Confessions of a Heathen

Beyond the stars, under the microscope, and down the rabbit hole

Overload!!

March 9th, 2010

OK, this has to be quick as I really need to get some sleep, but in case you’re wondering why you probably won’t see me out doing anything fun between now and, oh let’s say spring break, here’s my to-do list for the next 4.5 weeks:

    Books to Read

  1. Nana by Zola (in progress and probably will be finished tomorrow or Thursday
  2. L’Éducation sentimentale by Flaubert (hoping to start and finish by this weekend
  3. La Fille Elisa by Edmond de Goncourt (I need to actually FIND this book that Amazon doesn’t even have in order to finish it, preferably this weekend)
  4. L’Exil selon Julia by Gisèle Pineau
  5. Traversée de la Mangrove by Maryse Condé
  6. Le Cœur découvert by Michel Tremblay (in progress and hopefully will be done by Sunday night)
  7. La Duchesse et le roturier by Michel Tremblay
  8. Les Cahiers rouges by Michel Tremblay (one or two chapters read, but a lot to go)
  9. Les Belles Sœurs by Michel Tremblay (a play I’ve already read, but need to re-read and analyze
  10. La Nuit des princes charmants by Michel Tremblay (again, I’ve read it, but I need to go through and actually analyze it
  11. Éloge de la créoleté by Jean Barnabe (needs to be read and analyzed for a presentation next week)
  12. Le ravissement de Lol V. Stein by Marguerite Duras (for another exposé)

All of the Tremblay stuff my thesis director wants me to have read for our next meeting. That’s either SOOOOOO not happening or we’re meeting in June. Whichever.

    Papers to write:

  1. 7-8 pages of my thesis by FRIDAY?! SAY WHAT?! (5 or so done)
  2. 3-5 pages on whatever crap topic we have for Antilles for March 24th
  3. 10-12 page research paper May 6th for Représentations du féminin
    Oral Presentations to write and give:

  1. 20 minutes on Éloge de la créolté March 17th
  2. 20 minutes on vies de prostituées, les compagnes de Nana et “Nana, est-elle crédible?” (the life of prostitues, Nana’s female companions, and “Is Nana believable/reliable?” for April 1st
  3. 25-30 minutes on some aspect of Le ravissement de Lol V. Stein for just before vacation

Is this a manageable amount of work? No, not for the faint of heart. Will I get it done? Hell, why not give it my all? I mean, if I have all this shit done by vacation, I’m REALLY going to enjoy the time off, assuming I’m not in ICU recovering from exhaustion. Would it be so wrong to just buy a ticket back to the US and find a job instead of facing this Herculean task? Le ugh.

Add to this teaching and the fact that I also have translation homework to do and classes to actually attend, and you can see why I’ve locked myself in cafés or in my apartment until further notice. Three French lit classes and a thesis at the same time? Not my brightest move. FML.

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Slow Down, You Move Too Fast

March 8th, 2010

After watching Le Chef: contre-attaque with Cyrille Lignac on M6 tonight, a show which is all about slowing down and reclaiming France’s gastronomic heritage in a world of plats tout-faits (pre-made meals) and microwavable everything, I realized that some of the advances in the last century that have allowed us to accelerate life to its dizzying modern pace haven’t all been the Heaven-sent blessings they were cracked up to be. Well, that and the fact that the quick dinner I grabbed was served to me by a conveyor belt in meticulous and efficient Japanese style. We do eat too quickly and we don’t really take any joy in preparing our food these days, it’s true, and I’d love to get back to the days when that was possible. Hell, when it comes to food preparation here in France, I’d settle for an oven!

On a similar but non-food-related note, I think I’ve also been settling for the insipid, rapidly digestable, refined carbohydrates of literature lately which is nothing like the slow readings I enjoy putting on my mental back burners to stew and simmer for hours, adding the spices I find during my daily routine for flavor. Cramming all these books down my gullet at such breakneck speed just to get through them only ensures I end up with the flimsiest understanding of the basic plot. The idea of broadening my horizons through slowly peeling back the many layers of meaning just brings tears to my eyes and is fairly laughable given my impending deadlines.

Why did I opt for an accelerated master’s again? Why did I opt for an accelerated life in general? Is there something so wrong with doing things slowly and well? Blergh, I don’t have time to think about it. I need to take a power nap, get up early, drink some instant coffee, sprint to class, and speed-read all day tomorrow. At least darting around from one task to the next like a hummingbird has to burn lots of calories, right?

