Ground level is good for you

This blurry but otherwise charming family photo was taken over a quarter of a century ago by a little boy. Today, if you visit the website of François Skyvington [display], you'll see that he has made a lot of progress in the art of photography.

During that happy gathering, my 89-year-old grandfather told us with amusement that, if he could succeed in attaining the grand old age of 100, he would be looking forward to receiving a personal letter of best wishes from the queen... which was apparently a customary thing back in those days. Unfortunately, he didn't make it. On Australia Day 1985, he climbed up onto a swivel chair to change a lightbulb in his living room at Burleigh Heads, and suffered a fall that led to his death.

As a child, visiting Australia's beautiful Blue Mountains with my grandparents, I recall that Pop [as we called our grandfather] was just as anguished by mountainous heights as I am. If vertigo is an inherited affliction [which it probably isn't], then it's certain that I picked up the bad genes from Pop. In any case, the silly circumstances of Pop's mortal accident have made me particularly wary of the risks of injuries through falling from a height [as distinct from stumbling on the slippery slopes of Gamone and breaking a leg, as I did a few years ago].

In yesterday's news, when I came upon statistics concerning the causes of accidental deaths in France [for the year 2004], I seized upon this opportunity of using for the first time my brand-new spreadsheet software from Apple, called Numbers, to draw a simple chart (in less than a minute) representing the French deaths data:

Of the 18 548 mortal accidents in France, 5 354 were attributed to falls. This was twice the number of deaths due to suffocation, which is a category consisting primarily of gluttonous folk who choke on such things as pretzels. In these statistics, the most obvious sign of a global evolution in society is that relatively few people die of poisoning... which is no doubt good news for fast-food merchants. Instead of poisoning ourselves by the stuff we eat, we simply become fat and flabby and fall victims to so-called natural deaths due to stuffed arteries. That's progress.

Wild rabbits and environmental issues

Often, I like to see how new words have come into existence. And sometimes, to understand a new word that appears to be modern— a neologism, as they are called—you have to start a long way back in time. Let me tell you how a curious new word has appeared in French.

It's a roundabout story, which starts with rabbits. As an Australian brought up in a country town, I've always thought I knew a little bit about these animals. On countless occasions, out in the bush, I saw my father take his rifle from the back of the Jeep to shoot rabbits. They were Dad's number-one enemy, because they consumed the precious grass intended for his beef cattle. In France, I discovered that the word lapin designates the huge backyard rabbit reared in cages for meat. To talk about small wild rabbits running around in the fields and forests, as in Australia, the French use the expression lapin de garenne.

Most French people, asked to define a garenne, would probably reply that this word designates patches of uncultivated land in the country where you're likely to find wild rabbits. In the Middle Ages, a garenne was a hunting reserve. At that time, in Paris, much of the land to the south of the place where the Eiffel Tower now stands was a swampy garenne. Finally, it was cleaned up and cultivated by the monks of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, who grew vegetables there. The track leading down to the former garenne came to be called the rue Garanelle, and this was later changed to rue de Grenelle. From the start of the 18th century, numerous aristocratic mansions—called hôtels in French—were erected in this fashionable street.

One of these splendid dwellings was the home of the Duke of Châtelet [nothing to do with the famous square of that name in the center of the city]. When this gentleman was guillotined in 1777, the Hôtel du Châtelet became state property. For many years, it was the palace of the archbishop of Paris. After the separation between the State and the Church became law, in 1905, the Republic asked the archbishop to pack his bags, and the noble mansion was henceforth occupied by the ministry of Employment.

In this building, on 25/26 May 1968, at the height of the social turmoil in France [referred to, since then, as mai 68], representatives of the government of Georges Pompidou [including a certain young secretary of state named Jacques Chirac] negotiated with trade unions and management organizations, resulting in a 25% increase in the basic wage, an average 10% increase in effective salaries, and the adoption of the 40-hour working week. Since then, the historic outcome of this meeting has been referred to as the accords de Grenelle [Grenelle agreement].

Today, the name of the street where this agreement was signed has become a common noun in everyday French: grenelle [still spelled incorrectly, most often, with an uppercase G]. The new word is used to designate a major national get-together involving participants, often with widely differing viewpoints, who are intent upon achieving a consensus. At the present moment, for example, a vast process of debate and study aimed at finding solutions to environmental problems is designated by this neologism: the grenelle of the environment. For wild rabbits, that's a big hop.

Two happy men

Last Friday, 58-year-old Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a former French finance minister, was elected to the position of managing director of the IMF [International Monetary Fund], whose headquarters are located in Washington. On Monday, he was received at the Elysées Palace in Paris for a 45-minute discussion with Nicolas Sarkozy, who had been instrumental in promoting the candidacy of the socialist Strauss-Kahn for this prestigious international job.

Normally, French people in big jobs prefer to avoid revealing their income, because it's considered bad taste in France to talk publicly about one's wealth. As a professor at the political science institute in Paris once put it: "In France, money only becomes respectable after it's a few generations old." Be that as it may, everybody now knows that Dominique Strauss-Kahn's tax-free salary will be 495 000 US dollars. Besides, he'll get driven around gratis in a Lincoln. I hope he'll also receive free luncheon vouchers for the staff canteen.

In France, not surprisingly, people were interested above all in finding out whether Strauss-Kahn's acceptance of this job rules him out as a presidential candidate in 2012. Reading between the lines, I have the impression that this would not appear to be the case. First, Strauss-Kahn stated explicitly that he "remains socialist", which means that he hasn't abandoned the domain of French politics. Then, in diplomatic language concerning the elections of 2012, he pointed out that "the final words in such affairs always belong to the French people". That's a roundabout way of saying that, if the French people cry out for him loudly enough, he'll no doubt make himself available.

My kitchen door

As I explained in my recent article entitled Gamone enhancements [display], I'm thinking of installing a wrought iron and glass marquise above my kitchen door. I took this photo of the door in question—with the autumn-hued slopes on the other side of Gamone Creek reflected in the glass—so I can show it to the fellow who manufactures marquises, in order to choose an ideal model in his collection.

It's actually quite a small door. The opening in the stone is no more than 85 cm wide and 226 cm high. For the moment, the bell is screwed into the oaken beam above the door, but I think I'll move it to a bare patch of the wall, maybe well to the right. The lamp, too, will no doubt have to be moved, because it's in the way of the future marquise.

Talking about the bell, I was irritated to discover, back in 1994, that the architect in charge of the initial restoration of the house had installed an electric buzzer in the two-centuries-old stone wall, as if it were an urban flat. During the recent work on the façade, the buzzer short-circuited two or three times, outing my computer. I would like to get rid of it, but the problem is that I'm not sure how to go about removing the bloody thing, because it's connected directly to the power box. What an absurd gadget! What an idiotic architect!

Water pipes dug up at Gamone

A couple of years ago, when the bend in the dirt track that runs up beyond my house was about to be transformed for the first time into a macadam road, a mechanical shovel unearthed broken fragments of earthenware water pipes in the zone between the spring and the house.

Since I had already come upon old black rubber tubing used to bring spring water down to the house, I imagined that the earthenware pipes must have been part of an earlier water system. Some four-fifths of the inside of the pipe fragments were blocked by a calcareous deposit, now as hard as rock.

The inside surface of the pipes was lined with an enamel coating, making it easy to detach the calcareous core. The enamel then appeared smooth, bright and shiny, as if it were fresh out of the pottery oven.

The chief of the earthmoving firm that was building the new road recognized the pipes immediately, since this was probably not the first time that his machines had dug up such stuff. "Those are the well-known ceramic pipes from the town of Bollène, down on the Rhône." Although he was sure of the origin of the pipes, he didn't seem to know much more about them: neither the date at which they were manufactured, nor the name of the company that produced them.

When I made inquiries at the town council of Bollène, they told me that there were no manufacturers of water pipes in the region, and that none of the council members had ever heard of such an activity, in the past, in their town. This indicated, first, that these folk were surprisingly uninformed concerning the industrial heritage of their region, but it confirmed what I had imagined: namely, that these ceramic pipes were probably part of a very old installation, maybe even dating from the time of the monks at Choranche.

The pipes looked like expensive stuff, and their installation must have been a relatively delicate and time-consuming affair. I found it hard to believe that a modest Gamone farmer such as Hippolyte Gerin, mentioned in my article entitled Façade at Gamone [display], would have had the means, and gone to the trouble, of investing in such a sophisticated system. Besides, the thickness of the calcareous deposit in the pipes suggested that they had been in service for a long time before falling into disuse, and being replaced by rubber tubing.

After a few more inquiries through the Internet, and by phone, I've discovered that Bollène was indeed reputed for centuries because of the fine quality of local clay, which made it possible to manufacture high-quality industrial ceramics: not only water pipes, but refractory tiles for ovens. A director of a well-known tile manufacturing firm at Bollène told me that his company—which was quite old— was still making water pipes around the start of the 20th century. With a view to finding out more about my Gamone pipes, he suggested I should contact the university at Avignon to see if somebody has written a thesis on the history of local activities in industrial ceramics.

Readers will have gathered that I get a thrill out of attempting to solve puzzles of this kind...

Accident or assassination?

A Martian, seeing the following banner displayed on the Internet, might imagine that this affair is about to be examined for the first time:

[Click here to visit the website. It is not yet—and might never be—very interesting.]

Mohamed al-Fayed would like to see Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh participating in the inquests as witnesses. In bookmaking terms, I would say that the odds of seeing members of the royal family in this role would be about the same as the chances of England winning the World Rugby Cup.

It's a pity that the Poms, at the start of this tragedy, never had enough imagination and psychological perspicacity to think of awarding the late Dodi's father with a strong symbolic token of his integration into British society in general, and the outskirts of royalty in particular. It would have been so simple to grant him a so-called life peerage in recognition of his services to the UK. He might have become, for example, Lord Fayed of Harrod's. This would have surely appeased him sufficiently to avoid all the excessive conspiracy stink that has been smoldering in the wings now for a decade.

My bunyip family

Most people have heard tales about the mythical Aussie beast known as a bunyip, but sightings have been rare, and scientific research on this creature has been even rarer still. I happen to have a couple of fossilized specimens here at Gamone.

I found both the big oval slab with a "mouth" and the huge "leg" down alongside Gamone Creek when I first arrived here, and I brought them back up to the house. They're hard and heavy: probably limestone that has been washed smooth for centuries by the creek (when there's water in it). As for the baby bunyip, it's a different kettle of fish. It's a piece of white limestone that I unearthed, a few years ago, at the site of the medieval castle at Rencurel... which is no more, today, than a curious mound on the slopes. Here's the other side of the block:

I have the impression that it's a fragment of carved stone that has been washed smooth by running water. In fact, I'm unlikely to ever know what forces created these forms. So, it's less frustrating to decide, once and for all, that they're bunyip fossils. Who could possibly disagree?

Finding people through the Internet

One of my female friends back in Paris was a prolific and eclectic writer. She had decided, a long time ago, to invest in a multi-volumed copy of the Encyclopædia Britannica, and I believe that this big expensive tool played a major positive role in her work as an author.

Today, thanks to Internet tools such as Google and Wikipedia, everybody has access to a far greater encyclopedia than the Britannica. Over the last day or so, I've been in a research situation that illustrates one of the ways in which the Internet is a far more powerful source of encyclopedic knowledge than any mere printed book could ever be.

