Sunday, July 29, 2007

Ice -- Station -- Zebra

Ten fingers of whiskey,

ten fingers of terrible drawing?






















And the coattails of my mind are dragging through the kind of stomach ache you get from drinking a lot of warm liquid very quickly.

And any school of thought that has, as a classifying gem, such statements as:

"HELL IS -- OTHER PEOPLE."

-is not the school of thought for me.

That is a line from an existentialist play by Jean Paul Sartre.
And it's the sort of thing that keeps me from sleeping soundly at night.

Jean Paul Sartre is dead, but I brought him back to make a single change to this play.
We spoke warmly together on my green couch and it turns out, very funnily, that in French, the aforementioned line goes: "L'ENFER C'EST -- LES AUTRES."

And what he really meant was: "L'ESPOIR C'EST -- LES AUTRES."
Which would translate to HOPE IS -- OTHER PEOPLE.
Very similar words.
Very understandable mistake.
Sartre confided in me, that he felt very poorly about fighting alongside the people of Paris in the May '68 uprising, while betraying their cause with falsely conceived typos that suggested hell comes from the togetherness of people.

I even got him to sign his name.
It's all legal, if you're very concerned about that.

Anyway, I'd be really happy if the next publishing of this play included his sanctioned changes
because it was a really bad play.







1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Interesting to know.