I read a lot of Jean Baudrillard, and he remains one of the few theorists I still read from time to time – my tolerance for academic work has gone way down. Feed has published a review of The Vital Illusion, the latest of his works translated into English. I read a bit of it in French last year, but it’ll be fun to read it in English as well – there are some pretty good translations of Baudrillard out there.
Le Monde Diplomatique:
The French cast a suspicious sidelong glance at the net in Wired to the counterculture by Philippe Breton. As expected, it’s a pretty muddled picture.
Going to see
X-MEN tonight – I actually went out of my way to get tix early instead of just showing up 10 minutes before as I normally do. It’s very odd, cause I haven’t been a comix guy for a long long time, that was a part of a much younger me. But I loved X-Men back in the day, l’poque as we say in French.
Random odd Montreal
memory of the day: When I worked at CTHEORY, I walked or took the bus to work. One day I was standing at the bus stop and this bike courier rides up St-Laurent and turns right onto Sherbrooke, with one hand on his handlebars. A regular bike courier too – in all his bike courier splendour, not some buttoned-down facsimile. So he passes me, and in his right hand he’s carrying a Coleman cooler; white with a red lid. As he passed me, I clearly read the label: Alert – Live Human Tissue. Only in French. And I thought, “it can’t be normal to transport transplant organs by bike courier, can it?” No, I didn’t think so.
Hint
If you ever write in French and want to code it in html, dust off your &-n-b-s-p and use it often. In French, it is mandatory to leave a space between a colon and the sentence it precedes. If you do not use a non-breaking space, you’re in trouble. It’s like Murphy’s law or something.
