Birth of a Blog :: 05:30 AM :: easyjetsetter

Social Circle, Hexagon

What kind of person writes a blog? A 2003 study by Perseus found that the average blog writer was "a teenage girl who uses it twice a month to update her friends and classmates on happenings in her life." But when we think of a blog, we think of wonkette, belle du jour, little green footballs, talking points memo, la petite anglaise, read by thousands and updated daily. Fewer than 50,000 out of the 4.5 million surveyed had daily updates. 100,000-odd had at least once weekly posts.

I intend to fall somewhere in between. I moved to Paris in November following four months mouldering at my parents' house in Scotland wondering WHY I didn't marry an American so that I could stay there beyond the end of my degree in August. Then I remembered it was because I wanted to travel and be free, and so ran away to France. The longer I stay here, the more like America it seems to be (the cultural sense of superiority, the conviction that they invented democracy, the pride in language and country, the total inability to see another's point of view) until all the secondary school students strike and the government decides to give in once again on its designs to, say, stop giving pensioners free cigarettes.

I am the youngest person I know in Paris. My job includes socialising in the international scene with people a lot richer and a lot older than me. I manage this through a mixture of blagging, scrimping, saving, splurging, regretting, forgetting and repeating. 

I also am a liberal arts graduate who doesn't get to use her wide range of arcane (well, general) knowledge on anything other than quiz nights at a pub in the sixth, and the odd game of trivial pursuit. I therefore like to have a platform to sound off, to goof off, to laugh at the jerk-offs, to get pissed off, and, probably, get booed off.

Capitalist Socialism :: 06:01 AM :: easyjetsetter

Hexagon

Sounds kind of funky eh? And not in the good 70's way. More in the nasty, gym shoe way. And you would be right. As I was told at a networking cocktail the other evening, this is not a capital system, this is a social system.

Now, despite being identified as a pinko liberal in the US because I consider the health of its citizens one of the basic fundamentals of the people/parliament social contract, in the United States of Europe (Britain included) I am considered Margaret Thatcher. In my book, no bad thing. I think I just like the colour blue.

There really is a limit to the silliness with governmental intervention.

For example, the sales are regulated by the government. If you own a store, you can't have soldes except on specific, government-set dates. Generally about six weeks twice a year, the reductions are also defined by guidelines set out  by the government. However, this being France, everyone marks things down year-round, but instead of calling them soldes they say promotions or petits prix.

I was chatting with a polish emigree at a media thing this evening about this, and she, having lived here for seven years, still finds some things amazing. Recently, there has been some bother over le trente-cinq or the 35 hour working week. It was instituted a few years ago to try and create jobs. They assumed that cutting the legal limit for working hours would entice business owners to put more money into labour by leaving them short staffed. Undermanned. Whatever.

But now they want to repeal it, but only partially, because they want to give workers the right to work beyond that if they wish, but not on overtime pay. No employee can force somone who's happy with the 35 to change.

What astonished my polish interlocutor was that when they instituted the trente-cinq, not only did the employers (who were expected) demonstrate against it, but so did employees (who were not.)

Subsequently, the slight readjustment to make the working hours fairer for those who wished to work more brought those same workers out onto the streets. What do you suppose the government did? Despite negative growth in the fourth quarter of 2004? It capitulated.

A new version of the modifications was proposed, but I doubt it will be anything but a jabbering, quivering, pile of jelly with suicidal tendencies by the time they're done with it. There were new demonstrations on the day that the members of the International Olympic Committee arrived to inspect Paris for a final time before the decision on its 2012 bid.  Good selling point that: "oh and our infrastructure could fail at any moment because we supplicate on bended knee before the God that is the street march."

The Minister didn't even have the grace to say sorry, he just said "well, we're a democracy and we're proud of that." Presumably followed by a shrug. They're good at shrugs.

Comme on dit, du basket :: 02:41 PM :: easyjetsetter

Today, I am going to talk a little about basketball. In french le basket; not to be confused with les baskets; which are, inexplicably, the word they use for that particular kind of baseball boot shoe, a la converse et al. But for once, the focus is not on the French.

No, it is on a little town 3,000 miles away that I liked the call home until the INS took it away from me, in a cruel twist of fate that they like to call "graduation." If only I had my own carolina blue slippers that I could click to take me back.

