Maitresse

L'Education mise à nu

    

There's a mini polemic on in France right now about a series of photographs depicting professors (apparently real professors-- call me, Monsieur X--) in their birthday suits to protest the "dépouillement" (or dispossession-- literally: plucking) of the education system in France. These photographs are part of a calendar which you can see in its entirety here. On the news the other day, some conservative bureaucrat was complaining that these photographs "dévalorisaient la profession [d'enseignant]" [devalued the teaching profession]. What do you think?

And now a moment to discuss the South African wine industry

My friend Kaitlin Cordes is a Research Fellow in the Africa Division of Human Rights Watch, and is responsible for that report you may have heard about which was published last week and made the front page of the New York Times.  Kaitlin's report revealed that most of the manpower behind South Africa's wine and fruit industry, worth about $811 million a year, lives in squalor-- literally in pigstalls with no electricity, toilet, or protection from frequent flooding. Working conditions can be extremely dangerous, and wages are nearly nonexistent. The wine growers have been slow to address these dismal working and living conditions, and the government has done little to ensure that labor laws are respected.

Kaitlin has just published a forceful op-ed in Think Africa Press, which offers the following advice for consumers (mostly in the UK) of South African wine:   

When shopping for wine or fruit, consumers should ask the merchant where it comes from and under what conditions it was produced. They also should explicitly ask for products that are grown, harvested, packed and bottled by producers who are subject to ethical audits. This will send a clear message throughout the fruit and wine supply chain - up to the corporate buyers and down to the farmworkers in the field - that consumers want to enjoy South Africa’s agricultural products with the confidence that they were not produced on the back of abuse. Knowing that the wine we savour is not tainted by abuse is something we can all toast.

 

Provincializing Pamuk

I'm cross-posting something I wrote on my Tumblr, because it's the kind of thing I would have normally written here, except it happened to come out over there.

I'm thinking about what Orhan Pamuk had to say at the Jaipur Literary Festival this past weekend, which I find fascinating, whinging, problematic, and wrong-headed, all at the same time:

"Most of the writers at a festival such as Jaipur [write] in English," he said. "This is maybe because English is the official language here. But for those writing in other languages, their work is rarely translated and never read. So much of human experience is marginalised."

He goes on to complain that literary critics "provincialise" his work:

"When I write about love, the critics in the US and Britain say that this Turkish writer writes very interesting things about Turkish love. Why can't love be general? I am always resentful and angry of this attempt to narrow me and my capacity to experience this humanity," he complained. "You are squeezed and narrowed down, cornered down as a writer whose book is considered only the representation of his national voice and a little bit of anthropological curiosity."

1. The fascinating part is the way this intervenes in a larger conversation about national literature that I've been observing and writing about for some time (sometimes in public, sometimes in this Word doc I keep on my computer).

2. The whinging part--isn't it obvious?

3. The problematic part is that Pamuk implies that the Anglophone literary world is the only world that really counts, and if you don't publish in English it's as if you don't publish at all. "...their work is rarely translated and never read." As if to have one's work read only by other speakers of your native language is about the same as no one reading it at all. [I just realized I've been all hey, my novel's coming out soon, but it's coming out in French and not English, so I guess I'm marginalized too. Awesome.]

So he's arguing that non-Anglophone writers need to be translated into English to be "read" (by Anglophones, who it would seem are the only readers that matter). But then he's complaining that once translated, those writers are treated as representatives of their countries in ways they find limiting. 

I'm sorry, but how can a work in translation not be treated as a work in translation, and therefore as a representative of another culture? Especially if a plea is being made to translate more for the sake of translating more? To what extent is Pamuk suggesting we erase cultural difference in the service of Literature?

4. The wrong-headed part: because I don't think this is the conversation we should be having anymore. The horse is dead. We need new ways of thinking about world literature that don't presuppose the Anglophone world to be the center of anything. (Cf the world literature manifesto that came out in France a few years ago, in which the Paris was declared to no longer be the "center" of Francophone literature.) It's at least someplace to begin. Words are powerful. Ever hear of performative speech acts? (No? Ok, read this.) If you don't want to be a Turkish writer, what kind of writer do you want to be? Don't just complain: change the conversation.

A second second Second Sex

The new translation of Simone de Beauvoir's foundational feminist work The Second Sex was published in the UK in late 2009 (I wrote about it here).  It took some time for Beauvoir scholars to work their way through it, and one critic in particular--feminist scholar and Duke professor Toril Moi-- found the re-translation to be mostly a failure, tearing it apart in a recent essay in the London Review of Books.

Moi's essay has made such waves that Margaret Simons, philosopher professor and Beauvoir expert (and author of the original essay alerting everyone to the fact that the Parshley translation was incomplete and inaccurate), sent out a call on a philosophy list-serv for corrections to the UK edition, "which the translators have another day or two to correct in the US edition." It's a relief, then, to know that although this translation may not be ideal, the howlers which Moi identified can at least be put right for the US edition (and future UK editions). I tend to think Moi will consider the flaws to be more than simply cosmetic; Simons, on the other hand, calls it a" tremendous advance over the Parshley translation in accuracy and completeness."

I guess we'll all have to stay tuned for la suite.

