traducteur, quand c'est le moment, et aussi parce que pour nous, qui bénéficions rarement d'un tel cadeau, c'est magnifique de pouvoir faire circuler des fragments de notre travail ainsi transposé dans l'autre langue. Et qu'importe s'il s'agit de work in progress, d'étudiants qui fourbissent leurs armes.

Suis sûr aussi qu'on pourrait imaginer beaucoup de choses nouvelles en partant directement de textes publiés sur le web.

Tout cela, j'en ai eu un bref aperçu en décembre 2009, la première fois qu'Emmanuelle Ertel m'a accueilli. Puis là, en novembre 2012, pour une séance de travail en commun. Je reverrai les étudiants en mai dernier, en lecture publique de leurs travaux, lors de notre mini stage avec les enseignants.

Invité à nouveau aux US (Baltimore, San Francisco/Berkeley, Chicago, Madison...) fin octobre, avec l'autorisation d'Emmanuelle et des 5 traductrices, je mets en ligne ce travail, tel qu'il s'est fait, pendant quelques semaines, sur mon Autobiographie des objets juste parue.

Coupure de génération, coupure de civilisation... La tâche pour elles a dû être rude, je les en remercie donc à proportion.

Et bienvenue aux amis US qui souhaiteront ainsi prendre connaissance d'un aspect de mon travail.

Sommaire :
– Zineb | Question (an introduction) _ (original : book only)
– Serene | Nylon _ texte français initial
– Christiana | Mirror – texte français initial
– Margaret | The bucket of mussels _ texte français initial
– Hannah | Telefunken _ texte français initial

Zineb | Question (an introduction)

It's a dance : we get lost in it. Every two years you need to get rid of the old and replace it with that which is so much better – anyway, the thing breaks down by itself and it can't be fixed. It's also a celebration : questioning the world, through speed, planes, newly discovered cities, and what we learn by nibbling on the telephone's plastic or tactile slab with our fingers brings us unheard music, rare books, roads' or trains' exact status. We're standing on the edge of an abyss : the ransacked planet, political issues and conflicts, each one capable of making everything collapse quicker than any conflict of the old days, the cold cynicism of money blowing stronger than high altitude winds. And those objects with their programmed obsolescence that replaced the old permanence, we cannot bear thinking about who, how, and where they've been made, nor what we'll do afterwards with the rare metals and poisons in their semi-conductors. The old moves us : not necessarily because we held it in our hands during childhood – a rusting tractor in a field, a car hanging in equilibrium on a junk yard pile in the outskirts of town, glimpsed from the train, and it's time in its entirety that suddenly hits you, and what we missed out on. And yet. Never have we more precisely known the immensity that surrounds our own mystery : exo-planets and remnant radiant heat, nascent galaxies, and the same thing for the atom or the cell, theories that give up on unifying to better understand the immensely small or the immensely far strand by strand. In old books, we look for our own adventure. We read in the old adventure the distress of having missed our own. The dead are near by : hands and voices. We enter houses, we see them at the very back. Their own objects, the inventions they lived through and the life changing effects that followed. Are we thus so old ourselves in turn, for the appearance of the washing machine, the TV set, or electric guitars to be an event, even though the symbolic value of all this, in turn, has vanished ? We are not nostalgic – the idea of melancholy is richer, more subversive even, as far as both the present and the past are concerned. In the constant renewal of cities, we unlearned how to accumulate and keep (even though). What's left is the present, and its abyss : for lack of understanding it, and in the major chaotic amplification it represents, to go back and read the successive transitions. There are your hands, and there are the cold faces of the dead, those who were yours. At the end, at the very end, we know it : only books. Because would that too be in danger, that from which we learned so much ? So to read them too in that upheaval of things. How can we believe that we, ourselves, are products of such a world ? Fifty years, nothing.

sommaire

Serene | Nylon

While wondering about the very first object that I could consider a personal possession, I come across this word nylon. There weren't many stores, on the town's only street that contained them all. The hardware store, the pharmacy, one fabric shop, and this general store – the one where we would get our things, which we called le Syndicat, didn't have a store window. The other businesses – the two bakeries, the notary public, my grandparents' garage – these weren't technically store windows.

This other store, whose interior I remember only very vaguely, dark, square, cluttered – but how could I not confuse it with thirty similar stores I've visited since then – we named it after its owner, and I wouldn't be able to recall that either. In the store window, there was a yellowing carton, with pocketknives of increasing sizes, I can't picture the other objects, only this blue nylon cord rolled up in a compact coil, with an opaqueness, a brilliance.

I have no idea today what kind of use I had foreseen for it. Maybe, precisely, no other use than this supple and brilliant consistency of the nylon itself, a new material. I had one coin, it was a gift ; that had to have been the first time I had my own money – I imagine it was a five franc coin (but we were still using the old francs, so it was a five hundred coin, something smaller than a 1000-franc bill) – the cord cost two francs, I went in, I bought it. In a town where everyone inevitably knows who you are and who your parents are, I must have adopted a stubborn silence and not responded to any questions that according to rural courtesy must always be indirect.

My mother noticed the presence of the nylon cord just two days later. Where I had gotten it, and for what purpose – I had to answer. I confessed to exchanging the five-franc coin : I learned that day that I hadn't been given such money for its exchange value, but for compulsory capitalization. I had wasted. The possession that I had gained from my transaction didn't compensate for abandoning the coin, in its trade potential.

I had to hand over the cord to my mother, I had no say in the matter. In the garden, between some cement posts, we had three wire laundry cords, and space for one more – the nylon cord ended up there. It didn't interest me anymore, unraveled, useful, without any opaqueness or brilliance.

I only held onto that impression it gave, from the other side of the store window, and the fact that I had dared to go in to buy it.

sommaire

Christiana | Mirror

I don't think I have a particular fascination with my own image. On the contrary, the most difficult part is probably accepting it. What's strange, with all of these devices that allow us to stockpile self-portraits so easily, is the curiosity we develop for them, but I erase them just as quickly : you see the signs of aging more than anything else.

We lived far from any city. Luçon had practical value, but there was also the Messe bookstore, where we would go to get textbooks for school, where I acquired the taste for books, and dreamt in front of a globe – which ended up being given to me. La Rochelle was bigger, more complex, more magical. The city has deteriorated, seized by this vague abandonment characteristic of the provinces whose centers have been sucked up, as if through a straw, into the repetitive shopping districts of the surrounding suburbs, but there was still Prisunic – the now-defunct budget department store – with a second story. In the village, multi-story buildings were unheard of : land of winds. But there, the building was in the style of the big Parisian department stores, with multiple floors inside. The village and Luçon sufficed for the necessities ; coming to La Rochelle once a year was a waiting game and a reward. We would go inside Prisunic ; my mother had things to do there. My father, in the meantime, went to Fumoleau's place, in the La-Ville-en-Bois neighborhood – he was the workman who repaired boat hoists and motors for clients in the mussel industry of L'Aiguillon-sur-Mer.

My brother and I were allowed one request, provided that it was financially feasible. Within the allotted budget was a little rectangular mirror surrounded by a round plastic frame, with cardboard backing. In the car, it was out of the question to claim the purchases, mine as well my brother's, each in a personal, separate paper bag – no idea if this is also a memory for him.

In the house where we used to live, that we rented in Saint-Michel-en-l'Herm, there was a mirror in the bathroom, by necessity, therefore only for the daily rituals pertaining to it. There were also rear-view mirrors in the cars – I don't have memories of any other mirror or looking glass.

I have a clear memory of my rather heavy usage, during those early times, of the mirror with the cardboard backing and round plastic border, brought back from La Rochelle. I should say that, for me, the memory of the two cities that surrounded us symmetrically – Les Sables-d'Olonne to the north, La Rochelle to the south – is connected with the optical clarity of the glasses that I had just been endowed with – in the village near-sightedness wasn't something worth correcting.

I used the mirror around the house, following my path on the ceiling. It was fantastic and marvelous. Going from one room to another, meant jumping over an abyss. I only remember this mirror from holding it to look at the ceiling while walking around. Outside, it was even more unsettling – it was the sky that loomed under you.

In the clarity of this recollection, there is for me one certainty : the optical connection with the world – conjuring up in this world, by turning it upside down, via a frame, an unfinished dimension has remained a set life principle.

I can vaguely picture, in later periods, the mirror with its plastic frame in a wooden crate in the laundry room where my brother and I would store our old treasures (there too I can picture a plastic sword, also dreamt of, also abandoned).

His name really was Tancred Pepin, but his first name struck me less than his last, because of Pepin the Short. He was the quiet type, rather stocky like the people of this region, even a little cubic, and moved around on an often-overloaded moped, since he came into town for his gardening duties.

At the far end of the garden that surrounded our house, my parents had had some gravel deposited (a truck had poured it in a heap, the image still lingers) and we'd undertaken the task of lining two slender paths with upright concrete slabs in the form of triangles. My parents didn't garden, but Tancred came each week for the patches of potatoes, leeks and other useful things, tufts of sorrel, which played an obligatory role in this economy of isolation.

It's not possible for me to better define this device, not very complicated,which he used to align, install and set those triangular cement tiles. It was made up of two stainless steel rods, a green plastic frame, a handle. What's strange is that I have no recollection of Tancred Pepin's face, but I very precisely remember his moped and this device.

Somehow, I found it amazing : I've never liked grass, earth, vegetation. With this device they were gone for good. The countryside was transformed into the city. The whole world could be covered with geometrics of pure and clean cement.

Tancred Pepin lived ten miles from town, a place officially named Bout du monde, or the edge of the earth. I've always associated this expression with his name : the earth had an edge, and Tancred Pepin was the name of its inhabitants. He lived alone in one of those minuscule lockkeeper's houses granted by the Union. In return for free housing, he had to open the lock to the rising tide, close it to the ebbing tide, meaning four turns of the crank handle, three-hundred sixty five days a year. This occupation also seemed somewhat wonderful to me, in any case much more so than the different jobs proposed by the town or what I perceived of them firsthand – heavy burdens on teachers, with the annual visit from inspector Touroude (I wouldn't have remembered the name, it appeared suddenly on its own in the sentence), or symmetrically, pumping gas and repairing cars. Later I myself would have a lock at the edge of the earth, I would regularly open the gates in the shimmering mystery of the rising tide – that we all knew (and that I still know) just by a certain quality of the wind and earthly energy. The world that we lived in breathed through the sea, and the absurdity of this cheap urbanism cleaned away a year ago by the Windstorm Xynthia was exactly the opposite lesson of what we were taught by Tancred Pepin's moped, which appeared in town at various times, depending on what the turning of the crank demanded of him.

Did I even hear him speak once ? But there was this device, which proved that cities make themselves.

sommaire

Margaret | The bucket of mussels

No need for an object to be ours to determine its autobiographical place. Between the town's main road and the street known as Rue Basse, a sidestreet. At the end of it, Jézéquel's shed. Almost empty, a bit dark, the feeling of humidity linked perhaps to its fish traps and fish bins, which he piles into his van in the mornings. As for her, she goes all over town with her bike and trailer. In front of the handlebars is her Roman scale. You buy what she offers, depending on the catch. It can be cuttlefish or conger eels, gray shrimp still trembling and transparent, a very black, heavy plaice or sole. There's never a lot – the piles at the supermarket frighten me, compared to this trailer that would go along the street, and she who would send out her call to the housewives, I have fresh sole, I have mussels or something of the sort, I only remember the slightly high pitched voice of her call, and that is was enough to know it was time for her to pass through. I also remember the newspaper : the hake rolled directly in the printed word, the local news reported by Ouest-France or the obituary column. What is certain, for me, is the disappearance of their figures, his, hers, from my memory, while the interior of the nearly-empty shed, its darkened light, remains just as precise as the bike and its trailer. The curved, wrought-iron handle under the seat that the trailer hooked onto. The copper weights placed on the tin tray of the Roman scale. And the bucket of mussels. A mussel farming region, it's one of the essential elements on the list of permanent resources, along with snails, dandelion salad, and frogs' legs – mussels are eaten at least once a week. Like everyone in my family, I have the reflex to arrange the empty shells by stacking them. They are accompanied with bread and butter, which works out well, the area of our village operates on catches from the sea, redistributed in part to the community. Those that don't have agricultural activity receive vouchers for bread in compensation, or bons de pain, a portion of flour entered annually in your account at the baker's (how many times will this be my nickname in class, then for my brother in his), and the farmers that pasture the land allotted to their families repay in butter – how far away this world is. There is no reason why I should remember this bucket of mussels, a wooden cylindrical container, reinforced with zinc. If not for its associated noises - the mussels poured from the container into the Ouest-France (or the Ouest-Éclair) folded into a cone - that remind me of both the shed and the call, and the fish scantily placed at the bottom of the trailer, and all this economy of necessity, of the relative place of each person in the community. One day she'll have to stop using this liter that we all know, the mussels have to be sold in kilos. Because it touches upon an everyday life I knew for so long, it leaves me with a feeling of surprise to this day. Perhaps that's also why I see Madame Jézéquel's bucket of mussels so precisely.

sommaire

Hannah | Telefunken

It never lost its position of authority. It was until 1962 : in the small, somber dining room, which was only used for occasions (otherwise, it was the kitchen), on a narrow table reserved for him, the large Telefunken brand radio. Associated memories : the lacquer and the somber reflections of smooth wood panels, the heaviness of the folding top to the record player piece above, the very identifiable odor of the yellow varnished toile in front of the oval speaker, and that big green moving eye that indicated the quality of reception of big and small radio waves. During its splendid period, associated with De Gaulle's voice, and we had to listen with parents to the beginning that sounded like credits, Ladies and gentlemen of France…Politicians today would no longer use that tone of natural authority. Then came the television set – I didn't see it myself, but I have a precise afterglow of news with those voices and those black and white unmoving photographs that evoked the ending war in Algeria. It was that day that the teacher – Boisseau or Galipeau ? – had taken the class in rows of two for the arrival of the first television set in a house downtown, the tax inspector's place. Only, during the day, there was nothing but the test pattern and the inside of the tax inspector's house – mysterious job of this man who was authorized to take others' pennies, what did he do with them—, clearly more interesting, was the lasting image left with me.

Once the television is in the house, so the year being 1962, the radio set is in the hallway, but it's not even hooked up anymore. It's used for setting down objects. When we move in 1964, begins truly the era of the television, no longer for ritualized listening, but a daily presence, it's the age of Bewitched, and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Jeopardy, but I am eleven years old it's already too late for that to become important, I'm much better off with Poe and Verlaine.

The Telefunken is now in the kids' room, the three beds in the same room, with an unused chimney at the back, which we lean the radio against. The radio leaves me indifferent : it recovered its importance with the transistor, it's my father's, barely larger than a pack of cigarettes, but the chance to listen secretly at night and it's at that very moment, oh the live concerts on Pop Club, that we would finally discover how vast the world is, and that with these songs it can be ours.

So there is a thin period, from the end of seventh grade in 1965 when I receive my first record, the Equals' Baby Come Back, until July of 1967 when I have my license and finally my record player plays the Beatles' Sergeant Pepper's, where at the top of the Telefunken, the folding lid held open by a little copper arm, we rule over the plastic, faux-ivory needle on the 33, 45, or 78 (it requires a little plastic washer to center the 45s, they're the first Rolling Stones records), and in the end I don't know if I even need the music – the black turning movement of the spiral microgroove is enchantment enough.

Then, this must line up with the spring of 1968, I have this guitar and a microphone head encased in stainless steel, two stripped filaments : I unscrewed the bottom of the Telefunken, disconnecting the contact from the record player's DI box (not very difficult, but still a frightening memory to have taken the 220 volts several times, the red-hot transformer, and this very particular smell of burnt dust in these hot parts), to replace it with the guitar wires.

No, it wasn't enough to make an electric guitar. But it could give the illusion, as long as you listened quite close to the speaker, certainly. No idea of what happened to the Telefunken next, and to its big green eye for the big and small radio waves.

sommaire

preparatory notes for Shenzhen | the author, not the book

François Bon — 2014-11-24T10:17:37Z

– pas de meilleur moyen d'archivage que le site, donc je mets en ligne et actualiserai à mesure, jusqu'à la conf de samedi ;

– c'est bien sûr totalement irréel dans ma tête que je serai samedi en Chine pour dire ça, mais quand même – j'ai repris ici pour base mon intervention à Futur-en-Seine en juin 2011 (un vrai désastre : on m'avait demandé de la faire en anglais, mais tout le monde dans la salle parlait français et donc personne ne me comprenait), en la récrivant et remaniant en profondeur, selon les points qui me semblent aujourd'hui plus importants ;

– j'écris de l'anglais de cuisine – pour une conf dans ce contexte, c'est mieux de s'en tenir à des formes élémentaires, mais suis preneur de toute correction ou suggestion sur le texte ci-dessous, un petit mail merci !

– j'y serai (entre autres) avec Aïda Diab, de l'Asfored, voir sa page pour liens vers le colloque et sa propre intervention des sujets de réflexion pour le livre et le numérique.

Image ci-dessus : symbole de mutation technologique, quand le projecteur de cinéma devient objet muséal.

preparatory notes for the Shenzhen talk

All the following to concern a single word, the adjective unpredictable. And obviously related to the west european context only. I take as a wonderful chance this invitation, as an opportunity to learn from a reverse point of view.