But I digress. Because maybe it is best that I remain in the land of the munchkin-bottomed women, because when I was there I cursed Carolina basketball. Under Dean Smith's tenure, Carolina reached the sweet sixteen for 13 consecutive years. Even without that lord god of the NCAA they made it to the final four the year before I attended.

In the four years I was there, they attended the NCAA tourney not once, for the simple reason that they sucked. I had a hard time understanding why basketball was such a big deal if we were all so bad at it all the time, but I realise now that I was the aberration, that winning was the norm.

Suddenly the hundreds of dollars people would pay to see us play makes sense. Suddenly the total sparsity of friends at my March birthday party is not so hurtful and alienating as I had previously supposed. It wasn't me, it was basketball.

So I feel like this season is my gift to all those people whose years at Carolina were marred by the haunting sense that they had cursed it. Nope, you're ok, it was me. I'm sorry, here, run with that ball marvin, it's on me.

I don't particularly like basketball, but I did find this quality piece of trivia: JJ Redick's poetry. if I were writing a satirical article about the softer side of the team from hell I could not have done better. Read it. Weep with laughter.

Auld Alliance Francaise :: 08:01 PM :: easyjetsetter

Hexagon

There is one reason, and one reason alone, that my parents are letting me touch my tiny private income to pay my rent while I intern for pocket money here in Paris. And it's a four letter word: DALF.

The diplome approfondi de la langue francaise is the french ministry of national education's idea of an equivalent to the TOEFL. Unlike the TOEFL, however, it is not multiple choice. It does not take one day only. It is not easy to sign up for.

It is, in fact, nothing like the TOEFL, except that it permits one to enter a French University as an official FLUENT FRENCH SPEAKER which actually just means your professors feel justified in taking off marks for bad spelling. The TOEFL, as you all, of course, know, does this for foreigners going to English-speaking Unis, but without the spellcheck.

Why would I put myself through this you ask? Especially when there is something called the TCF, which is a lot more like the TOEFL in the various manners mentioned above? Because the LSE/Sciences Pos programme I wish to enroll in requires the DALF for all native English applicants. Let me pass on some hard-earned advice for those in a similar predicament:

First, when enrolling in the DALF, don't imagine that your enrollment is a one-off thing. Oh no. Because the DALF itself is a two day exam on the 13th and 20th of April, but heaven forbid you should be allowed to sign up for that when you want. No, one must first pass the DELF, 2nd degree. Which requires the DELF, 1st degree. Of course, one could bypass these and take the "test d'aces au DALF" in february. And this is what your fearless interlocutor did.>

In addition, you cannot sign up for the DALF itself until you have received your "attestation de reussite" for the test d'aces au DALF which arrives three weeks afer the test date (is your head beginning to hurt too?) You can only sign up up until one month beforehand, but even then, only on tuesday and thursday mornings, before noon, in one room, in one building, in Paris.

When I called the morning of the 10th of March, to ask whether I should come on tuesday to sign up, since the 13th was a sunday, I was told that that day had been the last day to sign up. At this point, my phone thought it would be funny to run out of credit. So I dashed to the phone kiosk, that was owned by my friend Marcel but is now in the hands of Indians who burn incense and sell pirated bollywood DVDs, and called again.

"Pardon Madame, mais on a ete coupe...c'etait aujourd'hui le dernier jour d'inscription?" UPDATE: (excuse me madam, but we were cut off...was today the last day to sign up?)

"Ben ouai Madame." UPDATE: (But of course you stupid foreigner - it was all in her tone)

(Add here internal train noises along the lines of "fucketyfucketyfucketyfuckety...since this is the only exam this year....internal visions of parental wroth, admitting to family I failed to sign up on time...fucketyfuckety...wondering how I can convince the woman that I am a special exception to all the Polish girls in my class...fucketyfucketyfuckety)

"Normalement c'est le dernier jour, mais aujourd'hui..."(THERE IS A GOD!!!!) UPDATE: (normally that is in fact the case, but today...)

"Aujourd'hui, a cause de la greve, on peut venir mardi prochain." UPDATE:(Today, because of the strike, you can come next tuesday)

I will never complain about French strikes again. They saved my skin.

Seven weeks of staying up allllll night :: 06:56 PM :: easyjetsetter

Hexagon

Actually, there remain ten official weeks of my adventures in Paris. But it's a nice lyric, from a good song. Today, in the spirit of the previous comments, I had a very funny morning in the Post Office.