Fighting over A Moveable Feast

What a lot of sound and fury about this new "restored" version of Hemingway's A Moveable Feast! After A.E. Hotchner's New York Times Op-Ed attack,Thomas Lipscomb wades in with his own attack, although he makes a show of trying to untangle fact from fiction (the lone commenter begs to differ with Lipscomb's version).  Brenda Wineapple has the fairest assessment I've seen, at the Wall Street Journal.

I haven't seen the restored edition, but am curious to do so (though I doubt I'll be able to find a copy before the fall).  However, like Thomas Gagen at the Boston Globe, I'd urge those who are coming to it for the first time to stick to the classic 1964 edition, and to treat this restored one as the equivalent of the bonus material on a DVD. 

Working

Yesterday afternoon, out of curiosity and disbelief, I stopped by Bryant Park to witness James Wood play the bongos with John Jeremiah Sullivan's band Fayaway. It was a sight to see! But no one else in the audience seemed to find it as incongruous as I did. Wood acquitted himself well, with much concentration and the occasional tympanic flourish. He has quite the ear for a triplet, something you can't say about just anyone, which made me appreciate his criticism all the more. [Update: via Mark Sarvas, I learn that Wood suffered a tambourine-inflicted wound during one song. Let it be said that the injury did not in any perceptible way affect his performance.]

After the set, Peter Terzian took the mic and led a panel of writers (Joshua Ferris, Stacey D'Erasmo, Clifford Chase, Asali Solomon) in a set of readings from the new collection he's edited, Heavy Rotation-- in which these and other writers (Wood, Sullivan, Benjamin Kunkel, Kate Christensen, etc.) discuss the albums which had the greatest formational impact on their lives.  The collection sounds great-- you can read more about it here.  Caleb Crain has some photos up on his blog, here.  (I did see some people filming in the front row-- I wonder if there's video available anywhere?)

Speaking of Caleb Crain, I came across his face-off with Alain de Botton today. Though I'm usually a fan of ADB (his Proust book and his architecture book to be more precise), this one-- on the pleasures and sorrows of work-- sounds deadly boring. In case you missed it, here's what happened: Crain reviewed ADB in the New York Times. ADB freaked out on Crain's blog, writing “I will hate you till the day I die and wish you nothing but ill will in every career move you make. I will be watching with interest and schadenfreude." People took note and wondered how ADB could make such a blunder in the same week as Alice Hoffman.  (Ed Champion did an interview with ADB in which he claims to have been unaware of L'Affaire Hoffman.) Then, ADB revealed that he intended his comments to be for Crain's eyes only, which begs the question of why he would leave a private message on a website, where-- I know this is tough to comprehend but stay with me-- other people can see it.

This hullabaloo over Alain de Botton’s comments is more interesting than the book, which seems to will itself to be a lyrical-philosophical-britannical updating of Studs Terkel. If you want to read about work, I recommend instead Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came To the End, which I picked up yesterday after hearing him read at Bryant Park. It’s so good--  a pitch perfect of the way we (i.e. contemporary, everyday, Joe Schmoe Americans) tell stories, tell jokes, and misunderstand each other.  Ferris captures the sense of quiet desperation in the work environment of a group of people working for a Chicago advertising firm-- but he doesn’t condescend or push the pathos envelope.  He achieves this through the use of a choral narrator, a loose narrative structure, and a relentless determination to find the humor in absolutely everything, which is occasionally cruel, until you realize they’re laughing for their lives.

And now, if you'll excuse me, I have to get back to work.

NPR's Top 100? Please excuse me while I rant

Heard about this last week but didn't get a chance to comment until today. At NPR, Dick Meyer summons his chutzpah and posts his list of the best 100 novels of the last 100 years.  Says he:

I am not a learned or prolific reader of novels. My taste is probably medium-brow, male and parochial in many ways. Tough. It's my list. I included two books that probably aren't novels: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Fabulous Small Jews. Lots of innovative, modern stuff didn't make it because I am not good at reading it.

My criteria were essentially how much the book hit me, moved me, made me see — and how it stuck with me. The books are all English-language novels written after 1900.

In other words, the man has absolutely no qualifications to make such a list, which in our bizarre (post-?)post-modern world apparently makes him the perfect candidate to do it. 

Of course such lists are by nature subjective and silly and change radically depending on who you ask. Probably no one would argue with The Great Gatsby or Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; some would argue with Lolita but for the wrong reasons.  But there are only seven books on there by women, and one of them is the atrocious A History of Love. (As one commenter put it: "Seven women and one of them is Nicole Krauss? What a joke.")

But it's not the numbers that get me. It's the pride in mediocrity and ignorance.  It's the unabashed "I really don't know the first thing about novels, but I'm going to make a list of the best ones anyway." It's the chin-jutting "My taste is probably medium-brow, male and parochial in many ways. Tough." His taste is thoroughly middlebrow and outrageously male. And though he's encountered some criticism for this, the fact is Dick Meyer is right there on NPR being accorded the right to be parochial and male, and getting away with calling his list the best novels of the last century.  Can you imagine had they asked a woman to make a list like this and it was full of female writers with only 7 male writers (one of whom was Herman Wouk?)? The list would be categorized "feminist" and therefore marginalized. But a parochial male view is lauded as the centrist point of view, not a list of the best male novels, but a list of the best novels. Simone de Beauvoir called her study The Second Sex because, then as now, men were where it was at. Women were an after-thought, a modification. There was the universal male, and then there was the feminine.

