Ah academia...

...nothing like a socially awkward, self-congratulatory conference to make me wonder all over again what the hell I've gotten myself into. Why are academics so weird???

This conference has managed to hit all of my conference pet peeves, I think. À savoir:

- Name dropping. Oh, the name dropping. Postcolonial studies lends itself particularly well to this phenomenon, we've had to deal with Spivak, Butler, Bhabha, Glissant, Naipaul, Saïd (these people are like Madonna in this field, so famous that they only need one name). Particularly Saïd. But then we also can't forget Derek Walcott, Paul Gilroy, CLR James. Google them if you want. Or don't bother. I wouldn't.

- Jargon. Again, postcolonial studies excels at this. We spent HOURS discussing the difference between "postcolonialism" and "postcoloniality." And the thing is, I'll accord that the two words are different. And everyone agrees. So let's move on already.

- Gossiping. As if anyone really cares in academia, other than to make themselves feel better about their own lives. cf the conference participant who tried to pump me for info on a superstar prof in my dept, what his wife is like, etc.

- Running over time. Let's be honest: there are only two kinds of papers in academia. The 20-minute version and the 50-minute version. Really. There's nothing else. If you're on a panel, EVERYONE knows you're supposed to talk for 20 minutes max. No, this does not mean that your paper is special and deserves 30 minutes. It means you need to do the work to cut down your argument as necessary to fit within the time frame, just like everyone else has done. The rest of us want our break to have a coffee, not to keep sitting here listening to you ramble because you didn't organize your thoughts enough in advance. For some reason this conference seems to be full of these people. I can probably count on one hand the number of people who have respected the time limit. bah.

- That guy. You know, the one who asks a TEN-MINUTE question when the session is already running overtime. And the question has no point, is full of theoretical jargon and name dropping, and missed some detail in the presentation. You know it did, it always does.

- The other guy, the one who thinks he's being all cutting-edge in his paper, when he's actually talking about something no one cares about outside this closed room of academics. cf the guy who was so proud of himself yesterday for saying that the phrase "postcolonial studies" has almost become a curse word in some circles. Ooooooh you're just a bad-ass, saying such a dirty thing. Postcolonial studies. That's as bad as insulting someone's mother! Really now, go to the drug dealer down the street (not that I've seen any in this neighborhood, which is actually rather posh, don't worry!) and say "postcolonial studies." If that doesn't get you a punch in the face, I don't know what will. I mean, really now, anyone here found this guy's lost sense of perspective???

- The non-committal historian who is perfectly happy to analyze the past but refuses any application to today. cf the keynote, who went on about "provincializing Europe." Then "that guy" asked the ten-minute question, which concluded by asking how to "provincialize Europe." The historian looked at us blankly, and with absolutely no sense of the ridiculousness of what he was saying, was like, "oh, I don't know, I'm a historian, I don't look at the present, I just say things about the past." Without even thinking about it, he just totally dismissed the relevance of his work. The old maxim about those who don't know the past are condemned to repeat it bears some expansion, namely that those who know about the past but don't use it for anything also also condemned to letting it repeat itself. Really, now, what's the point of all this if we're totally open about the fact that it doesn't mean anything? Or, more precisely, that we don't want to take the risk of making it mean something??? Does anyone in the real world really care about "provincializing Europe" as a concept rather than as a project? That's what I like to ponder at night, instead of watching TV. ha.

- The self-importance. Claiming we accomplished something. Yeah, right. All we accomplished was another line on the CV. That's something, at least. Something totally self-promoting. Sure, I'll be doing the same thing along with everyone else, yet another line to prove that I "do" stuff. But let's be honest, no one in this room changed the world today. REALLY. We sat around congratulating ourselves on our ability to manipulate buzzwords and show off what we know.

All that said, the ENS Lyon is bizarre, looks kind of like an orphan Frank Gehry building or something?

On that note, I have to run to my panel now, where I'll be doing all those obnoxious things mentioned above. Within reason, I hope!!!

This seems like a losing battle, but...

...I'm still going to try to catch up, haha. A good two weeks ago, the Champs Elysees was all dressed up...in nature.

It's a very French thing, you totally have to commune with the land. This is the sort of thing that can make or break a presidential candidate, that's how serious it is. I'm not kidding, Sarko has lost MAJOR points here for not being interested (or at least pretending to be interested) in agriculture. There's an agriculture festival every year, and it's basically obligatory for the pres to be seen smooching a cow. The problem is that Sarko has screwed this up repeatedly. Chirac, on the other hand, was quite good at it. And no one beats Mitterrand for the theatricality of regionalism.

