maîtresse

2007-03-14T09:49:00.000-05:00

Dear friends! According to my statistic trackers, many of you are landing on this page, when in fact I no longer live here. Since November 2006 the new address for this blog is http://maitresse.typepad.com.

You should be automatically redirected, but in case you are not, please click here.

Thanks!

keep up with maitresse

2007-02-02T05:43:00.000-05:00

for those of you trailing behind in your bookmarks and feeds, over at my new digs, here are some of the most recent posts...

Karaoke!

Interdit

The Bax

Memorial

P2V and the MPV: State of Denial

Now get with the program!

moving on

2006-11-29T08:26:00.000-05:00

This site has moved. If you are not automatically redirected, please click here.

Please adjust your bookmarks, RSS feeds, and links to http://maitresse.typepad.com.

Thank you and see you on the flip side!

thanksgiving dialectic

2006-11-23T13:39:00.000-05:00

As I was just telling my friend Julie, you know you're getting dark and twisty (and living in France too long, and possibly watching too much "Grey's Anatomy") when you're rolling your eyes at the voice messages left on your phone by Americans wishing you a happy gobble gobble day.

My first year in France, I flew home for Thanksgiving. Last year I felt like an ambassador, mildly festive, mildly observant.

This year I'm going to see Borat with Julie and trying not to write any more blog posts comparing breaking up with getting run over by a bicyclist.

To those of you who are celebrating Thanksgiving today: enjoy your turkey and your day at the mall tomorrow. I am thankful for all that I have, and I'm thankful for it every day, I don't need a holiday which bears the faint whiff of genocide to remind me.

I do miss my family, and the comforting sound of (American) football on television, with a fire going in the living room. So I give thanks that they're there, even if it is without me, and I give thanks that I'll be on a plane in three weeks to be with them for Christmas.

Gobble gobble indeed.

On bikes and boys

2006-11-21T09:33:00.000-05:00

Well, people, I think it's safe to say that Stella is getting her groove back.

It has been the strangest month. I've been pressed up against heartache and it's been hell. It felt like everything went to pot, my mind, my health, my heart, my job. I'd start to climb out of my pit a little bit and I'd tumble back down. A few weeks ago I tried to lift my spirits by going to the launch of a friend's literary magazine; on my way there I almost got knocked over by a guy on a bike. I had no idea I was walking in a bike lane near the Jacques Bonsargeant metro station; it looked like a sidewalk to me. I wasn't wearing my iPod so my hearing was fine. And from out of nowhere a guy on a bike clocked me so hard I nearly fell down.

"Goddamn piece of motherf***ing sh** wh*re co**s*cker!!" I hurled all of my fury on the guy, and turned down another street, fuming. And though he may not speak the Queen's English, apparently this guy understood gutter English perfectly. He turned onto the same street as me and bawled me out for walking in a bike lane. "Next time I'll knock you over!" he threatened me, waving his fist in fury.

Outraged, I stood up for myself. "You piece of sh**, you almost did knock me over, and you could have driven around me, or rung your stupid little bike bell! How the f*** was I supposed to know it was a bike lane, it's in the middle of the sidewalk!"

"I had the right of way! I had the right of way!" he insisted. "Didn't I have the right of way? Look at the sign!" he was up in my face. And all of a sudden it was too much, the man on the bike and Nicolas was all of a sudden the same person, the same guy going full-speed ahead without caring if I was in his way and I started to cry uncontrollably.

"I'm sorry, I didn't see the bike lane, why did you have to drive into me," I managed to squeeze out in between sobs. The guy kind of awkwardly patted my shoulder. I imagined him going home to his girlfriend that night to tell her what a weird run-in he'd had on his way home. He gave me a final admonishment to be careful next time, and drove away. I was left a sobbing, indignant mess. Who the hell was he to tell me to be careful where I walk? I thought. He should be careful where he drives! Even sidewalks are unsafe, it would seem.

It's the same thing in a relationship, I realized that night, on the metro ride home. I can be doing my best to be careful where I walk. But sometimes you don't know you're walking in a danger zone, and the guy needs to ring his bell or otherwise indicate that he's about to run over you, if he can't avoid hitting you altogether. He needs to let you know to get out of the way.

But now, a few weeks into it, I'm much better, I'm watching where I'm going, and I'm hopeful for the future. I would not go so far as to say I'm over him. I still want us to work it out. But I can accept more responsability for where I walk, I can look at the road signs, if he can learn to drive a little more carefully.

The Ballad of McFucked-Up

2006-11-14T14:36:00.000-05:00

Some girls have their McDreamys; some girls have their McFucked-ups. On learning to tell the difference, the hard way.

The sadder but wiser girl am I
A sadder but wiser girl
I met a boy and thought my luck up
I couldn't guess just how he’d fuck up
The otherwise lovely McFucked-up.

He was dashing and strong, and virile
And said that he loved me so deeply
It wasn’t too long
Before it went wrong
And soon I was feeling a muck up
From the otherwise lovely McFucked-up.

Still, he came back all devoted
He swore he’d be faithful and true
He’d just one condition
Of his own volition
He'd ne’er flatter, nor fawn, nor suck up
My otherwise lovely McFucked-up.

But twisted he was, and mad
Yet I only could see the good
I love you, he’d cry
I love you, he’d sigh
Oh you silly lover I’d cluck
Up into the ear of my gallant McFucked-up.

The sadder but wiser girl am I
A sadder but wiser girl
He’s done it before, he did it again
I can’t hang around, and watch it upend
I’ve got to move on, he’s got a new friend
New boys at the door, there’s no time to spend
On missing and loving and nodding and pining
On frowning and crying, the sun is still shining!
On hoping and praying and plotting and plying
The persistently distant McFucked-up.

And what, you may ask, is the moral of my story?
Don’t give your heart for less than sheer glory.
I know he seems charming
I know he's disarming
But if you meet my McFucked-up
Disregard his pluck:
Up and Run.

terms, coming to

2006-11-10T16:12:00.000-05:00

I was in full throttle, in that relationship. I was not prepared for it to end when it did, like it did. So I can be forgiven for having some difficulty slamming on the brakes.

It hurts to let go of him, but it hurts almost as badly to let go of the idea that I had of him. I thought he was a better man than this. But the breakup, the fact that he can let me go like this, seriously calls the last ten months into question, ten months when I've been happier and more in love than I've ever been with anyone. It sends me over and over the relationship, playing it all back in slow motion, examining every frame in excrutiating detail, looking for the evidence that he was, all the while, someone who was capable of betraying me the way he did, at my birthday party of all places. I knew he had a self-destructive streak, but I thought he trusted me, and my judgment, and he assured me that he loved me so much that he would never do anything to hurt me. I took it for granted, after he came back in May, that he was around for the long haul, that any issues that came up we would deal with together, and above all, I took it on faith that I could trust him.

It hurts so bad, to think back through everything we did together with this new idea of him. It makes me no longer understand who he was, and what we had. When the one person you think you can trust in your life betrays you, who are you supposed to rely on? Clearly I can't rely on myself, since my judgment was clouded enough to let me get so involved with this person. There are my family and friends at home, of course, but they aren't here for the day-to-day. I have friends here, but no one who knew me before I moved here, and the two good friends I made here have since returned to New York. There are friendships currently under construction, but some are with people passing through Paris, which makes me reticent to get emotionally invested.

Who am I supposed to trust? What am I meant to have faith in, after this?

It doesn't matter, I suppose. I just have to get through the everyday. I move through the week, through the familiar spaces, the turnstiles, the stairwells. I see familiar faces, students, colleagues. I sleep a lot. I read a little. And I write. I pour myself into the creative process. That's the only thing that will always be there for me.

And somewhere above my head, the neighbors play "Don't You Forget About Me" on their stereo.

in which I pretend to know something about American politics

2006-11-08T04:18:00.000-05:00

Good news from home!

Clinton and Democrats Sweep Races in New York (NYT)

The Dems also took the House, and results of the Senatorial elections are still being counted (you don't say).

The Kindly Frères Goncourt

2006-11-07T03:09:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, the gods of the Goncourt looked down from their lofty perch and awarded their annual literary prize, the jewel of the saison des prix, to a most unlikely benecificiary.

An American.

And a New Yorker, at that.

Surprisingly, the reactions in the press have not been sour grapes at all; Jonathan Littell did write his massive tome in French, which makes him a Francophone writer as much as the next recipient (last year's went to the Belgian writer François Weyergans; in 1995 it went to the Russian writer Andreï Makine; in 1993 to the Lebanese-born Amin Maalouf, and so on).

The book [full admission: I have yet to read it], which purports to be the autobiography of an SS officer who reconstructs a quiet post-war life as a lacemaker in the north of France, has received mostly glowing reviews. But not entirely. Libération quotes Colette Kerber, the otherwise charming owner of the Marais bookshop Les Cahiers de Colette, "It's cut-and-paste docufiction, badly written [écrit avec les pieds]. To think they're comparing him to Grossman or Tolstoy!"

Still, although there are plenty of complaints about the way literary prizes are handed out, and the "vampirization of the rentrée," no one seems to mind that the new French literary golden boy is American. They're even having fun with his name: the best headline I've seen so far has to be Libération: "Littell assez grand pour le Goncourt".

Everyone knew Littell would win, anyway; for the last few months his book has generated a the kind of buzz that crops up when everyone is congratulating themselves on finishing a book rife with historical documentation that clocks in at 903 pages. Les Bienveillantes, or "The Kindly Ones," (which has already sold 250,000 copies) is being called an "unlikely bestseller" by people who don't understand that the book-buying public loves a challenge, especially one they can boast about to their friends.

And besides, Littell moved to France with his family in the 1970s and lived here pretty much without interruption (except to go to Yale) until his recent move to Barcelona. So he's like an honorary Frenchman, right?

Although the prize itself consists only of a symbolic 10 Euros (not to mention an unparalleled level of publicity), Littell should have no trouble finding his next meal: US rights were acquired by HarperCollins at Frankfurt for a reputed seven-figure sum.

ripped off by the Globe and Mail

2006-11-06T04:11:00.000-05:00

This is why freelancing sucks, and why I rarely do it.

On November 1st, I pitched this article to the features editor of the Globe and Mail:

Dear XXXX,

I am writing to suggest a feature/Q&A on Canadian author Nancy Huston, who yesterday won a prestigious French literary prize, the Prix Femina, for her latest novel, Lignes de Faille.

Born in Calgary, Alberta, Huston has lived in Paris for over twenty years, and maintains an "aller-retour" writing technique since 1993, which consists of writing two versions of each of her books—one in French and one in English.

The twist is, although the book is an enormous success in France, where it has also been nominated for the Prix Goncourt, it will not be published in North America anytime soon. Huston's Canadian publisher, MacArthur, deemed the subject matter of the first chapter too risqué, too potentially anti-American, to publish without serious changes—i.e. deleting most of the first quarter—and Huston refused. It has been turned down by several American publishers as well, and to my knowledge the book does not have a publisher in English at all. I haven't seen any articles on this in the press (Anglophone or French) so this could be quite a scoop.

Lignes de faille chronicles the story of an average American family over four generations, in reverse chronological order, each chapter narrated by a child of six: Sol, Sol's father Randall, Randall's mother Sadie, and Sadie's mother Kristina. Each of the four chapters is set against a larger political context—the Iraq war, the Sabra and Chatila massacre, the Bay of Pigs invasion, and the Second World War—and the tension between what a child hears and what a child understands is a key source of resonance in the text. It is the first chaper, and Sol's obsession with the Iraq War, George W. Bush, and the Abu Ghraib photographs, that MacArthur considers so scandalous.

[edited out: the place where I pitch myself as the journalist]

Thank you for your consideration; I look forward to hearing from you.

XXXX

On November 2nd, they ran this story:

English edition of Prix Femina winner delayed

JAMES ADAMS

From Thursday's Globe and Mail

A French-language novel by Calgary-born Nancy Huston that was awarded France's prestigious Prix Femina this week was expected to be published in English first -- but the novelist's Canadian publisher and New York agent held off doing that this year because they wanted Huston to change portions of her text to avoid offending U.S. readers.

Talks are reportedly under way to have McArthur & Co. issue Lignes de faille in English next spring.

But Huston, who has called Paris home for more than 30 years, was close-mouthed about the matter when contacted this week by e-mail. "I'd rather not make any public comments on these sensitive issues just now, until some sort of decision has been reached," she said.

At issue, it seems, is the extent of the changes her North American representatives want. Kim McArthur, who published Huston's previous two novels in English, said yesterday that the author "has promised us some slight revisions; it's very tiny . . . maybe four sentences" to permit Lignes de faille to be published in 2007 in Canada and, possibly, the United States with a new English title, Birth Marks. However, no contract has been signed as yet, and "it's all just sort of very dicey," McArthur acknowledged at the same time as she praised Lignes as "fantastic . . . It's just riveting . . . She's just so famous in France."

In an interview in September in Paris with Montreal's La Presse, Huston, 53, said that "they want me to remove [enlève] half the pages concerning Sol, all of the material that revolves around Jesus, the war in Iraq, George Bush, the pornography, etc." The French version of the novel has been a bestseller in Quebec.

In that same interview, Huston said she believes that "contemporary America is reproducing the worst traits of Nazi Germany. I believe we are in a pretotalitarian state."

Lignes de faille -- nominated this year to the long list for France's most famous literary award, the Prix Goncourt -- is a four-part, 500-page novel, each part of which moves backward in time, from 2004 to 1982 to 1962 and, finally, to 1944-45. In each instance, Huston uses the viewpoint of a six-year-old child to tell the history of a Jewish family, starting in present-day California and working "toward" Holocaust-era Europe.

It's the first part, named after the young narrator, Sol, that prompted McArthur's concern and that of her North American agent, Rosalie Siegel. Sol, as described in La Presse, is a precocious, haughtily nasty American boy who, over the course of 128 pages, "gets turned on [carbure] by Internet pornography and images of the tortures at Iraq's infamous Abu Ghraib prison."

At one point, Sol declares: "I love to click on [images of] the dead bodies of Iraqi soldiers in the sand; it's a total slide-show." In another passage he says: "God gave this body and this spirit . . . I know that He has great plans for me, which is why he saw to it that I was born in the richest state in the richest country in the world . . . Happily, God and President Bush are good friends. I think of Heaven as being like a big state of Texas in the sky, with God wandering around his ranch in a Stetson and cowboy boots . . ."

"There's a bit of a schism between the war in Iraq [as seen in France] . . . versus the point of view from America," McArthur says. "You may remember 'freedom fries.' " Given that Huston has lived more than half her life in France, her "view is completely credible there," but "we [McArthur and Siegel] were taking the long view."

Fluently bilingual, Huston has published at least eight novels in the past 25 years and has become famous -- and controversial -- for self-translating them, usually from French into English. This was the case for her 1999 novel The Mark of the Angel, which was nominated for the Giller Prize for excellence in English-language fiction after being published a year earlier in French as L'Empreinte de l'ange. In the early nineties, she reversed the practice -- self-translating her fourth novel, Plainsong, from English to French (Cantiques des plaines), for which she won the Governor-General's Award for French fiction.

I got the story directly from Huston herself at a reading. Given that Huston didn't even want to talk to the journalist, I find it hard to believe that she would have alerted the press. And since no other news source has picked this up, with the exception of the Montreal paper, the only source I can imagine they would have for it is my pitch. And the information about her writing and her translating is just too similar for my comfort.

For crying out loud. I emailed my agent to find out if there's anything that I can do; I don't suppose there is, though. Good lord, how I hate freelancing.

2006-11-03T10:47:00.000-05:00

I have been cast in an amateur production of "Fame."

This has been a weird couple of weeks.

First rehearsal is tomorrow. Am undecided if I will stick with it. How much do I really want to know about the world of community theatre in Paris...

Then again, I suppose it's more productive than crying for hours or watching American television on iTunes.

2006-10-31T10:05:00.000-05:00

book-keeping

2006-10-31T08:23:00.000-05:00

in the last week, I have lost

1) several important documents
2) a receipt for a letter the post office is holding for me
3) fifteen pounds
4) the boy I thought was the love of my life

and I have gained

1) a cold
2) the aforementioned boots from comptoir des cotonniers
3) a therapist
4) a new blog host

Analysis:

The documents may turn up. I can't get the letter without the receipt so I may never get the letter back. The weight will stay off unless I go to Italy again and stuff more pizza down my gorge. The boy may come back. The cold will go away. The boots are hot. The therapist may be a long-term committment. And we'll see about the blog host (get a sneak peek here)...

Stay tuned, and get ready to adjust your bookmarks and RSS feeds.

2006-10-26T15:22:00.000-05:00

You thought I had holed myself up in some Parisian cave, didn't you.

I thought I had, too.

But this blog has never been about doing just one thing and sticking to it. So screw it. I sing. I mentioned that, I think. I'm tired of singing to myself. I've discovered how to put audio on my blog and life will never be the same. I just hope I don't drive all my readers away with my warbling!

This one goes out to all those lovebirds out there... and to all those pissed-off bitter ex-lovebirds, too. Maitresse sings: a snippet of Patty Griffin's "Rain."

the new reality

2006-10-24T14:21:00.000-05:00

maitresse is on indefinite hiatus. please check back from time to time. I may have the heart to blog again. but I don't know when.

thanks.

Maitresse style, part deux

2006-10-20T12:27:00.000-05:00

Don't get me wrong: I love the Face Hunter.

But looking at the shots FH is presently blogging from Iceland, I am left to draw the following conclusions:

1) Either people in Iceland dress the way I did when I was eleven, or;
2) I had a really kickass sense of style in sixth grade.

Probably both statements are within a few degrees of accuracy.

I went to middle school at a time (this would be around 1990) when one of the hottest trends was layered, different colored slouchy socks. My favorite pair of socks were tye-dyed all the colors of the rainbow, and I wore them with my skintight white Farlow jeans (that's right, skinny jeans way back then, beeyotches). If you weren't layering your socks, then you had to pull down the slouches of your socks so they lay just so over your Keds. And god forbid your socks should be too thin; you could tell cool socks from dorky socks at a glance by the thickness of the weave. The socks had a label too, but I've forgotten what they were called.

Are you getting a sense of what middle school on Long Island was like? The only thing that could save you from social obsolescence was the labels you wore. "Clueless," which thinks it's a movie about fashionable teenagers in the nineties, didn't come close. Put "Heathers" together with "Mean Girls," take out the cathartic relief of the school blowing up or Rachel McAdams getting hit by a bus, and you have some idea of it: relentless peer judgment in a pressure cooker that never went off.

But there was a time, before Farlows, before I knew which were the cool socks and which ones the "dorky" ones, a naive time when I wore whatever inspired me in my drawer that morning: I had tights in some really electric colors, blue, fuschia, crazy patterns, and I would coordinate them to match or to contrast the colors in my outfit. One day, thus garbed, I arrived at school, and, judging from the way the kids were looking at me, I had the sneaking suspicion that I had gone too far. This is the first recollection I have of feeling like everyone else had received some brochure on "how to be cool" in the mail over the summer, and I had not.

I quickly turned to my best friend at the time, who was already beginning to stray from me to become best friends with a bland wisp of a thing called Meghan, and acted like we had decided it was going to be "crazy color day." "Why didn't you wear your crazy tights today?" I said to her, loudly enough to be overheard by anyone passing by who might deride me for, or be blinded by, my ensemble. "We said it would be crazy color day!"

In retrospect, I can't blame her for ditching me. I was trying to implicate her in my fashion faux pas.

Today, I tend to think, and think hard, when picking out an outfit. And I play it safe in that Parisian gamine vein; all my stuff comes from Claudie Pierlot and Comptoir des Cotonniers. But I saw a cool co-worker last week wearing violet tights with camel brown boots... and who knows. I might be tempted to deviate from my opaque black tights...

(If you're just discovering Face Hunter through this post, check out The Sartorialist while you're at it...)

Le BM

2006-10-18T05:38:00.000-05:00

I know, dearies, I haven't been posting much at all, at all, but there are big things to come, I promise. Time is precious now that I've started teaching again, and I want to make my postings just so. So. In lieu of a "real" post, an anecdotal one (which somehow always feels like cheating to me).

It was my birthday, right? and my family is far away in New York, right? so my mom, who is the best mom, told me to go pick something out for myself and put it on her credit card. So I went to "Le BM," as the French call it, pronounced bay-em and short for Le Bon Marché, which seems to me a rather scatalogical way of referring to the best department store in Paris, indeed the world, but alright. I went to Le BM around six pm, because I was giving an English lesson in the neighborhood at seven, thinking I could get in and have a quick look-- pre-shopping, if you will-- and then go back, more informed, when I had more time.

Big mistake. I should have known: if a French department store closes at seven pm, it really closes at six. I have never felt such a wave of cold stares assail me as I walked through each of the designer nooks in the first floor annex. Every salesgirl turned her back and started to play with a pile of sweaters, and I got the message loud and clear: "we're closing, don't make us do any additional work, like wait on you or clean up after you."

Determined to at least try on a pair of shoes, I approached the saleswoman asking for a 36 in a pair of brown boots, and at the last minute, a pair of 1940s-inspired robin's egg blue Mary Jane pumps. The boots, those Castaners with the rubber bottoms, were awkward and looked kind of cheap. I mentally resolved to buy the ones at Comptoir des Cotonniers I had seen over the weekend.

But the pumps, oh my. They looked so kicky, so funky on the display. But when I put them on, I realized the chunky strap, a contrasting shade of beige leather fastened with--I kid you not--Velcro, actually resembled an Ace bandage. I made a face and started taking them off.

"You don't like them?" the saleswoman asked wearily.

"No," I said apologetically, and offered a rationale, as I've noticed women tend to do here: "I think the strap is too thick, it's too bulky."

She sniffed. "It's true that it takes a certain--" she paused-- "style, to carry them off."

I stared at her. Was this woman actually suggesting that I didn't have the style to carry off a two hundred euro Ace bandage? Dita Von Whatever-her-name-is the queen of burlesque could put them on and they would still look fugly.

