Quotation time!
Il faut lire l’entrée du 17 janvier du weblog de Neil Gaiman, très amusante. Tiens, allez, hop, je vous la recopie ici:
Yesterday I got a juicer. I dropped apples and celery and carrots and such into the top and watched everything that went in at the top turn into juice and pulp. Vegetables you could drink. “This is fun,” I thought.
I woke up from dreams this morning, in which my interest in juicing had led me to experiment with other things you could juice, and in which I had begun to juice books and photographs. I was mildly surprised to find that you could extract the essential essence from any book or picture in the form of a juice, removing the pulp. “Why has no-one else thought of this?” I wondered, as I turned several thick novels I’ve not had time to read into half a cup of pleasant-tasting liquid I could drink in moments. “I’ll probably get a medal for discovering this.”
And I woke up, half-disappointed, half-amused.
Un petit détail que j’ai beaucoup apprécié, dans le premier film du Lord of the Rings, c’est le fait que Rivendel y a un aspect un peu à la William Morris, et que Galadriel est nettement d’une beauté préraphaélite (quoique je l’aurai préférée en rousse). Pourquoi je dis ça, maintenant? Parce que je continue à lire The River (The Thames in our Time) de Patrick Wright, passionnante & étonnante visite guidée des bords de la Tamise avec une vision résolument « gauchiste » des événements, et que j’y ai lu l’autre soir une amusante tirade quant à Tolkien, l’influence que les Inklings eurent de William Morris & des Préraphaélites — et leurs conséquences…
Whatever the virtues of Lewis and Tolkien, their works inspired some dreadful inanity in the sixties and seventies, when pre-Raphaelitism collapsed into joss-sticks and patchouli oil at the craft fair, and when every high street, including, no doubt, Oxford’s, had a boutique called Gandalf’s Garden and yearned for a psychedelic pub called Middle Earth. There was a lot of infantile escapism in that late manifestation, personified by the ‘stoned’ pixies who used to stagger around clutching rune staffs and LPs by Tyrannosaurus Rex in the years that where actually defined by the oil crisis and the miner’s strike. The Pre-Raphaelite stream may have flowed on into real ale and ‘Green’ protestation since the early seventies; and Morris would surely approve of the simple water-purification systems and other ‘intermediate technology’ developed by Oxfam since it was founded as the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief in the 1940s. But nothing will cure me of the suspicion that one of the lessons of Kelwscott and its posthumous cult should be, ‘Never trust a Pre-Raphaelite.’