But I digress. The point of all that was to say that the Champs Elysees being covered in trees and bushes was not at all supposed to be funny or kitschy, it was dead serious. The point was to show off French agriculture. And it was indeed impressive, as you can see:

Even the nuns were rockin' out, haha.

I went with Ben and Amanda and Kari (not pictured):

The even was divided up by type of agriculture, so there were trees:

And vineyards (obviously). As I was standing there admiring the oysters, some random dude came up to me and started chatting about grapes and wine. Seeing where this was going, Kari high-tailed it out of there, leaving me to fend for myself from the lecherous dude looking for some sort of trophy mistress. So I agreeably said yeah, wine was good, then he was like, "do you like castles? Would you like to come to mine?" hahahahaha. That's when I said I had to go join my friends and bolted too. When I found Kari again, we wondered who the hell would fall for something like that? I mean, really, wtf??? I was like, "yeah, I mean, seriously, it's a perfect set-up, the whole 'come to my castle but let's go to the hotel first, then suddenly you find there's no castle and no car and you're left strangled on some bed somewhere.'" Kari thought I was being rather extreme on the dénouement of that one, that it was probably just "let's go to a hotel and oh, oops, too busy to show you the castle, I'll just take you home." But in any case, seemed like a perfect sociopath psychokiller set-up to me. So much for the vineyards.

And even oysters!

One of my favorites was the real food pyramid, haha:

The quote of the day, however, clearly goes to Amanda. We were walking down the street when all of a sudden she was like, "Man, every time I think, 'no, really, France can't be THAT politically incorrect...then I see something like THIS...'" Not realizing what she was looking at, I looked around and stumbled upon the object of her gaze. My response, "oh YES, that HAS to happen!"

Yeah, you're seeing that right. Some random dude was walking around as a "redskin" (literally...there was even a woman with him reapplying paint wherever the sweat wore it off) and taking pictures with people. Oh, the political incorrectness. At least he was promoting environmental awareness? In any case, I think everyone else was horrified, but OBVIOUSLY I had to get my picture taken with him (haha).

Afterwards we went for drinks in honor of Ben's birthday:

And here's Luis and Anne-Helene:

Catching up on Metz

I'm still behind, but here are some highlights from my trip to Metz this weekend...

First off, Metz is another city whose name is not quite pronounced as it looks. It's "mess" rather than "mets." Just FYI.

Anyway, Metz is in northeastern France, super close to the border with Luxembourg, actually. It's an old military town, population just under 200,000. Quaint and charming but also has a lot of cool stuff to do. It's an old walled city, so there are still vestiges of the ramparts around the outside of the inner city, such as this former entrance:


One of the cooler parts of the city is all of the public parks, such as the Grande Esplanade right downtown:


I thought the sculptures were quite awesome. Metz is also known for its cathedral, as any self-respecting French town should be (haha):

But the real reason for coming to the town was two-fold: to see my friend Antoine and to check out the new regional branch of the Centre Pompidou, which literally only opened last week. Yay!

Pompidou-Metz is just south of the main part of the city, on an old army field of some sort. The landscaping is still a work in progress, but the building itself is awesome. So here is Antoine with the building, my two reasons for going to Metz summed up in one pic:


The way it works is that the gallery space is the three tubes you see, that are kind of skewed one on top of the other. Then there's the draped roof, which is held in place as a wooden netting covered in some sort of plastic material. Here's a view underneath the draping:


Needless to say, it was totally mind blowing. Pompidou is all about modern and contemporary art, so it has a bunch of different stuff. The show was on "masterpieces," apparently because someone made a snippy comment when the project was announced back in 2003 that because this was a regional branch, it wouldn't have any masterpieces. So the curator of Pompidou Metz was like, "hell no, bring it!" So they did a whole show of masterpieces, hahaha. That's vindictiveness at its finest, and I obviously approve whole-heartedly.

Of course, the problem is, what is a masterpiece? The show tried to ask that question, and all in all it was very cool. They did a retrospective of the idea of masterpieces throughout the 20th century, and one of the more amusing installations was this junk shop that was apparently an institution in Nice in the 60s:


That was a winner, as were many of the Picasso and Dali paintings on display. This one, however, not so much:


The damned thing didn't even have a title! Susannah, care to comment on this?