In my articles entitled First word of a poem [display] and Rilke's hermit [display], I pointed out that I've been working on the creation of a movie script based upon Rilke's novel entitled The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. In the context of the author's fictional personages, there are references to a few dozen authentic historical individuals, some of whom are well known (for example, the French poetess Louise Labé, or the Spanish Carmelite nun Theresa of Avila), whereas others are no longer as well known today as they were back at the time when Rilke was writing his novel. I had trouble identifying two individuals, mentioned briefly by Rilke, named Anna Sophie Reventlow and Julie Reventlow. In a conventional encyclopedia, of the kind printed on paper, these individuals may not have marked their times sufficiently to earn a place in history, as it were. In the context of the Internet, using Google, individuals such as these two Reventlow ladies are often described in genealogical contexts... and that's exactly how I was able to obtain precious information about them, enabling me to understand why Rilke has brought these authentic individuals into the fictional world of his novel.

I was even able to find portraits of the two women. Furthermore, obtaining this information through the Internet enabled me to become acquainted, by email, with the man who produced the genealogical website, who is in fact a descendant of the family in question. And this was like using the Internet to unearth and enter into contact with real-life memories of Rilke's world... which is far more than what you can do with a paper encyclopedia.

Two cultures

When I was a young man, a widely-read little book by the British scientist and novelist C P Snow presented a dichotomous vision of contemporary intellectuals. On the one hand, there were those with a scientific education and preoccupations. On the other, there were traditional intellectuals concerned by the humanities (literature, philosophy, history, etc). Snow coined the striking expression "two cultures" to designate this breakdown. He claimed that the existence of this dichotomy constituted a fundamental barrier in the quest for harmonious and universal solutions to society's problems.

Personally, I first became aware of this phenomenon when certain people expressed surprise at the fact that I should wish to study both mathematics and philosophy, simultaneously, at university. Much later, at the research service of the French Broadcasting System, I had the privilege of working with Pierre Schaeffer, a splendid innovator in multidisciplinary thinking. But I still came upon colleagues who found it strange, for example, that a computing professional such as me might be interested in the linguistics of Noam Chomsky. (Today, of course, most people would no longer find this strange, because they know that computers exploit languages such as Basic and Java.)

The planetary success of the personal computer and the Internet has narrowed the gap, I think, between "cultivated folk" (in the old-fashioned sense) and "technical people" (who know how to write programs, for example). Besides, many ordinary individuals know that science—through disciplines such as cosmology, genetics and neurophysiology—has much to say (if not everything) about human beings and the world in which we exist. So, only an exceptionally reactionary observer would cling to the notion of a giant cleavage between science and traditional culture. Even the antiquated separation between science and philosophy has practically disappeared... and old-fashioned religion is slowly paying the price of increased scientific enlightenment. What I'm hinting at, in that last statement, is that it's becoming more and more intellectually difficult to maintain the beliefs of traditional religions.

In the midst of our new "computer culture", I often hear people on TV complaining that addiction to modern machines such as computers and portable phones is having an adverse effect upon a certain aspect of traditional culture: namely, the ability to spell correctly and to write in a grammatically correct fashion. Yesterday, for example, a well-spoken French fellow, employed in some kind of a stock-market job, explained in a TV interview that young people like himself communicate so rapidly and so profusely today, using computers and portable phones, that they tend to disregard such niceties as spelling and well-structured sentences. Now, this might be true as far as text messages and chat forums on the Internet are concerned, but I think we should relativize things before making global generalizations about the alleged negative effects of modern communications systems. In particular, it's ridiculous to suggest that there might be any kind of paucity in spelling and literary expression in the vast domain of what we might refer to as encyclopedic websites, characterized above all [but not exclusively, by any means] by Wikipedia. Here, on the contrary, all the is are dotted, all the ts are crossed, and every comma counts. Everything is rigorous, striving towards informational completeness and perfection. The web, at this level, is not a place for fast facts à la McDonald's.

Maybe the antiquated "two cultures" expression might be resurrected usefully in a modern context. On the one hand, there are the speedy youngsters, using portable phones and chat forums, who don't give a damn about spelling or expression, as long as their many muddy messages get through. On the other hand, there are the countless great web authors who are engaged in the passionate challenge of installing humanity's history and intellectual heritage on the Internet. It is normal that these two "cultures" should coexist, but it would be idiotic to confuse these two totally different preoccupations. One is a culture of immediate facility; the other, a culture of ageless wisdom. And the actors, in each of these two cultures, are not at all the same.

It could only happen in France

The following true story is perfectly trivial, but it's amusing in the sense that it could only happen in France. It starts with a typical photo of Nicolas Sarkozy, in a hurry, taken on 12 September 2007 as he leaves the weekly Conseil des ministres at the Elysées Palace.

Journalists confronted with this image [taken by an AFP photographer] were intrigued to notice that Sarkozy was carrying what appeared to be a handwritten paper. Once the photo was enlarged [no doubt on a computer screen], the contents of this document could be easily examined and analyzed. Surprise! The round handwritten letters had obviously been penned by a female, and the document appeared to be a personal letter that started out as follows: "I have the impression that I haven't seen you for ages, and I miss you..." The short letter indicates that the writer and her husband will be away from France for a while, then it ends on a highly personal tone: "I'd love to succeed in seeing you during the following week or weekend. Millions of Besitos." Although I'm not familiar with this kind of language, I would imagine that "besitos" are little kisses. My God, everybody thought, this is as good as love notes between Charles and Camilla! Was it imaginable that the president of France, leaving a ministerial meeting, was carrying an open love letter under his arm, for everybody in the world to see? Was this another example of the Sarkozy shock style (like spending a few days on the luxury yacht of a friend, or jogging in front of press photographers) aimed at startling mildly the world in general and his French compatriots in particular?

Next step in the puzzle. Journalists had no trouble in identifying the woman who wrote the letter: Isabelle Balkany, a 60-year-old local-government personality, and the wife of Patrick Balkany, a member of parliament. The Balkanys have always been close political associates and personal friends of Nicolas and Cécilia Sarkozy. Was it thinkable that Nicolas Sarkozy might be involved in a romantic relationship with the wife of a prominent politician?

Following step. Isabelle Balkany quickly explained to curious journalists that she was indeed the author of this letter, but that it was addressed, not to the president, but to his wife, Cécilia Sarkozy. "I'm simply an old friend of Cécilia's." Fair enough. But, in that case, why was Nicolas walking around with Cécilia's personal mail, opened, in his hand?

