The National division is effectively the third tier of French football, and Red Star, having just been promoted, are having a difficult time of it, especially at home. They’ve only won three games – one at home, two away (including a freakishly high 4-0 result against Paris F.C. at the Stade Charléty). So hopes were low coming into Friday night’s match, and were repayed by an insipid performance, with the Saint-Ouen side giving away an early goal. Red Star’s listless defence was repeatedly breached by an enterprising Ajaccio side, and they were lucky to go in only a goal down at half-time.

The second half began positively for Red Star, as they began to put together the kind of passing and movement that they’ve proved capable of in the past. But then, on 56 minutes, Ajaccio’s Colleredo scored the second, and Red Star had virtually no response. A frantic round of substitutions followed, but it made no difference. At the end of the game, as booing rang out, only two Red Star players came over to acknowledge the crowd. One lingered, and ended up being involved in a verbal spat with the fans. 2-0 to Ajaccio.

Stade Charlety

Getting to Red Star’s stadium, you leave the Clignancourt metro station and pass the huge markets at Saint-Ouen. In contrast, you can arrive at the Stade Charléty on a tram – and the station’s right next to the turnstiles. Running late, I climbed from the tram and heard the referee’s whistle signalling the start of play. But I was in my seat with three minutes gone, in time to see Paris FC’s well-taken goal in the fifth minute.

I thought I was in for a free-flowing and entertaining game, but instead things settled into a niggly pattern, with some hard tackling down the sideline, tight passing but little expansive play. I settled into trying to judge the capacity of the stadium (it’s about 20,000) and guessing how many people were in the crowd (about 300-400, I’d say). It was well into the second half before Arnaud Soquet went on an audacious solo dribble from near the halfway line that ended with him putting it past the Bayonne keeper from about 15 yards. Soquet’s run was achieved in part through passing the ball past opposition players, who each panicked in turn. The Paris FC forward showed real class and composure, and it’s little surprise that he’s been called up to the French under-20 squad. The Bayonnais turned up the heat on 90 minutes, with a brilliant curling goal from distance that made the added time distinctly uncomfortable for the home side.

During the game, I noticed something: goalkeepers, rather than taking long kicks downfield in the English fashion, were passing the ball to well placed defenders, who then tried to work attacking moves through midfield. This is the French third division, and everything’s played to feet. What’s the explanation, cultural differences?

At the bibliothèque Couronnes, a Perec mural

My essay on Georges Perec, the Situationists and Parisian geography appears in the third issue of the White Review, published this week.

I stood near the columbarium at Père Lachaise cemetery. I was there to see the locker-like vault containing the ashes of Georges Perec, kept alongside those of his aunt, Esther Bienenfeld. To the right of the plaque bearing their names and dates someone had affixed a wildflower to the wall with a Tom and Jerry sticking plaster. The columbarium contains thousands of urns stacked in a two-storey grid along one wall of the arcade. Its cloister-like arches surround the domed crematorium and its looming chimneys.

The grid became an obsession for Perec – his Lieux project and his novel la Vie mode d’emploi were planned using 12 by 12 and 10 by 10 grids respectively. Rather than being a limiting structure that undermined a creative impulse, the grid was seen as a constraint that would aid composition (in line with the literary group Oulipo’s view of the literary uses of limitation).

Perec’s Lieux project focused on 12 places in Paris, one of which was rue Vilin, the street where he had lived as a child.

Rue Vilin is in the neighbourhood of Belleville, in north-eastern Paris, and stands on hills overlooking the city centre. Perec’s Jewish family lived in an area described by his biographer David Bellos as ‘a whole Yiddish town within sight of the Eiffel Tower.’ While this street had an obvious emotional resonance for the writer, Perec sought to record his experience there as ‘simply, flatly’ as he could. A series of descriptive texts of each place made up one half of his project – the other half consisting of his memories of the same places. Perec’s descriptions of the rue Vilin capture a place that’s about to be erased: long designated a slum area, it has been marked for extensive redevelopment and reconstruction. It is far from a stable repository for Perec’s past.

Read more of the essay at the White Review. Or order a copy of issue three to read the whole article.

(Illustrator Badaude has contributed a poster to the same issue of The White Review that looks at Perec’s Tentative d’ épuisement d’un lieu Parisien; read her illustrated post about it here – I particularly like the tracing of pigeon trajectories around the place Saint Sulpice, something Perec does in his text. )

From The Readymades’ Facebook page:

‘Holten has expanded the scope of the contemporary novel’
— Brian Dillon

To mark the first Irish presentation of John Holten’s novel The Readymades Broken Dimanche Press are pleased to announce an evening discussion between Holten and writer and journalist Karl Whitney.

Holten has created a unique fiction that uses a variety of forms, genres and found texts to tell the story of Đorđe Bojić and the LGB art group. In collaboration with the Serbian artist and filmmaker Darko Dragicević, they have resurrected contemporaneously a catalogue of LGB artworks from 1995-2007 that accompany the story of The Readymades.