"Sans doute," I said, coldly, and took my Converse-clad self away from there, feeling at the same time vaguely insulted and derisive. I'm giving her the benefit of the doubt: she had probably had a long day.

(of customers complaining about the strap)

Et la Maîtresse fût

2006-10-11T02:04:00.000-05:00

October 10th, 1978. Game One of the World Series. Yankees versus Dodgers, away game.

October 10th, 1978. Yom Kippur begins at sundown.

October 10th, 1978. My mom goes into labour. There is not a single doctor to be found at North Shore Hospital, on Long Island, NY. The Jews are home fasting. The Gentiles are in front of the TV. Hell, I think my dad was too. He didn't make it in time for my debut sur scène.

October 11th, 1978, 5:34 am. In the immortal words of Tristram Shandy, I am born. And so is a Mommy.

Happy Birthday to both of us.

photo by Musings Orchards

looking and listening

2006-10-09T03:05:00.000-05:00

I've been quiet lately. That's largely because my iBook is currently in critical condition at the Apple Emergency Room after shutting off and going into a state they call "kernel panic," which basically means it won't turn back on.

But it's also because I've had so much to do since I came back from Italy that I haven't had time to blog about the trip, or Festival America, or any of the other things I've been up to that might be post-worthy.

What it comes down to, however, is not computer failure or lack of time. It's that I'm in one of my hazes, what happens when things are fulminating and I'm taking in a lot of information but am not really processing it. I'm mulling a lot of things over right now. I'm just living one day to the next and trying not to default on any of my responsabilities.

I'm turning twenty-eight this week. I can't even bring myself to plan a party. I can't commit to a date and a location. I just feel very fluid about it.

I've even stopped wearing my iPod when I go places. It was because of the computer failure, initially-- it ran out of battery and needed the computer to be turned on to charge. But even after I bought a charger I haven't used it. It's just another complication; another layer distancing me from where I am. It's having to be conscious of one more thing, the discomfort of headphones and the wire hanging down my front leading into my pocket.

I think N and I are going to go out of town for the weekend. I think maybe when I get my computer back I'll plug myself back in.

skipping the grid, again

2006-09-29T09:37:00.000-05:00

back on gridskipper today.

visuality, aurality

2006-09-28T03:53:00.000-05:00

Reading Nancy Huston rather obsessively at the moment, I'm struck by the degree to which her work is aural-- her writing is incredibly poetic in its adoration of and sensitivity to the rhythm, resonance, consonance, and assonance of the French language. Reading it aloud from time to time is almost better than reading it silently! Her predilection for wordplay amazes me-- not only because she is so adroit at it, but because she is adroit in her adopted language. (Huston was born in Alberta, Canada but moved to France at the age of twenty, and writes her novels in French). And while it is impressive, it's clear that it is only possible for Huston to write that way precisely because she's writing in an adopted tongue. For example, the interior monologue of an American in France, a character in Les Variations Goldberg:

"Find out what you have in common, homonym, comment, commère, comme mère, mare, cauchemar, mare au diable, diabolo menthe, mentir, m'en tirer, m'étirer, métier, quoi qu'ils fassent ils ont toujours raison de le faire, les ouvriers, les artisans, les businessmen, les chefs d'Etat, les intellos, moi je dirai jamais ça, je saboterai d'abord. Te rappelles-tu Lili comme on disait que les convaincus étaient toujours des vaincus quelque part? qu'ils avaient dominé et étranglé tous les doutes? C'étaient des cons, vaincus: beaucoup plus vaincus que les suicidés. N'est-ce pas?" (p. 98-99)

I found myself wondering how she would translate this section into English. I'd like to see how it was rendered, actually.

I love the musicality of language, and music itself, and rely heavily on all that is aural to inspire and contextualize my own writing. But (like my mother), I am mainly visually oriented. If you read something to me from the newspaper, I need to see the story and read it for myself before I'll truly understand the meaning. I prefer print news to radio or television. To understand something, I need to see it.

Art and literature are easier for me to intellectualize, whereas music is utterly intuitive. I don't know how I play the piano, but if I thought about my fingers they would falter. I don't care much to know how the vocal process works when I sing, and I'm not sure why there's always music in my head no matter what I'm doing at the forefront of my brain. C'est comme ça. (For example: what's on the radio in my head right now is a Chopin waltz I haven't heard or played recently, it's just stored somewhere in my brain). For the same reason, I don't like to write criticism about poetry-- I don't know what it is that's so affective about it but I feel that to analyze it would be, for me, to deflate it.

But! And this was meant to be the point of this post. To a certain extent, I can let go of the impulse to intellectualize the visual, and let it inspire a whole range of creativity and , yes, sentimentality. When I write, I'm certainly working off a visual composition in my mind, although sadly, I have no means for rendering that composition other than words. My father, an architect, is exceptionally talented as a draftsman, and does beautiful sketches and watercolors when he's on vacation, but this particular talent did not get embedded in my DNA.

Which is why I have to take my hat off again to Carol at Paris Breakfasts for her gorgeous series on Venice. I didn't get to see these posts before I left but they may in fact be more resonant now that I'm back. Between her watercolors, and Gill's photographs, I'm kept regularly inspired: they help nourish and refine the visual apparatus in my mind. They say a picture is worth a thousand words. But to successfully make that translation, you need a superior picture. Here are a few I took in Venice with these two women in mind-- to point up the beauty in the quotidien details.

At the Rialto vegetable market

Campo Santi Giovanni e Paolo: this one was actually deliberately composed in homage to Paris Breakfasts! Spritz, orange Claire Fontaine, tortoiseshell glasses, Lancel purse, brick church, sunset and conveninently located woman in red.

I wanted to buy my father paints from here but didn't know how, or if he could even use them.

The Chatterley Ban

2006-09-26T12:57:00.000-05:00

Well, would you look at that: it's Banned Books Week again. To celebrate, rather than chime in with another essay on why it's silly to ban/censor books, when it's already been done so competently elsewhere, I thought I'd open a brief discussion with these words from Philip Larkin.

Annus Mirabilis

Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(Which was rather late for me)-
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles' first LP.

Up till then there'd only been
A sort of bargaining,
A wrangle For a ring,
A shame that started at sixteen
And spread to everything.

Then all at once the quarrel sank:
Everyone felt the same,
And every life became
A brilliant breaking of the bank,
A quite unlosable game.

So life was never better than
In nineteen sixty-three
(Though just too late for me)-
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles' first LP.

The Chatterley ban, as you may or may not be aware, refers to the novel by DH Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, privately printed in Italy in 1928 but banned in the UK until 1960 because of its supposedly "obscene" content. On that count, I can attest that it does in fact contain certain four-letter words the use of which, the first time I read the novel, even as a relatively urbane, experienced early-twentysomething, made my jaw drop (although not nearly as wide as it did when I read Henry Miller's Tropics). The ban was lifted following a 1959 act which stipulated that a book could not be judged obscene if it could be proved to be of "literary merit." EM Forster and Raymond Williams testified in court to assure the judge that yes, in fact, Lawrence's text was possessed of at least this virtue. (One can only imagine, deliciously, what Woolf would have said on the witness stand.)

Interestingly, the novel contains an admission of its own potentially corruptive or even destructive power:

"Therefore, the novel, properly handled, can reveal the most secret places of life: for it is in the passional secret places of life, above all, that the tide of sensitive awareness needs to ebb and flow, cleansing and freshening.

But the novel, like gossip, can also excite spurious sympathies and recoils, mechanical and deadening to the psyche. The novel can glorify the most corrupt feelings, so long as they are conventionally `pure'. Then the novel, like gossip, becomes at last vicious, and, like gossip, all the more vicious because it is always ostensibly on the side of the angels."

As this passage attests, not only is Lawrence aware of the affect the book would have on the public, he encapsulates this general pudeur within Connie's shock at the depth of her own sexuality. Take this excerpt from the infamous Chapter 15 (right before Mellors takes her, "short and sharp and finished, like an animal"):

"He laughed wryly, and threw off his clothes. It was too much. He jumped out, naked and white, with a little shiver, into the hard slanting rain. Flossie sprang before him with a frantic little bark. Connie, her hair all wet and sticking to her head, turned her hot face and saw him. Her blue eyes blazed with excitement as she turned and ran fast, with a strange charging movement, out of the clearing and down the path, the wet boughs whipping her."

Although the passage is not entirely focalized through Connie, the second phrase certainly is, suggesting that we are experiencing the scene if not through her, then with her, and her surprise is our surprise. Although this is not the first time they make love in the novel, this scene is as evocative as any other of the daringness of Connie's act. We are crucially aware of how far outside--literally--she is of the social conventions which apply to her.

Conventions whose boundaries, I might add, gossip functions to establish and police. And, Lawrence suggests, novels have the same function as gossip. What is pure in concept may, it seems, be vicious in its almost fascist insistance on what is pure and what is impure. Lawrence, on the other hand, narrates what we have been conditioned to regard as "impure," and invites us to see the purity of experience in it.

You can find the naughty bits in Lady Chatterley's Lover yourself; the text is here.

tote that barge, lift that bale

2006-09-16T04:23:00.000-05:00

When I came to Venice to do some work, I meant to work on my book-- but today the city of Venice put me to work cleaning the Grand Canal.

No, this wasn't obligatory community service for my various infractions against the city (mini skirt in the church, iPod in the synagogue, etc), and no, I didn't find my inner environmentalist tree-hugger in this treeless city, but rather part of a newspaper article my former roommate Camilla had to write. See, today is apparently international clean water day, or something, and Project Aware was sponsoring a group of Venetians with t-shirts that said "RESCUE TEAM" on the back, big green fishing nets, and blue plastic gloves to get out there and pick up all that non-biodegradable debris floating around in the canals-- you know, plastic bottles, bits of styrofome, rubber parts, whatever.

So at 7:50 am this morning (ouch!) Camilla and I reported to the traghetto station at Santa Maria del Giglio, next to the Gritti Palace, piled into one of four gondolas, and set out in a boat with a couple of local politicians. We got to ride in a gondola for an hour! for free! all along rhe Grand Canal, under the Accademia Bridge! All we had to do was collect debris in our nets and empty the nets into plastic bags. Hopefully we didn't contract malaria or whatever diseases are floating around in the sea-green lagoon water.

It was very exciting, when we first set out. Camilla explained to the politicians, some sort of attachés to the mayor, what a French-speaking American was doing in their boat. I smiled haplessly ("Mi dispiace, non parlo italiano!").

"Una bottiglia!" Camilla cried excitedly, pointing off to the left. We were pleased to see the canal was, in fact, polluted, and it was up to us to clean it up!

"Let's go get that bottle!" the gondolier cried and steered us off in the right direction.

After awhile, though, we were floating past bottles that were too far off, and the whole mission seemed to get lackluster. Typical. At the end of the morning, between all the boats, we had collected about 100 bottles.

All in a day's work, my friends. I'll get some pictures up soon, if I can. And now I'm off to re-find, as the French say, il mio amore, as the Italians say, in Naples, as the Americans say. Ciao!

Remnick and a rant

2006-09-15T09:18:00.000-05:00

Great profile of David Remnick in The Observer last Sunday. I love his New Yorker, though I'll refrain from saying anything catty about its previous incarnation, and I sorely miss receiving it in the mail once a week. It just costs far too much money to pay for international delivery, and the online version only has a third of the magazine in it. (If I ever decide to launch a Pay Pal button, as some bloggers have done, you may be sure donations will go to the New Yorker subscription fund).

The David Remnick of my generation is kicking around somewhere. Maybe he's blogging. But where? I'm just so impatient with so many of the under 35 year-olds on the loudspeaker-- that is, who have something of a public voice-- they strike me as whiny, self-centered would be hipsters or "New Bohemians" (cf recent New York Times photo essay) with more of an interest in their own withering irony than in investigating, tunnelling, interrogating, questioning.

Either that or they're overly earnest and moralizing academics. Sometimes they're academic hipsters (groan). You'll forgive me for not citing people by name, I'm not trying to alienate anyone, merely venting about the real lack of authentic, dedicated thought amongst Generation X.

Nevermind the bollocks, the pretensions; where is the good writing, people?

on sontag

2006-09-14T14:42:00.000-05:00

I've long been an avid admirer of Susan Sontag, but--confession time-- have never committed myself to reading her work all the way through. I've read the standard stuff-- you know, parts of "Against Interpretation" in Critical Theory classes, bits of "On Photography" mainly to see what Barthes cribbed from her, a little of her writing on illness, for a seminar on Woolf. And "Notes on Camp," I have the feeling, will be really important for my thesis. But I'm not satisfied with this dabbling-- all this is set to change as soon as I'm back in Paris. The woman deserves a thorough reading! The novels, the essays, all of it.

She has what strikes me as an organized mind, something I keenly feel that I lack: the ability to go headlong into a problem and see it through until it's been completely worked out. I tend to think sideways, in many directions at once; the result of a vivid curiosity and an underdeveloped sense of discipline. I also blame wonderful and damaging inventions like the internet, which does not help in this respect, what with its hyperlinks and the expectation of instaneous comprehension it creates in the reader.

To think well, and to write well, I often find I need to shut my mind to the noise of mass communication. Even Woolf felt this way, as she wrote in a letter to Ethel Smyth, "the fact about contemporaries […] is that they’re doing the same thing on another railway line: one resents their distracting one, flashing past, the wrong way—something like that: from timidity, partly, one keeps ones eyes on one’s own road” (L IV, 315).

I'm reading some extracts of Sontag's journals (who runs in a direct line from Woolf, if any one does) that were published recently in the NY Times. I identify so strongly with what she writes, and dare to hope, idiotically, that similar thoughts on writing might imply similar levels of talent and competence...

For example:

31 December, 1958, in Paris
Nothing prevents me from being a writer except laziness. A good writer.

and 19 November 1959, New York
The only kind of writer I could be is the kind who exposes himself.. . .To write is to spend oneself, to gamble oneself. But up to now I have not even liked the sound of my own name. To write, I must love my name. The writer is in love with himself. . .and makes his books out of that meeting and that violence.

and this is one of my favorites:

12/3/61

Becoming aware of the 'dead places' of feeling — Talking without feeling anything. (This

is very different from my old self-revulsion at talking without knowing anything.)

The writer must be four people:

1) the nut, the obsédé

2) the moron

3) the stylist

4) the critic

1) supplies the material

2) lets it come out

3) is taste

4) is intelligence

a great writer has all 4 — but you can still be

a good writer with only 1) and 2); they're most important.

read the rest of the journal entries here, the whole of which are set to be published by FSG in 2008 or 2009.

a day at the synagogue, a night at the lido

2006-09-10T04:32:00.000-05:00

Yesterday morning, I woke up early and took my little self to the Spanish Synagogue for Shabbos services. I'm not really what you'd call an observant Jew (for ever so many reasons, one being that when last you saw me I was in a church lighting a candle), but the research project I'm currently working on here in Venice necessitates that I get to see a little of what the Sephardic ritual looks like.

I got terribly lost on my way from Dorsoduro, where I'm staying, up to Cannaregio; it's true that getting lost is the whole point of being in Venice, but when you're actually trying to get somewhere it's a little annoying to keep finding yourself at dead ends where the only way to get where you want to go is to swim there. So by the time I arrived at the Scuola di Spagna, I was a little on the late side.

There were two armed militia men standing guard, and a trio of what has to be the Venetian Jewish mafia blocking the door. The one in the front spoke English with me. He asked to look in my bag, and when he found my camera and cell phone there, he refused me entry. "This is an Orthodox synagogue, miss," as if, because I'm not wearing a long denim skirt with sneakers, I must not know from Orthodox. The thing about Shabbos, you see, is that you're not supposed to light a flame or do any work. Using electronic equipment is considered lighting a flame. So even the presence of potential flame-lighters is verboten.

I tried to reason with him ("but if they're not on! then it's not breaking any rules!") and when he wouldn't budge, I started to tear up. "But I've come so far from Dorsoduro, and got lost, and I'm only in town for a week, and...." and then I got smart. "And it's Shabbos! I have to observe the Sabbath!"

He wasn't fooled, but he offered me a deal. "Tell you what. If you can find a place to leave these things, I'll let you in. Otherwise, you can come back tonight for Havdalah. But I'm telling you," he said somewhat condescendingly, "most shopkeepers around here are closed for Shabbat."

There was no way I was going to traipse all the way back to Canareggio for the second time that day. Besides, I had plans to go to the Venice Film Festival on the Lido that night. I met his challenge. Around the corner, toward the train station, I had noticed an open antiques store. I went back to it, and the very genteel middle-aged owner spoke enough French to understand why I was holding out my digital camera and cell phone to him.

I went back to the synagogyue and triumphantly opened my bag to the man... when I noticed my iPod peeping out from underneath my wallet. Luckily, he didn't, and he let me in.

Later that night, I had plans to meet up with my former roommate, Camilla, and her assorted French and Italian friends, at the Lido, a 15 minute vaporetto ride out into the lagoon, where the film festival has been going on for the past 2 weeks. They had all been working there, running the accreditation desk or something like that. Last night was the night the jury was handing out the prizes, and so all the celebrities were turning out.

When I arrived at the festival and walked toward our appointed meeting place, at the Palazzo Casino, I noticed something strange-- everyone was taking pictures of me!

My, I thought to myself, I must look especially fabulous this evening, it must be my gorgeous new raw silk scarf.

But I soon realized they were taking pictures of someone walking behind me. I turned and saw this man, so I took a picture of him too, even though I don't know who he is. Does anyone else?

I found Camilla further down, and we walked over to the red carpet. I had her take a picture of my scarf and the lions.

There were too many people and I was too short to see over their heads, but Camilla assures me we were within twenty feet of Catherine Deneuve.

We had an aperitif (the thing to drink here is "spritz," some bitter orange concoction of Aperol and something fizzy), then went to get a pizza at a place on the main drag that looked just like the local pizzeria near my house on Long Island. On the walk to the pizza place we passed the Hotel des Bains, where the film "Death in Venice" was filmed... it was twilight, the only source of light was the lit-up dining room, and the waves crashed on the beach as we walked by. It was a very Gothic Novel moment, and for a moment I expected a psychotic accordeonist to jump out from the bushes and laugh at us.

So there you have it, from the sacred to the godless, more than just an average day spent visiting Venice.

the wages of sin

2006-09-08T03:40:00.000-05:00

Ciao, ragazzi, from an internet cafe in Campo San Stefano (pronounced STEF-a-no, and not Ste-FAN-o, as this correspondant just learned).

Venice is more spectacular than I remembered, although my view of it has no doubt been enhaced by the extreme amount of reading and research carried out prior to this trip, and my impressions, every one, are being recorded in a little orange Claire Fontaine notebook specifically labelled "Venice September 2006." My everyday Moleskine is on congé. Why such attentiveness on this trip? For that matter, why this trip at all? I'll leave you to puzzle that over, until the day when I receive such good news that the whole cloak and dagger routine is no longer necessary.

Soon after I got into town yesterday, I went to Santa Maria della Salute, where, following Philippe Sollers, I was planning to light a candle to guide the hand that writes (or the fingers that type). I made it as far as the nave when a clean-shaven young Venetian approached me and shook his head disapprovingly.

"Troppo corto," he said, gesturing at my denim mini-skirt. I had had the presence of mind to wear a cardigan over my tanktop (it is molto caldo in Venice right now), but hadn't given a second thought to the skirt. It would seem, dear friends, that the display of legs is unholy. Maybe my legs glow harlot red to him, maybe this pious young man could tell that the night before, they were wrapped around my boyfriend's waist.

I was a little surprised at the enforcement of this particular rule, as I was surrounded by tank-top wearing tourists in the church, but I didn't feel too resentful once I applied the Kantian imperative to the situation. I mean, if all women wore short skirts to church, when they knelt they'd be putting on a more interesting exhibit than the transformation of the host, and would no doubt distract the choir from their singing.

"Can I just light a candle and then I'll go?" I pleaded. He frowned, but nodded, grudgingly. Sin is permitted to light a candle, as long as it drops a euro for the privilege.

To the hand that writes, and the heart that loves, I thought as I lit my tea candle, and then I got the you-know-what out of there. And today, my white pleated skirt covers my knees.

But the sins this skirt has seen...

mambo italiano

2006-09-06T11:28:00.000-05:00

Venice, courtesy of this website.

After a lot of soul-searching, I've forgiven the Italians for their despicable showing during the final game of the World Cup, and as a gesture of apology for suggesting they were dirty cheaters, I'm spending the rest of the month in their country. Tomorrow it's off to Venice, to stay with my former roommate, get totally lost in the maze of bridges and waterways, and not eat fish; then on the 16th I'm meeting Nicolas in Naples, from whence we will hydrafoil it to Anacapri for a week of relaxing, eating, reading, and activities I won't discuss on my blog because, after all, I am a Lady.

So, Italy. I can fake speaking it like nobody's business. E perchè no? Sono italiana molto più di francese! La mia nonna è nato in Bari, e tutti la mia via ho ascoltato parlare italiano tutti la mia famiglia! [in the name of all that is holy, someone do a sister a favor and correct me, my dear grandmother is spinning in her grave!] Unlike me, my sister rocks the language of Dante, having spent a semester in Rome, and my dad's not half bad either. Well, you'll have to trust that my accent is better than my grammar. All it takes is a little "Allora, chè cosa fai?" and I can fool even a native. [Someone out there is snorting. Basta, non è buffo, sono molto vergognosa!]

It's not my first time to Italy; in fact, I've travelled throughout Italy more times than I can count. I absolutely adore it. Some people choose to go to a different destination every time they travel, but I think these are the people who don't reread books or rewatch movies. I, on the other hand, may have never been to Croatia, Cameroon or Copenhagen, but I know France and Italy like the back of my hand. Of course there are other places in the world I'd like to visit... But all in good time, I'm sure.

It is a very strange feeling, though, to visit the country of one's ancestors and not to speak the language, really. But then again, why should we speak it? I don't speak Russian or Yiddish or Gaelic or German or any of the various languages of the countries whose native children occupy branches on my family tree, and I don't feel like I ought to, but Italian is different. But then, my Italian family are the only ones who actively hold onto the homeland-- my Jewish cousins and my Irish Catholic cousins speak variants of New Yorkese.

The American "melting pot" phenomenon is one that never ceases to amaze me, probably because my sister and I have the blood of at least five countries running in our blood. The Ellis Island mythology was so strongly instilled in me at my elementary school that I sometimes feel like my own emigration back to Europe is some kind of betrayal of America. I mean, they all left Europe for a reason, right? My Jewish ancestors, fugeddababout it, they were lucky to escape with their tails intact from the scary Cossacks that came to burn down their shtetl (when I was little I thought maybe they took the same boat as Fievel).

I don't know the particulars of why the Recchias left Bari; I believe Mussolini was part of it, and they had the foresight to get out of there soon after he came to power. My great-grandfather went first, and the rest of the family followed. Except my grandmother's little sister, Palma, had some kind of infection, and when they arrived in New York (they did not come by boat, incidentally; they flew), the immigration authorities wouldn't let her in. They made her go all the way back to Italy! She lived out the rest of her life in Bari, and I didn't get to meet her before she died, a few years ago.

Anyway, I'll try to blog from Venice but I doubt they have internet where I'll be in Capri... just a blue grotto, a poolside bar, and my lovah.

Speaking of whom, tonight we're going to Nonna Ines, our neighborhood Italian place in the rue de l'Arbalete, per una pregustazione d'Italia. He thinks I speak Italian fluently. I intend to have him in such a haze of grappa, prosecco, and lovemaking that he won't even notice all I do is wave my arms and say allora.

Arrivederci, Parigi!

[NDLR: For some reason Blogger is freaking out and not listening to my html formatting commands. And jet setter that I am, I don't have time to futz around with it. My apologies]

she and he

2006-09-03T06:03:00.000-05:00

She: loves theatre.
He: loves anything out of the ordinary.

She: has a nodding acquaintance with contemporary French playwrights.
He: trusts her taste.

She: wants to see "La Science des reves."
He: wanted to do something more active than go to the movies ("les films sont désincarnés").

She: recommended they see Percolateur Blues, playing at Le Théâtre Les Dechargeurs in the First.
He: paid for the tickets.

She: had met the playwright, had read the play.
He: had to sit with his legs splayed in the too-small rows of the black box theatre.

She: found it wonderfully acted, if a bit histrionic at times.
He: found it painful. Painful because of the way you were sitting? she asked. Well yes, but also painful because it was so sad. But very good, very moving.
She: very well-written, don't you think?
He: yes, and very sad.
She: yes, but life-affirming.

And so and and so forth on the walk to Livingstone, an excellent Thai restaurant she knew of in the rue St-Honoré. He enjoyed his appetizer and said it was a bonne adresse. She was pleased to have brought him to a restaurant he didn't know, he who has lived in Paris for going on ten years now, who has wined and dined the ladies in every restaurant on the Left Bank (while, it must be said, she was being wined and dined in every restaurant on the Right, not to mention a few in Gramercy and the East Village).

She had a luscious curry d'agneau with sticky riz. He had a tangy, spicy beef dish. They consumed a bottle of Australian Shiraz and talked of the future. She explained an important twist in the plot of her novel. He said there should be a comet. She laughed so hard she almost choked. He grinned, pleased with himself.

After dinner, they walked past the Louvre and over the Pont des Arts, stopping periodically to kiss or to extricate her high heels from in between the floorboards. The bridge was crowded with people, the air was warm and the Seine glowed light green under the lights. La rentrée and l'été all at the same time.

She: (hyperbolizing, as the Eiffel does the shimmy) This is it. This is all I ever want from life. (She pauses, and looks at him) Well, that's not entirely true.

(He laughs, they get a cab at Odeon, go back to her place. The end.)

What's French for "mallrat"?

2006-09-02T05:47:00.000-05:00

There is a shopping mall a mere hop and a skip-- not even a jump!-- from my apartment. Yes, a shopping mall, replete with shiny/slippery faux-marble floors, skylights, and any chain store you could possibly need. I have never lived in such close proximity to a mall before, and my friends, my little American soul is gladdened-- gladdened, I say!-- by the ability to get all my errands done in one foul swoop, courtesy of the Place d'Italie Centre Commercial. On my trip yesterday, I needed (well, "needed"):

-New Chucks: old ones were tattered and dirty. Courir, up the escalator.
-A hairclip: always in the pursuit of new ways to keep my hair out of my face. Sephora, down the hall from Courir.
-A copy of Philosophie dans le boudoir: a gift for my inamorato, who shares my predilection for eighteenth-century libertinage. Fnac, on the bottom level.
-I thought I needed a voltage converter for my trip to Italy next week, but it seems the Italians use the same plug as the French, so plus de besoin. Learned that at Bricorama, also downstairs. Picked up crazy glue and lightbulbs while I was at it. And a 3 in 1 Scart adapter so I can plug my DVD player and my Freebox into my television at the same time. Guess what: it doesn't work.

There is also a supermarket in the sous-sol of the mall, a Champion, but the one time I went there, a little cockroach came home in the bags with me. Luckily, Petite was coming over for an apero so after I killed it with Windex she threw it in the toilet for me. (Not only is she a great writer, but she is fearless in the face of cockroaches. Unlike me: I once had one in my apartment in NY-- again, brought in with the delivery boy from a local Chinese restaurant-- and I made my then-boyfriend come home from a poker game with his friends to kill it.)

Needless to say, I never ordered from the place again. And I won't be returning to the Champion at Place d'Italie. Just to be on the safe side, I sprayed the heck out of my apartment with bugspray. But as I'd never seen one before or after this incident, i'm positive it was from the supermarket. Say it with me now: Ew.

Who the hell is Grégoire Bouillier

2006-09-01T05:27:00.000-05:00

Damned if I know. Every so often, the American publishing establishment decides to adopt a new "cutting-edge Gallic writer" and half the time I'm like, who? Apparently Bouillier is a sensation here in France. Somehow he got past me.

In any case, here's a delicious example of just how a) messed up b) ingenious c)totalement a l'ouest book marketing has become. I give you: the world's first coming attraction-- for a book.

There doesn't seem to be anything particularly French about this book, judging from the bande-annonce, unless the turtlenecks, 1964 Bordeaux, and effeminate accent ("these people don't look like celebrities, they look like little pieces of bread!") are supposed to be American code for "pretentious and French"? Because to me, that all just screams pretentious American graduate student.

I have no idea if the book is any good, but this little ditty is a surefire way to get me not to pick it up.

[NDLR: No offense intended to M. Bouillier, who according to Evene never intended to be a writer, much less a writer with crazy hype attached to his name. He's probably smacking his palm against his forehead and cursing America.]

Via The Elegant Variation.

"Paris je t'aime": moi non plus

2006-08-28T06:00:00.000-05:00

Aha. Thanks to some excellent reporting from Kristin Hohenadel at the New York Times, it is revealed that what I sensed to be the compositional flaws of the film "Paris je t'aime" were in fact the result of collaborative disagreement between the film's co-producers.

Emmanuel Benbihy, who originally conceived the film, assembled twenty different short films, each set in a different arrondissement. Claudie Ossard (one of the producers behind "Amélie") was brought in "to plug the holes in the movie’s budget of 10 million euro[s]." Benbihy assembled the films with very little connective tissue between them; this method apparently being too subtle for Ossard, she hired Frédéric Auburtin (co-director, with Gérard Depardieu, of the Gena Rowlands scene in Le Rostand) to film more "Paris-y" shots of the city's monuments to shove in between the short films.

In my review of the film I proposed that the filler shots work if they are understood as an ironic commentary on the myth of Paris as the city of looooove and lights and romance. But it appears that I was too generous-- Ossard told the Times that “I thought it was important that we see Paris, as we don’t always see it very well in the stories, which take place in the Métro, in cafes and so on.”

As Ossard would have it, Paris is in the monuments, and not in the Métro. Well-- I disagree. The scene in the Métro was a pretty good approximation of Paris-- le vrai Paris-- as far as I know and love it.

Despite Ossard's best intentions to make the film more marketable, she doesn't succeed in undermining Benbihy's more sensitive juxtapositions. Love in Paris is not a monolithic, homogeneous ideal; like love anywhere, it's a palimpsest: layer over layer of stories and conflicts and dirt and desire and sex and need and bodily fluids. That ideal Paris, that superficial, hygenic Love in Paris, doesn't exist. And thank god. Can you think of anything less sexy?

Today, I:

2006-08-24T14:20:00.000-05:00

1. used a power tool

--to drill holes in the concrete walls of my apartment

--to hang up a coat rack thingy that's been sitting on the floor for months because I was waiting for my boyfriend to do it but got tired of waiting.

2. bought a (cheapie) DVD player
--and Tout pour plaire
--and Les Poupées russes

3. landed on gridskipper

4. and citizen of the month

5. didn't go to the library

6. but worked on my novel

All in all, a productive day!

On Finally Seeing "Mulholland Dr."

2006-08-23T09:53:00.000-05:00

I just finished watched "Mulholland Dr." (2001) for the first time, and in the immortal words of Britney Spears, "Huuu-hhh??"

I've become pretty adept at unraveling postmodern puzzles: Pynchon, Borges, Joyce, Lowry, you name it, I've been obligated to read and make sense of it in one seminar or another. I've taken a fair number of courses in film studies, and generally I do ok talking about "film" with "film people" (except the crazies who've memorized hours and hours of B grade horror flicks from the 70s, I avoid those folks).

But still, to the extent that I'm semi-film literate, and semi-equipped to decode a narrative puzzle, "Mulholland Drive" has reduced me to Britney Spears on E (x, not !).

I read through some of the conjectures and explanations available in the four corners of the Internet, which were elucidating. It's a very sad story, when you get a semblance of a story out of it. It's very cleverly plotted. Nevertheless-- I just wasn't drawn in.

I blame this on Lynch's attempt to mimic film noir, which I generally don't care for, along with mystery novels. Call me a philistine, but consider this my anti-film noir manifesto.

--I hate, hate, hate when the screen is totally dark except for maybe one point of light. It makes me start fiddling around with my television's color and contrast control buttons and this is a waste of time.

--Worse than no light source is a flourescent or greenish light source; worst of all is when it's flickering out or only going at half power and is emitting that annoying buzz that sounds like the hum of your nervous system when you've got your ears plugged up. The absolute worst is when said light suddenly blows out. Ugh. It makes me feel uncomfortable. It's probably meant to. But it's such pointless discomfort.

--Close-ups on just one eye make me think of Bunuel and my skin starts to crawl. Usually the skin around the eye is sweating. If it's a woman, her mascara will be smudged.

--Gross hired killers with greasy hair.

--Fake Italian accents ("an esprrrresso!").

--Forced line readings. ("and you were there, in my dream, and you were scared, and I was scared because you were scared!")

--Cowboys. (ok, not really a part of film noir but I don't like westerns even in their own genre)

--ok I'll just say it now, I really don't like LA or the whole gestalt of LA and so I tend not to like movies set in LA, which is just about half the American film noir genre (and lots of other genres too)... My boyfriend made me sit through "Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang" last week and the best part of it was Robert Downey Jr's hapless New Yorker thrown into the ludicrous doings of Angelenos. The second best part was that in French the film was called "Keeess Keess Bong Bong." I'm sorry, LA readers. What can I say? Maybe it's an east coast thing.

I don't want to be totally harsh; Naomi Watts's performance was superlative, and Justin Theroux in glasses and a headset was hotter than all the lesbian sex in the film. The inept hired killer was pretty funny. I loved the casting agent's assistant and her big glasses. And the inimitable Ann Miller! In her last film role! I know she was probably decked out in freak gear for this role, but in my mind she embodies what LA does to the young and talented when they get old: they disappear from view and re-emerge with freaky plastic surgery.

I'm trying to think of something else I liked. Um, that Rebekah Del Rio sure can sing.

I'm told this is the best of all David Lynch's films. In that case, I'm not in a hurry to see the others. Something about a guy on a tractor driving cross-country? Spare me. But feel free to liberate me from my cavern of ignorance, if I'm missing something!

Call for contributions

2006-08-23T04:34:00.000-05:00

Hello all,
I'm co-editing a themed issue of the journal Reconstruction, which will be devoted to blogging. I'm hoping someone out there will be willing to contribute papers/projects/manifestos on the subject-- it doesn't have to be "academic"; the point here is to theorize blogging in general. Topics could go in a number of different directions, including, but not excluding, the following:

Theorization of the Blogosphere
Blogging Manifesto
Politics and/of Blogging
Aesthetics of Blogs
Activist Blogging
Auto/Biographical Blogs
New Media/Communication Theories and Blogging
New Journalism Blogging
Civil Rights of Bloggers
Global Culture and Blogging
Local Culture and Blogging
Education and Blogging
Gender and Blogging
Race and Blogging
Collective Blogs
Community of Bloggers
Unrealized Potential of Blogging
Critiques of Blogging
Representations of Space/Place on Blogs
Purpose of a Unique Individual/Collective Blog
Audio and Visual Blogs

We are especially interested in the experiences, theories and perspectives of those who actually blog. We are looking for longer theoretical essays and shorter statements/manifestos about blogging--including pieces that have already been posted on your blogs. We are also soliciting reviews of books about blogging and your favorite weblogs. Deadline for submissions is October 6, 2006. The issue is scheduled to be published as 6.1 (Winter 2006).

Feel free to propose other topics to the editors: Michael Benton (University of Kentucky; editor for Reconstruction; founder of the blog Dialogic) and Lauren Elkin (Université de Paris VII, CUNY Graduate Center, editor for Reconstruction, founder of the blog Maitresse). Send all queries, proposals and manuscripts to mdbento at gmail dot com or laurenelkin at gmail dot com.

angels and idiots

2006-08-20T09:37:00.000-05:00

From the New York Times to your local Barnes and Noble, there is no hope for the median intelligence level in New York.

Exhibit A. I hope this review in the NYT of the latest translation of The Three Musketeers is the first and last time someone compares Cardinal Richelieu to Dick Cheney. I mean, I know this reviewer's only, er, "literary" achievement is writing a book about people writing about movies, but surely the comparison should go the other way round? And what the hell is Charles McGrath thinking giving a review of a new translation of Alexandre Dumas to that guy? Mr. McGrath, perhaps you'd like someone who actually reads French and might have some idea of how to judge the translation next time, instead of using someone whose basis for judging a 19th century masterpiece is that its author was totally nutty and that it would make a great movie. I mean, I know you're trying to publish for a wide audience, but don't you know that the Times is, or at least used to be, the smart New Yorker's newspaper? The dumbasses are all reading the Post on Sunday morning. I'd like to volunteer for the job of writing reviews that respect the work and the readership at the same time. Call me.

Exhibit B. When I read Overhead in New York, I am at once reviled and proud: reviled at the cult of imbecility that's taken over the place, and proud of the witty souls (sadly, the minority of the population) who write these nuggets in and edit them so brilliantly. For example:

You Know, Someone Asked For a 'Book' Again. That's Like the 100th Time Today!

Customer: Do you have The Picture of Dorian Gray?
Employee: What is that?

--Barnes & Noble, Park Slope

via Overheard in New York, Aug 13, 2006

But don't despair, I've got the antidote here. That is, as long as she gets a teaching job in NY when she finishes her dissertation a couple years down the road. But it would be perfectly understandable if she wanted to leave.

in my new home, there are books

2006-08-20T03:52:00.000-05:00

photo by weyerdk, found on flickr and I hope she doesn't mind??

For the last month or so, I've taken up semi-permanent residence at the BNF. It is my new office. Every day by around 11 I get myself out the door, laptop bag strapped to my back, I take the number 6 replacement bus from Place d'Italie to Quai de le Gare, I get out across the street from where there was a horrible fire last year at 20, Blvd Vinccent Auriol, I walk along the quay until I come to the giant wooden ziggurat, I climb the stairs, I walk 'round the big open book of the Tour des Lettres, I descend at the west entrance, into the pit in the ground, I let the guard search my bag, I exchange my laptop back for a plastic box on a strap, I pass through the turnstile, push through the heavy steel doors, into a cement holding chamber, down two flights of escalators, and into the rez-de-jardin, where I joyfully join my brethren and sistren, all of whom are hunched over laptops in orderly rows of long tables, with piles of books next to them. I claim my spot (usually in salle U, littérature étrangère, or salle W, art et architecture), I go up to the desk and procure the books I've left for myself from the day before, I ask for "le truc anti-vol" which I use to attach my laptop to the desk so I can come and go as I please during the day without worrying about it getting stolen. I seceretly worry, though, that some malicious soul will come along and delete the file I'm working on, so I password protect my computer when I'm away from it. I know, I'm paranoid. I go hang out in the café at lunchtime and teatime. There's no wifi so I check my email on one of the three internet posts by the bathrooms-- there's usually one available now, in August, but I suspect by la rentrée it will be near impossible. Why they don't have Wifi is beyond me.

So if you're ever in the BNF, and you've paid the fee and passed the draconian interview process to win entry into the belly of the beast, come on by and say hi!

What I read this week...

Learn stuff

2006-08-15T02:10:00.000-05:00

School's not in session, but with only a couple of weeks left before la rentrée is upon us, it's time to start getting your brain back into shape.

If you have any interest in Paris, you ought to know a little something about Walter Benjamin. Read about his pot habit in this week's New Yorker.

What does "Glandridi glassala tuffm Izimbrabim/ Blassa galassasa tuffm Izimbrabim" mean? Find out if it really matters in this piece on Dada in the New York Review of Books

"I, for one, am not prepared to believe that Ann Coulter is made in God's image without seeing some proof." Me either. Jerry Coyne recenters the debate on Coulter's latest "book."

Tired of reading? Watch the late great Michel Foucault lay out his entire philosophy to the impossibly irritating Noam Chomsky on You Tube:

It's about 8 minutes long. You're allowed to go to the bathroom when Chomsky speaks.

August 2006 iPod playlist

2006-08-14T12:24:00.000-05:00

I had been putting my playlists on my other blog, but I don't remember the reasoning behind that, and now I'm thinking, why send my kind readers elsewhere, if they want to know the monthly Maitresse soundtrack? Why not just put it right here?

So, back where it belongs! Here's what I'm listening to this month.

1. The Songs That We Sing (Charlotte Gainsbourg)*
2. La meme histoire (Feist)
3. Poupée de cire, poupée de son (France Gall)**
4. Home (Jane Birkin)
5. Is It Any Wonder? (Keane)
6. I Will Follow You Into the Dark (Death Cab For Cutie)***
7. This Temporary Life (Death Cab For Cutie)
8. Wash Away (Joe Purdy)
9. Paris je t'aime (Elisabeth Anais)****
10. David (Nelly McKay)
11. Ruby Blue (Roisin Murphy)
12. Happy Together (covered by Leningrad Cowboys)*****

*waiting impatiently for CG to release her new album, on which she collaborated with Air and Pulp
**my new karaoke song, just waiting to be unleashed on the world
***would have loved to hear Pam's ukelele rendition
****ok I confess to raiding the "Paris je t'aime" soundtrack
*****this kickass morceau is all Nicolas, from the first "Paris Derniere" CD

Hey, who turned out the lights?

2006-08-10T06:59:00.000-05:00

Why it sometimes sucks to live in Paris: EDF and GDF, two smelly old fogies of socialized services who recently got a divorce. [for those souls floating in blessed ignorance, those initials stand for Electricité de France and Gaz de France]

I have to confess, although I moved to the Butte aux Cailles over a month ago, I have only slept in my new apartment once. In truth, when I'm not jetsetting around France, I have been hiding out in Nicolas's apartment, which is oh-so-strategically located near mine. (Or is it the other way around?) This was initially because I had to wait a month to get Internet hooked up, and then the heat wave set in and Nicolas's place is a million times cooler than mine, and well, you know how it goes.

In any case, I make semi-weekly visits to my "apartment" (read: the expensive storage facility in the super-cute neighborhood), and yesterday I went down there to drop off some things and water my plants, not having been there since before I left for the South.

I arrived , and, as usual, opened the windows and turned on the fan. Except the fan wouldn't turn on. I check the wall socket: plugged and ready. I went over to the bathroom and flipped the lightswitch. No juice there neither.

Uh-oh, I thought. That unpaid GDF bill is biting me in the ass.

You see, since I moved out of my last apartment, I have been embroiled in a saga of Kafka-esque proportions. I know this is a complicated story, but here goes. I moved from one apartment to another, and someone else moved into my old apartment.

Are you with me? I know it's a tough concept to grasp, but try, people, try!

Before I moved, I called EDF to transfer my contract from the one apartment to the other. "No problem!" the woman said. "Just tell the new tenant to call us before the 4th of July or someone will come to cut the gas in the apartment." I did as I was told.

Guess what: the new tenant never called. And she wasn't home when the technician came on July 4th. And so they couldn't get inside to turn off the gas. And so the gas contract has stayed in my name, even though I don't live there anymore. And when the new tenant calls to set up her EDF contract, they tell her she can't because it's still in my name. And when I call them, they tell me they can't put it in her name because she has to call and do it. And so on, and so forth, in a wicked coil of electric bureaucracy that culminated in a technician being dispatched to my apartment with no warning to me while I was on vacation, finding me not at home, leaving me a little note saying "I was here, you were not, so I'm cutting your electricity."

I called yesterday and harangued a very patient woman on the phone; just as she seemed close to having a breakthrough in understanding the situation, the computer system at EDF broke down. She had been about to reschedule a technician to come today, this afternoon, but the system went down and the order couldn't be placed. "Call back in an hour," she said. "Bonne apres-midi!"

When I called back, all the slots for today were taken, so I made an appointment for the technician to come Friday morning.

And just now, I get a phone call from the EDF technician, who is standing outside my apartment building, and could I please buzz him in? I explained the misunderstanding, but somehow I'm the one who ended up sounding like the idiot, and not his company.

I'm just hoping someone comes tomorrow morning to turn the electricity back on. And god knows if things will ever get straightened out with the contract from my last apartment.

what I read on my summer vacation

2006-08-09T05:12:00.000-05:00

Ahoy. Just back from the south of France, where I spent some quality time with my parents lounging by the pool with my nose in a book.

Just like old times!

Here's the round-up. What has everyone else been reading? Consider yourselves memed.

1. Hors-série edition of Le Point on Erotisme and Le Magazine Littéraire's issue on Désir. Great summary of both (in French) here. While trying to hide the bare-breasted cover from my parents so they didn't think I was reading French porn, I was particularly struck by LML's interview with Slavoj Zizek and his distinction between the desire to consume and the desire to desire. According to Zizek, children don't bother to eat the chocolate part of the Kinder egg; they just want the prize inside. True, semi-True, False, semi-False? Discuss.

2. Selections from The Stones of Venice in The Genius of John Ruskin.
This was more difficult to concentrate on due to the presence of two squealing British children and their mother's incessant mothering: "Allie, come 'ere, you've got your knickers on the wrong way 'round!" Ruskin, an extreme purist, believes the city began its decline in 1418 when its artists stopped making spiritually religious art and started concentrating on form and color, albeit continuing to use religious icons as an artistic vernacular. So Venice, then, has been in decline for nigh on 600 years. She looks pretty good, for all that.

3. Casanova était une femme: the letters of Sonia Rykiel and Régine Deforges. The back cover copy was intriguing: "Pourquoi, à l'heure des contacts rapides, ont-elles choisi de s'écrire plus de cent lettres? La réponse est dans leurs échanges [Why, in this age of instantaneous communication, did they decide to write each other over a hundred letters? The answer is in their exchanges]," but after reading their over a hundred letters I'm still not sure why they didn't just email. I think it has something to do with the fact that the letters were written by two women contemplating the ends of a lifetime of creativity, and encouraging each other not to worry as much about the end product as about the process, reminding each other of the fine moments in one's daily life and the importance of an all-orienting friendship, apart from one's husband and children. Really well-written: this was great for my French, and although there were a few moments this past week when I was really glum, missing my partner-person, it helped me refocus and recenter a little bit. When I finished reading I vowed to write more articulate letters to my friends.

4. The first 200 pages of Mémoires d'une jeune fille rangée, the first volume in the autobiography of Simone de Beauvoir. Once you read this volume of her formative years, you can better understand both where La Deuxième Sexe came from and how the founder of French feminism could have lived such a self-denigrating relationship with Sartre.

the view from the terrace of the hotel, Le Manoir de l'Etang in Mougins.

and now for something completely different

2006-07-31T05:40:00.000-05:00

This. Is. Hil. ar. ious.

[And when I say "hilarious," you have to hear me saying "hilAIRious" because some people pronounce it "hilAREious" including my French boyfriend but I don't know what backwoods town he learnt his English in because in New York, people, we say hilAIRious and so that's definitive pronunciation as far as I'm concerned.]

Soit. This is a film short starring my beloved friend from my theatrical youth, Alissa Dean. She's a real life professional actress in LA now; tune in to "Without a Trace" on CBS on Sept 24th to see her guest-star as a methhead/stripper/murder accomplice [insert type-casting joke here]. Knowing Alissa as I do, my educated guess is that this is 85% improvised, but bear in mind folks, she is acting and in reality is sharp as a tack. And please don't be offended by the content.

Raise your hand if you think rollerskating should be an Olympic sport, too!

Social equality at the Paris immigration office

2006-07-28T10:00:00.000-05:00

Dead of summer in the hôtel de police, all of us foreigners resembling a bunch of rejects from a Benetton casting call, not a single Pepsi pretty among us; the heat causing some of my fellow sufferers to emit a pungent odor-- some the cumin thickness of sweat, some the dark suggestion of badly irrigated bowels. When I was in elementary school and we learned about Ellis Island, I never thought one day I'd experience the (admittedly tamer) French equivalent.

I meant to occupy myself with some photocopies I'd brought along, but was more interested in looking around the room: A funky Asian couple held hands, a couple of Arabs chattered behind me in what even I could tell was a slang version of their language, a group of Africans sat and laughed good-naturedly together in the back row. In front of me, an Asian girl (the writing on her passport looked Thai) and her French boyfriend. I wondered for the millionth time why you always see white guys with Asian girls but very rarely see the opposite (one notable exception being one of my best girlfriends and her half-Asian boyfriend). They spoke in English and she clutched his arm and her Gucci handbag.

There are at least four babies in the room. They start to play a game of call and answer: one says, insistently,"Maman!" Another one behind me says "Maman!" To the right of me another chimes in: "Ba!" A woman in the front row begins to change her baby's diaper, right then and there, on her lap. I am mesmerized. Do they bring them here for sympathy? Is is a calculated political move, to keep the Sarkozys from kicking them out of the country? Or could they simply not spare a sou for a baby sitter?

What a place. I spot an older Asian woman who also sports a Gucci purse. The discrepancy in accessories is telling: Everyone from a country south of France has brought a child to demonstrate their social right to stay in the country; those from countries to the East and West bring their Guccis and Longchamps encoding a different social right, a right of affiliation.

Me, I have my Moleskine and my photocopies. And yes, a tan Longchamp. Selected especially to affiliate and blend.

"Vingt-sept!" A woman calls my number after having rapidly called out 25 and 26, whose owners are either not present or too slow. I gather up my papers and head toward the window.

"Move, move!" the Africans in the back joke. "I'm movin', I'm movin'!" I joke back.

The woman behind the desk begins to admonish me for being too slow when she spies my number card and interrupts herself. "You're not mauve! You're green!" Caught out like a Nader supporter at a Red State convention: I am sent back to my seat. Apparently there's a color-coded system that I have broken. I mutter and curse in English under my breath.

So much for affiliating and blending.

Fairly soon, I hear something that makes sense (for the first time since arriving at the precinct). "I've been waiting for two hours," a man's voice rose up angrily. "How long are you going to make me wait? I have a child with me!"

Aha, I thought. The kids are here to try to speed up the process!

I am "next" for the next hour. When I finally emerge from the police station, two hours have elapsed. Fair is fair. It doesn't matter if you have a child or a boyfriend with you, whether you smell like shit or Annick Goutal, whether you're white, black, green or mauve: you still have to sweat for two hours in the police station along with all the other immigrants.

Travel tip #389

2006-07-21T02:26:00.000-05:00

When visiting a small medieval town, such as Mirepoix in Southwest France, keep in mind that if there’s a market happening Monday morning, you should not park your car in the parking lot they’re using for it on Sunday evening. Not if you want to use your car that Monday morning, say, to go to the larger medieval town of Carcassonne. Because no one, not even the concierge of the fabulous Relais et Chateaux hotel you’re staying in, will be able to help you once a merchant has set up her woven straw bags behind your vehicle, gone off for awhile, and left her spiteful, leathery friend to watch over her stand-- a charming woman who will threaten to call the police on you every time you come within range of the car, alerting everyone in the surrounding area that you are the jackasses who parked your car in the middle of the market.

When this happened to us, this past weekend, rather than fighting with her, we slouched off to see the rest of the stands, feeling terrifically stupid for not thinking ahead, annoyed that our time was being wasted. We tried to make up for the delay by throwing ourselves into the carnivalesque atmosphere of the market. Some matching headgear was purchased, I do verily admit it, as well as half of a watermelon and one of those wood-handled pocket knives that every Frenchman I’ve ever met uses to slice saucisson lors d’un apréro.

market day in Mirepoix

Finally, when the appointed end of the market rolled around, we made our way back to our car, sporting our new matching straw hats (looking incredibly obnoxious I’m sure), toting our melon. Still no sign of the proprietor of the bags, but her friend was there and all riled up, practically hopping from foot to foot in her readiness for a fight.

“Don’t run your car over the bags, don’t even think about it!” she began to taunt us. I turned slowly to look at her. “Do you honestly think we would back over them?” I asked in a derisory voice. “What are you, nuts?”

That’s the thing about French merchants and bureaucrats when they’ve got their fight on: they will always have a comeback for you, and it will be more tauntingly immature than whatever it is you have just said to them. She sniped at us, Nicolas sniped back, we opened our car doors to air it out a bit, she walked around closing them one at a time. I just watched her, mouth agape, shaking my head.

Suffice it to say, the scene ended with our anger mounting, her gap-toothed smile widening, us physically moving the bags out of the way, and their owner magically appearing at that exact moment telling us we weren’t allowed to touch her stuff. Somehow Nicolas managed to back the car out, through the obstacle course of straw bags and French hags, and we sped off to Carcassonne for the day. As we left them behind, I must add that in addition to our hats, we wore matching smirks.

approaching Carcassonne

More pictures here

"Paris, je t'aime"

2006-07-13T03:56:00.000-05:00

Let's talk about the film, shall we? I was extremely anxious to see it, as I had a similar idea for a novel I'll write when I finish the current one and the one lined up after it; I emerged from the theater feeling deeply relieved that while more than one person can have a similar idea, the execution really will be totally different. I'm not going to share anymore of my idea now, because I don't want anyone to steal it! (hey, I've already had my blog plagiarized.) But I do want to talk a bit about the film: what was great, what was less great, and what it achieved.

What was great: the mimes.

What was less great: the weird Porte de Choisy sequence.

What it achieved: the fetishization of a red trenchcoat.

Ok, that was easy.

But seriously. What struck me was that the film took up the most mythologized theme in the most mythologized modern city-- love in Paris-- and deconstructed it in a number of different scenes all playing out around the city, featuring different people from different backgrounds experiencing a panoply of different shades of love. The mosaic of the film deconstructed the monolithic idea Western culture has of Paris as the city of love-- nowhere more brilliantly than in the "Tuileries" sequence [what, by the way, is with French men and ass-slapping? not that I'm complaining!] and attempted to give a richer and more quotidian portrait of both the city and the sentiment.

So in a sense, the film worked against the mythology of Paris. But then, if this is the case, why the filler shots of Paris at dawn, Paris at dusk, Paris at night, Paris with fireworks?

I think one possible answer is suggested at the end, when different scenes from the film are tiled over the shot of the Eiffel Tower doing the shimmy-- as if the two visual layers are working in counterpoint, the myriad "realities" laid over the myth-- which is itself a reality which occurs every night on the hour. Until, of course, they turn out the lights on the monuments at two am. That's when the vampires and Frodo come out.

One drawback, I thought, was that although the film was as much about Paris as it was about the individual characters, very few of the sequences actually used the tangible Paris neighborhood they were set in. Some did this brilliantly-- I'm thinking of the Place des Victories scene, with its statue of Louis XV [?] rearing on his charger and the centrality of cowboys to the story, or the bas-relief deer and fawn carved on the statue in the Place des fetes, against which the African man slumps after being stabbed in the street, innocent of any crime, a victim of the forest's predators.

My own project will interact much more with the physicality of the city, and the way one's experience of it constructs, remakes, reshapes one's soul-- profoundly, sure, but also on a very immediate level. The way places change according to our experience of them, and our emotional proximity to them, and the other way round.

"Paris je t'aime" gestured at this, and certainly came close to it in each sequence, but the producers were ultimately content simply to evoke twenty different neighborhoods in a way that would enlighten someone whose knowledge of Paris is limited to the tourist attractions, and to render nostalgic those of us with a more intimate knowledge of the city.

One last note: I think if I were still living in the States, frustrated and longing to move to Paris, seeing this film would have put me over the edge. Good thing I'm already here.

commedia dell'arte in berlin

2006-07-10T04:17:00.000-05:00

Nasty Italian coach: (thinks to himself) Hmm, things are not going so well, the score is tied and we're in the second overtime, if we go into penalty kicks, w we have no chance, because Zidane and Barthez are such a winning combination. We have to wrap this up now... Aha! I have it. (Whispers something to Materazzi)

(Materazzi gets close enough to call Zidane a number of expletives, one of which is clearly heard to be "terrorist!")

(Zidane responds with a dramatic head butt)

Materazzi: Aieee! Che cazzo! I die!! (falls to ground, writhing in pain, clutching his knee)

The Narrator, a serveuse de bar wearing a slinky referee's outfit paired with a crazy multicolored clown wig in bleu, blanc et rouge, steps forward, waving a glittery wand.

Narrator: Two households, both alike in dignity (though not in skill)
In fair Berlin, where we lay our scene
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny
Where bad blood makes footballer's hands unclean.
The Italian coach did seeth and did taketh his opportunity
to remove the head from the French body politic
Thus removing all reason from the remaining team
Distracted, dispairing,
lamenting the displacèd Zidane.

Oh, woe is you, most foul Materazzi
And you, Italian coach whose name escapes me
But woe of woes to the Frenchman who
in the throes of passion
cannot keep his hotted head from butting
thus ending a noble career
in the ignominy of a carton rouge.

Exeunt.

attack of the little green bugs

2006-07-07T12:19:00.000-05:00

Last night was an odd night on the rue Mouffetard.

Nicolas came home from work around 8:30. Halfway through the door, he demanded, "did you see them? did you see them?"

"Who??" I asked, my voice rising to match his pitch of excitement.

"The bugs! they're all over the place! Look!"

We went to the window, and sure enough, it looked like a shower of golden dust was slowly wafting its way down from the heavens. Here, there, and everywhere-- little specks of light-colored insects giving the optical illusion that they were hanging suspended, when in fact the breeze was shifting them around. They dominated the air space as far as the eye could see in both directions.

I emitted a sound of disgust. "They weren't out when I came home before! Is this some kind of seasonal phenomenon that happens every four years or something, like caterpillars?" Memories flooded in of being a five year-old at Ivy League day camp on Long Island and shrieking my head off every day when I had to step off the bus and out into the forest, where every black line on the ground inched its furry body around, climbed trees, fell from trees into my hair, crawled inside my clothes, squished under my feet. If I'm not mistaken, that infestation was back in the summer of '83.

Nicolas just shook his head. "Dunno. Let's go eat."

We headed over to the nearby Italian place (Nona Ines-- if you're ever in this neighborhood, go there) and, since the heat was starting to break, took a table on the terrasse. I knew it was a mistake as soon as we sat down, but there was no more room outside. The bugs were everywhere. One led a kamikaze mission into my eyeball. I say kamikazi because I killed it, my hand flying up instinctively to protect mysely from the light foreign contact, but it probably didn't want to die. I wiped its carcass on the sheet of paper on the table and inspected it. Nothing out of the ordinary. Just a little green winged creature. Pretty harmless. I felt mean for squashing it.

Over the course of the meal, I began to feel less badly; though the bugs were dissipating, they weren't exactly harmless. The food chain was in full swing: I ate my beef carpaccio, the little green bugs ate me. They began with my shoulder, somewhat bony but dressed with a lovely Acqua di Parma almond-scented oil. My elbows, both of them. Then they got fresh, flying inside my tank top, down my cleavage, and devoured the place where my underwire meets my ribcage.

The cheeky bastards. If they come out again tonight it's war.

When we came home we leaned out the first-floor window, looking down at the passersby. (That's right folks, look your best when you saunter down the rue Mouffetard, because there's a good chance Nicolas and I are above your head making fun of your outfit.) There was a storm moving in, and thunder somewhere far off, but the light was spectacular; it was ten o'clock at night but the light was tinted orange instead of blue. We both pulled out our cameras and snapped away.

qu'est-ce que c'est qu'un trope?

2006-07-07T02:44:00.000-05:00

I've had some questions as to what I meant by "troping" in my last entry. Here's what the American Heritage Dictionary says:

Trope:
NOUN:
1. A figure of speech using words in nonliteral ways, such as a metaphor.
2. A word or phrase interpolated as an embellishment in the sung parts of certain medieval liturgies.

ETYMOLOGY:
Latin tropus, from Greek tropos, turn, figure of speech. See trep-.

Basically, a trope is a motif, a theme, an idea, something which gets repeated and re-represented in different contexts. To use it as a verb, "to trope," is to fall into the kind of academic jargon that separates academic criticism from mainstream criticism; very unlikely you'll ever hear Michiko Kakutani use it as a verb, but a Google search of "troping" turned up essays like "Troping the Body: Gender, Etiquette and Performance," "Troping History: Modernist Residue in Frederic Jameson's Pastiche and Linda Hutcheon's Parody," and "Troping Toussaint, Reading Revolution."

On Paris Breakfasts, Carol picked up on what a range of seemingly unrelated objects had in common-- color or form-- and brought them into a kind of coherence by creating relationships between them. It's very obvious when she's working with something like cherries, but more subtle when, in this entry for instance, we see the troping of circular metal, industrial but shown always in a soft Paris morning light-- in which there is something almost metallic.

I don't know-- it's something that announces itself to me on a very intuitive level and it can be difficult to get it into (non-jargon) words.

Nothing to see here;

2006-07-03T13:29:00.000-05:00

everything to see here.

I'm mid-move and have so much I want to blog about (experiences renting the apartment, the move itself, "Paris je t'aime," Al Gore on The Daily Show) but am too busy/tired to attend to any of those topics. So I encourage you to go see the brilliant happenings at (once more for the slowpokes) Paris Breakfasts-- Carol is doing the kind of troping with forms and colors and calligraphy that makes my heart speed up and wish I could spend more time working with visuals ~~rather than~~ as well as words... what she's doing on her blog these days is sort of the visual equivalent of what I do as a literary critic, looking for the colors, commonalities and contrasts in vocabulary, colors, shading, ideas, representations, articulations, rhythms among one work, several works, one author, several authors. It's feeling the way things work together rather than seeing them, and then trying to get that into words.

Anyway.

Notes from a Woolf conference

2006-06-28T11:26:00.000-05:00

Wednesday evening. Arrive, fresh faced and excited, though slightly confused when I emerge from the train station into a mall. I consult a map and find it lacks a “you are here” indicator. With the help of a Balti guard I find my way out, learn that in Birmingham people say “ramp” instead of “hill,” and get promptly quite lost, rolly-bag in tow, trying to find my cheapie hotel, which I've been told is walking distance from both the train station and the hotel where the conference will be held. I find another “Brummie,” as those crazy Birmingham residents are known. He takes me on his way with him—through the library, a giant modern glass building with a McDonald’s in the lobby. I quickly learn you can get very few places in this town without passing through, under, or over other buildings which are wholly unrelated to your destination. Kind Mr Brummie points me towards the bus stop, reminds me they run on the lefthand side, and departs. I'm in a bit of a hurry; it's already 6 pm and I haven't finished writing the paper I'm slated to deliver on Friday afternoon. I'm not worried, though-- I have visions of myself working in the light of a window in a charming provincial Inn, this bein gthe fantasy conjured up by the ever-so-Anglo Norfolk Inn where I've booked a single room for the four nights of the conference. I arrive at my hotel and though the exterior is charming, rambling brick, I am dismayed to find it run by dimwitted Ukrainian women who are baffled by the intricate workings of the credit card machine. I get up to my room and find it identical to the one I lived in senior year at Barnard, in the crappy dorm where some girl killed herself three years before. Except Barnard didn’t smell like an odd combination of cleaning fluid, Ukrainian perfume and ass. Distressed, I escape to a nearby Indian restaurant but am not down with the Balti-style saag paneer. I long for my hometown variety, replete with la vache qui rit. I watch the Argentina match with the wait staff and write in my journal.

Thursday noon. Still haven’t finished the paper. Set out early to get to conference ahead of time. Plot out itinerary on map; satisfied with map-reading skills; leave feeling confident. Disembark at appointed stop. Continue up street which curves and twists in ways not reflected on map. Begin to feel queasy when two men leer at the sight of my knees peeking out from in-between long grey shorts and knee-high black boots. Walk faster and turn down iPod in order to hear in case leering men approach me from behind. Spy sign for Crowne Plaza Hotel over the rooftops, not too far off, due north. Five minutes later, hit canal. Look left; look right: no way of crossing in view. The queasiness solidifies into a little ball of frustration, takes on additional power from the stress from the day before and the fact of not having finished the paper and the fact that there are still three and a half days to get through in what I am increasingly identifying as a hostile environment.

After fifteen minutes of walking in the wrong direction, I hit a main street and reevaluate how to get to the hotel that I can no longer find in front of me. Seeking momentary solace, I duck into a phone booth to call Nicolas. Surprise: the phone doesn’t work. Surprise: neither does the one next to it. Fuming, I hit the road, arriving sweaty and out of breath at the hotel at the same time as another woman, who looks at me queerly when I mutter “putain j’en ai marre de cette merdique ville” under my breath. I later learn she is one of the distinguished French Woolf scholars I had planned to seek out at the conference.

Thursday night. I skip the evening reception, forgoing socializing, free booze and snacks to hole myself up in my smelly hotel room working on my paper. Pay T-mobile 5 pounds to check email on the only Wifi available for miles. So stressed that I feel like a Sumo wrestler has me trapped beneath his massive loins. Actually, that's pretty much what my hotel smelled like.

Friday afternoon. Success: I have finished my paper by morning, and though it might not be the most profound meditation on the influence of Lawrence on the fluidity of gender in Woolf's work, I believe in it and damn it, I think I'm right. The woman giving her paper before me reads from Cesare Lombroso. She has the audience in stitches. Turns out she’s my opening act: by the time I’m wisecracking about Lawrence and his tree-phalluses, they’re rolling in the aisles. Our panel on Sexuality was reputed to be the “trendy panel,” but it’s actually turned in to the comic relief in a conference otherwise preoccupied with such earnest topics as Victorian mothers and daughters and tangentially related talks on obscure Bloomsbury figures.

Afterward, we are treated to a wonderfully insightful talk on the queer coding in 1920s British Vogue by art historian Christopher Reed, the author of Bloomsbury Rooms. Vampy, campy, and as gay as a lark, that magazine was while it was edited by Dorothy Todd (under whose auspices Woolf wrote for the magazine). Not overtly so-- that's the thing about queer codes, you have to know them to recognize them. And no, dears, you don't have to be gay to know the codes, just someone who went to graduate school in a post-Eve Sedgwick/Judith Butler era.