Final step [for the moment]. Here we move into higher realms of expression, which can only be appreciated if you know how to read and write immaculate French. I'll try to summarize the situation. There are certain tiny linguistic details in written French [as in written Latin] that reveal the sex of the individual to whom the letter is addressed. For example, if you see the sentence "Tu es désirable", you don't know whether it's a male or a female who's being described as desirable. But, if you see "Tu es beau", you know it's a male who's being described as handsome. And, if you see "Tu es belle", you know it's a female who's being described as lovely. Well, in the context of the affectionate communication written by Isabelle Balkany, there's a tiny word, vu [past participle of the verb voir, to see], whose spelling would normally indicate the sex of the individual to whom the letter is sent. If Isabelle Balkany's sentence "I have the impression that I haven't seen you for ages, and I miss you..." were intended for a female receiver, such as Cécilia, then the tiny word should have been written with a final e, as vue. In fact, it's written as vu.

Maybe this simply means that Isabelle made a spelling mistake. Maybe she speaks and writes French, as the saying goes, like a Spanish cow. If not, it's Nicolas who may have made a faux pas by strutting out of the ministerial meeting with a private love letter under his arm... unless, of course, he did so deliberately. Who knows? In any case, as I said at the beginning of my article, this delightful storm in a wine glass could only happen in France.

Top 50

Whereas France is hosting the world cup in rugby, the nation's most popular individual is a soccer star: Zinédine Zidane. For those of you who might have forgotten the event, or missed seeing it because they were holidaying in a tropical jungle without access to TV, Zidane was the guy who used his hard bald head to butt the Italian player Marco Materazzi, who apparently made some kind of improper remark concerning a female member of Zidane's family.

Click here to see the entire list of France's 50 most popular individuals, as determined by a poll conducted by the Journal du Dimanche. If you browse around in the chart, you'll find lots of actors, singers, sporting heroes, TV personalities and even an ageing nun, a few politicians (including a president of the French Republic) and a soccer trainer... but no business chiefs, scientists or rugby stars.

Façade at Gamone

When I bought Gamone, on Australia Day 1994, it was a rough place.

The left-hand ground-floor of the building served as stables for animals, probably goats. Outside, a steel trellis was covered with grapevines. Notice too, on the far right-hand side of the following photo, the primitive outdoor toilet. The house was not yet connected to the municipal water supply.

The main façade of the house was stained with advanced signs of humidity. Inside, all the woodwork was rotten, and there were big holes in the remaining floorboards. Looking back on things today, I think I was courageous, if not intrepid, to invest in such a place... but it was love at first sight!

Today, the scaffolding has been removed from the façade of Gamone, and the restoration work can be admired.

The following photo shows a broken iron element that was dislodged during the restoration work. Can you guess what it was?

It was a scraper for removing mud from your boots. I'm not sure that such an article could be found in modern hardware shops. You can see it in the following photo, taken half a century ago, of Hippolyte Gerin, who used the iron boot-scraper as a bracket to stack up tools:

Click here to see a series of fifteen larger photos concerning the evolution of Gamone from the time of Hippolyte up until today. In the closeup photos of the restored façade, there are good images of specimens of the famous bluish stone called pierre bleue de Gamone [Gamone blue stone]. The restored façade also presents specimens of blocks of solid limestone (probably recuperated from noble ruins), porous tufa (from nearby Bouvante) and poor-quality marne (clayey rock that cracks easily, no doubt collected on the adjacent slopes). You can also find pinkish stones, bits of brick and even wood! The façade of Gamone remains, more than ever, a material and mineral poem.

Family fashion

On the point of writing a blog article about a fascinating TV show I watched last night, it was funny for me to consult the excellent weekly Télérama and to find, by chance, that the stuff I was reading was signed by the journalist Emmanuelle Skyvington... who writes remarkably well indeed (in French, of course). OK, I'm not going to post a blog about the intended subject (a nasty murder affair of secondary interest). There's no point in having two Skyvingtons talking simultaneously about the same things. It's weird, here in this grand nation where I still see myself as a guest, to discover that a certain media item might be handled in a kind of family fashion.

Indigenous peoples

The UN General Assembly recently adopted a non-binding declaration upholding "the human, land and resources rights of the world's 370 million indigenous people". Guess which countries opposed this declaration. Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States.

Australia defended its decision to oppose the declaration, saying that the document was "outside what we as Australians believe to be fair". Fair enough. The minister of Indigenous Affairs, Mal Brough, explained haphazardly: "We haven't wiped our hands of it. But, as it currently stands at the moment, it would provide rights to a group of people which would be to the exclusion of others." I fail to understand such mumbo-jumbo.

Once upon a time, the British colonialists in Van Diemen's Land—the early name for present-day Tasmania—set out to exterminate the Aborigenes, as if they were vermin. One of the last survivors, Truganini, pleaded to be buried in her mountainous homeland. Instead, her remains were placed in a glass museum case. Today, I have the impression that our Aborigines are still being treated, not as fascinating human beings, but as specimens in an antiquated museum.

Nazi photos unearthed

The US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington [click here to see their website] has just unveiled an amazing album of 116 photos of Nazis associated—directly or indirectly—with the Auschwitz concentration camp. The photos were taken in 1944, between May and December, shortly before the liberation of the camp by Soviet troops on 27 January 1945. The album belonged to Karl Hoecker, SS adjutant to the commandant of Auschwitz. There are joyous images of naive individuals who do not appear to realize that they are residing just alongside Hell on Earth:

There are precise images, too, of the highest-ranking Nazi indviduals in charge of Auschwitz:

Back at the time I was following the Faurisson affair as a free-lance journalist, in the early '80s, there were constant allusions to these three particular demons—Hoess, Kramer and Mengele—but this is the first time I've ever seen an image of their faces.

