Fragmenting in the Original English: Barthes, Me, and Destiny

So many airports. It's April 15^th and I’m drinking coffee in Casablanca Mohammed V Airport on my way home from my annual yoga bootcamp, and watching the clouds. I'm mulling on this day 39 years ago, and recalling a wondering of last year, when I was last in Morocco.

Weather in Casablanca

CMN to RAK. I went to COP21 in 2015 of course. Lots of talk and not a lot of action. Interesting I warrant, but in Paris everyone is pleased with themselves. All that pontoon-faced structuration theory. If we really want to address climate change, we have to choose to. Last November, in Menara Airport, Marrakech, it felt like a different world. COP22 was a much more dour affair. Dejectedly I flitted through the latest London Review of Books, with it's disturbing article on the May administration. Honestly. Another time. Then, a fascinating article about Brutalism by that lovely golden-haired boy Owen Hatherley. I rather enjoyed his book on regeneration though Tony was spitting bricks. Or prefabricated panels. But then, a new biography of Roland Barthes, reviewed by Michael Wood. I always wonder what you have to do to get motorway services named after you. Anyway. Barthes. Wood talks about Barthes’s last work. He’d had, while gazing at clouds in Casablanca, what he called a “conversion” experience on the 15^th April 1978, and thereafter intended to “enter into literature, into writing, to write, as if I had never written before: to do only that.” Later he poured water on the suggestion that he planned to write a novel, and by March 1980 he was dead. Wood says: “Many of his readers have regretted the loss of what might have been easily recognisable as a novel […] [some] critics […] have thought Barthes’s last book, Camera Lucida, was his novel; and still others see the notes for what Barthes called his Vita Nova as a conceptual framework for the novel we are all invited to write.

Well. I knew Barthes well. I called him Rollie of course, as all his good friends did. I’d played many a hand of vingt-et-un with his mother, Henriette, and he. And so Wood’s article both grated and gratified. After that April day, Barthes did go all out for the conceptual novel that we are all invited to write. Perhaps I should outline a little of Rollie’s ouvre before that day. Of course there was his 1967 essay, The Death of the Author. He outlined there how one must separate the context of the author from text. The alert reader might wonder how his book Camera Lucida fits that frame, being so heavily laden with the image of his mother, Henriette. Well of course, vingt-et-un! Though he describes the pictures of his dear maman, and the book is laden with images, none are of Henriette. Every text, he says, is “eternally written here and now”. What’s important is the destination. The jetztzeit is what Walter Benjamin calls the here and now (nowtime, some translate it as, but I prefer the former as an indication of the spatial too). This is what Rollie saw in the clouds over Casablanca. A future where the choice dictated by language was all about destination (language is fascism he once said-didn’t-say). Where the reader was both free of and explicitly enchained by authorial intention. Rollie was a trickster. A slippy slidey eel to paraphrase Robbe-Grillet (whom I never really liked even before he referred to me as a “young girl, vehement and angry” in that little book on Barthes of his. That was in 1977 and like all good young people I hadn’t quite understood this French saying-is-not-saying nonsense. But Alain didn’t have a clue what was going on, and anyway, he hit on me in the cafeteria. I most certainly did not “pounce”). 

It was like this one

Well. I am meandering. On that April day, and in the subsequent months, Rollie determined to produce – for young minds, free as yet of authorial stamp – destinations. Well, apparently free, but also not-free. The difference – vingt-et-un! – he told me and Henriette, between choisir and chosiste. Between choice, and what I see translated often as thing-ist, sometimes as concrete (and I'd say, between choice-not choice and the here-and-now).