In any case, the bottom floor has a special exhibition space (not in the tubes), and here they did a history of masterpieces, back to the middle ages. And what was really awesome was the ceiling, which was all done in mirrors. This is a shot looking up at the mirrors, which were reflecting the gallery space that was arranged in pods. That's hard to explain, but I was shooting up at mirrors looking down, if that helps.


And here we are just outside the top level tube:


Anyway, the other highlight to Metz is the natural environment, right on the Moselle river:


It's a lovely little town, complete with a nature walk:


Then that night we went to a concert inside a cloister. The weird thing was that one of the bands was from Brooklyn, hahaha. I was sitting there thinking, what are the chances? Here I am, more or less an Astorian, living in Paris, visiting a friend in Metz, and coming across a band from Brooklyn??? It was probably for the best that I was most likely the only one in the audience to understand their banter, as it was utterly stupid, haha. The music was pretty fun though.


The next day Antoine humored me and did a history nerd activity. The short history lesson of the day is that this part of the country was the industrial motor of France for a really long time, starting back in the mid-1800s with the industrialization process. There are a ton of coal mines (Zola's Germinal being perhaps the most famous literary representation of the mines, although that took place a little further north...that of course didn't stop me from thinking about the Maheu family, haha). Unfortunately, the region has been totally devastated by the collapse of industry, so most of the mines and coal refining plants have been shut down. This one, at Uckange, was preserved and turned into a visitor site. So now you can tour this monstrosity:


The most interesting thing is that we were able to have a guided tour, with a guide who actually worked in the plant! He worked there for 15 years, starting at the age of 14. The plant was closed down in 1991, so after that he did a bunch of other factory jobs before getting certified to teach accounting instead. But when it came to how this whole process worked, he certainly knew his stuff. He talked our ears off for an hour and a half, and now I think if I had to go and refine coal, I would know every little detail of how it's done, hahaha. But yeah, the historical interest of the plant was definitely worthwhile, I got a bunch of great pics that I can totally use when I teach French history. Of course, the one downside was that I came home literally COVERED in coal dust, hahaha. My hands were black for hours, despite multiple washings. I finally gave up and took a shower when I came home, after finding coal in my ears, haha. Antoine made a good point, though, in thinking about what it must have been like to breathe and live in that crap all the time, rather than just the few hours we were exposed to it. A definitely sobering thought.

So yeah, there you have it, a highly successful trip!

Playing catch up

Man, I'm having a hard time keeping up with my adventures, so I will start with Reims and hopefully later today have a few minutes to update what else I've done.

Kari and I decided to go to Reims a week ago Saturday to celebrate the completion of the first draft of my diss. Woohoo! As a side note, the pronunciation of "Reims" is nothing like what it looks like it should be. It's pronounced "rance" (with the usual French aspirated "r" sound). It's pretty hilarious, if you talk to French people and observe this fact, they're like, "no, it's pronounced exactly as it looks, 'rance.'" And then you're like, "no, but it's an "m" in the word, not an "n."" And then they're like, "yeah, exactly, 'rance.'" They just don't get it, haha.

Anyway, Reims is famous for two things: the Cathedral and Champagne. Reims is the capital of the province of Champagne, which is in fact the only region legally allowed to call their product "champage." Technically the only true champagne comes from Champagne, everything else is just imitation.

But before we get to that, Kari and I figured we should start our day as historical tourists, while we were still sober, hahaha. So we took an early train out and began with the Cathedral:


And here's the back:


The Cathedral is noteworthy on many levels: first off, it was the site of the coronation of many French kings before the revolution, thanks to Joan of Arc who knew the area and manipulated things to get her man crowned. Before the Brits came after her and all that burning at the stake nastiness ensued (in Rouen, not Reims).

After the Revolution, however, there was a change in attitude regarding the whole coronation in Reims thing, since the old symbolism was to set up the King as a son of God. The French took a dim view of that philosophy after the Revolution and Napoleon (who, as a side note, crowned himself rather than letting the pope do it...there's that famous David painting of him doing it himself). It's semantic but hugely important that after the Revolution, kings were called "King of the French People" rather than "King of France." The new evolution of the title set them up as responsible to the people rather than to God. So at that point the Reims cathedral lost a bit of its cachet.