I mean, ugh. Ugh. Herman Wouk has two books on the list but Virginia Woolf is only represented by To the Lighthouse? You really want to imply that The Caine Mutiny is a better novel than Mrs Dalloway just because you liked it better? Dick Meyer, you're embarrassing yourself. Go read your boy books.

around the internet on a tuesday: Republic of Letters edition

You've probably seen this already, but Robert Darnton's article for the New York Review on Google and the future of books is not to be missed. Darnton, a literary historian whose works include The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (excerpt here) and The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie, 1775-1800 is the director of the Harvard library system.  In that capacity he has a particular interest in the digitalization of books, but he situates his argument within the context of the Enlightenment, and the hierarchies which structured the Republic of Letters:

Far from functioning like an egalitarian agora, the Republic of Letters suffered from the same disease that ate through all societies in the eighteenth century: privilege. Privileges were not limited to aristocrats. In France, they applied to everything in the world of letters, including printing and the book trade, which were dominated by exclusive guilds, and the books themselves, which could not appear legally without a royal privilege and a censor's approbation, printed in full in their text.

One way to understand this system is to draw on the sociology of knowledge, notably Pierre Bourdieu's notion of literature as a power field composed of contending positions within the rules of a game that itself is subordinate to the dominating forces of society at large. But one needn't subscribe to Bourdieu's school of sociology in order to acknowledge the connections between literature and power. Seen from the perspective of the players, the realities of literary life contradicted the lofty ideals of the Enlightenment. Despite its principles, the Republic of Letters, as it actually operated, was a closed world, inaccessible to the underprivileged. Yet I want to invoke the Enlightenment in an argument for openness in general and for open access in particular.

If we turn from the eighteenth century to the present, do we see a similar contradiction between principle and practice—right here in the world of research libraries? One of my colleagues is a quiet, diminutive lady, who might call up the notion of Marion the Librarian. When she meets people at parties and identifies herself, they sometimes say condescendingly, "A librarian, how nice. Tell me, what is it like to be a librarian?" She replies, "Essentially, it is all about money and power."

We are back with Pierre Bourdieu.

You have to read the article for yourselves; I can't do justice to Darnton's argument here. But for my part, I would like to know why a subscription to the Journal of Comparative Neurology costs $25,910 per year.

*

Speaking of the Republic of Letters, why do writers hate each other so much? asks an article on the Nouvel Observateur's books blog [in French].  Can't we all just get along?

It would seem the answer is no.  And tant mieux! A new book just published here, Une histoire des haines d'écrivains, de Chateaubriand à Proust, by Étienne Kern and Anne Boquel (Flammarion), looks back at some of the most virulent and entertaining literary feuds of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in France.  Sainte-Beuve and Victor Hugo called each other "Cyclops" and "Sainte-Bave" (Saint Drool); Barbey d'Aurevilly said of Prosper Mérimée that he had "the legs of a peacock but not the tail," and George Sand piled on Mérimée: when Alexandre Dumas called his virility into question, Sand said that she herself had sampled it, and that it was "nothing special."

Both Le Figaro and the Nouvel Obs followed up their reviews of the books with a roundup of today's sharpest literary feuds.  My favorite has to be Pierre Assouline versus François Begaudeau. 

Août 2007. Pierre Assouline sort le stylo rouge sur son blog, contre «un livre franchement sans intérêt, ni fait ni à faire, à partir d'une idée qui ne vaut rien»: c'est «Fin de l'histoire» de François Bégaudeau. Une palme d'or plus tard, l'auteur-acteur d'«Entre les murs» se représente, avec son «Antimanuel de littérature» soigneusement dédicacé: «Cher P. A., toujours un plaisir d'être brocardé par les réacs, vous gênez pas.» Le réac prend la consigne à la lettre: «Même là, il parle en djeune! Te gêne pas! Nique ta grammaire! C'est écrit comme c'est dédicacé.»

Let me try to do justice to the French:

August 2007. Pierre Assouline gets out the red marker on his blog, against "a book that is frankly without interest, a botched job of an idea that was worthless to begin with": End of the Story, by François Bégaudeau. One Palme d'or later, the author/actor of "The Class" returns with his "Anti-User's Guide to Literature," carefully dedicated: "Dear P.A., always a pleasure to be mocked by the neo-cons, don't worry about it [hard to render in English-- he omits the "ne" in "ne vous genez pas" which is very slang]." The neo-con takes this advice literally: "Even there he talks like he's in the ghetto! 'Don't worry about it! Fuck your mother tongue [grammaire/mère]! Spelled how it's dedicated."

If there is a brighter example of the pompous Frenchman than Bégaudeau, I would like to see it.  There is just no beating him, I'm afraid.  To wit:

Begaudeau café litteraire
envoyé par noop

Bégaudeau isthe one in the black v-neck t-shirt who bobbles his head around like it's come loose from his shoulders. UPDATE: To be fair, perhaps he's just nervous or feeling persecuted.  There's a pretty good interview between him and Alain Finkielkraut here in which he acquits himself decently.