My mother contrary to my explicit instructions, recently sent my 2004 receipts for my US tax return recorded delivery. Unsurprisingly, they are lost. Just to check they were not lurking in my local banch PO however, I trotted along this morning and waited in the inevitable queue to ask the lady to have a look.

In front of me in the line (The post office is the only place where French people can form a queue - it's amazing, they even save old people places so they can go and sit down) is a young, chic mother, with her blond toddlers. Behind me is a man dressed as what he thinks a cowboy must look like: demin shirt over leather waistcoat, sunglasses inside, string tie with turquoise and silver buckle, and, of course, a straw BOATER. Behind HIM is a man in a suit talking on his cell phone. But he doesn;t just have a phone, oh no, he has one of those headsets.

So he's talking away in loud, accented, english, and the toddlers are playing with their spiderman (known here as Speederman) and they are FASCINATED by the headset. The man with the headset insists to the person on the other end of the line that he has to go because he is in the post office, and people are looking at him funny because in France, it is just something we don't do, talking on our phones in public. No, people are looking at you funny because you've got a stupid headset.

So the child asks the man with the headset tu es mon papa? (are you my daddy?) a common mistake that children make, when they are first learning to talk, is to confuse the word "dad" with the word "man" and so this is why they call any random man "daddy" or, in France, papa.

Our friend with the headset feels the need to recount this to his phone buddy, and adds to this "oh, I think I'm falling in love with these kids...I wish you could see them, oh wait, I'll take a picture." And proceeds to use his camera phone to send a TOTAL STRANGER pictures of UTTERLY random children. He did it reallly surreptitiously too, and I don't think he realised that I understood what he was saying.

Well, anyway, the kids escaped unscathed, the headset man withdrew his money for his trip to brussels, and the cowboy tipped his boater, and left. I came up to the counter and was rewarded not with my receipts, but with a returned package I had sent a month or two ago, which I had to pay 3 euros for the privilege of carting away and dumping into a recycling bin. You should have seen it, no wonder the royal mail wouldn't accept it, it looked like those diagrams you get of "packages that may contain a bomb or anthrax" with edges torn and handwritten notes and wires hanging out and oil stains...

Amoureuse :: 07:12 PM :: easyjetsetter

Hexagon

I am, despite a real problem with the French concept of social democracy and their total inability to communicate by emailor phone or indeed any modern technology that wasn't invented by France, in love with this country. If America taught me how to work, and boy, did it ever, France is teaching me how to play. My own predispositions for my free time (food, theatre, books, friends, conversation, films and a bottle or two of wine) happen to be perfectly concurrent with French culture.

They don't do sports. Americans compete and get injuries and suchlike. The French do loisirs, like skiing, and biking through the loire valley. Of course, their devotion to loisirs and leisure means they don't answer emails, but I am beginning to see that I can live without constant electronic contact.

I am sitting in my garret while the dark storm clouds go yellow in the aftermath of the thunder and lightning I just enjoyed, thinking about things I would miss if I had to move to London, or Brussels, as is distinctly possible if I want to set my career path in the right direction.

The cheap metro. I was in London visiting friends a few weekends ago and the underground is literally double the price of the metro, with half the stops and the trains themselves half the size. The 1960's entrances aren't a patch on our beautiful art deco ones, even though I would never be caught DEAD taking photographs of them, or even showing that I care they are there.

Being under 26. It's amazing what it gets you. Half-price train tickets EVERYWHERE. You pay an abonnement (about 15 euros) at the major museums and you can get in for free for the entire year. We're talking Louvre, Musee D'Orsay and so on.

Aux Pipalottes Gourmandes, Fauchon, Lenotre. On the plus side, leaving these behind would be good for my, ahem, behind, and my bank balance. On the down side, British food really does suck when set against the craftsmanship, aesthetics, and generally synaesthetic orgasm that these places provide.

Artisans. This is the French version of what Americans call indie. Basically, every neighborhood has it's own independent specialists. Chains are exceptions rather than norms. There's a place that sells saddles, yes the horse kind, across the street from me. There's a jewellry designer. There's a turkish tea shop. There's a hairdresser, there's a florist. The owners run the shops. I like that.

The post office. Such a pleasant place, despite the people preying on small children. There's a change machine, you can weigh and stamp your own letters on another machine, there's an autmatic photocopier, a cash machine, and a computer terminal. The nice people sell phone credit. They search for missing packages. They have pretty cards and prepaid envelopes in a vending machine. HAVEN of efficiency. The sign urging people to save for their retirement is handwritten in magic marker on brown paper. They have pink stamps designed by Cacharel. I love La poste.

Fashion does not equal beauty. This is why Paris renovates 19th century buildings, and also why women look great at 50. They don't do fashion, they do beauty. I was appalled at how silly london people look in their trendy pink bobble hats and wellies. They just looked pathetic. French people wear what suits them. I am learning. Not fast, but I don't look american any more. Or sound american, which is nice.

Other random things: Parc Monceau, which I drove past the other day and got so excited I actually exclaimed "oooh, but what's that?" because I thought paris didn't have nice parks. They do. They have Parc Monceau. Daily chocolate croissant and coffee and little chat with the baker. The falafel on rue des rosiers. The italian place on rue des martyrs. My pub quiz. My new friends. My view (monmartre rooftops anyone? Nightly swishing by of the eiffel tower searchlight.) The way the big monuments just sneak up on you and pop out when you least expect them. If I am being honest, the catcalls and chat up lines on the street give me a little boost. My bathtub. I drink water instead of soda. The fifth floor has reduced me by a dress size.

I don't want to go! If you know of anything politicky going in Paris let me know...even public affairs! I just want to stay! Embassy would be ideal, but don't bother looking at the OECD or UNESCO, even their interns have Phds. Sigh.

I recently started applying for jobs again, since my contract comes up in a couple of months and I am just not making enough or in the right field to stay with current job. I therefore am applying brussels and london, and have started receiving the next round of rejections. I did this in my parents' house for three months last fall, and boy, did it ever do wonders for my self-esteem. Even unpaid stuff was turning me down, it was so utterly depressing. So, I feel myself starting to sink back into this, like Atreyu's horse in the Swamp of Sadness. Just call me Artax.

I will read this little post of happy things every time I need a little pick me up. And then I will go and buy one of Fauchon's mini pink handbags containing two chocolates. Mmmmmm....

PDA :: 10:53 PM :: easyjetsetter

Social Circle, Hexagon

No, I don't mean the project on defense alternatives, nor do I mean those little handheld computers. I am talking about Public Displays of Affection.

You've seen them, those people draped all over each other in the metro, in the park, on the street, in the restaurant, your apartment steps, and, in fact, everywhere. And the spring weather has brought them all out in a rash of hand holding, kissing, squeezing, nuzzling and other physical ticks that make the rest of us (well, me) blush and avert our eyes.

If that's frightfully British of me, so be it. But I am generally very tolerant of things other people want to do that I do not, as long as it doesn't affect me, and since these couples aren't actually invading my physical space, why does this communal public fondling bother me?

Well, because I'm jealous. Super jealous. Madly, secretly, gut-wrenchingly jealous. I don't want to subject the object of my affection to the public humiliation of the PDA-fest, but I'd like to at least have the choice.

My father claims he deliberately made me and my two sisters, in my mother's words, "unmarriageable" in an attempt to avoid ever having to pay for a wedding. Middle, nice-ish sister (the one with her own teeth) has a cat. She thinks the cat is her baby. She will die alone. Eldest, evil sister (the one with teeth implants) is, as her description implies, evil. Anyone interested in her would lose interest about two minutes after moving in as she followed him around switching off lights, claiming he walked too loudly and making him cry every time he complimented her attire.

Two down, one to go.

I am a bit of a committment-phobe, so I would not describe myself as unmarriageable, but more as unboyfriendable (thanks Magnetic Fields.) I don't want a boyfriend, not really, mostly because I would then have to become a girlfriend, and something screwy happens to otherwise rational women once they are girlfriends. Ask any boyfriend about Valentine's Day and you'll see what I mean. I would like, however, what I am now calling a foster boyfriend - someone to look after until he is ready to move on to a more permanent home.

A lot of this yen for a chap is based on the fact that I don't have a close friend in Paris yet. Considering I have only lived here for four months this is probably unsurprising to you. I know plenty of people, and consider a fair number friends, but I don't have anyone who is even a small patch on my wife, or rather best friend, in North Carolina. Despite the platonic nature of our marriage, that kind of closeness is what I want and that involves spending a lot of time with one person. I'd like to meet someone who wants to do that.