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“I’m Over It”

March 7th, 2010

Now that you’ve picked yourself up off the floor from reeling from the shock of seeing a new blog post, let me apologize for the extended absence. Sure, a week or even two might be tolerable, but months?! That’s sort of pushing it, even for we busy professional types. I’d like to say that I’d been kidnapped by angry Argentinian activists, held in a cave where I was tortured for information, only to have clawed my way out, and through some novel worthy death defying adventure (I know that should be hyphenated, but I’ll explain why you won’t be seeing hyphens in a few paragraphs) to have made my way back to Paris, exhausted but posting to my blog. Hell, I’d even take a story about being hit by a car in the dangerous Parisian crosswalks, only to wake up thinking I was Queen Victoria and teaching all the Frenchies proper English etiquette until my memory came back, but that’s not what happened either. No, the truth is, I’ve just been busy. Outrageously so. Maybe I should see if I can contact those angry Argentinians because, if they’d let me bring my laptop and my reading, that quiet cave in the mountains might be ideal for getting through this mountain of academic drudgery. Between the roughly ten (yes, ten, like 1, 0) novels I need to read (not thin ones, mind you) and analyze, the three exposés I need to prepare (those are French oral presentations with very specific and somewhat ridid structures), the papers, and the thesis project all of which need to be done by mid May (damn this lack of hypen!!), I can basically count on locking myself in my apartment and spending so much time hunched over books in the dark, that I’ll return to the US some sort of photophobic mole person. Fantastic.

Anyway, you’re probably not here to listen to me (or read me) moaning (although, if you’re not, you’d think you would have learned by now…), and if you’re like Allie and “over” my blog, I’m probably not going to get you interested again talking about the two main ingredients of any master’s in literature (reading and writing). Instead, let’s take a whirlwind tour of my life since the end of January, shall we?

One of the main social events that dragged me out of my academic isolation last month was Whitney’s “Sabor Latino” party; a shindig of about twenty or so people that included copious amounts of sangria and a smorgasbord of tapas (little latin finger foods if you’re not familiar) which took place at her place in Malakoff. Can we talk about the kind of party you have to promise to get people to take the train all the way out there? I’m not sure exactly what she told everyone but I think I heard rumors of topless belly dancers riding Indian elephants.

It was a tricky night for her as she had to babysit until an hour and a half before her party, which anyone who has ever hosted a party knows leaves no where near enough prep time beforehand. Being my mother’s son and having helped through more than a few parties of this sort, I thought I’d offer to help out. As luck would have it, Whitney and I ended up on the same train to Malakoff and therefore ended up getting to her place at the same time. Both all too aware of the gravity of the situation, we sprung into action. Knives clacking frantically as garlic met its untimely end, tears streaming as onions were quickly reduced to a pile of translucent caustic bits, we were T minus one hour to the party and we needed patatas bravas made, baguettes sliced, and every other type of hors d’œuvre heated, unplastic wrapped (hopefully not in that order), and placed on a serving platter in less time than some of these things were supposed to take to cook. Clayton and Mario came and the unsuspecting duo was immediately put to work. Basically, after using pretty much every dish in the apartment, fighting Whitney for her iPhone which had suddenly taken on near holy importance as it had become both a recipe book and and a doorbell for her guests, and after stirring with one hand, peeling with another, and asking the microwave for all it could give, we all managed to make the food at the party happen. Kat and others were a big help in the whole endeavor too, but there was such a blur of hands and faces in the kitchen, I can’t remember who did what. It was a good time had by all (at least I hope it was), and I think people will definitely be going to Whitney’s next party, should she decide to have one.

Shortly after Whitney’s party, the 14th of February, the day all single women seem to dread, rolled around. Kate, Donna, and I all got together for a little Valentine’s dinner which included champagne rosé which I found at this neat little place down the street from Jess and Nick’s, a fantastic heart shaped cake filled with chestnut confit (which I assure you is amazing), a side of Terre à Delice salted caramel ice cream (which made me sick, but hurt so good), a nice red wine from Spain, an overflowing plate of fresh strawberries, and a case of these delicious little confections called “Millionaire’s Flapjacks” by Gü (thing “ooey gooey”) which were amazing if not assured to give you Type 2 Diabetes overnight. Anthony ended up stopping by later on, which was nice, and all in all, I think we all had an enjoyable holiday. As a side note, I might be the only one and maybe I’m broken or have a heart of stone, but being single on Valentine’s has never bothered me. I’ll have to explore that more later.

