Hymne à la Liberté

The ULTIMATE goosebump-inducing song. Been waiting for this to pop up on youtube for years. It used to make me almost cry… SO evocative.

Thanks to russianjewels and immobobby on Youtube for the lyrics.

Extrait de la bande originale “LA REVOLUTION FRANCAISE les années lumières” 1989

Composé par Georges Delerue et interprété par Jessye Norman

Toi liberté, liberté que nous aimons

Toi liberté, liberté que nous voulons

Sois notre espoir et notre force

Sois notre joie, notre bonheur

Nous pourrons

Chanter chaque jour plus haut

Chanter chaque jour plus loin

Chanter joyeusement cet hymne de foi

Liberté, Liberté, je crois en Toi

Liberté, Liberté, sois notre loi

Ô Toi qui peux donner l’espoir

Ô Toi qui peux sonner la joie

Ô Liberté, Liberté que nous aimons

Sois toujours plus près de nous

Sois toujours plus près de nos cœur

Loin de nous l’esclavage

Loin de nous les prisons

Plus jamais de privilèges

Loin de nous famines et massacres

Loin de nous le temps des tyrannies

Nous chanterons toujours ton nom, “Liberté”

Nous croyons en Toi.

On Outliving John Keats

Dear Keats, so many of your songs are sad,
The fruit of a life that could not see your sun
Rise in the wake of sickness and despair -
You lay on your deathbed thinking you had failed.
But look, now! Your truth, your beauty, has prevailed.
Not just your name, and place, did Time repair,
But also, the man who bore your name has won
No small regard from one who reads you and is glad.

So you broke away from safety, not knowing how to live
But knowing only that you had to write, or die;
Because there was such richness in your veins -
The joy and grief of being, and the race for more -
To run beside the writers who had come before.
And so leaping up to ride, you loosed the reins -
A breakneck pace. Now at the head you vie
With those who, once you thought, no ground would give.

The heart warms to Keats, whose story is the call,
Of language and of love, to one from level ground,
Who had nothing at first, not like the golden boys
Who knew their Greek, were born with silver to their lips,
Took what they wanted when they wanted, launched their ships,
And never suffered so much for the joys
Of poetry as this one, for great heights bound,
Once he made up his mind to stake his all.

Your story made me dream, when I was young,
That anyone could do the thing you did -
Through sheer bursting love for words and truth
And life, break through the dismal bond
Of ignorance and youth, to reach the stars beyond.
I too consider my origin uncouth,
But, like you, loved to turn the dirt for what is hid
Beneath – small treasures in the stones among -

Load every rift with ore! You taught me that,
As you taught me perseverance and belief.
At twenty-five you died not knowing that your name
Had not been writ in water but inscribed in stone,
Through your own passion. At twenty-five my own
Story runs counter, as my poetry’s flame
Has given way to arts of healing and relief.
Dare pace myself with you? Forgive me that.

For ’twas a time indeed, I took John Keats
As measure for myself, I thought with him to race -
My head was filled with jostling aches and dreams
And I too strained against the heavy chain
Of mortal mind, and leaden pen; my grain
Perhaps too coarse. Though bursting at the seams
I found I feared I could not keep the pace,
And left the chase, too proud to be like Keats.

One life to live only, and I fear to fail.
I fear to die, like you, thinking I had not reached
The mind of another, that my words will not be read,
That my labour will be lost. I am not as brave as you.
I have not the same capacity to woo
Melancholy; not in her lair to tread.
The ore in my life shall be that gently leached
By acts of service, not wordcraft that may fail.

See how I cavil though your sun is strong! -
I may imitate you in another wise;
Your zest, your jokes, your care for kith and kin,
The pleasure that you took in sight and sound.
Although I have a different playing ground,
May I, with the same amount of life, put in
All that you gave, and more, in different guise -
To serve, though my name will not live as long.

Joanna’s Favourite Books: A Retrospective

Books marked with an asterisk (*) are Joanna’s ALL-TIME FAVOURITE BOOKS.