Dating in Paris is pretty hard however, not least due to the fact that there is no such thing as dating in France. But then I never wanted to participate in the British system of shag-as-many-people-as-possible-then-end-up-shagging-the-same-person-for-a-while-break-up-then-start-shagging-everyone-again. Which is mindless. I also just never got the hang of the American dating system, which has courtship rituals that sub-saharan tribes would find convoluted and overwrought. I would persistently do the wrong thing, like calling someone whenever I felt like talking to him rather than at the socially acceptable intervals.

So, neither system applies in France, but I am not sure what system there is, despite Jason Stone's theorising on the subject. People tell me that I need a nice French boyfriend, but the problem is there is no such thing as a nice French boy. It would do wonders for my French though.

I was recently at my pub quiz with some friends and someone they had brought along. This someone, apropos of I forget what now, commented that although I had "fantastic tits" (thanks gap body) he would never be able to date me because he can never be sure that if he said the wrong thing I would not hit him. Another member of the group agreed "yeah, she's way too scary for me." This reminded me of something someone said circa 1995 about how I would always be single because I am "not sweet and never will be."

What do these people (men) mean by "scary," and "not sweet"? Well, I'll tell you. The fact is that I am, in many ways, very masculine. I think I am right all the time and am very loath to admit it when I am wrong. I express my opinions forcibly and loudly, and heaven forbid you disagree with me, cause I like nothing more than a big argument. Where I get to be right. I have nothing but contempt for stupidity or a lack of opinion, as well as a lack of ambition or engagement in society. I am, in fact, my father.

I am, apparently, as an opinionated woman, intimidating to the point that I am no longer girlfriend material. So Dad is three for three on the not paying for weddings front. Way to go Dad. Thanks a bunch.

Dinner Guests, RP, Calvin & Hobbes :: 02:49 PM :: easyjetsetter

Two interesting linguistic things have happened to me today.

The first was that I received an email from the couple with whom I will be partaking of Easter lunch tomorrow. This is an awesome American couple from New York (although the wife is originally an Okie) who moved to France this year to enjoy spending their niece and nephew's inheritance. I met them through the book I am co-editing, and the Okie wife and her husband, who we shall call Blanche, seem to have decided to look after me. Which is lovely.

Okie and Blanche are inviting about eight people for Easter dinner tomorrow, and I received an email from Blanche about one of the other dinner guests. It seems that they felt the need to alert me that one of the guests, despite his, and I quote, "non-U" accent from Coventry, is very cultured. Apparently they are worried that a) I will be shocked and appalled that they are friends with someone, again, to quote, "NQOCD" (not quite our class dear) or b) that this person will take offense at the fact that I speak a fairly high-end version of received pronunciation (RP.)

I have always spoken like this. People assume I learned it from boarding school, or that I had elocution lessons. The fact is, my parents spoke like this, and so did most of our family. I just learned to speak RP like a Japanese child in a French family would grow up speaking French and not Japanese.

RP in Britain is traditionally associated with money and class. A couple of generations back that was true of my family: there were boats and horses and foreign travel when nobody did it. However, all the money my immediate family has (and as my Mother constantly reminds my Father, it's not nearly enough...) was earned. By my Dad. It's ours. We didn't get it because of our accents.

We do, however, have what I consider class. I don't mean we're aristocrats, or that we consider ourselves better than Scottish people with actual Scottish accents simply because we speak differently from them. I mean that we behave in a certain manner, that is, don't talk publicly about money, always send thank you notes, when going to someone's house always take a gift, and so on.

I know plenty of people with no money, and broad regional accents who have oodles of this kind of class. I know far too many people who have oodles of money, and diamond vowels, and have not a jot of class - because they brag, treat others with disrespect, and behave abominably.

In my second year in college I took a sociolinguistics course on NC dialects with a German professor who has since moved back to Europe. Our research project was based around a tape of two code-switchers, that is, a man and a woman who spoke Standard AND Southern English, and switched between the two depending on what register they were talking in. They read a grammatically unmarked text, so they were reading something that was dialectically neutral, it was merely phonetically accented.

I did a fairly ethnographic kind of survey, where I sat people down and talked to them for a long time about their upbringing and thoughts and perceptions after I had them fill out a questionnaire about the tapes.

The results were pretty interesting: all the people I spoke to came to a similar conclusion. Namely, they could hear the difference, but since both were speaking grammatically correct English, the accent didn't affect their perception of how much money they made, how educated or intelligent they were. The only places you saw the two diverge was that the Standard accent was considered less "friendly" overall than the Southern one. Keep in mind that this was one person reading the same text, just in a different "voice."

