Schools Kill Creativity

Can't believe we hadn't watched this beautiful Tedtalk on creativity in education by Ken Robinson until now!:  

And here's the wonderful follow up talk he gave four years later on the revolution needed in education:

Ophelia Redpath - The Lemur's Tale

One of our artists, the lovely Ophelia Redpath, has just had her book The Lemur's Tale published.

Here's the book description:

A ring-tailed lemur is stowed away on a boat from Madagascar, and eventually ends up in the home of an eccentric but dysfunctional family. His night-time antics cause confusion, as he nibbles on the family's plants and raids their larder. But he brings great joy once they discover him curled up in a teapot, filling a little girl's life with hope and happiness.

You can buy it on Amazon here.

Thanks to the lovely photographer and artist Al Wildey for shooting this video of the September Art Show. And thanks to everyone who was on retreat here last month for helping out!

You can check out links to all the artists in the show under the video on Youtube.

The Muses...

One of our neighbor's daughter's, Hope Whitmore, just wrote a piece for Mslexia magazine about the Muses, inspired by names of our rooms at La Muse.

Here's a jpeg of the article below:

Two lovely artists, Mary Scurlock from Virginia in the States and Åse Pleym Bakken from Norway had an expo of the work they created at La Muse.

First there were aperitifs:

Then the Expo:

Shakespeare & Company Bookshop, a bastion of past literary fame, is accepting applications for its 10,000 Euros "Paris Literary Prize."


The prize is funded by the De Groot Foundation and is awarded for a novella. 

Examples they give of classics are The Old Man and the Sea, Animal Farm, L'Étranger and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

Another great thing besides the money is the fact that it is

"open to writers from around the world who have not yet published a book."

The 2 runner-up awards are for 2,00 Euros and all 3 winners are invited to a weekend stay in Paris to attend the Prize ceremony and read from their work at a special event at Shakespeare and Company.

Here are the submission requirements and here's how to enter.

Good Luck!

Eco Photos

Just found out that our friend Henry gave this great Ted Talk about his beautifully sad eco photos.

Please watch it, tweet it and like it to spread the word!

Happy New Year!

Photos of La Muse by Lowell Brower

Just uploaded a load more photos like this onto Facebook, all taken by the lovely writer Lowell Brower here.

Cross Dressing Moutaineer Dies...

The world is an amazing place...

Check out this article in the Telegraph.

Madrid shops hire graffiti artists

How cool is Madrid...

On Sunday they got a load of graffiti artists - over 130 from all over Europe, from Bristol to Milan - to paint their shop shutters. They did 140 shop shutters. Classic...

Here's the article in AFP.

Google Doodle

Love the animation Google put up today.

It's inspired by the French science fiction writer Jules Verne (Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea).

He would have been 183 today...

Michael Cunningham: A life trying to "burrow into these little bastards' minds and hearts..."

There's a good article in The Guardian: Michael Cunningham: A life in writing...

Here's what he has to say about the novel. Particularly like the bolded bit below:

"Never more so than in 2011, I feel like a certain interiority is what the novel can offer that no other medium can. I love movies, I love television, I love narratives of all kinds. The novel remains the most effective means of telling a reader what it's like to be somebody else. You can burrow into these little bastards' minds and hearts. And I often find novels that don't do that to be a little unsatisfying. Why would I read a book that doesn't take me some place that otherwise I couldn't go? Watch The Wire. Watch The Sopranos."

 And here's another nice line on Madame Bovary:

"Flaubert took this shitty, shallow little person, and looked at her so intently that he made her a great figure of literature."

Or this one:

"One of the great things about the novel – and one of the terrible things about writing a novel – is that it takes so long. It's so much about going sentence, by sentence, by sentence."

StreetView for Art!

Ok, Google gave us StreetView, but now they're doing the same for art?:

Explore museums from around the world, discover and view hundreds of artworks at incredible zoom levels, and even create and share your own collection of masterpieces.

Here's their promo:



Isn't that cool. To see just how amazing it is you can check out their website Art Project or play the video below to see what we mean:

Here are the galleries/places they've done it with... how fun...

Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin - Germany
Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian, Washington DC - USA
The Frick Collection, NYC - USA
Gemäldegalerie, Berlin - Germany
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC - USA
MoMA, The Museum of Modern Art, NYC - USA
Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid - Spain
Museo Thyssen - Bornemisza, Madrid - Spain
Museum Kampa, Prague - Czech Republic
The National Gallery, London - UK
Palace of Versailles - France
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam - The Netherlands
The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg - Russia
State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow - Russia
Tate Britain, London - UK
Uffizi Gallery, Florence - Italy
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam - The Netherlands

Silent Witnesses

We posted about Daniel Brown's new site here the other day, but we just wanted to let you guys know what he's working on right now as it's directly relevant to La Muse and the village - a new series of work called "Silent Witnesses."

It's the first set of nine drawings in the series called "Pathways and Passages” and how:

"seemingly ordinary or unseen architectural elements return them to the consciousness of a community, acknowledging them as living “members” of that community.  The selected architectural elements define the persona of each village, and have acted as silent witnesses to its history."

You can check out a slideshow of his beautiful new images here. 

Philosophers...

There's a good short article here in The Economist book section about the book Examined Lives: From Socrates to Nietzsche, by James Miller (FSG).

It contains:

11 biographical sketches of thinkers who tried to tread in Socrates’s footsteps, plus one on Socrates himself

and here's what it says about the French ones.

Rousseau:

preached on education, abandoned his five children by his long-term mistress, and made pathetic excuses for doing so (he was too ill and poor to be a good father, and a foundlings’ home is not such a bad place to grow up, anyway)... at the end of his life, Rousseau acknowledged that it was not nearly so easy as he had assumed to follow the Delphic oracle’s injunction to “Know thyself.” He concluded ruefully that it was “arrogant and rash” to profess virtues that you cannot live up to, and retreated into indolent seclusion.

and of course Montaigne is a:

master of the suggestive non sequitur and the self-contradiction.

Manifestation against France Telecom...

Forgot to post about the manifestation we attended the other day at the top of the village against France Telecom's refusal to listen to the locals of our village, but more importantly the villagers of Pradelles-Cabardes, over dropped calls and lack of service.

For over a year angry letters have been flying their way to no avail, so the locals, local mayors and the powers that be decided to block the road.

You've got to love the one below that says, "Le Telephone ne Passe Pas Vous Non Plus," which basically means, get lost, or, the telephone doesn't work so the road doesn't either, the verb "passe" meaning pass like in English but also not working in French:

Of course, as soon as the Midi Libre article and the L'Independant one came out, France Telecom promised 70,000 Euros in repair work and immediate solutions... the power of the press, and the people!!!

The Future of Books...

Just came across this great video of Richard Nash talking about the future of books at BookNet Canada's Technology Forum 2010 in a session entitled "Publishing 3.0: Moving from Gatekeeping to Partnerships."

Richard got married at La Muse years ago and since then has started up Cursor.

Tired of Having No Time to Write?

Come to La Muse and get away from it all!!!

Winnie the Pooh a la Francaise...

Dwight, a former barter fellow here, just sent us this classic video he found on a Huffington Post article of a little french girl recounting the story of Winnie the Pooh, her way: