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Find me from now over here.
The world is ending and I am starting a Ph.D. program in literature. These two facts combined constitute, I believe, an excellent reason to maintain a blog.
Unfortunately, this little blog will be no more. I may start again elsewhere, later. For now, I seek the life beyond the interwob.
Once I catch up with my life here, I’ll go back to reading and the occasional comment. Meanwhile, if you find yourselves in the City of Abundant Fraternal Devotion, give me a yell. (GEMCS-goers, I’m looking at you.)
Peace, kiddos. Over and out.
Reader, I finished it.
The thesitation, I mean. I am to be a Master of the Art of doing things to academic prose that should never be done. The space between degrees, the experience of high-speed thesis-writing, my unkillable love for old books, recusant ladies, the British Library, and my blessing of a supervisor to be (or not to be) blogged, later. Perhaps.
In other scattershot news:
- I have returned to the Home side of the Atlantic, for good (ish). Strange feelings on this to be blogged or not blogged, as we progress.
- Michael Chabon has my heart, will always have it, ever has had it. If you, like me, are an established fanperson of America’s greatest living prose adventurer, and have not yet mainlined Maps and Legends, by all means, do so. If you have not yet tasted the joys of Chabon fanpersondom, well, what the hell are you waiting for? Review of these beautiful essays, perhaps, to come.
- A new (to me) iteration of the laypeople-don’t-get-academics experience: here in New Eden, where I reside temporarily as I prepare to move to the City of Abundant Fraternal Devotion, I daily encounter folks who have known me a long while, but with whom I am only intermittently in touch. Inevitably, they ask, “so what are you up to now?” Evidently, “Well, I just finished one advanced degree in something you have never considered and am about to start another, in the same obscure-to-you area, which will take five or six years at best and will not provide me with anything like what you consider a reasonable salary until I’m into my thirties” strikes strange chords in New Eden hearts – chords which produce a thousand-yard-stare or, at best, a concerned head-tilt. Hmm.
- The blog? I don’t know. I consider quitting entirely, taking Kathleen Hanna’s excellent advice. (GET OFF THE INTERNET.) I consider moving to a new space, letting my bloggy persona grow up with my life persona. I consider staying here and moving in new directions. Newness, in any case, calls to me. We’ll see.
For now, reader, simply: greetings. Don’t give up on me just yet, much as my absence may have deserved it.
This post by Renaissance Girl really moved me. Over the past twenty-four hours, I’ve come to understand it.
Yesterday, as I began gathering books at the Petri Dish’s wonderful library, I received an e-mail announcing that a very dear friend has died of the cancer he’d been battling, on and off, for about a year.
I cocked an eyebrow at my books, in the moment before the shock wore off and I began to cry. I challenged the books to make themselves important, to matter in the face of the impossible yet inescapable fact that the kindest and best of men had just disappeared from the earth.
They failed entirely.
None of this matters at all. At all.
1) I wonder whether the rate of endorsement of pro-gun policies is significantly higher than average among people who work in the retail and service sectors. I’m beginning to change my colors on the issue, myself.
2) Why is flirting so fun, and why is it often even more fun if you know you’ll never actually become involved with the person in question? Is it just the thrill of pushing the envelope, exploring boundaries? Is it the excitement of discovering a person, sounding hir out, playfully dancing around in uncharted territory? Is it simple narcissism — the wish to be desirable, and to have your own desire recognized? Is it because flirting can highlight the eroticism latent in just about any exchange, and do so within emotionally safe, socially sanctioned limits? To return to an earlier wonderment: when it comes to flirting, where are the boundaries among sex, eros, and friendship — or do such boundaries even exist?
I was just outside watering my mother’s hydrangeas. My pup, whom we’ll call Yakdog, jumped and snapped at the gleaming spray from the hose, and engaged me in a game that involved rolling around in the grass and getting tangled up in the hose and very, very soaked.