That’s where I come in. I’d become friendly with Rollie directly after that inaugural address when in trying to avoid Alain (who really is slippery) I’d missed my lift. Rollie kindly took me back to the little appartement I was borrowing, and interested and amused I suppose by my impassioned disquiet over his saying-not-saying, he invited me to a cards evening with his mother. Of course I accepted. And when, in May 1979 – I was a young barrister, and although serious about Tony, not yet married (well. E chat parti, les souris dansent) – Rollie offered me some part-time piece-work to fill some empty hours while I built my practice and earn a few more pounds, I was intrigued. I got the boat train to Paris to meet him and a few others, of all nationalities, men and women, and a few I wasn’t sure about. “My name,” he declared, theatrically, twinkly-eyed, Gitanes in hand, in his black poloneck; with his sweet and comical heavily French-accented English, “Is Packard. Edward Packard.” We giggled. He later explained his choice. Packard from that funny little Hewlett-Packard word processor he’d been given by Henriette in the late 1960s I think, and a new printer he used to refer to as Fin, for the end of both the work as he printed it, and the world of books as we’d known it, and some play on Finnegan’s Wake, I understood; and Edward, the Anglicisation of that wonderful and earnest book Edouard by Claire de Duras that Rollie always said was the advent of postmodern French theory. (Henriette said though, and I believe her, that it was also after Edouard de Villefort – the poor little son of the awful prosecutor in Le Comte de Monte Cristo – who falls prey to Dantes’s revenge machinations and sparks his first episode of remorse. She said she read it to him when he was too young.)

Like all those French chaps, Rollie loved American movies. Of course you know that. His plan, it emerged that day, was to construct a series of books which had multiple pathways. Printed books that were non-linear. That reflected – if not honestly, then avec amusement, the paucity of comprehension with which we take decisions, and the rollercoasteering nature of our lives. And with re-reading – re-living as it were – better choices are made. Choisir – chosiste.

He showed us his prototype: The Cave of Time, a Hegelian foxtrot and no mistake. But he left it mostly to us. He took no remuneration himself, but split the royalties and commission between us. Mine was No. 6: Your Code Name is Jonah. It’s got Russian defectors (it was 1978!), German femme fatales, crooked White House insiders, dodgy scientists. And whale song. My little homage? You are Roland Barthes. Choose your own adventure! 

My (your?) friend, Rollie Barthes, by Paul Granger (from Your Code Name Is Jonah) and from the cover of Camera Lucida

Barthes’s own homage? La mort de l'auteur, of course. This, from page 48 of his last book:

You don’t see the laundry van until too late. You barely feel the impact. The clean sheets fill the air above you, floating gently down. As you fall, enshrouded, you are reminded of clouds on an April day over Casablanca. It is all over for you. 

The end.

Trump Surnud

I met a friend in a cafe in Tallin.  He had to leave early,  leaving me with an hour before my hair appointment. I took the time to practise my Estonian and started to wade through one of the newspapers gathered neatly in a pile on a shelf by the window.  I started with the headlines.  The front page was easiest: Trump something,  it said.  I couldn't quite work out the word: it was in the past tense,  it was short.  Finally I found it in my dictionary: Dead. In retrospect I should have got the sense of the article from the photograph that covered most of the front page.  It showed Trump at his inauguration,  his blonde hair like a frightened snow fox on Ivanka's shoulder,  his head a vast bloody hole.  I assumed it must have been some sort of exploding bullet. I used my dictionary to piece together the rest of the article.  As he crossed the podium to sign in,  live on TV,  his head had exploded.  At first it was assumed he had self-combusted,  apparently not uncommon in Estonia.  Detectives soon realised he had been shot from some point about half a mile up and two miles away.  Possibly a hot air balloon or air ship.  The newspaper speculated it was a rogue Amazon drone. 

To check my understanding I read the front page of an English language paper.  It simply reported the inauguration had gone smoothly,  Trump had said some inopportune things,  the Bruce Springsteen tribute band was well received,  and in short Donald Trump was now president.  I turned to page 2 of the Estonian paper.  The first article reported that the number of guns an individual was now permitted to own had risen from one to seven. This was more difficult to check,  so I asked the cafe owner.  He said he had heard a report on the radio that morning.  The law had been changed to allow those with a firearms license to own up to eight guns.  Not seven.  He was going to register his guns that afternoon.

This was odd.  The difference between seven and eight is not large. However,  it is still a difference. I read another story.  This one reported that ID cards were to be scrapped in Estonia: they were an infringement on an individual's right to be ignored.  I asked the cafe owner again.  His name was Mikael.  He laughed and told me that they had just made them even more secure -  much more difficult to counterfeit now.  Which, he informed me,  was a shame.  I asked him how he knew.  He had seen it on the TV before he came to work he said. 