Anyway, I wish I could say the same for Britain, where my accent has earned me ridicule over the years as being "posh." Even people at boarding school with me would tease me, because the current vogue among young people all over Britain is to adopt a vaguely Essex twang named Estuary English by linguistics researchers, that I like to call "urbanese." See Jamie Oliver for details.

I had a dream last night about being a radio presenter (I was really rubbish) but this is very unlikely because the BBC, to make up for years of bias towards RP, now leans towards people with regional accents: a British Broadcoasting Company for ALL Britons is a worthy idea. But it's still biased.

UPDATE: It is apparently not just me that finds the bias against RP annoying. While I myself switch to a more american accent among my yankee (and confederate) friends, this lady feels obliged to talk 'ackney. I was particularly appalled to read about the Glaswiegian Speaker of the House of Commons firing his secretary for having an annoying sloane ranger accent. Not considered discrimination in that direction is it?

Anyway, the second interesting linguistic thing was that the Google legal department sent this letter in response to a Wired article using the verb "googling" as interchangeable with "using a search engine."

This is a common phenomenon: look at Kleenex, Xerox and Hoover. More importantly, look at Radio, Television, Newspapers (and, I might add, the Internet or the Web.) All were originally names for particular types of a new technology. All have been de-capitalised as they became interchangeable with the name of the technology itself. Wired itself was the first publication to declare that its house style now recognised internet as a lower-case noun, and not an upper-case brand name. Nevermind that people had been using it for years like that.

All that the Wired article on googling was doing was using language the way that speakers do. That is really all written language is: a reflection of how people agree on correct speech. Writing tends to lag behind spoken, because written language is still a code of power that uses prescriptivist grammar to keep it high-prestige as a skill. This is not a bad thing, more formal writing is, of course, going to get you somewhere in life as opposed to writing like ur txting (sic.)

Anyway, I say use google as a verb. As Calvin remarked to Hobbes "verbing weirds language." I would add that it also enriches it.

P.S. Looking for the comic strip linked above, I came across this.

WTF Mate? :: 11:05 PM :: easyjetsetter

I know what you're thinking. You're sitting at your desk on Monday Tuesday morning going, WTF mate? Yes, the site has changed somewhat since Friday, because the combination of my usual end-of-the-month budget crunch and total dissatisfaction with the masculine look of my blog meant that I spent most of Saturday getting to grips with CSS.

And look how pretty it is now! Now, I know that the boys probably find it nauseating, but I consider this color combination sweet without being cloying, like gelato versus Ben and Jerry's.

Some things aren't quite right. My graphic design eye tells me that there are too many different fonts (there should be three maximum, with different sizes and emphases considered making text into a different font.) I have come to terms with this: essentially since there is only one color of text now, I can cope with the different sizes and emphases.

Also, I don't like how the title doesn't QUITE line up with the navigation toolbars. I am also pretty miffed that I can't change my dateline so that it's in longhand or in French. I'm unable to work out how to have my pretty pink cursor hover color in the body of my posts too. I am sure it is pretty easy, but I've been playing for a while, and nothing's doing.Thanks to justinsomnia!

Some other constraints I intend to fix using some tools I just signed up for. I think I am going to try and power using a different comments thing. Not sure how to do that. But I'll have fun trying. I tried out haloscan and decided that I liked tabulas' comments a whole lot more, but wanted to keep the trackback, so the little mash-up you see below is a result of my increasing experimentation with source code. I mess up from time to time, but it's worked out ok.

Just as a side note, I know it is an extra font, but since the whole site is in my favourite font, garamond, I could not resist taking Mcsweeney's up on their recommendation of the italic garamond ampersand. I am going to try to get this baby into as many places as possible, because it is the most elegant character ever. UPDATE: I now count four places that it appears. Enough? Nah.

V.O. & V.F.! :: 07:55 PM :: easyjetsetter

Hexagon Version française à suivre…je vous invite de me corriger!

This evening, in my French class, our teacher reminded us that there is only a fortnight (two weeks for our American friends...) until the great trial: the DALF. It’s petrifying to think about, but I have to. Mrs. Barbour (whose name comes from the fact that she wears a raincoat every day, even if it does not in fact rain) never desists in reminding me and my Polish classmates, “at your level, in order to succeed, you should be talking French all the time.”

I am rather at a disadvantage: I work in English, I speak to most of my friends in English, even if they are French, and, above all, I write my blog in English. Since most of the DALF is written, I’ve decided to write at least half of what I am thinking in French each day.

