Monthly Archives: April 2005

baby’s first french gurgles

Posted on by

…and just like a baby saying her first word, I just gurgled out my first spontaneous, reactive, and completely unpremeditated "oh la la."  It happened as I was cleaning up Baxter’s pee from the floor.  So tired of cleaning up pee, and seeing how very much there was, I inhaled the annoyed-French-girl inhale I’d already picked up (it’s a vocalized inhale that sounds, basically, like you’re surprised), started to exhale the annoyed-French-girl "ohhhh" that I’d already picked up, and then– the tongue went into action and I found myself "lalalalalalala"ing over the pee. 

it’s amazing.  I never once had a moment where I said consciously, oh, I like that oh la la thing they have going, I’m going to integrate that into my vocabulary.  No.  This is a case of being so surrounded by a new language that you pick it up completely organically, without making the slightest effort.

now that baby’s learning to talk, we can expect next she’ll learn to walk– in 3-inch heels over cobblestones, like a real French girl.  Then, who knows. I might learn to ride a bike– provided the bike in question is a robin’s egg-blue Vespa LX125…

hot child in the city!

Another New Yorker flies the coop

Posted on by

Judtih Regan, Publisher of ReganBooks (an imprint of HarperCollins) announced this week that she’s moving her publishing company to Los Angeles. 

Citing quality of life differences, she manages to get in a few snipes at New York that made my heart hurt– with homesickness, yes, but also with agreement.

"I want my staff to be happy, to  live in more affordable homes, to be able to raise their kids  without permanently mortgaging their quality of life…. I thought  we should change course for a while and build a creative community in a place where it’s possible to afford just a little more time  – and space – to rest and imagine," she tells the LA Times that New York has become a city of billionaire bankers and million-dollar one-bedroom apartments. 

Yes, precisely.  I left New York because there wasn’t enough room for me.  There was a tiny slot in a tiny apartment on the Upper West Side, and the nagging memory of gorgeous nineteenth century Haussmannian tree-lined avenues and apartment buildings with enormous windows and wrought-iron grills, and marble fireplaces, and evocative stairwells, and cobblestoned streets for my heels to get caught in.  My leaving was partially to do with being in love with the lifestyle I knew was available in Paris, but also had to do with being disillusioned and unexcited about the life I could lead in New York. 

In New York, I probably could eke out an existence for myself, as a grad student teaching lit courses at John Jay.  But in Paris– yes, I’m ekeing out an existence for myself, however I can, increasingly as a journalist, supplementarily as an English teacher.  But I’m doing it against a backdrop of such beauty and history that I am inspired 99% of the time.  My work is more interesting, my writing is more interesting, my life is more interesting.  Even when I’m going through a rough time, bureaucratically, professionally, emotionally, financially (and there have been far too many of those), it ultimately doesn’t seem to matter because I adore where I have found myself.

Regan writes, a propos of the opportunities to work from anywhere opened up by a globalizing world, "We’ve also got a lot to learn from what’s happening on the Internet — the bloggers and graphic designers and entrepreneurs who have been busy shaking up the old media hierarchies. These people are the future — smart young people who love creating content and who know how to reach each other and share their ideas using every possible means, whether it’s between hard covers, on the Web or on their cellphone screens. There are still talented people in New York who understand all that. But these days, with all the hassle and expense it takes to survive in that town, many of them are moving elsewhere."

Yes.  Good riddence.  And how heartbreaking at the same time.

animosity amongst the toys

Posted on by

I think Baxter is jealous of my laptop. 

It is, after all, always in my lap.  I give it my undivided attention.  I’m always touching it, tapping away at the keys or stroking the touchpad for the mouse.  I take it all over the apartment with me.

Baxter sits next to me when I’m working.  I do occasionally pat, scratch, rub, kiss, or otherwise lavish attention on him.  But he gets nowhere near the attention my laptop gets.

This would all be pure speculation, if Baxter didn’t have a couple of curious habits toward the laptop.  If I’m sitting on the couch and Baxter is walking around on the floor, he’ll come over to the couch from time to time, stand on his hand legs, and start tapping me with his front paws.  If I don’t respond, he’ll start hitting the laptop to get my attention.  This invariably provokes a negative response from me, but I guess a negative response is better than no resposne at all- especially to a dog.

