The Paris Residences of James Joyce

Bordeaux red wine and Artificial Intelligence – a good blend?

Bordeaux red wine and Artificial Intelligence – a good blend?

In an experiment, Artificial Intelligence (AI) could accurately identify which chateau 80 Bordeaux wines came from – with 100% accuracy! Mon dieu!

On 5 December 2023, New Scientist’s Chemistry section reported on a recent study that showed a machine-learning algorithm was able to tell which estate 80 Bordeaux red wines came from with 100% accuracy by assessing their chemical signatures.

We (humans) know that wines have a distinct identity related to their geographical location – i.e., where the grapes are grown and where the wine is made. Now AI bots do too!

Researchers at the University of Geneva in Switzerland used AI to analyze the chemical composition of 80 red wines from seven estates in the Bordeaux region of France produced over 12 years from 1990 to 2007. They wanted to know whether wine had a chemical signature independent of its vintage. Researcher Alexandre Pouget said,

“it means that one estate’s wines would have a very similar chemical profile, and therefore taste, year after year.”

The researchers vaporized each wine and separated it into its chemical components. The read-out of the components is called a chromatogram. The chromatogram has about 30,000 points representing different chemical compounds. For the experiment with 80 red wines, to program an AI algorithm the researchers used 73 chromatograms, with information on the estate (chateux) of origin and the year a wine was produced. Then they tested the algorithm on the seven chromatograms that had been held back. They repeated the process 50 times, changing the wines each time.

The AI algorithm correctly ‘guessed’ the chateau of origin 100% of the time. Not many wine experts can do that! The AI algorithm could accurately guess the chateau of the wines even using just 5% of the chromatograms. It could also separate the wines into groups that were more like each other. It grouped the wines from the right bank of the Garonne River – called Pomerol and St-Emilion wines – separately from those from the left bank estates – known as Medoc wines.

However, the AI algorithm correctly guessed the year that the wine was produced only about 50% of the time. But 50% is still a very good guesstimate.

The researchers said the study showed that a wine’s unique taste, and feel in the mouth, does not only depend upon a handful of key molecules, but rather on the overall concentration of many molecules. The study shows that local geography, climate, microbes, and wine-making practices together (referred to as terroir) do give a unique flavour to a wine.

Photographer: Martina Nicolls

Le Chapeau de Mitterand (The President’s Hat)

Francois Mitterand, 21 March 1993, Photo: Pascal GEORGE, AFP

Le Chapeau de Mitterand (The President’s Hat).

Many people are defined by their hat. Take Napoleon, for example.

Last month, on 19 November 2023, one of Napoleon Bonaparte’s black bicorne (two-cornered) hats – with a red, white, and blue cockade (the ribboned rosette of official office) – sold for a record price of nearly two million euros (USD $2.1 million) at a French auction. It was owned by French businessman Jean-Louis Noisiez, who died in 2022, and bought by a South Korean businessman.

It reminded me of a fictional book I read about French president MItterand’s hat.

Le Chapeau de Mitterand (2012) by French author Antoine Laurain was released in English in 2013, called The President’s Hat. It begins in Paris in November 1986.

Accountant Daniel Mercier is at the train station to greet his wife and son who have been on holiday in Normandy. Mercier is wearing President Francois Mitterand’s black felt Homburg hat.

The day before, he was at a restaurant and the president sat at the table next to him. When the president left, he forgot his hat. Instead of trying to return it, Mercier stole it.

The hat turns the quiet Mercier into a more confident man. Even his work colleagues notice his ‘calm demeanour, air of assurance, the extraordinary way he had of saying the unpalatable with the utmost tact … true class!’

Wearing the hat, touching the hat, and even having it close to him gives Daniel Mercier a feeling of authority and ‘immunity to the torments of everyday, life.’ It sharpened his mind and gave him the ability to make important decisions.