My title will be « The author, not the book » – in ten brief points (or hope so).

1

We are living directly through a considerable mutation in writing : not only limited to reading, digital technology affects the entirety of our use of language, in its relationship to others, in its relationship to the world, in the relationship that we maintain within ourselves, oneself to oneself, with writing and reading. Digital technology also likely affects a part of language itself, by adding on its codes – the code as language.

First axiom : to consider as a chance to experience this mutation in the present, we always have to remind its most immediate future as unpredictable. And first axiom too : it's not the mutation of the reading tools that affects the reading uses, but the uses of reading themselves in a global context that changes every mode of our relation to the world. This has already been going on for at least 10 years, but is always in an accelarating, and not stabilizing, process.

Every attempt at predicting the immediate future (the CD-Rom abandoned when the ADSL came up, the uses of the connected phone far wider than the electronic ink, the importance taken by multitasking on our single screens) has been disavowed by the arrival of each new medium – and it keeps going.

Second axiom : we are charged with ensuring the continuity and transmission of civilization's values, for which the book was primarily responsible, and in a context that has become brutal and erratic ; structured on economic struggles at a global scale, and no more based on cultural or civilizational values.

Is there nothing we can possibly plan for ? At our disposal, an acute awareness of the present, and the examination of materials, customary use ? The first task is to step backward. In each long period of stability – even a constantly evolving one – as the one the book symbolizes, this look toward the past has been relegated to the background. For what we name « the future of the book », we don't have more visibility than each of the previous ages on their own mutation : as for them, the way we continously build the narrative of our own representation only matters.

2

A double movement establishes us as a community through language.

First axiom : one does not even need writing nor books for it. Written languages constitute, at best, a third of all languages. Very complex constructions in mythology, legends, social and cultural relationships, were formed and transmitted without using writing. Let us not be afraid today of what puts language, the story, in movement – the flow, the burst, the ephemeral.

Second axiom : in the long history of writing, what surprises is the extremely limited number of these transformations, if one were to compare to the history of social, urban and esthetic transformations.

Firstly, the three-dimensional object – six faces, eight corners, but this also has been a progressive conquest – whose long history spans from 3200 BC to 300 AD : the clay tablet. A complex object that hosts non reproductible sacred writings as well as private correspondences, war reports, and accounting documents ; that divides its methods for archiving (there are uncooked tablets that one can reuse), that includes means for verifying authenticity (a thin envelop covers the principal text with the same text recopied), and whose evolution (the invention of the page itself, when in the beginning lines were written in circles around the hand made clay bowl) in turn influences the evolution of the language itself, what he tells and how. The transformation of the tablet to the papyrus roll made them coinciding over several centuries. Have we thought enough to this precise history : for example, how the increase of the writing speed by using alternatively stroke and triangle has induced the change, in the whole western area, from iconic to syllabic writing ? The history of writing has always been a technological story, the story of its tools.

Next, the transformation of the roll to codex, faster, but nevertheless lasting roughly a century and a half. Next the transformation – and not that of Gutenberg's – which produced a reduced number of bibles (about 160) : a heavy, fixed object definitively linked to the cathedral which harbors it. The modern printer is invented in Venice, at Aldo Manuzio's, with a technique that attaches type settings to rods from Korea. In Venice, where manuscript copying is a mass industry, Manuzio strives to ensure printed books be distinguishable from hand-copied books. Remember that one of our most modern print type settings, the Garamond, was copied from the manuscript handwriting of Ange Vernèce, the calligrapher for King François 1st. The revolution initiated by Manuzio : a very precise and thiner italic font that reduces the weight and size of the book : you can take it in your pocket. But ask any people in France who has invented moden printing, the answer is always Gutenberg, and not Manuzio.

Finally, an ultimate, major transformation right near us : the irruption of the press and the serialized story, the industrialization of the printer.

Third axiom : in each case, what characterizes these transformations, is that they are all global, or encompassing – all-out transformations. In every case, they arise and then englobe at once the private uses of writing, and redefine or establish dominant literary forms that don't pre-exist this appearance. Forms that seem to us to have always been there ; Herodotus' “The Inquiries,” Homer's Odyssey, were born from the appearance of their new recording medium. Rabelais invents the farces of “Pantagruel” right at the printer where he and his friends edit scholarly books (for Rabelais, annotated translations of the Greek doctors, Hippocrates and Galen). In the XIXth century, Stendhal's “The Red and the Black” entitled, “morals”, and Flaubert's Madame Bovary “provincial morals,” not novel. Our responsability is to transmit the history of the literary forms, not to maintain their changeable pregnance in each era of time.

In 1845, in a magnificent text, “The Painter of Modern Life,” Baudelaire marvels that drawings by Constatin Guys created on the battle fields of Crimée, captured from life, very quickly, reaches London in less than 9 days, and appears just as quickly in the newspapers. A historic, far away event – says Baudelaire – is made known to us as it simultaneously takes place. And, by transmitting itself with an image, history is able to do away with a story told in words. We have since changed the cursors of simultaneity and the number of images : but today's mutation is a direct extension of this last transformation in writing, by the press and the serialized story.

Last axiom : each of these transformations has revealed itself as complex and conflicting, but irreversible. Of course, we still raise horses, but we rarely use them, over the last 150 years, to travel from town to town : the important thing is not to know “how we will read tomorrow,” it's to know that the current path, though timid, embryonic, does not have the responsibility of bringing with it existing publishing and distributing structures. Our responsibility does not concern the structures, but the values of civilization, and of transmission, which we place in written content.

There was no need to study history of the book, when the book was the lonely material form for literature. And, today, because of the impossibility to know how goes the present itself, a urge to study not only this history, but the history of each of his transitional phases, which has been only partially written.

4

That the book is an ecosytem is a lesson we have everyday still to learn.

But the idea of a sense of stability for the book is distorted today by the interior re-composition of its industry.

« A great publisher lives on ten to fifteen books », said one of ours french great publishers, a few weeks ago. Fewer than five hundred titles cover two thirds of all sales. The average lifetime of a work in a bookstore is five weeks. And I would say, that for a long time – if it ever was the case – printed works only compensate the financial cost of creation for a few hundred widely-selling authors. This system is worn out.

The French system of author rights was born in the XIX century, in a context where theatre and the serial novel gave a popular dimension to literature. It is fully linked to the transfer of a material object, and property, the book. Two examples : France is the only country where the publishing contract based on the duration of intellectual property, makes an exception for commercial rights, which limits its duration to ten years : in addition, France is the only country where an author's compensation, according to intellectual property laws, is based on the sale price of the book, and not on the variable earnings of the publisher. This system is worn out.

How will we read tomorrow : but do we understand well enough, that today, the books that we read are already printed websites ? Ten years ago, even fifteen years ago, publishing became digitized. A modern printer uses an ensemble of text files, metadata, and CSS frameworks.

How will we read tomorrow ? The printed book was an object with a long distribution period. Its limitation was made in the press and magazines, and created a specialized function for this recommendation, literary criticism. Now that the book, and the recommendation pass through the same medium (our screens), the separation between writer and critic has no meaning. But the word, “writer,” itself – écrivain in french – has a history : it was born in the XVIIth century, which is very recent (it didn't exist for Rabelais nor for Montaigne), and gained its symbolic value (the “great” writer) with the expansion of the printer in the XIXth century. Look at the epistolary writing of the XVIIIth century : the direct continuity of a major literary form (“Dangerous Liaisons” by Laclos, “The New Heloise” by Rousseau) and of a private use of writing (not yet available to the masses, the people do not yet have access to literature). Another unusual case : the letters of Madame de Sévigné, because one can say in a letter to one's daughter what we would not dare say in a book – so these letters were recopied, and then each copy recopied, even before being sent to their destination.

One example strikes me in particular, because it proves – though we could demonstrate it at every époque – the link between literary forms to personal uses of writing. When everyone, on their computer, their tablet, their telephone, publishes on social networks, these personal, new uses of writing also recondition the more erudite or artistic uses of writing. One need not ask : how will we read tomorrow, the writings of today ? One must merely ask themselves : are we attentive enough to forms of writing being born today, which don't call upon the book ?

5

It's not reading that has changed, its our customary use .

Forty years ago, I was proud of my first long-playing vinyl records, it was the arrival of rock. Almost 25 years ago, at the beginning of the 1980's, I bought my old records again, in CD form. For the last 5 or 6 years, I haven't bought a single CD, but I listen to music from my computer. For 1 year, I don't download music on my iTunes, but I listen directly to music on line with a Spotify membership.

That means, that even over a long period – I was curious about music my whole life – I listen differently. I pass from one music to another by analogies, extensions, arborescence. I listen as much as I want, and I sometimes listen to what I don't like, I discover rare things I wouldn't have had access to otherwise. In return, I require the supplier of the subscription to loyally pay back the creators with a part of their earnings, even if it concerns extremely rare musicians. The annual sum of this subscription equals 8 CD's – a lot more than I would buy.

Why this detail ? It shows that at least two years ago – at least in music – we accepted the idea that we would not be owners of what we listen to. How can we predict today, what will result from this idea, when it is just beginning to be applied to texts ?

6

We have in France an old rural expression : « look for a needle in a hay stack ».

If we look for a needle in a haystack, search engines – whatever they may be – will find it in a fraction of a second.

Now, the question is what we are looking for. Or more precisely : how to educate curiosity ?

When a customer at a library, or library user, expresses a request, even a vague one, the intuition of the bookseller or librarian will be to decipher the request in a way adapted to the person who is asking. That is what Amazon does with your searches and in its engines, using your previous purchases.

Nobody needs literature, texts and poems that present a risk. And even less so, when they no longer have the symbolic approval that scholarly reviews bestowed upon them, the interior partitioning of bookstores, even the organization of society itself.

New axiom : the computer concentrates a mass of comfort use, utilitarian use, and we will need to build a call for content through the same framework, which ruffles feathers, that demands a dense reading, an separate interval for thought, without providing compensation in exchange.

Our tool : serendipity – or : how to find what we're not looking for. Digital books contain metadata that allows for the possibility of associating it with a request which has not been formulated. But the international system of classifying books, BISAC (books international standards), used by Apple and others, is only in English : a book of poetry will only be classified as “Continental European.” Nothing more. More categories for religion than for fiction. More categories for domestic animals than for philosophy. How will we read tomorrow : it's about organizing resistance to the tools of today.

7

Internet is destined to disappear.

Digital technology is disappearing, as such, because it inserts itself in the finest, complete sense, in our relationship to the world, including our most private, or intimate customary practices.

In the past, everyone read their favorite newspaper. One generally easily recognized a reader of Le Figaro from that of a reader of l'Humanité. Intellectuals bought the Le Monde book supplement as soon as it was in kiosks Thursday afternoon. Today every individual creates his or her own information filters, by organizing our his or her personal kind of “watch” containing flows (flux) that will associate very general sources to very specialized others.

Not a week goes by without bringing up another scornful phrase for the blogs. “Internet is just rubbish.”

But literature always had its lungs : small periodicals, literary gatherings (and even the “salons” of the XVIIIth century until Mallarmé). It must constantly have what it needs to be its own rough draft. In the 1950's, until the end of the 70's, literary periodicals had that role. It has now entirely passed onto the web. The text as « noise » in the men's story disappears with each historical period : with Internet, we hear firstly the noise of our own period – is this really new ?

Are we “weaker” readers, or more fragile on the screen ? We read several windows simultaneously, and what of it ? The universe of creative blogs is astonishingly complex. When we read literature as an instant creation on the web, is this a specifical nature, compared to previous times ? When we read digital new practices by contemporary writers, with videos, sound, pitures, social interaction, is this a secondary way of concentrating and reading that the last novel on the market ? Sometimes it's a better use to reformulate the question itself, instead of answering it.

Literature, according to Maurice Blanchot, is “language reflected upon” (« le langage comme réflexion »). In this multiple and diffused location, which is the screen, literature is what questions these languages – codes, stories, representation – as such. We don't need to transport the forms and objects that materialized this questioning to literature, before the time of the screen.

8

Do we need the digital book ? Our students say no. The charts of best-selling eBooks are mostly crap.

Is the digital book condemned to only be a short-lived projection of the printed universe on the digital trade system ?

More interesting is this frontier between the fluidity of the web, which is our home, and the place where we invent. And the resistant magic of what symbolizes for me, the book : small stiff packet, susceptible to make its way on its own, and to awaken in a relationship that excludes me, and only concerns it and its far away reader, unknown and anonymous.

Have a look on your own students : the computer opened and connected between you and them, and their phone no more on their knees under the table, but on the computer itself for the private texting. Look at them in the cafeteria : three at the same table, and computers or phones between them, sending material as they speak. What does it show, what does it change for thought and for literature ?

It seems to me that therein lies the magic that still justifies what one calls the “digital book” : how a small bit of my web site, which is my artist's studio, can separate – from the site, and from me – to go awaken itself amid an intimate relationship of another, with their reading ? Same for the film, with the « webdoc », non-linearity, transmedia stuff.

We accept the present : no longer need a postman to bring the mail, no longer need a newspaper or magazine bought at the train station kiosk, no longer need to go by foot to the city library (or yes we do : to work with several others, with our own computers). And yet, we have never been so passionate about texts, images, stories and fables, peculiarities – of voices too, since the radio programs them for us, recorded via the web. So never, in this profusion, has attention been subject to such pressure, and such a consensual push, normalized culture, the dominant “majors.”

Here is the main danger : nothing more subjective and fragile that our writing and composition, but the whole environment of it under control of american firms, with rare earthes and workers sweat form China – and american firms don't bother much about literature : their only word is « market », perhaps with sometimes a second one : « marketplace ».

9

How to explore, invent, advance, but not conclude or predict ? Is Internet a chance or a threat ?

Too much of protection talk (author's rights, copyright, pirating), but a new economy in profusion and sharing : first try, and then see in what space and for which forms, a future state of stability might rebuild – but we are far from that, because the support mediums themselves don't contain this stability. “We are inventing the dinosaurs of the future,” this axiom also remains pertinent.

For the first time in human history, the library is a general library, films, music, texts, one must admit the shift is irreversible : we have, from everywhere, access to everywhere – how can this axiom also not have significance, reversibly, for the creation of content itself, and the definition of the artist or the writer ? The main question for me, as an author, resumes as : how to write, how to tell the today's story ?

For the authors, it's up to us to enter resolutely into a new pact – the fabric of literary activity is in itself a living, constant redefinition – our presence on the web is not a window anchored on the old world, but our wirting experience in itself – it has no economical value ? don't give a damn.

Enough of the catastrophe talks, forever the web as a “threat”, or the book that must “defend itself” from digital technology : industrial mass culture is a recent invention, less than forty years for music, even less for the book that we must reward our art amid a relationship to the world that is not associated to a culture-based industry, would only be, from the point of view of the history of literature and arts, a return to the norm.

Let us rejoice, on the contrary, that web tools, live-stream, networks of writing workshops, collective works, offer us new mediums for consideration : the figure of the “professional” writer was never a dominant figure, nor important in the history of literature – let us accept letting go of it.

Our chance : the general redistribution of tasks, and the social forms of these tasks :

– starting from the text, thinking only of the text – but of the marvelous text born of our personal web use : when we write on our computer, we write with our entire computer, it's image possibilities, sound, documentation, received mail, network messaging – there is no “enhanced book” : the traditional book was a projection in a technical universe of reduced dimensions resulting from it own industrial constraints.

– we cannot know “how we will read tomorrow”, but we can, with confidence, take risks in “how we write today”, and the hell with the rest.

10 and last : the author, not the book

The author's notebook doesn't change : there are always sketches, cut papers, documentation. What changes is that we can integrate them anywhere, as distinct levels, in the object we separate ourselves from, so that it belongs to its reader.

The author's library doesn't change. Faulkner venerated Tolstoy and hated Dostoyevsky because of his disorder, but while having a much worse one, Proust was bored by Tolstoy and venerated Dostoyevsky, but wrote “salons” on the same formal principal as Tolstoy, our task of teaching doesn't change, even if the American authors rise to the highest level in contemporary literature without meditating on the ages of books, as we in Europe are obliged to do, of we want to survive in a world that doesn't require us any more.

Our students' use, to keep themselves informed, read, write, listen, in the same movement : smartphone, laptop.

So yes, with literature, and what it brings of subversion and transgression, like the beat poets emerged vocally on campuses because the musical space had created a place for them that the printed world had refused, work for the laptop.

Look at word processing : what difference is there between your first Word software (for me, 1993, almost twenty years ago) and today's version ? Your mail management software makes up its own database. And the new generation fort text softwares are based on a database, without even using text files any more. Yes, some changes are going on.

What we call a book, on our computer, is no longer a single file, but a vast dossier made up of separated research, different versions of work, and certainly an area of archiving organized links and messengers.

Another characteristic : we only write by way of the comfort of a screen, which you manage to your liking, the function of exporting the text is specific to the way in which the text is going to circulate, and how it will be reproduced and accessible for reading : on a website, via an electronic book, via a PDF, or a separated text file.

