On Perec's "La vie mode d'emploi"

On Perec's "La vie mode d'emploi"

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Last week I just finished, after a quite a few months (yes, it’s hard to concentrate on books these days with all these electronic distractions), George Perec’s massive book “La vie mode d’emploi”. Perec’s book is an encyclopaedic tome that probably is the closest thing in the French language I think to a Gaddis or a Pynchon that I’ve come across, at least in terms of scope. And certainly in terms of length (more than 600 pages long). And written in a French is which is pretty damn obscure — I did have frequent recourses to asking ML “what does that word mean”?

The book describes all the inhabitants of a Parisian apartment building situated on the fictional Rue Simon-Crubeiller. And I when I say all the inhabitants, I mean all those who lived there from the building’s construction to around the mid 1970s — everyone who has lived in each apartment of each floor of the building. The book features not only an index, but also a chronological list of all the major events of the book, as well as a list of all the many stories that Perec tells us — by story, I mean here a short history or “fait divers” in most cases lasting no more than a few pages. And usually, but always, often ending badly or surprisingly.

All classes of characters swarm through the pages of Perec’s book — artists, confidence tricksters, millionaires, accountants, doctors, scholars, scientists. Perec fills his book with spurious scholarship, made-up citations from imaginary specialists of every field of human knowledge. Many characters spend their entire lives of fruitless quests that often end in failure, pursuing impossible endeavours. He includes everything. There are endless enumerations of every object found in the cellars of certain apartments. Paintings and interior decorations are described in excruciating detail. Not only the paintings themselves, but also the stories which take place inside the paintings. At one point, all the objects found in the stairway of the building over the last few decades is listed. Many of the characters know other characters in the building, but many others live separate lives. The events described in the book cover the four corners of the Earth, although we never leave rue Simon-Crubellier.

The main story running through the book is that of English billionaire Percival Bartelbooth, whose life’s work consists of a decades-long project to travel the four corners of the world (staying away from Paris for almost twenty years I think) and paint a series of watercolours in different seaside spots; back in Paris at rue Simon-Crubeiller, artisan Gaspard Winckler, on the orders of Bartelbooth, transforms each of these painting into a complicated jigsaw puzzle. For the next twenty years, Bartelbooth devotes all his energies to solving these puzzles; as each one is solved, he returns to the place where he first painted the picture and dissolves it, leaving a blank sheet of paper. Yup: I’m reminded of Beckett: everything we do in life is a means to avoid boredom.

Reading the book I couldn’t help thinking of the building I was reading it in: our building here at Avenue Rene-Coty was built at around the same time as Perec’s fictional building at 11, Rue Simon-Crubeller. Both of them are Haussmannien structures, built during the great housing boom in Paris at the end of the 19th century. Although, unlike Perec’s building, the most of the apartments in the building here have remained in the same family since its construction — talk about a particularly astute purchase, given that most of the apartments today in this seven-floor building are now worth more than 400,000 euros. I wonder what are all the stories of all the people who have lived here over the last 150 or so years?

Linking all these chaotic stories together is impossible — there is no thread running through them all. Well, that is real life, after all, where the people in the 7th floor may not necessarily know what happens on the ground floor. Links go unmade, after all. Perec does not make any attempt to step out from behind the curtain and tell us what it means. It doesn’t mean anything — we not in a novel, after all…

George Ellis and the Multiverse

George Ellis and the Multiverse

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Last Friday’s IAP “blockbuster” seminar speaker was the renowned cosmologist George Ellis. Ellis talked to us about the “multiverse”,  a topic which has gained an enormous amount of coverage in the popular press. Countless books have been written about it: during his talk he gave us a healthy selection of quotes from many of these texts.

The “multiverse” idea is essentially that the the Universe we observe is really only a universe, with a small u, and that outside the bubble of our past “light cone”, those photons which can reach us within the lifetime of the Universe, there are in fact an infinite number of other Universes. And, this is the important part, these Universes many not resemble anything like our own Universe at all: they could be Universes completely different. Radically different, with a different set of physical parameters, leading to them being utterly barren of planets, stars and structures. God does not only play dice, but he does it with the whole Universe, infinite numbers of times. There could be a Universe exactly like the one we are living in with the only difference being that my espresso this morning was slightly stale. The reason this idea is attractive is that helps us to explain why there are complex structures like human beings and stars — we just happen to live in one of these multiverses where everything was tuned just the right way. Otherwise, of course, we wouldn’t be around to observe any of it — the anthropic principle.

