Slow Down, You Move Too Fast

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?

Tags: cooking, Cyrille Lignac, food, France, Japanese, M6, school, television

Lest We Forget

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?

[poll id="2"]

Tags: 9/11, al-Qaeda, America, amnesia, Bush, Charles V, Christianity, Dickens, Enemy of the State, François 1er, Gene Hackman, Great Expectations, Islam, Judaism, Mexico, Orwell, Patriot Act, politics, Quebec, terrorism, Will Smith

It’s What’s Inside that Counts

It’s official: James Cameron’s new film Avatar is a hit. So much so that this billion-dollar blockbuster might actual be more financially successful than Titanic which few of us thought was possible. I’ve been hearing nothing but praise for the film since Eddie saw it, so after catching a clip of Live with Regis and Kelly which mentioned the film in my daily groggy haze as I drank my coveted first cup of coffee and wanting to spend the whole day with Cynthia, the stars had aligned to see it. So, after a green tea that tasted rather more like kelp than I had hoped and a chapter of Great Expectations at Borders, Cynthia and I were off for subs, plants, coffee, and entertainment (which, in case you were wondering, is my entire repertoire for amusement here).

After dodging the bullet of theaters without heat (Cynthia finds herself in a perpetual state of hypothermia), it was time for Avatar on a screen which was rather smaller than I had hoped. After the short previews (I’d gotten used to the ridiculously long ads in Parisian cinemas), I was psyched to see something by the man that brought us some of my favorite action flicks (e.g. Terminator 2). After about thirty minutes of plot, I knew this wasn’t going to be challenging classic James Cameron for a place in my heart. Why? Cavernous plot holes. Giant, gaping, ulcerated, stinking plot holes that made me unwilling to suspend my disbelief. OK, sure, let’s say that a completely untrained “pilot” can have his consciousness thrown by an MRI machine with a digital sarcophagus into an alien life form that happens to be genetically compatible with our race despite its independent evolution on a distant planet and can interface with it effortlessly. Unlikely, yes, but surely the apparatus that can read the incredibly complex human neural network could be some sort of fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) with a flawless and positively massive wireless bandwidth capable of transmitting all of the signals (i.e. muscular impulses, sensory data, etc.) the human brain produces and translating them for alien hardware with extra parts and different bits might be possible; after all, Skype video calls would have seemed equally fantastic during the Renaissance. Questioning the capabilities of future computers would be foolish given the incredible advances I’ve seen in the twenty years I’ve been using computers which have gone from behemoth monotone unnetworked computers to iPhones, something even the Jetsons didn’t have.

It wasn’t the wildly improbable premise of the movie that bothered me, because that’s part of the fun of science fiction. It was the lack of logic. Let’s assume the military has gone to the trouble to engineer these organic machines from alien DNA which probably cost hundreds of millions if not billions of future world dollars: is it really likely given the hardware necessary to send and receive real-time data from a remote brain that the military would have forgotten a tracking chip? “But wait!” you say, “GPS can’t work without satellites circling the planet and the humans have just invaded: there can’t be a network in place!” True, but assuming the military fits the stereotype that the movie tries to cram them into (i.e. brainless thugs who are slaves to their corporate overlord), a stereotype based on the American military, I’m guessing that there’s no way they wouldn’t have some method of triangulating the position of the avatars. How else do you get the brainwaves to them? A hope and a prayer?

Let’s assume the avatars function on a future technology which does not allow for triangulation or tracking but, being infinitely better than current cellular technology and slinging vast quantities of data into and out of the jungle despite the dense vegetation, which has pushed our willing suspension of disbelief to the “I’m not sure I buy this” stage: we keep watching out of respect to this fantastic director. The movie is beautiful, the dialogue is convincing, and the plot immerses you in a fantastic world that is so intriguing that you want to like what you see. But then there’s that pesky climax where the military strategy of the rogue avatar pilot hinges on a magnetic disturbance so strong it kills all of the instruments responsible for mapping and guidance, and yet the magic brain link and walkie talkies are completely unfazed. Huh? Really? James, those annoying laws of physics are making me question your logic again.

Assuming you’re not well-versed in information technology or physics or that you aren’t as damned pedantic about science fiction adhering to the same physical laws throughout, you’ll probably enjoy the movie. I did and I can be a nerdy pedant. When we get to the thinly veiled metaphor of the American military/government/people and its capitalistically driven imperialist ambitions throughout history and the mistreatment of the “savages” of the moment (Native Americans, African Americans, Hawaiians, Puerto Ricans, or any of the inhabitants in our republics or those countries we’re “saving” from themselves), it’s more pleasing. Well, if you hang to the left politically or belong to one of those oppressed groups. I had trouble trying to determine which, if any, of the many peoples America has roughed up in this way, but as best I can tell, the lanky blue cat-people symbolize a conglomeration of them all. I’m not sure who the target audience is for this film, but the movie clubs you over the head so hard with its message so many times, that it should be fairly obvious to anyone. If you’re one of the millions against the occupation of not only the Middle East by American troops, but of other more peaceful regions which we occupy, the moral inside the digital wrapper should redeem the few bad spots in the plot.