And one of our tasks, certainly, is to read again the pas history of literature, and build it again as digital objects. When we think of the work of Baudelaire, or Franz Kafka, we don't think of the sum of their books, but first of this set of archives that entered the public space, in a partial or total way, immediately or progressively, long after the author's disappearance. Perhaps, in a much more humble and dynamic understanding of the word oeuvre, we could find a stable foundation for what is starting off, that books do not allow us. This task is – to my own sens – a considerable one. And notably from the educational viewpoint.

And another continent in the word author itself : Internet is a collective intelligence. How digital writing would be anything else but a collective author ? The new continent of literary form is already the continent of their collective forms, and collective invention of forms.

The unpredictability of our moment in transition is chaotic, dangerous, because it eliminates the established positions, to begin with the status of the « écrivain ». But this present itself is also, inextricably, a story, which we can and must treat as such, under the condition of reaching it by way of the stories of the preceding transitions.

Which of us would not have liked to write at the time of the invention of the printing press, like Rabelais, which of us would not have liked to write at the time of the appearance of serials and newspapers, like Dickens or Dumas, or the appearance of locomotives, like Flaubert and Zola, or electricity and the telephone, like Proust ?

Please take it as extreme and real luck to be seized ourselves by the changes now and blindly happening, and that our writing, captured by new forms of reading and distribution, obliges us to jump : « au fond de l'inconnu, pour trouver du nouveau », has written Baudelaire.

in english | Daewoo, a novel, how and why

François Bon — 2013-12-09T10:30:00Z

Après la publication de Daewoo, en septembre 2004, Guy Walter, directeur de la Vill Gillet à Lyon, avait rassemblé plusieurs auteurs dans une publication bilingue à direction du public américain, incluant une présentation inédite du livre par l'auteur, et un extrait.

Les voici en ligne, à l'attention des visiteurs anglophones de passage. Je lirai d'ailleurs la version française de cet extrait samedi 4 septembre, à Leicester, lors du colloque Social divisions in France and francophone world.

Photographies : déménagement de l'usine Daewoo à Fameck, novembre 2003.

François Bon | Daewoo, an introduction

One of our debts to American literature is a short fragment from William Faulkner (to the effect that “my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it”). It makes us understand that the chief difficulty is to find that little postage stamp, to recognize and accept it, before digging down to write.

I've always loved to read. Maybe it's connected with having been nearsighted as a child and living in a tiny village with the sea for horizon. A novel is a dream, which reveals an otherwise inaccessible world.

I always try to have a project on the side. To work on my adolscence and the 1960s, I spent years putting together a biography of the Rolling Stones. Right now, I'm working on the 1970s, and some American friends are helping me trace the career of Led Zeppelin in your country.

If we chose our dream literature ourselves, it would fall flat. “Kill your darlings,” Faulkner also said. Twenty years after my first book, I find myself the author of a series of books that I did not choose to write. Prison. Mécanique. C'était toute une vie. In each case there was a death to honor—to be faced, because otherwise living becomes impossible, or at any rate it becomes impossible to write around the absence.

This was the case with Daewoo, very much so. First came the layoffs, then the sudden closing of the plant, and then I happened to read a couple of sentences in a newspaper, sentences pregnant with silence : “It made me crawl into a shell. I was on tranquillizers for months.” And that was it. You can't go and ask the worker who uttered those sentences what they meant for her love life, her dreams, her insomnia, the empty hours of her day. They weigh on us, those few words, like dead weight, and our job is to give them their full amplitude, to put into them what we would put into them if it were a question of our own nights, our own children, our own lives. And then there are the other words that go along with these, the words of the homogenized language, the language of money, of the chamber of commerce, of industry : “Here as in other, similar towns, one finds an increase in the rate of suicide and divorce, as well as in the number of cancer cases.”

My friend Charles Tordjman, the director, and I borrowed a car from his theater and went to see for ourselves. Because the factory was so close. Because the invisible world had come knocking at our door. We bluffed our way into the empty factory. The assembly line was wrapped in plastic, like one of Christo's art objects. All the signs, names, and faces were gone. When I returned a few weeks later, a truck with a crane was lifting the big sign with the name of the factory off the roof and putting it down on another truck, which hauled it away. To where ? That day I walked to a supermarket near the plant. bought a large notebook, and sat down for three hours in the cafeteria to write down everything I'd seen and heard.

Not all that much, to tell the truth. It's a small town, a very small town, with its “Nails 2000” store (the year was 2003) and its “Future Driving School.” What to do ? Ask people what this upheaval meant to them ? No : write so as to extort from reality the symbolic violence that has been erased, rubbed out. I wrote in empty stairwells, in uninhabited apartment buildings. In hotel rooms. The full force of the violence had to be restored : I invented voices to get at what I didn't understand in the words—each preceded by an arbitrary phrase. I said I'd recorded them on a Sony MiniDisc.

It's literature's job to convey the symbolic violence that reality erases. That is also part of what William Faulkner taught us.

How's life ? (an excerpt)

When they invited us to be on How's Life ? our friends said, “Yeah, lucky you.”

And others said, “Like they're gonna care about your stupid stuff, they're gonna look down on you, you won't even see it coming …”

Three of us went. All expenses paid, supernice hotel. If I told you we weren't nervous, I'd be lying. Everybody polite : smiles, little pats on the arm. People to stick mikes on you, fix your hair, offer you orange juice and coffee. The rich guys, they were down the other corridor. With their own makeup, their own orange juice. That was the idea of the show : you weren't supposed to meet ahead of time.

Three against three, the moderator in the middle.

You've seen her on the tube a hundred times without really noticing. In person she's not as big as you might think. She talks to you, a couple of sentences you think are meant for you, but while you're thinking of how to answer, she's already onto somebody else, repeating the same thing. So that was the idea : the rich and the poor.

And guess what : we were the poor.

The word had just gotten out about the end of Daewoo. The first company plan, and our first occupation, when we held the guy hostage. So they called the union and said they'd rather have girls who weren't involved. Like, regular girls, you know ?

I'm in the union, but we told them I wasn't.

The rich guys were three men, and they picked young ones on purpose. One had never worked a day in his life because he didn't have to. “I could get used to that,” I said to the guy. On camera.

The TV people had shot a couple of short films. To show how things were where they lived, how things were where we live. Their kids getting driven to school in the car, you know, but like we're on foot because the school is the one you see from the apartment building : stuff like that. When they film you taking your kids to school with their hair all combed and dressed up nice, what's not to be proud of ? What difference does it make if three million people are watching or one : it's you, taking your kids to school.

They weren't about to show you the kind of rich people you read about in the papers, they didn't want that, it had to be rich people like you and me : so you see this guy coming home at night after his workout, and he pours himself a drink in a living room with a TV as big as a movie screen. And after that, in the other film, it was Evelyne's husband, and they'd asked him to fix himself a drink, his cocktail and three bottles in that bar he built himself. Yeah, go ahead and smile. He was nice, too, Evelyne's husband, he offered the film crew a drink.

And the rest, you know, it was all like that.

Fill up the old Renault at the supermarket in one, in the other some German car where you turn on the radio with the push of a button. That was for openers. Them sitting around on a patio, us milling around the factory lot in the morning at the starting whistle because nothing is going on inside the plant, they said because there were no supplies, but we went to work anyway just to make them pay us to the end.

After that I have no idea. It's a world where everything is shiny, the lights are very bright, and it's always straight ahead, no turning back.

Some of the questions you could expect : them with their nicely shaved cheeks, born with silver spoons in their mouths and not about to cough them up, and us, from another world.

What got to me, you know, wasn't the clothes or the glitz or anything, it was our faces, the difference you could see : that you carry so much baggage around with you, that says who you are and what you do.

They might have asked, I don't know, what would you do if you could live for three days the way they do, and vice versa. But no, they made us talk about cooking, and she wanted us to say things about our love life. Our habits, and like what we did in bed, why not ? The guy with the BMW, he was against marriage. That was their philosophy. We dreamed of going places, and the guys on the other side, they'd already been and were bored. And really they were all right, those guys, the girl from the show told them three times she would have preferred guys with claws, small-minded guys. We don't make our enemies.

She had us talk about what pissed us off. That we could do. We knew what got to us. They were more, like, noble : when you're not pissed off at your boss, you can get all high-minded and talk about how you hate dictators and stuff.

Like they were saying : see, those girls, they fit the part.

I felt damp and said to myself, You're sweating, don't let them see. I thought : my friends are watching, my mom's watching, I gotta get out of here.

When the three guys talked, they pointed the cameras at our faces to see what we were thinking, how we were reacting. They showed our legs, and you know what else ? the chain on my wrist and Josiane's rings. You didn't see the guys' ankles or whether they were listening when we talked. Or the smiles, or the whispers : the redhead, she's hot, no ?

What did she want, the girl from the show ? For us to all get up at once, three guys and three girls, and hug in front of everybody and say stuff like, We're sorry, we had the wrong idea about you, the world shouldn't be like that …

One of the guys explained that it was basically our fault, that you have to be ready to move, to go live in Nice or Germany, and in my head I was like smiling, for them life was so simple. Finally Josiane said we didn't give a damn about the money, we didn't care about eating or paying the rent either, what mattered was freedom and self-respect, but the girl didn't let her finish her sentence : she announced that next week there would be something or other about sexuality. We figued out that the three guys were planning to take the girl from the TV out to dinner (well, anyway, it was Josiane who figured it out, she went and took a look down the other corridor : Josiane always has an eye or an ear out), but we weren't invited.

Before going back to the hotel, we went out for a drink, three women, like grown-ups, in Paris : big deal, right ? The next day in the train, we didn't talk much.

You feel things because of who you are. You brood. The hard thing is time passing. All the simple things that used to be your life, the little fun things you bought yourself, something to wear, a movie.

With this in your head, that there's nothing certain about starting over.

You don't say that to anybody else.

The day after the show, I saw Sylvia and asked her what she thought. She hadn't watched, is what she told me.

Fine, going on TV to talk about Daewoo, to talk about who we are—what were we supposed to do, say no ?

Berkeley | a digital biography (and now ?)

François Bon — 2013-10-23T13:29:18Z

– la version française du texte already beyond the e-book age
– english translation by Hannah Stell (NY) - eventual mistakes due to my own reworkings, sorry
– many thanks to Laurence Marie, Gilles Delcourt & Stéphane Ré, Tim Hampton & others

François Bon, a digitial biography (and now ?)

1982

I'm 29 years old, I publish my first book. I run across Beckett or Robbe-Grillet in the stairwell of the Editions de Minuit. With my first royalties I buy myself a leather-bound edition of Flaubert in 16 books and my first refrigerator. Bookstores sell the book, newspapers write articles : everything will surely go on like this forever.

1983

However, I'm already on my 4th typewriter : a two-toned ribbon and manual return one, to a ribbon one, then electric keys, to an IBM type ball, then to a “daisy wheel” and the appearance of a new capability : I can go back over the last 15 characters and correct them before the letters strike. I still have carbon paper to make “a copy”, and scissors and tape to format the text.

1988

I receive my first computer, an Atari 1040. Among my friends, Daeninckx, Bergounioux and Novarina have the little Mac Classic that looks like a cube, Pierre Michon has an Amstrad. I have a pin dot matrix printer with a roll of perforated paper. There's no hard disc, first you have to load the disc system, then the word processing disc, and then the disc works. Having two copies on the disc itself.

1990

We agree on the new manuscript with Jerome Lindon, from Editions de Minuit. I ask him if he wants the disc, he answers me : “I hate MacIntosh literature.” Then, 2 days later, he calls me back : “Send me the disc anyway.” Since my first book, I haven't done anything else : every two years a new publication, my first requests to appear as a writer (on the radio, for example), grants (the villa Medici, or at Berlin DAAD) : someone who publishes a book doesn't benefit from any privileged social status, but author's royalties do have the benefit of a tax relief, and we raise our children close to the sea. When a book appears in the month of September, it's printed in July, in August it's sent to the critics at their vacation addresses. The big sellers get up to 30 or 40,000 copies (the Medici prize for the beautiful Cherokee by Jean Echenoz, a Goncourt gets up to 100,000 (Jean Rouaud) : we live on little, but we live it all. In Sweden, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, I'm translated : we exchange the rights, which are negotiated for between 300 and 500 dollars : so in all these countries now I have friends. Now, the same book everywhere, everywhere. No longer ours.

1992

I live in Montpellier, south of France. When, for a film or a play project, I work with a Parisian friend, I connect my computer to the phone jack via a 5600 baud modem, and the file passes from my computer to his. Twenty years earlier exactly, in engineering school, I learned the Fortran language of perforated cards. A little earlier, in 1970, we received our first Hewlett-Packard calculators, but on exams only the “slide-rule” was permitted and required.

1994

It's the age of the CD-ROM : I acquire the Littré (our old and best French language dictionary), an atlas, and an encyclopedia, then the complete works of Balzac. The screen of my PowerBook 145 is still in black and white, but it's portable, and can last at least an hour on the battery. The hard disc is 45 Mb, it's so huge that I called it “Ocean” (now I no longer give names to my hard discs, and my MacAir doesn't even have a hard disc). Above all, it's as big as my two hands, I use it like a notebook.

1996

I arrive in Tours, where I still live. In Le Monde I read an article explaining that on the Internet you can download Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal. I have a 13,200 baud fax modem. I make a CompuServe account, then am sent to the university in Aix-en-Provence to download the Netscape 1.0 browser, which takes a good hour. So I enter the address given by Le Monde, and maybe a minute later I open the file in my Word word processor. As thanks, I send a letter by post to the University of Geneva, department of mineralogy, which hosts this first database of texts, and I offer them, also by post, facsimiles of first editions of Rabelais that I've re-transcribed on the computer over the previous two years. And so I discover the collaborative principal of the World Wide Web. I hand copied the first edition of Une saison en Enfer, then Illuminations by Rimbaud, d'Alcools by Apollinaire, and while in 1998, after purchasing a scanner, I finished my Lautréamont, there are three of us, one in Montreal, on in Brazil, and I in France, who offer the html version at the same time. The french national library, BNF, doesn't have a website yet, but I understand that an era is closing. One of the first businesses to offer a large digital library, Acamedia, went bankrupt (who would have been interested ?), I now have on my computer a good thousand digital copies of titles.

1998

I put the texts I ask my writer friends for online, while explaining the importance of an Internet presence to them. I take on a new role : the one who takes care of their Internet presence in their place. This site is always running, it's called remue.net, and I'll separate my personal site from it a bit later : I'll need several years to understand that “acting in the place of another” isn't the solution. The literary Internet is still meager, but there's the appearance of a couple of online journals. I love webcams : I follow five or six, around the world, they don't show much (a gas station in Iceland, a port in Scotland), but the relation with what's not accessible to us in the world ceases to presume the preceding catastrophe.

2000

I'm finishing a 10 years work about the reception of rock in Europe, and the constitution of culture in the media age, already a transition story : a 1000 pages book, called : « Rolling Stones a biography ». I have purchased over the years a bunch of bootlegged CDs, kilos of books and old magazines in London Helter Skelter or the fabulous World Trade Center bookstore in New York, every resource is a conquest, which necessitates a trip, contacts or exchange, and finally a transaction. In 2006 I publish the following, the ‘70s version of this essay, called « Led Zeppelin, a portrait » : the smallest detail was discussed on forums, and if we still exchange films or pirated books, the whole archives come through the Internet – particularly a japanese guy who spent years to photography each location, homes, studios, venues, where the Zeppelin have been, and put them on line, or another one who provides every flyer, concert tickets or posters. Writing could avoid producing a representation of the world inside the novel itself : the world is beginning to provide himself, anytime, everywhere, his own representation. How to avoid it interferes deeply on how to build a story ? Something happened. By the way, the millennial bug didn't happen.

2002

Lots of dreams, for years now, on how can fiber optics be taken advantage of for fast Internet ? Not arrived yet to my place. Electrical outlets ? More realistic. But here it's proposed to us to use the old copper telephone wires, what an idea…ADSL (Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line) the information that you send over it goes less quickly than what you receive. But in one fell swoop, no more need to buy a printed newspaper, we flip through it with the same speed on our screens. And on the Bibliotheque nationale's website, I can flip through author's first drafts in picture mode. And the premature end of CD Roms : who could've guessed ?

2005

My site is made up of close to 600 individual html pages (about 7 000 entries today : my full life and wok ?). The appearance of blogspot, as the first easily configurable CMS for non-computer scientists. From then on, my site is a “database”. For the moment, I continue to give my manuscripts to my editor : on the site, the construction of the book, the author's journal, writing workshops. And, when the book is released, the articles and interviews concerning the book. The Internet as cultural media : strangely, it's still the dominant model for American authors. A blog uses whichever platform, mostly on Blogspot platform, acquired these days by Google, to provide direct access in place of buying the book. In 2006, I want to give myself a constraint that permits me fantasy or science-fiction writing : for a year, every day I publish a brief story directly issued from my daily experiences, or a dream, or in the form of micro-fiction. I connect it to photographs, I insert hypertext (hallways whose doors open to other texts), links, and sound. The site is called Tumulte, at the end of one year I publish what I consider to be a global fiction, fiction being also what protects in the daily and intimate exhibition on your website. This fragmentation according to the daily time spent writing is not new in literature, from Montaigne to Stendhal, or Kafka's Journal and lots of others, or the “micro-fiction” by Robert Walser published daily in the Berlin newspapers. But, when I publish my book with Fayard, the articles all say “Bon publishes his blog”. I understand at that moment that I've taken a new step : the publication on the site, with its underground galleries, indexes, is a way of reading that's superior to that of the printed book. Only, we are there in it (we are always there in it) : what took me from author to writer is the symbolic understanding of this role—who would grant that to writing on the web ?

