Monthly Archives: March 2008

orals update

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I know I promised I would talk about studying for my orals, as a way of making myself process what I’m reading and providing literary blog content, and I have thus far failed miserably.  This is not because I am watching The Hills instead of studying– I am reading, but I’m not quite at the point where I want to start fitting my reading into a narrative. The point of preparing like this is not to fit everything into the analytical schema I’ve been building up since I started grad school, but to take a step back, read a lot, and make sure the foundations of that schema are secure.

I haven’t read so much in my life. Here’s a sample from the past few days:

–Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Read chapters 1 and 2, started 3.

–Simone de Beauvoir, Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée. Have been making my way through it for a couple of years now but am finishing it tonight.

–Simone de Beauvoir, Cahiers de jeunesse. Just released this month. Am plodding through (it’s an enormous tome).

–Robert Desnos, Oeuvres.
Rrose Sélavy, Langage cuit

–Colette, La Vagabonde.

–Nancy K. Miller, Subject to Change: Reading Feminist Writing.
Intro and chapter on La Vagabonde.

–Proust, Du côté de chez Swann. I have like 20 pages left. Don’t know if I’ll read past the 2nd volume.

–James Joyce, Dubliners. Somehow in all my career as a modernist, I only read "The Dead." Am starting from the beginning with "The Sisters."

Tomorrow I’m off to the BNF to tackle Auden, Pound, and a bunch of critical works on modernism.

To rephrase The Mountain Goats, I am gonna make it through this month if it kills me.

If anyone out there has already passed her orals and wants to dispense advice, I am all ears.

You can play too! Some Desnos for you, after the jump.

Continue reading →

Theater review: Les Bonnes

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Les_bonnes
"Les Bonnes" by Jean Genet, playing at Aktéon Theatre, 11 rue du General Blaise, 75011. With  Alice Dumont, Muriel Poletti, Laetitia Vercken. Directed by Henry-Anne Eustache. Playing until April 12th.

Last night I headed over to see a black box production of Genet’s classic "Les Bonnes" ("The Maids"), and, well, I thought I’d tell you about it, in case you’re into postwar avant-garde French theatre too.

For those of you unfamiliar with the play, it is a loose adaptation of L’Affaire des Soeurs Papin, a double murder perpetrated by two sisters, maids in a provincial French household, in 1933. (There’s a grotesque description of the murders in Wikipedia which appears to have been written by a perversely imaginative soul rather than a responsible historian.) Essentially, the two sisters brutally murdered their mistress and her daughter, and then called the police and confessed to everything. The case was such a horrific example of the underlying social tensions in French society exploding into violence that the entire country was captivated by the trial, and spoke of nothing else for months.

The 1947 play is far more than an exploration of class tensions in France; the genius of it is in the transposition of the master-slave dialectic from Madame (here the mother and daughter are one single overbearing character) onto their  own sisterly relationship; this is what transforms a possibly preachy subject into a fearless exploration of human relations. 

The director of this production has obviously understood this; the actresses playing the eponymous maids were grotesque and touching; the actress playing Madame alternately flattering and bellowing. The staging was inventive and lightly handled; the sisters had a synchronized bunny hop they performed in front of Madame to demonstrate their servitude, and the violence is handled well. Genet left out the gory bits; in his rendition, one maid kills the other, rather than Madame, although the of the play takes place in such delirium that the audience is unsure if what is represented on stage is not a figurative murder of all three women.

Special mention has to be made of the costumes and make-up– the girls’ heads and faces were covered in white powder, and they were clad in white leather S&M outfits each topped off with the frame of a bustle, which, stripped of its overlying fabric, looks just like a wearable, portable cage. Madame’s costume was less réussi, in my opinion; she was got up like a drag queen and covered in fake posies. We understand just from the language of the play that she is meant to be vulgar, and that her behavior is meant to belie her lofty social position.  Dressing her up like that struck too heavy a note. 

