Monthly Archives: February 2006

guest starring…

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I’m very pleased to announce the first ever guest blogger on today’s show.  As I spent the weekend in Marseille(s) attending my boyfriend’s cousin’s baby’s bris, I’ve been a bit busy to blog.  And I didn’t think anyone would notice.

I was wrong.

If ever I wondered who my audience was, now I know.

I now turn the podium over to my baby sister, writing from her desk in a boutique consulting firm in Manhattan.

lauren.  we have a major problem.  you are being very very selfish.

you must grasp that while you might have started writing your blog for yourself, its become much bigger than that now.  you now have a responsibility to your fans to post on your blog in a timely manner.  its been 5 days.  i check your blog several times a day every single day waiting for a little love on the metro to come my way, waiting for some silly french bureaucratic nonsense to be relayed my way, and have been left wanting.  [...].  5 days is just too much.  i know youre in marseilles, but honestly, im sitting behind a desk and i dont think asking for 10 minutes of your time is too much to ask to liven up my day.  think about the kid in kansas reading your blog b/c he’s always dreamed about getting out of kansas and going to france.  if you dont post regularly and shape his impressionable mind, he’s going to grow up and vote for more bush progeny to lead this country.  and that, my dear, is the greatest evil.  fight evil.  fight against the dark side.  post on your blog.  why do you hate freedom?

Aux armes, citoyens!

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Today was not a day I wanted particularly to go to work.

The combined means of public transportation needed to travel to Nanterre from my boyfriend’s apartment in the 5th (bus + 2 RERs) combined with the early hour (we left the apt at 8:15) and the book-and-paper teacher-crap I have to lug around with me (of which, to be fair, N carried half) wreacked havoc on my already sensitive stomach; I staggered off the train at Nanterre-Université feeling a bit green and shaky. I was late for my 9 am class and still needed to run up to my office in the E building to get my teaching materials for the day: photocopies, a cassette tape, and a cassette player.

I did not realize anything was up when I descended from the platform and had to push through crowds of loitering students to get to the main campus walkway. There are always loitering undergrads; no one here seems to be in a hurry to get anywhere except us graduate students.

I did not realize anything was up when I reached the walkway to E building and they had barricaded the path much as they had on Monday when I took these pictures:


See, the students at Nanterre, who have a fine upstanding tradition of rebellion and work-shirking to live up to dating from 1968, are up in arms over the recently proposed Contrat premiere embauche, or CPE [say-pay-euh], a contract for employees who are under 26 years old and working in their first job. The students hate the CPE because they say it allows employers to fire employees anytime they want, for any reason they want, which leads to a much-feared précarité du travail, or lack of job security.  Dominique de Villepin, who is championing the new contract, swears this is not the case.

I’m not totally clear on why this bill is a bad idea, and why the students are so mad about it; when I got into the E building on Monday I saw an information booth, and I wanted to ask someone to explain it to me, but since this is France, there was no one in it to ask:


So as best I can make out, here’s how the situation stands. Under the current system, when you are employed for a company it is with one of several types of contracts, the most common being either the Contract à durée déterminée, or CDD [say-day-day], and the more sought-after Contrat à durée indéterminée, or CDI [say-day-eee]. Basically it’s a question of job security: do you know from the getgo this is a limited committment or somewhere you could conceivably stay for the rest of your life.

I’m making this brief because I don’t really have the time to research the good and bad points of the system, and after my experiences today, I don’t give two figs.

As I was saying, I thought nothing amiss until I was physically prevented from entering the E building to go to my office by two scruffy looking twenty year-olds.

"C’est bloqué, Madame, personne ne peut entrer!" they cried with revolutionary glee. I looked beyond them. Instead of the somewhat organized labyrinth of desks you see in the picture above, the desks were now piled in ramshackle fashion to create a massive barricade that would have inspired the cast of Les Mis to jump up and drape themselves on it. It was a sight to behold.

The students told me all the classes were cancelled and all the professors were on the march to the Assemblée Nationale. I looked at them, half full of hope, half skeptical, and fully pissed off at having come to Nanterre for nothing. I raised a fist in the air, comrade-style, and wished them bon courage, then set off for the F building, where my classes are held, to see if the building was open and if I had any students.

To my dismay, the F building was open for business and contrary to what I had been told, the salle des professors was full of my colleagues making photocopies, drinking coffee, and kibbitzing as if nothing were going on outside.

My whole day was completely out-of-whack, as I by chance had only a few photocopies with me of an article, along with some grammar exercises. The lessons I tried to cobble together and my students’ softspoken English were almost completely drowned out by the bullhorns and the crowds gathering outside chanting, shouting, and blowing whistles.

