Gimmick hour

Before Sydney switched the lights off, I hope that somebody was thoughtful enough to warn pleasure boaters in the dark waters of the harbor to be sure to get the hell out of the way of careening cats. Jeez, if those Sydney ferry cowboys were called upon to navigate, say, in the waters of Venice or the port of Marseilles, there would be large-scale manslaughter.

Talking about gimmicks, I regret that the French newspaper L'Equipe decided to bring up that doping story concerning Ian Thorpe, which seems to serve no useful purpose.

White rock, gray creature

Back in Australia, I never really knew what altitudes were all about, because we all lived more or less at sea level. And I didn't learn much about this concept as long as I stayed in Paris. The weather people often tell us that there'll be snow above such and such an altitude. Here's a picture of the Cournouze (from my bathroom window) that demonstrates what they mean:

An hour ago, now that I'm subscribed to the Free ISP [Internet service provider], I was able to phone my 91-year-old uncle Isaac Kennedy Walker in Coffs Harbour on the northern coast of New South Wales, and talk with him at length. Last year, before traveling out to Australia for a month, I asked the barber-woman at St-Jean-de-Royans to shave off all my hair, otherwise my wispy straggles float around in the breeze. My uncle was alarmed to see me bald. I don't know whether the following photo of an aging gray creature at Gamone is likely to reassure him:

David Hicks: future Aussie celebrity

Wow, this 31-year-old boy's in for a bright future! But he's only got nine months to put his celebrity act together, to start learning off by heart just the right things to say in interviews, the right clothes to wear, the questions to brush aside, the answers that attract audiences, when to joke, when to be serious, how to sign contracts to skin a kangaroo for a Japanese or American TV crew, where to invest his earnings...

Sorry, Irwin, it's time to get your heavenly arse out of the arena. Tina too. There's no way of combating this new wild beast. His fighting credentials are infinitely better than those of existing gladiators, including even Mad Max and the blond girl who married a washed-out hillbilly. If only David can sign up Mori as an agent...

Bloody lucky Australia! The country hasn't lost a single boy in Iraq (thank Allah), Howard and Bush are convinced that the sun shines out of each other's arsehole, and here we have in our own Taronga [Sydney's zoo] the only existing real-life specimen of a genuine home-grown terrorist, with direct links to Godfather Osama.

Flucki cuntri! [texto for fucking lucky country]

Miracles happen

It would appear that a miracle was brought about on 2 June 2005 through the intercession of the late head of the Roman Catholic Church, Pope John-Paul II. The Frenchwoman who benefited from that miracle happens to be a member of this same Church: Sister Marie Simon-Pierre, a 46-year-old nun. That's the Catholic way of keeping things in the family.


The story, which spans over two months, is straightforward. By the time John-Paul II died on 2 April 2005, Sister Marie Simon-Pierre was already gravely affected by Parkinson's disease on the left side of her body. Being left-handed, she could no longer write, and her trembling left arm dangled at her side when she walked. A month and a half later, on 13 May 2005, the new pope, Benedict XVI, wiped away the traditional delay of five years in the canonization process concerning his predecessor. The next morning, like a team of footballers preparing themselves for a forthcoming match, Sister Marie Simon-Pierre and her fellow nuns got stuck into a heavy-duty program of praying aimed at persuading the heavenly soul of the departed pope to do something about the nun's affliction. In spite of all their prayers, on 2 June 2005, Sister Marie Simon-Pierre was in such a state of suffering that she asked her mother superior for permission to abandon her physical duties. This request was refused. Instead, the mother superior demanded curiously that Sister Marie Simon-Pierre should use her pain-racked left hand to write the name of the deceased pope. As might be expected, the result was unreadable. But later in the evening, alone in her cell, the nun felt a sudden urge to perform the same writing exercise, and she discovered with amazement that, this time, the result was... miraculous. The following morning, Sister Marie Simon-Pierre informed her mother superior and the members of the community that her Parkinson's disease had indeed disappeared. A miracle... which the Church is now examining scrupulously.

