Free speech and that naked dude at the Tour de France


Bauke Mollema streaked to victory today in Tour de France stage 15 from Laissac-Severac l'Eglise to Le Puy-en-Velay. He made his move with about 30 km to go, after much of the field had cracked. He was only 100 m or so from the peak. Still, a group of pursuers were only a few hundred metres behind. "Mollema needs a buffer!" said the announcer. I tweeted my thanks immediately.


Both announcers, Matthew Keenan and Robby McEwen, liked the tweet. That was fun. I could have a drink or three with those guys, I think.

I have been told that the Greek word for clever, deinos, also connotes a sense of terrible. Perhaps that is why those who make puns are routinely greeted with the judgment "that was terrible!" To say that Mollema needed a buffer was accurate if, by it, the speaker simply meant a little extra time and distance from his chasers. But it's clever to choose the word buffer, which carries the extra meaning of being naked. It's doubly clever, even cheeky, to use the word buffer while the image of the fan's backside is on the screen. This achieves the fidelity of word and picture so important to creating the magical spell of television. It is terrible because words mean different things at the same time. They don't stand still. They mock our desire to make things stay put.

Words are slippery multitaskers.

I have read that the painter-sculptor Marcel Duchamp was addicted to puns. The word addicted, used by Lewis Hyde to describe Duchamp's devotion to the oiliness of words, is, for two reasons, fitting. First, in its etymology, addicted comes from the Latin dicere, which literally means "to say." Fundamentally, it appears, addictions have to do with speech and words. Second, the more obvious meaning of addicted, which describes a mental of physical dependency on a particular substance, suggests why puns are irresistible to all of their coiners, and more than a few of their hearers. Puns are not just good material. They are material. Just like any other material that hooks us.

Consider that it's not the word buff or buffer that is attractive to a punster. It's the viscous coating of the word that allows it to mean different things at the same time. That can be unnerving. And thrilling. Contra-dictions can make us groan. But they can also serve a higher purpose. Here is Hyde on Duchamp from p. 307 of his Trickster book:



"Duchamp's well-oiled contradiction...was a tool not simply for avoiding mundane consumer regret but for avoiding the regret of living a life derived from unexamined language, tradition, and habit. Individuals who never sense the contradictions of their cultural inheritance run the risk of becoming little more than host bodies for stale gestures, metaphors, and received ideas, all the stereotypic likes and dislikes by which cultures perpetuate themselves."

Tomorrow is a rest day for the Tour spokesmen. Then, starting Tuesday, it's the final week and the run up to the dramatic finale on Duchamp's Élysées. Muscles massaged, chains oiled, words ready to flow.





Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

:)

Image
One of the joys and dangers of studying in the MACT program is that you start to feel scared enough to feel confident enough to fool around and try simple new things with technology. The danger is that you're not good enough not to spend most of your time fiddling around doing those things. And, so, this morning I am proud to announce that, taken by the hand, I have managed to embed html vimeo code into my blog. Please, no applause. This is not much, I know. Your basic 8 year old can do more. Asleep. But it is a minor accomplishment for me, because of me. And how I get in the way with my pre-wired reaction that new things won't work. The effect of that kind of thinking (or that lack of thinking) is that I transform the machine in front of me into an antagonistic force working to undo me. But it does remind me of me when I attribute malevolence to the skies when they conspire to bring rain on a morning of golf! Either way, that's bad storytelling. On another leve...
Read more

Hello!

Image
The potential socialness of a bicycle is built right into its roofless and windshieldless and doorless frame. It is easy to say hello on a bicycle. Like this morning. These sidewalkers nodded to me in unison at the exact instant I nodded to them. I said hello to the jogger, and he waved back. Hi, I said, to the dog walkers and the dog, and they nodded a greeting back. Both joggers smiled and said hello as our lives passed. I said hello to the squirrel. I said hello to the woman walking with poles and she returned the hello. The jogger looked over and I said hello as she said hello. I said hello to this fellow egg picker upper and we talked for a couple of minutes. Her bicycle comes out April 1. She is excited. Hello, I said. Hi, she said. I said hello to the  man on the other end of this leash and he said he and his dog were enjoying the beautiful morning. I said hello to this woman and she said hello, and we laughe...
Read more

Some Late Thoughts Listening To Wheat Kings

Image
Wheat Kings in Edmonton, July , 2016 I asked a friend at work what The Tragically Hip song Wheat Kings was about, and he paused for a beat longer than he would have had he not considered the same question many times. And then said: "I don't know." I took this as a good sign both of his humility and the song's profundity. It was an honest question. I don't know much about The Hip. They were cool for the first time when I was watching my wife raise our children, and trying to help the mission where I could. Those were busy days. The 1990s are my mediated decade, preserved by photographs of my younger self. Among the art that didn't get in was The Tragically Hip's. And it was a dishonest question. I knew the song was about David Milgaard's wrongful conviction and wrongful jail time served for the murder of Saskatoon nurse Gail Miller. And it was an honest question, because song's visual shards—that weathervane, a killer's face lit ...
Read more