2008

For almost ten years, regular but fruitless conversations with my editors and my friends who work in publishing houses, bookstores or libraries about how to use the web. And so I'm overseeing a collection of contemporary literature at Seuil : I often receive short texts, texts from young authors, for whom the site permanently steps in for the manuscript, transforming them into a book would be like trying to force a foot into a too-small shoe. And so I set off on my own : I create a digital publishing house, publie.net. In the beginning, only in order to make available online, in PDF format, the texts that my writer friends and I kept on our hard discs. In New York, I buy my first “liseuse” (we keep it in the feminine form, this French word for e-reader), a Sony then a Kindle : if reading habits are being established here, with specific bookstores, why not create a workspace for contemporary literature ? Besides, our websites suffocate under their own limits : how can you read a 300-page text in the division of a site, how can you bring it with you to the beach or on the train ? We will discover the ePub format like a new frontier : a closing, a little box shuts, with bits of text in it, the css files (cascading style sheets) that give them a face, the possibility of including images and sounds (we launch a digital experimental review, D'ici La), and above all, the metadata files, which will allow for a hazy request coming from a general platform (Amazon or iTunes) or directly on a browser, to bring forth that very text as a suggestion. The experience will last 5 years and will be very beautiful, we had underestimated : 1, the distrust and the passivity of the traditional book trade, literary press included, 2, the passivity of the university, so completely concerned with digital technology, science, social sciences, but stopping at Humanities.

2010

For at least 3 months, I keep going over these themes. A limited number of things seemed to me to be progressively detaching :

– this “closing” of distinct elements, text, graphic mask, metadata, it also makes up the printed book in that it goes from the editor to the printer, and it's also present in the smallest word processing file. A student who starts his studies in mathematics or geography will right away learn to master these digital tools that will be the vocabulary of his thinking. In France, a great philosopher, Gilbert Simondon, who influenced from Deleuze to Stiegler, theorized this necessity for the thought to not be separated from the technical object. What do we do, in the Humanities departments, or in training on the craft of the Book, to implant this “digital culture” ?

– for an immense majority of authors who were my friends in the time of paper publishing, even today the Internet is a media, a promotion tooli : you type your name into Google, and you see your Wikipedia page appear, newspaper articles about you, books to be sold (according to the way of Amazon, or in France our local Fnac, or whichever independent store has handed over its ransom to Google), and press articles. This is called “digital identity”. Very early on, to create my own understanding of digital identity I used the metaphor of the artist's workspace (« l'atelier du peintre ») you enter when you want, you can watch him work, he goes “to the subject”, as Cezanne said, some canvases are turned to face the wall, in the workspace there are even the books he's reading, the curosities or objects or pictures he has bought) or the workspace of an instrument maker friend, dead now : in the little window through which his workspace looks out over the street, he places an old instrument to be repaired, the mold of an instrument being made, and we see he himself from the street making his bow or preparing his varnish. This assumes buying his own domain name, to assure the ownership of his database (Google will treat the data of a Wordpress website that you host under the form myname[dot]com, or that Wordpress hosts under the form myname[dot]wordpress[dot]com differently). Recently, the site of a friend who is a celebrated and well-respected author, didn't appear until very far down in the Google searches : his own name never came up on the pages of his site, because it was his…Questions obviously become even more decisive when you express yourself in a language like the french language, slowly falling to the status of the regional language : the welcome message in the United planes, yesterday morning, was given in six languages, but no french anymore – and given that the totality of the actors on the web, research, bookstore, machines, software, and even domain name authority, are yours, you Americans.

– and that we have an amazing opportunity : compared to the political, aesthetic, and social changes, the changes in writing can be counted on one hand. The invention of writing, which is far from applying to all languages. The extraordinary story of the clay tablet, when the simplification of the tool (the bevel-cut tip of a reed), while quickening the speed of writing, it sparked the change from iconic writing to syllabic writing, the techniques for authenticating a text (a layer of raw clay covering the layer of baked clay with the same text), the invention of the page (the first clay tablets were molded by hand, writing wraps around it), reproducibility (crude tablets were kept in a water pail to be used again), the primacy of reproducing images (the seal, the cards used for divination made from the livers of animals). Then the spread of the Egyptian scroll through the Mediterranean (the biography of Ramses II, 35 meters long, accompanied him in his tomb : no other reader), the cementing of oral corpuses (Homer), and the word “book” which referred to the parts of a roman long text, cut in separated rolls, the first metadata (author, title, book) on the plug that seals their case. As for the tablet, the use in private correspondence interfered with official, ritual, or literary usage : a Roman read his scroll horizontally, but his private correspondence is written vertically, on the longitudinal falls of scrolls for books. But legal texts are also written on vertical scrolls, to prevent cut off or added pages. Then the invention of Codex, and the words that came along with it : the “copies”, separated notebooks of a manuscript copied identically, so that several copyists can work simultaneously, but always from the single copy closest to the original. Finally, not Guttenberg's printing press, but how Aldo Manuccio, in Venice, taking from the Koreans painting on silk robes, has the idea of a rod on which movable characters are attached : the author could be burned, but from 1,000 printed copies, not larger than your pocket, the idea will still not be stopped. Finally the very complex story of how newspapers and serialization interfered with forms of literature. Five major changes : digital writing is the sixth. Each of this major moves has been irreversible, and global.

– for each of these changes, we get rid of precise chronometers : Balzac (the definitive pseudonym of Honoré Balssa), will have 3 successive names that correspond to 3 successive stages of forms for commercializing his writings, from « fascicule » for reading rooms, then to serial publishing, and monthly reviews, with each time a different way of telling a story. Baudelaire wrote a dazzling text about the drawer Constantin Guy, « Le peintre de la vie moderne », whose sketches done right on the field of battle in Crimea arrived at the daily newspapers in London in 9 or 11 days : there was real time access to historic turns (and add these 11 days to the speed of dissemination on 11.20.63 or on 09.11.01), but don't forget Baudelaire's terrible question : in this case, the image itself sufficed and no longer needed text. So what appeared is a decisive axiom : each of these 5 changes is accompanied by a very rich transitional period that we can grasp in itself. The turnaround, for universities of the Humanities, who never needed to consider the book as a historicized object, it is up to them to learn to work on the history of these transitions, up to them to have a chance to think about the current transition, which is clearly happening on a scale as strong and radical as those preceding it.

– finally, last axiom : the unpredictable—even at Berkeley, we're talked to about the “future of books”, but the book is only one particular form of the written, and the written one particular form of literature (“language as reflection” Maurice Blanchot stated). The question that is presented to us, in a time of transition, is that it is up to us to act in a responsible manner in the immediate present, to teach, to pass on, to carry with us, in the crossing of the ford, the living words we have inherited (the beautiful sentence by Rabelais : “I build only living stones—these are men”—these living stones are entrusted to us), even though all the present transformations appear suddenly and erratically, and only reveal themselves to us retrospectively. Word processing doesn't change. Is it a regression for dense reading ? A surgeon who operates from a distance, from his Mac, on a brain tumor, has on his screen, like the pilot of a United Boeing, a dozen different opened windows. When we read a printed book, with our notebook of comments set on the table and the day's newspaper to the side, or even at a café and the friendly voices just nearby, is reading not already, and always has been, a social act ? Multitasking has taken part in these unpredictable micro-revolutions. In 2010 the iPad appeared : we take the web with us. I remember having discovered in April 2010, in Boston, the first ads for the iPad : people in socks on their couch. How far have we come ? The little “READER” icon on iOS, or the little pair of green glasses on the Kindle Fire, indicate that the browser rewrites the web page, and gives it to us with ergonomics (up to us to define the parameters) exactly identical to that of the digital book (eBook). With the button “Send to Kindle” we read a streaming text with the same ergonomics as began with the epub.

2013

Is there stabilization on the horizon ? Surely not, or not yet. We can even confirm that the season of great movement hasn't started. Here, in the US, the distribution of e-books is put forth as a visual extension of the printed book, it's even physically visible in Barnes & Noble bookstores, with a space set aside for the Nook by the entrance. But appropriating the web as a vector for literature has remained in the realm of magazines and reviews, which are a fantastic workshop on the web, but they don't take advantage of the economic model to the same level as the traditional method, and even less than the great giants you Americans have so kindly offered to the world, Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft and a bunch of few others, Adobe, Yahoo, CloudFlare as the last one... The rarity of brick and mortar libraries, or in any case the degree to which they are becoming rare, has probably delayed this change, by making the web a vector for acquiring objects, in the way that they don't care that I read on my Kindle. The stratification by genre, novel, romance, fantasy, poetry, without talking about the writer's aid line, is found even more reinforced, even while American literature was one of the first to develop forms like the short story or non-fiction that give literature of creation an appropriation of the world outside of all hierarchies, up to the writer to create the most direct rapport between language and still unwritten reality. This worked for Thoreau or Dos Passos as for Ginsberg's Fall of America, or contemporaries like Nicholson Baker or David Foster Wallace and others. In Europe, we had to learn a little earlier that the web would be our first terrain of writing as dissemination, and the location even (spatiality or temporality as well as medium) of what we demand to writing. This is what I understand in the expression that I've chosen to make my title : « already beyond the e-book age ».

writing changes in the end

But we know that, in all times, the dense rapport with the texts has surged from the same place, and with the same writing medium, that there where private use is established—from reading aloud for a few listeners to Rabelais' time, and that is the dramaturge's key in his recitals, from the epistolary novel whose golden hour in XVIIe century (Mme de Sévigné) was that of a unified and quick postal service, partially freed from censorship, on a countrywide level. Our students' use, to keep themselves informed, read, write, listen, in the same movement : smartphone, laptop. So yes, with literature, and what it brings of subversion and transgression, like the beat poets emerged vocally on campuses because the musical space had created a place for them that the printed world had refused, work for the laptop. Fetishizing a unified technical object ? It keeps progressively disappearing : five years ago today, his colleagues made fun of a young Indian MIT student, Pranav Mistry, who walked around with a giant camera set on his head, strapped on a worker hard hat, and a “video projector” data show on his chest, his hand as a screen, before everything could be miniaturized, and here we have today Google Glasses—we must permanently negotiate an object with a millennial history, long time evolving, writing, in the context of a story of radically moving mediums, and first of all mercantile.

Look at word processing : what difference is there between your first Word software (for me, 1993, almost twenty years ago) and today's version ? But do you still use Word ? Your mail management software makes up its own database. Most likely, to find a file sent by a student, you archive the e-mail with its attachment, this will be faster and easier to find. There's little, for every text we write, we open a new file, specific to this text, and archive some files from hundreds. A book, on the contrary, on our computer, is no longer a single file, but a vast dossier made up of separated research, different versions of work, and certainly an area of archiving organized links (tools like Zotero) and messengers. Software appears (I'm thinking of UlyssesIII) that doesn't create a separate file for a text, but allows you to write as you intend into a unique database, that you can archive at the same time on your computer and outside of your computer, and present characteristics like being able to tie in at any moment of the book, or the article, or the notebook, these links, images, e-mails, meetings. Another characteristic : we only write by way of the comfort of a screen (on the iPad, this software is called Daedalus), which you manage to your liking, the function of exporting the text is specific to the way in which the text is going to circulate, and how it will be reproduced and accessible for reading : on a website, via an electronic book, via a PDF, or a separated text file. How can such a revolution, still so new (who, in the room, has swayed between a Pages, or Word, or Open type of word processing to a “markdown” software—and equally ask a mathematician friend who among them doesn't use LaTeX ? Not a critique, but a question : the code that stays invisible to us, because stable, in our 300 year long use of typography, from manuscript writing since well before that, at what moment must it become, in the name of our liberty in language, an element of culture to teach or transmit ?

So what am I then the author of, if not a database, which henceforth overrides the books that I commercialize through contracts with editors, but are all accessible on my personnel website ? So the publishing contract represents a specific mode of access, to the side of the main arborescence. My archives don't differ (I mean : for those who make them) essentially from the collections of notebooks, rough copies, correspondence left by pre-internet authors in an archival institute or a library. The problems of perenniality are specific (the Bibliotheque nationale has given my site an ISSN code, exactly like a book, and in theory, regular collection). But if I stop paying my hosting service provider, and everything flies away. The idea of publication, the rapport between daily writing and the finished work are the same : but, we pushing web publication, the temporality of publication, the notion of a community of readers, become official tools for the time being in the very composition of the story, and how it acts. What acts is not the partially finalized figure of a particular point in my work, what was a book coming after another book, but, permanently, the web site itself, where I'm the artisan of not only the text but the ergonomics, the navigation, the coding—points that I accept as integral functions in my work. When we think of the work of Baudelaire, or Franz Kafka, we don't think of the sum of their books, but first of this set of archives that entered the public space, in a partial or total way, immediately or progressively, long after the author's disappearance. Perhaps, in a much more humble and dynamic understanding of the word oeuvre, we could find a stable foundation for what is starting off, that books do not allow us.

That's where I am. In 25 years of the computer, and 30 years in the world of professional publishing, passed from a stable world to an unstable one. The question of technology is completely secondary to that of the culture. The unpredictability of our moment in transition is chaotic, dangerous, because it eliminates the established positions, to begin with the status of the « écrivain » (in french, more than simply « writer »), a word invented in the 17th century, and to which only the 19th century has conferred its symbolic dimension. But this present itself is also, inextricably, a story, which we can and must treat as such, under the condition of reaching it by way of the stories of the preceding transitions. Which of us would not have liked to write at the time of the invention of the printing press, like Rabelais, which of us would not have liked to write at the time of the appearance of serials and newspapers, like Dickens or Dumas, or the appearance of locomotives, like Flaubert and Zola, or electricity and the telephone, like Proust ? Please take it as extreme and real luck to be seized ourselves by the changes now and blindly happening, and that our writing, captured by new forms of reading and distribution, obliges us to jump : « au fond de l'inconnu, pour trouver du nouveau », has written Baudelaire.

l'avenir du livre c'est qu'on pourra s'en passer

François Bon — 2013-10-18T20:49:09Z

C'est une phrase que j'ai écrite comme ça, parce que je n'aime pas écrire synthétique et qu'il le fallait.

Ce n'est pas une phrase qui figure dans mon intervention, already beyond the e-book age actuellement en cours de traduction, pour mon intervention de mercredi à Berkeley.

C'est une phrase de fatigue et d'interrogation profonde. Je suis venu au jour à moi-même par le livre, dès l'enfance. Mais c'est un grand livre dont je sais qu'il contient toutes les formes antérieures et toutes les formes hors du livre. Je sais qu'il est aussi le grand livre de l'oralité, et des visages de mes grands-pères. Je sais qu'il est aussi un livre fait d'appareils-photos, de magnétophones, de caméras Super 8, et qu'il est aussi un livre fait de voitures retirées des fossés au bout des câbles de notre dépanneuse, des réparations des pelleteuses sur les digues qui nous protégeaient de la mer. Un livre fait de quand on marche à Butrint, en Albanie, et qu'on foule les vers de Racine qui y place Andromaque mais n'y est pas venu.

Ce grand livre des livres, il continue de vivre par le web. Il est embryonnaire, maladroit. Soumis aux marchands de pub, aux trafiquants de puissance, à l'hégémonie de nouveaux riches assoiffés. Il est malgré tout, même là, le clavier sous mes doigts, trace du rêve de ses inventeurs.

L'an dernier, chaque jeudi j'explorais un des labos du plateau de Saclay, Palaiseau, Orsay. Là où s'invente le plus beau de la science, biologie ou astrophyique, les salles prévues pour les bibliothèques de labo étaient transformées en entrepôt pour les vieux cartons d'imprimante. Le livre a disparu (sauf dans un des labos). Parfois, sur la table de l'astrophysicien ou du volcanologue, le livre qui a décidé de son parcours et de sa vocation, mais qu'il n'utilise plus.

Je suis né par les livres, ou le livre. Dans quelques minutes, ce billet une fois mis en ligne, je prendrai pour une heure la récente réédition des Dostoïevski traduits par André Markowicz, et prendrai L'Idiot où je l'ai laissé hier soir, et c'est mon lieu de nécessité, d'agrandissement, de creusement, de forge mémorielle. Mais je peste contre Actes Sud qui m'impose l'objet malcommode et lourd, que je ne pourrai même pas emporter avec moi dimanche en voyage, alors que j'emporte bien sûr l'iPad qui me servira à lire d'autres livres, à faire mes confs, et me connecter à l'hôtel pour l'utile et l'amitié.

Nous sommes d'une transition. Je l'ai explorée il y a 2 ans dans Après le livre, explorant alors avec confiance la façon dont le livre numérique pouvait accueillir et prolonger ce qui avait fait notre histoire. Aujourd'hui, il me semble que nous vivons une nouvelle étape du web : l'expérience même du monde, le monde avec les mains, y compris lisant, y compris écrivant. Ma dernière expérience dense d'écriture (Proust est une fiction) est devenue un livre, celle que je mène en ce moment côté science-fiction ne saurait l'être.