The profound purples, gentle yellows, and ecstatic blues of the hydrangeas, extraordinary bunches of them the size of canteloupes, caught the light and gave it substance, depth. The grass underfoot tickled my ankles, and the freckles on my shoulders smiled up at the warm July sun.
If I were Jo(e), I would now post a photo of the hydrangeas. But since I’m not, all I have to say is this:
I’m really not, and never have been, a city girl, after all. The grimaces of my asphalt-blooded friends notwithstanding, it would be really nice to go to school in Northern Harbor Town, where I could have a little house and a little yard, and a dog, and loads and loads of hydrangeas.
My brain is in too much of a fizzle from: too much sun, too much job-searching (for, reader, I am unemployed), and too much totally pointless fretting about, alternately, my Brit Uni prospects and the propensities of the French electorate regarding a man whose coat of arms, if he had one, would almost certainly involve a water cannon (rampant, gules).
So here’s my half-hearted “Happy Birthday, Shakespeare and Nabokov — or, or, wait, shit, I lost my Julian calendar… what day is it? Who was born when? Whatever.” post. There were going to be poetry and quotations and shiny pictures and all sorts of stuff, and maybe even an Urban Jewess-esque literary mashup (“The Tragedy of Pnin, Prince of Denmark,” perhaps, or “Macbeth, or Ardor,” or “Invitation to a Beheading, or What You Will”).
But I’m just too damned depressed. And Yourcenar’s memoirs are too good. So, cheers, Will, and cheers, Vladimir, and to those of you who have read neither (high school English doesn’t count, unless you’re still in high school), you should, uh, go do that. Quicklike.
One of the instincts that tells me I want to spend my life as an educator is the instinct that kicks in when I am reading a book, a poem, a particularly deftly crafted article, and find myself planning hypothetical lessons. This happened recently with Jane Eyre and again, weirdly, with Cymbeline.
The first time it happened, the first novel that inspired that devoted, eye-opening thought, I would love to teach this, was Slaughterhouse Five. I was fifteen. I have never wavered since in my desire to teach.
Kurt Vonnegut, I owe you one. May the afterlife bless you with unbridled wackiness and visionary laughter. Requiescat in pace.
Yesterday, I bought a plane ticket. This morning, I booked hostels for Paris and Toulouse. Now I need a visa and a place to live.
I am actually, really, truly moving to France.
I’ve been doing a balancing act in my head: what I will miss against what I look forward to.
Americana to which I am deeply attached:
- Mexican food (ironic, isn’t it).
- Mac & cheese from a box.
- Coffee-to-go.
- Wireless internet everywhere you go.
- Queers and a queer movement. [Trying to find an appropriate, idiomatic French translation of “Not ‘gay’ as in ‘happy’; ‘queer’ as in ‘fuck you.’” Feel free to help me out.]
- Doggy bags. Ask a French waiter, “Can you wrap this to go, please?” and you’re likely to get a cheese-knife between the eyes.
- Efficient, quality service with a smile.
- Vegan food; affordable tofu.
- Feminist men.
- Comfy, baggy, tee-shirt-and-jeans, slouched-down-in-a-chair-with-legs-splayed classic American tomboy femininity. [I hope French women like this exist somewhere in France. If they do, they do not live in Paris.]
- Cheddar cheese!
French high-points that make my mouth water:
- Highly drinkable 5-Euro wine. Hello.
- Sit-down coffee.
- The ingrained cultural value of fresh-baked bread.
- Cheese, cheese caves, cheesemakers. Unpasteurized dairy products generally. Vive la microbe!*
- Cheap, fabulous North African foods (ironic, isn’t it).
- Blanquette de veau. [One of many reasons I hope Madame will invite me to dinner in Paris. Woman makes a mean blanquette.]
- Tartes, soufflés, mi-cuits, millefeuilles, etc, of all varieties.
- Free museums. Student discounts at the movies. Government-worker discounts on train and air fares. Misc. perks of social democracy.