Talking about miracles, I've often imagined a fabulous thought experiment: the resurrection of my father King Mepham Skyvington [1917-1978]. Now, that would be an authentic miracle, which would convert me instantly into a Believer. But that's not the point of my scenario. Let's imagine that my resuscitated father, out in his native Australia, were to be placed in front of a webcam, and that his friends were to tell him that he could now communicate in real time with his son over here in France. I would imagine that Dad would see this as magic... or, in ecclesiastic terms, as a miracle.

If we were to quiz enlightened Church people about the notion of miracles, many would admit that universal Science cannot be opposed concerning almost everything that has happened, is happening or will happen in the Cosmos. But they would then mention an addendum à la Leonard Cohen:

There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.

They would claim that there are exceptions to Science, and that some of these exceptions can be described as Miracles.

Exceptions? I don't like exceptions of any kind. Imagine a murderer who defends himself as follows: "In general, I've always believed that killing was an unpardonable crime. But, in the case of my victim, I made an exception." Or a child rapist: "Sure, I believe in general that children should be protected from people like me. But this kid was exceptionally appealing."

In democratic societies, laws prevent citizens from saying certain things. I know little about legal systems, and I certainly don't have the vocation of a lawmaker, but I often feel that there should be some kind of a French law concerning people who would blab out publicly, at the start of the 21st century, their ridiculous beliefs about allegedly magic events. To call a spade a spade, I'm shocked by the fact that a French nun should be seeking the spotlight because her Parkinson's disease disappeared "miraculously" (in inverted commas). Medical researchers should be given time to advance suggestions (if they can) about why this astounding event might have occurred. Meanwhile, talk of magic and Christian miracles is stupidly outrageous, and should be outlawed.

Normally, this might be a big deal, except that [once again, an exception] few people today in France or elsewhere really give a folkloric fuck about what this nun or the Roman church might be claiming. Maybe it was Jesus himself who descended miraculously from his cross and gave this mindless nun the power to write the name of the pope. Who knows? Who cares? Let's have done with clownish popery. Meanwhile, Science moves on...

Thinking about things

At the age of 18, when I met up with the IBM company in Sydney and started to learn how to be a computer programmer, I was amused and intrigued by their famous motto: THINK.

In fact, it's an ambiguous imperative. On the one hand, thinking is a profound and mysterious human activity. So, the IBM verb sounded in my imagination like the Socratic imperative: Know yourself! [When I encountered IBM, I had just completed a year of Greek philosophy at Sydney University, and I was totally under the charm of the great Socratic adage: The unexamined life is not worth living.] On the other hand, IBM's founder Thomas J Watson no doubt introduced his THINK slogan with more down-to-earth considerations in mind: Think twice before making a business decision. Reflect at length about all the options that are available to you. Master the situation with which you are dealing. Try to be smarter than your business opponents. Etc.

In any case, I preferred the more lofty notion of thinking. Besides, just one step away from IBM's electronic brains, there was talk about a new science named cybernetics invented by Norbert Wiener [1894-1964] and the exciting challenges of a strange discipline known as artificial intelligence. As the great Alan Turing [1912-1954] asked, somewhat rhetorically: Can machines think?

I've started to write an autobiographical account of my adolescent years, culminating in my encounter with computing and my subsequent move to the Old World (rendered easy through my professional experience in programming). Up until now, I had been using the word Antipodes (title of this blog) as the title of my early autobiography. Now, while the antipodean concept is ideal for this blog, I've always realized that it was not quite the right word for my autobiography. In particular, I wanted a title that might evoke the encounter with IBM that changed the course of my life. And the title should also evoke the fact that my adolescence was dominated by constant thoughts, of an inevitably hazy kind, upon the nature of the cosmos. About all things bright and beautiful.

Dwarf tossing

I seem to recall that this kind of game used to be practiced, long ago, in Aussie pubs or clubs... but I might be confusing Australia with Patagonia or Dilbert's Elbonia. This degrading sport still goes on here at Gamone, as this fuzzy photo reveals:

When Moshé uses his powerful jaws and teeth to grab the skin on the spine of the midget goat Gavroche (also known as Sex Machine) and twirl him around in the air like a frisbee (while the second donkey, Mandrin, admires the show), the most amazing thing is that the stubborn buck comes back for more, as if he liked that rough donkey treatment. Maybe, once upon a time, when our human ancestors were young, that kind of gripping and tossing was love play. Still is?