Saddle up, it’s Saturday!

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And time for a gallop through the remainders clogging up my Firefox tabs…

I really want to read this book, Women’s World, a novel made of bits and pieces of language snipped from 1960s womens magazines * Who in their right mind would want to shop at a store called Acne? Next thing you know everyone will be shopping at Eczema or Rosacea * This review of Petite’s book is pure hackery, the most "authentic" French thing the writer found in it was that she lives in Belleville. That’s a major pet peeve of mine– people who think they’re deconstructing the myth of Left Bank Paris by building up a myth around Belleville. The other pet peeve is people who live in Belleville who can’t wait to tell you how much they love it there and how you couldn’t pay them to live in a more upscale place. Poseurs. * While we’re on the subject of pet peeves, the New York Times’s book blog, "Papercuts," shares the 7 words it wishes book critics would stop using.   High on the list: "poignant," "eschew," "compelling." All in one sentence: “Mario Puzo’s intriguing novel eschews the lyrical as the author
instead crafts a poignant tale of family life and muses on the
compelling doings of the Mob.” I can’t think of a particular word I hate, but I can’t stand it when a critic is trying to wind up his review and closes with "So-and-so reminds us (…) what it means to be truly human." Or "truly black." Or "truly a woman." That can kill a perfectly good review for me.

March 28, 1941

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"It was in that deep centre, in that black heart, that the lady had drowned herself." (Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts)

Photograph: The River Ouse, by Patti Smith, featured in Land 250, an exhibit of the musician’s photography which is on right now at the Fondation Cartier.  Smith is holding a Virginia Woolf soirée tonight at the museum to mark the anniversary of Woolf’s death.

vendredi, poésie

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Sonnet CXLIX. (Bill Shakespeare)

Canst thou, O cruel! say I love thee not,
When I against myself with thee partake?
Do I not think on thee, when I forgot
Am of myself, all tyrant, for thy sake?
Who hateth thee that I do call my friend?
On whom frown’st thou that I do fawn upon?
Nay, if thou lour’st on me, do I not spend
Revenge upon myself with present moan?
What merit do I in myself respect,
That is so proud thy service to despise,
When all my best doth worship thy defect,
Commanded by the motion of thine eyes?
But, love, hate on, for now I know thy mind;
Those that can see thou lovest, and I am blind.

Maîtresse meets “The Hills.”

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The_hills
If you’ve been reading this blog for awhile, you know my MO when I’m working on a big project is to shift into a weird dialectic whereby I do nothing but work and take breaks by watching (sometimes vapid) American television. Now that my orals are approaching in 6 weeks or so, I’m taking breaks from Foucault, Huyssen, Beauvoir and friends to watch Conrad, Montag, Pratt and co stir up drama on "The Hills."

This show features the dumbest people I’ve ever seen. Are there really that many college dropouts in LA? It’s, like, de rigueur for everyone to be completely brainless, drawling and slack-jawed.  All the denizens of La La Land apparently only speak in vowels.  The girls have overprocessed blond hair and too-white teeth; the guys churn out the cheesiest pick-up lines and have a penchant for wearing diamond-studded rosary beads as necklaces over their sloppy T-shirts.  They’re so ridiculous! Like over-sized toddler-monks! I love it!

I just feel bad for my little namesake, LC. I think she actually is smart under there! She just suffers from really bad taste (in guys and friends), although I’m only midway through season 2, and I hear she does eventually drop Heidi. She looked so sad when Emily, she of the shiny brown hair, the intern from NY who visited LA, said the word "chinoiserie" and LC didn’t know what it was or how to pronounce it. Poor LC! She needs better influences. She should stick with Whitney. She seems to have two feet on the ground, although also a vowel-speaker.

Mostly though I’m in awe of this LA lifestyle. This East Coaster is simultaneously shocked and delighted to find that life out there looks as idiotic as I imagined. But fun! It looks very fun. If I had never read a book I think I would totally dig it. But oh, that pesky education, it gets in the way of everything groovy.