If he’s sitting next to me on the couch (as he is now), he’ll also come over to me to check on me or to solicit attention.  No response from mommy? This is his cue to start tapping on the keyboard.  While I appreciate Baxter’s contributions to my JTA articles, they aren’t as coherent as they would need to be, often consisting of things like "wawqqwqwQSAA."   

If he has been pushed off the keyboard and told firmly to stop, he is sometimes undeterred, and will physically climb up onto the laptop and walk across it, closing programs and wreaking mayhem. 

So.  I don’t know what to do but I feel rather like a mother trying to prove to the oldest child that although the baby gets a lot of attention, I love them both equally as much, and in different ways.

help, I’m stuck in a dialectic

Posted on by

Thesis: boy number one
Antithesis: boy number two.

Thesis: boy number one, too young
Antithesis: boy number two, the right age, but too busy.

Thesis: boy number one, so sweet. 
Antithesis: boy number two, so cool. and sweet.  uh-oh, there’s a flaw in my perfect antithesis…

Synthesis: although I swing back and forth between nostalgia for the former and sadness and frustration over the latter, neither guy seems currently to be available.  However, my heart can’t deal with breaking out of the dialectic with some new radical disruption, like, say, some hypothetical guy number three.   

Solution: A month of cold-turkey, take-care-of-myself, I-don’t-need-no-stinking-boy, alone time.  Regardless of what kind of overdetermined state my emotions may be in, I don’t actually have to worry because neither guy is breaking down my door at the moment.  There’s a song that I like by a group called Frou Frou that says "Let go…cause there’s beauty in the breakdown." Ok. So here we go.  Six more days of matzoh and three more weeks of cold turkey (the month began last week when I broke up with J).

Honestly.  Sometimes you have to actively make the choice to concentrate on yourself and not be open to new people.  I have enough people.  I have enough complications.  Time to simplify.  Time for the breakdown. 

Except: boy number two still has to come get his stuff from my apartment.  Well– maybe cold turkey is a little extreme… what about lukewarm turkey?

more passover fun

Posted on by

Seder went well! Everyone came with something; everyone left with something. Some people learned that the Last Supper was actually a seder (helLO, I thought everyone knew that!). Some people learned what a seder was to begin with. Some were inspired to live more Jewishly; others found Judaism fascinating in a way they weren’t formerly aware of. And every single Jew present (8 out of 15) felt proud of herself (and one himself) for attending a seder in this pagan land they call France.

There was enough food and enough wine. I ran through the haggadah like nobody’s business. Nat asked a question no one could (or wanted to) answer (why do we need a Messiah if we can heal the world [tikkun olam] ourselves?). Actually I think it depends on your definition of “messiah,” and what you expect him (or her, or it) to do.

But that’s really not my theological bag, messianic theory. Much like American literature before 1880, I prefer to leave it alone and let the specialists handle it.

And now, a Slate article to fill you in on everything I can and can’t eat this week. Looking forward to that matzoh pizza a la francaise… I’m not going crazy this year and eating only kosher for passover products, FYI. So my matzoh pizza is liable to feature goat cheese and arugula with a balsamic vinaigrette reduction. Bon appetit!

the first annual vegatarian/sephardic/non-traditional/over-crowded pesach extravaganza

Posted on by

… is about to begin.  Am I crazy? Yes, I am. 

First things first.  My Emily is coming! and not alone: with Renee and Renee’s roommate Corey! Fun.  Fun fun fun.  All-girl fun in Paris.  Tonight: fondue and wine in baby bottles and TLC for your maitresse’s still very sad little soul.

Then tomorrow: the deluge.  I had this great idea: it’s Passover in Paris and I’ve never thrown a seder before– why not start now? Complicating factors: I don’t know how to lead a seder, I’ve never done it before, I don’t have any of my Judaica in Paris with my (no kiddush cups or matzoh covers or haggadot), and I have a fairly small living room with limited seating.  What’s more, I detest cooking meat, much less anything pesach-worthy like brisket or roasted chicken– and besides, I don’t have an oven. 

So it’s a vegetarian seder.  Cool.  Lots of hummus and tzatziki and some concoctions with artichokes and eggplant will be present.

Then there’s the fact that the Jewish community in Paris is largely Sephardic.  Which means all the pesach accoutrements I was able to find are a little non-traditional– or at least, not within my Ashkenazi tradition.  So I will be featuring orange-flavorzed Matzoh a vin (sounds decadent) on my seder table.  We’re veggie, remember, so instead of that nasty shank bone there will be a piece of radish or something.  We’re feminists, so yes, we will have an orange proudly in the middle of the seder plate and we will be trying something called "Miriam’s Cup," to give the matriarchs some credit in the whole Exodus thing.

