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[...] Half-heartedly, I picked up The Firm again, skipped forward two hundred pages, skipped back fifty; by chance I happened on a sex scene. The plot had developed a fair bit: Tom Cruise was now in the Cayman Islands, in the process of setting up some kind of money-laundering scheme, or in the pro…

[...] Meanwhile, people were working, making useful commodities; or sometimes useless commodities. They were productive. What had I produced in the forty years of my existence? To tell the truth, not very much. I had managed information, facilitated access to it and disseminated it; sometimes, too,…

In the years that followed, pork prices continued to plummet. There were farmers' protests, marked by a desperate violence; tons of slurry were dumped on the Esplanade des Invalides, a number of pigs were gutted in front of the Palais Bourbon. At the end of 1986, the government announced emergency …

[...] her passion for contemporary art is real. As far as I'm concerned, I'm not actively hostile to it: I am not an advocate of craft, nor of a return to figurative painting; I maintain the disinterested attitude appropriate to an accounts manager. Questions of aesthetics and politics are not my t…

I spent the last day of my compassionate leave in various travel agencies. I liked holiday brochures, their abstraction, their way of condensing the places of the world into a limited sequence of possible pleasures and fares; I was particularly fond of the star-ratings system, which indicated the i…