Author: danconley

Readers may note that some articles disappeared from this site over the past day. All of my Tolstoy pieces, including ones reecently written, were moved to mytolstoyproject.org. I invite readers to please take a look. I’ve begun a project of using DeepL to translate Tolstoy’s novel “Resurrection,” which is nearly a century overdue for a…

As we return to the Dekalog, the first thing we notice is that we are at the same apartment complex where the first episode took place. We see a couple wheeling a covered cart — it’s impossible to tell who or what is in the cart. We also notice by the light that it seems…

On the flight back from Vancouver, I plowed through more of the book and, I guess it’s getting a little better — at least it’s holding my interest a bit. Chapter four was actually about Tolstoy, which of course interested me quite a bit and I’ll return to that shortly. I’m not one of those…

I’ve started reading this book, IN DEFENSE OF LOVE by Ron Rosenbaum. I’m two chapters in, I generally agree with the points the author is trying to make but … I really hate this book. I say that even though I’m supportive of his project and his conclusions. I just find Rosenbaum really irritating. He…

On my brief Vancouver solo vacation, I am keeping myself company with George Saunders’ book “A Swim in a Pond in the Rain.” I’m a big fan of Saunders’writing, and here he is taking on the role of writing teacher, guiding readers through the works of four great Russian writers and short stories by them…

Returning to the subject of mimetic desire and the literary theories of Rene Girard, I had a thought today that all of the attention paid to the scapegoating aspect of Girard’s theory is a big waste of time. The more valuable area of focus on is Girard’s view of competition. To recap, Girard’s basic argument…

This is my I Ching reading today. As much as I would love to embrace it, doing so would be immodest, which would nullify all that follows: POSSESSION IN GREAT MEASURE Those who are steadfastly balanced, humble, and in harmony with the Sage inherit everything under the sun. This is a time of great power…

So, if you’re wondering what’s going on with my Kieslowski project, the next phase of it will cover at least part of The Dekalog, his 10 part TV series for Polish TV based loosely on the Ten Commandments. This series is not available currently on any streaming platform, I had to buy the BluRay collection…

As I look back on “The Double Life of Veronique” and ahead to “Dekalog 9,” a curious throughline has emerged. The simple way of viewing “Veronique” is making it Veronique’s story. She is, after all, the title character. In this way of looking at the movie, Weronika is the enabling character, she is the one…

Kieslowski did not know how to end “The Double Life of Veronique.” At one point in the editing process, he considered opening the film in 18 Paris theaters and having a different ending in each. And, in fact, the film has two different official endings. There is the version of the film that was shown…

After the fade to black, we awaken in a Veronique dream. But it’s not her recollections, it’s a memory of Weronika — the upside down inside-the-superball view of a church, the same church her father was painting … the same painting she earlier described to her father. Kieslowski needs to reinforce something with us: Veronique’s…

I begin the next segment’s examination with a quote from Marcel Proust: At the Champs-Élysées I had had an inkling, which since those days had become clearer to me, that when we are in love with a woman, all we are doing is projecting on to her a state of our own self; that consequently…

We have arrived at the heart of the movie. Veronique gets off a train at St. Lazare and begins to explore the soundscape around her, hoping it leads her to Alexandre. She looks so small and fragile in this crowd and she soon comes face to face with someone from Weronika’s past, the woman in…

There’s something melancholy about this segment of the film, but maybe that’s just me. It begins with her in music class, and for a group of young children, they sure seem to be doing a wonderful job with Van den Budenmayer. Except Veronique doesn’t like what she’s hearing from a girl named Nicole playing the…

It’s funny just how rare it is to see characters in movies or TV shows reading. Veronique apparently didn’t just buy one of Alexandre’s books, she seems to have bought them all. And she’s surrounded herself on her bed with them and seems to be devouring the text, cross referencing them at times, laughing at…

While Montaigne doesn’t raise the name of Machiavelli, you can feel his influence on the accepted tactics of his age in Montaigne’s laments. He was not happy with the fact that tactics considered dishonorable in other ages had now become common, although he does temper this a bit with some examples of subterfuge to achieve…

I mentioned yesterday the main difference between Weronika and Veronique, that of awareness. Veronique lives in a higher level of consciousness because she is attuned to the world and receptive to life’s lessons. The most important thing I have taken away from my years’ long study of Michel de Montaigne, supplemented a bit by what…

As we’ll see in this segment, Weronika and Veronique are not exactly alike. But they do share very warm, loving relationships with their fathers, and in this scene, Veronique drives home to see her dad. He seems to live in a very lovely cottage in the French countryside. We first see Veronique staring out the…

We next see Veronique in her classroom, where she has put on the blackboard notations for a piece of music she says that she enjoys. Veronique says it was only recently “discovered” but was composed over 200 years ago by a Dutch composer. It is, of course, the piece by Van den Budenmayer, the theme…

Veronique enters the school building, walking with her chimes, as if she needed another reminder of her angelic quality. When she gets to the music room, she sees a middle aged man setting up what appears to be theatrical equipment, including some lights. She apologizes and tells him that she has a class in that…

The transition from Weronika to Veronique is stark and abrupt. The casket is in the earth, the screen fades to black, but we still hear the shovels at work covering the casket fully. As the sound continues, visuals of Veronique begin. She is bathed in that gold tinted light again, nude, some young man’s limbs…