Joanna’s favourite books in life. A reminiscence, to remind me of the books that I’ve found very good and been privileged to have the opportunity to read while growing up; which entertained me, accompanied me, disciplined me and played a part in making me into what I am.
* * *
“Books…are like lobster shells, we surround ourselves with ‘em, then we grow out of ‘em and leave ‘em behind, as evidence of our earlier stages of development.” – Lord Peter Wimsey

25 years old seems like a good time to review the lobster shells and look back on the activity that I once spent the bulk of my life on: READING…

The numbered list is a list of the books that stand out from all the books I’ve read simply because they agree with me very well. The fun books, the moving books, the rollicking and swashbuckling, fast-paced and witty books that I could read again and again. This list does not include all the “good literature” I’ve read as part of a healthy, balanced diet… such as the fresh bread of Charles Dickens, the bleak oats of Thomas Hardy, the morass of porridge of Austen (yes, I never learnt to appreciate Austen despite liking the movie “The Jane Austen Book Club”) and the brown rice of Dostoyevsky. These books are more like the yummy ginger chicken soup, mee swa and taugeh that I like with some snacks like fishballs, wasabi peas and bak kwa thrown in… Mmmm! Some of them have shaped my life more than others.

The unnumbered books (in brackets) are books which still stand out for me as well from all the others I’ve read in my life, whether because I liked or disliked them (liked more than disliked) – but in my opinion all are good books. I may or may not have enjoyed them just as much as the numbered books (which are the most ‘special’ ones, but many of the unnumbered ones are special too).

The Formative Years
“A children’s story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children’s story in the slightest.” – CS Lewis

1. Peter Pan — JM Barrie
2. The Jungle Books* / Kim — Rudyard Kipling
3. Narnia series — CS Lewis
4. The Scarlet Pimpernel — Baroness Orczy
5. The White Rabbit — Bruce Marshall (non-fiction; WWII)
6. Les Miserables* / Notre Dame de Paris — Victor Hugo
7. Biggles series* — WE Johns
8. The Neverending Story* / Momo* – Michael Ende
9. The Outsiders* — SE Hinton
10. White Fang / The Call of the Wild — Jack London

(Other things memorable during this period: A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett – I liked the descriptions of food; A Wrinkle In Time series by Madeleine L’Engle, Roald Dahl, Dick King-Smith, 101 Dalmatians by Dodie Smith, a few of The Chalet School series, The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster, the Oz series, the Joan Aiken series, the Mrs Frisby series, O. Henry and Saki, Howard Pyle and Roger Lancelyn Green, An Elephant for Muthu by Carolyn Sloan which was the first book to ever make me cry, at age eight. And I loved Enid Blyton’s Five Find-Outers ['The Mystery Of...'] and Malory Towers / St Clare’s series. I also liked The Enchanted Castle by E. Nesbitt and Greyfriars Bobby by Eleanor Atkinson. Edgar Allan Poe was also memorable for his horrible creepy stories. I still feel very freaked out when I think about ‘The Cask of Amontillado’.. Eee!)
* * *

The Exploratory Years
“There is no land uninhabitable nor sea innavigable”! – Robert Thorne; quoted by Lymond and Wimsey (as Ling first pointed out)

11. Le Morte d’Arthur* — Sir Thomas Malory
12. X-Wing series* — Michael A. Stackpole / Aaron Allston ESPECIALLY Starfighters of Adumar (I LOVE IT.. oh, DEFINITELY bak kwa, definitely comfort food)
13. The Once And Future King* — TH White
14. Watership Down* / The Plague Dogs — Richard Adams
15. Possession — AS Byatt
16. The Lymond Chronicles — Dorothy Dunnett
17. Oscar and Lucinda* — Peter Carey
18. The Book of Sorrows — Walter Wangerin Jr (This has the distinction of being the only other book that has ever made me cry after An Elephant for Muthu)
19. The Peter Wimsey series* — Dorothy L. Sayers, ESPECIALLY Gaudy Night (I LOVE IT)
20. The Man Who Was Thursday* / The Napoleon of Notting Hill / Father Brown series — GK Chesterton