Il y a encore quelques mois, il m'arrivait de dire (pour se justifier, en quelque sorte, notamment auprès d'universitaires Lettres qui, sauf quelques exceptions, se recroquevillent dans une passivité irresponsable) que j'installais mon travail sur le web parce que pas le choix, parce que là que s'installaient les pratiques de réflexion et d'imaginaire des étudiants, et là qu'il fallait bien les emmener vers Lautréamont (ou Blanchot et Michaux, mais là c'est barré par le coffre-fort Gallimard, pas touche, « l'exception pédagogique » ça me paraît un problème bien plus grave que la question des supports). Exercer notre tâche de littérature sur le terrain empirique des usages. Je crois que sur ce primat du numérique dans les usages de représentation du monde, et de ce lieu où s'est toujours inventée la littérature, celui des usages privés de l'écriture (l'épistolaire, le journal, l'enquête ou le rapport), la bascule termine de s'accomplir. C'est une autre tâche qui s'ouvre : le web par choix.

J'ai écrit cette phrase en bout de réponse à ces trois questions synthétiques, en me disant que ce n'était pas si grave, dans le cadre d'une publication loin de la France, et pour un public d'universitaires, les french departments des facs US, qui ne sont fondamentalement pas plus avancés sur le web que chez nous, contrairement à ce qui se passe dans les domaines scientifiques ou les « grandes » écoles.

Mais finalement, là, au moment de partir, je l'assume complètement cette phrase. À nous de l'assumer dans son mouvement, son contexte, son histoire. À nous de l'assumer dans la responsabilité qu'elle nous confère, pour la création comme pour la mémoire, pour l'enseignement comme pour le cri. D'en faire une logique ouverte, qui nous permette d'assumer notre activité web comme essentielle, et non médiation ou périphérie.

Nous ne porterons pas par avance le deuil du livre, et de plus en plus de mal à supporter de voir ces questions uniquement abordées sous l'angle marchand ou industriel, ou celui de la perte des valeurs, comme si le web était pour quoi que ce soit dans l'effondrement d'un système laminé par sa propre propension au livre normé (jusque dans les personnages ou le nombre de pages, voire la photo de l'auteur), à l'histoire qui fasse coup, au loisir qui flatte, et tout le système de distribution gangrené par le syndrome de la consommation de masse, des goûts qu'on suppose, et de la rotation accélérée d'une marchandise indéfiniment reproductible. Voir comment même la loi Lang, permettant aux hypermarchés, sur 500 références les plus rentables, des remises énormes dans leurs achats tout en gardant un prix de vente fixe, a induit une logique d'assèchement qui grève l'équilibre dont aurait eu besoin la librairie indépendante à échelle dix de ce dont a pu la léser la vente en ligne.

C'est une phrase logiquement précise, elle ne dit pas qu'on devra s'en passer, ni qu'on s'en passera – elle fait simplement état que le chemin qui s'amorce aujourd'hui, dans la bascule de culture, dans l'établissement des ressources numériques, leurs architectures d'accès et leur ergonomie de consultation, dessinent des chemins où rien de l'essentiel n'est perdu, et où il peut être du devoir de certains (on ne force personne, et grand respect pour les artisans de l'ancien), au nom même de cette possibilité ou de cet impératif, à travailler aujourd'hui sur ces formes embryonnaires, y placer leur champ de travail et d'invention, ou d'enseignement.

C'est une phrase que je prononce comme constat (déjà acté pour les dictionnaires, le droit ou la médecine, une grande part de la technique) et aussi comme risque et danger : la part d'invention, de mémoire et l'imaginaire, de construction de représentation là où le monde en mouvement est perpétuel inconnu, comment l'assumerons-nous hors du livre ? Et, là aussi, dans la mesure où, même sans cesse alertés depuis une dizaine d'années maintenant, le corps massif de l'édition traditionnelle choisit plutôt une politique de la carapace, de l'enfoncement hostile (toujours ce vocabulaire du face au numérique, du web fourre-tout, de la menace numérique – ou encore la semaine dernière, dans la lettre du de la SGDL, la jungle d'Internet : j'ai peur d'un fossé irrattrapable). En faisant obstacle, depuis 5 ans, à un équilibre livre papier et livre numérique, ils ont contribué à nous faire sauter plus vite dans un écosystème basé sur le web, y compris dans ses formes marchandes, ses constructions d'ergonomie de lecture dense, et de constitution de méta-ressources et de leurs systèmes d'accès, qui se passe de la stabilisation par la forme livre.

J'assume parfaitement, pour l'invention, pour la quête, pour la langue, qu'a une question téléologiquement posée non sur ce que porte la littérature, mais sur l'objet qui en a symbolisé le commerce, nous ayons dès aujourd'hui à appréhender l'idée d'une société au-delà du livre, imprimé comme numérique.

Je mets donc en ligne tel quel, en version bilingue. Un grand merci à Gilles Delcourt, Hannah Loué, et au blog French Culture du Bureau du Livre français à New York pour les questions, la traduction et la mise en ligne.

Photo ci-dessus : terrasse de la bibliothèque d'Évreux (construite par Chemetov).

l'avenir du livre c'est qu'on pourra s'en passer

How have the digital technologies impacted the reader's practices ?
— I think that what we should bear in mind is that all the major changes which have overthrown our reading practices have been unpredictable : the arrival of ADSL in the era of CD-Rom, or the era of multi-tasking at a time when we had to change software to read, write, listen and communicate. The history of reading is also the history of the human body : reading on the iPad has very little to do with reading on a vertical screen ; so does reading on a 7” tablet with reading on a 9” tablet. The history of reading used to be the one of lighting, candles, lamps and light bulbs, when nowadays all of us can read in the dark. To answer such a question, we must remember that devices constantly evolve ; no stabilization is yet to be expected. Reading in the palm of our hands will be the next step.

Ce qu'il me semble devoir retenir, c'est que chacun des grands changements qui ont bousculé nos usages de lecture ont été imprévisibles : la venue de l'ADSL au temps des CD-Rom, le temps du multi-tâche alors que nous changions de logiciel pour lire, écrire, écouter, communiquer. Et l'histoire de la lecture est aussi une histoire du corps : lire sur l'iPad n'a rien à voir avec lire sur l'écran vertical, lire sur une tablette 7'' n'a rien à voir avec lire sur une tablette 9''. L'histoire de la lecture était une histoire d'éclairage, bougies, lampe, ampoule, et voilà que nous pouvons lire dans le noir. Toujours se souvenir, pour juger d'une question pareille, que l'objet se transforme à mesure qu'on en parle, pas de stabilisation à l'horizon encore. Bientôt lire dans la paume de sa main.

How does this ongoing mutation redefine the writing practices, both in private and social spheres ?
— The word processor has been created by mimicking old typewriters and reprography machines (photocopiers, printers). It is the software that has the least evolved in 25 years. Something is happening right now with the “markdown” software, which adapts to the practices of literary creation, while integrating project management functions and highlights the heterogeneity of documentation sources (links, pictures, mails, documents). Nothing new there. What is revolutionary is that one can now save this heterogeneity as it is within the digital device, when it had to be sacrificed with the printed book. For instance, for me Twitter is not a “social” device nor a communications tool, but a kind of instant journal where annotations, observations, pictures and discussions mingle, and interfere with the most intimate moments of the writing process.

Le traitement de texte s'est imaginé et créé en décalque des anciennes machines à dactylographier, et des appareils de reproduction (photocopieuses, imprimantes). Il est le logiciel qui a le moins évolué en 25 ans. Quelque chose s'amorce en ce moment avec l'adaptation aux pratiques de création littéraire des logiciels « markdown », incluant la gestion de projet, et surtout le caractère hétérogène de la documentation (liens, photos, courriers, documentation). Ce qui n'a rien de nouveau en soi. Ce qui est nouveau, c'est qu'on puisse sauvegarder cette hétérogénéité en tant que telle dans l'objet numérique abouti, alors qu'il fallait la sacrifier pour le livre imprimé. Par exemple, pour moi, Twitter n'est pas un outil « social » ou de communication, mais une sorte de journal instantané, annotations, observations, photos, discussions, qui interfère en permanence même avec les moments les plus intimes de l'écriture.

According to you, what are the prospects for the new medium of books ?
— It seams that as the years go by, I am increasingly emancipating from the book in itself. I am writing a database (my website) – which gathers reactions to the news, to reflexions and debates, but also important resources with a slow sedimentation process – made of galleries, sections and archives that can be perpetually transformed. My reading device is no longer the book ; it is the internet browser itself : the iPad, the iPhone or the Kindle Fire can endow a web page or site with ergonomics without having to go through the digital book step. We should make these functions ours to enable the literature to be more powerful and more intense in depicting – or not – the world which surrounds us. In a nutshell, I believe that the future of the book is that we're gonna live without it.

Il me semble que chaque année désormais je me détache un peu plus de la question du livre. J'écris une base de données (mon site web), qui inclut des réactions à l'actualité, aux débats et réflexions, mais aussi des ressources d'ampleur, à sédimentation très lente, avec des galeries, couloirs, archives, et la possibilité d'une transformation permanente. Mon outil de lecture, ce n'est plus le livre, c'est le navigateur : l'iPad, l'iPhone ou le Kindle Fire peuvent redonner une ergonomie à une page ou un ensemble web sans passer par la case livre numérique. Approprions-nous ces fonctions pour que la littérature agisse plus fort, plus intensément, avec ou contre les représentations du monde. Pour moi, l'avenir du livre c'est qu'on pourra s'en passer.

in english | François Bon, The new town (complete story)

François Bon — 2013-09-22T06:12:26Z

The New Town, in french Morsure (une grève), by François Bon, has been published in 2000 by © Allen & Goodwin - Sydney, translated by Patricia Clancy (many, many thanks). Complete short story (personal advice : use your "Send to Kindle" button, will be ok for digital use on your device). Other english resources on this web site.

– BITER
– THE YOUNG WOMAN WHO WATCHES ON THE BALCONY
– STEVE
– BITER
– THE FRIGHTENED WOMAN WHO LIVES ALONE
– THE YOUNG WOMAN WHO WATCHES ON THE BALCONY
– ELVIS
– STEVE
– THE FRIGHTENED WOMAN WHO LIVES ALONE
– THE YOUNG WOMAN WHO WATCHES ON THE BALCONY
– BITER
– THE CARETAKER'S WIFE
– ELVIS
– THE YOUNG WOMAN WHO WATCHES ON THE BALCONY
– THE FRIGHTENED WOMAN WHO LIVES ALONE
– BITER
– STEVE
– THE FRIGHTENED WOMAN WHO LIVES ALONE
– THE YOUNG WOMAN WHO WATCHES ON THE BALCONY
– BITER

BITER

I've never been cold.

That comes from living on the streets, from living on the streets for such a long time. I was maybe sixteen, and I already had the nickname Biter, like now.

In the old days, there were old streets way up there above the new town, the part of the town they rebuilt. They knocked down the old streets to build the blocks of flats.

I turned eighteen, then twenty. Now I'll soon be twenty-three.

There's not a lot to the new town : just the sea, and behind that the port. The town used to be spread out around it, but none of us ever knew. The war came and the town was bombed, except the old streets higher up. After that they rebuilt it with straight streets and straight buildings. And then they rebuilt here as well, blocks of flats where the old streets used to be.

I used to live in the old streets when I was a kid. We had this house here, and these rooms, and my mother and younger brother lived here, and when I was sixteen I left and went to the new town, only sometimes on a Sunday I'd come back to see them, my mother and my young brother. After a while they told me not to bother, they said they'd rather not see me. The old streets had been pulled down, they had a flat in the block—it almost smelt new at the time—now I don't know where they've gone. I know that my brother liked the south, and my mother was sick. Then I came back up here to live.

I tell myself that it'll be easier to find me if they want to get in touch. They only have to ask for me : I've had this nickname for ages now. BITER. They'll ask for Biter. They've never come back ; they've never asked about me.

I've been living on the streets for so long now.

summary

THE YOUNG WOMAN WHO WATCHES ON THE BALCONY

The trucks are still there at the roundabout on the southern highway interchange.

I can count them from my window. Twenty in the first line, most likely more behind them, ones I can't see. They've made a fire, out there in the fog. They're burning planks, they're burning wood. It's an orange colour, with something darker above it.

And down there on the bridge over the river—it's too far away but I know, that's what they're saying and I know—that there's a whole lot more, and others at the northern tunnel. There are three ways to enter our town. The southern interchange, the bridge over the river and the tunnel at the end of the valley to the north. The trucks have blocked the three routes, and the town's closed off.

This morning there was nothing above the refinery. From my window I can see the sea, and in front of the sea, the grey cubes and tanks and pipes of the refinery. There are these three chimneys above it with orange flame coming out of them, a little orange flame, but it's there in the daytime and there at night too, and this morning there was no flame. The trains aren't coming out of the refinery any more. The trucks have blocked off the trains as well. It's starting to get cold in the town. It's getting cold in our building too, and it's evening now and even colder.

Down there the truck people have made fires. We can't light fires in our buildings.

summary

STEVE

If the roads are closed off, you can't drive anywhere.

I've got some petrol, about a third of a tank full, so I could get in my car and go. The petrol stations closed the day before yesterday, the third day since the trucks arrived. They say that the refinery itself has shut down today. No heating in the buildings, and they've said that maybe there won't be any lighting tonight. We live in the new town and we depend on the refinery for everything.

From the buildings higher up, you come down to what's called the embankment or the promenade. It's the boulevard that goes around the shoreline, and in summer the people who swim there. We hardly ever swim, and in any case we don't go there. At the end of the embankment there's this road that goes down to the sea. And almost overhanging the rocks, there's the place they call The Escape. It's a bar, like another home to us. You can only get to it by car. That's the big advantage of having a car.

You can't go anywhere much in the car, so I've parked it here, just in front of the stairs, and I turn on the radio. It's a cassette radio. The guys bring cassettes, we sit in the car. I let them have the driver's side, and I sit beside them and look after the radio. With the windows open you can hear it nice and loud because of the extra speakers, so there can be quite a lot of you, but there's only one car and what I say goes around here.

Why is everyone so edgy this evening ? They have to walk up from town since the buses have stopped too. They've done their shopping on foot. You can see them carrying their bulging white plastic bags. That really makes me laugh : the supermarket isn't getting deliveries any more, so they stock up with anything they can still buy. Seems there's no more milk in the supermarket.

‘So what ?' I tell them. ‘If there's no more milk, we'll drink beer !'

A car's great when you need to be alone. You wind up the windows, park in front of the view, and then you can think.

summary

BITER

It's mine, it's my place.

I found it by myself, like the way you create the place where you're going to live. In the beginning I slept in the car park, but that didn't work very well as they close at nine o'clock at night and don't open again until six in the morning. So you had to arrive early and leave again before they did their first rounds. I used to leave my sleeping bag down the back of the car park. The great thing about the place is the temperature. Below the second underground level, the temperature stays the same, summer and winter.

I even painted my name in big letters on the wall : Biter. That way, everyone who knows me realizes this is my place.

It's because I used to leave at six in the morning that I came across the service entrance, an iron door that's hidden from above because of the slope. There's a ramp where they bring down the rubbish bins. There's one of those iron rods with a pneumatic jack that closes the door automatically, but no key. You only have to pull and it opens. Behind the door there's a passage with two empty rooms at the end. One leads down from the offices—that one's locked—and the other's for the rubbish bins, but it has another room off it, also made of bare concrete. They wouldn't bother with paint or signs down here. There are water and gas pipes, the beginning of the electric wiring network and a transformer. There's a humming noise, but it's not too bad, and it's a bit warm. So this is where I've been sleeping since then. I come and go whenever I like. And there's a small basement window, but without bars, just a fairly narrow opening under the ceiling, looking on to the place where they keep their machines. There's a yellow machine they use to clean the aisles with a brush underneath and a kind of steam jet for the floor tiles. There are machines with little rubber castors used to carry pallets of wine or fruit juice, or frozen food or whatever they need. I get into the machine room through this gap in the ceiling. Once I'm in, there's only a curtain of thick rubber strips between me and the supermarket. It's not patrolled. In front are the locked and bolted iron curtains and the shopping mall. It's the shopping mall that's patrolled. The first time I got in, I even took some grog and had a ball. The second time, I ate there and stashed away the papers. Afterwards, I thought it was a bit chancy, so I only take what I need, take everything back to the transformer room and eat there with no worries. Something extra on Sundays. And no one has ever suspected a thing.

It's my place and I'm careful. No one else should know about it.

‘Hey Biter, where do you live ?' my mates ask me.

‘Down there under the supermarket,' I reply vaguely.

If they come with me, I go to the car park, where I left my sleeping bag.

You don't give out an address like the transformer room, not to anyone. It's my territory, my patch. If anyone got the idea they wanted to want to share it with me, they'd have Biter to contend with.

summary

THE FRIGHTENED WOMAN WHO LIVES ALONE

I moved in two years ago. I should be used to it.

In the beginning, of course, I didn't suspect anything. How could I ? I'd arrived there with my husband and daughter. We'd installed the furniture and repapered the walls. It wasn't very far to my husband's work by car, as he works at the refinery, and my daughter could take a bus straight to her high school. There are two high schools in the new town, which they call North High and South High—South High more for boys' technical courses, and North High more for girls' occupations, with a nursing school next to it, which is what my daughter wanted to do.