My criticism is fairly harsh, but like I said, the movie was still enjoyable. James Cameron’s heavy-handed delivery of a political moral (one with which I basically agree) is eclipsed by the breathtaking cinematographic value of the film. Computers have certainly come a long way since Tron and one of the first major CG-real life hybrid films, and Cameron’s expert direction in this new and precarious medium is ever obvious. The landscapes are beautifully rendered, the creatures intriguing, and the slightly granola notion of a giant network of life, a Pandorian Gaya if you will, is a pleasant way to remind us that our survival is based on the mutual success of all species and people on the planet, not just the most powerful. This movie is definitely worth the price of admission, and will require further analysis on my part in the future. Still, if you were waiting for Mr. Cameron to expiate Terminator 3 as I was, you’ll need to keep waiting.

Tags: Amber, Avatar, Borders, cinema, Cynthia, Eddie, James Cameron, movies, oppression, savages, Tron

Merry Christmas, Everyone!

It’s another Vermont Christmas and I’m reading Dickens. Though I’m reading Great Expectations instead of A Christmas Carol, it actually feels quite appropriate. You see, I see myself a bit of Pip in myself of late. In case you haven’t read the book, Pip is a young common boy in England who finds himself beckoned to play at Miss Havisham’s, the wealthy spinster who lives “up-town” in his town. You see, before playing at Miss Havisham’s, Pip is somewhat blissfully unaware of how “common” he is with his thick-soled shoes and his coarse hands, yet after Estella gets done with him after his first visit, he becomes self-conscious of his station in the society of the small town. After my return from Paris, I have have a similar revelation about my place in the world.

I’ve been lucky enough to have traveled since a tender age and I’ve seen a lot more of the world than many people, from the East Coast of the US to the West, from North to South, through most of the provinces of Canada, a smattering of countries in Europe and yes, even a good deal of China, but coming back from France feels different somehow. Normally, I come back to Vermont and can only think of how picturesque my state is; how returning here is somehow like coming back to a place that exists somewhere between the paintings of Normal Rockwell and the poetry of Robert Frost. But this time it feels different. This time, after spending so much time in a city which feels tailor-made for me, Vermont feels diminished, like the beautiful forests I remembered have been replaced by trees and overgrown underbrush. What was once a cute country general store is now just overpriced. The snow covered roads lacking sidewalks aren’t rustic but impinging my ability to exercise comfortably. In short, Paris has killed off my romantic vision of what was and has shone a garish light on my home state, allowing me to see it through what may be a more objective lens.

In short, I think that I’m not only a city mouse now, but one that is having a hard time readjusting to the country, albeit just for a little break and not a life there. This is pretty natural it seems after reading the Facebook statuses of all the other Parisiens now back in the States for Christmas who are ready to go back to France. For those that love her, Paris beckons us back with her cinemas, pastry shops, and vibrant culture which is equaled in no other place on Earth, at least not one that I’ve ever seen. Maybe what’s making me feel uneasy isn’t so much the countryside of Vermont, but instead the fact that I’ve realized that I can never come back. The Vermont I once knew is an old knit sweater that I’ve outgrown and whose pattern has gone out of fashion, and that’s frightening because it means that I’m homeless, in a larger sense if not literally.

Don’t get me wrong, I still love the Green Mountain State dearly, and I might call it home again someday, but until I’ve realized my career ambitions and am really ready to settle down, it’s just no longer for me.

On another note, I’ve picked up a copy of the 2009 addition of America’s Best Essays and I think I’ve finally found a genre that fits my writing style between the essay and the short story. Beyond that, after watching one of Mom’s Christmas presents, Julie & Julia, I think I need to set a deadline for myself to get published because, seriously, if I end up back in a cubicle doing data analysis after my year in Paris, no matter how well paid I am, I will flip my shit. I promise. One of the keys to Julie’s success was surely her deadline as, like me, it seems like she had great ideas but poor follow-through. So, like her, if I’m going to get my words out of cyberspace and in print on crisp glossy pages (or even better on woody matte ones between two cardboard covers), I’m going to need to actually finish something. As I know breaking into the published world isn’t easy and that my studies and work will make it necessary to stop banging out essays and shorts from time to time, I’ll give myself until my 27th birthday (February 23rd, 2011) to get my words in print.

What do you think, blogosphere, can I do it? Is my writing good enough to get published in print somewhere (I’m not talking about the New Yorker for starters, mind you)? If so, help me find an appropriate audience by posting a comment on the following question:

In your opinion, in which publication would Jonathan’s writing fit best?

Tags: A Christmas Carol, Christmas, Dickens, goals, Great Expectations, home, Paris, publishing, Vermont

Vie de merde

Fellow French speakers and graduate students who enjoy the site fmylife.com will quickly recognize the French equivalent expression (and website) in the title of this post. Why? Well, I’ve got this article about the American inferiority complex which promises to be deep and insightful (that’s the idea at least), but I’m not in the right mood to flesh it out tonight. Today has been less than stellar and I feel like sharing. Consider yourself warned.