However, a rather militant member of the audience took the opportunity of the question-and-answer session after Reed's talk to castigate him for the crime of attempting to decipher those codes. "As a lesbian, I can tell you, those are our codes, and they are very complex, and there's a lot that you don't know," so don't even try, she didn't need to add as she chased him away from "her" subject matter and "her" people's cultural heritage. I exhaled a silent prayer of thanks that she hadn't attended my panel-- she probably likes straight girls doing queer theory even less. Reed looked out at the audience for help, but no one in that crowd was going to pick a fight. Everyone I spoke with afterward, however, agreed that the woman who spoke out was entitled to her opinion but was out of line.

Friday evening. Relieved that my paper is over and no one attacked me for caricaturing Lawrence or being reductive about Woolf, I'm ready to meet people and enjoy the rest of the conference. Dinner at a restaurant in the ultra-trendy Mailbox with new friends Katie and Ana; we gossip and talk shop and have a grand old time. I'm deliriously happy to be among Anglophone academics again. After listening to me kvetch several times about my hotel, Ana generously invites me to crash on her extra bed the next night.

Saturday morning. At breakfast I catch out two fellow Woolfians discussing Deleuze before I've had my morning coffee. Feel inferior; must read more Deleuze; must sleep less. Check gleefully out of unbearably smelly hotel. Drag suitcase to conference feeling lighter than air.

Saturday afternoon. Somehow I find myself having lunch with Ruth Gruber, one of the most phenomenal people I've ever had the honor of speaking with. [Do follow the link and read about her; she's astonishing]. I skip off afterwards to buy books at Waterstone's down on New Street, which is followed by a complete meltdown when I try to make contact with the outside world by telephone. Have finally reached the point where not speaking to Nicolas or my parents has affected my ability to function, I am desperate to hear one of their voices, but every credit card I try to use--three of mine and two of my parents'-- to call them is declined. Worse, it appears someone has hacked into my bank account and taken all my money.** The only people I can reach on the only telephone I find that works are the operators and the people at the toll-free number on the back of my credit card. I came to learn about Woolf but find myself trapped in Kafka. All I want in the entire world is to go home. I get the concierge to help me call British Airways but there are no more flights to Paris until the one I'm scheduled to take the next day. I'm stuck and defeated: all the credit cards anyone in the Western world could hope for and I'm cut off from civilization.

Saturday night. Decide to make the most of the place while I'm stuck there. Ana and I head to Ladywood Rd, in the Balti triangle, a part of Birmingham not even on my map. Something possesses us to walk home instead of taking another taxi. We have a great time bashing Birmingham, and we take advantage of the permissive UK open container law to buy a couple of those flourescent alcopop drinks for the road. Back in the room we try to decode "Meet Joe Black," as we miss a ten-minute chunk fifteen minutes into it.

Sunday morning. Wake up after dreaming that Leonard and Virginia Woolf have hosted a party at their flat and me and the other conferenciers are hanging out in the basement smoking pot and dressed in scrubs like the cast of "Grey's Anatomy." That's after Virginia took me for a ride on her scooter to get the booze.

A few more panels and back on a plane to Paris. Many hours later, when I get home I fall into Nicolas's arms and sob rather dramatically for a few minutes.

So, an educational weekend overall. In addition to hearing some really excellent scholarship on Woolf, I learned some other things: 1) I'm not going anywhere without my boyfriend for awhile. 2) I'm not going anywhere in the UK for awhile, except maybe London. 3) Flourescent pink alcopop gives me weird dreams. 4) Next time I'm speaking at a conference splurge for the higher priced room in the same hotel as the conference. 5) Finish the freaking paper before arriving at the conference!

**Luckily, this turns out to be a computer glitch and not true in the slightest. Whew.

moving questions

2006-06-28T02:25:00.000-05:00

Maitresse is just back from Birmingham, UK, where she gave a stunning performance in the role of "young and ambitious Virginia Woolf scholar." Scenes and sounds from the conference to come.

For now, a couple of questions regarding her upcoming move across town:

1. Does anyone know where to buy moving materials like boxes and bubblewrap? This town is in urgent need of a Mailboxes, Etc.

2. Do I have any readers who are somewhat burly and/or strong who would like to help with the move? Either loading up in the 9th or unloading in the 13th? Compensation in the form of food, alcohol, and my eternal gratitude...

Thanks!

oui, paris blogue

2006-06-19T11:56:00.000-05:00

moi je serai là, et vous?

moving sale

2006-06-19T06:57:00.000-05:00

It's official: I'm moving on July 2nd from the 9th to the 13th. I'm extremely psyched about the move, since I'll be living in my own apartment (read: a real one, not a tiny studio) for the first time in my life. And, as with every move, there are certain things I won't need at the new place, so I'm selling them off. They include a closet, a fridge, and a washing machine; my roommate is selling her (slightly damaged) bed and/or mattress (which is in perfect condition).

If you or anyone you know needs any of the above items for extremely reasonable prices, please put them in touch! Photos and prices are here. Thank you!

the evil truth your jeweller doesn't want you to know...

2006-06-15T03:11:00.000-05:00

When N brought this up at a small gathering last night, I couldn't help but laugh. Apparently not a day goes by in France that some poor unlucky soul has their ring finger torn off when the ring they wear on it gets caught on some door or other daily obstacle. Talk about the perfect excuse for men not to wear their wedding rings... I told him if the day does come for us and he refuses to wear a ring I'll make him tattoo my name around that finger.

The language the writer uses in the story, however, makes me think a deeper fear lurks in the French male psyche... Jean-Michel Bader isn't just afraid of having a ring take his finger off "like a wire through butter, slicing and taking with it skin, veins, tendons." I think the fear of the doigt découpé stands in for the potential loss of another member. Or maybe they're really afraid of having their droits découpés...

Of course women must lose their fingers just as often as men (the article doesn't break down the statistics). But this whole story just seems like a load of butter to me.

I wonder what the stats are in the States.

[Incidentally, I found an apartment, and will soon be a proud denizen of the Butte aux Cailles, but am still on semi-hiatus while I finish my Woolf paper...]

short hiatus

2006-06-12T16:14:00.000-05:00

just a note to say that I'm crazy busy right now looking for an apartment and preparing a paper that I have to give in ten days at a conference in the UK. in trying to stay on top of all of my responsibilities here at maitresse centrale, blogging has to momentarily take a backseat. will return soon!

I was born in Dusseldorf and that is why they call me Borf Rolf

2006-06-07T23:03:00.000-05:00

Family, friends, yadda yadda yadda, it's been good to be in New York. But for sure the highlight of my trip has been hanging out in the den with my mom watching the film based on the musical based on the film "The Producers." Will Farrell is a scream. Roger Bart's not bad either ("Can I take your hats, your coats, your swastikas?"). I make no secret of it-- I'm a musical theatre nerd, the kind of person who knows all the words to "Hello, Dolly!" and isn't afraid to trot them out. But when you get Mel Brooks involved, there is no hope for me. I'm a captive audience. Pardon the pun.

["Was there a pun?" "No, he thinks he's witty."]

A close second was hitting the Tara Jarmon collection at Target. I went home with this sassy number for only thirty bucks:

Check out this blog, apparently the collection is making quite an impression Stateside!

So tomorrow night I head back to Paris, bringing back lots of goodies from home, but minus one important member of my household... actually the only other member of my household. Baxter will be spending the summer with his grandparents while Mommy travels and moves house. I'm going to be ok without my little furball, right? right? Good thing I have a technophilosopher to come home to. Isn't it semantic...

reverse culture shock

2006-06-03T09:20:00.000-05:00

you know you've been living in France too long when, upon arriving in the States, you:

1. Are no longer capable of waiting in an orderly line, or of even finding where the line is supposed to begin or end. Seriously. This happened to me twice yesterday-- once at Banana Republic, and once at Blockbuster. Both times, there was no discernable waiting line, so I just kind of hovered near the register. My backpack (containing laptop, thank you), newly shorn haircut, cuffed jeans and Chuck Taylors must have made me look like some truant high schooler, because I was eyed warily and treated like I couldn't possibly know any better: "She's not in the line, but take her anyway, Tameeka!" I fumed, inwardly and outwardly. "Tameeka, there really was no line," I explained. And if we were in France no one would care anyway, I wanted to add.

2. Prefer using the handheld apparatus in the shower, because it can be manoeuvered into the crevices that the overhead spout just can't reach. Plus you can be sure to get all the conditioner out of your hair.

3. No longer know how to respond when people hit on you in your own language. It just seems so... direct. I stammered and blushed, feeling extremely violated, when the pizza man was trying to chat me up, without the buffer of a foreign language.

4. Are regularly almost knocked over in the streets by people trying to get where they're going-- when normally you're the one mowing down anyone who gets in your way.

5. Are confused when you overhear two women discussing the merits of the Pisarro-Cezanne show. You're not sure where you are or where you're supposed to be, since it's currently on at the Musée d'Orsay. Then one of them mentions MoMA and everything is illuminated. Except you feel like time and space have just compressed around your cranium.

That's all I've got for now. Mostly I'm enjoying New York-- the air conditioning, the pace, the smells, the driving everywhere on Long Island, the pizza and bagels. But I heard it just got sunny in Paris, and I have to say... I'm starting to feel homesick.

A day in the library; a night in Murray Hill

2006-06-01T14:24:00.000-05:00

I started moving differently the minute I got off the train at Penn Station. I climbed those stairs like a badass New Yorker, like I was packing more than just an attitude, know what I'm sayin'? Jeff Buckley wailing "Back in NYC" on my iPod, I strode across 34th Street assertively, thumb tucked into the strap of my bag, elbow down, sunglasses on, pseudo-French pout replaced by a determined "I've got somewhere to be and it ain't here" scowl.

This lasted a few blocks. Then I reached 6th Avenue and Bryant Park and I turned into a fawning tourist. It's so beautiful, I love it here, why don't I live here anymore? I began to ask myself.

Then it hit me: visiting Manhattan is like hooking up with your ex. It's so familiar and feels so good that you start questioning why you broke up in the first place. But beware, my friend, beware. Steel yourself against the insintuating nostalgia. Remember: there was a reason things didn't work out between you. He never treated you right, you had no quality of life whatsoever, and he was pretty dirty when you think about it. He might be tall and sexy but you're only in his arms for the day. And night.

A few hours later, by the time my sister and I had finished our dinner (at Josie's, at an organic restaurant in Murray Hill), it had dawned on me that New York, my ex lovah, had changed. The city that was once a mystery, full of dark nooks and alluring alleyways, had become a pastel imitation of itself. The cigarette has been replaced by edamame. The gin and tonic by anything ending in the suffix -tini. And the innate sense of style by cookie-cutter outfits sold in bulk at the same chain stores you can find across the country. No creativity; no punctum, grabbing your attention and luring you in to admire the parts composing the whole. Just glossy; shallow even; impenetrable, but boring.

Of course had I been on the West Side, or in Brooklyn somewhere, it would have been a totally different story. But I was on the East Side, in a restaurant full of newly minted college graduates sporting their business casual with the tags just cut off. But my sister, herself a recent college grad, put them all to shame. She was sporting business cahj, no doubt about it; her black pleated skirt, black top, cardigan and chunky jewelry were fresh from the office. But she was working it, whereas her Murray HIll cohorts were just wearing it.

And so this post is for her, on her 23rd birthday. If anyone can save NYC from turning into the rest of the country, she can. CKE, I'm counting on you. You're carrying the torch now. Show them how it's done.

notes from long island

2006-05-31T09:35:00.000-05:00

1. I forgot how damn good it can feel to get all my aggression out by hitting the piano to play Beethoven's Pathétique at full volume when no one's home.

2. I love jet lag when it helps me wake up early in the morning. I hate it on the other end when I can't fall asleep at night.

3. I'm "blog of the week" at Paname Ensemble. Cool. Check out my Q&A here.

4. Today was Katie Couric's last day on The Today Show, and NBC threw a giant party in her honor. Harvey Fierstein sang a very clever song, backed up by four harmonizing fellows from some Broadway play about Frankie Valle. The Central Park jogger shared her thoughts on Karie's humanity. Apart from those highlights, the whole thing was rather nauseating. Katie even said so herself. Glad we're in agreement on that.

5. My dog got a haircut and I got my highlights done: all is well in the world.

born to perform

2006-05-30T14:23:00.000-05:00

this maitresse was born a ham. the earliest signs of it were manifested when I would come home from nursery school at age two and show my mom the songs I learned that day.

"head, shoulders knees and toes, knees and toes!"

as I grew up my music teachers were more and more impressed with my, ahem, perfect pitch, and uncanny ability to replicate different series of rhythmic claps. my reward for this was getting to sing the solo in "edelweiss" at the third-grade chorus concert.

fast-forward to middle school and high school-- first chorus parts in all the shows, then lead roles. then on to syracuse university to major in musical theatre and-----

screeeeeech!

What, you mean I won't always get the lead? and I have to audition all the time? and never know where my next job will come from? and work in, like, real estate or retail or waitressing? And I have to compete to make myself heard above all these caterwauling theatre people?

No, no, no! I transferred to Barnard, majored in English, got a strong liberal arts education, and let my elevated sense of my own importance carry me forth to a career in academe. And a blog.

[Here's the commercial bit]

But all my performing and lifetime of showing off was nothing-- repeat nothing-- compared with this freaking awesome add-on from Firefox. People, I can blog at the bottom of my screen whenever the urge o'ertakes me. Nicolas turned me on to it (among other things). I can't compete with Firefox so I'm not even going to try.

[NDLR: Just tried to do some fancy stuff in the program and it didn't work for me-- you have to shift to a different screen to write in HTML. And you can't edit what you've just posted. I might beat Firefox yet.]

Homeward Bound

2006-05-27T09:18:00.000-05:00

Gearing up for a ten-day trip to New York! I gave my students their final exams a week early, amid much groaning and complaining; I don't know what they're griping about, I'm the one who has to grade them! I'd much rather write an exam than have to decipher their handwriting... so at least I won't lack for activity during the 8-hour flight home. I see it as a challenge: can my brain watch bad airplane movies and grade papers at the same time? We shall see.

(I should point out here that I am a completely responsible English professor and would never disregard my students' efforts so callously as to watch TV while I grade their papers. That is, as long as I can tell that they weren't watching it when they wrote them.)

Ten days is a long time and a short time... it's a short time to be with my family, who I miss terribly over here, but it's a long time to be away from a certain someone whose arms I've only recently gotten back into, after a strange and intermittent month of disquietude. It's a short time to see all my friends and a long time to be away from my friends here, some of whom are leaving Paris soon to go back to NY for good. And more practically speaking, it's a short time to get all the work done I have to do in the New York Public Library and a long time to be away from my apartment hunt (that's right kids, I need to move at the end of June, if you know anyone vacating a great studio or 2 pièces, this would be a good time to speak up!)

So, without further ado, and in case there's anyone out there who still cares after my heartless remarks about cow art and impatience with my high school French teacher, here's the to-do list of an expat New Yorker momentarily touching down on home soil:

-Highlights
-Haircut with Nigel
-Mani/pedi (these are ridiculously overpriced in Paris)
-Darling sister's 23rd birthday
-Tix to Threepenny Opera for the above (Alan Cumming and Cyndi Lauper in the same show, I think I might keel over)
-A session in the Berg Collection to find out what Woolf was saying about Lawrence when she wasn't being published
-Meeting up with A White Bear, H*BOMB, Kristin, various other friends who don't know I'm coming yet because I'm a lazy email correspondent
-Consuming very very much pizza
-RDV with former boss/agent
-hours and hours at Borders with a stack of American magazines, new releases, and Chai latte after Chai latte
-driving my mom's Audi cabriolet to:
-hit the beach (good old Robert Moses)
-walking my dog on the boardwalk (good old Sunken Meadow)
-BBQing with the fam
-watching my dad swing in his hammock
-going to the mall with my mom (*ahhhem*Club Monaco*coughcough*) (poor old Walt Whitman, the man will forever be known to me primarily as a mall and secondarily as My Captain)
-watching reruns of the second season of "Grey's Anatomy"
-and what will I be doing in between all these activities? hugging my mommy.

2006-05-27T09:14:00.000-05:00

New iPod playlist up for May.

an elk-hound and a rosebush:

2006-05-25T14:22:00.000-05:00

the only two things which matter to Virginia Woolf's Orlando, at least by the end of the sixteenth century (things do get better for Orlando by the twentieth, by which time he's had the great fortune to be transformed into a woman). I'm in the midst of writing a paper on the novel, to be delivered at a conference in the UK this June, and so I thought it would be appropriate at this juncture, having recently been subjected to some of the ~~very worst~~ most mean-spirited condescention that human nature can spew, to turn to Woolf's hero/ine herself, after her own similarly fatiguing run-in with "society" (in the eighteenth century):

"'Is this,' she asked--but there was none to answer, 'is this what people call life?' The spaniel raised her forepaw in token of sympathy. The spaniel licked Orlando with her tongue. Orlando stroked the spaniel with her hand. Orlando kissed the spaniel with her lips. In short, there was the truest sympathy between them that can be between a dog and its mistress, and yet, it cannot be denied that the dumbness of animals is a great impediment to the refinements of intercourse. They wag their tails, they bow the front part of the body and elevant the hind; they roll, they jump, they paw, they whine, they bark, they slobber; they have all sorts of ceremonies and artifices of their own, but the whole thing is of no avail, since speak they cannot. Such was her quarrel, she thought, setting the dog gently on to the floor, with the great people at Arlingon House. They, too, wag their tails, roll, jump, paw, and slobber, but talk they cannot. 'All these months that I've been out in the world,' said Orlando, pitching one stocking across the room, 'I've heard nothing but what Pippin might have said. I'm cold. I'm happy. I'm hungry. I've caught a mouse. I've buried a bone. Please kiss my nose.' And it was not enough" (195-6).

It's too good for me to even gloss.

By the way-- I'm back together with my own Orlando furioso. Hurrah!

oh, la vache!

2006-05-21T14:10:00.000-05:00

There are cows all over Paris right now.

I know what you're thinking: the dogshit is bad enough. But these cows don't produce shit, they (ahem) are the shit.

Ok that's mean of me. But seriously, there's a big old "art" installation of decorated cows dotting random parts of Paris. And I'm sorry to sound like a blasé New Yorker, but these painted cows are so turn of the millennium-- I mean, we had them back in 1999, if I'm not mistaken. And I could be exaggerating, but only to underscore just how very over cutesy-painted farm animals are.

Incidentally, my French teacher in high school was nuts about cows. So much so that my father nicknamed her Madame La Vache. I think she would plotz if she found out I live in Paris and speak French with a humble level of fluency. Does anyone else ever want to email their high school English teachers and gloat, or is that just my desperate need for validation rearing its ugly head again? Madame Leclair, il est vraiment dommage que vous m'~~avez~~ayez sous-estimée pendant toutes ces années-là. N'est-ce pas ironique que je n'ai pas été admise dans le French Honor Society ~~et pourtant~~ alors même que je suis sans doute le seul ancien élève de Commack High School deà démenager en France? Ce n'est certainement pas vous que m'a appris de parler français comme je fais, et même mes erreurs ne vous doivent rien. Faites bien attention, car les étudiants timides ou silencieux, comme moi, qu'il me semble ne méritaient pas votre attention, ne peuvent pas tous se débrouiller aussi bien que moi.

But I think I heard she retired anyway. Oh well.

things are looking up

2006-05-20T03:46:00.000-05:00

and it has everything to do with the fact that I walked out of the last 15 minutes of "The Da Vinci Code" last night. I had more important ciphers to crack on the south side of town...

the cure for a boy is a boy

2006-05-18T07:15:00.000-05:00

I've never been one of those girls with tons of male friends-- when I was younger, either boys were objects of my desire or they barely registered at all. In fact, I was extremely nervous talking to any human with a penis for a really long time, even if I wasn't attracted to them. I'm convinced this is because I don't have any brothers and have only two male cousins, neither of whom was around when I was growing up, for one reason or another.

Then, after high school, I went to a women's college. I definitely had relationships here and there, but never saw the guy as a person-- they were more like really attractive aliens. It went across sexuality, too-- even though I did theatre for a long time, I never even hit it off with the gay boys. Objects, totally.

All that changed when I dated a boy for four years after college. He wasn't an object or an alien, and his friends were the kind of guy's guys I had no experience with. I could joke with them, drink with them, watch sports with them, watch them hit on girls, feel protected by them. These guys were like the big brothers I never had. They were awesome, and they changed so much for me. No longer was every new male in my path someone to worry about my effect on, or someone to try to flirt with. It sounds strange, but guys became humans to me. Funny, drunken, smelly, rambunctious humans.

And now, since I moved to France, my entire social circle has been reconstituted. Sure I have my girls, but probably seventy percent of my friends are guys, and fifty percent of those guys are gay. When did this happen? Why did this happen? It would be interesting to get deeper into the demographics. They're mainly Anglophones, these boys of mine, and I've met them in a variety of ways. Some have (unsuccessfully) hit on me in bars. Some I met on Friendster. Some I've worked with or taught with. Some date guys I've taught with. Some I've met through friends or family. Some I've had class with. You get the picture. They're non-threatening and supportive, and they make me feel good about myself. Yay for male friends.

But now that I'm, er, single, things get tricky again. For example: if I turn to my straight male friends for advice about my breakup, the likelihood that they will slam N into oblivion is very high, because they're protective, because they want to sleep with me, because even if they don't want to sleep with me no guy is good enough to sleep with me, certainly not a guy whose reason for breaking up with me is that he wasn't good enough for me ("Bullshit!" two of my male friends said just last night). If I turn to my gay friends, they're totally supportive, telling me I'm so cute and charming and smart and all that jazz, but they clap a hand on my shoulder and tell me to move on, because I'm too fabulous for some lame hetero fool.

So I'm not relying on my guys for advice. They're too biased. Instead, they're helping me get through this by drinking with me, cooking for me, downloading "The Family Guy" and "The Sopranos" to watch with me. My rockin' publicist cousin N was in town this week and took me and some friends to Kong for dinner. My co-correspondent is going to get me soused on Sunday. I'm getting together with a (male) editor friend tonight to do some work. There's no cure for a broken heart, but it's clear to me that the cure for losing one boy is filling up your time with lots of other boys.