What fantastic day comes just a week after Valentine’s Day? Which day am I petitioning the French and American governments to recognize as the special, day off worthy occassion that it is? Why, it’s Lise’s and my birthday, of course! She and I had planned to do some big combined extravaganza but as we both took so long to plan the thing and it fell on a Tuesday night just before a week of vacation, we ended up having a thoroughly enjoyable smaller group out for dinner and dessert in the 13th. I have to admit, I was a little skeptical about the choice of venue when I first showed up, bedraggled after teaching on my feet for 5 hours straight and seeing this little empty restaurant named “Gladine’s” on the corner. It looked pretty, well, délabré (run down) and there was no one inside. Still, I trusted Lise, and hoped for the best. Yahaira showed up shortly after I did and we had a nice chat until Lise, Eric, and Whitney joined us, we did the Paris shuffle to get a table, moved to a bigger table so Kat could join us, and added an oddly folding chair when Jess arrived a bit later. Despite the exterior, it was an excellent choice for a restaurant with extremely generous helpings of Basque cuisine which, after it opened, had lines out the front door and around the corner waiting to be seated. Dinner was nice, and though I wasn’t as adventurous as Eric was ordering tripe, I had a good time.

As the restaurant was pressed for space, we decided to have dessert up the street at Place d’Italie at a small place called O’Jules (presumably named after the French bastard son of an Irishman). We all had ice cream, or in my case, vodka soaked lemon sorbet, coffee, and enjoyed ourselves despite the irritating know it all (really missing those hyphens) waiter that informed Eric that people don’t say “en fait” (actually/in fact) unless they have a speech impediment (totally untrue, EN FAIT) and who was generally rude. It’s amazing how many French servers become assholes when you have the audacity to openly speak English around them.

I also had my first visitors since I got here! My friends Hayden and her boyfriend Nick who I know from my Burlington and UVM days came to visit in February after a month working for an agricultural exchange program in southern France and eating altogether too much poireaux soup and crappy bread, butter, and cheese sandwiches. Nick had never been to Paris before and Hayden had only been long enough to do the touristy whirlwind sightseeing tour. I did my best to show them around while managing to get my work done and allowing them a little time to themselves (it is the city for lovers, after all). I really enjoyed having them here, and not only because they brought me fantastic mint tea from their recent trip to Morocco, but as I saw them getting on the train to Charles de Gaulle (the big Parisian airport) on their way back to Vermont, I was hit by my first major twinge of homesickness. There’s nothing like friends from home that are part of an existence totally seperate from Middlebury to provoke “le mal de pays”. Ah well, such is life.

That pretty much wraps up the exciting goings on in my life. Aside from that and shortcircuiting my keyboard during a rather unfortunate cleaning accident (thus the lack of hyphens and my ‘p’ key also acting as mute) which brings my tally of laptops killed or severely maimed since I started college up to five or six, it’s all reading. Not that I can complain too much; most of my reading is fairly interesting as it’s about prostitutes or other equally exciting populations of the francophone world. Still, this lack of posting is inexcusable, and so I’m going to try to resolve to write at least a paragraph a day. Well, as soon as I replace this damned keyboard because this muting my music every time I type a word with ‘p’ in it is getting all kinds of old. If you don’t hear from me, don’t worry too much; my brain probably just exploded all over the walls of my apartment after it exceeded it’s maximum capacity.

Joy El, can you please work on either a) extending the day to 36 hours so I can get everything done or b) creating a few adult clones of me that have a copy of my brain (I don’t have time to raise and teach them)? I could really use the help and I’m not really sure why you’re dragging your feet. We paid off those ethics people, right?

PS, if you need to send a greeting card, check out Hallmark’s new SmileBox service. It’s kind of cool and (mostly) free!). Take a look below at the card I sent my sister to see what I mean.

Click to play this Smilebox greeting: You You You
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It All Begins Again

January 24th, 2010

So this is it: the end of winter vacation. Tomorrow begins the spring (and final) semester of my master’s degree with a bucket of ice cold reality being poured over us in the form of last semester’s grades in the morning. I should have been more academically productive with my time over break, but life got in the way. I’m not sorry, it just means I’ve got more reading to do this semester; c’est la vie. It might have been unproductive, but it certainly was fun! I got to see most of my friends back in the States, visit with my family, spend loads of time with Donna (and her cute friend with the curly hair), finally really talk to and befriend krazy Kate Billingsley, and to actually enjoy Paris for a week without the same feeling of the Sword of Damacles (or Paoli as the case may be) hanging over my head.