But one day he accidentally leaves the hat on the train. Fanny Marquant, a secretary in a regional tax office, boards the train. She is on her way to Paris for her regular meeting with a married man. It is raining and she sees the hat. Inside the hat are the initials F.M. – her initials. She wears it with her denim mini-skirt, high heels, and silver jacket. Wearing the hat makes her feel powerful, with an air of distinction.

Grey-bearded 52-year-old perfumier Pierre Aslan sees a black felt hat on a park bench. He is on his way to see his psychotherapist who is treating his depression. The smell of the hat is familiar – in fact, he can discern two scents. One scent is a man’s after-shave, and the other is a woman’s perfume: the perfume Pierre created eight years before.

Bernard Lavalliere is at a restaurant with his friends, where they argue about Francois Mitterand and politics. The cloakroom attendant gives him the wrong hat. If it weren’t for the hat, he would never have spoken to his neighbour and accepted an invitation to an art gallery exhibition. But one morning as he is buying his daily newspaper the hat is stolen right off his head.

Each story links the characters together through the president’s hat. And each person feels changed – in a positive way – just by wearing the hat; this hat; the president’s hat. ‘It had the power of destiny’ and each person’s destiny was changed – forever, and for the better.

Laurain’s writing is easily readable and wholly engaging, painting a picture of each character’s life and lifestyle as he or she undergoes a personal transformation that impacts their fate and fortune.

The intrigue dips in the middle as Daniel Mercier continues to find the hat – his hat – his lost hat. Nevertheless, the beginning and the ending are solid and enjoyable. Overall, it’s a wonderful novel about the sequence of decisions and actions that lead to important events in people’s lives. Just because of a hat.

Photographer: Martina Nicolls

Paris in the fall

Paris in the fall.

Photographer: Martina Nicolls

Sir Wallace fountains – drinking fountains in Paris

Sir Wallace fountains – drinking fountains in Paris.

The Sir Wallace fountains – or Wallace fountains – are the iconic green drinking fountains across Paris.

In 1872, philanthropist Sir Richard Wallace (1818-1890) aimed to bring free, clean, drinking water to the public, particularly the poor in Paris.

His friend Charles-Auguste Lebourg designed the cast-iron fountain. The instruction from Sir Wallace was that the fountain should be useful, symbolic, beautiful, and a work of art.

The design has four draped female figures (caryatids) representing kindness, simplicity, charity, and sobriety. Each of the females are slightly different – the way their knees are bent or where their tunic is tucked into their blouses. The women hold up the pointed dome, decorated by dolphins.

There are four different types of Wallace fountains, varying in height and motif – up to a maximum height of 2.7 metres (almost 9 feet) tall. The second two models were created following the success of the first two models, building upon improvements.

They continue to be made by GHM. There are currently about 100 fountains around the City of Paris, but only two of them, located in Place Louis Lépine, are classified as registered, historic monuments.

The Wallace fountains are turned on during spring to autumn months, from 15 March to 15 November.

Photographer: Martina Nicolls

Mister Morris’ Columns – Parisian advertising

Mister Morris’ Columns – Parisian advertising.

Around Paris, looming large, are many iconic Mister Morris’ Columns – decorative advertising pillars. In Paris green with its SPECTACLES sign on the ‘lid’ of the column, they advertise SHOWS. Initially theatre shows and now mostly cinema shows.

Frenchman Gabriel Morris was a Parisian printer who specialized in posters for shows. In 1868, Gabriel Morris won a competitive grant process conducted by the City of Paris, and won the monopoly to build 451 cyclindrical cast-iron advertising columns.

The 1854 design came from a German printer, Ernst Litfass (1816-1874), from Berlin. He installed them on the streets of Berlin to cut down on paper waste!

Richard Gabriel Morris (1837-1914) and his father Richard James Placide Morris (?-1884) introduced the columns to Paris in 1868.

Each Morris Column – Colonne Morris – is identical. They stand 6.25 metres (20.5 feet) tall, providing 4 square metres of advertising space. Decorated with six lion heads, they also have the City of Paris medalion on the top next to the SPECTACLES sign – a ship floating on a stormy sea, with the motto Beaten by the Waves but Never Sinks – Fluctuat nec mergitur.

