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Cycle for Life!
Fur
Ce soir, je suis allé me faire lire des textes au Diable Vert pour la soirée-cabaret des Auteurs du Dimanche. Je trouve dommage d’avoir manqué les six premières saisons, mais il faut bien commencer quelque part.
Pendant la soirée, j’ai cherché un mot. Parce que les auteurs ont besoin qu’on leur fournisse un petit mot qui sera pigé au hasard comme thème pour la semaine suivante. Juste un petit mot, et ils sont tout content, les auteurs. Alors moi, quand on me demande de trouver quelque chose, je fouille. Et comme j’étais seul avec mes deux amies les pintes d’inspiration, j’avais le temps de fouiller en masse. En cherchant tranquillement, je me suis souvenu qu’il existe des mots de la langue française qui sont totalement disparus de notre usage courant mais qu’on continue à utiliser dans nos expressions et proverbes. Quand je prends le temps de penser à ces mots désuets, je ris tout seul. Alors tantôt je riais tout seul à l’idée de soumettre le mot “fur”, comme dans “Au fur et à mesure”.
Fur…maudit que ça veut rien dire! Hein!? Je viens de chercher dans le gros Robert. Pas de panique mesdames, “fur” a tout simplement été remplacé par “mesure” avec le temps. En avez-vous d’autres des mots absurdes de la sorte ?
Mais finalement, j’avais soif un peu, et pis je pensais à mon déjeuner de demain matin, alors j’ai écrit “Pulpe”, mais il n’a pas été pigé. Dommage. J’y retournerai quand même dimanche prochain pour entendre ce que les auteurs auront écrit pour le thème “Moustache”.
Et si on me lit un texte qui combine “Moustache” et “Pulpe”, alors je risque de m’évanouir sur place.
Des pages et des pages
Je reviens de la libraire, le sac lourd de mots.
J’ai d’abord acheté Mañana, le dernier roman de Louis-Thomas Pelletier, collègue avec qui je n’ai jamais eu encore la chance de travailler. Je me suis aussi armé du nouveau Petit Robert 2007, parce que oui, je vis depuis près d’un an sans dictionnaire. Mais récemment, j’ai réalisé que de chercher l’orthographe d’un mot sur Google et de considérer celle qui retourne le plus grand nombre de résultats comme étant la bonne ne m’apprenait pas grand chose sur la langue française. Je me suis aussi procuré la nouvelle grammaire Grevisse, parce que j’ai encore de la difficulté avec les tout/tous, les pluriels de mots composés et l’écriture des chiffres sur mes chèques de loyer (ce pourquoi, depuis juillet, j’écris simplement “TROP CHER!!!” à la place).
Armé de mes nouveaux bouquins, je vais tenter quelque chose sans précédent…avoir des articles qui contiennent un plus grand nombre de commentaires que de fautes d’aurtografes. Pas facile, d’autant plus que ma meilleure commentarisateuse vient de pèter sa coche…
National Story Project, version Montréal
En 1999, Paul Auster a été invité à l’émission du matin All Things Considered sur la chaîne de radio NPR. Quelques semaines plus tard, on a demandé à Paul de revenir régulièrement à l’émission, question d’avoir une chronique à lui pendant laquelle il pourrait lire des histoires. Paul accepta, et demanda aux auditeurs de lui écrire de petites histoires vraies, de belles anecdotes et des hasard incroyables. Le National Story Project est ainsi né, la quantité et la qualité des histoires reçues dépassa les attentes de tous. Sa chronique dura 2 ans, en 2000 et 2001, pendant lesquels des centaines de chanceux se sont fait lire leurs courtes histoires par Paul Auster à la radio.
À la fin de ce projet, Paul décida de compiler les meilleures à ses yeux et d’en faire un recueil qui s’intitule I Thought My Father Was God (ce lien contient un mp3 d’une histoire lue par Paul Auster). Je l’ai lu il y a 3 ans et j’ai tout simplement adoré. Je vous le recommande frottement (ce n’est pas une faute, c’est une phrase d’un sketch de RBO, pour les amateurs….).
Ce matin j’ai eu l’occasion de repenser à ce livre et je me suis souvenu comment il m’a fait découvrir un style d’écriture que je cherche encore aujourd’hui dans les livres que j’apprécie (et je l’ai trouvé d’ailleurs, dans l’écriture de Matthieu Simard). D’ailleurs, je crois que c’est parce que j’adore cette écriture qui rend hommage au quotidien que j’ai ouvert ce blog il a maintenant deux ans déjà.
Mais si je vous parle de tout ça ce matin, c’est qu’à 6h53 Franco m’a réveillé en essayant de me faire croire que c’est bien meilleur le matin. En passant, je suis du genre à mettre mon cadran à une heure random, mais à garder cette alarme longtemps par la suite. Je me réveille à 6h53 depuis novembre. Cherchez à comprendre…Donc, Franco me réveille en me disant que l’auteur Jean Barbe a eu la brillante idée de contacter Paul Auster pour lui demander la permission de répéter l’expérience du National Story Project à Montréal. Ainsi, chaque vendredi M. Barbe lit une des histoires qu’il recoit de ses auditeurs.