- Miniature automobiles.
- Never having to tip anyone, ever.
- The value of history and preservation and collective memory. Not, “oh, these brownstones were built before the Revolutionary war? Well, that’s too bad because we’re going to have to knock them down to make way for a new amusement park,” but “Gee, I’m a private individual with a spare million, why don’t I fix up this old ruin and donate it to the public?”
- Sitting at a bar, a café, a restaurant, imbibing something delicious, carrying on a lovely conversation with friends and smoking a cigarette at the same time! Quelle joie, quelle beauté, quel miracle!
- The French press.
- French politics. (“Ségo- who?” you say. You’ll learn.)
- My angry, loud, opinionated, sarcastic French persona.
- The smell of the Paris métro. I’m not kidding. A corollary: the frustrating innavigability of the SNCF. Something about it just feels like home.
- Price-control. For many products, like, importantly, petrol and cigarettes, a given brand cannot charge different prices in different places. A pack of Gauloises Bleues costs the same in central Paris as it does in a quiet coastal hamlet in Normandy.
- Being exotic. The French are enthralled by American laid-back attitudes (which some might call “lack of manners,” “vulgarity,” “culturelessness,” and so on). American girls who smoke are a perpetual source of wide-eyed amazement. Baggy jeans on a girl? Wow, she’s such a rebel!
- And yet: the French always seem to have a better grasp of American history and American politics than Americans do.
- And my favorite phrase: “C’est pas de ma faute, j’ai pas voté pour lui.” I think people will be more likely to believe me now than they were in 2004.
*Liam Patrick Stack quote of the day: “Cheese country sounds like fun to me. I bet cheese country wouldn’t have destroyed the Beirut airport. Or invaded Iraq.”
I’ve spent most of today and yesterday doing “research” (read: Wikipedia and guidebooks, from Michelin to Let’s Go) on Toulouse and the surrounding region. As you can see on the right, le Gascogne – an antiquated name for a region comprising most of southwest France, just barely excluding Toulouse to its east- is quite lovely. The Pyrénées in the background promise majestic mountain-ness. I have never been to the mountains (the Berkshires don’t count). I flew over the Swiss Alps twice, passing through Zurich on my way to Istanbul and back. Awe-inspiring as the view was, I’m afraid that didn’t count either. Anyway the impression was much wiped away by the majestic, brutal rudeness of the Sweissedeutsch airport employees. Yerk.
But these lovelies are just crying out to me to break in some boots and get my urbanized ass back into the wilderness:
Gascogne and Aquitaine to the north both maintain (and this I remember from my visit to the most idylically bucolic place I’ve ever been, Périgord and the Dordogne) a lively historical memory, mostly relating to some stinky English kings who thought themselves sovereigns of the region about eight hundred years ago. Cultural chauvinism runs strong, as it does everywhere in France. The best foie gras – and the unhappiest geese – in the world come from Périgord.
Albi, a well-preserved (from an historical point of view) town to the northeast of Toulouse, is dwarfed by this magnificent structure:
Sainte-Cécile, over two hundred years in the building (from the mid-thirteenth to the mid-fifteenth century), is a sort of half-cathedral, half-fortress – a symbol of the kind of secular power held by the Church in medieval France.
It will be important to note, as my life there begins and progresses, that France was and frequently still is known as “la fille aînée de l’Église” – the eldest daughter of the Church. From this appellation, its origin, and resistance to it, derives the République’s obession with “la laïcité.” Sometimes, however, the will to historical oblivion that drives the more rabid of the laïcard(e)s smashes up against a wall of ingrained Catholic identity – a wall strikingly similar in weight and intransigence to those of glorious, fortified Sainte-Cécile. The result? Rioting Arabs.
But before we begin to despair of ever seeing a peaceable France, we’ll call an end to this installment of mouse’s daydreams about her future life. And isn’t it beautiful?
