Billy's Lines Of Gibberish

Le Maillot Jaune

It is in the very nature of sport that competitors do as much as they can to win. For an athlete though, searching for the first place should not apply to the results of the competition only, but dignity, human excellence, and fair-play as well.

In other words, 'being the first at any price' is not defensible. There's a gap between being the first, thanks to your efforts, perseverance and biological aptitudes, and winning because you cheated.

Many people think that 'the end justifies the means' though. According to this logic, being the first is not the main goal in itself. It is a way to get honours, please a government, make money, and have many other people around make money also.

When I was a child, the Tour de France punctuated July. I would spent hours watching it on TV. I undoubtedly learned a lot of French geography by writing down every stage, with distances, intermediate towns, passes to get over, etc. I would read every day in the local newspaper about the day's winner and the jersey holders: the white, spotted, green, and of course, yellow jersey — Le Maillot Jaune.

Tom Simpson Mont Ventoux, July 13, 1967

And then... on July 13, 1967, British cyclist Tom Simpson died climbing Mont Ventoux. Millions people saw it live on TV. I did. "Heat exhaustion" they say. That's right, blame the heat... Even the child I was at the time understood it could not be related to heat only. We heard later that Simpson's autopsy found amphetamines and alcohol in his blood. Police also discovered amphetamine tablets in the pocket of his jersey and in a team support car.

As year passed, we heard of steroids, androgens, the 'pot belge', erythropoietin, and so on. We learned that, besides training, willpower, capacity for overcoming pain, that are still necessary in a crazy competition that aims at putting back the limits of human resistance to pain and effort, doping substances were and are still essential.

Richard Virenque, Marco Pantani, Jan Ullrich, Bjarne Riis, Floyd Landis… and dozens other 'champions'. Dozens of cheats and liars who had sworn for years they were 'clean', until they were convicted of doping, and then cried and apologized. Many cyclists have not been caught yet, or have miraculously been put in the clear, scientifically guilty but not guilty on juridical grounds… What a farce.

Anyway. A lot of people still love the Tour de France… people outside France especially. Among the people who watch Le Tour on the French roads every year in July, there are a lot of fans from all over the world, bikers or not, who come to France especially to see it. Good for them.

Yet, as for me and millions of French people, I don't follow the Tour de France any more. I watch the News of the Tour sometimes though. Not because I want to hear about who won the stage or who leads the race. Only, I am a little interested in hearing which cheats will be unmasked this time.

Georges Perec's portrait as a jigsaw puzzle Puzzle pour un portrait de Georges Perec La Poésie dans un jardin — Festival d'Avignon 1988

Born in Paris in 1936, Georges Perec was the only son of two recent Jewish immigrants from Poland, Icek and Cyrla Peretz. His father volunteered for French Army during World War II, and was killed in 1940. His mother was deported by the Nazis and died in Auschwitz in 1943.

Georges survived because his mother had previously sent him by train to a little town in the Alps mountains, where relatives took charge of him. They had him baptized Catholic and his name frenchified to Perec. They adopted him formally after the war.

Disappearance of his parents when he was a child, disappearance of his Jewish roots, there is nothing so surprising that Perec was haunted by absence, loss, erasing, disappearance. “I have no memory of childhood” are the first words of his novel W or the Memory of Childhood, an admission that he remembers almost nothing of his early life as a Jew in Nazi-occupied France.

In 1969, Georges Perec published a novel named La disparition, a phrase that means ‘the disappearance’ in English. A word for word translation of the title into English had to be replaced by A Void (Gilbert Adair) or A Vanishing (Ian Monk) though, because the letter E appears three times in ‘the disappearance’, and the whole novel  is a 300 pages lipogram written without ever using a E.

La disparition tells the story of the disappearance of a man, whose name is Anton Voyl (in French) or Vowl (in English), in a strange world from which an enigmatic part five of 26 has disappeared as well.

It implicitly talks of its own lipogrammatic limitation, starting with the name of the missing person — Voyelle in French, Vowel in English, after the E's have been lost. Characters in the novel work out what is missing, but they risk fatal injury if their though gets too close to that taboo “circular symbol with a horizontal bar across it”.

The constraint that underlies the story induces endless tricks and distortions of language, and describes how a world can be built that fills that void. Besides the amazing lexicographic feats of writing a whole novel with zero occurrence of the most frequent letter in French and English though, the silent disappearance of the letter is a metaphor of loss, and suffering it causes.