Or, does it really explain anything at all? The point is that we can never, ever observe any of this. Since the multiverse are too far away from us, photons from these Universes can never reach our Universe. They are in a region of space which is not casually connected to our own (or maybe — Ellis talked about the mind-bending idea that Multiverses could actually collide — if that happened in our Universe it would lead to the formation of a ‘ring’ on the cosmic microwave background. No rings have been spotted so far ;- ).

And that is really his criticism — multiverse theories aren’t really science. One of the most important aspects of any scientific theory is that it should falsifiable, which is to say that there must be some observation which you can make to exclude the theory. Since there is no casual link between these other universes and our own there is no way we could ever make an observation to rule out the theory.  It’s not testable: these universes don’t ever interact with our own.  But, it is certainly presented as a scientific theory by its practitioners. Fair enough — to me, as someone who spends a lot of time on  galaxy surveys and observations, I appreciated very much his blast of Popperian realism, which is something sometimes you don’t get too much of in the more speculative branches of cosmology (I think all most of my observer colleagues would agree with Ellis).  And, warned Ellis, once you accept the theories of the multiverse as a real scientific theory, the gates are soon opened to all other kinds of questionable theories…

Is this really any different from what has happened before? In the past, there have been lots of crazy theories which either turned out to be consistent with observations and not falsifiable (quantum mechanics is a pretty good example of that — the theory is so counter-inutitive, and people have gone to enormous lengths to try to “catch the universe out”, like Serge Haroche with his single atom traps — but no-one has succeeded so far).  Or,  they have been ruled out by observations, like the “luminiferous aether”, instantly killed by Michelson and Morley and their interferometer experiment. These “bad” theories just fall away, because they don’t help us understand the Universe any more. However, the difference with the ideas around the “multiverse” is that they have a strong philosophical attraction to us — they claim to provide (at least a partial) answer the question, “why are we here?”.  But, for the moment, they’re not science.

Reflecting on this I see one possible course of action for the multiverse practitioners — start a church!

Back to the world-wide-web

Back to the world-wide-web

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It was 1993 or 1994, maybe, and I had just seen my first web site –it was the Canadian Astronomy and Data Center’s (CADC) front page. I was in Canada, studying for my Masters’ degree at UVic’s astronomy department. I can even remember the first image I saw on the web – it was a picture of the Hubble Space Telescope, hosted at the CADC. 

Of course, I was already known at the department as an internet hacker, always interested in searching out obscure materials hidden in the deepest corners of internet. But in those days, that meant logging into libraries in Saskatchewan and seeing if they had the latest novel from Kurt Vonnegut or not. And of course everything in those days was text only — although I remember one particularly interesting episode where I found wax cylinder recordings of the World’s Most Evil Man, Alastair Crowley, and played them through the telephone-audio quality loudspeakers we had on our Sun workstations. In the middle of the night, I think? Anyway. But this world-wide-web thing was something else. Right from the start, there was a ton of content. Not only could you look at web sites — but you could also make your own! With a friend in the department, Luc Simard, we downloaded the apache web server and installed it on a server in the basement, and set to work creating the astronomy group web site.

Those were simpler times — no CSS, just plain HTML. We found a picture of the astronomy dome and stuck it on the front page. With another friend,  James Overduin, I went to the library looking for suitable pictures we could use  (remember of course there was really no Web at this time so any pictures you wanted you had better scan them yourself). We found a picture of some cave-men building Stonehenge and put that on the Grad student page, and wrote at the bottom ‘At work on the next generation of telescopes’.

I wrote most of the text. The front page was simply picture of the astro dome, along with three or four paragraphs of text interspersed with links (which, in those days remember, were blue). I resisted innovations. I approached it a bit like telling a story.

The front page is still there, actually, linked to from the Astronomy department’s front page.  Some of the words that I wrote almost twenty years ago are still on that page. Looking at the source file I was amused to see the date of modification/creation was 16 November, 1994, and the user was one “Howard W. Cambell”: assiduous students of American literature will know just who he was (answers on a postcard…) Those pages lasted a long time because they loaded so fast and contained most of the information you needed. Today, of course, they look terribly dated. 

But it was funny — in those early days, I was the only Henry Joy McCracken on the internet searches (people interested in the other Henry Joy hadn’t yet heard about the world wide web) and I even got a few emails about my little personal web-page telling me that such-and-such a link was broken, etc. I never made another web page again, for various different reasons. But …. now, here in the 21st century, I’m obliged for other (professional) reasons to make one again. And I am obliged to write this blog post, because if the link is not out there, Google will never index it (and the best chance of them indexing it is if it’s on one of Google’s own pages, i.e., here). So, here it is:

http://www.iap.fr/users/hjmcc/

So yes, I admit that this blog post was an advertisement. But, at least there was at least a small story in there somewhere.