(Many things were memorable during this period for both good and depressing reasons: Ivanhoe and Rob Roy by Sir Walter Scott, James Herriot and Gerald Durrell, PG Wodehouse, Joseph Conrad, Oscar Wilde, Somerset Maugham’s short stories, Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Katherine Neville’s The Eight, Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate, Gaiman/Prachett’s Good Omens, Carey’s Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, Irving’s World According to Garp, Huxley’s Brave New World, Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm, Golding’s Lord of the Flies, Beaumarchais and Moliere, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, Voltaire’s Candide, Petronius [I read this at age 13. Don't ask.. ok fine this was entirely Peter Wimsey's fault for having mentioned him], Glyn Maxwell’s Last Crossing of Isolde, Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac, Alexander Dumas’ Three Musketeers, some Dickens, some Hardy, some Chaucer, some Bronte sisters, Hilary Mantel’s French Revolution epic A Place Of Greater Safety. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings… it was such a chore to wade through the descriptions though… I waded through Dante Alighieri’s Inferno age 14 but I think I was too young to appreciate it. Not to mention my big medieval swashbuckling phase: the Mabinogion, the Nibelungenlied, lots of Arthurian stuff which would be a list in itself, El Cid, the Chanson de Roland,
etc… The White Goddess by Robert Graves.. a radical and inflammatory poetic manifesto which caused me to quit studying literature. As you can see I was completely overstimulated during my teenage years. I might have read all that stuff but I probably didn’t really “get” most of the scholarly aspect of it. I got a lot of fun though – it was indeed a golden age of exploring uncharted territory, an explosion of reading and discovery… at the expense of my sleep, eyesight and probably part of my sanity.)
* * *

The Growing Up Years
Clearly my adolescent years had been spent on an extravagant amount of reading, which left me highly-strung, oversensitive, given to romanticism, prone to making huge whopping life mistakes and in need of a good shaking-down back to sense and reality. These, my ‘Growing Up Years’ in university, were the years in which I tried to cut down hard on my reading to try to focus on my new direction in life and looked to hall, God and medicine to keep me grounded

21. Quo Vadis — Henryk Sienkiewicz
22. Between Silk and Cyanide — Leo Marks (non-fiction)
23. When We Were Orphans* — Kazuo Ishiguro
24. King Lear* by William Shakespeare (my favourite Shakespeare play)
25. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
26. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (this is not in the “Formative Years” because it made no impact on me then)
27. The Thursday Next series / Nursery Crime* series — Jasper Fforde, ESPECIALLY The Big Over Easy (I LOVE IT)
28. Theatre* / The Razor’s Edge / The Moon and Sixpence / The Painted Veil by Somerset Maugham
29. The Aubrey/Maturin series* by Patrick O’Brian (UNSPEAKABLY GOOD STUFF — BOTH GREAT WRITING AND GREAT FUN)
30. The Untouchable* — John Banville (perhaps the most brilliantly written book I’ve EVER read)

(Other things memorable during this period: The Dambusters by Paul Brickhill, The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series by Alexander McCall Smith, Oliver Sacks stories, Dead Men Do Tell Tales by William R. Maples, The Hunting of the Snark by Lewis Carroll, The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh, Inspector Rebus series and short stories by Ian Rankin, CS Lewis’ Till We Have Faces, George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss, Mark Haydon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, some Tennessee Williams, Julian Barnes, John Updike’s Rabbit, Run, Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series.. although it’s not as nice as Narnia, whatever Pullman may say ;P The Saint series by Leslie Charteris – I’ve only read a few. The Secret History by Donna Tartt… thanks to Siu Qey.)
* * *

And the Richest Language Award goes to…
- Dorothy Dunnett
- John Fowles
- AS Byatt
- Peter Carey
- John Banville

Funnest Writing Award goes to:
- Dorothy L. Sayers
- GK Chesterton
- William Thackeray
- Patrick O’Brian
- Ian Rankin
- PG Wodehouse, James Herriot, Gerald Durrell … bow before the masters!