World cycling championships

In Stuttgart today, the seventh place in the female time-trial event, over a distance of 25 kilometers, was obtained by the illustrious cyclist Jeannie Longo-Ciprelli, from the Dauphiné/Savoy region of France. Jeannie's titles and trophies are awesome:

— 5 times world road-cycling champion;

— 4 times world time-trial champion;

— 3 victories in the feminine Tour de France;

— 19 times French road-cycling champion;

— 7 times French time-trial champion.

In all, Jeannie has held 38 world records of one kind or another.

The most amazing thing about this fabulous cyclist—who finished this morning just 1' 21" behind the German Hanka Kupfernagel (and well ahead of the current French champion in this discipline, Maryline Salvetat), is that Jeannie Longo-Ciprelli is 48 years old! For those of you who are older than that, think back to what you were doing at the age of 48. [Personally, I had just returned to Paris after eighteen months in Perth, Australia. I was leading a dissolute life, and smoking over a packet of cigarettes a day.] At the age of 48, could you have dreamed of finishing seventh in a world sporting championship?

Why didn't I think of volunteering to play?

How silly of me. Why didn't I have enough imagination to think of sending an email to John Connolly suggesting that he might hire me temporarily as an nth-grade replacement player in the Wallabies team for next Saturday's match against Canada in Bordeaux? He's wrapping so many major Wallabies players in cotton wool—so that they'll be able to take a rightly-deserved rest before the tough action, and avoid the risk of getting injured—that I'm convinced he would have appreciated the services of volunteers such as me, on the spot here in France, to make up the numbers... even if this meant that I would have been obliged to do a crash course in modern rugby rules, which no longer have much to do with the way in which we once thrashed around at school in Grafton [where we played 13-man League, not 15-man Union].

Once upon a time, when a player was about to kick a penalty or attempt a transformation after a try, they hadn't yet invented those plastic support gadgets. So, a team-mate had to lie on the ground alongside the ball and hold the top of it in place with an outstretched index finger. Now, that's the kind of service that I would be perfectly capable of rendering if only I had thought of asking Connolly to hire me in the match against Canada. What's more, I'm sure that some of those Canadian guys speak French. In close encounters, in scrums and rucks, I could have muttered all kinds of dirty insults at them in French, and this would have surely upset the Canadian team. In any case, those bloody Canadians would have been completely destabilized to find an Aussie opponent wearing glasses. I tell you, if ever it's a close match next Saturday, Connolly will certainly regret that I didn't think of asking him to invite me to play.

Multilateralism

That's the new planetary buzz word, launched by the new general secretary of the UNO, Ban Ki-Moon. It can be defined as the opposite of unilateral political actions. In the spirit of multilateral thinking, no world-shaking act—such as attacking Iraq with the hope of discovering weapons of mass destruction, for example, or attacking Iran with the hope of finding concealed nuclear weapons—should be carried out in a unilateral fashion, merely because a single world power has decided to do so. Multilateralism means that major operations of this nature must first be envisaged within a multi-nation context, so that they eventuate, if necessary, as the outcome of a broad significant consensus.

Yesterday in New York, French president Nicolas Sarkozy preached the multilateral message before the General Assembly of the United Nations Organization. And his discourse created a mild surprise by borrowing famous terminology invented by a certain Franklin Delano Roosevelt [1882-1945], greatly respected in France:

"I wish to say, in the name of France, solemnly and gravely, that there is so much injustice in the world that we cannot hope to live in peace. I want to speak to the consciences of all those who are responsible for the conduct of the world's affairs. The world is in need of a new state of mind. A genuine New Deal at a planetary level is required: an ecological and economic New Deal. In the name of France, I call upon all nations to unite in order to found a new 21st-century world order based upon the powerful idea that the commonly-held possessions of Humanity must be placed under the responsibility of Humanity as a whole." Personifying France in the style of de Gaulle, Sarkozy concluded: "France believes that we can wait no more. France demands action. France encourages action. France will be present at a rendezvous for action in the service of peace in the world."

Rugby craze

In France, even cats are following the Rugby World Cup on TV.

This young rugby fan, named Lulu, is a new member of the household of my Mediterranean friends Natacha and Alain. They noticed that the cat seemed to be watching TV out of the corner of its eye, as it were. When they installed Lulu's scratching pedestal in front of the TV set, Natacha told me they were astonished to discover that the cat apparently follows the movements of the rugby action on the screen, for long periods of time. What I don't know yet is whether Lulu is betting on the Blacks or the Wallabies... or maybe even France.

Prayer

Before arriving in Cartusia in 1084 and starting his legendary existence as a hermit in the Alpine wilderness, 54-year-old Bruno had held for many years a comfortable ecclesiastical job at the cathedral in the French city of Reims. Before settling down in France, the future founder of what would become (after his death) the Chartreux monastic order had received his basic education in his German birthplace, Cologne.

A week or so ago, in that same city of Cologne, the current cardinal, Joachim Meisner, evoked the concept of "degenerate art": an expression that rings an ugly-sounding Nazi bell. Media articles on this affair showed a photo of the cardinal in prayer, like Bruno.

The juxtaposition of Meisner's declaration and the photo of him in prayer gives the impression that the reasons for the German prelate's unexpected judgment on art can only be found in the private dialogue of prayer between the cardinal and God. Now, this suggestion infuriates me. When scientists and technologists—not to mention other intellectual leaders of society, including art experts—are called upon to back up their beliefs and allegations by hard facts, they obtain these precious elements of justification by many subtle and often complex means. Legal folk would speak of evidence. In any case, private dialogues with God are totally unacceptable as a justification for incendiary declarations concerning things in our everyday world... particularly when the declarations in question come from a German churchman, and they sound shockingly close to Nazi talk.

Rilke's hermit

I'm working intensely at present on the filmscript project based upon The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke. The final years of Rilke's life were spent in hermitic conditions in a small manor-house in Switzerland. I was intrigued to rediscover a passage in the Notebooks [written when Rilke was not yet thirty] that prefigures this solitary existence at Muzot.