Finally, during my last class, I lost it, and spewed something resembling the following diatribe at my unsuspecting students:

"I’m sorry, maybe this is a massive cultural gap, but why the f*** don’ t they shut the f*** up and get to work??? don’t they have sh*t they need to do, these people?"

They laughed at me, and groused with me. Last week, one girl told me, the protestors blocked off the RER tracks so the trains to Paris couldn’t run, and it took her two hours to get home on the bus.

It’s a good thing that didn’t happen while I was there, because I probably would have started a counterrevolution.

Love on the Metro

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I got hit on just now on the metro.
he started out by tapping me on the leg while I was listening to my ipod.
I turned off the music to look at him.
he smiled, and waved at me.
I smiled and waved back.
he said "hiiiiiii"–
I said "hiiiiii"–
we sat silently for a few minutes, smiling at each other.
then his mother wheeled his stroller off at pigalle.

“sous ce masque, un autre masque.

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…je n'en finirai pas de soulever tous ces visages."**

That's Claude Cahun for you, in Aveux non avenus (1930). Cahun was the subject of my mémoire de DEA at Paris IV, in which I examined her relationship to the avant-garde, the surrealist movement, her decadent influences, her politics, and her conception of the fluidity and mobility of identity.

I'm thinking a lot of Cahun lately, as I try to devise a dissertation proposal, but even more so this week, as I spent the last two days attending a conference held at my Parisian alma mater, Reid Hall, sponsored by the University of Florida, entitled "Women and the Avant-gardes". The papers were very interesting, and the crowd was nothing if not illustrious, containing at least five of the theorists whose work I drew from extensively for my mémoire– in particular, Rosalind Krauss, Shelley Rice, Laura Mulvey, and the head of the U of F Paris Research Center, Gayle Zachmann. Gayle gave a fascinating paper on the intertextual relationship between Cahun and Mallarmé and I could have picked her brain for hours on the various aspects of Cahun's work that she touched on, particularly Cahun deals with her (problematic) Jewish identity in her work.

But I love this quote of Cahun's, because it's particularly pertinent for artists, writers, scholars, and even bloggers. We lead similar quests– trying to say something, express something, represent something, or just get to the bottom of things– but ultimately we can't get beyond ourselves, we will be forever limited by the scope of our minds. And for those of us engaged in life-writing (bloggers included), it's impossible to get at our "real selves," because they change from moment to moment, as we accrue experiences, with every new thought, with every new person that comes into our lives. I'm constantly aware, in my scholarship, my blogging, and my fiction-writing, that everything I write is just a reflection of my brain, and to a certain extent is a representation of myself as I would like to be perceived. There's no way around that.

Fittingly, tonight we're going to a party for "Karneval," thrown by a friend of mine from Cologne, Germany, and we've been warned that we won't be allowed in the door unless we come disguised– i.e., wearing masks. In my experience, the French are very big on costume parites; in the past few months I've been invited to a party where everyone had to wear flipflops, a fruit party where everyone had to come dressed as a piece of fruit, and another one with a Hawaiian theme. Where I come from, it's only permissable to dress up for a costume party if it's Halloween or you're in a sorority, and in both scenarios it is understood that you must dress as slutty as possible (cf. La Coquette's recent trip back to college). Americans, at least those of my generation it seems, don't like to look foolish, but are alright looking like "pimps and ho's," to cite at least one party from my college years.

Out of sheer embarrassment, I've refrained from attending any of these costume parties here in Paris, but I'm told most everyone who attended complied with the dress requirements… So for tonight, to get my feet wet, I'll be wearing a blue and gold Hermes scarf as a top, with a gold mask in the shape of a rising sun…

** "Under this mask another mask. I will never finish removing all of these faces."

til [fill in the blank] do us part?

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I haven’t posted, really posted, in awhile. This is because I was busy doing random stuff like reporting on the cartoon crisis for JTA, rereading Mrs Dalloway for the 6th time, having health problems, and buying new Annick Goutal perfume at Galeries Lafayette to make myself feel better.

But mainly it’s because there’s something going on which I haven’t had the courage to post about. I learned something about my new boyfriend that is vaguely upsetting, and I’ve had a little time to process it, and I think I know how I feel about it, and so I was hoping it would go away and I wouldn’t have to put it up on my blog.

But it isn’t going away, I’m very perturbed, and I’m going to Amsterdam with him tomorrow, and I don’t feel alright with this.

Here’s the thing: he is still PACSed to his ex-girlfriend.

PACS? ask the Americans. What’s PACS?