Why Paris: a new manifesto for an old subject (I of III)

Part One: Moratorium

I am mildly embarrassed to have let my feathers ruffle so because of a puff piece in the Wall Street Journal called "Why the Expats Left Paris." For me, it was one puff piece too many, because the more these articles are published, the more a certain idea about Paris is reinforced, and the American reading public deserves better stories of that city than what they've been getting. I am not naive enough to think that because one writer voices her discontent, the quality of articles about Paris will improve; still, I must speak up.

I hereby call for a end to clichéd articles about literary Paris, all those which invoke the names of the deities ("Sartre" and "Beauvoir") in an incantation to raise from the dead the spirit of a Paris that never existed.

Newspaper editors must think these stories are romantic in some way, but the subject has been utterly emptied of its original meaning, and now signals only "here is another article about that place everyone likes with the tower and the bridges." What is written is incidental to the fact that it is being said, again, and it is in this way that sloppy mistakes and misconceptions creep in. Besides which, aren't newspaper editors in the business of printing news? It seems to me that any other travel story on any other location would have been researched and fact-checked.  But because it's Paris, and we've heard this story before, touchy-feely clichés based on one person's very limited experience are apparently acceptable. This is called "reification."

Do not misunderstand me: this is not a moratorium for all invocations of literary Paris: only those which tell us nothing, add nothing, and flatten out an important moment in literary history. I call for this moratorium in favor of better, truer writing about Paris.  Let us agree no longer to reduce Paris to this tired cliché, and to produce, if not works to rival Being and Nothingness or The Ethics of Ambiguity, at least better travel writing.

What is the difference between a cliché and a myth? Myths are stories we tell ourselves, to explain why we form affinities with certain things, or to help cope with a necessary but unpleasant rite of passage. Myths can be productive; myths can be powerful. But they can also create a false sense of communal agreement—false because the terms are assumed, not specified. Myths can also be untrue.

Literary Paris is a potent myth. An entire cottage industry of books has cropped up around it, some of them quite good, some of them horrid. But how do we tell the difference? Not long ago, I reviewed a book called Paris Cafe: the Select Crowd.  This book treats the myth in a way that both pays homage to the past and makes it relevant to the present. The ineffable quality of the cafe comes through in the gossipy and insightful writing, and the visceral, well-wrought illustrations.

Clichés, on the other hand, are dead thoughts. The term cliché, in French, can also be used to mean "snapshot." As in "here, let me show you the banal pictures I took on my last trip to Paris." The article in question employed enough clichés to fill up a Flickr account.

In writing about Paris, clichés are easy to use and hard to avoid.  They must first be acknowledged, and then excised: a new way of speaking about an old subject must be sought, and failure to conquer the cliché will ensue your argument rests on a weak foundation. The writer or the artist with Paris as his subject must find his own vernacular. 

*

This "manifesto," if you will, may seem out of proportion to this particular article. Surely it is a bit of light reading for the weekend's Wall Street Journal, destined for the trash bins on Monday. Nothing anyone should take seriously.

But the writer, Dinaw Mengestu, is the kind of guy you do take seriously. He has written a well-received first novel (The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears, which won the 2007 Guardian First Book Award as well as the Prix du Meilleur Premier Roman Etranger that year, which is more than most of us can say), and he has also published engaging articles on Darfur and Uganda. Surely what Mengestu writes bears the stamp of thoughtfulness and commitment— is worthy of our scrutiny more than, say, some hack journalist trying to make a buck off of a pile of clichés. (I say this with all due respect for hack journalists, being one, on occasion, myself). It is all the more disappointing, then, that instead of delivering an insightful look at Paris, we are served an interesting idea wrapped in nonsense.

His premise is that black American writers once fled the racial (no mention of homophobic) discrimination of their native land for the "refuge and sanctuary" of Paris, whereas nowadays, America has caught up with France, and France has in fact become more conservative, judging at least from the suburb of Seine-Saint-Denis.

This is an interesting and thought-provoking basis for an article. But then he gets bogged down with wondering where the expat American literary community has gone, looking from left to right on the Blvd St Germain, finding only tourists in a café lamenting the price of a bottle of water (presumably they are too dense to know they could get a carafe of water for free). He concludes, like Robinson Crusoe, "I am alone on the island," and goes on to extol the joys of being in a Paris that is no better or worse than any American city. Moreover, he rejoices that there are no other American writers hanging around to cramp his style or force him to feel "fashionable."

The Wall Street Journal's weekend paper was perhaps not the market for a 9,000 word think piece on the comparative environments for African-Americans in the US and African immigrants in France, which I am sure Mengestu could write ably, given more time in France. But to make the article marketable—for the editors, the readers, and the advertisers—it needed a catchier hook. And this is how Paris becomes a cliché: when it is reduced to a marketing concept. The result: "Why the Expats Left Paris."

Sorry to disappoint you, Dinaw, but we haven't left. You're just not looking for us in the right places.

Part Two: Now versus then

Mengestu has been living in the 6th, he tells us, where he finds the lure of nostalgia too strong to resist; he fantasizes sitting in the Café du Flore with Sartre and Beauvoir, overhearing an argument between Wright and Baldwin. Fair enough; we all have these moments (they do tend to happen more in the beginning of one's time in Paris, and fade after the first year or so).