I could keep dishing but I’m a little embarrassed, so I’m going to stop here. I can’t wait to see the latest Paris episode!

Tuesday links

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Here is a fantastically long list of New York Times readers’ favorite quotes from books. (via)

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Patti Smith has an exhibit in Paris opening at the Fondation Cartier. Meg was kind enough to tell me, but I was puzzled as to the connection between the singer and the city. Then I came across an article that explained it.

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Think I’m gonna head over to Ivy Writers Paris tonight for a reading with Jerome Rothenberg and Eric Suchère. I think, I’m not sure. I love reading poetry but am less down with the contemporary, po-mo poetry "scene." I mean, Rothenberg is supposed to be "a swinging orgy of Martin Buber, Marcel Duchamp, Gertrude Stein, and Sitting Bull." I’m just not sure I have the patience for that. If you do, you should go– I’m sure they’re much better poets than their admirers make them out to be.

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Anne Fernald finds a connection between Barak Obama’s speech in Philadelphia to Woolf’s "Granite and Rainbow."

Personally, I wasn’t that impressed by Obama’s speech, but that’s mainly because I saw it as a calculated political move rather than a serious meditation on what race means in America today. It was simplistic, in the insulting kind of way, and worse, featured that irritating defensive habit some politicians have of posing questions to themselves and giving their own answers ("Did I know him to be an occasionally fierce critic of American domestic
and foreign policy? Of course. Did I ever hear him make remarks that
could be considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes. Did I
strongly disagree with many of his political views? Absolutely").

The speech goes on in the same vein: listening to the speech, we can each criticize ourselves, black and white, and then feel really good about doing so, and then move on from that and think about something else, like undergraduates getting really stirred up in Sociology 101 and then forgetting about it in the lunchtime rush.

What will really be audacious is when we get a presidential candidate who has graduated beyond Sociology 101. But, and this is a big but, simply because the speech didn’t go there doesn’t mean Obama is stuck at the entry-level. His speech’s limitations may be equally to do with the fact that America as a whole is barely at the undergraduate level when it comes to discussions of race.

And that is why I live in France: their discourse skipped right to graduate level work, i.e. race is a social construct, so we’re not going to use "race" as an indicator of anything. But this approach, as we well know, is deeply problematic, and in some ways France is 30 years behind the US when it comes to talking about race.

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Given the choices before us, I’d rather elect Martin Sheen for president.

March 22, 1968

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On this day, 40 years ago, students at Nanterre University, led by Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Daniel Bensaid, took to the streets and kicked off the protests that would escalate in May 1968.

Tariq Ali provides a good account of those heady days, and enlarges our view of the uprisings beyond the Western-centered accounts, reminding us that not only were there protests in Berkeley, New York, Paris and Prague, but in Pakistan and Vietnam as well. [Via]

Expect to be hearing a lot more about May 1968 over the next few months,  particularly here in France, where the normal activity of  philosophizing about what it meant then and what it means now will be intensified now that there is an anniversary to celebrate.

40 years is a long time, and France has changed enormously since the late 60s. Today the students at Nanterre (where I taught for two years) are as politicized as ever, but they seem, at least to this observer, more like rebels in search of a cause.  Take the CPE protests.  As one astute reporter back then commented wryly, only in France would the students go to the barricades in defense of the status quo. Their politics are predictable and their protests lack originality. If they wanted to get worked up about something, there are some refugees and sans-papiers they could worry about. Or they could go global and get so worked up over Darfur the French government is forced to do something about it.

Des chansons tristes

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Chansons
If you’re in the US and you haven’t seen "Chansons d’Amour" yet (or "Love Songs," as they’re calling it there), you should absolutely see it. Pay no mind to what the hack reviewers (except for the always prescient A. O. Scott) have been saying: it is very sad, and very beautiful.  It’s odd, and gentle– pretty much what we’ve come to expect from Christophe Honoré. The greys of the palette, the incompleness of the strangers the camera finds in the street, finds its complement in Alex Beaupain’s score, and nestles in the arms of the French musical film tradition– closer to "Les Parapluies de Cherbourg" than to "Les Demoiselles de Rochefort."