PACS, or Pacte civile de solidarité, is a civil union put into place in France in 1999 to allow non-married couples to enjoy some of the legal benefits of marriage. For homosexual couples, this meant having their unions legally recognized. For French couples, this means tax breaks all around. For American girls, this means a way to get your working papers. (I’m probably butchering the proper explanation; read more about PACS here)

And, for the French boys dating those American girls, it apparently means saving up to 20,000 Euros in taxes. Which, my man swears, is why he did not break the PACS when they broke up in mid-2004.

My mind is absolutely spinning with reasons why this bothers me. For one thing, I would loooooove to get PACSed to someone. But in order for non-EU citizens to get working papers this way, I believe you have to live together for a year. Since I am dead-set against living with a boyfriend again, at least not for a very long time, that’s totally out. So it’s not like I want to PACS myself to this guy– it would do me no good. And I have no idea where this is going and I don’t want to rush into anything.

But, that said, I also have strong reservations about marriage in general; I’m not exactly sure how it works and it frankly seems a little unnatural. I don’t know that I would be able to spend the rest of my life with one person, and I’m certainly not ready, at 27, with (knock wood) many years ahead of me, to say that I’m ready to stop looking around. However, I’m not totally opposed to the idea of PACS. I feel like it’s a semi-commitment that I could probably make. And so, because for me PACS could possibly replace the ultimate commitment of marriage, it somehow gets imbued in my head with all the importance of marriage.

So learning that my boyfriend is PACSed to someone else has all the significance of him actually being married to someone else.

His ex is back where she belongs, on the West Coast of the States, and she has a boyfriend and everything, and if I’m not mistaken I believe he said that she was engaged. They broke up a long time ago and I don’t feel threatened in that respect. But the girl has to come back to France from California to get unPACSed. Is it irrational of me a) to think that’s an awful lot of hoop-jumping that she might not be in any hurry to do, and b) to not particularly want this girl to come back anytime soon because I’ll probably have to meet her and from what he’s told me she sounds likea piece of work, and blah blah blah?

Finally, the French people I’ve consulted about this promise me that PACS is not serious for heterosexual couples, that they know people who are just friends who’ve PACSed themselves for the tax breaks, that for straight people it’s not marriage at all. They told me not to worry about it. I’m telling myself not to worry about it.

So why is this bothering me?

how to sleep with a movie star

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It’s out, it’s out!
My best friend Kristin’s book is out, you can go buy it in Barnes and Nobles now!
Or on Amazon!
Either way it’s a hilarious read!
Besides, what will you do when everyone else is reading it on the subway and talking about it at the water cooler and you’re totally out of the loop?

More of L’Affaire Frey

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"’The biggest terror everyone has right now is that Oprah will suddenly say "Oh, to hell with it" and stop doing her book club.’" This from an editor quoted on condition of anonymity to the New York Observer.

The fate of the publishing industry is in the manicured claws of a dilletante who just happens to have a massively successful and powerful talk show.

And now the publishers are spending time and money checking to make sure the memoirs in their catalogues are "truthful."

Oy.  Like they have the means for that.  What a little casse-couilles that Oprah is.

Mostly Mozart

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I am listening to the Paris Symphony this morning in preparation for tonight’s sortie: this evening my gallant is escorting me to a Mozart concert transpiring somewhere near the Pantheon and sponsored by Jean Tiberi and the Mairie du 5e Arrondissement. (This comes two days after we attended an organ recital at Notre Dame. Am I being wooed or what?)


The concert is part of the celebrations of the 250th anniversary of said composer’s birth taking place around the world; in Paris, for example, we’ll be treated to a new adaptation of Don Giovanni at the Opera Bastille as well as a panoply of concerts and conferences.  The New York Times has a largely bland article on the celebrations in Salzburg and Vienna (where Mozart was born and lived most of his life, respectively) save for a fantastic last graph:

"In the first major musical event of Mozart Year, the Vienna State Opera staged the composer’s "Idomeneo" at the Theater an der Wien last Friday, with the Brookyn-born tenor Neil Shicoff in the lead. After struggling with one of the composer’s more difficult arias, Mr. Shicoff was booed by purists in the second balcony. He nonetheless received respectable applause at the end of the opera, and then — unexpectedly — blew kisses in the direction of his detractors. Charmed by a gesture of such Mozartian effrontery, they cheered wildly."

Can you imagine being booed by Viennese purists?[ Can you imagine a Jew being booed by Viennese purists?] I want to curl into a ball and disappear at the least criticism from my editor! Those opera singers have to have cojones, man.

But back to Paris; when he came to stay here for a few months in 1778, Mozart was allegedly told by his father that in order to be financially successful during his stay in Paris, he should let himself "be guided by French taste" and not write anything too difficult for the French amateurs to appreciate.

Judging from the hoopla around his birthday here in Paris, Mozart had no problem when it came to French taste.