Most Gek Sim (=Depressing; Hokkien for ‘Heart Ache’) Stories Ever:
- The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy – this takes the cake as the Most Traumatizing Reading Experience of All Time
- Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey – also very traumatic. My friends to whom I recommended it got PTSD from this one
- Jude The Obscure by Thomas Hardy… and most of Hardy’s stuff actually… what’s wrong with that man?
- The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevsky, another dour author if ever there was one.
- The Book of Sorrows by Walter Wangerin Jr
- Le Morte d’Arthur. Sighhhh

* * *

Fictional crushes (in chronological order)
1. Peter Pan (age 6-8)
2. Alan Breck Stewart in Kidnapped (age 9) – dear me, I even know how to sing The Song Of The Sword Of Alan! (in English translation)
3. Sir Gawain (age 9-16)
4. Sir Percy Blakeney in The Scarlet Pimpernel (age 12-13)
5. LORD PETER WIMSEY (spanning a long period from 13 to present)
6. Algy Lacey in the Biggles books (age 11-18)… hahaha <3…not so much a romance as a childhood friend and companion through my teenage years.
7. Jean Prouvaire in Les Miserables (age 11-18)… oh! EVEN MORE HOURS spent on Jehan. my most high maintenance crush. the only one with whom I was actually in love… oh well, 'in love'. and the only one besides Alan Breck who's not an Englishman so far haha (and the following three are all Scottish…)
8. Francis Crawford from the Lymond novels/ Simon Templar from the Saint (age 14-19)
9. Adam Blacklock from the Lymond novels (very similar to Wedge in some ways) – (age 14-19)
10. WEDGE ANTILLES.. (age 15-present) a guy who's good enough to render all other fictional characters I ever met after age 15 uncrushworthy for ever after. hahaha. (Get it? Wedge? Scottish? oh never mind…hee)

* I forgot to mention Stephen Maturin. (age 19-present). But he's not so much a crush as he is LIKE ME. so it's not a crush… it's an AFFINITY and a deep affection and respect and someone whose focus, dedication, erudition and medical knowledge I shall endeavour to emulate

* * *
There’re still lots of good books out there waiting to be discovered..

Books I’d like to read, some of which I have already taken steps towards acquiring:
1. Peter Carey – Theft
2. AS Byatt – The Children’s Book
3. George Eliot – Middlemarch, Silas Marner, Daniel Deronda, etc
4. Austen – still doing my darndest to work up some sort of affection for her writing
5. John Buchan – The Thirty-Nine Steps, Mr Standfast
6. Donna Tartt – The Little Friend
7. Dickens – Bleak House, etc
8. Fforde – Shades of Grey
9. Wilkie Collins – The Woman in White
10. Dodie Smith – I Capture The Castle
11. Bram Stoker – Dracula
12. Hilary Mantel – Wolf Hall
13. Vikram Seth – A Suitable Boy (though Swati told me she was so annoyed by the ending that she wished she hadn’t read it!)
* * *

Authors I’d like to read or read more of but haven’t got around to, much…
1. William Faulkner
2. John Steinbeck (though I’ve read some of his shorter stories eg The Red Pony and The Pearl, depressinggg)
3. Tolstoy – haven’t touched this guy’s stuff yet!
4. More Chekov (have read a few of his plays and short stories)
5. More Dostoyevsky (have read Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment but not the others)
6. Truman Capote – In Cold Blood
7. JD Salinger – like Jane Austen’s, I don’t take to his books naturally
8. Kit Marlowe and Ben Jonson
9. Nabokov – haven’t read anything of his besides Lolita
10. More Thomas Hardy
11. Virginia Woolf
12. More Aeschylus and Euripides
13. More Corneille and Racine come to that.. (blame Prouvaire for making me feel I have to acquaint myself with these guys)
14. RK Narayan and VS Naipaul
15. Hemingway