I heard about it in the shopping mall in front of the supermarket. When people start to become acquainted, naturally they talk to each other. ‘Are you new around here ? Where do you live ?' That sort of thing. But not more than that, because the people in the flats are generally discreet. It was in the bakery, and people who work in bakeries are always curious. I pointed to our stairway, the second last on the left.

‘Over there is it ? Where those young men hang around with their car, near the seat ?' That's the first thing she wanted to know : whether the young people bothered us.

‘They're polite,' I said. ‘If they're a bit noisy, it's because they're young. The woman in the bakery said that not everyone felt like that, specially in summer when the windows were open. It was February then, since it was exactly a year ago. I replied that we'd see when summer came. The woman said, ‘It's true that you've got a nice view. You can see the whole town and even the sea.'

A nice outlook, yes, that's what had made us choose this place to come to. On one hand there was the price, which wasn't so dear, and on the other, from the kitchen you could see the sun set over the sea, and between us and the sea, the whole of the new town with its straight streets and yellow buildings.

You normally have to buy fresh bread every day, and when I went down to the bakery usually at about half past nine, the rush hour was over and the woman behind the counter had more time.

‘But you're not on the third floor, are you ?'

Yes, I was on the third floor (there are six, with a lift).

‘You don't know then ?'

What didn't I know ?

‘What's it matter . . , you'll find out. If you're happy there. After all, it's been empty for a long time.'

She didn't want to say any more and I didn't insist. I thought to myself, ‘There's still the caretaker and the postman. I'll find out easily enough.'

summary

THE YOUNG WOMAN WHO WATCHES ON THE BALCONY

It's evening, the sun has already set over there below us. You can't see anything now beyond the black rocks of the jetty. Nothing but an expanse of dark, leaden grey. In the sky, also grey, a horizontal break, mauve with purple edges.

The town has come to a standstill, the streets are empty, without any cars, and there's an unusual silence, which means that the siren of a police car speeding past can be heard for miles around. The sky puts on its show, and every evening at that time I just like to stand and watch it.

Just before sunset the birds go mad : the town birds that live in the scrawny trees in the square or over there along the avenue, and the sea birds, the white birds that send cries of distress down the shopping streets when the weather's wet, and come right up here to our rubbish bins when it's really windy. And when the sky sinks into night, the birds fall silent.

There was an accident this morning at the southern interchange. It seems that the trucks were letting a few cars through in single file, and a van that had been refused entry forced its way in. They said on the radio, and then on television, that a truck driver was run over. The van was turned over on to its roof and set alight. The police had to get the driver out.

I was on my balcony. I could hear the sirens, I saw the flashing blue lights on their cars and from behind the other window—the bedroom window—beyond the factory buildings, there was this yellow column surrounded by black smoke, and then I could see how the black smoke had gathered in the sky above the southern interchange.

An hour after that, the heating and electricity were cut off.

It's cold now. The windows in the flats are dark. Nothing behind them to light up the kitchen curtains—all the kitchens have curtains—the way they usually do. Some people have already lit candles. Now, as evening has fallen, you can see them.

summary

ELVIS

You carry the noise around inside your head, and when the noise stops, you don't know where you are. Doors have opened that you can't close again. Your inner resources have gone. You're lost.

Sometimes I go to my parents' place. My father's home this evening, so I won't go. They're on the fourth floor and I still have my key.

My mother's the only one who knows.

My father threw me out eight months ago now. I saw him again once. It was at the bus stop. He looked at me but didn't say anything. So I didn't say anything either. It's not the right time yet.

My mother says : ‘He's waiting for you to say you're sorry.”

And I say : ‘He's the one who should say sorry first.'

So I wait too, and anyway, he knows how to find me.

Because we're often there on the concrete seat at the end of the lane that goes to the square with the kids' playground, where Steve's car is—that's been his nickname since he was little—and his music. I don't go there all the time, but we say hello and sometimes I stop. Steve knows where I live. (Steve's the one who first gave me the name everyone here knows me by : Elvis). I even have a bag of my stuff in the boot of his car. He said, ‘I'll look after it for you.'

If my father wants to talk to me, he talks to Steve and Steve comes and tells me. My mother knows about it and that's why I told her, ‘If he wants to talk to me, he knows where to find me.' My father hasn't made up his mind to talk to me yet.

It's cold this evening. I went round to see Steve. He was in his car, but the windows were up. When Steve winds up the windows, it's no use trying to speak to him. After all, his car's his castle, and as he's got two kids on the fifth floor, he can sometimes take a break on his own.

So I went up again, but the light wasn't working either. There's a service light there and I've plugged a powerboard into the light so I can connect my radio. Only the motor wasn't going either. It's the sound of the motor that's missing, and I couldn't get used to it. I sat down on the stairs, right at the top, on my step.

I call it “my” step because no one comes up here without a special reason. The tiled stairs stop at the sixth floor, the one above Steve. After that it's just concrete. There's a little window for the guys who have to get out on the roof to fix leaks or antennas, and there's the lift motor.

You can't walk upright. There's not enough room. You can't stretch your arms either, but you don't need to stretch your arms all the time.

The day after my father threw me out, I waited till my mother had gone out. I went down to the fourth floor, got my mattress, my radio and three bits and pieces (my photos and my sports medals, and that's the stuff I put in the bag in the boot of Steve's car). I've got the mattress and the radio here, and that's enough.

In the morning, I can tell when my mother goes to the supermarket and the bakery, when the lift leaves from the fourth floor. I go down, have something to eat, and my mother always leaves some coffee. I leave my dirty things, and I have a shower when I feel like it. Sometimes she leaves a fifty franc note on the table. In the afternoon, if it's fine, I go to the seat in the square. She comes and sits down beside me, and like me she looks down at the town and its straight rebuilt streets. My mother was born when the town was still an old town with its different quarters and curved streets, and when there was nothing here but fields and open country.

She looks straight in front of her. I turn and look at her. She doesn't. She looks straight ahead, and her first words are always about the sea : how the sea looks today. Perhaps she thinks that if she doesn't look at me, she's not going against what my father said. ‘And I forbid you to speak to him,' he said to her, in front of me, when I was leaving. It's the last thing I heard from my father.

‘Your little hovel,' my mother says.

I know that one afternoon when I was in Steve's car she came up to see it. If you don't need to stand up, it's not uncomfortable. And I can see a bit of sky out of the little window. I can hear the motor : first the release of the relay mechanism, the sound of the cables rising, the brake, the doors opening, and then the pneumatic closing of the doors, weaker or louder depending on the floor.

Then I know what floor the lift is on, and if anyone gets in or out, and so I know who's on the stairs at that particular time.

And this evening the motor's cold, like the stairs, and silent.

summary

STEVE

Because life goes by so quickly.

You're eighteen, you're nineteen, you go out and you rage, you're in love. Not that I regret all that, the raging and what followed ( I had my first car, not like the one I've got now, but then those late nights in each other's arms, putting off parting and her going up to her parents' flat, where she was still living, for one more moment). No, I don't regret any of that.

It was serious, for her, for me, for both of us.

Yet you can't help thinking : it went so quickly.

The thing is we're no longer two. There's the tiny bundle in white nappies you're holding in your arms and her following with a bag, coming out of the maternity hospital, and from then on no more raging or going out (although we did sometimes leave the baby with her parents for an evening ; we did manage to go out).

Anyway, since I was working and since I still do—I have temporary work on metal construction sites—and there are naturally payments that come from the work sites, we get by like anyone else. I changed cars, and when the second child arrived we got the flat here, high above the town. It's knowing you've got fresh air, her parents used to say, and then she says that she never gets tired of seeing the sea from really high up, from the sixth floor, and that there are never two evenings the same. She likes to watch and look at things. Me, I like to get in my car and think. ‘Steve and his car,' my mates always say.

Think of everything that has gone by so quickly : you're about twenty-two, and life sometimes seems to weigh more heavily than you do.

THE FRIGHTENED WOMAN WHO LIVES ALONE

Well, I didn't ask the caretaker, I asked his wife, who also works as caretaker.

They live at the end of the other block. He looks after the rubbish bins and the paths, the outside cleaning. She does the stairs and entrances. She's at home in the afternoons. It seems she reads the cards for people for whatever money they like to give her, and she tells their future to those who want to believe in it.

I haven't asked her to read the cards for me.

She was down below cleaning our entrance and the letter boxes with the trolley on castors that she uses to carry around her brooms and cleaning things to whatever staircase she's in. (She cleans the windows too, but not as often.)

‘Tell me about the people who were on the third floor before me.'

‘Oh, it was empty for a long time.'

She didn't want to talk, and I don't like people hiding things from me.

I asked the postman.

‘Was it empty for long before I arrived ?'

‘A few weeks, two months I think. It's a moving population here, you know. They come and they go. We didn't know the people before you very well because they only stayed, oh, scarcely four months. You can ask me about the people before them. They were there since the flats went up, like me.

Then, on the following Monday, I asked the caretaker's wife again while she was mopping the entrance.

“The people before me, they hardly stayed four months. Didn't they like it here ?'

‘People . . . It wasn't people. It was a woman on her own. At least we thought she was on her own..'

I brought the subject up again to the woman in the bakery.

On the third floor the flats are all the same : the one on the right is for a family with three children (but I don't know them . . . just enough to say hello to), the one opposite is more for single people, only a lounge and bedroom. Before me there was a woman on her own too.

‘So you know. You've found out,' the woman in the bakery replied.

But as I didn't know, what she said didn't get me any further.

summary

THE YOUNG WOMAN WHO WATCHES ON THE BALCONY

The children are playing now.

The cooking's done, they've eaten, I've cleaned up. Their father was there, and then he said, ‘I'm going out.' That's what he always says, ‘I'm going out.'

He doesn't seem to understand how nice it can be at that time of the evening when they get into their pyjamas and you put them down for the night. By the time he gets back, the light in their bedroom will be out. Sometimes he goes into their room, sometimes he doesn't bother. He comes to bed too, but I can't sleep. In the dark, I turned over against the wall on the other side.

I sometimes used to ask him, ‘But where have you been ? Who did you go with ?' And invariably got the reply, ‘I was in the car. Some friends came around.'

Now I don't bother to ask.

And I could see the car from the balcony, parked in the usual spot, and there was the outline of a dark shape behind the window. He says it does him good. I asked him once, ‘What's the use of us being together ?'

Another time I said, ‘But if you're like that at twenty-five, what will you be like at thirty or forty ?'

‘Don't hassle me,' is what he said.

I don't hassle him. I'm here, I do the best I can. I have to get the children up, take them to school, and then go to work. There's more money when he's working on a site, but that's not always available. Sometimes he's away for two months if there's a factory to be built, the framework of a warehouse or a big building. He comes back on a Friday night and leaves again to see his mates. We're together on Sunday, then he leaves very early on Monday morning with his car all ready to go the night before, cleaned and vacuumed as though it was dirty.

There's where I work. Our town doesn't have an airport, so to take the plane you have to use our agency. I make out the airline tickets for the long journeys. The children stay on after school until I pick them up. I have Wednesday afternoon off.

He says, ‘It's gone by too fast.'

Isn't it up to us to keep up with it ?

Sometimes I say to him, ‘What do want from me, if you'd rather be away ?'

He doesn't understand.

summary

BITER

Take what you do during the day.

The thing is to do a lot. If you don't do enough, you feel down.

The ones who feel down don't last much longer out there. You gotta be tough to last. You gotta grow inside, be strong.

The name helps, too : Biter. They don't give you any trouble, even though you're only just twenty.

I've tried the other ways of living. There's living in a flat and what you have to do to pay for it. Not for me. Being cooped up inside, and every day the same. Then you'd have to find a job.

You look. You find things, you meet the people. They're ready to take you, because you look a decent sort of guy. Then come the questions,

‘And what were you doing at the same time last year ? And what did you do during the summer ? And what sort of work ? Where, how, what, why, when, for how long, and why did you leave and why this, why that ?'

They don't say no. They say something dumb like, “We'll call you.'

It worked well in the beginning. They always asked me—to be a barman in summer, to help with camps, since we're near the sea. But now, well, people go further away for holidays. There's no one here any more in summer. Cars with foreign number plates pass by, roof racks piled high, or towing semi-trailers. They drive slowly, slowing down along the beach, going even slower past the hotels. Sometimes they park and eat there at lunch time, facing the sea, watching a cargo boat or an oil tanker being pulled slowly into dock by its tug, while another one waits further out to sea. That's about all the tourism there is.

Us streets kids, we know all about it, we notice what's going on. Your eyesight's keener when you're on the streets.

Living in the supermarket, I've got my own territory. Where the cars slow down. That's where I stick my little notice close up to their faces. I change it often to give them a bit of variety. Sometimes my notice says just “Hello. Me again !” And the following day, “Hello. I'm still here !” Then the day after that, “Just to say hello to you.”

Sometimes I try the trick of giving them a series of notices (a guy from Montpellier taught me that one). The first : “Hello. Ten francs please.” That gives them a bit of a shock, then I whip out the second notice hidden under the first : “Hello. Five francs please.” The window usually stays up. They're electronic windows with buttons, which means they have to move at least their little finger. If the window comes down, I'm right : the other hand will scrabble in pockets for change. And besides, cars often have coins hanging around in them. You must have confidence. I've got confidence—I bring out my third notice : “Hello. Two francs please.” Then immediately, notice number four : “Only one little franc ?”, with a big question mark. That's generally when they give in and lower the window, and then they give a bit more than a one franc coin. It would irritate them to do what my notice asks, and that's why you have to whip the last one out quickly. One problem : you can't do the four-notice trick at the same spot every day.

When winter comes there's more to do, and that's what get you through. In the morning there's breakfast, free, at the Salvation Army. It's best to arrive when they open, at seven o'clock Then you can stay for a while and have a talk. You have to leave around nine. In the city centre there's the Shopping Mall : three arcades with shops in the shape of a star. It's modern, well maintained. A good spot is in the doorways.

If you bring out your notices, the security guards arrive in no time.

‘Begging is prohibited,' they say.

I reply, ‘It's not begging. It's sharing.'

We call the security guard Albert. (I don't know what his name is, and anyhow, even if they change guards from time to time, we always call him Albert now). But he's not too keen on us making jokes if he's not sure of what we mean.

It's at the entrances to the shops that you get hot air coming up from the grating. You can stay for a while between the double doors, between the mat with “Welcome” written on it and the hot air vents. When we stay too long, Albert tell us to move on. Then we go to another entrance.

In the afternoon I go to the Refuge. The guys are decent. (I say guys, but really the only guy there is the night watchman. Apart from him, it's mainly girls). There's a washing machine and I do my laundry once a week. There's the shower, and I do that every day. And there's hot coffee. You have to leave at five. I go to the end of the pedestrian street, but there are too many of us to put your hand out. You give it a go for twenty minutes then let a mate take over. Up to three is okay, but it's not worth it with more than that.

Next stop, the Soup Kitchen. It's an association, a place with a table, seats and a meal. Then I walk back up here. It's a hard climb, specially if it's raining, but that's where I live, high up here. Living in the supermarket's an advantage that I wouldn't share with anyone.

There are no more cars in town, because of the truck blockades and the three highways being jammed. And people have turned nasty. Some days you'd think the world's gone crazy. When they've got their own worries, they're not going to bother about ours. So what did I do all today ? Stood there at the bus stop staring at a garage and a chemist shop. Didn't get a penny.

I left home at sixteen. I've covered a fair bit of the country. You can still see a lot, hitch-hiking with a sleeping bag. You can take your time, stay in villages, go to the islands in Brittany, because people are nice and it's easy to find somewhere to stay in houses that aren't lived in any more. I've been to all the big cities, even Paris, but I won't go back there. Too hard to stay clean in Paris. So, you come back here where you were born. You've been a long time on the road, you know where to find places to sleep, you know where to get something to eat. And so you make a life for yourself where you live, a life that you wouldn't have imagined living there before.

Sometimes I go and see my family. I go in the bus. It's in the country, not far away. They don't ask me any questions but they wouldn't like me to stay either. My sister's kids are in town—they're grown up now—and they see me sometimes in the distance. One of the three—the youngest one—waves when he passes by on his motorbike but doesn't slow down. It's not an easy life. You're always on your guard with the friendships you make, both you and the other person. Good places are hard to come by on the street. All the same, here in the new town, everyone in the area knows who Biter is.

When evening falls, I like to come to the end of the blocks of flats, where there's the kids' playground and this wooden seat overlooking the town, where you can see the sea and the refinery. And tonight, you can even see the yellow fires with the thick black smoke from the three truck drivers' blockades.

They must have got some pallets : there's a lot of heavy smoke.

I like looking at the sea.

summary

THE CARETAKER'S WIFE

Before we came here, my husband and I, we used to work in Paris. Well, close by.

Cement scenery. Same work, grey shapes, geometrical lines. And those skies in the evening when the whole town looked like cut-out shapes. In the end you feel you can't breathe. We saw the advertisement and I said to my husband, ‘At least we'll be near the sea.' (My husband likes fishing.)