In almost 170 years, the design has not changed much, except now they are lit at night and rotate. A weatherproof perspex glass protects the posters from weather and vandalism. They have been under the management of JCDecaux since 1986, and are now in almost every French city.

Not only do the columns advertise shows, but inside the columns, the space is hollow. And that’s where the City of Paris lamplighters used to store their ladders – and now the City of Paris stores brooms and street-cleaning equipment. But not always – in the 19th century, the hollow section was exposed and used as a street urinal – Colonne rambuteau. They’ve even been used as telephone booths.

Photographer: Martina Nicolls

The Paris Tree Plan

The Paris Tree Plan.

Paris has a Tree Plan – in fact, it has two tree-planting plans: The Biodiversity Plan and the Paris Tree Plan.

In 2021, the City of Paris adopted a Tree Plan that sets out defined commitments to 2026 and perspectives to 2030, and reaffirms the role of trees in the city. One of the measures of the Paris Tree Plan sets the development of a Guide des Essences to adapt to environmental and health issues, the choice of tree species, and the right tree planted in the right place.

More than 63,000 trees have been planted in Paris since 2020, including 25,000 last winter in 2022, a record planting season in the captital.

In 2022, during last autumn and winter, a total of 25,168 trees were planted in Paris. The embankments of the peripherique (the boundary of Paris city) has more than 11,500 trees; the Bois de Vincennes has 4,600, and the Bois de Boulogne has nearly 2,700, with more than 800 new plantations in the streets and schools.

Two hundred different species were planted last winter, inclding edible fruit species (apples, pears, as well as ornamental species). There are also trees without fruit or flowers, but interesting for their colourful foliage.

In accordance with the Tree Plans, Paris is also conducting a comparative study on the dryness resistance of nine tree species. It will provide a better understanding of their behaviour during hot weather and limited water.

The trees are cared for, or monitored by, almost 250 professionals daily.

To date, the Paris territory now includes about 600,000 trees, of which 500,000 trees are managed by the City of Paris, with more than 800 different tree species.

Photographer: Martina Nicolls

Does anyone read James Joyce’s Ulysses any more?

Does anyone read James Joyce’s Ulysses any more?

American-born writer Janet Tyler Flanner (1892-1978) lived most of her life in Paris. She arrived in 1921, a year after Irish author James Joyce (1882-1941) made Paris his home for twenty years. Janet was described as a ‘narrative journalist’ who was the Paris-based correspondent for The New Yorker magazine from 1925 to 1975.

In her 1972 book Paris was Yesterday 1925-1939, Janet Flanner wrote about the publication of James Joyce’s 1922 book Ulysses. The novel had been serialised in The Little Review from 1918 to 1920, but, for the first time, Sylvia Beach, owner of the Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris, published the entire novel.

Here is Janet Flanner’s account:

The publication in toto of Ulysses in 1922 was indubitably the most exciting, important, historic single literary event of the early Paris expatriate literary colony. Through portions of it that we had seen in New York printed in their Little Review by Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, many of us in Paris knew the scope of the opus – that chaotic fictional masterpiece–mixture of single Celtic genius, of Angican erudition, of Irish character analyses and Dublin night-and-day thoughts and events, culminating in the final revelatory concupiscent monologue by Molly Bloom, linear ancestress for the merely monotonous permissive lubricity that has been printed in our time in the recent 1960s. It has been commonplace to say that Ulysses was the great isolating novel in the English language that was published in the first segment of our twentieth century, an isolating novel in that it was itself isolated from all other great fiction in our tongue. In its unique qualities, in 1922 it burst over us, young in Paris, like an explosion in print whose words and phrases fell upon us like a gift of tongues, like a less than holy Pentecostal experience. Over the years, Ulysses, though read only in its early fractions, has established itself as part of our literary life to come, when and if eventually completed and published. Thus, long before our eyes had seen Sylvia Beach’s entire printed text in Paris and before our hands had ever lifted the full weight of its 730 pages, Joyce’s Ulysses had become part of the library of our minds. As we learned by listening to and watching Sylvia in her bookshop, to accomplish her publishing feat she became Joyce’s secretary, editor, impressario, and banker, and had to hire outsiders to run her bookshop.