In French, E is the only vowel in père [father] and mère [mother], and sans E [without E] sounds very much like sans eux [without them]. Furthermore, since the name Georges Perec is full of E's, the disappearance of the letter also ensures the author's own disappearance.

The absence of a sign is always the sign of an absence, and the absence of the E in A Void announces a broader, cannily coded discourse on loss, catastrophe, and mourning […] Each "void" in the novel is abundantly furnished with meaning, and each points toward the existential void that Perec grappled with throughout his youth and early adulthood. A strange and compelling parable of survival becomes apparent in the novel, too, if one is willing to reflect on the struggles of a Holocaust orphan trying to make sense out of absence, and those of a young writer who has chosen to do without the letter that is the beginning and end of 'écriture' [writing].     — Warren Motte

Postscript: When I challenged myself with the Blogging by numbers constraint, I decided the first entry in the series would be related to Number 0 — not 1 — and dedicated to A Void. It seemed fair enough because the very idea of the constraint was inspired in particular by the works of Georges Perec and Oulipo. I did not know though that another void was just about to occur, when my I had my laptop fell from a table three weeks ago and its hard drive broke. Another aching void and a lot of work to do again, because I had not performed any save for a month or so …of course. Anyway, I am back now.

1988 Poster of Drowning by Numbers by Peter Greenaway (With number 44 in the background)

In his 1988 movie 'Drowning by Numbers', British Director Peter Greenaway tells the strange story of three women belonging to three generations in a same family, who bear the same name and cause their husbands to drown, one in a bath, one in the sea, one in a swimming-pool.

The result is a fascinating, intriguing, weird black comedy. The local coroner is drawn into a plot to disguise the murders. As the plot progresses, his son explains the rules of various games played by the characters as if they were ancient traditions, while the numbers 1 to 100 successively appear in ascending order, either seen in the background or spoken by the characters.

Most of the games played in the film have been invented for its purpose, using rules that are so complex that Greenaway later published a whole book dedicated to explaining them, entitled 'Fear of Drowning by Numbers'. That a whole book was needed to explain rules of a movie built all around constraints reminded me of the works by OuLiPo members, especially 'La Vie Mode d'Emploi' (Life: A User Manual) by Georges Perec.

OuLiPo, the Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle (Workshop of Potential Literature), is a group of writers and mathematicians who seek to create literary works using constrained writing techniques. They use constraints as a means of triggering their ideas and inspiration.

Quand tout est permis, rien n'est possible.

If everything is allowed, nothing is possible. (Jean Ricardou)

Georges Perec especially, certainly the most famous OuLiPo member with Raymond Queneau and Italo Calvino, wrote the best part of his work using lipograms, palindromes and various kinds of constrained writing. His masterly book, 'La Vie Mode d'Emploi' (Life: A User Manual) is a complex (patch)work built according to a complex plan of constraints.

This fascinating book tells the lives and thoughts of the inhabitants of a fictitious building in Paris. Although it is a book that can be read and enjoyed without being concerned with the constraints, one quickly discovers that there are complicated games going on all over the place, and try to find the constraints like a detective. You will only find a small part of them anyway: here also, a whole dedicated book had to been published, that contains their inventory.

Unlike 'Fear of Drowning by numbers' though, the 'Cahier des charges de La Vie Mode d'Emploi' — the title means 'Specifications of Life: a User Manual', yet the book has not been translated into English — has not been published by its author, but exegetes after he died.

I have blogged using constraints myself in a couple of occasions, for fun and as a help at times of lack of inspiration. I assigned myself the thematic constraint 'Write about the 5 senses and Paris' once. It ended up in six blogs about Sight, Hearing, Smell, Taste, Touch and the Sixth Sense. Another time, it was 'Use the names of at least 10 movies by Alfred Hitchcock'. I am not sure anyone noticed the titles hidden in this story despite several clues, but I enjoyed writing it.

From now on, I will obey the constraint 'Write blogs on topics one can associate with successive ascending numbers'. Hopefully, this constraint will stimulate my imagination. We'll see until what number I succeed in following the rule, be it agreed that I will probably interpolate 'normal' blogs between the 'blogs by numbers' sometimes, in particular in response to a special event or for an anniversary.

When you have been blogging for years, sometimes you wonder what's the use. You often feel unsatisfied with what you have written, and guilty about what you have not. It takes a lot of time, especially when you are weird enough to write in a foreign language. Furthermore, you know that few people will read your prose, which is quite fair because, if you don't close your eyes to the truth, what you write is not of any special interest.