We came here six years ago. Comfortable living conditions, pleasant work. People keep to themselves more. My husband's grandmother is from these parts, not far from here. That gave us a lead-in to the conversation, a reason to be here really.

Very polite people, no damage and less abuse, but they don't go as far as asking us up to their place for a drink. I haven't gone back to work at my original profession, which is reading the cards and telling the customer what you can : the person's there in front of you, she's concentrating, attentive (I can say she, because pretty well all my clients are women). You've heard her voice and when it trembles ; you've seen her eyes and when they go dreamy. You say the words that go with what trembles and dreams.

It passes the time, and someone's listening.

Someone who'll listen—that's what people miss, mostly. Once you leave home, that's it : loud noise everywhere, bus engines, and in every shop, even the post office, there's the radio or music, Foxy FM, TripleY or Golden Oldies Radio, we even have Radio Concrete playing anything that goes boom boom in your ears.

So I'm the one they come and tell their stories to, and when I read the cards and say the right words, that calms them down. Today, the third day since the trucks blocked the bypass, you get the feeling that even the air has changed, and no one has come.

I don't ask for money. If they want to leave me a gift, they do so. There's a salad bowl near the front door and I usually find a note in it. I don't say thanks, I don't even look, I want to give the impression that people don't have to pay for this work, which is mainly listening,.

You see a fair few people come and go in six years.

In the past, they used to eat, sleep and raise their children here. Of a morning they'd go to their offices in the port or the factory. Now they stay there. There are parts of the town where the houses seem to go to sleep in the daytime ; here, you can see the men on their balconies. Where would they go ?

And then there are those who hang around. I see them too as they approach and look at my rubbish bins, or go down there to the square, towards the seat. You hear them talking, offering to sell a computer, a cassette player, walkmans or nice bomber jackets, cartons of liquor, at prices well below normal. Some of them have small vans parked in the street. I'd like to know what's inside the vans.

As a caretaker, the reputation of what you're taking care of is important to you, so we don't like these sorts of illegal deals.

summary

ELVIS

People don't know how much room there is under the roof in a building.

To get into my place, there's a wooden door locked with a chain and padlock, but the pin that holds the chain is loose. All you have to do is take it out and put it back again. Right behind it is the motor and the electrical relay, with holes for the cables.

Naturally there's a bit of noise, and it smells of oil, but in fact it goes right down through the building, so there's some room left. Now I've got a mattress, I brought up my bedside table too, a sleeping bag and my radio, some bits and pieces and a light globe with an extension cord plugged into the motor box. Plus an armchair, from downstairs.

It's there so that the guys who come to do repairs can have some light. They're saying, on the stairs, that they're cold tonight in the flats, because there's no more heating. I've got no worries about that.

But they have windows with reflections of the sea and the port, the beacon at the end of the jetty that you can see so much clearer tonight as there's no more light in the town. I don't see anything.

And as for lighting a candle—no way, with the insulation in my garret. So, what'll I do ? Just wait way up here on the stairs, listening to them talking ? All of them except my father, (my father's at our place and won't be going out), because on a night when nothing is normal—no heating in the building, no light in the town and no cars on the roads, only the big yellow fire where the trucks are a bit further away just on the interchange—no one stays inside, they roam around the floors, talking to neighbours.

Where we live—I mean our building—is called Arthur Martin. We say we're in Arthur Martin, because there's this neon sign on top of our block of flats. In the daytime the lights are transparent, you don't see them, you can hardly see the black iron framework with the cables that hold it to the four corners of the walls. It's at night that you can see it in the distance when you're travelling on the southern interchange. The sign's meant to be seen by people passing by.

In the old days, we lived in places that had names. Now, even if the street has a name and numbers, the place we live in has the name of a sign on the roof. If you can see it, you don't live here. We always say : ‘I live in Arthur Martin. You know, the building way up on the hill, near the southern interchange.'

And this evening, we still live in Arthur Martin, but as there's no electricity, no one can see the sign on the roof. Our name's gone out.

A while ago I heard some noise coming from the sixth floor. I went back into the motor room. It was my mother who left me some hot food in a camping tin, a bit of bread and some dessert in the white plastic box. When I know that my father isn't there, and I go down to take a shower, I bring back the boxes and put them in the sink. I went down, took the box, the tin and the bread, ate a bit here on the last step under the window, now quite dark, but I don't like eating in public (even if there's no one here to see me, the stairs are still public) and there's no way I could eat it in the dark, since the light globe, as well as the lift, wasn't working.

Usually at night, with the Arthur Martin sign and the windows, my place looks blue. I get the reflections ; I live in a blue house that flickers on and off. But not tonight.

summary

THE YOUNG WOMAN WHO WATCHES ON THE BALCONY

I had to put the children to bed in the dark.

They asked where their father was. I told them that he'd be back, that he'd be home very soon. It was cold. I put an extra blanket on each of them. They had a story, not a very long one, with a boat that was coming back to port. They like boat stories, because they can see the boats from their balcony.

I didn't want to leave a candle near their bed, but eating by candlelight had been fun for them, like Christmas time. So I got the torch, left it switched on by the bunk beds and told them that it would stay on all night.

The little one said that it made shadows and the shadows frightened him. So I lit up the wardrobe and the corners, and explained what the shadows were. When the chair and toys were pushed out of the way and the wardrobe was closed, there were no more nasty shadows.

I went back into the living room. They talked for a while, then fell asleep. People were talking on the stairs ; I opened the door and listened ; it was further down. We're on the sixth floor. I think it's the lady on the second, the one who often looks at people passing by when they walk down instead of waiting for the lift.

The town is quite dark. Out to sea, the only point of light is a waiting oil tanker, lit up from stem to stern, with its cranes and cabin block. The light from the beacon turns slowly—three short flashes and one long one—and tonight you'd think it was right up close, that you could almost touch it. On the interchange, the truck drivers have put up strings of lights, like the ones you see for festivals, with green, red and yellow bulbs. They've probably got a petrol generator. In the middle you can see their fire flickering, a moving spot in the night.

Now there's no one talking any more. It took me a moment to realize that the Arthur Martin sign on the roof wasn't working either, because there was no light shining on the balcony.

I decided to go downstairs : if he's in the car, we'll have it out.

summary

THE FRIGHTENED WOMAN WHO LIVES ALONE

I found out from the young woman who lives on the sixth floor. One time when she was coming down with her two children and we had a word.

‘Horrible things,' she said to me, ‘aren't you frightened ?'

I was rather sorry for that young woman, seeing her bringing up her two youngsters alone. And then I learned that there was a father, and that the father did in fact live there. Even that it was the same young fellow who spent his time down below cleaning his car or fiddling around fitting new accessories in the engine. One Sunday I saw them set off together, all four of them.

So I went back to see the caretaker's wife. I pretended that I knew all about it.

‘Why didn't anyone tell me what happened in my flat ?'

She said that the people here don't talk about those who just pass through. There'd be too much. Anyway, they weren't buildings where people stayed all their lives, and besides, there was nothing left when a story like that was all over.

‘The walls here don't have any memories,' she said. She even added, ‘It's cement, nothing but cement. They all take their private dramas away with them from their various floors and little boxes.

Then I suppose I didn't speak in the right tone of voice when I said, ‘Was it as horrible as all that ?'

And the caretaker's wife knew then that she had to tell me everything, which she did. She didn't go into details or make too much of it. She's sensitive, the caretaker's wife, a very understanding person.

‘First of all, it was horrible for my husband. Because my husband's the one who discovered it all,' she began.

And so in the end I found out everything.

summary

BITER

I went to see the trucks before it got dark.

Two rows bumper-to-bumper all down each side of the highway. There was just enough room in the middle of the road for one slowly moving car. They left it clear for ambulances or the police. Apart from them, by the third day no one else was asking to get through. You could walk around there like in a pedestrian mall.

Some trucks were shut and barricaded, with curtains drawn ; with others it was open house, the truck driver welcoming his mates in for a chat ; there was a radio playing the news and a coffee pot on the dashboard. They even have television in their trucks. There were refrigerated semi-trailers left there locked up, with the engine still going. I always wonder what all those trucks can be carrying. With some, it's easy to tell. But with most of them, you haven't got a clue.

And then there's the truckies who were down at the end between the two tight lines of trucks formed in a circle . They were wearing warm clothes, hood or caps on, and had their hands in their pockets. There were camping tables set up with glasses of wine and hot soup. I don't know if other countries have strikes like these that we seem to have so often.

And behind that, a big electric generator running on petrol for their strings of coloured lights and their loud-speaker, because as well as that they were playing

music. The fire was there, not far away, with a big pile of old pallets. No shortage of those in the factories near the southern interchange—there are old pallets lying around everywhere. Huge deep yellow flames where three men were grilling sausages, and the cartons of sausages were still wrapped in transparent plastic. They must have come from the refrigerated semi-trailers.

I listened to what these men were saying. They said they were going to stay on strike, and that a town without electricity and heating wouldn't hold out for long, and that the time would come when people would have to listen to them.

But they didn't talk to me. And when one said to me, ‘Hey you, are you looking for something ?', I went back up to Arthur Martin. Even if Arthur Martin, on that particular evening, was nothing more than a high white patch stretched out under a sky that had already turned mauve, and the supermarket and shopping mall beside it nothing but concrete over a completely empty parking lot. The bitumen was smooth and shining, and already black because it had rained late in the afternoon.

That's when I decided to go and sit on the seat in the square.

summary

STEVE

It's not much good having a car but no petrol left to drive anywhere. Even if I still had half a tank and a pretty full can in the boot. But you don't know how long those guys' strikes can last. If it's like the trains, it could go on without anyone knowing why.

And what use would it be to drive, if you wanted to go into town ? The interchange, the bridge and the road are blocked off and you can't go anywhere.

I nearly went back upstairs. I thought it would be the same old thing up there : the kids still up and a frosty reception.

‘Where've you been ? What were you doing ?'

So I stayed on a bit longer. I turned on the radio. I'd wound the window up : no one disturbs me when my windows are up. When I leave the door open, that's when friends come around.

I caught sight of Elvis. He's called Elvis because of his hair. These days that hairstyle with the quiff in front isn't fashionable any more. Elvis is like everyone else (by everyone I mean, well . . ., us), very short on the sides and a bit longer on top. We're well known in the shopping mall. The barber's called Mickey and specialises in that cut for thirty-five francs, provided it's in the morning when there aren't many people around. He could easily do it cheaper : they're styles that have to be cut more often than when curly hair was in fashion.

Elvis is a strange kind of guy who's made his home even higher up than the floors in our building. He took me there once. You open the door of the lift motor, a big blue cast-iron thing that groans and clatters when the lift is going, and behind it is a long but not very high space just under the roof, where he's made a home for himself with his radio, just under a small window where you can see the moon, the end of the Arthur Martin sign and a tiny bit of sky. He didn't tell me why he made his home there. He just said, ‘I like to be independent.'

I offered him my cellar.

‘I never go into my cellar, and my wife and children even less often. If it's independence you want, it would be perfect and a lot more comfortable.' I even added, ‘You can have it for as long as you like.'

He didn't want it.

I saw him in the rear vision mirror as he was coming out of the building, but the widows were up so he passed by without giving any hint that he'd seen me in the car. That's what my friends do. He walked towards the square, where the children's playground is, where you can see the whole town and the sea. Then I sounded the horn—just once, briefly—he turned round, I opened my window and he came back.

‘How about walking there ?' I suggested. ‘I can't drive (I wasn't very keen on the people in the building knowing that I still had half a tank and the can), but you can get to The Escape on foot. It would take, oh . . . , half and hour ? We'll have a drink and then come back,' I said to Elvis.

Our town was rebuilt on a hillside above the sea. You have to make detours in the car, but if you're walking you can take short cuts. I like The Escape because it's a bar built right over the sea. I joke about it with the proprietor, “Hey, you could fish from the window.' There's a pinball machine and a billiard table, and best of all, they don't hassle you while you're there.

Elvis asked me whether I was sure it was open. I said that if it was closed we'd come back—at least we'd have done something and got a bit of fresh air—and that the proprietor of The Escape wasn't the type to shut up shop, he'd more likely bring out some kerosene lamps and Chinese lanterns for atmosphere, and that we'd be sure to find people there.

We saw the guy who asks for money at the red light. I know he sleeps somewhere behind the supermarket, a guy younger than me. I know because in the early days, down there in town, we were at school together. That goes back a long way.'

‘What does he do in the square ?' I asked Elvis. ‘I don't like those guys who hang about in the streets.

‘You worried about your car ?'

I said that up till now no one had dared touch my car, and that anyhow it was parked right under the windows of the flats and they'd hardly start doing it tonight. And even if someone did lay a finger on it, I'd know right away who, and where to look.

‘I think he's called Biter,' Elvis said. ‘Somebody told me that, I don't know when.'

‘That's a lot of help,' I replied.

‘Well, let's go,' Elvis said. ‘I can't stay up there in the dark.'

summary

THE FRIGHTENED WOMAN WHO LIVES ALONE

When I found out, I told myself to be sensible. And the first night I slept as I usually did. That even reassured me a bit : it's easier when you have an explanation rather than a mystery.

It's the second night, because I heard a baby crying. Perhaps it came from much higher up (you hear a lot of what's happening on the other floors through the pipes ; you don't understand the voices, but the mood comes through), perhaps it came from that young woman on the sixth floor who's alone with her two children (there is a husband, it seems, but he's rarely at home).

Well, that made me have a dream. In the dream, the baby was crying here in my place. I got up, put on the light, looked everywhere, in the kitchen, in the cupboards, everywhere in the bedroom and bathroom, and even on the shelves in the passage. And then the noise stopped. I went back to bed, I couldn't go to sleep again.

The following night I woke my husband. And on Sunday when my daughter came, I told my daughter. I couldn't sleep any more. Now the dream comes every night. It's been going on for two years. Now my husband's left and my daughter doesn't come any more. They told me to see a doctor, and the doctor gave me pills. I don't like pills : you sleep just as badly, and uncomfortably, and during the day you feel weird, you go around with a woolly head.

So, I still hear it. I don't fall asleep at first, then the moment I start to doze, that's when the crying starts. How can I tell if it's in my head, or if it's in the walls ? So I get up, I walk, in the kitchen, in the passage, in the living room, in the bedroom. Sometimes I can't bear it, I open my door and go and sit on the staircase outside.

I've learned lots of things about the building, staying there on the stairs at night. Things that I'll never tell, to anyone.

I say to the caretaker's wife, who's become a friend, ‘What if this baby's crying for justice, for rest ?'

summary

THE YOUNG WOMAN WHO WATCHES ON THE BALCONY

I could see that there was no light on in the car down below, and that he'd left. He'd obviously be away a while.

There comes a time when you say to yourself that it's just too much, that you can't take it any more, that you've come to the end of your tether. I went downstairs. I left the door of the flat half-open.

On the second floor I saw that lady who can't stop looking at everyone who passes by. This time she was well and truly out on the landing. What was she doing ?

I asked her how she was. She told me that she felt anxious, that something wasn't right, as if something serious was going to happen, that she felt it, and yet she couldn't do anything, not knowing what was going to happen, how or to whom.

That obviously disturbed me, quite a lot actually.

I said a few reassuring things to her : that it was because of this truck-drivers' strike, because of the dark, no electricity in the town or the flats, the cold, no heating in the middle of winter. I told her that I had put extra blankets on the children's beds.

This lady isn't well because of a tragedy that took place, on the stairs. Two years ago, a pregnant girl who lived on her own had the baby in her flat, without saying a word to anyone, and the next day the caretaker found cut-up remains in the rubbish bin. He'd been intrigued by the double bag, and the light weight, and the cats that had gathered around it. The flat stayed empty for two month, then this lady came, with her husband. Her nightmares began and a lot of us advised her to leave.

‘And what if I'm the one this child wants to contact ?' she'd reply.

Her husband's the one who left ; she stayed. She's like that sometimes at night, sitting on the landing, because of the noise she hears in her head, and she says it's the sound of that child crying.

I told her to go back inside, that everything was all right, then I went on downstairs.

summary

BITER

I stayed on the seat for quite a while. There was a big boat lit up out to sea. No shortage of electricity there. Did I maybe fall asleep ? I don't really know. I don't wear a watch, no need for one. It sometimes happens that I go to sleep, as I don't sleep for long at a stretch, and even when I'm asleep I have to keep a look out. I doze off for a moment now and again during the day like that when I'm sitting on a seat, waiting around.

I got up, took a last look at the beacon, the boat, the town in total darkness. That's what was so bizarre. Where you normally see the layout of the streets, the cars travelling and the houses going dark one by one, everything had disappeared into thick darkness.

Even the truckies' coloured lights had disappeared. You could only see their fire, rising high in the night, down there at the southern interchange. No lights either in the Arthur Martin building.

It was when I was leaving the square. There was this car that was parked there already when I came a while ago, with a guy inside, but no one I hang out with or who'd say hello to me. Besides, no one approached me. Now the car was still parked, at the same spot, headlights and interior lights out, but with the engine running. That's what surprised me the most, that engine running when all the service stations had been closed, out of gas, for three days.

So anyway, I went over to take a look.

You couldn't see anything in the darkness—certainly not if there was a couple making out inside, and they'd have been a bit cold—but I couldn't think of any other explanation. A couple keeping each other warm on the back seat of a car couldn't care less whether there's a truck strike or not.