I don’t have anything particularly deep to say tonight, so I’ll keep this brief, but I’ve been thinking a lot about what I’m going to do when June rolls around, and I’m sort of at a loss. Do I move to Boston to be near my family and friends on the East Coast? Do I move to NYC and try my hand in the Paris of the West now that I’ve become accustomed to life in the big city and want to keep it going? Do I move to California in preparation for a Ph.D. program at Berkeley? Maybe I just move back to Burlington where you can rent a fantastic apartment at unreasonably low prices. Or should I go really crazy and move to Puerto Rico so I can work on my Spanish in an organic way?

More importantly than where I move, what will I do when I get there? With the economy on shaky foundations that have been ravaged by financial earthquakes and which could be toppled by future aftershocks, what will I do with my M.A. French? Naturally I could teach at a private school or perhaps as an assistant or adjunct professor, but will that provide sufficient remuneration? No, probably not, but it’s still an option. Does anybody have any suggestions as to go about finding a good school to teach at? If I skip the teaching, do I go back to hospital administration which pays well and which I know fairly well, but which gives tedium new and more Hellish meaning? These decisions are not easy, my friends, and applying for jobs is not precisely what I wanted to do while working on my thesis. Le ugh.

Maybe I should just stay here in Paris. Sure it’s expensive and far away from home, but it’s still pretty great! Naw. After all my friends head back to the US or to whatever new and exotic place they might be going, Paris might be a pretty boring place. Besides, I miss my friends back home and as most of them are young professionals in their 20’s just starting out, they probably won’t be taking too many European vacations to come visit me. Add to that aging grandparents and it seems like living in North America might be a better option. That is, of course, assuming a high paying job doesn’t fall in my lap. If that happens, all bets are off and Paris could easily become chez moi.

Life would be boring if it were straightforward, right?

Oh! Before I forget, I wanted to mention Le lustre noir (The Black Chandelier) which is a lesser known club that Donna and I got to visit over the weekend in the Third. It’s kind of a neat little place that had German punk pop blaring when we got there, and whose eclectic East meets West decor, Woody Allen movies playing from plasma TV’s, and good selection of wine and pizza make it a must see for a low-key evening on the town with friends. I hear they even serve spaghetti dinners with sauce and garlic bread faits maison (homemade sauce) on Saturdays. It’s worth checking out if you can get past the doorman!

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Lest We Forget

January 14th, 2010

I’m getting to the point in reading Great Expectations where Pip is starting to settle into his new life as a gentleman and to forget his days as a blacksmith’s apprentice back near the misty marshes and the working class. Having recently returned to Paris, I am beginning to wonder if a voluntary amnesia is something we come down with from time to time when we’ve left one world behind in order to immerse ourselves in a new one. Like Pip, I’m not purposefully forsaking my old life, but I do feel as though there is some sort of portal hovering over the Atlantic that serves as a gate between two completely different worlds. There’s the quiet, pastoral existence I’ve led in Vermont, which I love, and there’s the more cosmopolitan life here in Paris full of hustle and bustle and steeped in history, literature, and the culture of a millennium or two. At first glance, it seems like these two modes of operation are so incompatible that it would take two different people to lead them, but evidently not. After all, here I am.

This somewhat forced memory loss, this redefinition of self at the drop of a hat, is apparently more common in our culture than I had once thought. After an enjoyable birthday dinner for my father, it became clear to me that, as a society, we have largely forgot the foibles we have committed in the past in favor of the more easily digested claptrap that is taught in basic history classes. I know that history is written by the victors and that there’s a lot more story there than anyone would like to admit, but in many high school classrooms, the history that is taught borders on outrageously one-sided. It might not be propaganda if the only sin you commit is omission, but it still sways the hearts and minds of the next generation in a questionable direction.