When we speak of hermits, we take too much for granted. We imagine that people know something about them. No, they do not. They have never seen a solitary; they have simply hated him without knowing him. They have been his neighbors who made use of him; they have been the voices in an adjoining room that tempted him. They have incited things against him, then they made a great noise and drowned his voice. Children have been in league against him because he was tender and a child, and as he grew, the stronger grew his opposition to grown people. They tracked him to his hiding place, like a hunted beast, and his long youth had no closed season. And when he did not sink exhausted, but escaped, they decried what had come forth from him, and called it ugly and cast suspicion upon it. And, when he paid no heed, they came out into the open and ate away his food, breathed his air and spat upon his poverty so that it became repugnant to him. They denounced him, as one stricken with contagious disease, and cast stones at him to make him depart more quickly. And they were right in their ancient instinct: for he was in truth their foe.

But, then, when he never raised his eyes, they began to reflect. They suspected that with all this they had simply done what he desired, that they had been fortifying him in his solutide and helping him to cut himself off from them for ever. And now they changed their tactics, and used against him the final weapon, the deadliest of all, the opposite mode of attack — fame. And at this noise he has almost every time looked up and been distraught.

— Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

September 24, 1940

On 24 September 1940, my peephole into human existence was opened at a maternity clinic with the glorious name of Runnymede, evoking the historic water-meadow in Surrey where Magna Carta was signed by King John in 1215. My Runnymede of 1940 was located at Grafton in Australia, and the only document that got signed thereabouts was my birth certificate.

Although I have no clear recollections of the circumstances in which this photo was taken, I'm practically certain that it shows my mother Kathleen holding me in front of her Walker family house in Waterview. This is the same charming house that appears in this photo [of much the same epoch] of Kath's champion cyclist brothers Johnny and Charlie:

While claiming that a blogger such as me has every right to use this powerful communications medium to celebrate narcissistically his own birthday, I hasten to add that other events of an infinitely more consequential nature were unfolding on the planet Earth in September 1940. In any case, as Elton John once put it: I'm still standing!

Exceptional filmmaker

I'm a little ashamed to admit that I've never yet had time to view any of the mammoth documentary films created by the celebrated 54-year-old US filmmaker Ken Burns.

It's literally a matter of finding time, because each of this man's major productions—The Civil War (1990), Baseball (1994) and Jazz (2001)—lasts for an average of a dozen hours. So, it's a bit like planning to read Tolstoy.

The reason I mention this award-winning cineast [apart from the fact that critics on the web are currently praising his most recent fifteen-hour masterpiece, The War] is that his name appears when you're using the excellent Macintosh video-editing tool named iMovie. He invented a simple but ingenious technique known today as the Ken Burns effect, which consists of applying subtle panning and zooming to photos, with a view to breathing life into otherwise fixed images. And Apple's software tool implements this effect in a methodical manner.

I'm convinced that my former mentor Pierre Schaeffer [1910-1995] would have been thrilled to discover the simple power of the Ken Burns effect. At the Research Service of the ORTF [former French broadcasting system], we were often accused of producing TV documentaries of a "talking heads" kind, which might have been created just as well in radio. Like Schaeffer, I've always considered that images don't really need to move very much in order to be meaningful, if not exciting. They merely have to give the illusion that they're moving. From this point of view, I see the Ken Burns effect as a highly Schaefferian concept.

Schaeffer, celebrated throughout the world as the inventor of musique concrète (music composed of sounds that would normally be described as noises), used to warn us that, if you intend to recreate the sound of a bucket of nails falling onto a steel plate, for example, then you must not be tempted to use a microphone to record the actual sound produced by a real-life bucket of nails falling onto a steel plate. You can obtain a far more "realistic" sound by using a specially-prepared piano, or ideally a synthesizer. It's a Schaefferian truism to say that, to give the impression of being authentic, things don't really need to be authentic. They merely have to... give the impression of being authentic. And this is precisely what "movements" of the Ken Burns kind succeed in achieving.

Voluble ex-stars

Former French prime minister Dominique de Villepin belongs to the category of public figures who can't easily be put down. His political ascension was exceptional in the sense that he was never at any moment an elected member of parliament. He was educated to become a diplomat, and his achievements in the diplomatic domain enabled him to become a cabinet director, presidential secretary for Chirac and finally a senior minister.

As indicated in my article of 5 July 2007 entitled Destruction of computer files [display], Dominique de Villepin has been seriously embroiled in an aspect of the Clearstream affair, and he is even placed under a court order that prevents him from communicating with Jacques Chirac. But nothing stops this proud aristocrat from speaking out publicly on various subjects... including, in particular, the presidential style of Nicolas Sarkozy. "The French cannot live in a permanent whirlwind," said Dominique de Villepin today on radio. "I think we must escape a little from the present frenetic situation, but this doesn't mean we shouldn't work harder, or that we shouldn't launch projects. Nicolas Sarkozy is ambitious. I believe that, little by little, he should tame his ambitions, and tame himself in order to attain serenity."

Funnily enough, another white-haired former prime minister, Lionel Jospin, has also been quite voluble over the last few days. In a book to be published this week, he attacks retrospectively and violently the lady who happened to be Sarkozy's opponent in the recent presidential election: Ségolène Royal. According to Jospin, who himself was defeated by the right-wing extremist Jean-Marie Le Pen in 2002: "For the first time ever in the case of a socialist candidate, Ségolène Royal founded her entire campaign, not upon great political themes, but upon herself, and the special relationship that she claimed to have established with the French people. Everything was designed methodically, using polls and qualitative studies, to sustain what we must call a myth."

And, while all these words are being thrown around, we hear today of the death of the celebrated mime Marcel Marceau, at the age of 84.

Known throughout the planet, his personage Bip—in many ways, a stylized stage version of Chaplin—has spoken his final silence.