A Place for Tears

On 8/7/10, as Zichun and I were travelling to prayer meeting, there in the sky was the most solid rainbow I have ever seen in my life. It reminded me of the rainbow in The Golden Key. With one foot planted over the Kembangan MRT and the other stretching to East Coast, it was imposing and majestic… and the first rainbow I’ve seen in Singapore that I could see the complete arc of! I also noticed it was a double rainbow, with a faint arc outside the main one.

* * *

The past two years of my life have been a major shift into full ‘work’ gear. After the emotional roller-coaster of university which ‘toughened me up’ and made me feel I still had to toughen myself further – and what with starting work and having to steel oneself to working in close proximity with suffering / disease / death everyday, I’ve developed quite a lot of the armour that most adults, especially working adults, not to say doctors, have – ‘toughness’, doggedness, cynicism – the need not to feel so much so that one is able to swing into action when things need to get done, and try not to bat an eyelid when things go wrong, the better to be more efficient and get through the day without wasting too much emotion on antagonistic personalities, bureaucratic red tape or the personal tragedies of other people so as to conserve more energy for the next work day. The first year of work, also known as HOship, went by in a blur of 12-hour work days and up to 6 or 7 overnight calls a month, meaning at least 30-hour shifts on little or no sleep. That’s the essential ‘trial by fire’ that every HO has to go through – to toughen you up for the rest of your career and ‘burn all the dross’ away, in the area of work performance My personal life, for a while during HO-ship, was an irritant to me as well, and I preferred to keep emotion out of my life entirely so as not to interfere with my ability to work.

So, during this time, had I been praying much / going to church / reading the Bible?

Praying, yes, but not much dedicated time to praying or time spent deepening my relationship with God (let’s just say that my prayers were a lot more of the ‘desperate plea’ kind and not so much of the ‘quality time’ kind). Going to church – not so much, considering I had to round on a majority of weekend days (not to mention the weekend calls, etc). Reading the Bible – almost none, sad to say.

I told my mother I felt I had nothing to talk to God about during HO-ship. There was so much tragedy every day, not just in the sickness itself but in all the social issues that one runs into in hospitals: neglect, lack of love, poverty, homelessness – while it did not shake my belief in God, it made me feel that it was a bit awkward to talk to Him heh. Having been a skeptic when I was young, I’d been through all the questions of ‘why is there suffering in the world’ etc ad infinitum before I even became a Christian, so at least these questions didn’t bother me at this stage in my life. However, seeing all the suffering, in practice, made me just feel like sealing myself up so that I would not be bothered by it, the better to be more efficient to help the individuals who were suffering. I didn’t know how to talk to God about it. In church we hear so much about God’s wish to heal – and then one goes back to the hospital and sees all the ill people. It’s hard to see where God fits in sometimes. That’s why I say it felt awkward to talk to God – it’s feels like “what’s going on man!”. (I do know the theoretical answers lah, I know how to answer myself. Just takes some time to get used to reality.) It was better to just do my best for the patients, because I believed that when I did my best I was helping them the most.

(Of course, it’s not just the tragedy, in working life it’s important to be ‘tough’ also so that one doesn’t waste emotion on all the sheer frustration, stupidity and inefficiency that one encounters more frequently than tragedy!)

Besides, having to be ‘tough’ in itself put a kind of distance between me and God. I was doing my best to convert all my ‘weak emotions’ into practical, businesslike love: channeling all feeling into helpful action, so as not to be inefficient. Yet this seemed to be at odds with being vulnerable before God and waiting on Him (‘waiting’? I seemed to have no time to ‘wait’..) And it seemed that all the rest of the world was spending its time and emotions on very small things.. people (I mean both in and out of hospital) would get worked up and horrified at all sorts of things that weren’t even the real tragedies. When you’re trying to be ‘tough’ it’s difficult to identify with weakness and it’s difficult to be able to show real loving Love. It’s also difficult to love God.

