SWM Seeks Muse

As many of you know, because of the volcanic eruption in Iceland that spewed ash into the atmosphere which resulted in the grounding of more planes than ever before, I’ve spent the last two weeks in Paris instead of back home on the East Coast where I was planning to be. I can’t say that I was overly impressed by the idea of spending two weeks of vacation with my books and mountains of esoteric articles on the intricacies of the cyclical nature of Lol V. Stein’s journey to reconstitute her past in Marguerite Duras’s take on the modern novel about nothing (no really, that was the goal of the book, to be about NOTHING). You know what’s important in life? Not that. I can’t think of many things I care about less than Marguerite Duras’s take on nothingness at the moment. Actually, perhaps my generally apathy for this whole program exceeds my general indifference to Duras. Last summer, after two years off from academia spent in hospital administration, I was kind of psyched to speak only French for a few months and genuinely excited about learning again, but ever since I came back from Christmas break, the novelty has most definitively warn off.

I think it’s time that I confess something: when I applied to Middlebury’s M.A. French program, it was more to escape the dull workaday world of lab specs and staff meetings than out of a burning passion for French literature. My friends actually had to goad me into actually sending in the deposit to finalize my acceptance. Don’t get me wrong, I love the French language and some francophone literature, but I actually mildly dislike a lot of “serious” contemporary French lit. It’s too depressing and too often art for art’s sake which is fun to analyze for awhile, but picking apart metaphors and explaining synecdoches (where a part of something represents the whole for all of you who don’t actually talk about this crap everyday) basically equates to intellectual masturbation and after months and months and months of it, I’ve lost my drive. Now, instead of being a fun game or an intellectual quest that reveals some fraction of universal truth like it used to, my work here just feels like a colossal waste of time.

If my goal was to escape the drudgery of life and live in a dream world for a little while, mission accomplished, but as a means to achieving that end, this master’s program has lost its utility. The point of getting good grades this semester is to get the degree, but as I’m fairly certain I’m never going into a Ph.D. program nor do I really have any desire to teach at a private school, I find myself asking the question “à quoi ça sert?” (what’s the use?) The part of this education that I’m going to use, the part that will make me a better writer and a better French speaker, I’ve already got; the rest of this process is just tying up loose ends to get a piece of paper. Even if I stopped now, I’d have gotten my money’s worth out of the program. So why not just quit worrying about all this research and academic mumbo jumbo and enjoy my 44 remaining days in the City of Lights?

OK, you’re right. I am SO CLOSE to the end and having the degree can only help my future so I might as well finish it. After all, I’m here until the middle of June and need something to give my days structure until then, right? The only problem is that when I get like this, when I have decided something is pointless, I have a much harder time coming up with clever ideas to write about for, oh say a 10-12 page mini-mémoire (research paper). Does anyone out there have a muse they’d like to lend me until Thursday? Maybe I’ll just take a deliberate break from pounding my head against the desk trying to find a way to finish these papers and just watch a movie or something. Who knows? Maybe I’ll find my muse after I stop looking for her.

Tags: academia, French, Literature, Marguerite Duras, Middlebury, Paris, research, writing

“I’m Over It”

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.

Make your own digital greeting

Tags: 13th, Anthony, birthday, Burlington, Clayton, Donna, Epitechp, Eric, Gladine's, Hallmark, Hayden, Jess, Kat, Kate, latino, Lise, Malakoff, Mario, Middlebury, Nick, Paris, parties, research, Sailor, SmileBox, UVM, Valentine's, Vermont, Whitney, Yahaira

New Character: Atropa Belladonna

You may have noticed that my writing exercises have all been revolving around Sister Marie and an exaggerated version of a parochial school. Well, these are all elements in the new story I am working on called “No God Before Me” which I hope to actually complete someday soon (and by complete, I mean, compile from writing exercises and make whole). While scouring the internet and watching Perfect Strangers, I came across yet another reference to the mythical “nightshade” or “belladonna” plant. I’ve always head a sort of dread fascination with this wicked little plant, so I’ve decided to make her a character in my story. I mean, listen to this juicy extract from botanical.com:

According to old legends, the plant belongs to the devil who goes about trimming and tending it in his leisure, and can only be diverted from its care on one night in the year, that is on Walpurgis, when he is preparing for the witches’ sabbath. The apples of Sodom are held to be related to this plant, and the name Belladonna is said to record an old superstition that at certain times it takes the form of an enchantress of exceeding loveliness, whom it is dangerous to look upon , though a more generally accepted view is that the name was bestowed on it because its juice was used by the Italian ladies to give their eyes greater brilliancy, the smallest quantity having the effect of dilating the pupils of the eye.

In combination with my love of terrible beauty and the femme fatales, I think Atropa Belladonna (the Latin name for the plant) will be a deliciously wicked addition to my story, don’t you?

ETA: Anyone for a group of baddies named after poisonous plants? Ooh yes,