Anyway, even if I were not on the brink of an exam that wakes me up screaming every night, common courtesy dictates that I write in French. I recently signed up for several Paris webrings, which are, of course, entirely francophone. I expect I will make mistakes, but the fun thing about the blogosphere is that bloggers everywhere like nothing better than to correct people who are wrong. French bloggers like being right as much as their transatlantic cousins.

You’re not allowed a dictionary for the DALF, so I am trying to acclimatize myself to writing in French without a seatbelt, as it were. I therefore do not know how to translate the word pundit. Originally, it was the Sanskrit word for the Brahmin who would recite the prayers, or “puja” at all the big events, like cremations and marriages. But ordinary Indians were not allowed to understand what this Brahmin was saying.

So, you could say that pundits are those with access to privileged linguistic knowledge. If there are any French pundits listening – I welcome you. Help me!

P.S. I cheated, pundit translates to pontife thereby confirming the link with priests and pointiffs.

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Ce soir, dans mon cours de français, notre prof nous a rappelé qu’il ne reste plus qu’une quinzaine avant de passer la grande épreuve : le DALF. C’était absolument effrayant d’y penser. Mais, il le faut, et comme Mme. Barbour (on va l’appeler de cette façon car elle porte toujours un imperméable – même s’il ne pleut pas) nous dit sans cesser, « à votre niveau, pour bien réussir il faut toujours parler en français. »

Malheureusement, mon boulot m’handicapé parmis mes camarades polonaises : je bosse en anglais, je parle l’anglais avec la plupart de mes amis, même les français, et, surtout, j’écris mon blog en anglais ! Puis que la plupart du DALF soit une épreuve écrite, j’ai decidé de faire au moins la moitié de mes pensées chaque jour en français.

D’ailleurs, même si je faisais pas une épreuve qui me donne des cauchemars chaque nuit, la politesse m’obligerait d’écrire un peu en français. Récemment, je me suis inscrite aux plusieurs webrings parisiens, dont tous les blogeurs sont français. Bien sûr, je vais faire des fautes, mais dans le monde des blogeurs, il n’y rien de mieux que quelqu’un qui se trompe. Les blogeurs français, ansi que leurs frères transatlantiques, adorent avoir raison.

Dans le DALF, on n’a pas le droit d’un dictionnaire, alors il faut que je m’acclimate à écrire sans une ceinture de securité, comme on dit. Par conséquent, je sais pas comment traduire « pundit ». A l’origine, c’était un mot Sanskrit pour le Brahmin qui recitait les prières, ou « puja », chez les incinérations et les marriages. Mais les indiens quotidiens comprennaient jamais les mots que ces prêtres disaient.

On pourrait dire que les « pundits » sont les gardiens des conaissances linguistiques priviligées. Si vous m’écoutez, les « pundits » de la langue française, soyez la bienvenues. Aidez-moi !

P.S. J’ai triché : « pundit » veut dire un pontife en français. Cela confirme le lien avec les prêtres.

An hors d'oeuvre before my main post... :: 05:03 PM :: easyjetsetter

Version francaise a suivre - je vous invite de me corriger

I just applied for a job (mostly just for fun...) with a certain renowned search engine, who shall remain nameless. In the last couple of days I have applied for 20 jobs and only one has replied with a confirmation of their receipt of my application. I was therefore flummoxed and astonished that this nameless search engine should have written me two emails within the space of four seconds to say thank you for applying, and how sorry they are that they may not be able to contact me personally if I am unsuccessful.

I mean, fair enough, they were electronically generated, but if all employers could take that trouble then being unemployed would be a rather less soul-destroying experience. Without feedback, it’s like sending my soul into a black hole every day. Yes, I do have a job, but the combination of my microscopic salary and working from home gives me the feeling of being unemployed despite having work to get done…

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Je viens de faire une demande candidature (plutôt pour m’amuser que pour réussir…) chez une certaine société anonyme, mais très connue pour son recherche web. Ces derniers jours j’en ai fait une vingtaine mais il n’y avait qu’un seul cabinet qui m’accusait réception de ma demande. Tenant compte de cela, c’est prodigieusement bosculant de récevoir deux emails, dans un delai de quatre secondes, de cette société anonyme. L’un m’a remercié de ma demande, et l’autre m’a offert des excuses qu’il serait impossible de me notifier si je n’aurai pas d’entretien.

