Serendipities

A Dutch lingerie chain store called Hunkemöller has decided to promote their new women’s underwear with a Shakespeare sonnet:

They picked the first two lines of sonnet 20, presumably because they thought the poem went well with the “woman’s face” they display on the poster behind the window. The fact that this face has clearly been painted with lipstick and eyeshadow – and not with “Nature’s own hand” – did not give them pause, nor did they stop at the words “master-mistress of my passion.” Judging from the sweet pale pinks of the lingerie on display, I doubt that they meant to evoke a kind of dominatrix-fantasy.

They probably did not read the rest of the sonnet, or they would have noticed that the nice pair of knickers worn by the mannequin in the window do not contain the “one thing to [the speaker's] purpose nothing” designed for “women’s pleasure”…

French police researching the case of Julien Coupat – one of the “nine of Tarnac” suspected of sabotaging the overhead lines of the TGV in November 2008 – have sofar been unable to link him to the sabotage. French newspapers now report that police have swooped down on Coupat’s library as their only piece of evidence. The police noted, in bold, that they found five thousand books in the house Coupat lives in. Among them were works on philosophy, history, and literature. They also noted that several of the books were not translations, but editions in the original language. Libération writes:

Dans le dossier d’instruction un long PV revient sur la bibliothèque de la communauté de Tarnac. «Cinq mille ouvrages», écrit en gras le brigadier qui relate les perquisitions du 11 novembre. Des livres conservés dans une pièce de l’appartement du 2, place de l’Eglise, à Tarnac et classés entre «les archives, les pensées philosophiques, les ouvrages littéraires et l’histoire des civilisations».

I haven’t counted our books recently, but I would estimate that we own around 3000. Should we be worried? Perhaps I should, because we own at least one of the 27 books that French police singled out as suspect: Antonio Negri’s Books for Burning. At least I can honestly tell the police it belongs to my partner.

Perhaps the police have adopted president Sarkozy’s attitude to books. He recently complained to have suffered when he was made to read The Princess of Cleves in his youth. The Guardian reports that sales of the book have soared as it has become a symbol of resistance to Sarkozy’s government, especially among French university staff. Similarly, downloads of the leftist cultural critique that Julien Coupat is suspected of having written (and which is actually quite critical of Negri’s work) are soaring. L’insurrection qui vient has been reprinted and is widely available in bookshops.