But– there is no horseradish to be found in all of Paris.  Seriously.  I looked in the Marais, in Belleville, and in my local supermarket.  Nada.  So in place of horseradish: mustard! I know. Ew. But horseradish and the mustard seed are vaguely related, and anyway shut up, it’s my seder.

As far as the haggadah goes– I’m basically just cutting and pasting stuff off the internet and handing out photocopies.  Most of my guests are not Jewish, so they won’t know the difference, and my Jewish guests are not observant in the slightest.  They’re just happy to be attending a seder!

Finally, there are the guests themselves.  I have a habit of doing this in Paris, when I have parties– I feel like I know hardly anyone here, so on the couple of occasions where I’ve had get-togethers, I’ve invited almost everyone I do know, and ended up having way too many people.  My birthday party in October took up two full rooms of a bar in the Marais.  My housewarming, which began as an informal apero to which I did NOT invite everyone I knew, specifically to keep the numbers down, ended up spilling into all the rooms of my apartment.

The seder will be no different.  Anxious to have those whom I care about in Paris around me, plus the people they care about, I already had an over-inflated list.  Add to that my 3 visitors.  Add to that a couple of random friends who I invited on the spur of the moment.  Soon you have 15 people in a tiny little living room, sitting on the couch, the floor, and on the 3 chairs in the apartment. 

Then there are the deletions, or the impossibles– the people who I want to be there, but who won’t be.  The people I love more than anyone in the world–  my parents and my sister– are too far away.  My extended Jewish side of the family, who I adore, also in New York (even the ones who live in London).  My ex, who I spent every passover with for the last 4 years, obviously won’t be there (the ex-factor as well as the NY factor).  Finally, there’s my most recent ex, J, who I wanted to come so badly, but who has to work an event that night (obviously; thus the breakup).   How can you reconcile the pain of the absences when there are so many presences? There’s nothing I can do about that, except think of the people I miss and send them warm happy passover vibes. 

I really don’t know what we’re going to eat for dinner, though.  I’ve declared this a Sephardic zone, so there will be couscous involved, as well as something with tofu that Kaitlin promised to make.  But I spent 70 euros on groceries and dessert– and I still feel like there won’t be enough food.  Oy, oy, oy!

Chag sameyach, les enfants!

Benoit Seize

Posted on by

Hurrah, hurrah, there’s a new pope!

The cardinals arrived at their decision rather quickly. I thought the little box on France 3 focused on the chimney of the Sistine Chapel for the past 2 days was a little extreme ("what, are they going to watch the chimney for a week??" I asked my roommate).  But it is exciting that there’s a new man in charge at the Vatican.

The last one was named Pope the same month that I was born (October 1978) and so for that pope to have died– well let’s just say I felt a litttle old to have lived out the entire length of a papacy– and one who was elected YOUNG at that!

So Ratzinger– sorry, Benoit XVI (because that’s what he’s called in my adopted country)– has a fairly good record with the Jews. Apparently he said our wait for the Messiah is not in vain.  Thanks for that confirmation.  Now that he’s the Pope, I’m sure he knows more about God than I do (even if he gets the details wrong).

But Rat– I mean Benoit– oh, he’s nowhere near as cute and cuddly as JP II was. He’s kind of moche, no?

I have to say, though, I think this whole pope thing has been extremely bizarre.  First there was the outpouring of public grief in St Peter’s Sqaure.  People crying as if their own father had died. Now, I’m not Catholic but I know a lot of fairly observant Catholics, and I don’t think they considered the Pope anywhere near in the same category as their fathers.  So the wailing and the crying– I don’t know, kind of excessive.

Then there was the parading of the corpse around the square. Ew. Just ew. Kristeva, as I understand it, says the problem we have with corpses is that they are an expression of the abject– the fact that we are all destined to the same fate. Yes that could be it. But dead bodies are just eerie and gross.  Closed casket, anyone?? But I guess everyone has to see that he died naturally or something, that there was no foul play.

Then there was the wait by the chimney.  They’re reairing footage of the so-called "white" smoke being released. Is it me or does it look kind of grey, Good thing they rang the bells as well, because otherwise people would have just been like, "uhhhhh… grey somke? does that mean they elected someone and he said no?"