So I went on my way again. But just when I turned around, I saw the pipe on the back. It was a pipe connected to the car's exhaust, going up to the back door and wedged in the window. That's when I realised what was going on.

A bit later I realised more : it was a hose from one of those car vacs that you plug into the cigarette lighter to clean the seats. They're sold even in supermarkets.

Then I pulled the door handle on the driver's side. It was locked from the inside. I didn't have a clue what was in there. I thought it was this guy that I saw a while ago, but you don't really think at times like these, do you ?

I banged on the window pane. No reply.

The engine was still running, and the pipe was well and truly stuck, I couldn't get it off. So I picked up a stone from behind me (there are plenty of stones around here), and I chucked it at the window. I unlocked the door. There was a young woman inside (I'd seen her often in the supermarket, with her two children), she looked as though she'd passed out. I pulled her out on to the grass, I turned off the engine. Once she was stretched out on her back, I slapped her face, two fairly hard slaps. She opened her eyes, a bit of colour came into her face again. People arrived, from the flats. Several of them had come out because all that had made quite a bit of noise

‘Can you help me,' I said, ‘we'll have to phone for a doctor.'

But the young woman was already sitting up, and then she threw up.

‘You should thank me,' I said.

But she didn't. All she could say was, ‘The car window. What'll Steve say ?'

That's what she said, they were the first words she said.

What then ? I went back towards my parking lot. Perhaps I'll go and see her tomorrow, with some flowers. I heard people say she lives on the sixth floor. ‘It's the young woman from the sixth floor, the one with the two children.' She doesn't even know my name.

You don't say your nickname to people like that : you give your real name (Jean-Paul, how would she know that my real name is Jean-Paul).

As I left, I saw them coming back. The guy she calls Steve, and another guy. I didn't speak to them and they didn't speak to me either. What he'd say about his car window was none of my business.

Yes, flowers. That's what the young woman needs.

END

in english | How to proceed into the unpredictable ?

François Bon — 2013-09-01T08:05:00Z

Merci à l'université de Berkeley pour l'invitation au colloque de San Francisco, 25 & 26 octobre, Reading & thinking in digital age, où j'interviendrai en compagnie de Bernard Stiegler.

Mon intervention aura pour titre : Already beyond the e-book age ?, et en voici le pitch :

Each of the previous and rare transformations in reading and writing has revealed itself unpredictable but global and irreversible. In the brief and chaotic story of the current ongoing transition, we're confronted with stories and fictions that are born from digital perceptions and experiences of the world, and we have to fulfill the old task of literature in the very place where these practices are designed. Far beyond the digital book, this disruption affects both the author's status, and the publishing and archiving forms and temporalities – and in very different ways in the USA and in France.

Bien sûr, le contexte a changé en 2 ans, mais je tiens à rendre accessible à celles et ceux avec qui la discussion va s'engager, ce texte de juin 2011. La traductrice a souhaité rester anonyme, un grand merci évidemment. Lire la version française originale de 2011 : Comment lirons-nous demain.

François Bon | How to proceed to unpredictable ? (2011)

We are living directly through one of the rare transformations in writing. What we know from previous experience, is that these transitions are complex, but that they are irreversible and global. What the Internet changes is not the relationship to the book, it's our relationship to the world. What are the consequences for our stories, our fables ? How does one invent them ? Transmit them ?

1/ 6 | context of the mutation

First axiom : we are lucky enough to experience this mutation in the pre-sent, but its most immediate future is unpredictable. Every technical micro-evolution shakes the possibilities of reading – and never in the way that we had imagined. And this has already been going on for at least 10 years.

Every attempt at predicting the immediate future (the CD-Rom abandoned for the ADSL, the uses of the iPhone, electronic ink) has been dis-avowed by the arrival of unpredictable mediums – and it keeps going.

Second axiom : we are charged with ensuring the continuity and trans-mission of civilization's values, for which the book was primarily respon-sible, and in a context that has become brutal and erratic ; structured on economic struggles at a global scale, and not on the aforementioned values.

Is there nothing we can possibly plan for ? At our disposal, do we merely have an awareness of the present, and the examination of materials, customary use ? The first task is to step backward. In the long period of sta-bility – even a constantly evolving one – which the book symbolized, this look toward the past was relegated to the background, becoming a part of what we falsely named, “the history of the book.”

A double movement establishes us as a community through language. On the one hand, state what most closely surrounds us, the world, present tensions, on the other hand, there is a distance created between oneself and the immediate statement ; where language constitutes an interval in thought, reflection.

First remark : one does not even need writing nor the book for it. Written languages constitute, at best, a third of all languages. Very complex constructions in mythology, legends, social and cultural relationships, were formed and transmitted without using writing. Let us not be afraid today of what puts language, the story, in movement – the flow, the burst, the ephemeral.

Second remark : in the long history of writing, what surprises is the extremely limited number of these transformations, if one were to compare to the history of social, urban and esthetic transformations.

Firstly, the three-dimensional object whose long history spans from 3200 BC to 300 AD : the clay tablet. A complex object that hosts sacred writings as well as private correspondences, war reports, and accounting documents ; that divides its methods for archiving (there are uncooked tablets that one can reuse), that includes means for verifying authenticity (a thin envelop covers the principal text with the same text recopied), and whose evolution (in the beginning lines were written in circles around the four sides of the object) in turn influences the evolution of language, the passage toward syllabic writing. The transformation of the tablet to the papyrus roll, brings the two together, coinciding over several centuries.

Next, the transformation of the roll to codex, faster, but nevertheless lasting roughly a century and a half. Next the transformation – and not that of Gutenberg's – which produced a reduced number of bibles (about 160) : a heavy, fixed object definitively linked to the cathedral which harbors it. The modern printer is invented in Venice, at Aldo Manuzio's, with a technique that attaches type settings to rods from Korea. In Ven-ice, where manuscript copying is a mass industry, Manuzio strives to en-sure printed books be distinguishable from hand-copied books. Remember that one of our most modern print type settings, the Garamond, was copied from the manuscript handwriting of Ange Vernèce, the calligra-pher for King François 1st.

Finally, an ultimate, major transformation right near us : the irruption of the press and the serialized story, le feuilleton, the industrialization of the printer.

Third axiom : in each case, what characterizes these transformations, is that they are all encompassing. In every case, they influence private and epistolary uses, and redefine literary form. Forms that seem to us to have always been there ; Herodotus' “The Inquiries,” Homer's Odyssey, were born from the appearance of a new recording medium. Rabelais invents the farces of “Pantagruel” right at the printer where he and his friends edit scholarly books (for Rabelais, annotated translations of the Greek doctors, Hippocrates and Galen). In the XIXth century, Stendhal's “The Red and the Black” entitled, “morals”, and Flaubert's Madame Bovary “provincial morals,” not novel.

In 1845, in a magnificent text, “The Painter of Modern Life,” Baudelaire marvels that drawings by Constatin Guys created on the battle fields of Crimée, captured from life, very quickly, reaches London in less than 9 days, and appears just as quickly in the newspapers. A historic, far away event is made known to us as it simultaneously takes place. And, by transmitting itself with an image, history is able to do away with a story told in words. We have since changed the cursors of simultaneity and the number of images : but today's mutation is a direct extension of this last transformation in writing, by the press and the serialized story.

Last axiom : everyone of these transformations was complex and con-flicting, but irreversible. Of course, we still raise horses, but we rarely use them, over the last 150 years, to travel from town to town : the important thing is not to know “how we will read tomorrow,” it's to know that the current path, though timid, embryonic, does not have the responsibility of bringing with it existing publishing and distributing structures. Our responsibility does not concern the structures, but the values of civilization, and of transmission, which we place in written content.

2/6 | in its recent form, the book is an ecosystem.

For those in my generation, the imaginary, the sense of language, the perception of the world (we knew how to read before the arrival of television), was formed by the book. We were constructed by the book.
But the idea of a sense of stability for the book is distorted today by the interior re-composition of its industry.

“A great publisher lives on ten to fifteen books,” said one of these “greats,” a few weeks ago. Fewer than five hundred titles cover two thirds of all sales. The average lifetime of a work in a bookstore is five weeks. And I would say, that for a long time – if it ever was the case – printed works only compensate the financial cost of creation for a few hundred widely-selling authors. This system is worn out.

How will we read tomorrow : but do we understand well enough, that today, the books that we read are websites ? Ten years ago, even fifteen years ago, publishing became digitized. A modern printer uses an en-semble of text files, metadata, and CSS frameworks.

3/6 | It's not reading that has changed, its our customary use

first point, the subscription

second point : educate curiosity.

You know the old French expression from the world of : “look for a needle in a hay stack.”

If we look for a needle in a haystack, search engines – whatever they may be – will find it in a fraction of a second.

Now, the question is what we are looking for.

New axiom : the computer concentrates a mass of comfort use, utilitar-ian use, and we will need to build a call for content through the same framework, which ruffles feathers, that demands a dense reading, an separate interval for thought, without providing compensation in exchange.
Our tool : serendipity – or : how to find what we're not looking for. Digital books contain metadata that allows for the possibility of associating it with a request which has not been formulated. But the standard international system of classifying books, BISAC, used by Apple and others, is only in English : a book of poetry will be classified as “Continental European.”

Nothing more. More categories for religion than for fiction. More categories for domestic animals than for philosophy. How will we read tomorrow : it's about organizing resistance to the tools of today.

4/6 | Internet doesn't exist.

Internet is destined to disappear.

Digital technology is disappearing, as such, because it inserts itself in the finest, complete sense, in our relationship to the world, including our most private, or intimate customary practices.

In the past, everyone read their favorite newspaper. One generally easily recognized a reader of Le Figaro from that of a reader of l'Humanité. Intellectuals bought the Le Monde book supplement as soon as it was in kiosks Thursday afternoon. Today every individual creates his or her own information filters, by organizing our personal kind of “watch” containing fluxes that will associate very general sources to very specialized sources.
Not a week goes by without bringing up another scornful phrase for the blogs. “Internet is just rubbish.”

The universe of creative blogs is astonishingly complex. Giant blogs by a single author, and some are only 12 years old. Collective periodicals. For digital art, the base of the NT2 laboratory in Montreal, counts 3000 : at least 2/3rds of them include uses of text. But also the principal of exchanges between blogs : in France “the convoy (convoi) of glossolalies,” the “général Instin”, “The 807” are collective literary creations, within which each author has his or her own blog. Another example : the first Friday of every month, the “vases communicators” (mutual flow of communicating vessels) – each one writes in the blog of the other. It has ex-isted for 2 years, and often regroups some 60 blogs. Each one writes as a function of the publication location hosting him and his partner : once a month, hundreds of us read the resulting web object – it's not a book, but it's clearly a very strong interaction in web literature.

Are we “weaker” readers, or more fragile on the screen ? We read several windows simultaneously, and what of it ?

What matters : our use of language toward others, toward ourselves, our possibility to tell the story of the world, to represent ourselves what is further away from us, passed on by these multiple screens, which we will soon no longer notice. Literature, according to Maurice Blanchot, is “language reflected upon.” In this multiple and diffused location, which is the screen, literature is what questions these languages – codes, sto-ries, representation – as such. We don't need to transport the forms and objects that materialized this questioning to literature, before the time of the screen.

5/6 | do we need the digital book ?

I am interested by this frontier between the great fluidity of the web, which is our home, and the place where we invent. And the resistant magic of what symbolizes for me, the book : small stiff packet, susceptible to make its way on its own, and to awaken in a relationship that ex-cludes me, and only concerns it and its far away reader, unknown and anonymous.

Of course we fully accept the techniques involved : circulation, digital distribution, format standards, ability to make sure that the reader alone defines the uses he chooses, with the apparatus he chooses.

We accept the present : no longer need a postman to bring the mail, no longer need a newspaper or magazine bought at the train station kiosk, no longer need to go by foot to the city library (or yes we do : to work with several others, with our own computers). And yet, we have never been so passionate about texts, images, stories and fables, peculiarities – of voices too, since the radio programs them for us, recorded via the web. So never, in this profusion, has attention been subject to such pres-sure, and such a consensual push, normalized culture, the dominant “majors.”

But never before have our tools been as pertinent for resisting, and propelling forward what is singular.

One of the great misfortunes of the traditional book industry, is the partitioning of its fields : recent re-editorialisation tools for streams (using Instapaper, FlipBoard and the rest) are not a “meditation effort” on writing, or the press agency for the publishing house – in the same way that with epub, the ergonomics of the page are part of the story itself (this was already the case with the traditional book, but it became invisible), the stream is part of what we name the book. Another surprising example of the unpredictable : the technical function that allows us to send, with one click from a web consultation, an article on one's Kindle or iPad, or rather, to comfortably read personal documents by sending them to oneself by e-mail, are not simply “pluses” in technique. They affect the content of our reading and what we hope to propose in our writ-ing – how could we have imagined it only six months ago ?

6/6 | explore, invent, advance, but not conclude or predict

Conclusion in three points :

Enough of protection talk (author's rights, copyright, pirating), but a new economy in profusion and sharing : first try, and then see in what space and for which forms, a future state of stability might rebuild – but we are far from that, because the support mediums themselves don't contain this stability. “We are inventing the dinosaurs of the future,” this axiom also remains pertinent.

For the first time in human history, the library is a general library, films, music, texts, one must admit the shift is irreversible : we have, from eve-rywhere, access to everywhere – how can this axiom also not have significance, reversibly, for the creation of content itself, and the definition of the artist or the writer ?

Technical mediation that enables financial support of the artist (canvas, book sales), based on the process of putting work material at one's disposal, can no longer stand on its own, but through the service it pro-poses, inserting the functions for recommendations in one community (social network), proposing updates, event information about the artist, etc : a micro ecosystem linked to the work.

For the authors, it's up to us to enter resolutely into a new pact – the fabric of literary activity is in itself a living, constant redefinition – presence on the web, when it is not simply a window anchored on the old world, of the where to buy my books genre / what press reviews and three photos, it is a powerful instigator for experiences.

Enough of the catastrophe talks, forever the web as a “threat”, or the book that must “defend itself” from digital technology : industrial mass culture is a recent invention, less than forty years for music, even less for the book
that we must reward our art amid a relationship to the world that is not as-sociated to a culture-based industry, would only be, from the point of view of the history of literature and arts, a return to the norm.

Not an economic approach from the specific transformation of an object, but the general redistribution of tasks, and the social forms of these tasks :
starting from the text, thinking only of the text – but of the marvelous text born of our personal web use : when we write on our computer, we write with our entire computer, it's image possibilities, sound, documentation, received mail, network messaging – there is no “enhanced book”” the traditional book was a projection in a technical universe of reduced dimensions resulting from it own industrial constraints.

we cannot know “how we will read tomorrow”, but we can, with confidence, take risks in “how we write today”, and the hell with the rest.

le tiers livre, web & littérature

the technical image as flow, gesture and story

english | the author as ecosystem, the case of H.P. Lovecraft

description and extension of an author as ecosystem (and the parallel dream to apply it on ourselves)

Daewoo « French Voices Award 2016 »

About Daewoo as a novel – interview with Milena Heinrich

autobiographie des objets | try it in english ?

Zineb | Question (an introduction)

Serene | Nylon

Christiana | Mirror

Margaret | The bucket of mussels

Hannah | Telefunken

preparatory notes for Shenzhen | the author, not the book

preparatory notes for the Shenzhen talk

1

2

4

5

6

7

8

9

10 and last : the author, not the book

in english | Daewoo, a novel, how and why

François Bon | Daewoo, an introduction

How's life ? (an excerpt)

Berkeley | a digital biography (and now ?)

François Bon, a digitial biography (and now ?)

1982

1983

1988

1990

1992

1994

1996

1998

2000

2002

2005

2008

2010

2013

writing changes in the end

l'avenir du livre c'est qu'on pourra s'en passer

l'avenir du livre c'est qu'on pourra s'en passer

in english | François Bon, The new town (complete story)

BITER

THE YOUNG WOMAN WHO WATCHES ON THE BALCONY

STEVE

BITER

THE FRIGHTENED WOMAN WHO LIVES ALONE

THE YOUNG WOMAN WHO WATCHES ON THE BALCONY

ELVIS

STEVE

THE FRIGHTENED WOMAN WHO LIVES ALONE

THE YOUNG WOMAN WHO WATCHES ON THE BALCONY

BITER

THE CARETAKER'S WIFE

ELVIS

THE YOUNG WOMAN WHO WATCHES ON THE BALCONY

THE FRIGHTENED WOMAN WHO LIVES ALONE

BITER

STEVE

THE FRIGHTENED WOMAN WHO LIVES ALONE

THE YOUNG WOMAN WHO WATCHES ON THE BALCONY

BITER

in english | How to proceed into the unpredictable ?

François Bon | How to proceed to unpredictable ? (2011)

1/ 6 | context of the mutation

2/6 | in its recent form, the book is an ecosystem.

3/6 | It's not reading that has changed, its our customary use

4/6 | Internet doesn't exist.

5/6 | do we need the digital book ?

6/6 | explore, invent, advance, but not conclude or predict

description and extension of an author as ecosystem
(and the parallel dream to apply it on ourselves)