You are talking to us about a distance…
That a journalist and writer returning from a tragedy puts into his words, reporting on a book born from another massacre…
It’s in Libération, the journalist is Philippe Lançon, survivor of the attack against Charlie Hebdo in 2015, and who from his survival drew striking chronicles and a book of introspection… And without ever mentioning his own fate – but how in to ignore, reader – he does not find it, this introspection, in the work he is treating, written by a colleague, Amir Tibon of the major Israeli newspaper Haaretz, himself a survivor of October 7, 2023, when his kibbutz of Nahal Oz on the Gaza border was invaded by Hamas men, losing 15 dead and 7 hostages…
Amir Tibon, his wife and their two daughters survived in the secure room of their house, Amir’s father, a retired officer, came to rescue them – we told this adventure last year… Today Tibon tells the story of his village in a book called “The Gates of Gaza”, taken from an old speech by a former Israeli general and statesman, Moche Dayan, who warned the residents of Nir Oz that they inspired Gazans with understandable hatred , and that it would be their destiny… You will read.
But despite this lucidity, Philippe Lançon does not adhere to the story he chronicles… He does not contest its intelligence, but finds that it lacks interiority, he says that the story over the pages becomes “quietly unbearable”… That the fight scenes seem like they came out of a Ridley Scott film, and that the narration easily pits heroes against monsters about whom we know nothing…
“The book is a story as breathtaking as it is annoying, as clear as it is candid, but this tragic candor is also the price: it says a lot about the state of mind of people who, humanists and right-thinking, are ready to set up their dream just a stone’s throw from an overcrowded Palestinian sewer. »
And even Tibon’s description of a grieving mother ten years ago inspires in Lançon a reserve that he claims.
“The most infuriating pages are those that should be the least: they recount the death of Daniel, a 4-year-old child, killed in 2014 by a shrapnel from Gaza. At his grave, his mother said: “We were the happiest family in the world, and I don’t understand.” We understand his grief: nothing is worse than losing a child; but, on the other side of the wall, there are hardly the happiest families in the world, and, between the time Amir Tibon wrote this book and the time we read it, thousands of Palestinian children are there. killed by bombs. They seem to have neither face nor identity. What exactly did Daniel’s mother not understand? We cannot escape a war that we wage against ourselves. »
And if Amir Tibon’s book reveals the candor of Israelis, Lançon’s text reveals the distance that has often established itself between Israeli tragedies and our understandings…
Easier to read, but no less moving – since the Middle East inevitably permeates us – you will debate it after 9 hours here – upsetting therefore are the stories in the Nouvel Obs of Palestinian children with broken bodies, broken souls, which we have taken out of Gaza and treated in Abiu Dhabi where Sarah sings and smiles again, five years old, whose face was deeply burned, and who looks at us at her wrinkled face decorated with new grafted pink skin…
Also moving is the friendship recounted by La Croix l’Hebdo, of Palestinians bereaved by Israel and Israelis bereaved by Palestinians, each victim of the other, but these victims meet in a thirty-year-old group, born during the disappointed hope of the Oslo agreements, the Circle of Parents-Family Forums, which new members have joined since October 7, and which are led by two mature men who consider themselves brothers, Arab Aramin whose sister Abir died in 10 years of a rubber bullet from a border guard and Guy Elhanan whose sister Smadar died at 14 in a suicide attack on her way back from school… There is in the story of the Cross the weekly wounds hatred, anger and then overcome and laughter and complicity… I read that Guy Elhanan overcame his rage by coming to study in France in Saint-Denis, it was with us that he learned Arabic, it is our cultural diversity that has calmed him down, I feel proud of it… Let’s preserve it?
L’Express tells us about a year of anti-Semitism in France, which is not only violence, but sometimes a couple falling apart, friendships broken.
Charlie Hebdo, the other newspaper from Lançon, knocks us out with old pages from another satirical newspaper from a past century, laughter, where the Jews, good joke, had beards, crooked eyes, hooked noses, Charlie wants us to remember ourselves -even when anti-Semitism was a familiar language… These archives are disturbing, it’s an understatement…
We are talking about other archives…
Who they are the enchantment of an American historian, Robert Darnton, who you read in the weekly Cross Again and in Point, specialist in our 18th century and who tells us about this happiness of the past in the libraries…! “I discovered this joy of the archive: the box that is brought to you, the link that must be undone, the box that is opened, the exploration work that begins… It’s fascinating! We make discoveries. We have contact with lost lives”… In his silent adventures he discovered one day a policeman, Joseph d’Hemery, a cultivated man who compiled the authors of his time, and who, as a young Diderot, had written… “very young man intelligent, but very dangerous. » Which was well seen if we consider that the enlightenment led to the Revolution… In his latest book Darnton tells how it happened, the revolution, not as a surprise but as the culmination of an atmosphere, a state of spirit, a revolutionary mood, in English we say Temper, it’s exciting…
Other surprising archives, those of the Vichy justice system which tracked the communist resistance, come to us, a marvelous text published by a subsidiary of Gallimard, travel notebooks of Jean Giono, who in the summer of 39 surveyed the Drôme and wrote his path, the smells, the earth, in a school notebook… This walk and the fate of these surprising words are told to you in the Dauphiné Libération, a gift…
And as a gift, told in Télérama these notebooks of the great Virginia Woolf, accessible on a dedicated website, 7000 pages blackened between 1905 and 1941 and it’s marvelous, we thought we had read everything about her. “Virginia Woolf writes like one would draw waves. His words undulate. By scrutinizing his ups and downs, we imagine his rapid gesture, his thoughts galloping under the pen. The letters cling to each other and often form rushing arches, like little bridges between ideas. The ink is black, blue, sometimes tending towards turquoise or delicate purplish. » She also gives Télérama a lot of talent!
And you’re talking to us about butts…
Pink and muscular buttocks, man’s buttocks which take all the light and impose themselves triumphantly in Paris, arriving from Boston one morning in September, informs me the delighted teasing Exhilarated Point, whose pen Violaine de Montclos brightens up to the description of a male body surprised in the toilet…
“Head lowered, hair disheveled, legs apart, the faceless man energetically dries his back, revealing his buttocks and testicles. Her feet have left traces of water on the ground, her skin is mottled, livid in places, doubtless pinkish from the cold in others, and this naked body is so realistic that it gives the spectator the feeling of observing him surreptitiously, as if the bathroom door had suddenly opened onto this trivial scene. »
But who was this fellow that the painter Gustave Caillebotte had seized in his own bathroom? Because yes, it is a painting, ‘the man in the bath’, which we had never seen so well in France old Europe… Executed in 1884 it was shown almost on the sly in Brussels in an exhibition of avant-garde artists themselves embarrassed by this neighborhood, then sank into private collections before being revived in 2011 by the Boston museum, which therefore loaned it to the Musée d’Orsay for an exhibition opening in four days devoted to Caillebotte and named painting men…
And that’s the subject. Alone of all the impressionists, Caillebotte devoted his colors and his strength to men, they were vigorous men, muscular boaters, floor planers glistening with sweat, but men of all classes of all faiths, whom he captured in their masculine simplicity, far from the sanitized bodies of the classics, he painted them so much men, Caillebotte, that we have been speculating for several years about his sexual preferences, him, of whom a photo exists disguised as a woman, but for a masked ball come on! He lived with Charlotte Berthier, whom he did not marry because she was from a modest background… But beyond the secrets or fantasies of alcoves, there floats around Caillebotte, a queer perfume, speculations, a homoerotic charge which exudes from his paintings… The disturbing buttocks will be at the heart of the exhibition, am I disturbed.