This was odder still,  and something to think about whilst I had my hair cut.

Number Crunching and Rug Munching

The sexual habits of the nation – particularly women – are altering. I read with interest the results of the third National Sex Survey (NATSAL) last week.

It seems that more women (from a sample – pretty good by any standard – of 15,000 people) are having same-sex sexual encounters. The figures the survey extracted say that t 16% of women are having sexual 'experience(s)' with other women, up from 4% in 1990, while 8% were going for the home run, up from 1.8%. Well, although I am good friends with one or two lesbians who might like to take personal credit for this, what I wonder is whether we might actually be looking at an altogether different prospect: alien infiltration. This is a simple statistical matter. I would like to bring the reader’s attention to two apparently coincidental happenings that concern a corner of the Pennines that is close to my heart.

The mothership and a witness

"An analysis of 10,278 UFO sightings between 1947 and 2001 shows, that, as a ratio of population against sightings numbers, sightings are 12 times more frequent within the sparsely populated region that the national average...73 per cent of all alien contact reported within the Pennines occurred within 10 miles of Todmorden."
 

"Hebden Bridge has the highest number of lesbians per head in the UK."

And I might add that the ‘Hebden Bridge effect’ has spread into Todmorden with a high occupancy of lesbians in that town too. I have often wondered whether these two ‘facts’ might be linked. Is there a correlation? Might those two Pennine towns actually be a distribution centre for aliens who are ‘passing’ in the human population? My own belief is that members of the early lesbian enclave that developed there from the 1960s might have been picked up (let’s not mince our words: abducted) by aliens who have steadily replicated what they considered to be an average example of the population and are therefore planting more of their kind into their Pennine hub, allowing them to diffuse into the wider populace.
 

This might not be a bad news story. Let’s look at it another way and assume innocence until proved otherwise: these aliens, perfectly replicated, have no ill intent towards us. Lesbians have historically been committed to public services, and (historically) without family commitments have contributed longer working lives. Nursing, police work, social work, care work, community work, sports: who doesn’t have a stereotype of a lesbian in these professions? Although it’s hard to get the stats, in my legal career and among personal acquaintances I can testify to a higher proportion of lesbians per capita in these roles than in society at large. Tony agrees. So, more lesbians might well mean a fairer, leaner, fitter, more giving, society. Bring on the alien takeover!

The Cutns-Monte Act

I'm not sure how many of you have come across this little know piece of US legislation. It appears that both Obama and McCain voted for it. It was passed several years after a Mr Cutns Monte was cleared by the Federal Courts for buying a house with someone else's credit card. He still lives there to this day. Apparently this is every American's constitutional right. I think we can therefore hold both candidates responsible for our current plight...

Crime in Transit

Southampton’s Ford factory will cease production of the Transit van by 2011. Oh sad day, some cry, the vehicle that built Britain is being sidelined. But will the loss of the Transit have an incidental effect on the crime rate? Is this a subtle way to clean up Britain? The introduction of the Paracetamol 16 piece blister pack is believed to have cut the suicide rate by 25%, so maybe taking the vehicle of crime away will deter the potential criminal. In my professional life, the only vehicle that ever seems to come up in court – often including those that pull up outside court to unload the accused – is the ubiquitous Transit. It wasn’t a beige VW Transporter driver that tried to anti-Tebbit Dave Cameron off his bike with a well-timed shove. White Van Man is one thing – one of Britain’s more stagnant characters – but he’s small fry compared to Blue Van Man. We are a nation of van-driving murderers and our chief weapon is being revoked. As a classic 1973 Transit owner, I may mourn, but as a lawyer and a Brit, I’m glad that the blood-bath is over.