That said, I'm also looking forward to this Saturday with the girls...

similies, metaphors, endings, postponements.

2006-05-16T02:24:00.000-05:00

I hate having to come to terms with the end of a relationship. You feel like you've been gripping a glass so tightly that it shatters in your hand, and you look down at it, as surprised that it broke as you are by the pain and the blood.

With this breakup, it's as if some malevolent spirit removed all the nails from the structure of our relationship in the middle of the night. For another two weeks the house remained standing, held together by love and by habit, but after all, love can't hold the whole thing up forever; you do need nails for that. And Sunday, the wind changed course and the house couldn't stand the shift; it came crashing down around us and we had to run for our lives.

I'm tired of breaking up and breaking down. I feel like I burn through relationships like wildfire through a forest, feeding off any available oxygen and destroying everything that gets in the way. Afterwards I stand among the tree skeletons and cry and cry, as if tears could water an entire forest of decimation back into bloom.

It's particularly hard in France-- they move so fast in the beginning, these French men; whereas their American cousins will take months to commit, Frenchmen will be your boyfriend after only one kiss, and they'll slam on the gas pedal until you're dizzy with love for them. Then, at the slightest bump in the road, they jerk the emergency brake ( or "break," depending on his resolve). You're thrown from the car. They drive away.

These destructive images belie what I'm hoping for the future, that he'll get through his existential crisis and realize neither of us will ever have it any better with anyone else than we do with each other. I refuse to believe that a man-- French or otherwise-- who truly believes his heart has found a home, will be able to move out for good, even if he thinks he might be a bad roommate.

[The period of self-indulgent prose will be over soon, I promise.]

finding the music

2006-05-15T08:22:00.000-05:00

The alarm was making its familiar fuzzy sound, an alarm clock stuck under a pillow, when in fact it was just my cell phone imitating an alarm clock stuck under a pillow. I crawled out of bed this morning, my eyes puffy and stuck together with tears. Had to teach at 9 am. How on earth, how to get all the way to Nanterre, when my bed and my hangover from the Tylenol PM and my heartbreak were right there in the room with me, how to get dressed and out the door, up the street, to the 2, then to the RER A, then to Batiment F?

On my desk was the sheet music that had just come from Amazon: vocal selections from The Baker's Wife. Much like the tracks they laid across the Alps before they had a train that could make the journey, I bought the sheet music even though I have had no access to a piano since I moved to France. And this morning, I looked at the music, sitting there, unplayed, unsung, and it occurred to me: somewhere in one of the numerous random Bauhaus buildings dotting the Nanterre campus, there must be a piano. And today is the day, I said to myself, when I will find it.

I left the house feeling a little bit lighter, a little more optimistic, the sheet music stuck in with the lesson plans in my bag. And when I had an hour-long break, the stars aligned and guided me on my way. I very sweetly asked the guys who work downstairs in my building if they knew where I could find a piano. They sent me to Batiment L. The man at the desk sent me into the Office of Cultural Affairs. The woman in the Office of Cultural Affairs pointed me to a little black door and said I could go ahead in and stay as long as I wanted. And behind the little black door was a giant rec room, with a little brown upright piano, perfectly in tune, if a bit muted in terms of its resonance. But I didn't care. I took out my book, spread it open to the correct page, and launched into "Where is the Warmth."

A few years ago, I would have been incredibly shy when two students came in to get some stuff from a corner of the room while I was singing. But almost two full years without access to a piano will do wonders to cure timidity!

I realized, during that hour this morning, that music is the thing that's been missing from my life-- for as long as I can remember it's been my creative outlet when I'm tired of reading and writing, tired of forcing my thoughts into words. I used to spend hours and hours practicing and singing. Take that away from me and there's a hole the size of a piano in my life, that I end up filling with obsessions and addictions. Basta. Back to the piano! When I move into my new apartment I'm going to get myself one of those new-fangled electric keyboard things that has the weighted keys and the pedals of a piano, but the headphones that I can plug in and spare the neighbors when I want to play at 2 am. And I'll have jazz soirées and everyone is invited to come over and sing. Provided you let me show off just a little.

This star called Paris

2006-05-07T05:33:00.000-05:00

"Brother, if you can’t paint here you might as well give up and marry the boss’s daughter."

Thus opens Vincente Minelli's classic MGM musical "An American in Paris." I watched this film this week because I've been feeling pretty down, due to a series of mishaps which I won't chronicle just yet because I'm waiting to see how it will turn out. I needed some affirmation, I needed some tap-dancing Gene Kelly, I needed some Gershwin, and most of all, I needed to remember why I'm here to begin with. Not because Leslie Caron danced next to a man-made Seine in a Hollywood backlot in 1951, but because there is some magic here which I find particularly inspiring, partly owing to the absolute foreignness of it all, and the sense of accomplishment at having learnt a language and built a life for myself over here out of nothing. I'm reasonably content, doing my thing, and I find ample source of motivation to continue with my research and my writing.

So on thursday I wiped away my tears, splashed some cold water on my face, and somewhat appropriately headed down to La Salpêtrière, the former asylum where women diagnosed as "hysterical" became a floor show for Charcot and his sexist psychoanalyst underlings. Nowadays the place is just a regular French hospital (although, continuing the tradition of welcoming women misunderstood by the men in their lives, it is where Princess Diana was brought after her fatal car accident in August 1997). In spite of what you may be thinking, I was not going to turn myself over to the psychiatric authorities. I went to see an art show in the chapel.

It was called "Springtime in Paris," the hackneyed phrase capturing exactly the spirit I was hoping to infuse into my week, what with the Gene Kelly and all. A number of expatriate artists affiliated with the IVY Paris salon were showing their work, and I knew I'd find friendly faces there. I went, as the French say, to change my ideas.

The show was fascinating; there were some really affective pieces (TK: I'm going to have to do a little research to quote them by artist). Judging from the show, the contemporary expatriate artist's view of Paris sure has changed since Jerry Mulligan sketched the Arc de Triomphe-- the pieces ranged from photographic nocturnes of Paris in the moonlight to a three-dimensional advertisement of Paris as "The City of Piss."

Some of the work was remarkably original; some of it remarkably derivative (far too many Surrealist would-bes for my taste, having recently completely a long research project on the real thing). Most everything showed a high level of technique and accomplishment. Nothing, however, made me stop in my tracks saying "Yes! This is what expatriates are doing in Paris right now. This is reason for us to be here. This is what we're contributing, what we'll be remembered for."

Nothing, that is, except the event itself. The fact of its organization, the fact that it was so well-attended, the fact that it created so much internet buzz, the fact that I went with a couple of other bloggers, the fact that I was on the lookout for people I only knew through blogs, the fact that, on my way out the door with E, a young girl came running up to stop us asking if E really was La Coquette. The structure of association among expats, artists, writers, and even friendships here in Paris has been totally revolutionized by the internet, and I think we can safely say that this-- what we're doing-- the way we're connecting, the way we're experiencing this place and this time and each other-- is the new spirit of "Springtime in Paris." We're all mindful of the old mythology, hopefully we're humble enough not to assume we're worthy to assume its mantle, but we're here, and we're writing, and we're painting, and we're burning down our sculpture (on purpose??), and it might actually be beginning to mean something.

I didn't take my camera, so I don't have any pictures, but there are some here.

oenosnobberie

2006-05-01T03:58:00.000-05:00

It's a well-known and well-mocked ritual: you order a bottle of wine, the server presents the bottle to you, you look at the label, it has a pretty drawing on it, you nod ok, the server takes it away to uncork it, brings it back and shows you the cork, it's fine too, then the server pours the slightest bit into the glass of whoever's been doing all this looking and nodding and then: the moment of truth. You lift the glass, swoosh the wine about ever so subtlely, to indicate that you know what you're doing but aren't going to show off about it, you sniff delicately, you sip, and, as the server and your companion(s) wait with bated breath for your approval, you nod once more, the wine is safe to drink, has not been contaminated by ill-intentioned corks, let the liquid pour forth and let all share in its bounty.

I have taken part in this scene countless times, both as taster and as watcher. And I am here to tell you today: it's a sham. It's a farce. It presents the illusion of choice and control to the taster where, in fact, ultimate control rests with the owner of the restaurant.

In other words, if you are going to refuse a wine, you better damn well know your wines, because if you refuse, say, a 1971 Chinon, accusing it of being just slightly bouchonné [contaminated by the cork], you will not only still have to drink the wine you ordered, but you will be subject to the condescention of the owner of the restaurant forcing said bottle upon you.

"This wine is not at all bouchonné, Monsieur," pronounced the proprietor of L'Aigle d'or, a restaurant in Azay-le-rideau in the Loire Valley. "Are you accustomed to drinking old wines?" she inquired, not bothering to hide her disdain. "Perhaps the apéritif affected your palate," she suggested. And rendered him unable to tell if a wine tastes weird or not? I thought to myself angrily.

They decanted the wine to allow it to breathe a bit. That didn't help. It just tasted off. I complained about the pointlessness of the whole affected ritual-- "Why do they even let the customer take the first sip, why doesn't the owner just do it if she's just going to disagree with you?"

The meal was alright, considering we were drinking bitter brew. Escarcots en croute tasted a little too earthy, and his langoustines were mediocre. The blanquette de veau was decent, as was the fresh chevre they served, and the tiramisu I picked at.

But the proprietor still had more awkwardness in store for us. When the bill came, N handed over his Visa. The credit card machine rejected it several times before he could even punch in his code. The owner sighed impatiently and asked if he had another card. He wordlessly gave her a different card. Same problem. "I believe there is a problem with your machine," he volunteered. She flurried and stammered and told him to go to an ATM around the corner. "But leave me your passport or your watch!" she cried, as if, angered over the wine, we would just take off and stick her with the bill.

N looked at her like she was insane, and I volunteered to stay as a sign of good faith. While he was gone, she rang up the party behind us and the machine worked like a charm. When I told N, he shrugged and said they probably just wanted to have the cash. Our server, who was somewhat apologetic about the wine, reassured us before we left, "There were some other problems with other cards besides yours, don't worry."

Don't worry? We weren't worried. I took the card of the restaurant and murmured with restrained glee that I was looking forward to writing up our experience on my website.

The restaurant is mentioned in the Guide Michelin but, quelle surprise, doesn't have a star. And now we know why: the proprietor probably told the undercover Michelin scout that he didn't know his wines.

Why Sarah Hepola quit blogging

2006-04-25T09:52:00.000-05:00

(You didn't think my only contribution today would be about Freud's bris, did you?)

This is an interesting article about how blogging can keep you from writing. Unfortunately I don't have time to blog about it right now because I have to read DH Lawrence's Fantasia of the Unconscious. I, for one, am still laboring under the delusion that I can Do It All: read, write, blog, live. Keep reading to know how it all turns out.

Freud's Foreskin

2006-04-25T05:26:00.000-05:00

If you're near midtown Manhattan on the evening of May 10th, I strongly suggest checking out this event. Would that I could be there myself! It's a real milestone in the evolution of American academe.

The New York Public Library
Humanities and Social Sciences Library
Dorot Jewish Division

presents

FREUD’S FORESKIN
A sesquicentennial celebration of the most suggestive circumcision in history

7:00 p.m.-9:00 p.m., Wednesday May 10, 2006
South Court Auditorium, Humanities and Social Sciences Library
Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street

The Joy Gottesman Ungerleider Lecture
this year takes the form of four short presentations and a conversation at the intersection of Jewish identity, psychoanalysis, and minor surgery.

There are many reasons for conferences, but the 150th anniversary of Freud'sbrisis the most novel I've come across yet.
--John Efron, Koret Professor of Jewish History, University of California, Berkeley

Circumcision in Freud’s Context: The State of the Art, 1856-1939
Circumcision—its meaning and value—was a matter for fierce and widespread debate, among Jews and others, in late-19th and early 20th century, in Central Europe especially. What were the issues and why did circumcision become the ritual around which discussions about the nature of Jewish identity revolved?
ROBIN JUDD is Assistant Professor of History at The Ohio State University. Her book, Cutting Identities: Jewish Rituals and German Politics, is forthcoming from Cornell University Press.

Psychoanalyzing Phallacies: Freud and Current Circumcision Controversies
This Freudian perspective, focusing on circumcision as symbolic of social, erotic, and cultural loss, uses Freud to analyze those who use Freud to critique the procedure.
ERIC KLINE SILVERMAN is Edward Myers Dolan Professor of Anthropology and Coordinator of Jewish Studies at DePauw University. His first book, Masculinity, Motherhood, and Mockery: Psychoanalyzing Culture and the Iatmul Naven Rite in New Guinea, was published in 2001, and his next, From Abraham to America: A History of Jewish Circumcision, is due out in June.

Little Hans: A Footnote in the History of Circumcision
In an aside in his case history of “Little Hans,” Freud locates the root of antisemitism in an unconscious dread of the sight of the circumcised penis—symbol par excellence of the castration complex. How does this startling claim relate to the rest of Freud’s oeuvre and to his contemporaries’ assessments of the ethnic, sexual, and gender identities of Jews?
JAY GELLER is Senior Lecturer in Modern Jewish Culture in the Graduate Department of Religion at Vanderbilt University. His book, Mitigating Circumcisions: Judentum and the Construction of Freud's Corpus, is forthcoming from Fordham University Press.

Circumcised Supremacy: Freud’s Final Cut
In Moses and Monotheism, Freud finds in this “holy mark” in the flesh the key to the peculiar Jewish identification with the incorporeal realms of the mind and spirit.
ELIZA SLAVET is a member of the Interdisciplinary Faculty at New York University’s Gallatin School, and a doctoral candidate in Cultural Studies at the University of California, San Diego. Her dissertation, Freud’s Moses: Memory Material and Immaterial, focuses on Freud’s controversial belief in the biological inheritance of memory and his formulation of a “theory of Jewishness.”

This event is free and open to the public.
This program is made possible by the Dorot Foundation as part of its support for The New York Public Library’s Dorot Jewish Division.

Back to school

2006-04-24T07:54:00.000-05:00

Well, we're back. The New York Times would have told me if my alarm clock hadn't already done so at 7 this morning, when it chirped its little chirp, ignorant and uncaring that it was the first time it had been set that early since before the strikes, somewhere around two months ago. I dutifully arose, switched on the coffee maker, stumbled into clothing, filled up my Mediabistro travel mug with java, patted the dog on the head and went out the door, ready once again to teach the French that they go on holiday and not in holiday and that they go to the movies and not in cinema.

But to my surprise, I have found today that I don't mind coming back to school at all! My students are all really cool, and I was glad to get back to some semblance of a schedule-- particularly in light of the fact that hext Monday is a holiday, as is the Monday after that, as is the 25th, and also the 5th of June... and I'll be in Corsica May 20-24, meeting the woman whose loins gave forth to my boyfriend, and in NY May 29-June 8, with the woman whose loins gave forth to me. So really, teaching is just kind of a hobby I try to squeeze in between strikes I'm not a part of, religious holidays I don't celebrate, and vacations I really shouldn't be taking given that the semester, originally ending May 26th, is being stretched til June 10.

But whatever.

One of the warm-up exercises I've asked my students to do at the beginning of each class today has been to tell me what they did during their two months off from school. But when they turned the question around on me... I had no idea! I read a whole lot of DH Lawrence. I gave a seder and went to another seder. I did not keep kosher for Passover despite buying 15 euros worth of matzoh in the hope that I would. I blogged a little and wrote a lot and progressed on a couple of different personal projects. I went to bad French movies with Nicolas and good American movies with Remy. And best of all, my family was in town last week.

Still, though, all play and no work makes Lauren an undisciplined girl. So lay it on me: five more weeks of working a part-time job part-time. I think I can handle that.

The Second Annual Vegetarian/Sephardic/Non-traditional/Not Overcrowded/did I mention Feminist? Pesach Extravaganza

2006-04-13T04:58:00.000-05:00

Happy Passover! Well, for the second time in my life I led my own seder last night, replete with alternative haggadah, orange on the seder plate and illegal rice (Sephardim are allowed rice on Pesach, Ashkenazim are not). It's not your mother's seder, but it does the trick.

You might recall last year I went a little loony and threw a doosy of a seder for twenty. We gathererd in my living room, Jews and non-Jews, Sephardim and Ashkenazim, girls and boys, gay and straight, friends and lovers, vegetarian, vegan, carnivorous, pescatarian, and flexatarian, and a joyous time was had by all. Except that I was stressed beyond oblivion and shortly afterward I found myself shouting at my (now ex-) best friend on the metro and spent the rest of the night in tears for that and various other reasons. I was conflicted last year, between being overwhelmed at the sheer number of people in my house, and overwhelmed at the absence of people who ought to have been in my house and who weren't, through my own doing and through the whims of fate.

After that I made a resolution and a wish. Though when we concluded the seder we said "Leshana haba'a bi'yirushalayim," "Next year in Jerusalem," I was pretty certain that the next year would also occur in my living room in Paris. I just wasn't sure, watching all my American friends go back to the States, who would be at my seder table. I resolved, then, to keep the number of guests down, so that I might relax the way we're supposed to on Passover (because though we might be free from Pharoah, we are not free from the obligations of hospitality). And my wish? I wished to have fewer absences in the crowd. My ideal was not Jerusalem for this year. It was just to be at home in Paris.

And so I was delighted to be surrounded by wonderful friends last night, who boasted a pleasing symmetry: three girls, three boys; three Jews, three Gentiles; three French, three American. Everyone got on well; even when Nicolas and Frédérique argued over colonialism, they assured us it was one of those French debates for the sake of debating: nothing personal (cf. my post on "Fighting French!").

Our seder was not as brief as this one, but it was just as "heretical," according to one of my guests. Irreverent, I like to think. As we made our way out of the desert and through the Red Sea, we got progressively more and more plastered (is that why we drink red wine, I wonder?), Remy made it through the Four Questions with panache, our rendition of "Dayenu" brought the house down, and Remy's boyfriend showed up from work just in time for the Aubergine Gratin, which was a stunning success, if I do say so myself.

By the time we got to the end of the seder and we proclaimed "Next year in Jerusalem!" Nicolas squeezed my knee and said "How about next month in Jerusalem?" I looked at him, who had been by my side during the seder, who had played along by the crazy rules, who had shyly pronounced "dayenu" at the end of every phrase, who had come here to be with me, and no matter how burned I've been in the last year, no matter how much I had been let down, I dared to hope last year's wish had come true.

I want my MTV

2006-04-05T11:46:00.000-05:00

One of the perks of living in France is that you get exposed to American pop culture in much smaller doses that you do, say, living in an apartment on the Upper East Side with subscriptions to the New York Post, New York Magazine, the New Yorker, and Tivo (Actually, I'm a little nostalgic for the last few items on the list). Believe it or not, I used to be fairly in the know!! but over the last two years I've found I can no longer quote the Queer Eyes by heart, I don't know who Ashton Kutcher is Punking these days, and I have no idea who half the actors are in the American movies we get over here. I'm free from the barrage of must-knows and must-haves, and though I went through a slight period of withdrawal at the beginning, now I just feel much more peaceful.

Every time I fly home, whn I get off the plane at JFK and stand in that line waiting to get through passport control, they always have a bunch of TVs hanging from the ceiling, all turned to CNN or Fox News, and I stare at them gape-mouthed as I wind my way through the line, amazed at all the colors and moving pictures and the scroll-thingy at the bottom. It takes a real thirty seconds or so of adjustment before I slip back into my old "savvy New Yorker" skin, and it usually takes several days before I stop saying "Pardon, excusez-moi" when I bump into someone, and a few more days before I stop saying anything at all (we New Yorkers are far ruder than the French in this respect, it's true!).

One of the downsides of being out of the US is that I really do miss certain aspects of our culture-- for example, certain television shows. Listen to this: I've been out of the country for the entire duration of the Desperate Housewives obsession. I've never seen an episode in my life! I don't know who these women are, or why they're so desperate! I've never seen Grey's Anatomy, though it does sound like a hoot! and worst of all, there's a new season of 24 and The Sopranos and I'm missing them! The agony!

For awhile there I was catching episodes of Gilmore Girls by downloading fuzzy episodes on Limewire. I've stopped doing that, though, because of the questionable quality and, um, legality. My old roommate Rémy [not to be confused with friend Remy] got me into Lost through his downloaded episodes from seasons one and two. But he moved out right after Shannon got killed and I've been in limbo every since.

However, I have just discovered to my unending joy that you can now download television shows on iTunes! It's two bucks an episode but who cares! it's legal! and the quality is good! and now there's always something to watch on my computer, anywhere there's wifi access! I've been sick in bed all week, but I haven't minded because I've caught up on Lost! I'm right there with you, USA!

So now, I've turned my attention to Desperate Housewives on iTunes. I'm going to start watching them this weekend with a friend who has the DVD box set, but I'll probably need to watch a few on my own... and guess what I've learned.

All of the titles of the episodes are taken from Stephen Sondheim songs. Ok, not all, but most: "Pretty Little Picture," "Anything You Can Do," "Move On," "Every Day a Little Death," "Your Fault," "The Ladies Who Lunch," "There Won't Be Trumpets," "Children Will Listen," "Live Alone and Like It," "Fear No More" (from the quite obscrure The Frogs!) and my favorite, as you well know-- "Sunday in the Park With George."

Oh my god. Writers of Housewives, I salute you. From across the pond, you have won my allegiance. Can't wait to start downloading!

La femme en violet

2006-04-04T10:32:00.000-05:00

It was Monday, March 27th, just after 7 p.m., and in the streets and in the cafes, the inhabitants of Paris exalted at the arrival of spring weather, the setting forward of the clocks, the first illuminated evening we'd seen since October. It was plain to see: from the Parisians shedding their top layers to the good-natured waiter in the place Saint Sulpice, from the man on the parked scooter embracing the woman in the short tight skirt, to my messy topknot and sunglasses propped jauntily up on my head: everyone was happier than any of us had been in six months.