Not, however, without one last 15 minutes of fame, which occurred at the coronation of Charles X in 1825, well after the Revolution. The first king after Napoleon was Louis XVIII, who was ok with all this constitutional monarchy nonsense (if you ask them, haha). Charles X, however, was not a fan and wanted to get back to the old school days where he could run everything and not listen to the people. Press censorship was a favorite activity of his. But before all that, everyone probably should have seen it coming when he had his coronation back in Reims. The only post-Revolutionary king to do so.

What makes this event so noteworthy is actually rather peripheral, in that a young Victor Hugo attended the coronation and whom did he meet? None other than Quasimodo, the prototype for Notre-Dame de Paris. So we can thank the Reims cathedral for the existence of the hunchback of Notre-Dame, even though the hunchback of Notre-Dame was actually in Notre-Dame de Reims rather than in Paris.

Subsequently, Reims suffered GREATLY in WWII, as it's only a few miles away from the Marne river, where the Battle of the Marne, not surprisingly, took place. The Battle of the Marne is by far my favorite battle of WWI, if you can have a favorite battle when the death toll was so incredibly high. The Battle of the Marne was right at the beginning, in 1914. The French were still under the mistaken idea that this would be a quick and easy war, and the Germans were still under the mistaken impression that they could hand the French their asses on a plate again, just like in 1870. And the Germans were almost right--as they tend to do, they whipped their way through Belgium with no trouble and started making their way to Paris. It had all the trappings of 1870 all over again, as the Germans were racing west to the capital. The French government was already fleeing to Bordeaux.

BUT. Enter General Gallieni, who knew that the Germans were coming and needed to be stopped if the French had any prayer of surviving the war. They were coming fast and would be to Paris within hours. So what did he do? One of the more ingenious solutions, he requisitioned ALL the taxis and the taxi drivers in Paris to drive French soldiers east. Yeah, that's how desperate it was, they took cabs to the battle. So the taxis raced out east with thousands of soldiers, and they met the incoming Germans at the Marne river, only about an hour outside Paris. And that's where the Battle of the Marne occurred. The Marne wasn't particularly a victory, it was the beginning of the real war of attrition. But it was a huge victory for the French, in the sense that it saved the capital. And now Gallieni is memorialized as the last stop on one end of the 3 subway line, haha.

Anyway, all that to say that Reims was in the thick of things and was mostly destroyed. The cathedral didn't come out too well either--those pics are mostly reconstructions. The town isn't particularly pretty anymore, since it was all reconstructed in the 20s and 30s. There are some cool art deco influences, but it's not nearly as charming as many French towns of a similar size.

But that's ok, because the other claim to fame, the booze, is still a winner. The wine caves are old chalk mines from the Roman era:


It's a remarkably complicated procedure, of course, and here is where they store the bottles for fermentation.

After the visit, we got to do a tasting of three kinds:



Needless to say, it was an all-around winner:


I know I look toasted in that picture, but I SWEAR it's wind burn. It was super windy that day!!! Really!

We had some time after our tasting and visiting, so we decided to take advantage of the glorious weather and sit out on a terrace cafe. Somehow I ended up with a PINT of sangria, not really sure how that happened. Needless to say, it was the biggest sangria I've seen in my life, haha. And it was in a Hoegaarden glass, which just kind of ups the klassiness (yes, with a k) of the whole thing:

Fortunately, it was very clearly mostly fruit juice. I bet there was like a quarter cup of wine in that whole thing, it mostly just tasted like sugar, haha.

More performances...

So I had another grand weekend of performances.

Friday, I attended a dance performance interpretation of Bernard-Marie Koltès' play Roberto Zucco. The story behind this is kind of cool, as one of the professors organizing one of my seminar (the same one on immigration and spectacle...and the same guy who was responsible for getting me to see the burqa ballet) is also a professional dancer. Besides being a sociologist. So anyway, he was in the show and invited us to come. It was out in St. Ouen, so Kari, Niamh, Emily and I headed out there (just north of Paris, literally just on the other side of the peripherique beltway). St. Ouen is a pretty cute town and it was a gorgeous performance space. Complete with cheap wine that we were allowed to bring INTO the theater, so what more could you ask for? haha.

Plus Koltès is one of my favorite French playwrights. He's probably #2 on my list, after Mouawad. So needless to say, I was excited. I even went out and bought Roberto Zucco, since it was one of the few Koltès plays I hadn't read (figures, I've read a pile of them, and they'd pick one of the few I don't know, haha). Anyway, now I have a bit of a problem: I'm going to be seeing this prof at our seminar, and I have no clue what to say. I didn't really get the performance, haha.