BDP, together with our new partners at Galerie Gojković, will be presenting this work through exhibitions that will mark the launch of the book across Europe this autumn. We’ve already started in Oslo at Gallery 1857 in August, and this discussion will lay the ground for a further Dublin intervention in the coming weeks.

This fiction is on-going; the novel is dead, long live the novel! Time for a fight

I switched on the radio instinctively, as if I was going to hear news reports about the end of the world on TSF Jazz, interrupting some interminable vocal jazz performance.

In the end, though, it turned out that this is just a test: the sirens are tested on the first Wednesday of every month, all over Paris. One of the reasons for the sirens being used is that they need to be kept in shape just in case of nuclear war. Perhaps not the cheeriest way of looking at things, but practical too, I suppose.

The effect of hearing the sirens ring out across the city is to drag one back to a primal time where everything one did in everyday life was carried out under threat of war. The sound of sirens would trigger a set of responses that were almost programmed, so habitual had they become: run for shelter, wait for things to pass, put out lights. Cower and wait. All these actions ran through my mind when I first heard the sirens, as if I was regressing to a long-ago rehearsed set of habits that weren’t necessarily my own. When the sirens were again set off at 12.10, I expected them (I had instantly done an internet search to find an explanation), and even recorded them on video for posterity. This is how the most unusual phenomenon come to be accepted in everyday life: through repetition, which, when carried out enough times, breeds familiarity, then invisibility.

My friend Conor and I were on our way to see a lower league football game between Red Star 93 – based in the Stade Docteur Bauer just north of the flea market – and L’Entente SSG, a club from a few miles up the road in Saint-Gratien.

The weekend was a tale of two matches. Firstly, a trip back in time to historic Red Star, and then back to the present: a journey to French football’s biggest fixture of the year.

Red Star was founded in 1897, and the club was a powerhouse of French football between the wars – winning the Coupe de France five times – before going into a period of decline that was arrested somewhat when they spent the majority of the seasons between 1965 and 1975 in Ligue 1. However, now a much reduced force, they play in group A of the French Amateur League – effectively the fourth tier of French football.

One of our reasons for travelling out to this evocative old stadium on the edge of the city was an Irish connection: Tony Cascarino had joined Red Star from his previous club AS Nancy in the summer of 2000, putting a brave face on stepping down from the top league, hoping it meant a new start. But it didn’t provide the reinvigoration Cascarino was seeking: he only played two games at the beginning of the season, and was soon on his way. Nevertheless, with that short-lived transfer a glancing relationship with Irish football was established, one we were keen to explore.

Our other trip that weekend was to Parc des Princes, to see Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) take on Olympique de Marseille – another of journeyman Cascarino’s ex-clubs – in the grudge match that has become known as ‘la Classique’. PSG’s past provides a sharp contrast to that of Red Star. Red Star has all the history, the connection with a literally iconic figure (the first World Cup trophy was named after their founder, Jules Rimet), yet PSG, formed only in 1970 through the merger of two Paris clubs, have the success – and the crowds – that Red Star lack.

PSG’s first game in Parc des Princes had been in 1973, in a second division game against Red Star. In 1974, both Red Star and PSG were promoted to Ligue 1; this was Red Star’s last season in the top division. The teams passed each other quietly, like ships in the night, embodying two dramatically different eras.

The experience of arriving at Red Star’s ground tells you this is a big club that has fallen far: you turn a corner, pass a church, and reach a muddy car-park behind a large stand, a covered terrace behind one of the goals. The stadium’s capacity far exceeds the relatively small demand for tickets. It’s obvious that the club once had much larger crowds, filling all four corners of the ground.

The floodlights are on, the incandescent light bleeding past the stands into the surrounding streets. From the noise of the crowd you can hear that the game has already kicked off. You buy two tickets at the window, each costing only 4 euro, double-checking the price with the seller in disbelief. Once inside, you’re on a concrete terrace, surrounded by chanting fans who keep up the noise for the whole game, fans of mixed ages and of different races: North African, Sub-Saharan African and Middle-Eastern. People drink cheap beer from plastic glasses; some smoke; in the middle of the stand, there’s a children’s section where at half-time a young lad stands on the terrace practicing his free-kicks with an invisible ball, trying to target its imaginary flight towards somewhere near the centre circle.

At one end of the Stade Bauer stands a wedge-shaped apartment block coloured in brown and yellow, making it resemble nothing so much as an extremely large pizza slice. Silhouetted in the windows, you can see people sitting, watching the game.