I won’t ruin the plot for you– there is a surprising cleavage about a third of the way through, and the second two thirds are an attempt to heal from it. The result is a meditation on the mystery of presence, of love, and of death, and a study of the heart that has lost.

Some critics have complained that the film doesn’t work, that Louis Garrel’s character isn’t likeable enough, that the three-way with Ludivine Sagnier and Clotilde Hesme doesn’t seem believable, nor does the turn to the jeune Breton ("je sens la pluie, l’océan, et les crepes au citron"*), nor does the impromptu singing. But I think we’re outside the realm of verisimilitude in this film– its affect does not come from your accepting whether such a series of events could happen. It’s allegorical, not literal, and the impromptu singing is a major indication that we are meant to understand the relationships on this different, purely emotive level.  What we are asked to believe in is not the specific events, but the emotions that result from them.

*For the record, my boyfriend is also jeune, beau and Breton but he does not smell like crepes au citron, and I would worry if he did.

around the internet on a tuesday

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Is it self-serving to link to my own article first? Sorry. At the NBCC blog, Critical Mass, my account of the Salon du Livre de Paris, falling panels, bomb threats, fistfights and all.

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Robert Darnton, literary historian, bless his heart and all his family, writes about a rediscovered masterpiece of eighteenth century Parisian bohemia for the New York Review of Books. As in, before Murger, Balzac, and Mercier codified the concept in their own work. But, Darnton admits, what’s been found can’t really touch what we already had:

I must admit, however, that I may be succumbing here to hyperbole. Having found the book, Les Bohémiens, a two-volume novel published in 1790, I want
to believe it is a masterpiece. A sounder assessment would rank it as
an extraordinary novel, written with wit and brio, but more important
for its picture of literary life under the ancien régime than for its
excellence as a work of art.

Its writer sounds pretty interesting, too:

Anne Gédéon Lafitte, marquis de Pelleport, was, according to everyone
who met him, a scoundrel, a reprobate, a rogue, a thoroughly bad hat.

For a really good cultural/literary history of bohemianism, take a look at Jerrold Seigel’s Bohemian Paris.
For more Darnton goodness, I recommend wholeheartedly The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France. Here’s a tasty morsel of what goes on in that book:

I did a statistical study of literary demand, based on orders for books
by booksellers scattered everywhere in France. After reading 50,000
letters, I calculated the number of copies ordered for 720 books that
circulated in the highly developed underground trade—that is, outside
the censorship and the control of the monopolistic booksellers’ guild.
They included many works by Voltaire and Rousseau—in fact, the entire
Enlightenment. But of the top fifteen best sellers, five were libels ["the libelle, or libel, a scandalous account of private life among the great figures of the court and capital"],
and more libels appeared everywhere else throughout the retrospective
best-seller list. I concluded that a huge literature of libel had
permeated French society on the eve of the Revolution, yet virtually
all of those books and their authors have now been forgotten.

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Kate Christensen  just won the Pen/Faulkner award for her novel The Great Man. Her reaction, the Guardian reports, was shock: the award "always seemed unattainable … I was like, ‘do women actually win this thing?’"

It’s a case of revenge on the publishing industry as well: her first book, In the Drink, was branded "chick lit" and forgotten. How do you like her now!

Oh, and, uh, I worked for her agent back then. Just thought I’d point that out.

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The long list has been announced for the Orange Broadband Prize for women’s fiction, and Nancy Huston is on it, Joanna Briscoe notwithstanding. The shortlist comes out on April 15 and the winner will be announced on June 4.

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Profile of a genius in the Times: Tom Stoppard. (Via)