At the great wall

At the great wall

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I am back again in my room at the campus of Peking University. It’s Sunday morning and I can hear the birds in the trees outside — and what I now recognise as the sound of distant construction works. Construction never stops here. In China, work like that doesn’t stop for the night or the weekend. In Xinlong, at the observatory, in the forest, we often passed a derrick drilling a well to bring fresh water from deep underground. Drilling continued all day and all night, making a clanking, grinding noise which could be heard all around the observatory. In the morning, returning from our observations, lights still burned on the drilling platform and through the trees we could see three or four workmen wrestling with heavy machinery or leaning against the derrick and watching the drill bit slowly spiralling downwards. In the corner of the clearing I could see a small green tent, and nearby, clothes were strung out on a line. Did they sleep here? If they slept here, how did they sleep with the unending noise of the drilling?

Yesterday we did not return directly to Beijing – instead, we went first a little further to the north and south, taking us to Great Wall – note the capital letters. Over the past ten days, during my arrival in Xinlong and last Monday during our excursion to the Qing tombs, we could often see sections of the wall around us on distant hilltops, some of it restored, some of it crumbling and showing the passage of time. But on Saturday, we drove (or rather we were driven, by once again our gracious host, who had never yet visited that section of the wall) to Jinshaleng, where there is a very large section one can walk — more than four or five kilometres of total length I think, although we only walked a fraction of this. It is quite remote, around two hours from Beijing and consequently there are far fewer people than on the more heavily frequented sections like Badaling, where most buses from the capital arrive. So it was a real privilege to visit there.

We arrive at the parking lot at the foot of the mountain at around midday. Despite the supposed remoteness of the location, we find that the parking lot is already full. A cable car takes us to the wall; the cars advance with maddening slowness, swaying slowly in the breeze, trees below scraping the cabin. A trapped fly buzzes angrily in our cabin for perhaps fifteen minutes, but there is no way to open the window. We can hear people talking on their mobile phones in cars passing in the other direction.

Then we arrive, and jump from the cabin. Leaving the platform, I see the wall from close at hand for the first time: not only is the nearest section only a few hundred meters away, I can see both to my left and right sections disappearing down into valleys only to rise up again on more distant hilltops even further along. The wall continues across the mountains until it merges with the distant misty horizon, always tracing the crest of the hills, following the steepest path imaginable, continuing on. At each hilltop there is a guard tower of perhaps two or three stories in height, and it is one one of these guard towers which is our first direct contact with the wall.

Through the northern windows of the tower we see the rugged hills disappearing into the distance. To the south, the same hills, and near the southern horizon sunlight through the clouds picks out a shimmering distant lake — this, I am told, is the main water reservoir of Beijing. Here at the wall, the sky is overcast although an occasional patch of sunshine slides across the hills. There are a fair amount of people at this part of the wall, so we continue to walk. We don’t have enough time to walk the entire four kilometre length of this section so we will turn around after one hour and head back and retrace our steps.

After walking for perhaps ten or fifteen minutes, there are already far fewer people. Here there are long, straight sections of the wall where we are almost alone with the exception of or two locals trying halfheartedly to sell us “tea coffee beer”. Standing there on the wall I am reminded of Angelopoulous’ film “The hanging foot of the stork”, a film about frontiers and borders. Imagine, says a character in the film, I stand here on this bridge, a bridge on a river dividing two countries, and I raise my leg on the border line, in the middle of the river, the centre of the bridge: where am I? Where am I indeed. We walk further along the wall, up the steepest steps I have ever climbed in my life, and I think the same thing as Angelopoulous’ character, here on this wall separating civilisation from the outer darkness. At the highest point, a kilometre from where we arrived, I can see the wall extending far into the eastern distance, merging with the horizon. I wonder how it must have been to be here in the darkness of night six hundred years ago, surrounded by this desolate and empty countryside. I see the soldiers eating their noodles, drinking tea and straining to hear sounds or distinguish shapes of against the darkened treeless hills. Fearing the arrival of intruders.

Suddenly, it seems, it is time to return, although we have no particular desire to leave the summit of the mountain where it is quiet and peaceful. We retrace our steps, leaving the further western reaches of the wall unexplored. It will have to wait for a future trip. The return to Beijing is uneventful, although almost half of our journey seems to be spent crossing the endless sprawling expanse of this vast city, roads thick with traffic, people returning from vacation and weekends. Far in space and time from the frontier lands we visited only hours previously.