Scars and sundials

My ex-wife, Christine Mafart, invented a delightful metaphor for the numerous irregularities in the façade of my house at Gamone. She referred to them as scars: traces of wounds, now healed by time, inflicted upon the façade of this old house that was erected back in the days of a certain Corsican soldier named Napoléon Bonaparte [1769-1821]. It's easy to understand why there were wounds and scars. When the Chartreux monks were chased away from Bouvante and Choranche, in the wake of the French Revolution, a local farmer would have purchased this property and set about transforming the ancient wine-making premises of the monks into a place where he could reside with his family and earn his living. To build a house, this fellow probably called upon his vigorous offspring to collect boulders on the slopes of Choranche, and bring them back to Gamone on the backs of donkeys or in bullock-drawn carts. If finely-cut stones could be found in the ruins of local ecclesiastic and noble structures, then so much the better. That's why my house has various splendid stone elements tucked away in the mass of hillside boulders.

If an oak beam crumbled and stones fell to the ground, the owner would do his best to patch up the disaster, using whatever materials happened to be on hand. For a few decades, carrying on the wine-making activities invented by the monks, the families at Gamone would have lived in a relatively prosperous style. But, after the abrupt and terrible devastation of France's vineyards by the phylloxera pest in the late 1800s, the folk at Gamone were no doubt reduced to survival level, because the sloping rocky land at Choranche does not lend itself to ordinary agriculture. Maybe they tried to survive by rearing goats, for meat or cheese. That hypothesis applies to the period between the phylloxera catastrophe and the agricultural activities of Hippolyte Gerin. At a certain moment in time, walnuts appeared on the scene. Needless to say, it's frustrating for me to know so little about how these people lived and worked at Gamone.

In unknown circumstances and at an unknown date, a great hole appeared in the façade of my house at Gamone, just above the steel girder seen in the old photos attached to my article entitled Gamone enhancements [display]. The owner didn't scratch his head, nor did he seek an aesthetic solution. He simply filled up the hole in the façade with vulgar red bricks. And this became the most ugly scar on the ancient façade of Gamone.

Today, thanks to the excellent restoration work of Eric Tanchon [click here to see the home page of the future website I intend to build for Eric], the huge hole above the lefthand steel girder in the façade of Gamone has been rendered smooth and relatively unnoticeable. In fact, it's a big blank rectangle on the façade, and I immediately wondered if I might not be able to occupy it, say, by a sundial. Why not?

Sundials are a local tradition. In the neighboring village of Rencurel, an ancient house boasts two sundials, separated by the colorful image of a soldier.

The principal reddish sundial, for afternoon viewing, is located on a southern wall, whereas an early-morning yellowish sundial and the brightly-colored Epinal-type soldier are found on an eastern façade of this ancient house.

In the neighboring village of St-André, I came upon lovely modern sundials, created from ancient models, executed under the guidance of my aging friend Bernard Peignet, proprietor of the castle.

On the façade of the village church, a simple sundial accompanies a big clock, so there should be no excuse for arriving late at Sunday morning mass.

Having appreciated these splendid specimens of sundials, I was impatient to know whether the flat space above the openings into my living room might be able to house, one day, such an object. Alas, I had forgotten just one essential data item. Most sundials in France are attached to southern walls. It's feasible to put a sundial on an eastern wall [see the above case of a lopsided sundial at Rencurel], but it's not an ideal solution. My empty space at Gamone is on a façade oriented toward the east, which only receives sunshine in the early hours of the morning. Putting a sundial on this wall would be akin to erecting a windmill in a deep valley where the wind rarely blows. It would be like a grandfather clock with a weak spring.

New idea. I would like to fill in the empty space on the eastern façade of Gamone with an Epinal image on the theme of an Antipodean upside-down world. Something like this:

I must talk about this idea with my Dutch friend and neighbor Tineka Bot.

Gamone enhancements

Yesterday afternoon, the tradesman who's restoring the façade of my house reappeared with sand-blasting equipment: basically a big diesel compressor unit and a steel bin, with an output tube and nozzle, housing the special fine-grained sand used for cleaning façades. Next Monday, Gamone will be submerged for another day in an artificial sandstorm, but the job should be completed by the end of day. Then it'll be a matter of getting rid of the sand and dust in which the house is presently submerged.

I'm already exploring a few enhancements that might be applied to the newly-restored façade. First, I intend to install a so-called marquise over the main door of my house, which leads into the kitchen. This term means literally the wife of a marquis. I have no idea why it has come to designate an old-fashioned awning made of forged iron and glass, fixed to the façade above a door, to protect people from the rain while they're waiting for the door to open. I was amazed to discover a manufacturer of marquises in a nearby village. It's not as if the possibility of getting wet while waiting for the door to open is a major problem. The real reason why I wish to install such an object is that, when the scaffolding is removed on Monday, the façade of Gamone will appear as a vast rectangular wall, punctuated by various openings. The role of the marquise will be to put the accent upon one of these openings: the door into the kitchen. The door opening in question can be seen in the middle of the following photo, with the wooden gate, behind the back of Hippolyte Gerin [1884-1957]:

In this photo, the door opening on the right leads into a room that now houses my washing machine and deep freezer. On the left, to the rear of the two ladies, the two openings separated by a brick column lead into my living room. Here's a better photo, showing Hippolyte standing behind two youths and a dog:

You can see a pair of wooden shutters on the kitchen window. I still have these shutters, stored away while the façade is being restored, but I'm not likely to put them back in place. The truth of the matter is that openings in the restored façade reveal a subtle aesthetic blend of stone and brick, which must be left as such, naked, rather than concealed behind shutters of any kind.

As you can see in the above photo, the openings into my living room are surmounted by an ugly steel beam. During the restoration in 1994, a similar beam was installed above the opening into the room with the washing machine and deep freezer [see the first photo]. Consequently, one of my first tasks, now that the façade is restored, will consist of hiding these two steel girders. In fact, I'm going to ask the guy who manufactures the marquises to weld a line of thick steel bolts to each girder, which will enable me to cover them with oak slabs. The nuts fixing the slabs against the girders will be concealed in the mass of the wood, and covered with mastic. With a little bit of effort, the future Gamone façade should look much neater than back in Hippolyte's time.

