The Virtual Stoa

Pierre Hadot, born 21 February 1922, died 24 April 2010.

UPDATE [28.4]: Le Monde.

Asterix, series pictographica in toto orbe terrarum nota, mense Octobri exeunte quinquaginta annos complevit. Quod iubilaeum in Francogallia variis expositionibus, concentibus aliisque eventibus institutis, quin etiam propria tessera epistulari edita, publice celebrabatur. Ad honorem anniversarii semisaecularis etiam novus libellus pictus et divulgatus est, qui inscribitur: ‘Dies natalis Asterigis et Obeligis – Liber aureus’.

From Nuntii Latini [obviously]

Do note, by the way, that today is the French Republican Calendrical equivalent of 29 February — it’s the leap-day that comes round in order to complete the quadrennial cycle, hence its magnificently appropriate name.

I’ve long thought that the EU got things the wrong way around when it mandated use of the (French Revolutionary) metric system and stuck to the old Gregorian Calendar. My offer to Mr Brown’s Government is that if they legislate to implement the French Republican Calendar in this country, I shall drop my opposition to the creation of British Values Day — especially if it gets held on the Jour de la révolution, which would mean not only that it’ll only come around every four years, but also that it’ll tacitly, or not-so-tacitly, identify British Values with French Republican Values, which would be a significant improvement on what’s otherwise likely to be on offer.

Year CCXVII kicks off tomorrow…

As everyone should know by now, today is International Talk Like A Pirate Day, so please feel free to Talk Like A Pirate in the comments box here, or, indeed, elsewhere. Suggestions over here. Ah, Jim lad.

It’s also the Jour de la raison, according to the version of the French Republican Calendar installed at this site, one of the holidays that brings the old year to a close — and it is appropriate, I think, that a day celebrating human reason should fall on International Talk Like A Pirate Day.

Le Monde, in one of its summer retrospective thingummies, over here.

A very strange clip here combining the Stoa’s interest in Monday Marseillaise Blogging, and Lego…

Here’s the French football team and the better part of a hundred thousand fans singing the Marseillaise before the start of the 1998 World Cup Final. (Starts at 5 minutes in; jump forwards to 5.48 or so for Jacques Chirac in full-throated song.)

Haven’t had any of this for a while. Here’s a bit of film from 1907:

David Bordwell writes, of a recent screening:

“There were many early attempts to record synchronous sound, though all too often the accompanying discs have been lost even if the image track survives. The 1907 films contained a few such, but one, La Marseillaise, had its singer’s original voice, remarkably clear and perfectly synchronized. The result was an unusually poignant and vivid sense of a link to a hundred-year-old performance, an immediacy that went beyond what most silent films can convey, wonderful though they might be.

Go over the fold for the article on beavers from the second volume of the mighty Encyclopédie (pp.750-753) [warning: in French, c.4,000 words] [link]

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Coming out of the monkey-house at the ménagerie in the Jardin des Plantes here in Paris yesterday, we read a notice about the orang-utans, which said, among other things, that

“Sa mère Wattana rejoindra prochainement un groupe de femelles élevant leurs petits à Appeldoorn, en Hollande, afin de compléter l’entraînement qu’elle a suivi à la Ménagerie pour recouvrer un comportement maternel.”

And what was the matter with her comportement maternel, we wondered?

The internet, as ever, comes to the rescue. This page starts with a disussion of La grande erreur de Rousseau, but eventually gets to the ape in question:

“Des observations récentes, en milieu artificiel, suggèrent même que les grands primates sont susceptibles d’apprendre la culture et les comportements d’une espèce voisine, y compris en ce qui concerne des éléments aussi sensibles à la sélection que les comportements sexuels. L’exemple de Watana, célèbre jeune femelle orang-outan de la ménagerie du Jardin des plantes à Paris, qui reçut des éléments de culture sexuelle bonobo au zoo de Stuttgart et se retrouva plus tard rejetée brutalement en milieu orang-outan, est à cet égard particulièrement édifiant!”