Officers have said they want to trace the owner of a blue transit van which is thought to have been seen in the drive of the pensioner's home last Wednesday.
A total of 500 blue Transit vans and over 180 Range Rovers were traced and eliminated during the course of the enquiry. … "However, we still need the public's help in tracing a white Transit-size van which was travelling in Sanderson Road behind the blue van we have now traced.”
His car was forced to a stop by a white transit van before two men got out of the van and opened fire.
Torbay Police are hunting a light blue Transit van in connection with the disappearance of a Paignton man nearly 5 months ago.
4 days later a blue transit van that was believed to be the same van that abducted Jenny was spotted by CCTV in Birmingham.
Danielle was seen talking to a man in a blue Transit van shortly after leaving home the day she disappeared.
Detectives say they have been able to pinpoint the time of death to within 36 hours and widened their search for the drivers of a blue Transit.
A suspicious blue Transit van was seen around the playing fields on Monday morning and could be linked to the burglary.
The married father of two had gone into the shop to buy a newspaper, but emerged to find his blue Ford Transit was being taken, the spokesman added. The vehicle then struck the victim a glancing blow before running him over.
Twenty years ago, on a dark November morning, a gang of five armed robbers were sitting in a stolen blue Transit van on the Heathrow trading estate, waiting for their "inside man" to turn up [... but let's not forget the Transit's dodgy axle problem ...]. As the robbers filled up the battered Transit with this windfall the vehicle's axles started to bend.

So, since my last blog I read the following in an article about women in Farc. It got me thinking again about the Revolution and god:

Another recent deserter resorted to particularly dramatic measures in order to return to the family she had left behind when she joined Farc. Sitting in her mother's sparse sitting room in a Bogota housing estate, she looks every inch the typical city girl: manicured nails, carefully groomed hair, white trousers. Amalia now has a respectable job in a travel agency and keeps her guerrilla past a secret from her neighbours. When she went to the camps, her two-year-old daughter was sent to live in Bogota with her grandmother but, after two-and-a-half years, Amalia could no longer bear the separation. 'I was given the task of looking after an airstrip, and I saw my opportunity,' she says. She got on to the plane with her gun and told the pilot he was being hijacked. 'He went very pale and did what I said.' On the journey to freedom she read her horoscope in the newspaper El Tiempo. 'It said I was about to start a new cycle in my life. I remember thinking how true it was.'

I bet no one realised that day that El Tiempo's astrologer was writing about an escaping female guerrilla. This is what El Tiempo says about me today:

VIRGO

24 de agosto a 23 de septiembre

Tu talento recibe mayor expansión y es posible que puedas encauzar con mejor precisión tus proyectos. La inteligencia y calma, que empleas al hacer tus negocios; se convierten ahora en la llave secreta del éxito.

Or is it actually addressed to another Farc member about to employ her intelligence and calm to organise a successful kidnapping. Who knows?

Is God a Marxist-Leninist?

And so another day, another painstaking journey across google earth in a virtual hot air balloon in search of a likely plot of land for my Plastics Injection Moulding Company. I don't think I've mentioned my dream yet. Briefly, I managed to get our money out of Bare Fanny Sterns (or whatever it is) before the crisis which Gordon tried so hard to avoid. So it's sitting in a bank looking for somewhere to go. Since I was a child I have loved plastic of all shapes and sizes. In fact one of the nicest things about it is you can mould it into nice shapes of nearly any size. And before any of you write to tell me about my carbon footprint these days you can use recycled plastic and even honey. And that's exactly what I will do. I will turn recycled plastic into Habitat chairs and Save the Children Toothbrushes and create a Foundation for Underprivileged Children with Human Rites. (Geddit? future?)

But I need a place to build my factory where labour costs aren't too high. Hence google earth and my desire to share with you an interesting place I found today. It is a district in Binh Duong province in Viet Nam called Tam Uyen. As you can see it has lots going for it. The most interesting claim was that made on the 'Natural Conditions Page'. The land density numbers and relative moisture are good by any standards, and actually fall in the range I am looking for. But what about the other claim? That God hardly does anything there. I, as a practising Catholic, find that hard to believe. I know Viet Nam is a Marxist Leninist Country, and strictly speaking, they aren't really believers. But that would be more of a reason for God to visit the place, not stay away. And so I am forced to ask myself - and you, dear readers - is God a Marxist-Leninist? Please vote.