His version of the "good old days" is as vague and unspecific as the bad new days. It amounts to a misreading both of our era and of theirs.  Paris then is presented as a grand old place to live, with Sartre and Beauvoir placidly presiding over the intellectual scene. Nevermind that Beauvoir and Sartre sat and wrote for hours in the Flore, or was it the Magots, because they couldn't afford to heat their apartments. Mengestu's version includes no mention of the vicious infighting amongst the literati, the casual racism and anti-Semitism, even after the Holocaust. Richard Wright moved to Paris in 1946, Baldwin in 1948. Where is the post-war épuration in Mengestu's account? Where is the Sétif massacre? The rumblings of war in Algeria? No, in the mythic version of the postwar days, Paris was just a happy land of philosophers. But to romanticize this era within the context of an article that ventures into the political waters of our day (at least by the invocation of "Seine-Saint-Denis" and the 2005 riots, which have acquired a mythic stature of their own), is in bad taste.

There was indeed a culture of relaxed mores which flourished in Paris between the wars, as well as in the 50s and 60s, which attracted writers and artists from around the world; and yes, Wright and Baldwin did enjoy more freedom from prejudice in France than they did in the States. This is not in dispute. But building a mythology around those eras because of those freedoms is kind of a flat, un-nuanced reading of history. What were Baldwin and Wright arguing about? This article gives us myth without matière.

Blinded by his nostalgia for Paris in the 50s, Mengestu has a hard time seeing contemporary Paris. "What's really missing these days isn't just café literary life, but a palpable and vibrant American cultural life." Missing from where? From the Blvd St Germain? Or from Paris altogether? The first might be accurate; the second would be deluded.  Does he hang out with no one under the age of 40? Francophone or Anglophone, they would have informed him that the creative types are hanging out predominantly in northeast Paris. He need only look away from the 6th to find communities of writers and artists making a living as best they can, and living in Paris for one reason or another—some, like James Baldwin, just to get away from where they're from, some because they are inspired by and in sync with the city. Look to the 13th, to the Butte aux Cailles, where American blogger Aimee Gille has recently opened her own cafe. Look to the outskirts of Pere Lachaise. Look to Belleville. These are places that have their own mythologies as well now (which I've complained of in the past, but it seems amazing to me that Mengestu would not mention them). If Baldwin and Wright were to sit down over coffee today, they would do it at Café Chéri(e), and it would cost €2,20, or $3.50 a cup-- roughly what they'd pay in a cafe in Brooklyn

"Today it's impossible for me to imagine the sense of refuge and sanctuary that other Americans once found here," Mengestu writes. But even if the atmosphere "back home" these days is kinder to racial and sexual minorities than it was in Wright's day, Paris is still a refuge and a sanctuary for the expatriate, by virtue of its being far from home, a different culture, a place to reinvent oneself in a completely foreign context. If Mengestu had bothered to talk to any expatriates other than himself, he might have found this out.

Still to come: Part Three: Beyond an "American" in Paris, and Part Four: So who are these creative types and where can I find them?

Why Paris?

James Baldwin noted shortly after he first arrived in France, "I didn't go to Paris. I left New York." Inherent in that statement is the idea that it wasn't the destination but the departure that mattered most. I can't help but think that to some degree that sentiment still holds true, although for drastically different reasons than before. Paris has lost some of what once made it so special and unique, enough so that it's hard to imagine another outburst of American cultural creativity taking place in Paris again anytime soon. Why Paris when there's the rest of the world, much of which is cheaper and more unknown? It's a question I hear constantly, less so from Americans than Parisians who seem baffled by my decision to be here.

I am still seething over Dinaw Mengestu's article in the Wall Street Journal, "Why the Expats Left Paris," but I've narrowed it down to this particular paragraph, which rings polemical to me (but maybe I'm just overly sensitive on this subject). I'm still working on articulating my response (right now I just have a growing Word document filled with indignant sputtering), and I'll post it as soon as possible.

In the meantime, I invite all the expats who are reading this to leave comments or email me privately, answering Mengetsu's question, "Why Paris?"

Why did you come to Paris, and not anywhere else in the world?  What is it that makes Paris special and unique?

Mengetsu concludes his article by professing his affection for the quietness of Paris, extolling the absence of an expatriate scene which would presumably deafen his thoughts. "There's no romantic ideal to be lived out here anymore -- no cafés, readings or events that can't be missed." I can't speak to the romantic ideal part-- that's up to the individual.  But as for the readings and events-- how very, very wrong he is.

 

Bienvenue chez les Français

Controversy is brewing in France this week over a proposed amendment to the Constitution declaring regional languages to be part of France's patrimony. The amendment, which was proposed on May 22nd, was suppressed by the Senate on June 18th, two-thirds of whom agreed that it threatened the unity of French national identity, invoking legislature from 1539 and 1794 (God, I love France) as precedent.

The political analyst Arthur Goldhammer has an interesting take on his blog, encouraging the French to think less in terms of their "roots" and more in terms of their "branches."

Le Monde notes that "a language does not need to be legislated to exist. The 21 million French people who went to see '[Bienvenue chez les] Ch'tis' can best attest to this."

It'ch true it wach a really funny movie, hein?

saddle-up, it's saturday

"If you can't annoy somebody, there's little point in writing," said Kingsley Amis. Words to live by. From an LA Times piece on the declining role of the critic in American discourse. Yes, another one. This time it's not just book criticism which is on the wane-- film critics are seeing their jobs slimmed down, and music critics aren't allowed to say anything bad about anyone!