To be fair, I knew getting up that today wasn’t going to be great. I woke up at 5:45AM wide awake, but instead of getting up and taking advantage of the highly useful extra time before class, I decided to take the lazy route and hit snooze until 9AM (my first class was at 10:45AM) which was foolish but felt right at the time. Next, after zipping around and managing to skip my morning coffee despite the ample time I had had, I arrived five minutes late for my Prince class. I could almost understand being late for an 8AM or even a 9AM class, but 10:45AM?! There’s no excuse! I know the reason is that I don’t really like the class that much, but I could at least be on time! After sitting through an exceptionally boring lecture about how the peasants and various other underlings rebelled against and critiqued princely figures during the Renaissance (if you’ve ever seen an editorial cartoon, you basically didn’t need to go to the lecture), I got that paper I hurried to write before our professor zipped off to New Caledonia. Let’s just say that I’m sometimes right about my papers being a train wreck. Somehow resisting the urge to throw myself out of the second story window, I sort of wandered aimlessly assembling a lunch from several shops located on the same block as the Centre. As I waited for the cheese to melt on my croque monsieur, I wondered how my measly three and a half page paper could have been so wildly vast that it didn’t adhere to the subject of “the power of the princes of the Renaissance.” I’m not saying it was a genius paper, quite the contrary, I just thought its insufficiencies would be found elsewhere than covering too much ground and having hid my outline too well. Umm, what? I’m sorry, the fact that I’ve been to write in such a way that isn’t flat and lifeless actually works against me here? You WANT the strict robotic steps I used to plan paper to be obvious? If you think my writing is too vague or is incoherent, please say so, but don’t lower my grade just because I don’t produce writing that has more in common with corrugated cardboard than something people would actually like to read.

Whoa, bitter much?

Next, after fuming about my paper, it was time for our réunion obligatoire (total waste of time) with the local director of our program here in Paris. As we all had guessed, it was about l’engagement d’honneur (the pledge) which we all signed stating we would use French exclusively in our lives with very few exceptions. What was the purpose of bringing us all in to chastise us? I mean, those that speak English are going to keep on doing so and those who devote themselves religiously to speaking French will continue to do that. Besides, can we talk about how infeasible this pledge, as written, is for more than a summer? It might have worked well in the dark days before the internet and cheap intercontinental communication, but with things like Facebook, instant messengers, and Skype quickly becoming part of everyday life, how do you draw the lines linguistically and say to the vast majority of your friends “I’m not going to talk to you, effectively cutting you out of my life, for 10 months, not because calls are expensive, not because I won’t see what you post online everyday, but because my school thinks I should cut all anglophone ties, ensuring maximum culture shock and minimal enjoyment of my time in France.” Yes, I’ll get right on that, Middlebury.

I can appreciate what the Pledge is trying to accomplish, especially in Vermont where students are surrounded with English on all sides. Well, in theory; in actuality they are surrounded by cows. My major issue is just that I’m not capable of completely cutting English out of my life, especially not for a whole year, and in my experience most students, despite their best intentions at the beginning, aren’t able to either. That doesn’t mean I don’t maximize my exposure to French, I do; I only talk to French people in French, I go out of my way to find francophones to talk to, and I spend an outrageous portion of my limited free time immersed up to my eyeballs in French novels and history books. But what about when I just need a break? Am I supposed to always go to the VF, or painfully dubbed in French, version of every movie even though at least half of the movies here are in English? Am I supposed to start writing my blog in French in hopes that my audience, largely non French speaking, will be so dedicated to my ramblings that they’ll learn a new language just to read stilted, grammatically incorrect posts? And the myriad of signs and songs in English here; shall I walk around with earplugs and a blindfold? I’m sorry, Middlebury, French is great, but English is just a part of everyday life now, not to be extricated by a signature and mildly threatening, half-hearted admonitions. In order to really make this work, you’ll need to lock us in a room, strap us to a chair with our eyelids held open à la Clockwork Orange and force feed us French until we’re chain smoking and not happy unless everyone around us is miserable. Besides, according to page 14 of the 09-10 Guidelines of Studying with a Middlebury Graduate School Abroad, we are only required to “…maintain the spirit of the Middlebury Language Pledge.” What does that mean precisely? What is the acceptable amount we can use English to communicate with our non French speaking friends? Does saving my sanity by watching a movie in VO now and again count as a violation of the Pledge? Is the boardroom where they come up with these Draconian policies somehow disconnected from reality?

Can you tell I’m in a prickly mood tonight?

The rest of the day went fairly well. I thankfully did well on the grammar test, which didn’t really make me feel better, but didn’t add to the anger, and then I got an e-mail from my old boss at the hospital who wants to hire me to freelance for him while I’m here in France. Why not? Living in Paris, why turn down extra money? Let’s hope after this little rant (cathartic activities must be an exemption from the Pledge, but I’m sure you’ll hear it here first if they aren’t) and a quiet evening with tea I’ll be my normal somewhat upbeat, moderately perky self tomorrow. Oh wait, I have to go teach English to a bunch of tech students for five hours straight after Tragédie. FML.

Tags: FML, France, French, language pledge, Middlebury, Prince, VDM