Switch from Wanadoo/Orange to Free

This morning, as planned, I switched abruptly from Wanadoo/Orange to Free. The Internet connection worked immediately, with no need to reconfigure anything whatsoever. I now have a new basic e-mail address [which I invite you to use instead of sky.william@wanadoo.fr]:

sky.william@free.fr

[Normally you should be able to click that address to e-mail me.]

Funnily enough, my telephone is not working yet. That's a really antipodean (upside-down world) situation. Normally, the old-fashioned phone works perfectly, but the Internet connection is screwed up for mysterious reasons. For the moment, at Gamone, it's exactly the opposite. My Free connection to the Internet seems to work perfectly, but my phone is not yet operational. Patience! I have confidence in Free. They're the highly-professional people who've been giving me free webspaces for years, along with all the state-of-the-art bells and whistles in the way of PHP and MySQL.

I'm reminded of desert island questions such as: If you were stranded on a desert island with either the works of Shakespeare or the Bible, which would you choose? [Personally, I would choose WS.] Here, the decision is more high-tech: If you were stranded on a desert island with either the Internet or the telephone, which would you choose? The fact that the present message in a bottle is reaching you is an indication of my obvious choice.

Early blog articles

I've often been annoyed by the fact that my older blog articles seem to disappear into oblivion. This, of course, is an illusion. All my old articles are all still there, but readers don't necessarily know how to access them. I've noticed, for example, that friends to whom I've sent the address of my Antipodes blog often reply with an appraisal of the tip of the iceberg: that's to say, the last few articles that are normally displayed. But some of these friends seem to ignore that more and more of my blog articles (posts, as they are called) end up being stored away in the Antipodes archives, where you have to make an effort to access them (as I hope you will).

Yesterday morning, I evoked this problem on the Blogger forum, and I received a most useful reply from a sympathetic Italian blogger referred to as Lady Luck. [Click here to see her blog.] Valentina (that's her real name), who knows everything about blogging, suggested that I use the simple concept of labels. So, that's what I've done. For example, as you can see, the present post carries a label: Valentina. Normally, from now on, my blog readers should be able to use this labels device to browse through all my articles. Thanks, Lady Luck.

Vote for the planet Earth!

I've translated into English the flyer for a big outdoor reunion in Paris, next Sunday at the Trocadéro, organized by the Nicolas Hulot Foundation. If you feel like listening to Nicolas explaining in French his ecological pact, click here.

Books about Provence and the French Riviera

I don't wish to appear foolishly pretentious, but I still believe that the most readable English-language book about Provence and the French Riviera is the one by Jean Hureau that I translated for his French publishing house back in 1977. Over the thirty years since then, in my (biased) opinion, this tourist guide has hardly—as they say in French—developed a face wrinkle.

That book was a funny writing affair. When I first browsed through the original, after having signed a well-paid translation contract, I was horrified. Jean Hureau's French was excessively syrupy and mushy. I had the impression that he was so overwhelmed by the beauty of the places about which he was writing that he had abandoned all sobriety and constraint. As we used to say in vulgar and misogynous Aussie parlance, his written expression was all over the road like a mad woman's shit. I quickly concluded that there was no way in the world that I could simply translate literally Huleau's descriptions dozens of cities, towns and villages. I could generally understand what he was trying to say, but he wasn't using the kind of words and phrases that would go down well in English. So, I decided to do the only thing possible. Instead of attempting to carry out an almost impossible task of translation, I would carefully read the multiple elements of Hureau's text—which had the merit of being well documented—and then I would simply rewrite each description from scratch, in my own words.

When I finally submitted my "translation" to the publisher, they gave it immediately to somebody whose job consisted of evaluating my work. He/she apparently read through my typescript, found it not only readable but well-written, and told the publisher that I was indeed a good "translator". That's why they then gave me a contract to write a tourist guide on Great Britain.

Since 1989, most English-speaking visitors arrive in Provence with a copy of Peter Mayle's book in their luggage. Over half a million copies sold! The observations are informative and thorough, but it's superficial writing, like articles in a weekly magazine. He describes a gay and quaint Provence inhabited by stereotypic French individuals who belong to a sun-drenched lavender-scented adult fairy tale. I guess it's great if you're a tourist or a newcomer, and you like and believe that kind of story.