Je vous invite donc à participer. Nous n’avons qu’à envoyez nos histoire à : meilleurmatin@radio-canada.ca
The Boy With Nails In His Eyes
Je prends souvent le temps de m’assoir devant mon clavier et de jouer n’importe quoi, sans vraiment avoir l’intention de composer quelque chose.
Et là, hier soir, j’ai écouter The Nightmare Before Christmas de Tim Burton pour la première fois. Ensuite, ce matin, dans l’autobus, j’ai lu son petit livre illustré, The Melancholy Death Of Oyster Boy & Other Stories, que j’ai trouvé bien bon. Et finalement, tantôt, j’ai bu deux bières particulièrement savoureuses.
Tout ça ensemble fait que ce qui a sorti était pas pire, alors j’ai décidé de l’enregistrer et de le nommer “The Boy With Nails In His Eyes”, simplement parce que ça été mon histoire préférée du petit livre. Voici donc l’illustration de Tim, la petite histoire en question et mon 2 minutes de piano.
The Boy With Nails In His Eyes
The Boy with Nails in his Eyes
put up his aluminium tree.
It looked pretty strange
because he couldn’t really see.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
Le 12 juin dernier, c’était la graduation des finissants de l’université de Stanford. Les gradués ont eu la chance de célébrer leur réussite avec Steve Jobs, le CEO d’Apple et de Pixar, qui était présent pour leur partager sa vision de la réussite et de la poursuite des rêves au moyen de trois épisodes de sa vie personnelle.
Le texte peut être trouvé un peu partout sur le net. Je l’ai trouvé très intéressant, voilà pourquoi je le place ici moi aussi.
I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories. Lire la suite…
I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.
The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?
It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.
And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.
It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.
Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
My second story is about love and loss.
I was lucky – I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation – the Macintosh – a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.
I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down – that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me – I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I retuned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.
I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.
My third story is about death.
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.
This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960’s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
Thank you all very much.
Steve Jobs
12 juin 2005
Update:
Encore mieux, je viens de trouver un enregistrement du discours. C’est tellement plus agréable de relaxer et d’écouter quelqu’un nous raconter son histoire que d’en lire une asser longue transcription.
Trucages Photos
Cette semaine j’ai fait 2 lectures en vue d’une dissertation qui pose des questions comme “Quesqu’un fait historique”. Pour une rare fois dans ma vie d’étudiant, j’ai l’impression que 1000 mots c’est court.
Peu importe, l’important c’est qu’une des 2 lectures était intéressante, surtout la section qui parlait des faits historiques. Pas facile, très intéressant (et très important) de vérifier si un fait est valide lorsqu’un historien tient à ne pas dire n’importe quoi. Un exemple du texte était le trucage d’une photographie de Staline, ce qui m’a poussé vers le livre duquel l’exemple était tiré: Le Commisariat Aux Archives. Les photos qui falsifient l’histoire, d’Alain Jaubert, écrit en 1984.
Un vieux livre oui, mais tellement intéressant. Il est remplit de photos truquées et surtout, d’explications historiques des motifs politiques et sociaux qui ont menés à cet outil de propagande puissant. Vous l’aurez deviné, les meilleurs trucages (en quantité, surtout pas en subtilité) nous viennent des grands mouvements de propagande du siècle dernier. Que ce soit certains amis de Lenine qui disparaissent grossièrement des photos de presse, des Juifs qui profitent de leurs séjours au camp de concentration pour faire du jardinage en souriant à la caméra, Mao qui maigrit subitement, Hitler qui danse ou même Che qui…..est toujours pareil lui!… ils ont toujours de bonnes raisons de jouer avec les images.
Une autre chose superbe, le livre s’arrête dans les années 60, bien avant que les graphistes ne troquent leur gouache et leurs pinceaux pour des ordinateurs et Photoshop. Oui, cette belle époque ou le graphiste n’avait pas droit au MagicWand pour déjouer Bonneau…s’il manquait son découpage par un mauvais coup de ciseau, il se faisait tirer une balle par l’officier qui le supervisait.
Venez me parler de vos conditions de travail maintenant.
ouch!
Ce matin, Richard Martineau fesse fort dans son blog. J’adore lire Martineau parce qu’il me fait toujours me remettre en question, plus que jamais ce matin parce qu’il pointe du doigt les jeunes chialeux de mon âge.
Dilbert
… autre découverte: Dilbert
(je suis dans une phase ou je découvre des choses que tout le monde connait déjà)
c’est pas nouveau du tout, mais je n’avais quand même jamais pris la peine d’en lire régulièrement pour voir si c’était comique. Et depuis une semaine, oui c’est comique.
Particulièrement celui de ce matin.
La section About Google de www.google.com déborde d’articles super intéressants à propos de l’entreprise et de ses technologies. Voici quelques unes des meilleures lectures que j’y ai fait:
- L’entière section Corporate Information : Intéressant de lire comment est né google
- Pigeon Rank : Le secret de la performance de leur système d’indexation.
- britnty spaers misspelling : Un bon exemple que la technologie encourage la paresse et les fautes d’ortographe.
- Google Copernicus Center : Google ouvre de nouveaux bureaux et recrute !
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Who ?
My name is François Côté. I live in Montreal, QC, and I've been blogging in french for a couple of years.I'm a Web Producer for CloudRaker. Because I love the Web and tons of other things that I want to share, I will also try to communicate my thoughts in english once in a while.
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