The match was played at a good pace, and with remarkable skill, by players who looked good enough to be playing at a much higher level. Two excellent goals in the first half, both spectacular – the first from distance, initially looking like a cross that beat the unfortunate goalkeeper, the second a low swerving shot hit hard from the right that curled inside the post – meant that Red Star ended the game as deserving victors. Afterwards we went across the road to a bar; above the counter was a team photo taken in the summer of 2000 with, unmistakeably, the figure of Tony Cascarino lurking in the back row.

The next day’s game was an altogether different experience. Parc des Princes is a vast concrete amphitheatre in the west of the city, a sharp contrast to the intimacy of Red Star’s ground. For this trip, we were joined by my girlfriend Laura. We arrived in a packed Métro train not far from the ground, not knowing what to expect. PSG fans have a reputation for violence, something that was more than hinted at by the battalions of riot police stationed along the streets outside the stadium. Marseille supporters, sworn enemies of the PSG crowd, were not allowed in, leaving the corner of the stadium reserved for away fans oddly empty.

After several checkpoints and searches, we arrived in our seats. The atmosphere was explosive – PSG had been overshadowed in their midweek European nil-all stalemate by Marseille’s 7-0 away win against Zilnia. The newspapers were full of quotes from Marseille sources about the club’s ‘tradition’ and ‘history’ – an obvious slight to PSG, which celebrates only the 40th anniversary of its founding this year.

Against the grain, PSG ground out a famous victory, scoring two early goals, then conceding a goal from Marseille on the break, before holding on heroically until the end. The crowd, never less than volatile up until the final whistle, erupted in an unwieldy combination of sheer relief and triumphal aggression.

On the train on the way back into the city, PSG fans chanted insulting songs aimed at their absent Marseille counterparts. For tonight, at least, Parisian football would have the upper hand.

Georges Perec lived at the apartment building at 13 rue Linné. When I passed it, I photographed the building from across the street, then crossed and took a picture of the courtyard, a bicycle visible inside the gate, leaning against a wall.

The urge to wander has struck me in every city I’ve visited, even those towns in the American west that lack event the most basic amenities for pedestrians (e.g., footpaths). While walking these towns and cities I’m motivated by two impulses: the impulse to get lost, to find new streets and corners of the city; and the impulse to map new territory, to utilise the newly discovered places of the city to aid future navigation. The getting lost is play: it is loose and undefined, and allows you to make mistakes and then correct them, without the pressure of having to conform to the framework of a map, an adherence to which may restrict your wandering.

Nevertheless, my journey this morning was also informed by a sketchy knowledge of the geography of the area: rue Monge runs along a steep hill, sloping down towards the Seine. In walking uphill, you are invariably heading south. Although, just to mix things up a little, this is not always the case: small hills derail you from any over-determined geography of the area, injecting a sense of play into proceedings once you realise you’ve left your map of Paris on the kitchen table.

My review of Emilie Bickerton’s A Short History of Cahiers du cinéma is on the 3:AM Magazine site here.

Yet, it seems to me that what the early Cahiers critics did so well was to bridge the gap between commercial concerns and personal visions, and to acknowledge the possibilities of a quick-witted director harnessing the potential of the studio system. In this way, the Cahiers critics were negotiating the contradictions of attempting to produce highly personal cinema in an era of increased consumer capitalism. This image of the director as auteur may have been wishful thinking on the parts of Truffaut and Godard, yet this convenient fiction allowed them to imagine themselves in the role of director, an effort of the imagination that is even more astounding for having actually materialised. Their cinema, in actuality, took a markedly different form from their heroes Hitchcock and Sam Fuller: fewer studio sets, more filming on the street; lower budgets, smaller audiences. Perhaps the lessons about negotiating the commercial aspects of filmmaking were forgotten by Cahiers in later years; when it couldn’t survive as an autonomous concern, it fully embraced commercialism – again, mirroring Toubiana’s leap from Maoist to pillar of the industry (he’s now the Director General of the Cinématheque française).

The present Faubourg retains few material traces of this glorious past, and only the friends of Red Paris mentally raise their hats when they cross Rue Charles-Delescluze and remember that at the crossroads of Rue du Faubourg Saint-Antoine and Rue de Cotte they are on the site of the barricade where the representative of the people Alphonse Baudin was killed for twenty-five francs. But even if the proximity of the Bastille Opera now disagreeably contaminates the first few metres of the Faubourg, even if Rue de Lappe, long since deserted by the Auvergnats, is no longer the haven that it once was for modern art, still the Aligre market, the fountains on the corner of Rue de Charonne and in the square in front of the Saint-Antoine hospital, the courtyards where illustrators and computer buffs, Chinese artisans and photographers, work cheek by jowl – this unique mixture maintains the quarter’s identity as plebeian and industrious. If, taking up Marcel Duchamp’s idea, we should manufacture cans of Air de Paris, it is certainly that of Faubourg Saint-Antoine with which I would fill mine. (124)

Eric Hazan will be in conversation with Iain Sinclair in London’s Institut Francais this Wednesday 3rd March. (Details here.)