By far the most profound treatment of Provence I've encountered (thanks to Natacha) is Caesar's Vast Ghost by Lawrence Durrell. It's a mixture of poetry and history, with a little madness thrown in for good measure. At times, I had the impression that Durrell might have been half-drunk when he was writing, particularly in the final chapter, whose heroine is a full-sized latex doll named Cunégonde with the features of a sexy Provençale. I recall that, when I dropped in at Sommières long ago in the hope of finding Durrell at home (which was not the case), the village people all warned me that he was more often drunk than sober. The best-written sections of his monograph take up the theme, introduced by Denis de Rougement, of the invention of courtly love in Provence. Durrell talks of Avignon, Arles and Aix as if these magic places transmitted aphrodisiac waves, or exuded a vaporous love potion. Ever since running into the great novelist/poet in Nîmes in 1963, and hearing him talk about Provence, I've never doubted his words on this subject.

Turbulence ahead

I'm about to change my ISP (Internet service provider). After many years with the French national provider named Orange (formerly Wanadoo), I'll be moving to Free, mainly because it's cheaper and their phone service is wider. Above all, most Macintosh users in France swear by Free.

As soon as I change ISPs, my old e-mail address will become obsolete. So, from now on, please use one or other of the following addresses:

william.skyvington@free.fr

william.skyvington@gmail.com

If all goes well, I'll be able to use Free in the next few days. However, I prefer to be cautious, since anything could happen. If the worst came to the worst, I could even enter a blackout zone (as they say in the astronautical domain) in which my blog and e-mail would go into temporary hibernation. So, if ever I seemed to disappear from the Internet and/or phone world over the coming days, don't be worried. Naturally, if the blackout were to persist for longer than expected, I would get around to sending out lovely handwritten postcards with photos of Pont-en-Royans and nice French postage stamps.

Guilty plea... to try to get out of Guantanamo

Yesterday, trying desperately to get away from Bush's notorious and ignominious Guantanamo penal colony, Australian David Hicks pleaded guilty to a charge of material support for terrorism. This courtroom sketch shows Hicks seated next to his sympathetic military defense attorney, Major Michael Mori:

The prisoner has let his hair grow long so that he can use strands of it to cover his eyes to protect him from the light that is turned on permanently in his cell at Guantanamo. Isn't that trivial anecdote straight out of a horror movie? Doesn't it back up one's feeling that the Bush administration, traumatized by 9/11, has lost all sense of moral relativity?

The truth of the matter, I fear, is that most Americans, preoccupied as usual by their own egocentric challenges (these days, the possibility of running short of petroleum gas for their automobiles), probably haven't even heard of David Hicks and the unjust way in which his case has been handled. As far as ordinary Australians are concerned, their passionate attempts to insist upon a fair deal for David Hicks have been typically marvelous, right from the start, and it's a terrible pity that the Australian people's concern and indignation have never been relayed adequately to Bush & Co. In the words of Brett Solomon, executive director of GetUp!: "The Australian government didn't have the guts to intervene and ensure a fair trial for David."

Sharing power in Northern Ireland

Normally, these two allegedly Christian leaders wouldn't share a piece of bread if they were hungry, let alone power. Like many of their fellow countrymen, they haven't evolved much at a religious level over the last four and a half centuries, since the days when England's Henry VIII decided to break from papal allegiance, and found a new church, so that he could get rid of his wife Catherine of Aragon. Be that as it may, the Democratic Unionist Party and Sinn Fein made a promise today that they will share power in Northern Ireland starting on 8 May. The world will be watching them, warily.

Crying in the wilderness

The other day, my friend Eveline (who stayed in my house when I went out to Australia last year) informed me that an artist friend, a wood sculptress whom I don't know, was interested in an old dead tree behind my house. I realized immediately that she was referring to the dear old object—a dead cherry tree—that I've always called Crying in the wilderness.

The form of the dead tree reminds me of the famous man in a white shirt in Goya's celebrated Third of May 1808 painting.

What is the world coming to, you might ask, when artists start to become interested in dead trees? It's coming to awareness, sensitivity, perspicacity, feeling, empathy, etc. In a word: humanity.