You began blogging for some reason. Over the years, you thought of giving up several times. After all, what the heck! You stopped blogging then, a couple of times, but you always resumed, when withdrawal symptoms appeared. At the end, you are still here. You keep on writing about topics you are interested in, you write down thoughts of yours, or something someone else once said. Most often in fact, what you publish is not dedicated any more to the few people who will read it. It is just something you need to do, "because".

Writing in English was a constraint I put on myself when I began blogging, because I then used an English-speaking network (Yahoo! 360°) where most people would not understand French. Also, I wanted to improve my skills in a language I have never liked, but is nowadays a necessity, the lingua franca of our times. My best friends here, beside a couple of native speakers friendly enough to tell me about my mistakes, have been an electronic dictionary and Google, as an online checker for idiomaticity.

I thought of switching to French several times, but never did. Not only because I did not want to disappoint my public (hah) but also, funnily enough, because I have come to realise that I write blogs more comfortably in this foreign language I don't fully master than in my native language. When I write in French, I cannot help from rebuilding every sentence indefinitely, because I am a never satisfied perfectionist. I cannot have such a problem in English. I know there are certainly errors in every blog of mine. I hardly deal with the past tenses. Some sentences are certainly clumsy. Yet I am not able to see it.

Contrary to what I wrote a few weeks ago, I cannot be a real stickler in English, because I just cannot feel the English language. And you know what? It is great.

Several years ago, I was given a book entitled Chronique du vingtième siècle (The 20th Century Saga), edited by Le Monde newspaper.

It is a huge book (1350 pages, A4 size) that contains excerpts of most relevant articles published in French newspapers in the 20th century. 'Sarajevo: Archduke shot dead' (June, 1914); 'Lindbergh flies over the Atlantic' (May, 1927); 'Paris is now free' (August, 1944); 'Explorers on the Moon' (July, 1969), and so on.

You have a strange feeling when you read articles written many decades ago, on the very day historic events happened. They fill in a gap between personal experience and what you have been told. Obviously, the journalists who wrote the articles could not know about a future that is part of a well-known past for present readers. Yet, paradoxically, such a lack of knowledge adds a lot. When an event happened long time ago, before you were born, or able to understand it, you see it as a piece of History; almost an abstraction. On the opposite, when you can remember a event, how you heard of it, what you thought about it at the time, it is part of *your* history. Quite not the same.

When you read articles in such a book, you feel as if this gap has been filled in. Past events become more real, because you hear about them happening 'live'. Furthermore, beside words, you see pictures, some of which are known throughout the world: Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin in Yalta. Edwin 'Buzz' Aldrin on the moon, photographed by Neil Armstrong who appears also as a reflection on the visor of Aldrin's helmet. Vietnamese girl Kim Phúc, badly burnt, running down a road after a Napalm attack...

It works with articles, it works with photos. It works also with films. I remember the year 1989 very well: resistance and demonstrations in communist countries, protesters in Tiananmen Square, the fall of the Berlin wall. The youngest cannot remember how hopeful we Westerners felt at the time, and how sad and angry after the massacre  in Beijing. Yet, thanks to the movie below — that I have displayed several time on my successive blogs — they can feel the same as we did, 20 years ago exactly, when the desperate action of the Unknown Rebel testified about what the courage of a unique human being can be.

The Triumph of Death or The Three Fates Flemish Mille fleurs tapestry (ca. 1510-1520).

The three spinning goddesses on the left were named Moirae in Greek Mythology. Later, the Romans called them Parcae. Now, we call them the Fates. They were the daughters of Nyx, the primordial goddess of the Night, also the mother of Hypnos (Sleep) and Thanatos (Death)

Klotho, the spinner, would spin the thread of life from her distaff onto her spindle; Lachesis, the drawer of lots, would measure it with her rod; and Atropos, the inexorable, would cut the thread of life with her abhorred shears.

Several papers and posters dealt with Klotho last week, at the World Congress of Nephrology in Milan, Italy. As you will guess though, kidney specialists have not experienced a sudden interest in Greek mythology, even in a place that once was part of the Roman Empire. The many scientists who have written hundreds of articles about Klotho in medical journals for a couple of years have not either. Only, a blood protein, and the gene that codes for it, have been given that name, Klotho, because of their striking properties.

I will not go into details of the specialised topics discussed during the Congress about relations between Klotho, bone and kidney. Yet everyone will probably be interested in hearing that blood levels of Klotho protein lower with age in humans, and that Klotho-deficient mice suffer a disease that simulates fast ageing. Even more noteworthy, in experimental studies, mice had their life span extended by more than 30 percent when their Klotho gene was over-expressed.