Regular readers of Popbitch can probably guess what’s going on here — the giveaway phrase, culture sexuelle bonobo, will be setting off the alarm bells. But there’s also this page which gives a few more details:

“Le second exemple concerne une amie orang- outan, Wattana. Elle appartenait, de naissance, à cette espèce solitaire dont les comportements sexuels, dans la nature, sont rares, pendant le court oestrus des femelles et plutôt calmes. Les hasards de la gestion des parcs zoologiques l’ont fait élever parmi des bonobos, chimpanzés bien connus pour leurs performances sexuelles permanentes et variées, nombreuses et brèves, entre partenaires de toutes combinaisons de sexes. Eduquée par ce groupe, Wattana fût ensuite “mariée” à un orang mâle qui, d’abord, prit si mal ses grimaces provocatrices et propositions sexuelles explicites qu’il fallut les séparer ! Dans un deuxième temps, introduite dans un groupe familial, Wattana fût acceptée par son fiancé, dont elle modifia culture et comportements, ainsi que ceux des autres membres du groupe!”

Grimaces provocatrices! Anyway, this seems to be the deep background to help explain why she’s now off in Holland to recover her comportement maternel. The scientists seem to be interested in the case, as it’s a good example of the extent to which sexual behaviour is learned, rather than innate. (There’s also an academic article out there about Wattana’s talents with knots.)

And for more on the culture sexuelle bonobo, you might start here.

(What follows is pretty trivial, so I really don’t recommend you read it.)

One of the things I come across from time to time is people – especially young people – using the word “refute” to mean “disagree with”, “oppose” or “deny” rather than, as the OED neatly puts it, “to disprove, overthrow by argument, prove to be false.” (Indeed, the OED notes the incorrect usage, and labels it incorrect, with a series of examples that I’ve placed over the fold.) (I’m sure there’s someone out there who thinks that postmodernism is something to do with this, but that’s a conversation for another occasion.)

Anyway, this Summer, Le Monde has a daily feature revisiting past controversies that have beset what it calls the “intelligentsia hexagonale“. So this week we’ve had discussions of the bicentenaire, Heidegger, the Bibliothèque Nationale, and today (i.e., the issue dated vendredi) we’ve had the affaire du foulard in its original 1989 incarnation. And it’s in this last piece that we find this:

Dès le 24 octobre, Guy Coq, membre du comité de rédaction de la revue Esprit, pousse un premier cri d’alarme dans les colonnes du Monde. Il réfute l’argument de la différence culturelle à respecter. C’est le maintien même de la tolérance qui “périrait si les diverses communautés religieuses entraient en compétition pour s’emparer de l’espace laïque de l’école, pour en briser l’unité, pour y manifester non pas l’esprit d’accueil pour chaque individu en lui-même, comme simple humain, mais le signe de la clôture de chaque communauté contre les autres”.

Now unless my French is even worse than I think it is (which is wholly possible), that looks suspiciously like using “réfuter” to mean “deny”, i.e., following the incorrect English usage of “refute”. So is this because the French verb has a broader meaning than its English equivalent, ranging all the way from “deny” to “disprove”, or is the same bad habit that the Anglophones have developed shared by Francophones? And, if so, has it spread from England to France or vice versa, or is it properly autochthonous in both linguistic communities (if that’s not too pretentious an expression to use)?

I may just be barking up the wrong tree, or just barking. But any thoughts are more than welcome.

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There’s not enough cheese-blogging in these parts, so here goes.

I’m eating a lot of cheese while I’m in France, and one thing I’m noticing is that if I eat a lot of cheese in the evening, I have weird dreams. Not bad dreams — which I get if I drink red wine too soon before bedtime — just distinctively weird dreams. I can’t report on the content of any of these (you’ll be relieved to hear), because I have almost invariably forgotten the content of my dreams by the time I’m washed / showered / shaved / breakfasted / caffeinated in the morning. But they are weird.

Here’s information from the British Cheese Board blog on the subject, though in their less than cosmopolitan way they are only concerned with the effect that British Cheese has on dreaming.

UPDATE [8/8]: The nonbloggishblog has more.

From the end of what may be the greatest scene in the greatest film ever made: Rouget de Lisle teaches the Marseillaise to the people of Paris, in Abel Gance’s Napoleon:

I’m delighted to say that someone is letting off fireworks in North Oxford, which I am assuming is in honour of Bastille Day. Vive la République!

Was this year the first time the French have entered a song with Anglo lyrics in the Eurovision song contest?

(You can tell that I’m brooding over the issues that matter.)