OK, then the story changes again, since I became an MO two months ago. Life has become better and there’s more breathing space – for God, for Star Wars – which I didn’t think about AT ALL during HOship – and some recreation (at last.. haha) and for reading up. Am still trying to find a healthy balance among the above

Actually, in retrospect, I think there IS only one way to get through HOship, and that’s to do anything that it takes to survive, so the ‘being tough’ was probably a phase that was necessary albeit not healthy if extended even after one has the luxury to be less ‘tough’. So now that HOship is finally over, it’s time to work out the following questions because now one finally has the breathing space to do so:

1. How to ‘run the race’ and ‘beat my body to make it my slave’ in a way that allows God to be in control of the race rather than me; how to study hard to be competent and be diligent and always improving in my field and still have time for God. (actually that’s not so hard.. it just means cutting down on Star Wars)
2. How to toughen myself up spiritually without allowing my ‘being tough’, in a worldly sense, to compromise my relationship with God.

* * *

Anyway, in the prayer meeting that we went for on the day of the rainbow, the pastor prayed for breakthroughs, so I prayed for a breakthrough for myself in the area which I’ve described above (I guess I do have insight into my areas of weakness and where I need to be prayed for lah..) I felt that God was telling me that there was no need to be so ‘tough’ and it was time to let Him get close to me again by allowing myself to be vulnerable and to care more for the things that I see are wrong in the world. Of course it’ll take time.. having spent the last 10 years trying to convert myself from a ‘useless dreamer’ into an ‘practical doctor’ (‘O where are you going? said reader to rider’, yes thank you Auden and Yeats) – I’m still trying to find a balance. Then at the end of the service the pastor, who had also been told about the rainbow, mentioned that the rainbow is a sign of God’s everlasting kindness and His promise to be there for us. Someone gave a word about how God was reminding us that there is a place in our life for tears, it doesn’t matter if at times everything seems to be going wrong, but through the tears God will always be there like the rainbow is there. (Ok those weren’t the exact words, but that was the spirit of the thing).

So that was God’s amazing message to me, which He put a physical sign of in the sky for me to see so that I will always remember His promise of everlasting kindness

* * *

In the days since then, I’ve learnt a few things during quiet time. Over the past month or so I’ve been reading 1&2 Corinthians and now 1&2 Samuel and Philippians (some of it from following the 40-day fast book). I won’t elaborate on everything here but the gist is coming together now -

Some areas that I need to work on:
- not look out for my own interests (haha.. my interests meaning Star Wars…!!!!) only but those of others / Christ (Phil 2:21 – “For everyone looks out for his own interests, not those of Jesus Christ” / Phil 2:4 – “Each of you should look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others’)
- relearn sacrifice (in 2010 God has blessed me so much with a full and happy and very complete life that I realise I’m so comfortable I have to remind myself that it’s an honour to suffer for God! heh) … even though I guess for now the biggest sacrifice I’m called to make may be the very simple act of spending less time on Star Wars!
Phil 1:29 – “For it has been granted to you on behalf of Christ not only to believe on him, but also to suffer for him.”
- to keep a place for tears.. and pray and feel more for those around me and the painful issues in the world.

So I hope that the year to come will be one in which I re-fix my eyes on Christ and His aims.

If it were left completely up to me, my own aims would be:

1. study hard and be a good doctor
2. draw and practise diligently towards my dream of being a good artist
3. spend more time with loved ones and friends
4. run, cycle and swim more and become fitter and complete the marathon in 5 hours this time!

I think God would like me to make sure, though, that I put Him above all those priorities… I don’t think the two are in conflict though. But the aims of God are greater.. and as part of those aims I would also hope to become more loving, gentle, womanly &c. And learn not to be afraid of being weak but trust that God will be my strength.

There’s a lot to do!

Back from the dead!