Janet Flanner outlines all the work and expenses that Sylvia Beach outlaid during the publication of the book, and afterwards. She had to endure financial constraints while James Joyce lived luxuriously in Paris.

As Sylvia herself apologetically said, ‘There was always something a little shabby about Mr. Joyce.’ She thought him handsome, with his deep-blue eyes, one badly damaged by glaucoma, which had half blinded him. The strain of proofreading his almost illegible handwriting helped ruin her eyesight, too.

Janet Flanner concludes the section with the sentences:

Does anyone read Ulysses now, read it entire, word by word, with the impetus we did fifty years ago? I wonder. And I disbelieve.

Well, Janet’s question is now about a century-old publication. Ulysses is set in stone, written, and unchangeable, but Paris is forever evolving. Ulysses will always be Ulysses and Paris will always be Paris.

Photographer: Martina Nicolls

A sign of the changing typeface in Paris: out with italics and in with normal

A sign of the changing typeface in Paris: out with italics and in with normal.

The typeface of tourist location signs is changing in Paris. The font, the style, the weight, the colour. I wrote a previous article, “Metropolitan to Métro to M – signs at Paris metro stations,” about the Paris Métro station signs gradually evolving from the entire word to only the first letter. Not for the better, in my opinion. Is the same thing happening with tourist location signs – a sneaking change?

A mixture of older and newer signs in Paris (photographed April 2022)

Most signs in Paris are either white writing on a black background or the reverse: black writing on a white background. Some signs are blue with white writing and a few are brown with white writing. CAPITAL letters and lower-case letters. Thick letters. Italic letters. Italic letters have the cursive, slanted, and oblique style, leaning to the right – like this.

Actually, there is a difference between true italics and oblique letters. Oblique letters are slanted, whereas true italics have some changes to the letter forms, most noted in letters such as: a, e, f, g, k, and y.

I began noticing a change in the typeface of directional signs in Paris from about June 2020, and a few more in February 2021. Maybe I had nothing better to do during the 2020 lockdown in the city than to notice tourist signs (and not be permitted to go there)!

The newer signs have the same font as previously – a very clear, no-fuss font that looks like Helvetica to me. Helvetica is the most-used typeface in the world because it is modern and simple. Max Miedinger from Switzerland designed the Helvetica typeface in 1957.

In Paris too, Helevetica typeface has been used for signs for decades. However, the new signs are not in italic letters and they include more CAPITAL letters. I think some have a lighter weight too – they look thinner. The newer signs are mostly black writing on a white background. But now, as a sign of the times, the typeface is out with italics and in with non-italics – referred to as roman, classic, upright, or normal.

Photographer: Martina Nicolls

One year until the Paris 2024 Olympic Games commences and the Torch is ready

One year until the Paris 2024 Olympic Games commences and the Torch is ready.

On 26 July 2024, the Paris Olympic Games commences and concludes on 11 August 2024. The Paris Paralympic Games commences on 28 August and concludes on 8 September 2024. So, a year from now, the 2024 Olympic Games will begin.

But before the events commence, the Olympic Torch Relay will kick off the celebrations to mark the lighting of the Olympic and the Paralympic Flame and culminate in lighting the cauldrons in the main stadium. About 11,000 people will participate in the Olympic Torch Relay. The Torch and the Flame represent a message of peace and unity.