In short, Klotho protein acts as a hormone that extends life span by about 30 per cent... in mice at least. Klotho could be shown to be an anti-ageing hormone in humans some day. I bet you we will hear a lot of it in the next future then. We should be cautious though, and learn from the wild hopes put lately on DHEA and HGH. Essentially, let us keep a critical mind when New-Agers and charlatans will talk of Youth Hormone or Youth Gene again. A little bird told me it could happen soon.

9:00 am, New-York (Jean-Jacques Sempé)

I have hardly unfolded the newspaper over the small round table, between a butter dish and a plate with toasts and croissants. I hold a mug of Earl Grey in my left hand instead of putting it down, in order to see articles while I sip. There are essentially horrible things in a newspaper. Politics. Crime. War.

I am in a hotel room in Milan, Italy, reading yesterday evening's issue of Il Corriere della Sera. A newspaper is something different when you read it while having breakfast. It smells fried eggs and tea. Orange juice, also. And apricot jam. And butter. War tales cannot touch you when you are wrapped in such fragrances, can they?

News are written in Italian today, it adds some distance. Also, I am not at home. Under the headlines' durability, today's disasters turn relative. "European Parliament: one week only until the Election". Well, I'll read about it later maybe. "What do Milanese think of 'La Liga Norte'?" Bah. "Twenty-six alleged US spies will be judged in absentia by an Italian court, for kidnapping and torturing an Egyptian Imam". Aw. Not today, please. "Georges Prêtre will return to La Scala tomorrow and conduct the Fifth Symphony by Gustav Mahler". Ah, let's read this article... Next, I'll have a look to sports. And I'll read weather forecast also.

Seven o'clock. It is still early... I'll go to the Milan International Convention Centre a bit later. This Sunday of work is not in a hurry to begin.

Venus of Urbino by Titian (1538) Oil on canvas, 119 x 165 cm — Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence

I had known her for years, we had never meet though. About two years ago, I had hoped we would, at an exhibition dedicated to Tiziano Vecellio, aka Titian, held in the Palais du Luxembourg, the Museum of French Senate in Paris.

Portrait of a young woman (1536) Oil on canvas, 96 x 75 cm State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg

Yet, she stood me up. Well, as a matter of fact, she came, but she came on disguise, dressed as the young lady with an elegant feathered hat on the right side. I once wrote a blog about our quasi-meeting.

Because she was not allowed to travel to Paris, I had to go to Florence, the city where she has lived for about four centuries. I am just back from a five-day vacation trip there. As you can imagine, my eyes are still full of a lot of wonderful images: paintings, frescoes, statues, by Botticelli, Giotto, Lippi, Fra Angelico, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Donatello, and so forth, displayed in many places in the city. I am going to blog about them soon, yet on my first day in Florence the main thing was: I went to the Uffizi Gallery and I have met her at last!

Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be." (Walter Benjamin)

In 'Little History of Photography' first, then in his famous essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Marxist philosopher Walter Benjamin used the word aura to describe the specificity of the work of art, which is unique, linked to a special place, and is part of history. According to him, and without going into details, mechanical reproduction of artworks by means of modern techniques such as photo and cinema frees them from place and ritual, and results in a loss of their aura. Although I don't agree with many developments of Benjamin's theories in terms of mass culture, I did fell Venus' aura in the Uffizi Gallery in a much deeper way than when I looked at her reproductions.

Thousands of pages have been written about this great painting. There have been endless commentaries and discussions about the meaning of Venus' open eyes that look directly at us, her left hand location, the bouquet in her right hand, the dog asleep at her feet, the two handmaidens in the background rummaging in what seems to be a wedding chest, the plant pot near a column on the window ledge, and many other details in the painting.

Sleeping Venus by Giorgione & Titian (1510) Oil on canvas, 108 x 175 cm — Gemäldegalerie, Dresden

I won't add to so many erudite works. To me, the Venus of Urbino is simply one among the most beautiful pieces of arts ever, as well as a big step towards modernity in painting. There is little doubt that Titian took the topic of the Venus of Urbino from a painting by Giorgione, the Sleeping Venus (also known as the Venus of Dresden), he himself finished after his friend and master died.