Hahaaa I’m back from the dead!

I haven’t been writing for a long time because I’ve been trying to be hardworking hehe. Working, reading up on EMed stuff (I like my EMed posting! Two months into it and I still like it), studying for basic theory test (yeah I’ve FINALLY signed up for theory test and driving lessons!) and trying to do a bit of drawing and catching up on the side with the SW Universe since HOship ended (which means Betrayal, Exile and Fury by Aaron Allston). However, abstaining from blogging means that I’ve been spamming facebook. So I think it’s more productive if I direct my observations and energy back here to my blog.

My brother recently showed me this video that someone made of Snape to “Be Prepared” from the Lion King. It’s quite funny but somehow I couldn’t enjoy it with my usual enthusiasm cos something seemed “off”.

Then it hit me – I exclaimed, “It’s because it’s JEREMY IRONS singing but it’s ALAN RICKMAN’s face… They’re the same generation of British actors, so they’re too close and similar for it to be really funny… It’s as if someone dubbed Hugh Laurie’s voice over Stephen Fry’s voice, you know..”

My brother rolled his eyes at me and said, “Things are so complicated for you!”

HAHAHA

Un jour un jour

One of my favourite poems by Louis Aragon, turned into a song by Jean Ferrat. After all these years looking for this song… finally there is a youtube video which allows me to hear what the song sounds like… It brought tears to my eyes!

UN JOUR UN JOUR
Poem by Louis Aragon, music by Jean Ferrat

Tout ce que l’homme fut de grand et de sublime
Sa protestation ses chants et ses héros
Au dessus de ce corps et contre ses bourreaux
A Grenade aujourd’hui surgit devant le crime

Et cette bouche absente et Lorca qui s’est tu
Emplissant tout à coup l’univers de silence
Contre les violents tourne la violence
Dieu le fracas que fait un poète qu’on tue

Un jour pourtant un jour viendra couleur d’orange
Un jour de palme un jour de feuillages au front
Un jour d’épaule nue où les gens s’aimeront
Un jour comme un oiseau sur la plus haute branche

Ah je désespérais de mes frères sauvages
Je voyais je voyais l’avenir à genoux
La Bête triomphante et la pierre sur nous
Et le feu des soldats porté sur nos rivages

Quoi toujours ce serait par atroce marché
Un partage incessant que se font de la terre
Entre eux ces assassins que craignent les panthères
Et dont tremble un poignard quand leur main l’a touché

Un jour pourtant un jour viendra couleur d’orange
Un jour de palme un jour de feuillages au front
Un jour d’épaule nue où les gens s’aimeront
Un jour comme un oiseau sur la plus haute branche

Quoi toujours ce serait la guerre la querelle
Des manières de rois et des fronts prosternés
Et l’enfant de la femme inutilement né
Les blés déchiquetés toujours des sauterelles

Quoi les bagnes toujours et la chair sous la roue
Le massacre toujours justifié d’idoles
Aux cadavres jeté ce manteau de paroles
Le bâillon pour la bouche et pour la main le clou

Un jour pourtant un jour viendra couleur d’orange
Un jour de palme un jour de feuillages au front
Un jour d’épaule nue où les gens s’aimeront
Un jour comme un oiseau sur la plus haute branche

Quoi ca?

Now that’s something I didn’t know.

The Best Scene in Star Wars

Still sends shivers down my spine.

First Love

Vous rappelez-vous…?

Jean Prouvaire

(To think I’ve known this guy for 13 yrs now, the time it took for me to become the same age as him)
Image from episode 35 of the anime ‘Shoujo Cosette’

X-Men – some of the art

The more I see of X-Men art, the more I like it. As the issues progressed (I’m talking about the main continuity here as it dates from the 1980s, not even of any of the subsiduary universes)… the art got really nice! I like this style of drawing a lot.

Psylocke is pretty!

And I think Kitty is my all-time favourite X-Men character. Glad she gets such a big role now in Astonishing X-Men.