Boring spectator sport

Back at the time of the Olympic Games of 1956 in Melbourne, I remember my aunt Nancy telling me excitedly that one of the amazing surprises of their new tool called TV was the fact that it brought swimming races right into your living room, because you could actually watch the swimmers in the pool. Big deal. For me, TV swimming remains the most boring spectator sport that I can imagine, because you can't understand anything apart from the excited words of the commentator. And you simply wait for the times in hundredths of a second. I should be super-excited about the prowess of Laure Manaudou, whose first name sounds like gold in French. The truth is that this mindless love-struck youngster is just as boring as the sport in which she excels. French commentators, with nothing to say about this silent juvenile wonder woman, complained that Laure might have at least inscribed AMOUR rather than LOVE on her left palm.

There's an even more boring sporting phenomenon than swimming. It consists of wandering into a Sydney pub, say, on a Saturday around midday and being confronted by dozens of video screens relaying matches of all kinds (rugby, horses, dogs, etc): the object of betting. Last year, shocked by this spectacle, I was tempted to cease considering myself as an Australian. Sport as gambling commerce. It's simply all too boring.

Half the local Aussie population is leaving!

Sheridan Henty arrived in Pont-en-Royans in May 2003, having purchased a huge village house on the banks of the Bourne that was rebuilt in 1955 after the Nazi bombing of 21 July 1944. The original owner was a maquisard named Hugues Reynaud du Charmeil, killed in the bombardment.

When I first met up with Sheridan (an inevitable encounter in an environment where we were the only two Australians), I was amazed to learn that she was the sole descendant of the famous Henty brothers who left England on the barque Caroline and reached the Swan River, Western Australia, on 12 October 1829. [I remember that date because my brother Don was born on 12 October 1941, and our father died on 12 October 1978.] This tiny fuzzy drawing, executed by James Henty, shows the Caroline anchored off Rottnest Island:

Shortly after Sheridan's arrival, I learned by chance that my ancestor Charles Walker [1807-1860] had reached Sydney on that same ship, working as a steward, on 6 August 1833. So, there we were in Pont-en-Royans, two shipwrecked Aussies whose ancestors had reached the New World on the same vessel.

Unfortunately, Sheridan has discovered that she cannot carry on living in Pont-en-Royans, so she has sold her house and will be moving back to Paris in the next few days. Yesterday, there was a delightful farewell luncheon for Sheridan in an excellent village restaurant.


Meanwhile, Sheridan Henty has given me officially the task of obtaining a valuation of her mysterious and magnificent ceramic plaque of a youthful Victoria. [Click here to visit my website.]

Back at school in South Grafton, we children learned that the Hentys couldn't stay for long in Western Australia because their English animals, brought out on the Caroline, ate poisonous weeds and died. So they left for what would later become the city of Melbourne, and they got involved in Tasmanian whaling. Here in the Royans, there are no poisonous weeds, but Sheridan is leaving us all the same. When a Henty moves, there might be great changes, as in the old radio saga of When a girl marries. In any case, whales in the Seine should be warned of impending danger.

Max gets mad about the Mayas

American sheilas should know that you don't fuck around with us Aussie blokes about ancient history, particularly when we've got Firm Convictions. And we all know that Mel Gibson has always had Firm Convictions, even about biblical stuff such as the treatment of Jesus. Mel knows what really happened. Don't ask me how or why. I have no answers. We must simply believe in Mel.

Last Thursday, Mel dropped in to a Californian university to talk about his recent film Apocalypto. Alicia Estrada, an assistant professor of Central American Studies, complained about the fact that Gibson's film presented the Mayas as savages. The academic passed the microphone to a Mayan representative, Felipe Perez, who made the mistake of speaking his native tongue, Spanish. This created a disturbance in the audience. There were boos and cries: "This is America. Speak English!" In spite of his having posed as a specialist on the Mayans, Mel Gibson revealed that he too was not a man of many tongues: "I can't understand what you're saying." In the confusion, microphones were turned off, and then turned back on again, enabling Mad Max to sum up the situation. Turning towards the eminent academic Alicia Estrada, Gibson blurted out: "I think you're a fucking troublemaker, so fuck off."