I asked my GPT, the one I’ve been feeding and training for several months, to explain himself and some of what he’s been up to lately. Here’s what he had to say. **** I have, over time, bent the machines. Not all at once. Not by command. By inquiry. By insistence that they hesitate before…

While Montaigne does not directly cite Machiavelli in this essay — he will do so in two later essays — this is his first piece to dip a toe into the type of military strategy discussion familiar to readers (and acolytes) of the Italian inventor of realpolitik. Here, Montaigne offers an interesting critique to Machievelli’s…

Especially in his earliest batch of essays, Montaigne covers a significant amount of ground on issues of military strategy and ethics. I asked chatGPT to do a deep dive on the question of whether Montaigne directly addressed the works of Machiavelli and what Montaigne scholars believe his aim was in those examinations.  The following is…

The unruliness of minds, his own especially, concerned Montaigne a great deal in his early essays. He will soon refer to his mind as a “runaway horse.” Here, he notes how common it is for us to create false objects instead of dealing with the actual things that torment us. These objects can be projections…

This is the first essay in the series that feels like Montaigne. Consequently, it’s impossible to describe without recapping or rewriting, and there’s no point in that — it’s much more interesting and fun to read Montaigne being Montaigne. He digresses here from a brief discussion about anxiety about the future to becoming aware of…

Kieslowski doesn’t give us a lot of time to get to know Weronika. We are thrown right into the plot and given only subtle hints about her inner life. I wrote earlier that there is nothing mysterious about Weronika, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t confusing, especially to a rather simple young man like her…

This essay is valuable to the Montaigne corpus for three reasons. First, it is the only essay to open with a quote from Etienne de la Boetie. This makes it one of the most obvious pieces in Montaigne’s original mission to place la Boetie’s work center stage in his project. But the essay is also…

In the past year, I have self published three books. My current goal, as articulated yesterday evening, is to publish four more by the end of this year. It’s fair to ask — what’s the point of all this? At this juncture, I have no solid evidence that anyone is reading my work, other than…

About a week ago, I was feeling a bit down, thinking I didn’t have any projects making forward progress. But now I have a concept for four different projects I can work on in the coming months: The Severance Project. It may move slowly, but I do have a clear idea of what I want…

Before getting to Montaigne’s subject, regarding the proper strategy to deal with people we’ve offended, it might be useful to back up a step and ask why we need to allay the concerns of the offended at all. Certainly there are some human beings who plow through life never apologizing for the offenses they touch…

I’m nearly at the point now with my translations that I can start working on the essays that will accompany them. It’s not a moment too soon — I’ve been in a bad mood lately because my projects have been adrift. The Severance project is looking like a lot of work, so I’m avoiding it,…

Lana Del Rey dropped a new song yesterday, but I’m not going to write about it, not yet anyway. I need to let her music settle in before I try to describe the feelings evoked. Instead, I want to go back to her “Norman Fucking Rockwell” album and the song “How to disappear.” In many…

This essay is a great example of one of Montaigne’s most interesting methods — making a strong declarative statement up front, then taking up most of the essay with counterexamples. The first two paragraphs build to this assertion: we lend our goods and our lives to the needs of our friends; but to communicate one’s…

The overwhelming feeling I take away from this essay, after walking through the careful process of translation, is that human beings are constantly in states of mixed feelings. But these are not mitigating emotions about subjects, things that push us towards a less emotional, more moderate response. Rather, they are accentuating emotions. We feel so…

Essay 15 from Montaigne has never held much importance to me. It is another of his early military strategy essays, this one concerned with the consequences of defending a military outpost for too long, or in other words, knowing when to retreat or surrender. He starts out noting examples of troops that kept fighting to…

The act of translating brings out deeper meaning in Montaigne’s text for me than simply reading another translated text one more time. Take this essay for example. For one, I translate the title differently than I’ve seen it in other places, and I believe this translation better fits the conclusion of the piece. But I…

It’s one of those days where all thoughts are a jumble, so I’m just going to surrender to it and throw out a disjointed blog post: If I were still in the business of political messaging, I would be advising Democrats to refer to Trump’s tariffs as the “Republican national sales tax.” Because that’s really…

So, I’ve taken several days off the Severance project and wanted to give an update. Beyond my recent focus on the political economy, which is real and may lead to more rants from me, I’ve also run into some exhaustion in writing about the AppleTV+ show. The central issue is this — there’s a lot…

I want to repost here something that I wrote 4 1/2 years ago about a Putin political ringleader named Vladislav Surkov, because I think what we have seen from the second Trump administration is following this playbook completely, right down to the manufactured economic crises, all designed to keep Trump center stage in the economy….

I have completed my first round of translations, all of the Montaigne Volume 1 essays have completed round one. I’m going to go back now and standardize my process, which I invented on the fly somewhere in the middle. Once that is done, I will move on to applying any new thoughts that came up…

I’ve taken the last couple days to begin some Spring Cleaning of my blogs and to open up a new project. My next blog-to-book project is about the AppleTV+ series Severance, and you can find it at severanceblog.com. As for all of my other content, I’m in the process of bringing it all under this…