Finally, there’s the cheering and screaming about the new Pope– as if the Vatican had won the World Series, or there was a new American Idol. People chanting "Viva Papa, Viva Papa!" like their father was winning a spaghetti-eating contest at Puglia’s in Little Italy.

So that’s my snarky take on what’s going on. I just feel like the whole thing should have been carried out with a bit more gravitas.

breaking news

Posted on by

-baxter got a haircut.  he looks adorable and, more importantly, he is CLEAN.  He got a new broccoli-shaped chew toy for being such a good boy at the groomer’s.

-j, having temporarily regained his senses, has once again been deprived of them.  the reason? he can’t manage his workload and have a girlfriend at the same time, at least for the next six months.  I officially understand the impossibility of the situation (honestly, I do, I’ve been through what he’s going through), but unofficially I reject this explanation and am going to have to be content to write this one off as one of those bizarre things that can happen to you when you’re not careful and let yourself fall for someone before you really know them and their issues.   

-I saw the most amazing movie tonight– "va, vis et deviens." I can’t write much about it now because I’m still a little too upset about j to think rationally enough to write a film critique. suffice it to say: it’s about a 9-year-old ethiopian refugee in israel, whose (christian) mother sent him there to escape the refugee camp in the sudan where he was sure to die, telling him to "va, vis et deviens" [go, live and become].  in order to survive, he has to pass as an ethiopian jew named schlomo.  the film follows his life from the moment of separation from his mother to fatherhood and the relocation of his birth mother.  there’s a lacanian analysis to be written in there somewhere, but I’m not the one to write it.  anyway– as I was telling my friend Lis on the metro heading home after the film– I don’t know if it’s better to see a comedy or a movie like this the day you get your heart broken.  if you see a comedy, you get to laugh for two hours, but then when you leave you’re faced with your misery again.  at least with a movie like this, you have to admit that your own problems seem small in comparison.  when you leave the theatre, they’re still there, and you have to come to terms with them, but without a doubt you’ve been served a heaping portion of humble pie.

I should add I cried the entire movie, for various reasons:
-there was the simple heartbreak of watching a little boy leave his mother. 
-then there was the loading of the El Al plane in the Sudan and the subsequent deplaning in Tel Aviv.  this of course made me think of that time when I boarded an El Al place in the Sudan.  No, just kidding.  But it made me nostalgic about my own trip to Israel in 1999, and I felt a renewed sense of committment to Israel and to Judaism.  However, I felt somewhat divided about and suspicious of those feelings– I felt proud of Israel for basically saving Ethiopian and Soviety Jewry in the 80s, but I was/am conflicted about the problematics associated with welcoming a group of people into a country and turning away others on the basis of their religion.  The film certainly touched on that, but didn’t explore it in great length.
-there was my own weird relationship to judaism, and the fact that I’ve had it so deeply called into question because of all these freaking goys who keep screwing me over
-then when he found his mother at the end, I started bawling because I wanted MY mommy.

then at random times during the film, for no related reason, I would remember one of j’s gestures or mannerisms or figures of speech, and I would remember that it was over with us, and I would cry again.

that’s all for now. who was it who said life is a veil (vale?) of tears? I really, really want there to be fewer tears in my life, starting NOW. Genug! Merde, ca me fait chier, ce mec!

[exhaling slowly]

Posted on by

well, my meeting with my directeur actually went really well! Oh my lord I was petrified, sitting in the bibliotheque ascoli waiting for him to call me (the offices at the Sorbonne are adjacent to the library, which is reserved for the people who study french literature).  I had my laptop, my notes from him class, several books, three of my journals (where I take research notes and brainstorm ideas), and two printouts of my outline.  I was furiously reviewing and synthesizing and compiling questions to ask him.  Luckily he was running very late, so I ended up having an hour and a half to wait, although by the end of that time I was slumped in my seat staring up at the ceiling wishing I could listen to my ipod.

finally he called me in, and we had a good talk.  I feel like my paper is going in a good direction.  and although initially I complained that the sorbonne is too conservative, now I just think they have an old-fashioned research methodology.  that’s not necessarily a bad thing.  he suggested in a couple of places that I was answering my questions before I had even posed them (for example, titling one chapter "deconstruction de l’identite" in claude cahun’s photography.  what I meant was to pose as a hypothesis that cahun deconstructs a stable gender identity in her work.  he didn’t see that as a done deal, as a foregone conclusion, and thought I was presenting it as one.  There were a few other instances of this, where, in my haste to break new ground in the way we write about artists who challenge gender, I was making a lot of theoretical assumptions that simply don’t exist for the French.