Remy and I strolled into Les Editeurs to meet Jessica for a drink, and there she was. Not our petite blonde American girlfriend, but a petite blonde Frenchwoman clad entirely in purple: purple blazer, purple chemise, purple pants, purple bag, and even, when she left the café and we watched her cross the Carrefour de l'Odéon, bright purple socks.

And la pièce de résistance: her hair. A swirled, hairsprayed concoction of springtime joy, it was the shape that the color purple would take if it were to take shape.

It had a life of its own; it was a work of art. The picture I furtively snapped does not do it justice.

She had a manuscript in front of her and worked diligently correcting it, occasionally raising her eyes up in front of her and pursing her lips (see above). I tried to imagine what she was working on and why, and finally decided she had to be a romance novelist. I think she was correcting the draft of Elle ne connaissait pas son nom or Bras de fer, bras d'amour. Any other guesses?

décrocher la crémaillère

2006-04-03T07:05:00.000-05:00

I knew it was coming, but I didn't think it would be so soon: remember my flighty Italian roommate who looked like she was going to move out in January, three weeks after moving in?

Well, a few days ago she informed me that she's moving out at the end of June. She's going back to Venice for the summer, and she doesn't know if she'll be coming back to Paris in September.

And best of all, the rental agency doesn't want to do another (a fourth) lease with me in this apartment. So it's definite: I'm moving. And you know what? I couldn't be happier! I'm overjoyed at the idea of getting my own place, at no longer having to deal with roommates and their sudden decisions to move out. Witness the three roommates I've had in this apartment in the last year alone. Roommate #1: "I'm moving in with my boyfriend!" Since we definitely were badly matched as roommates, and are much better suited as friends, I found it hard to hide my enthusiasm at her departure. Roommate #2, four months after moving in: "I got a job in Morocco!" This was sad, as he was really cool, hardly ever home, and when he was we got on well, and all the furniture in the apartment belonged to him. However, as he couldn't take his stuff with him to Morocco, I ended up buying most of it from him and he gave me a really good deal. Roommate #3: great to live with, but in spite of the fact that I told her when I interviewed her that my two major stipulations in letting her move in was 1) that she stay for at least a year and 2) that she be cool with my dog, who barks and runs around and despite being teeny-tiny is very hard to miss, she has proven incapable of holding fast to the first condition. "Roommates come and go," she tells me. "No one wants to stay in colocation for long."

Well-- she's right on that point. But it is so very annoying to move in France that you'd think they'd stay longer. In the case of this apartment, the rental agency has insisted on redoing the lease in both renters' names each time. And each time I've had to redo my caution bancaire (since I don't have a French guarantor). And each time the guy has to come to do the Etat des lieux and by the third time I think he thought I was doing it on purpose just to get him alone in my apartment (he is very cute, it must be said).

So in my experience, roommates=annoyance. Living alone=higher utilities bills, higher rent, smaller space, but peace of mind.

There's one other possible living arrangement but I think it's probably too soon to talk about it. Maybe by the end of May, when I actually start looking for apartments... and then maybe this is a different post, for a different day.

In the meantime, if you hear of a decent studio or 2 pièces that will be opening up at the end of June, anywhere in Paris, please let me know.

(don't) say my name

2006-03-31T08:11:00.000-05:00

My boyfriend calls me by my first name.

Oddly, this bothers me.

I just got an email from him saying "See you tonight Lauren," and reading that made me sit back in my desk chair, frowning.

I can't think of a single person who calls me by my first name. My family call me a range of affectionate nicknames, as do my friends, generally some variation of "Laur." My students call me Madame. People I deal with professionally or administratively call my Mademoiselle. And I'm not even going to blame it on some lame Franco-American cultural gap-- because every single one of my ex-boyfriends, French and American alike, has called me things like kiddo, baby, chérie, ma puce.

So what's with the perverse insistance on calling me by my first name?? I rarely call him by his name-- it's "baby," "babe," or "chéri" all the way.

The impulse to nickname, it's true, is born of affection-- when the person's real name is too public for use between intimates. So I think I'm upset because I thought we were close enough to drop the formality. He'll occasionally use a term of endearment-- but when he's directly addressing me, never. Or at least, not yet.

In my opinion, it's basically the 21st century equivalent of calling me "vous" rather than "tu." And it's starting to bug me.

Total Eclipse of the Heart

2006-03-29T04:19:00.000-05:00

We interrupt this regularly scheduled and vaguely overbearing discussion of France, the French, and their curious habits to bring you a special Astrology report.

Hello, my name is Maîtresse, and I am a staunch believer in the effects the mysterious patterns of the stars can have on us here on Earth. There are numerous events which I could cite to prove the veracity and authenticity of astrology. For example: today, March 29th, a total eclipse of the sun will occur at 11h30 French time. That's in just ten minutes, folks [as of the time of this writing]. As if in response, it is getting progressively darker and darker in my apartment, and I predict that at the moment the sun is totally blocked by the moon, there will be very little light at all in my apartment.

Coincidence? I think not.

I am not alone, either, in my starry beliefs. My cousin Elissa is an ace chart reader and introduced me to Astrodienst, a service that in my opinion provides the best daily horoscopes, which if they do get repetitive, at least aim to explain how the star positions affect your mood and therefore your actions. Elissa loads up the Free chart selection, sets it to "natal, transits, and progressions combined," in the House of Koch (whatever that means) and when you're done inputting all the info, you end up with something that looks like an mathematically and artistically inclined kindergartener got hold of a pie chart. I have no idea what it means til Elissa explains it to me-- and then I smack my head and feel like a fool for not seeing it myself.

I've had her do readings of my chart combined with those of my boyfriends' for the last few years and she's always right: she knows exactly what the issues are in our relationships before I've even told her a thing about the guy other than his date, time, and place of birth. The last few guys she's peered at the chart, squinted a little bit, and murmured to herself, before concluding "This is not him. This is not the guy for you."

Fast forward to the present. I think I've met him. I think I've met my guy. My inner judge nods approvingly and raps his gavel to indicate the case is closed. But the stars, what do the stars say? I sent an emergency email off to Elissa in London, who has promised to get back to me soon.

Until then I've contented myself with MSN's Astrology site, which lacks the nuance of a personal reading but is pretty much on target...

Libra & Scorpio
This unusual combination of Water and Air may spawn either the best or the worst. The Libran's intellectual grace thrives on the Scorpio's emotional profundity, and vice-versa. Libran eloquence may also draw Scorpio out of his silence, and facilitate the Scorpio's efforts to make new contacts, although the latter will still need periods of solitude in which to resume his old patterns. The Libran preoccupation with commitment is compatible with the Scorpio's possessiveness. Their journey through life together may be long and passionate. This is a union of light and dark.

(which sign am I, do you think??)

Fighting French

2006-03-25T05:46:00.000-05:00

"The pugnacity of the French in a riot has to be seen to be recognized as a native strain in their character," Janet Flanner wrote in May 1968 in her "Letter from Paris" to the New Yorker. "Had the young French soldiers fought like rioters against the Germans in June, 1940, Paris might not have fallen," she added, sardonically.

They are very good at fighting, the French are. They have to be-- someone's always trying to screw them over, whether it's the bank or the butcher or the government. It's just that they're not so good at constructing viable systems after the fighting has calmed.

Looks like we're approaching a stalemate here, as the government refuses to withdraw the CPE and several student unions refuse to meet with the government to discuss other possibilites. The CPE is set to go into effect in April, which is rapidly approaching.

The university is going into its third week of closure. The two-week long Easter vacation begins April 8th, and it looks doubtful if it will reopen before then.

Flanner wrote that the students of '68 "have [...] stated that they do not believe in university examinations, since they are repressive."

The students are saying they'd rather have this semester invalidated than give in and go back to school.

Some professors are organizing online courses as ways of continuing this semesters' work. I've received several emails from study abroad programs looking for teachers to fill in part-time until the strikes are over, if ever.

But unlike in May 1968, there seems to be a destructive strain in these riots that the students insist has nothing to do with their cause, attributing the violence to anarchists and extremists of both the right and the left.

Research facilities have had ten years' worth of research destroyed. The military training grounds of les Invalides have been overcome by the casseurs [French for "people who break stuff"]. Numerous shops and cars have been trashed and burned.

The weird thing is: I haven't seen any of it firsthand, despite a fairly consistent pattern of movement between the 9th and the bottom of the 5th. I'm glad they've stayed away from my neighborhood(s), but I can't help noting how odd it is that all this can be going on in the center of my city, and if I didn't watch the news or read the papers and the blogs, I'd have no idea.

So I'm working from home, thinking about nineteenth century French social movements, 1830, 1848, 1871, debating with my boyfriend the extent to which the Communards were Communists, reading the emails I get from French graduate students who are attending the manifestations, and thinking how right Kristin Ross is in her book on the student uprisings of May 1968, where she argues (via Baudrillard, and excuse me for paraphrasing from memory) that an event is not an event until the media tell us it is. And until you tap into the media, you might not even know what's going on a hundred meters away from your apartment.

Channeling Stein, Redux

2006-03-22T11:38:00.000-05:00

My roommate and I finally had a chance to pendre la crémaillère on Saturday night, which is franglais for we had a housewarming party to celebrate her arrival on the scene this past January.

It was, by all accounts, a raging success. Her friends mixed and mingled with my friends, and several of my friends found they knew each other independently of any association with yours truly.

One of the joys of blending your friends with someone else's is that you get to see them all try to hook up with each other. More than one young man was smitten with Gill (who isn't??), and one French fellow, in desperate need of her approval, confided that he knew the English terminology for several sex acts which are too naughty for me to refer to explicitly.

This self-same fellow earned my personal ire when he eavesdropped on my conversation with a fellow Anglophone. I was explaining, in English, that two of my friends had so kindly brought me some strawberry-flavored vodka in a tube that they had procured at the Bon Marché. Apparently the way I pronounced the name of that hallowed hall of commerce was "just too cute" and said Frog went on to prance merrily about the room speaking French with a pronounced American accent. I gritted my teeth and tried not to tell him what I thought of his English skills.

Several bloggers were in attendance, some meeting each other for the first time, and some non-bloggers had to be informed gently that the girls referred to as “coquette” and “petite” in their midst were actually minor celebrities. The Brits banded together and hunkered down til four in the morning, the actors traded shop stories, and at some point in the night my friend Joel decreed me the Gertrude Stein of my generation, “only without the dykey stuff."

To that charming distinction I humbly qualify that I cannot hope to rival Stein in terms of her girth, her modernist art collection, and her healthy disdain for punctuation.

iPod arcana

2006-03-20T05:23:00.000-05:00

A White Bear piqued my interest recently with her digital scatomancy... inspiring me to add a bit of mysticism to my apparently smug and self-satisfied usual commentary. The way it works is, you use your iPod as a divination device in conjunction with the Celtic Cross tarot configuration. Instead of tarot cards, you shuffle to the next song that comes up on your iPod! Voila, a very expensive Magic Eight Ball.

Come to think of it, I've actually been playing iPod divination ever since-- well, since I got my iPod in early 2004; I'd be walking down the street and I'd ask the iPod what I should do about a particular (boy) problem, or ask for a sign which could help with a particularly difficult decision. And the game itself is a descendant of the radio divination game I used to play in high school with my friends Renee, Noelle, and Kate: we would tune the radio to 99.9, "Love Songs at Night" and say "Ok, does so-and-so like me" and then Billy Joel's "Goodnight My Angel" would come on and we'd all go "awwwwwwww he likes you!"

Here's an explanation of what the difference cards in the Celtic Cross mean (taken from Byzant Mystical by way of Preposterous universe)

1 This covers you (or me, him, her or them, depending on who the reading is for)
2 This crosses you
3 The crowns you
4 This is beneath you
5 This is behind you
6 This is before you
7 Yourself
8 Your house
9 Your hopes and fears
10 What will come

So without further ado, I turn to my iPod and ask: am I stuck in the land of grevists for good?

1 The Covering: The important events, issues, attitudes or influences around the question or current situation: “Les Cactus” Jacques Dutronc. "Le monde entier est un cactus!" it's true, I feel totally buried by the prickliness of the French and their weird interpretation of democractic process (the minority disrupting the everyday life of the majority! the extremists overshadowing the moderates!)...

2 The Crossing: Current obstacles, problems, conflicts and opposition that the questioner must deal with: “Departure,” REM ...which makes me unsure if I should stay here

3 The Crown: The best that can be achieved or attained from current circumstances: Love Theme from “Romeo and Juliet” ...but at least I have my Romeo

4 The Root: Past events or influences that have played an important part in bringing about the current situation: “L’Amour,” Carla Bruni ...and it was love of France that brought me here to begin with

5 The Past: Events or influences from the more recent past that have influenced the present but are now passing away: “Cha cha cha” Jimmy Luxury ...was going through a sort of second adolescence, partying and hooking up, but that's calmed down over the last two months

6 The Future: Future events and fresh influences about to come into play that will operate in the near future: “Keeper of the Flame,” Nina Simone ...uh-oh. here's hoping this refers to my current flame.

7 The Questioner: The questioner's attitude and how they relate to the current situation: “Perfect Day”, Lou Reed

8 The House: How other people around the questioner affect and view matters in hand: “Lucha de gigantes” Nacha Pop ... "En un mundo descomunal/ siento tu fragilidad."

9 The Inside: The questioner's hopes, fears and expectations with regard to the question or the current situation: “Gigantic”, the Pixies ..."it's a big, big love"

10 The Outcome: The eventual outcome of events shown by the other cards: “Dolly Dagger”, Jimi Hendrix..."Been riding broomsticks since she was fifteen/ Blow out all the other witches on the scene."

(I must say I'm often suspicious of the iPod shuffle function's claim to randomness; can sheer chance determine the repetition of the term"gigantic" in numbers 8 and 9?)

a funny thing happened on my way to my therapist

2006-03-17T13:35:00.000-05:00

So there I was, innocently taking the RER B to Port Royal from St Michel yesterday, when I found myself surrounded by screaming twentysomethings, all banging on whatever they could get their hands on-- the sides of the escalator, the metro turnstiles, each others' backs, their own heads, drums, and pots and pans clearly brought along for the express purpose of giving me a headache. Their voices resonated all around me, their shrill yelps bouncing off the tiled walls in the tight corridors. I gritted my teeth and turned up my iPod.

When I arrived at Port Royal I had to fight to get out of the station, and when I emerged into the daylight this is what I saw:

and this:

and this on the side of a bus stop:

(so scary!)

I also saw this:

and this

and I laughed at these people

and as I passed the police, who were standing around with nothing to do, one of them played with his shield and said to his partner gleefully "Je vais me déguiser!"

But my favorite was this:

round 'em up

2006-03-16T03:23:00.000-05:00

This was sent to me by my colleague Dan, who was apparently part of the crowd of protesters who got tear-gassed at the Sorbonne.

Makes me yearn for my tenure at that fine university, when tears ran down my face not from a chemical defense weapon but out of sheer and utter boredom in my cours de méthodologie...

And the counter-protestors are stepping up their actions as well. Apparently there's a big counter-protest scheduled for Sunday and we lecteurs are supposed to attend. According to their site:

"Pour le moment, nous organisons un sitting (sit-in) Dimanche 19 Mars à 13h et jusqu'à 15h sur le parvis de l'Hotel de Ville de Paris."

I love the way they use the English verb, to sit, but in a way that English speakers wouldn't use it in this context ("a sitting"). Then they give the correct English form so everyone's clear that the Franglais for "sit-in" is "un sitting."

Further down on the site they ask that anyone who attends on sunday come wearing a white t-shirt, to emphasize that they are not protesting in the name of any ideology or political (pseudo)philosophy.

Unfortunately, I may be on a plane for Seville that day to go cover this. Oh well. Protestors in Paris or Imams in Spain? I think my choice is clear.

University closed until further notice!

2006-03-14T13:59:00.000-05:00

I was jubilant to find upon arriving at Nanterre yesterday that classes were suspended all day. But I learned very quickly how serious things have turned... A referendum scheduled for today in order for the students to vote whether or not to continue the strike was abruptly cancelled by the president of the University, apparently out of fear that violence similar to what happened at the Sorbonne would occur at Nanterre. I'm off to catch up with some of the ATERS in the English dept to find out if anyone has heard anything about when this will blow over. Not that I mind a little time off from those 8 am classes I've been blessed with this semester.

According to the Nouvel Observateur, the president has closed the university until security can be assured. The president told the paper that there are a number of students who wish to take back the university, and for classes, disrupted for the past three weeks, to resume. these students, he said, "are sometimes more numerous than the protesters." Last Thursday, security forces were called in over fifty times to curb physical aggressions which had kindled up between students.

This whole debacle makes more sense if you recall that the riots in May 1968 actually started at Nanterre. For weeks I've been saying "But this is not 1968, this is not Vietnam!" but it's true that there has been something boiling in France over the past year and I would argue that this has more to do with an underlying sense that thigns need to be shaken up than it has to do with the actual CPE. It's been a fascinating time to be in France, and I'm doing my best to keep track of the major issues that keep polarizing the country and which get frenetic media coverage what with the rejection of the referendum last May 29th, the riots in the suburbs last fall, the controversy over the cartoons of Mohammed, the anti-Semitic murder of 23 year-old Parisian Jew Ilan Halimi, and now this... am I leaving anything out?

In the meantime, I've located a number of Internet resources for information direct from the strikers. To wit:

Stop CPE 92, a blog where Nanterrians argue about the strike and some students propose that Sarkozy is worse than Hitler (I know, I know, but it's worth reading just for the comments) FR

Another blog on the strikes at Nanterre, with some nice photos

More photos

Eureka!

2006-03-10T03:58:00.000-05:00

This morning as I got off the RER at Nanterre-Université, my heart was pounding. I had heard, via the Nouvel Obs and some of my colleagues and students, that there was a university-wide strike planned for today. In other words, there was a possibility that I might get to turn right back around and go home!

As I climbed the stairs, two students were posted at the exit, handing out flyers: "1500 pour la greve!" they announced. "Ce qui prouve une chose: la mobilisation est effective, elle continue et s'accroit au sein de l'Université Paris X Nanterre." I dared to hope. "Come on kids, make me proud," I muttered under my breath as I neared F building.

Then I saw a sight to see. My colleague Dan walking in the opposite direction, away from F building, with a smile on his face, making a little turnaround gesture with his pointer finger. "Turn yourself right back around, Miss!" he announced. "No classes for you today!"

I callooed and callayed and thrust a fist into the air. "en greve! en greve! americans for the greve!" I cried, feeling like mounting a barricade for the first time in weeks.

Let freedom ring!

On a side note, look how freaking cute my genius boyfriend is. But don't leave him any embarrassing comments.

Strikes again

2006-03-09T04:16:00.000-05:00

The universities continue to strike, at the Sorbonne , Nanterre (as I learned this morning by email from a fellow lecteur), Jussieu, and I'm told Tolbiac, Censier, and up to over thirty others around France.

The strikes are in response to the fact that the Assemblée Nationale voted in the loi sur l'égalité des chances yesterday, the law that (thanks, Amy) makes possible the CPE, but which also aims to "mettre le pied à l'étrier à des jeunes qui ne se voient rien offrir," according to the Prime Minister ["put the foot into the stirrup of young people (read: non-white people) who see no future for themselves"].

Yet again, the strikes at Nanterre occur on a day when I'm not teaching. Drat. I taught yesterday, however, and my students clamored to tell me about their experiences at the big manifestation on Tuesday. Apparently the protest took place calmly and peacefully, marching from Republique to Nation, with the only conflicts taking place between the police and the unions over how many people had been there (in Paris my students said the number was in the hundreds of thousands).

When I expressed my surprise that it went off so uneventfully, one student disagreed: "My friend had to go to the bathroom, and so she had to leave [the area cordoned off for] the protest, and before she could leave, the police made her take off all of her stickers," she reported with some annoyance.

"God forbid the protest should spread to the bathrooms of Paris," I replied, mock-seriously. "All hell would have broken loose."

Really, though, I wonder about all this protesting at the universities. It makes sense, because these are the kids the law will most directly affect, those who will graduate and seek their first jobs in the next few years. But we don't really hear so much about protests at the grands écoles, do we? Because those kids ostensibly will be on the job market around the same time as my students at the fac, so shouldn't they be equally worried about the threat of précarité, or precariousness, that comes with a contract that permits the employee in question to be--gasp--fired?

I tried to get some sense of the response to the CPE on the part of the elite French students by asking my boyfriend his opinion. N, a graduate of one of the grands écoles whose name I can never remember, as it's a melodious amalgam of French vowel sounds, hasn't articulated his opinion of the CPE; when I bring it up he just mocks the whole system. I get the feeling he's one of those Lawrentian revolutionaries who don't think it's any use modifies the system, better to blow it all up and start over-- or quit France and move to Denmark.

From what I can tell, the students at the grands écoles are reacting in the following way: at the Ecole Normale Supérieure they're striking because of inroads the government wants to make in allocations de recherche, at HEC they're making polls of the striking universities, at INSEE/ENSAE or whatever (I think that's where N went) they're studying the statistics of the strikes, at EHESS they're studying the sociology of the CPE. But none of these students is actually taking part: they're too busy studying.

It kind of reminds me of what my dad told me about his experience during May 1968. At a time when students at Berkeley and Columbia were chaining themselves to buildings, my father was studying architecture at Penn. Apparently some kids from Columbia went down to Philly to recruit their Ivy brethren to the cause. The architecture kids reportedly told the Columbia kids to hit the road: they were too busy working on their final projects to protest.

I always liked that story.

hackery

2006-03-08T12:20:00.000-05:00

I have to admit, in my opinion, and don't bother contradicting me to be nice, the posts I’ve written on my blog of late have had a rather sub-par quality to them. Dashed off in haste (in an attempt to score a daily slot on The Paris Blog?) to comment on something that’s going on in Paris, to account for my whereabouts, to put something out there, anything at all, just not to leave stale copy up for weeks on end.