"If one more person tells me that my book The Stone Gods is science fiction, presumably because it is set in the future and has a robot in it, I will turn myself into a dalek." Jeanette Winterson on genre fiction and the crime novel. Really insightful and not too long, don't miss it. [Via]

"He deserves this homage," said Abdou Diouf this week, regarding the speculation that the recently deceased Aimé Césaire, poet and central figure of the négritude movement, will be interred in the Panthéon. At 6 pm tonight a vigil will be held for Césaire in the Place de la Sorbonne, the apparent birthplace of négritude.

”Le regard de Zucca, plein de talent sans doute, ne peut pas être le nôtre aujourd’hui. Le travail d’explication sur ces images est insuffisant“ ["Zucca's perspective, talented as he is, cannot be ours today. The contextualization of these images is insufficient."] So says Christophe Girard, Delanoe's chargé de culture, on the decision to remove the posters around Paris advertising the very controversial Zucca exposition, "Les Parisiens sous l'Occupation," currently on view at the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris. Pierre Assouline has the story here.

de quoi je me mêle?

My take on the casse-toi pauvre con debacle has just run on HuffPo...

Eric Zemmour is a sexist pig, they say

Eric Zemmour, controversial author of controversial books about how women and immigrants should know their place, was the good-natured target of an avant-garde feminist intervention yesterday led by a feminist group called La Barbe (the beard). Zemmour was signing his latest book at the Publicis Drugstore on the Champs-Elysées when he was approached by a group of gender-bending activists asking him to dedicate a book to "Simon." Like "Simone," get it? Cause she wrote the foundational text of modern feminist called Le Deuxième Sexe about how female gender is constructed as the "other" with male gender as the norm? So women are literally the second sex? Well Zemmour thinks women have been getting rawther too much attention because of that whole feminism thing, so he wrote a book called Le Premier Sexe-- get it? ha ha-- that attempts to take back the night for the good old boys.

Here's the video:

Feeling inspired to join the fight against the badly-dressed chauvinist pigs of France? Next rendez-vous is March 8, international women's rights day, 1 pm, métro République. Wear a beard.

Version française

It's a small, small world? Starbucks and local culture

On the occasion of a Starbucks franchise opening in Tijuana, Jim Bening for WorldHum asks "Does the spread of Starbucks really suck?" The post includes photos of Starbucks around the world, rounded up on Flickr. Anti-globalization folk argue that a Starbucks in every city erases local differences and does in the mom-and-pop coffee industry. (God, what a dead horse. Mom and Pop need to get a lawyer and copyright their name so they can start collecting royalties to help with the loss of business). Starbucks in Tokyo does anything but threaten the "authentic colorfulness of the world’s tapestry." They might be serving the same latte I can get in NY, Paris, and Tijuana, but the process of getting it is very place-specific.  Compare if you will:

NY: I place my order and hope they don't give it away to someone else.

Paris: I place my order, they write my name on the cup, and if they give it away to someone else they'll blame it on me for not answering when they called my name.

Tokyo: I place my order, the cashier repeats it to the person standing next to him, who tells the person standing next to him, who follows suit, and soon all six of the people working behind the counter are singsonging my order. "Grrrande cappuccinooooh! Grande cappuccinohhhhh!" "Grande cappuccinoh gozai masseh," the last one finally announces as she hands it to me with a head nod. "Gozai masssss," I nod back and accept the drink as if it were a precious gift.

Riyadh:  Religious police arrest woman for sitting with a man.

around the internet on a Tuesday

Hello from the former colonial outpost known as the US, where everything is fat-free but the people, and everyone talks? like they're asking? a question? Here are your Tuesday links!

As an undergraduate at Barnard I had to write two senior theses, one per semester. The first semester I had a dragon lady for a professor and I wrote the thesis on Jean Rhys's Quartet and the crisis of femininity after the First World War. The crisis? Too much alcohol and not enough mans to go around. Like "Sex and the City" but there's a man shortage not because they're all married or won't commit but because they all died in the war.  The dragon lady professor, a hardened New Critic, gave me a C or something because she didn't like my New Historicist reading, thereby f*cking up my GPA and making grad school applications really fun (sample interview question: "so if you want to do modernism, how do you explain this C on your first senior thesis?").  And look at that: Virginia Nicholson, author of "Among the Bohemians," daughter of Quentin Bell and grand-niece of Virginia Woolf, has written a book on precisely the same topic. It's called "Singled Out" and the Guardian's review is here.  Meanwhile the dragon lady retired soon after I graduated-- not soon enough for my GPA's liking.   I did appeal the grade, by the way, but final authority was given to the professor, and she stuck to her dogmatic guns.  B*tch.  (But I'm over it.)

Speaking of Barnard, the New York Times informed readers yesterday that there is a "fracas" about the recent decision to give tenure to Professor Nadia Abu El-Haj, an anthropologist and assistant professor at Barnard since 2002.  Professor El-Haj is of Palestinian descent, and apparently in her book provides a "they're just misunderstood and colonialized, poor things" explanation for the "ransacking by thousands of Palestinians" of Joseph's Tomb back in 2000.  I can't believe Barnard denied Lynn Chancer tenure but gave it to this one.