The Olympic Flame will arrive in Marseille in France on 8 May 2024 to open the start of an uninterruped 4-month celebration of the Olympic Torch Relay which will end when the torch lights the cauldron at the Opening Ceremony on 26 July 2024. The flame unites the Olympics and the Paralympics, but the Torch will ignite a new cauldron at the Paralympics on 28 August 2024 until the end of competitions at the Paralympics Closing Ceremony on 8 September 2024 when the flame will be put out. The flame stays alight throughout both the Olympics and Paralympics.

French designer, Mathieu Lehanneur, has been chosen to design the Torch for the Paris 2024 Olympics Games. His inspiration is three themes: equality, water, and peacefulness.

Torch designer Mathieu Lehanneur (Source: Photographer Felipe Ribon, http://www.paris2024.org)

EQUALITY … WATER … PEACEFULNESS

Equality represents the unifying emblem, mascots, and Torch that remain the same for both the Olympics and the Paralympics. Equality also reflects the fact that, for the first time in the history of the Olympic Games, as many women as men will take part in the competitions. Mathieu Lehanneur has made the Torch perfectly symmetrical, both horizontally and vertically, to symbolise this equality.

Source: Photographer Felipe Ribon, http://www.paris2024.org

Water represents the arrival of the Torch via the Mediterranean Sea aboard the Belem. The Torch and the flame will travel across the Atlantic Ocean, the Indian Ocean, and the Pacific Ocean to reach five overseas French territories: Guadeloupe, French Guiana, Martinique, French Polynesia, and Réunion.

Water also represents the River Seine running through the French capital, Paris. Mathieu Lehanneur has made the Torch with wave, 3D, and vibration effects to produce ripples of movement reflecting light on its surface.

Peacefulness represents the original intention of the Olympic and Paralympic Games as a symbol of peace uniting people and nations. Mathieu Lehanneur has made the Torch with curves and rounded lines to suffuse gentleness amid the steel design.

A total of 2,000 Torches will be made – five times fewer than for previous editions of the Olympic Games to reduce its carbon footprint. French steel company, ArcelorMittal, will create the Torches, mobilising its Global Research and Development (R&D) department and three of its French sites to represent the expertise of its workforce.

Photographer: Felipe Ribon, http://www.paris2024.org

Dreaming of Building Your Castle in France? Author Gerald Doucet offers advice.

Dreaming of Building Your Castle in France? Author Gerald Doucet offers advice.

French author Gerald Doucet offers much serious and hilarious advice in his book Building Your Castle and Living Like a King in France. Admittedly, it is dated now (1995), but much of the advice is still very current in his memoir of collective castle-building in Paris, France, from 1983 to 1994.

‘With a few tips you too can flourish in French society without really crying,’ asserts Frenchman Gerald Doucet.

A collective of eight families – called the Montmartre Eight (M-8) – build and live in a castle in Paris. At the time of writing, the M-8 have been together for 10 years, going through various stages of cooperation and conflict, but with a ‘surprising cohesion’ between them.

The M-8 are all involved right from the start, with developing the blueprint with an architect (the first one quit !) and all the headaches that go along with the construction process. Finally, they all move in, in various stages, only to face new challenges, such as noise, disputes, growing children, gossip, affairs, and divorce.

It should be noted that the M-8, of course, do not actually live in Montmartre. While the situation is real, the castle location and the individual families remain undisclosed.

Not one of the M-8; this is the blog author Martina Nicolls visiting a French castle

Gerald Doucet begins with the ‘leaders of the pack’ – the individuals who make the majority of the decisions regarding the management of the ‘build.’ Each family lives in apartment spaces ranging from 150-180 square metres (1,600-1,900 square feet) within the castle on an adequate block of land. By 1988, five years from the start, the castle

‘had life, the smell of good food, the laughter of children, and one very large mud hole that we set about to groom with trees and grass.’

This book is not only about advice on building a castle and dealing with architects, construction workers, and government regulations, but it also includes how to greet each other, whom to kiss and when to shake hands, buying food at the market, how to invite the French to dinner, what to serve, where to school your children, and where to go on vacation.

It is well-written, fast-paced, authentic, and hilariously funny.