...et l'infini !

Yesterday's OuLiPo meeting was entitled "... et l'infini !" (...and the infinite!) It was a reference to last month's meeting, which was all about "Zéro." (you don't need a translation for that one, right?) For Michèle Audin (one of the oulipians who is actually a renowned mathematician!), zero and infinity are just two sides of the same coin. Since you can establish an equivalence relation between them using x and y where x=1/y, they're not exactly extremes, but rather more akin to cousins. 

One of the Oulipians recited a "pantoum" (an oriental poem popularized by Baudelaire in his "Harmonie du soir"), partly out loud, partly in silence. He got a lot of laughs when the camera man (who projects the oulipian who is currently talking onto the back screen) mistakenly put him on the screen instead of the oulipian who was actually talking. One Oulipian demonstrated how you could have a BD (comic strip) that goes on forever, all in one page. It dealt with infinite series, something one learns toward the end of 11th grade math, if I remember correctly. Very clever. Michèle Audin recited excerpts from her abridged autobiographical dictionary. Why a dictionary? Well, for her, a dictionary is potentially infinite! Yes, it makes sense. Just think about it for a second. And OuLiPo cares about the potential. I mean, that is the Po. Her dictionary started with Aleph (the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, which coincidentally is the symbol chosen by Cantor to denote countably infinite sets) and ended with Zéro. Coincidence? I think not! By the way, did I mention there are levels of infinity? I learned about it in my abstract algebra and topological analysis classes back at Hopkins. Cool stuff. OuLiPo apparently knows all about it too—I shouldn't have been surprised. 

But, I should mention the most surprising part of my night last night. I decided to take a bus back (there's one that goes basically straight back to where I live), and while waiting at the bus stop, I saw this written in a window of a huge building across the street: 

In case it's hard for you to read (it was certainly hard for me to read, and take a picture of), that says "Who is John Galt?" It is the first sentence in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, basically the LAST book you would imagine finding a reference to here in Paris. She was so pro-capitalist that sometimes you just want to throw her book out the window because it's too preachy. She would have laughed at modern-day Americans, jumping up and down screaming "I told you so!" about everything that's happening to the economy now, and then shot herself. And as for Europe, well, this is why she left to go to America. The saddest part was that she truly believed that by writing Atlas Shrugged, she could change what she saw as the inevitable course of American history. No one listened. But hey, someone put it up on a building in Paris! I'm glad I'm not the only person in Paris who has read Ayn Rand and has a sense of humor!