so it goes without saying that my directeur finds me to be a curious specimen of american academic.  I think today I proved that I can hold my own, or that I know what I’m talking about, or whatever. but on my way out, he told me a funny story.  carrie, who is always railing against inductive reasoning, will appreciate this, though perhaps not its implications for american researchers.  he said "the americans remind me of that story about the rabbi who goes all around the town saying ‘I have answers, who’s got questions?’"

the interpretation of dreams

Posted on by

I dreamt, last night, that I was standing on a very narrow footbridge– you know, the kind that’s made up of just planks linked together– that went across the east river but somehow was still a suspension bridge. I was joined by a bunch of asian women.  We were forming two parallel lines up and down the length of the bridge; I was standing somewhere in the middle.  Well, not standing—I was sitting, as were a bunch of other people.  But occasionally, everyone would start whispering that it was time to stand up.  I didn’t want to stand up because I was so much taller than everybody else.  But then I finally did get to my feet—and my full weight on my end of the bridge made the bridge tip out from under me! Luckily I was holding on to some of the suspension cords, but that forced me to swing out at a 45 degree angle to the bridge, out into the night, over the east river. Then when I swung back onto the bridge, I tried to catch hold, but was unsuccessful. I just tried not to panic and held on tight, figuring eventually I would lose momentum and wind up back on the bridge. 

Here’s what I think is the source of this dream.  Yesterday, I went to a seminar on non-fictional literary production at the Ecole Normale.  Some interesting papers were presented, one challenging Genette’s assertion in Fiction and Diction that the only texts worthy of narratological attention were fictional ones, that all other kinds of “pedestrian” writing was simply “diction,” which basically reduces literary to a function of style; another one attempted to conflate or problematize the categories of historia and poeia as they are set down rather oppositionally in chapter 9 of Aristotle’s Poetics; and the third paper was about the literarization of scientific and naturalist travel writing in the 18th century.  But at the end of the seminar, a debate erupted over the validness of these categories, “fiction” and “non-fiction.” I wasn’t able to follow the debate that closely because the people having it seemed propelled by a kind of nervous energy that made them speak really really really fast in French.  So I was kind of hanging on for dear life in the debate.  I didn’t really understand what the questions were that they were asking—they started talking about intertextuality, and I was with them; they meandered to the idea of the “reference” and I started to lose them, then they were debating the “real” and I was completely torn between disagreement with the way they were treating the category of the historically “real” and uncertainty as to whether I had actually understood them completely.  I wanted to enter the debate, but I was in a room with 20 French doctoral students and was a. intimidated because of the French issue b. intimidated because of the number of people there. 

The other thing was that I thought the theoretical framework a little funny.  The first paper talked about the way that literature contributes to the formation of social institutions and civic rhetoric by menas of phenomenology and sociology.  But I kept wondering why he didn’t draw the juxtaposition back the other way, to take the New Historicist line that literature (that is: fiction and non-fiction, everything that is a text, which is everything) is in fact the site where social forces converge and contribute to the text’s production. His aim was to treat “non-fictional” texts as literary texts and to examine how they are constituitive of the public as well as the literary sphere.  My observation was more along the lines of, why do we have to persist in the division between fiction and non-fiction? They’re all texts—instead of serving as an organizational placeholder, such a counterfeit division leads to confusion and the “busy work” practiced by literary critics of moving texts back and forth over an invisible genre line, i.e. “Rousseau’s Confessions is non-fiction because that’s really what happened in his life!” “No, the Confessions are a literary construction and how reliable is Rousseau actually as a source on his own life, and anyway he made a lot of that stuff up!” The emphasis is not on the texts, but on the way we categorize them.  I mean, I guess that’s genre studies for you, which I find vaguely interesting but am also wary of, because a lot of it seems designed just to keep academics working rather than being a worthwhile line of questioning.

I’m rambling and rushing this a bit because I have to prepare for a meeting I have today with my directeur de recherche.  Would love to hear alternate interpretations of my dreams—but basically I think I need to stand up and do what I have to do and accept that that means occasionally I’m going to look like a fool or fall off the bridge.