I’m of two minds about this. I don’t have enough time to craft the time of posts I would like to, this is a simple fact. Since classes started up again at Nanterre, I have much less free time than I did before. So I can either write nothing because it won’t be up to my standards, or I can post slapdash stuff in the hope that in the dreck there will be a kernel of something interesting.

The fact is, I haven’t been writing very much lately at all. I’ve written a lot of journalism, especially in the wake of Ilan Halimi’s murder and the impact that’s had on the Jewish community here, although to tell the truth I don't think I've been writing anything so hot in that department. I’ve been reading up a storm—in the last few weeks, researching for a paper I have to give in June at the Virginia Woolf conference in the UK, I’ve read (or reread, as the case may be) DH Lawrence’s The Tresspasser and Women in Love and Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando, and The Voyage Out. I just started Sons and Lovers today (which I’ve never read and have been meaning to for ages). I’ve also been reading Hermione Lee’s and Julia Briggs’s biographies of Woolf, as well as Lawrence’s little [(misogynistic) incidentals that he published in newspapers to make a buck.

I spent all my free time with N, some of which he spends programming (yup, he’s a computer geek) and I spend reading, and we’ve been traveling every other weekend (this weekend we’re off to Dijon). I’ve been cooking like it’s my job (just made those banana empanadas, which came out ok, if I may say so!).

But writing? Not so much. I have to fit it in somehow. But in order to do that, something else has to get shuffled around. Ah well. Five weeks to April vacation.

I am stupefied

2006-03-07T10:16:00.000-05:00

I am absolutely stupefied and deeply saddened to learn that Dana Reeve has died.

I spent a summer in the apprentice program at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in 1998, the very program where, once upon a time, Christopher Reeve himself began his acting career. I read his autobiography that summer and was thrilled to learn that it was through doing theatre there that he met his wife, the lovely Dana (then) Morosini. The way he wrote about her was so romantic, and the couple continued to have a strong association with the WTF. That summer I remember seeing Christopher wheeling around and watching Dana perform on the Main Stage.

What is it about him that was so universally adorable? I don't think it was just "Superman." When he died in 2004 I cried-- I loved him more for "Somewhere in Time" than for "Superman," but either way he was the epitome of masculine beauty for me, growing up in the 1980s, and I fancied Reeve as Clark Kent even looked a bit like my dad. I felt terrible for his wife, for his children, for his accident.

When I heard last year that Dana Reeve had lung cancer, despite never smoking, I was shocked, but assumed that, at 44, with today's medical miracles, she would be fine.

I can't believe I was wrong. I barely knew this woman and I'm shocked to my core.

I once heard her sing "Meadowlark," from The Baker's Wife at the WTF Cabaret. It's one of the most beautiful songs in musical theatre, and she was captivating.

My heartfelt condolences go out to her family.

En grève!

2006-03-07T09:02:00.000-05:00

Strikes at Jussieu. Photo (c) AFP 2006, Pierre Andrieu

Well, my pesky Nanterre students are at it again today in full force, and they've managed to convince half the universities in France to join in, as well as airline workers, the post office, Radio France antenna workers, the unions FO, FSU, and Sud. Even the Sorbonne, bastion of conservative politics and research, was closed today [I say that with all possible affection as I do hold a degree from this fine institution].

They're protesting the CPE, which I wrote about a couple of weeks ago, but they're also protesting something called the law pour l'égalité des chances, which sounds maybe like a French form of affirmative action. I'm totally lost in the maze of French politics now, because I thought the left was in favor of affirmative action, and these are the same students who are always manifesting for the sans-papiers and discrimination against étudiants étrangers (and I can tell you, it isn't American students they're standing up for).

Luckily, the strikes do not appear to have caused any more chaos than is normal, and haven't particularly disrupted my life, which I appreciate. Actually, I wouldn't have minded a little disruption: couldn't they pick a day when I'm supposed to teach to have their massive strikes and demos? That way I'd get a definite day off, instead of unsure days where I have to go in early in the morning only to find buildings barricaded and have to teach anyway.

AFP said there's nothing to worry about, Le Figaro said they strikes were having "a serious effect on education and weak on transport."

I received an email from Paris VII, where I occasionally attend courses, advising me I would need to be equipped with student ID to get into the building and that most students were on strike except the agrégatifs.

This morning I took the number 7 subway home from Censier-Daubenton, and we crawled along under Jussieu, Sully-Morland, and Chatelet. Once we got out from under ground zero, we sped off at normal speed. Good thing I was listening to 1776 on my iPod; it got me into a little more revolutionary of a mood.

counting

2006-03-05T14:51:00.000-05:00

This was one of those weekends where things shift around almost imperceptibly under the surface of an otherwise ordinary couple of days.

What's shifted around is my ability to get outside of myself a bit more, stop being so sensitive and analytical, so in it, in order to be at peace with what's going on.

I have wonderful friends, a combination of new, less new, old, older, and oldest, a beautiful boy whose side I think I'll never leave, a loving family who I miss so much it hurts, who are all working on their French, especially my mom, gearing up for their trip here in mid-April, and people all around me who inspire me to work harder. I have a sound educational foundation on which to build my projects, a discerning mind. And I finally have my titre de sejour, at least until August, when I need to renew it again (because it took 6 months to get this one!).

So all the interference-- the insecurities, the doubts, the anxiety, the too-early classes, the haters, the ignorance-- somehow I managed to put a lid on it all, just by taking a couple of steps back. I feel better than I have in weeks.

"back in business and ain't it grand/

2006-03-02T05:48:00.000-05:00

let the good times roll." [daily défi: name the composer/lyricist!]

So, back in Paris after a weekend in Marseille. Pix are up on Flickr. Nanterre is still barricaded, and most classes are cancelled, except for mine, because they take place in the only building NOT barricaded, the Law/Economics/Applied Languages building (batiment F). At least they're letting teachers into the building where my office is (batiment E). My patience is wearing thin and I'm convinced I have the shit end of the stick on this greve-- my colleagues in the English dept have been getting a paid vacation because they don't teach in F building like I do. Plus the Applied Languages department is so incompetant that yesterday two of my classes didn't have classrooms and I had to lead my students around like Moses through the desert looking for an open room. I mean really, I feel like a room for every class is the least Nanterre can offer its students. I'm not asking for widespread Internet access or American-style student activities and clubs. Just classrooms. And maybe soap in the bathrooms. I'm thinking of starting my own personal strike in response.

Last night my hep cat boyfriend took me on a St Germain dream date... we met at La Hune, an excellent art bookstore at 170, Blvd St Germain, where I browed through Meyer Schapiro and bought the latest issue of Les Temps Modernes, the revue started by Simone De Beauvoir and her ugly boyfriend and N bought a book called La guerre sexuelle, about a man who finds his life so mediocre that he decides to kill his wife. (After reading the back of the book, I eyed him warily, and he laughed deviously.)

Then we headed next door to the Flore, Cafe de Flore, that is, where he had a 16 euro coupe de champagne, a Moet rose, and I had a Martini rouge and a whole dish of peanuts. The Flore is part of the triumvirate of storied cafes on the boulevard, including the Deux Magots and Brasserie Lipp, but no one except tourists goes to the Deux Magots and only politicians go to Lipp's. However, cool people who think it's cool to overpay for drinks go to the Flore-- it's apparently still a place to "see and be seen." So my boyfriend and I sat on the terrasse and let ourselves be "seen" making out like teenagers.

After N got drunk on his champagne (the boy has the lowest tolerance in the world, rivaling that of my father's), we went up the block to Le Bilboquet, a vaguely overpriced but very swishy jazz club in the Rue St-Benoit. Apparently the film "Paris Blues" was made there. I haven't seen "Paris Blues," but it definitely seemed like a good place to film a movie about blues. We had dinner on the very dim and very plush mezzanine, and at ten the performance started: the Monica Passos Trio, playing really cool Brazilian music that I don't totally remember because I had a bit too much wine. I remember thinking at the time that it was really groovy. So that's endorsement enough. (Monica et al will be there through the 5th of March.) N asked me if I knew of any places like that in New York. I couldn't think of any-- the only jazz clubs I've been to in NYC were tiny and smoky, but this place felt more of a combination of a gentleman's club and a cabaret... very fin de siecle, very Parisian, very... red.

We left just before eleven, cabbed it down to his apartment in the bottom of the 5th, and, well, that's the end of the St Germain date so that's as far as my narrative goes...

guest starring...

2006-02-27T13:01:00.000-05:00

I'm very pleased to announce the first ever guest blogger on today's show. As I spent the weekend in Marseille(s) attending my boyfriend's cousin's baby's bris, I've been a bit busy to blog. And I didn't think anyone would notice.

I was wrong.

If ever I wondered who my audience was, now I know.

I now turn the podium over to my baby sister, writing from her desk in a boutique consulting firm in Manhattan.

lauren. we have a major problem. you are being very very selfish.

you must grasp that while you might have started writing your blog for yourself, its become much bigger than that now. you now have a responsibility to your fans to post on your blog in a timely manner. its been 5 days. i check your blog several times a day every single day waiting for a little love on the metro to come my way, waiting for some silly french bureaucratic nonsense to be relayed my way, and have been left wanting. [...]. 5 days is just too much. i know youre in marseilles, but honestly, im sitting behind a desk and i dont think asking for 10 minutes of your time is too much to ask to liven up my day. think about the kid in kansas reading your blog b/c he's always dreamed about getting out of kansas and going to france. if you dont post regularly and shape his impressionable mind, he's going to grow up and vote for more bush progeny to lead this country. and that, my dear, is the greatest evil. fight evil. fight against the dark side. post on your blog. why do you hate freedom?

Aux armes, citoyens!

2006-02-22T16:45:00.000-05:00

Today was not a day I wanted particularly to go to work.

The combined means of public transportation needed to travel to Nanterre from my boyfriend's apartment in the 5th (bus + 2 RERs) combined with the early hour (we left the apt at 8:15) and the book-and-paper teacher-crap I have to lug around with me (of which, to be fair, N carried half) wreacked havoc on my already sensitive stomach; I staggered off the train at Nanterre-Université feeling a bit green and shaky. I was late for my 9 am class and still needed to run up to my office in the E building to get my teaching materials for the day: photocopies, a cassette tape, and a cassette player.

I did not realize anything was up when I descended from the platform and had to push through crowds of loitering students to get to the main campus walkway. There are always loitering undergrads; no one here seems to be in a hurry to get anywhere except us graduate students.

I did not realize anything was up when I reached the walkway to E building and they had barricaded the path much as they had on Monday when I took these pictures:

See, the students at Nanterre, who have a fine upstanding tradition of rebellion and work-shirking to live up to dating from 1968, are up in arms over the recently proposed Contrat premiere embauche, or CPE [say-pay-euh], a contract for employees who are under 26 years old and working in their first job. The students hate the CPE because they say it allows employers to fire employees anytime they want, for any reason they want, which leads to a much-feared précarité du travail, or lack of job security. Dominique de Villepin, who is championing the new contract, swears this is not the case.

I'm not totally clear on why this bill is a bad idea, and why the students are so mad about it; when I got into the E building on Monday I saw an information booth, and I wanted to ask someone to explain it to me, but since this is France, there was no one in it to ask:

So as best I can make out, here's how the situation stands. Under the current system, when you are employed for a company it is with one of several types of contracts, the most common being either the Contract à durée déterminée, or CDD [say-day-day], and the more sought-after Contrat à durée indéterminée, or CDI [say-day-eee]. Basically it's a question of job security: do you know from the getgo this is a limited committment or somewhere you could conceivably stay for the rest of your life.

I'm making this brief because I don't really have the time to research the good and bad points of the system, and after my experiences today, I don't give two figs.

As I was saying, I thought nothing amiss until I was physically prevented from entering the E building to go to my office by two scruffy looking twenty year-olds.

"C'est bloqué, Madame, personne ne peut entrer!" they cried with revolutionary glee. I looked beyond them. Instead of the somewhat organized labyrinth of desks you see in the picture above, the desks were now piled in ramshackle fashion to create a massive barricade that would have inspired the cast of Les Mis to jump up and drape themselves on it. It was a sight to behold.

The students told me all the classes were cancelled and all the professors were on the march to the Assemblée Nationale. I looked at them, half full of hope, half skeptical, and fully pissed off at having come to Nanterre for nothing. I raised a fist in the air, comrade-style, and wished them bon courage, then set off for the F building, where my classes are held, to see if the building was open and if I had any students.

To my dismay, the F building was open for business and contrary to what I had been told, the salle des professors was full of my colleagues making photocopies, drinking coffee, and kibbitzing as if nothing were going on outside.

My whole day was completely out-of-whack, as I by chance had only a few photocopies with me of an article, along with some grammar exercises. The lessons I tried to cobble together and my students' softspoken English were almost completely drowned out by the bullhorns and the crowds gathering outside chanting, shouting, and blowing whistles.

Finally, during my last class, I lost it, and spewed something resembling the following diatribe at my unsuspecting students:

"I'm sorry, maybe this is a massive cultural gap, but why the f*** don' t they shut the f*** up and get to work??? don't they have sh*t they need to do, these people?"

They laughed at me, and groused with me. Last week, one girl told me, the protestors blocked off the RER tracks so the trains to Paris couldn't run, and it took her two hours to get home on the bus.

It's a good thing that didn't happen while I was there, because I probably would have started a counterrevolution.

Love on the Metro

2006-02-21T08:32:00.000-05:00

I got hit on just now on the metro.
he started out by tapping me on the leg while I was listening to my ipod.
I turned off the music to look at him.
he smiled, and waved at me.
I smiled and waved back.
he said "hiiiiiii"--
I said "hiiiiii"--
we sat silently for a few minutes, smiling at each other.
then his mother wheeled his stroller off at pigalle.

"sous ce masque, un autre masque.

2006-02-18T12:31:00.000-05:00

...je n'en finirai pas de soulever tous ces visages."**

That's Claude Cahun for you, in Aveux non avenus (1930). Cahun was the subject of my mémoire de DEA at Paris IV, in which I examined her relationship to the avant-garde, the surrealist movement, her decadent influences, her politics, and her conception of the fluidity and mobility of identity.

I'm thinking a lot of Cahun lately, as I try to devise a dissertation proposal, but even more so this week, as I spent the last two days attending a conference held at my Parisian alma mater, Reid Hall, sponsored by the University of Florida, entitled "Women and the Avant-gardes". The papers were very interesting, and the crowd was nothing if not illustrious, containing at least five of the theorists whose work I drew from extensively for my mémoire-- in particular, Rosalind Krauss, Shelley Rice, Laura Mulvey, and the head of the U of F Paris Research Center, Gayle Zachmann. Gayle gave a fascinating paper on the intertextual relationship between Cahun and Mallarmé and I could have picked her brain for hours on the various aspects of Cahun's work that she touched on, particularly Cahun deals with her (problematic) Jewish identity in her work.

But I love this quote of Cahun's, because it's particularly pertinent for artists, writers, scholars, and even bloggers. We lead similar quests-- trying to say something, express something, represent something, or just get to the bottom of things-- but ultimately we can't get beyond ourselves, we will be forever limited by the scope of our minds. And for those of us engaged in life-writing (bloggers included), it's impossible to get at our "real selves," because they change from moment to moment, as we accrue experiences, with every new thought, with every new person that comes into our lives. I'm constantly aware, in my scholarship, my blogging, and my fiction-writing, that everything I write is just a reflection of my brain, and to a certain extent is a representation of myself as I would like to be perceived. There's no way around that.

Fittingly, tonight we're going to a party for "Karneval," thrown by a friend of mine from Cologne, Germany, and we've been warned that we won't be allowed in the door unless we come disguised-- i.e., wearing masks. In my experience, the French are very big on costume parites; in the past few months I've been invited to a party where everyone had to wear flipflops, a fruit party where everyone had to come dressed as a piece of fruit, and another one with a Hawaiian theme. Where I come from, it's only permissable to dress up for a costume party if it's Halloween or you're in a sorority, and in both scenarios it is understood that you must dress as slutty as possible (cf. La Coquette's recent trip back to college). Americans, at least those of my generation it seems, don't like to look foolish, but are alright looking like "pimps and ho's," to cite at least one party from my college years.

Out of sheer embarrassment, I've refrained from attending any of these costume parties here in Paris, but I'm told most everyone who attended complied with the dress requirements... So for tonight, to get my feet wet, I'll be wearing a blue and gold Hermes scarf as a top, with a gold mask in the shape of a rising sun...

** "Under this mask another mask. I will never finish removing all of these faces."

til [fill in the blank] do us part?

2006-02-09T04:27:00.000-05:00

I haven't posted, really posted, in awhile. This is because I was busy doing random stuff like reporting on the cartoon crisis for JTA, rereading Mrs Dalloway for the 6th time, having health problems, and buying new Annick Goutal perfume at Galeries Lafayette to make myself feel better.

But mainly it's because there's something going on which I haven't had the courage to post about. I learned something about my new boyfriend that is vaguely upsetting, and I've had a little time to process it, and I think I know how I feel about it, and so I was hoping it would go away and I wouldn't have to put it up on my blog.

But it isn't going away, I'm very perturbed, and I'm going to Amsterdam with him tomorrow, and I don't feel alright with this.

Here's the thing: he is still PACSed to his ex-girlfriend.

PACS? ask the Americans. What's PACS?

PACS, or Pacte civile de solidarité, is a civil union put into place in France in 1999 to allow non-married couples to enjoy some of the legal benefits of marriage. For homosexual couples, this meant having their unions legally recognized. For French couples, this means tax breaks all around. For American girls, this means a way to get your working papers. (I'm probably butchering the proper explanation; read more about PACS here)

And, for the French boys dating those American girls, it apparently means saving up to 20,000 Euros in taxes. Which, my man swears, is why he did not break the PACS when they broke up in mid-2004.

My mind is absolutely spinning with reasons why this bothers me. For one thing, I would loooooove to get PACSed to someone. But in order for non-EU citizens to get working papers this way, I believe you have to live together for a year. Since I am dead-set against living with a boyfriend again, at least not for a very long time, that's totally out. So it's not like I want to PACS myself to this guy-- it would do me no good. And I have no idea where this is going and I don't want to rush into anything.

But, that said, I also have strong reservations about marriage in general; I'm not exactly sure how it works and it frankly seems a little unnatural. I don't know that I would be able to spend the rest of my life with one person, and I'm certainly not ready, at 27, with (knock wood) many years ahead of me, to say that I'm ready to stop looking around. However, I'm not totally opposed to the idea of PACS. I feel like it's a semi-commitment that I could probably make. And so, because for me PACS could possibly replace the ultimate commitment of marriage, it somehow gets imbued in my head with all the importance of marriage.

So learning that my boyfriend is PACSed to someone else has all the significance of him actually being married to someone else.

His ex is back where she belongs, on the West Coast of the States, and she has a boyfriend and everything, and if I'm not mistaken I believe he said that she was engaged. They broke up a long time ago and I don't feel threatened in that respect. But the girl has to come back to France from California to get unPACSed. Is it irrational of me a) to think that's an awful lot of hoop-jumping that she might not be in any hurry to do, and b) to not particularly want this girl to come back anytime soon because I'll probably have to meet her and from what he's told me she sounds likea piece of work, and blah blah blah?

Finally, the French people I've consulted about this promise me that PACS is not serious for heterosexual couples, that they know people who are just friends who've PACSed themselves for the tax breaks, that for straight people it's not marriage at all. They told me not to worry about it. I'm telling myself not to worry about it.

So why is this bothering me?

how to sleep with a movie star

2006-02-07T10:19:00.000-05:00

It's out, it's out!
My best friend Kristin's book is out, you can go buy it in Barnes and Nobles now!
Or on Amazon!
Either way it's a hilarious read!
Besides, what will you do when everyone else is reading it on the subway and talking about it at the water cooler and you're totally out of the loop?

More of L'Affaire Frey

2006-02-03T09:32:00.000-05:00

"'The biggest terror everyone has right now is that Oprah will suddenly say "Oh, to hell with it" and stop doing her book club.'" This from an editor quoted on condition of anonymity to the New York Observer.

The fate of the publishing industry is in the manicured claws of a dilletante who just happens to have a massively successful and powerful talk show.

And now the publishers are spending time and money checking to make sure the memoirs in their catalogues are "truthful."

Oy. Like they have the means for that. What a little casse-couilles that Oprah is.

Mostly Mozart

2006-02-02T03:43:00.000-05:00

I am listening to the Paris Symphony this morning in preparation for tonight's sortie: this evening my gallant is escorting me to a Mozart concert transpiring somewhere near the Pantheon and sponsored by Jean Tiberi and the Mairie du 5e Arrondissement. (This comes two days after we attended an organ recital at Notre Dame. Am I being wooed or what?)

The concert is part of the celebrations of the 250th anniversary of said composer's birth taking place around the world; in Paris, for example, we'll be treated to a new adaptation of Don Giovanni at the Opera Bastille as well as a panoply of concerts and conferences. The New York Times has a largely bland article on the celebrations in Salzburg and Vienna (where Mozart was born and lived most of his life, respectively) save for a fantastic last graph:

"In the first major musical event of Mozart Year, the Vienna State Opera staged the composer's "Idomeneo" at the Theater an der Wien last Friday, with the Brookyn-born tenor Neil Shicoff in the lead. After struggling with one of the composer's more difficult arias, Mr. Shicoff was booed by purists in the second balcony. He nonetheless received respectable applause at the end of the opera, and then — unexpectedly — blew kisses in the direction of his detractors. Charmed by a gesture of such Mozartian effrontery, they cheered wildly."

Can you imagine being booed by Viennese purists?[ Can you imagine a Jew being booed by Viennese purists?] I want to curl into a ball and disappear at the least criticism from my editor! Those opera singers have to have cojones, man.

But back to Paris; when he came to stay here for a few months in 1778, Mozart was allegedly told by his father that in order to be financially successful during his stay in Paris, he should let himself "be guided by French taste" and not write anything too difficult for the French amateurs to appreciate.

Judging from the hoopla around his birthday here in Paris, Mozart had no problem when it came to French taste.