What am I talking about? Well, it all started with that bomber from Yemen that ended up blowing off more of his junk than any part of the plane while landing in Detroit. Surely these terrorists are just God obsessed nut jobs who are completely off their rockers and take some sort of masochistic pleasure in offing themselves for Allah, right? Well, maybe so, but I think it’s important to realize that it wasn’t really all that long ago that we people of the “modernized” West were waging our own holy wars. Just look at the speech that Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor during the Renaissance, gave to the pope when his nemesis (there is a GREAT, quasi-epic story here which you really need to learn if you don’t already know it) François 1er teamed up with some Turks to foil his imperialistic plot. This great Christian king talked about “killing the infidels” and fighting to restore the righteous rule of God, who he served with every breath (naturally). Actually, not that long ago, it was quite fashionable to send troops into the Middle East to kill off the “heathens” who had done nothing to provoke we “civilized” Christians. It seems we were not only doing the same thing a few centuries ago, but we were using the same language as the terrorist groups are now. If it works, don’t fix it, right?

Don’t get me wrong, I certainly don’t condone terrorism in any form, whether it’s Christians killing Jews or Muslims during the Renaissance or if it’s al-Qaeda trying to kill off the West nowadays; killing to forward religious or political ambitions (which often amount to the same thing) is always, always wrong. I just think it’s important to realize that this type of “lunacy” which the American media vilifies (and rightly so), is one of the skeletons in our closet too. We’re no better, we’ve just moved on to new tricks.

It’s also important to remember where we all came from. Many people in America have clenched their teeth and set themselves steadfast against immigrants, illegal or otherwise, that are “invading” their country. Not only does this not make sense financially as immigrants do a lot of the work that must get done but Americans are no longer willing to do, but it wasn’t so long ago that many of our ancestors were those immigrants coming to the U.S. looking for a better life. In fact, in the middle of the last century, it was common for French Canadians to come down to the U.S., much as Latin Americans do through Mexico these days, in search of work. America was founded by those who were persecuted in their home countries and who sought to create a more perfect union. Identifying oneself now as a “real” American as opposed to one of the “invaders” is the truly un-American thing to do. We are a nation built to welcome the downtrodden and oppressed, a policy which has been largely responsible for ensuring our success as a country, and yet one we so easily forget about when we go to vote (or, more often than not, don’t go to vote).

Maybe amnesia is the only way to move forward. Maybe the weight of history is just too great and there’s just too much to know (God knows every time I learn something new, I realize I know far less than I should). But, as frightfully dull as learning dates and royal family trees can be, there are lessons to be learned there, tucked in dusty tomes on dark shelves in the back of libraries. As humans, we tend to repeat ourselves instead of inventing new tricks, so while the technology might be different, we seem to have been using the same strategies to get what we want for centuries. Learning these patterns means being able to outsmart them.

All of this build-up brings me to what I really wanted to talk about: a little movie called Enemy of the State starring Will Smith and Gene Hackman. It’s a decent action-suspense type film where a senator is murdered because he tries to block new legislation that forwards the political ambitions of a sinister director of an Orwellian agency, blah, blah, blah. It’s entertaining, but we’ve seen this sort of conspiracy theory before. What makes this movie interesting is that, at first glance, it looks like a writer took what the Bush Administration did after 9/11 to civil liberties with the Patriot Act and made a film: a director of the NSA has bypassed the legal process necessary to get phone taps, and is using the full brunt of network technology to track and destroy anyone that gets in his way. Screw warrants and judges, let’s just let the government listen to any conversation they’d like. After all, friendly Uncle Sam would never abuse the privilege, right? Terrifying.

The whole thing seems so obviously based on the Patriot Act and the results of 9/11 that when the bad guy’s birthday is 9/11/1940, it just seemed intentional. I mean, he is destroying civil liberties with his legislation, and the terrorist attack on the World Trade Centers on 9/11/2001 was the beginning of the same erosion of rights in America. It’s just a semi-transparent allegory, right?

Wrong. What sent shivers down my spine is that this movie was released three years prior to 9/11. Cynthia and I were both shocked since when we found out on IMDB as we both had drawn the same conclusion about the movie. It made us wonder if, like airplanes, submarines, and videophones, the plot of this movie went from fantastic fiction to reality when the time was right. No, I’m not suggesting that someone took this movie and said, “Gee, what a great way to bypass those pesky rights Americans have! Let’s use this movie as a blueprint for a totalitarian regime!” (though if anyone was going to do something so obvious, it would have been our former president), but it does make you wonder: what else is lurking out there in the past that explains the present and possibly the future?

Do you like allegories in the same vein as 1984 by George Orwell and Metamophosis by Kafka?

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