Fool on the hill

On 14 December 2006, in my article entitled Why? How? [display], I explained that my Swedish filmmaker friend Eric M Nilsson had asked me to participate in a philosophical project inspired by these two basic questions. I've just browsed through Eric's film, which will be broadcast on Sweden's channel 2 at 10 pm on 21 October 2007. Since the one-hour documentary is in Swedish, I'm incapable of appreciating the exact ways in which Eric has amalgamated my words with those of the other main participant: a Swedish pastor. But Eric assures me that it's good TV, and I trust his artistry and his judgment. Click on the following stylized rendering [by Eric] of the Cournouze mountain seen from Gamone to hear an introductory statement [which may or may not be honest] from the scientific Fool on the hill:

French sport

Theoretically, France should be able to defeat Ireland in this evening's pool D match of the Rugby World Cup. But theory doesn't amount to much in rugby, where all kinds of unexpected factors come into play. Theoretically, France should have been able to defeat Argentina in the opening match of the Cup, but it didn't. And, since then, the French have been haunted by the possibility that their team could get kicked out of the Cup during the pool matches, before the start of the real action. This evening, we'll see. It's a do or die thing. If Ireland were to win, France would be definitely out.

Evil-minded observers [Who isn't, when it's a matter of commenting upon a major sporting defeat?] would say that the bald-headed French trainer, Bernard Laporte, didn't get his act together before France's opening match. Or rather, he got his act together a little bit too well. Problems and criticism stem from the fact that loud-mouthed charismatic Laporte has become more of a popular star in France than any of the national players. He has a delightful south-western accent, and TV viewers love to see and hear him getting excited and screaming like a distraught dad at his hefty kids. Besides, we come upon Laporte all the time on TV, because smart companies have hired him to sell all kinds of wares and services. And many viewers have ended up wondering how the hell this video star could possibly find time to train the French rugby team.

Above all, Bernard Laporte has friends in high places... including one sports-minded friend in a particularly high place: Nicolas Sarkozy. Poorly-planned public relations enabled French citizens—not to mention the members of France's rugby team—to learn that Laporte has already accepted a golden job that has been offered him by his mate, the president. After the Rugby World Cup, Bernard Laporte—who knows next to nothing about politics—is destined to assume a senior governmental role in the French sporting domain. So, if ever France were to fail this evening, it would look a little like Sarkozy has signed up a lame duck to look after French sport. Let's hope this doesn't happen...

Meanwhile, French sport reached a summit with the victory in heavy-weight judo of Teddy Riner: a splendid young black-skinned clone of the great David Douillet. Although I know almost nothing about judo, I love to think that a young French Black, bursting over with personality and friendliness, has become—in a sense—the most powerful man on the planet, even more so than any of the rugby giants. Teddy Riner is truly the sort of quiet and beautiful guy [like Yannick Noah] whom you would like to invite to a home barbecue, to talk about anything and everything with the kids. Is there any better criterion of human excellence?

I love my dog

And she seems to love me too. Or rather, she depends upon my presence. In any case, it's a big deal for Sophia when I deign to lead her on an excursion just a few dozen meters away from our house at Gamone. Most of the time, from an objective viewpoint, Sophia doesn't have enough canine perspicacity to imagine visiting such remote places on her own. So, of a morning, she barks frantically, inviting me to step out onto the road alongside our house, so that I can accompany her... or rather she, me. For Sophia, this is exotic tourism! She sniffs around wildly for tiny lizards. My lovely dog has the same camouflaged calcareous colors as the rocky slopes of Gamone. Twenty meters away from the house, Sophia seems to be saying to herself: "What a chance for me to have a Master who's prepared to lead me on voyages to the Antipodes!" Like me, Sophia knows perfectly well that our Antipodes is located, in all simplicity, right here at Gamone. This special place, for my dog and me, is both the zenith and the nadir of the universe. Gamone is not only the Theory, but the daily Practice, of Everything.

Australia intends to censor the web

I've often thought that Australia surely appears to the world at times, from a sociopolitical viewpoint, as an immature nation. When political candidates seek to be elected, and when citizens vote, they often seem to do so, not through profound principles about what's good for the people and right for the nation, but merely on the basis of a single pervading question: What's in it for me? Things are warming up for a forthcoming federal election, and the tactics of the two major contenders [current PM John Howard and Opposition leader Kevin Rudd] are already producing what a local journalist referred to poetically as "a shriekfest about smears, fears, sneers, jeers, cheers, leers...".

To my mind, there is no more abject indicator of sociopolitical immaturity than an appeal to censorship. And this is what John Howard and his minister of Communications, Helen Coonan, are presently seeking to impose upon the Australian people.... in a telltale elusive manner, as surreptitiously as possible, so that few observers are likely to realize what is happening, and kick up a fuss.

This lady wants to extend a black list of websites to be outlawed, purely and simply, by the ACMA [Australian Communications and Media Authority]. For the moment, apparently, ACMA shields the Aussie public from certain websites containing pornography or offensive content. It would be interesting to know what exactly is meant by the terms "pornography" and "offensive content", just as it would be intriguing to learn something about the individuals who perform this censorship, their credentials and their operational criteria.

The planned Coonan censorship extensions concern websites in the domain of "terrorism and cyber-crime". Superficially, that sounds great. Australia simply has to ban websites that seek to expound terrorist ideology and cyber-crime methods, and—abracadabra!—these obnoxious phenomena will disappear magically from the wide brown country. What idiotically naive thinking! Are Australians not mature enough to separate the wheat from the chaff? To see what web stuff they wish to examine, and what they want to reject spontaneously? Are Howard and Coonan afraid that some silly kid in the suburbs is going to learn from the Internet the art of making roadside bombs, or the methods for delving into the online bank accounts of unsuspecting citizens? What rubbish! The nation's leaders would do better to enhance the sophistication of their intelligence, security and law-enforcement services...

To paraphrase one of my favorite conclusions on affairs of this nature: Every nation has the censorship it deserves.