Entendu, ils on été produits automatiquement, mais si les autres employeurs prenaient le temps de le faire, être au chômage pourrait être moins démoralisant. Sans réponses, c’est comme si j’envoyais mes demandes dans un vide. C’est vrai, j’ai un boulot, mais je bosse chez moi et je gagne si peu que j’ai l’impression d’être au chômage, malgré le travail qui me reste...

Two great American art forms :: 07:10 PM :: easyjetsetter

At 17, if anyone asked me what my hobbies were, I would list "travel, reading, theatre." Everyone says that. But then I was quite a boring child. When pressed, and when nobody my age was looking, I would add "renaissance culture."

Then, one day, my headmaster called me into his office and told me "our school is eligible for this scholarship to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I've nominated you for it because you're very chatty and Americans like that." Of course, although I had never been to the States I knew that there were no REAL universities there, so I wasn't going. However, I needed the interview practice and quite fancied visiting California for free (I was dull and stupid) so I agreed.

Well, I just loved it. It was like the ugly duckling when he meets all those other swans and flies away with them. It was like Dumbo when he realises he can fly without the magic feather. Howard Hughes. Charles Lindbergh. Insert your own inspirational flying analogy here, and that's what it felt like.

There were many great things that happened to me at Carolina, but one of them was I developed actual hobbies. Real things I liked to do. Both were direct consequences of courses I took, as part of the fabulous woolliness that is a liberal arts education.

First, my new best friend, who is now my wife, was taking a music course, and thought it would be cool if I took it too, as my "aesthetic - fine arts" perspective. I had played the clarsach (traditional celtic harp) and sang for 9 years and had a strong musical theory background, so I figured it would be an easy A. This is how I was seduced by that devil jazz.

Duke Ellington once said that jazz was the kind of guy you wouldn't want your daughter to come home with, but the point is that jazz is exactly the kind of guy she wants to hook up with. It was sexy. It was dirty. It could only have happened in America, and only in the delta, and only in Cajun country, where the blacks and the whites and the creoles all sat in the swamp and sang the blues.

Albert Murray, who came to speak to our class, told us that jazz was like a rabbit in a briar patch. Life is surrounded by thorns, but you use your wits to live in it with the minimum of scratches. Jazz was the original music of rebellion, the ultimate form of protest: I will play it my way.

I only really like jazz up to about 1960, because West Coast and cool jazz just don't do it for me, but I enjoy a lot of more recent fusion stuff, like skrunk, and latin jazz, and bluegrass (yes, it's a form of jazz.) So for me, jazz IS charlie parker and dizzy gillespie. none of this Boney M and Kenny G shit.

My second great american love came from a crush. This chap was a little disturbed (I like the weird ones.) His mother had held his head under water until he bore witness as a child and he was subsequently virulently atheist. His parents made him major in journalism, when all he wanted to do was write. He was rather in love with being a tortured artist, and boy do I love those tortured artists.

In an attempt to make this particular tortured artist aware of my existence, I took a class he was teaching called "the post-modern comic book." Yes, he was an undergraduate. It was a special program. A faculty TA supported it, in this case the superlative Paul Jones, who runs ibiblio and who was invaluable on my thesis on computer mediated communication. The crush, as it happens, didn't pan out, and the gentleman in question is now happily married. But I digress.

Comic books...everything from that hideous Family Circle, to Superman, to Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, to this harrowing tale. You might have noticed I have a link to the comics journal on the sidebar. Those people are the professionals, the NRA to my BB gun. I don't measure up to them, but I also can't resist that bit of the bookstore. The one at the back, between the porn and the science fiction.

I would eat Gorey and Crumb. If I could marry Chris Ware, I would. If Art Spiegelman ever needs another daughter, I'm her. I wish Marjane Satrapi wanted me as a friend. Joe Sacco and Seth make me cry. To paraphrase Scott McCloud, the media go-to person for all things comix, I can't stop reading!

Living in the land of the Bande Dessinee, where such things are respected and appreciated as true art is nice, but there's something less raw and real about it being considered high-brow in France. It's the opposite in America though, it's quite an exciting time for comix, like being in the New York music clubs in the 1940's for jazz...not quite respectable, but no longer a dirty little secret.

This article prompted this post today. I think you'll see why I consider comics today and jazz before 1960 inextricably linked. And hey, now my hobby list reads "travel, reading, theatre, comix and jazz." Just my own little "I'm an individual" ping to the big wide conformist world.