Ok enough politics and enough Barnard. Pierre Assouline weighs in on the plagiarism dispute between Marie Darrieussecq and Camille Laurens.  And this piece on Pascal Quignard is great as well (in French).

Just in time for Rosh Hashanah (for which we here in Jew York get 2 days off from school-- now that's one thing NY has over gentile France!), Lars von Trier tells Ha'aretz he wishes he were Jewish.

Finally, on this Tuesday in New York six years after another fateful Tuesday in New York, it would be appropriate to take a non-nationalistic, non-partisan moment to remember.

Venice in Peril

See these people? The ones in the yellow hats?

They were part of a larger contingent of yellow-hatted people from some unidentifiable Eastern European country who descended on the Piazza San Marco a few moments after I got there, last Thursday.  I was leaning against that lion, waiting for N to meet me there, when a yellow-hat came in front of me and flapped her hands and opened and closed her mouth like a fish.  I assumed she had some kind of disorder and ignored her.  She flapped her hands again.  I then realized she was telling me to get the hell out of her way so she could take a picture of her pimply teenaged kid perched on the lion above my head.  With some reluctance, I did so, muttering.  When  she had finished I moved back into my position.  Until another yellow-hat came along, this one a male, and with raised eyebrows and an emphatic nodding of his head encouraged me to move for him as well.  Thankfully N appeared soon after, or those yellow hats might have seen some bloodshed.

I was just emailing Nardac this morning about my trip, and as I was writing to her I had a thought.  Venice in Peril ought to dedicate some of their efforts not only to restoring the buildings but to instituting some kind of tourist diversionary barrier-- siphon off some of the flow and redirect them somewhere else, and tell them they'll like it just as much as Venice-- and they will.  Because they don't actually care about Venice or anything it contains. They've just heard they should go there, so they go.

So ok, how do you decide who gets to go and who doesn't? N suggested a steep tax, but that's not fair because not everyone can pay it, and I don't think Venice ought to become some kind of exclusive resort for rich people.  So I thought of something much more egalitarian: there should a pop quiz to get into Venice. If you don't get at least 60% of the answers right, you have to get back on the boat and go visit Padua instead.

Here is my suggestion for the Venice in Peril Pop Quiz.

1. Venice was once ruled by the Doge.  A doge is a______
a. car
b. duke in a funny hat
c. group of men in funny hats

2. Bellini, Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, Canaletto.  These names refer to:
a. cocktails
b. cities in Italy
c. artists

3. The Accademia is:
a. a school
b. a museum
c. a sports stadium

4. True or false: a canal is an acceptable substitute for a garbage can.

5. Do you and/or your family own and wear fanny packs? (Y/N)

6. Do you think it is acceptable to eat potato chips whilst riding in a gondola? (Y/N)

7. Do you believe that if you don't videorecord every moment of said gondola ride it's like it didn't happen? (Y/N)

8. Are you likely to buy a sparkly mask to take home to your family? How many?

9. Please define the following terms in your own words and to the best of your ability: mosaic, vaulted ceiling, gothic arch, Byzantine.

10.  If told you that you were to be staying in a hotel in Venice that was built in 1890, which of the following most closely would match your response?
a. 1890? wow, so it's a new building.
b. 1890? Holy shit, that's like a hundred years ago! Dude, this place is old!
c. Whatever, as long as it's clean.

On books as sweaters (part 3 of 3)

read part one here; read part two here.

In the weeks since the book section of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution was closed down, many good articles have been written to analyze the state of literary criticism in the US (notably here), and after a brief survey of the litblogs, the furor seems to have died down. And after all that hemming and hawing, the general consensus seems to be an industry-wide shrug.  The book reviewers have gone back to work, if nervously.

As for my own contributions on this blog (here and here), I’ve received some thought-provoking responses to these posts, both in the comments box and privately, and I have not been surprised to find many reiterated the consoling mantra of our time: "at least people are reading." And  I have to say, with all due respect for those who have uttered it here or elsewhere,

No, this is not good enough.

Nardac had the goodness to recommend an excellent article here and her own response here.  Calling it illiteracy, as Silverblatt does, is perhaps alarmist, but certainly one underlying problem seems to be that people don’t know how to read, really read—reading is hard, they complain. It’s boring.

In my opinion, it isn't sufficient for people to only read easy books that reinforce their worldview,  because only reading someone like Sophie Kinsella or Meg Cabot does nothing to elevate the general discourse.  If everyone is just reading people who talk exactly like they do, people who have exactly the same ideas as they do, the culture will never move forward.  They will remain mired in mediocrity.  Don't get me wrong; Kinsella and Cabot are lively and entertaining writers, but I'm sure they would be the first to agree that their readers should only expect momentary diversion.

But more generally, it’s a numbers game, argues Lindsay Waters, executive editor of humanities at Harvard University Press. “There is a causal connection between the corporatist demand for increased productivity,” Waters writes here, “and the draining from all publications of any significance other than as a number. […]When books cease being complex media and become objects to quantify, then it follows that all the media that the humanities study lose value.”