Venus  by Palma Vecchio (ca 1520) Oil on canvas, 113 x 186 cm — Gemäldegalerie, Dresden

Perhaps he knew also of the Venus by Palma Vecchio, where the nude woman, who lies in the country like in the canvas by Giorgione, gets the Venus of Urbino's wide open eyes.

Titian's Venus of Urbino in turn inspired countless painters over the centuries in one of major topics of Western Art: the reclining female nude. It includes such huge painters as Francisco de Goya and, especially, Édouard Manet when he painted Olympia, more than three hundred years later.

Venus by Lambert Sustris (1558) Oil on canvas, 116 x 186 cm — Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Venus and Cupid by Johann Rottenhammer (ca 1610) Oil on canvas — Gemäldegalerie, Dresden

La maja desnuda by Francisco Goya (1805) Oil on canvas, 87 x 190 cm — Museo del Prado, Madrid

Olympia by Edgard Manet (1863) Oil on canvas, 130 x 190 cm — Musée d'Orsay, Paris

Marjane Satrapi is an Iranian/French graphic novelist. She was born in 1969 in Rasht, in the North of Iran, and now lives and works in Paris. She became famous because of her critically acclaimed autobiographical graphic novels Persepolis, which describe her childhood and adolescence in Iran and Europe.

Persepolis graphic novels were adapted by herself and Vincent Parronaud into an essentially black-and-white animated film bearing the same name. The movie was called 'islamophobe' and 'anti-iranian' by the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, thus it is not allowed for broadcast in Iran. Yet it is not a political movie. It deals with life in the real world. It is a work of poetry for all of us to delight in.

When the movie starts, Marjane is a child. She lives in Tehran, in a progressive family involved with the socialist movements. She attends the Lycée Français in Tehran, and witnesses the growing oppression of civil liberties and the everyday-life consequences of Iranian politics. Then comes the Iranian revolution, the fall of the Shah, and the regime of Ayatollah Khomeini. After days of elation, disillusion follows quickly. Political opponents are put in jail again, many are executed, and islamist rules are imposed. Then the Iran-Iraq war starts. At the age of 14, her parents send Marjane to Vienna, Austria, to flee the Iranian regime. She discovers Europe, boys, and loneliness. She comes back to Iran.

The movie relates with realism and humour Marjane's years of hardship, she shared with million young Iranians of the time: overnight obligation to wear a veil, search for forbidden pirated audio cassettes, secret parties with friends where you dance and drink alcohol despite police raids.

Persepolis was awarded the Special Jury Prize in Cannes Film Festival in May 2007. Last Year, it was given the Better First Movie Award in the Cesar Award, the National film award for France. It also competed in Hollywood for the Oscar, as a nominee for best animated film, but had no chance against Disney's blockbuster Ratatouille.

The Turul Bird — Budapest, July 2007

"Photography is not about cameras, gadgets and gizmos. Photography is about photographers. A camera didn't make a great picture any more than a typewriter wrote a great novel." Peter Adams  All the week-end long, I have been saving on DVDs photos I took during my trips in the last two years. Will you imagine there were more than seven thousand photos!

It's nothing of which to be proud though. It's too easy to click away madly at anything with a digital camera... and most of the pictures I took in two years and about twenty countries were devoid of any 'artistic value'. Many are personal souvenirs. Some can be considered decent tourist shots. From a photographic standpoint, I am satisfied with about twenty or twenty-five — and I feel lenient today. The photo above is one of the latter. Also, I love it because it has a story.

I went to Hungary for nine days in July 2007, in a hiking/photo trip. Although there was a heat wave in Central Europe at the time, with temperatures up to 40°C, I arrived there with my whole photo gear in my backpack, and a tripod. Quite cumbersome and heavy, please believe me. After seven hot days in Hungarian towns and country, I arrived at Budapest. I could put down the backpack at last in an hotel room, and spend two days visiting the city with my camera in a small bag.

When I visited the Hungarian National Gallery (Magyar Nemzeti Galéria), any bag, and my camera, had to be put in a checkroom. Too bad, because when I was walking in a corridor on the last floor, I caught a glimpse of a scenery you could see in that way from nowhere else in the city: the legendary Turul, the sacred bird of the Magyars, was spreading its wings above Budapest.

I stopped, tied up again a shoelace that did not need it. When the attendant looked in the other direction, I quickly stole one shot with my cell phone. One shot only. With my cell. Without any setting. Through the pane of a window. Granted, the picture has poor definition. You can make out the reflection of my torso and head on the pane. Yet I see it as a good photo, and undoubtedly my favourite from my 2007 trip in Hungary.