From what I could tell, it was sort of each dancer's impressions of the play, like each person chose a scene to explore in more detail. The dancing seemed fine to me (I know almost NOTHING about dance though), and I liked the music. But yeah...otherwise...hmmmmm.

So that was Friday. As I was coming home I was thinking to myself that I didn't have plans for Saturday night and I needed to get on that, and what do you know, I got home to find an email in my inbox from a member of my orchestra, who had a spare ticket to the opera on Saturday night. Perfect. So I wrote back to see if the ticket was still available, and I got lucky :-) So I immediately set out googling Billy Budd to find out what I needed to know for the performance. Since the original story was written by a dead white guy, I obviously knew nothing about it, haha.

It was at the Opera Bastille (the fairly ugly building that is actually quite impressive on the inside), and even though I've been all around the rehearsal space, I had never been to the actual hall. And MAN is it impressive...seats just over 2,700 people! Yeah, THAT is how big it is.

Even better, this woman from my orchestra WORKS at the opera bastille, so she had sweet tickets, for only 27 euros apiece. We were in the orchestra section, literally in the 6th row. Yes! Makes an opera so much cooler when you can actually see the acting going on at the same time, without any need for binoculars. Word.

During the intermission, she even took us back stage. This was awesome on two accounts: we got to use the bathroom for important people (and skipped all the lines, haha), and also because we got to go on stage and see all the equipment. Which was super awesome because the stage was amazing--it was done with these hydraulic pumps of some sort, so the floor would lift up and down to change scenes between above deck and below deck! Needless to say, the staging was so captivating (and my view of it was so good) that I found myself forgetting to pay as close attention to the music because wow, the spectacle of the whole thing was genius. The whole thing was in fact awesome, I've always liked Britten, and he did a great job on this opera (and E.M. Forster wrote the libretto, according to wikipedia, hahaha).

So yeah, there we have it. I've always wanted to hit an opera in Paris, and sure enough I managed to score and go with someone who works for the opera and thus gave us the royal treatment. Score!

One last asparagus post

Ok, I'll only bore you with one more asparagus dish, this time a frittata:


I had to eat it in the pan because, well, I couldn't get it out, haha. It would have been mangled, so I figured, what the hell, I'm living in a shoebox of a dorm room, I CLEARLY have no standards. So out of the pan it was. Along with the asparagus I added some zucchini and a few different kinds of peppers. And it was a winner.

Various and sundry adventures

So I've been meaning to post this picture for a week now (but got distracted with asparagus and tractors, haha), but last weekend I made a Very Important Pilgrimage. Every year, there is a competition for the best baguette in Paris. Obviously. Why wouldn't there be? And then the winner of the competition gets to be the official provider of bread to the Elysée Palace (France's White House) for the following year. For Sarko's nightly dinner and also for fancy state dinners. And of course the winner gets a major boost in sales, since everyone has to go check out what kind of bread the president will be eating for the year.

Anyway, this year's "best in show" is a BRILLIANT situation: it's a boulangerie up by Sacré Cœur, and get this, it's owned by a Senegalese man. Yes! So here we have Sarko, Mr "The immigrants are overrunning our country" being served the best bread in the city by an immigrant. hahahahaha. I really, REALLY hope the boulanger spits in the batter. Just once.

Conveniently, my friend Leslie lives right around the corner from this boulangerie. Her comment was, "yeah, I USED to buy my bread there, but now I can't get anywhere near it, the lines are too long." hahaha. Even so, she agreed to take me there, so here I am posing with a roll from the best boulangerie in Paris. And it was indeed a winner:


On an entirely unrelated note, this weekend, being May Day and all, featured a wine tasting with the Bryn Mawr club of Paris. One of the members has this kick-ass wine cellar, I've never seen anything like it before, in fact. She even had her lantern on display:

Anyway, Ben and I realized quite early on that this was not really going to be a wine "tasting" as much as a wine "drinking" party, haha. We had pondered coming over on the bikes but had thought better of it, and oh were we glad we did, haha. There were 5 varieties and they served two glasses per variety, so yeah...you can do the math. Thank goodness there were a lot of snacks to go with it, as the evening would have ended quite differently otherwise!!!