I'm not sure that many researchers would be prepared to adopt Gibson's blunt method of handling scholarly questions, which we can sum up in Mel's Mad Maxim: Fucking troublemakers should fuck off!

Reading

Over the last six months, my acquisition of English-language books has increased considerably because of the ease of getting them through the local branch of Amazon. Meanwhile, for old stuff of a historical or genealogical nature, the Gallica service of the BnF (bibliothèque nationale de France) has been useful at times, but not as much as I would have hoped. [Click here to see this service.]









A new system named Europeana has just gone into action. It is the French contribution to a future European digital library with an ugly but logical name: BnuE (bibliothèque numérique européenne). It goes without saying that this European initiative aims explicitly to counteract the dominance of Google Book Search in this domain. If you want to read, not only Racine and Hugo, but also Shakespeare, Dickens and Dante, then Europeana is the place to go. [Click here or on the banner to visit the website, whose interface is only in French for the moment.] For the moment, the catalog of Europeana is not very rich, compared with Google's present achievement of a million scanned books. [Click here to visit Google Book Search.]

If everything goes as planned, the great advantage of Europeana, compared with Google Books, will be the possibility of downloading fragments of a book in text format, so that they can be pasted into the user's work.

For me, the subject of books reveals that I remain a very old-fashioned fellow. While I love to see stuff flashing up onto the screen of my Macintosh, I must admit that there's nothing better, on cold evenings, than to sit in front of my open fireplace, with my bare feet up on the hearth, and a good book in my hands.

I remember our potter friend Maurice Crignon pointing out that the "three eights" system applies, not only to ordinary folk (roughly: work, personal affairs and sleep), but also to monks (even more roughly: their daily schedule of prayers, worldly activities and sleep). Well, I've created a personal three-part breakdown for my daily existence. It's not an earthshaking invention. The early moments of the morning are for thinking. The main part of the day is for writing or working on my computer. And evenings are for reading, or watching a little TV. I'm convinced that the human brain functions in a way that encourages this particular time-based division of operations.

Ordinary, all too ordinary

I've finally learned how to pronounce the name of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Once you get into the habit of pronouncing the syllables smoothly and rapidly, they just roll off the tongue: mah-meud ah-mah dee-neuh jad. A couple of days ago, he was interviewed for the first time by French TV, and he came across (in an erratic context of language translation) as a very ordinary guy. Too ordinary, in fact, to be true. The French often apply a silly expression to individuals who talk as if they might be sneering slightly and trying to avoid an authentic contact. They say that he/she has a tête à claques (slappable face). Watching him trying to avoid the direct questions asked politely by the calm French journalists, I couldn't help feeling that it would be fun to slap Mahmoud's bearded face. But I realize that my reaction is a variant of an obsession whenever I see a guy sporting a beard like a banner, for alleged religious reasons. I feel like taking out a can of pink aerosol paint and giving his beard a few spurts, to make it stand out even more clearly. [For red and purple robed cardinals of Rome, I would use white paint, or maybe simply the traditional technique of cream tarts.]

We learn this morning that Ahmadinejad won't be visiting New York as planned to address the UN Security Council. He claims that his delegation couldn't get their US visas in time. If it's true that the US embassy in Switzerland was sluggish in supplying these documents, it's indeed a shocking predicament, like missing a train because the ticket seller had stepped outside for a smoke. Let's await explanations.

Howard speaks out on brutality

I don't usually see Australian PM John Howard as a positive leader on the world scene, but I must admit that I liked his rough style of talking about Zimbabwe and its president Robert Mugabe:

"Frankly, I've run out of patience. Most people have run out of patience about what's happening in Zimbabwe. We pussyfoot around far too much using diplomatic language. This man is a disaster. His country is just a total heap of misery."

Above all, we must applaud the courage and pragmatism of Australia's consul in Zimbabwe, Mark Lynch, who protected Sekai Holland—a female member of the MDC opposition party (Movement for Democratic Change) whose husband is Australian—by driving her to the airport and putting her on a plane to Johannesburg.

Howard described the context in which Holland had been bashed:

"The police are using brutal tactics. They're bashing up opposition politicians. They're fracturing skulls. They're behaving in a totally unacceptable fashion."

What a pity that Howard didn't use this kind of direct language in describing the treatment of detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison. [Click here for further photos.]