Billy's Lines Of Gibberish

Although I am a Frenchman, born and raised in Paris, and I don't appreciate the English language that much, I have been blogging in English for more that four years.

There were many reasons for it, that I explained several times. Yet, the reasons have progressively vanished. I don't feel like writing in English any more.

If I keep on blogging, which is likely, I'll do it in French from now. I guess that most readers of B.L.O.G. don't understand French. I apologize but… "C'est la vie" *smile*.

Have a good wind, everyone.

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 were 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 five blogs about Sight, Hearing, Smell, Taste, and Touch. 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.

The more I read and learn about Blogger, the more I am enthusiastic about it, or rather, about real weblog softwares. I had not fully realized before how poor a blogging tool Yahoo 360° is. For example, you can easily post one picture at the beginning of posts, but if you want to illustrate them with several pictures, you must write a couple of lines of HTML code for each pic, which is annoying and time consuming.

Also, among the points I missed most in Yahoo was the lack of real archives and research tool. Now that it is a total mess there, I can hardly — or not at all — have access to many of my own posts, even if I remember when they were posted.

Fortunately, I've kept a copy of every blog I posted on Yahoo. Some of them are worth not being lost in the ether of Internet cyberspace, methinks. Since you can back date your posts in Blogger, I will do that, for some old blogs of mine I like particularly, in forthcoming days or weeks.