This reminds me of the fundamental argument of The Dialectic of Enlightenment.  Horkheimer and Adorno write, “The countless agencies of mass production and its culture impress standardized behavior on the individual as the only natural, decent, and rational one. […] Everything which is different, from the idea to criminality, is exposed to the force of the collective, which keeps watch from the classroom to the trade union” (22).  Reading unchallenging books keeps people on the same track, conforming and trying to keep up with what everyone else is doing.  In a worst case scenario, such as the one Horkheimer and Adorno had just survived (Dialectic was first published in 1944), this complacency enables fascism and totalitarianism.  But in our present, less dramatic context, it results in widespread and willful ignorance, which, while less overtly dangerous, is no less insidious.  Adorno was notoriously opposed to mass forms of entertainment, like jazz, and cinema, and he was certainly wrong on those counts.  And I am certainly glad that people do buy books, and read them, no matter how insipid, because they are the core of he publishing industry, that enables more challenging work to be published. 

The problem is that, from early on, as Silverblatt points out, we are not encouraged to do better, to do more.  We simply don’t have any literary ideal on which to model ourselves. Susan Sontag writes that when she was growing up in suburban Arizona and southern California, she turned to reading to escape from “the prison of national vanity, of philistinism, of compulsory philistinism, of inane schooling, of imperfect destinies and bad luck” (At the Same Time, p. xvi).

This assessment has the ring of hindsight to it; it’s unlikely that she could have formulated such a critique from within the provincial setting. Sontag needed to escape it, to get to other thinking people, to become Sontag. And isn’t that ironic? To think that her family, my family, came to America, Jews straight from the shtetl, to build a better life for themselves, and they did it: we, their descendants grew up in such comfort with such essential quality of life that it seems we ought to be the culmination of their hopes for us.  And yet. Something was left out, in the struggle for survival, and the fight to give their children and grandchildren a better life, something got lost. 

The phrase “charmed existence” was coined to describe the childhood of the average suburbanite, i.e., me; all my basic needs were met and most non-basic needs as well.  So it was all the more difficult to put my finger on what was wrong, all those years.  I looked around my middle-class Long Island town and I thought I was just odd.  I didn’t realize I belonged to an entire tribe of people, people who read furiously and deeply, passionate about ideas and their expression. And, like Sontag, I can look back now, and see that it is because there were no models.  Despite the fact that my parents are both highly literate, intelligent people who took me to the ballet, the theatre, to concerts and museums, the zone outside my parents' jurisdiction was deadening to original thought.  In my high school, as I’m sure is true in every other mediocre high school across the country, you were commended for playing by the rules, reading what you were told to; anyone thinking (or reading) outside the box was left outside the box. We read a little Shakespeare, and that was interesting, and otherwise—Holden Caulfield, The Scarlet Letter, Arthur Miller, Ibsen.  Good stuff but it was like receiving echoes from outer space:  I had no idea what it was all connected to or where it was coming from.  I had never heard of Woolf except through the Edward Albee play, much less Beauvoir, Proust, Pynchon, Nabokov, all the greats of the 20th century. Forget about Adorno.  Benjamin who? Hannah who? I didn’t find out until I went to Barnard: and that was when I first began to exist.

Nadine Gordimer describes a similar coming of age, in a 1983 interview with The Paris Review:

In the town where I lived, there was no mental food of this
kind at all. I’m often amazed to think how they live, those peo-
ple, and what an oppressed life it must be, because human beings
mustlive in the world of ideas. This dimension in the human psy-
che is very important. It was there, but they didn’t know how
to express it. Conversation consisted of trivialities. For women,
household matters, problems with children. The men would talk
about golf or business or horse racing or whatever their practical
interests were. Nobody ever talked about, or even around, the
big things: life and death. The whole existential aspect of life was
never discussed. I, of course, approached it through books.
Thought about it on my own. It was as secret as it would have
been to discuss my parents’ sex life. It was something so private,
because I felt that there was nobody with whom I could talk
about these things, just nobody. But then, of course, when I was
moving around at university, my life changed.

 

I was lucky enough to have the courage to stick it out, to deal with being different, and to make it to Barnard. To this day, I chafe when people tell me to take it easy, to take things less seriously.  Elias Canetti once said, “Imagine telling Shakespeare to relax.” Just because we’re not Shakespeare, or Sontag or Canetti, doesn’t mean we should relax, tune out, follow the crowd.  We should take things more seriously than we do.  We should take ideas more seriously.  We should dare to listen before formulating our opinions.  We should take time to consider our thoughts on a given subject, instead of running with whatever thought is at the top of our minds.  We should value less the attempt for its own sake, and start valuing excellence.  We should drop the self-deprecating attitude and try taking ourselves seriously again.  If we come up short of our own or other peoples’ expectations, so be it. 

But that would mean we would no longer be living out our lives through a protective veil. 

Nardac has more faith in humanity than I do, and so I'll end this with her idea: “A human being’s best qualities, the things which I believe are the fundamental principles to all intellectual life, are curiosity and imagination. They both require active cultivation and effort but its rewards are a reprieve from the atrophying effects of apathy and smug ignorance.”

But they need permission to exercise their curiosity, which will otherwise flag and grow dull.  And they need permission not from some Parisian blogger, but from the media, from their schools, from their family and friends.   

On books as sweaters (part 2 of 3)

Picking up where I left off in part one...

In my last post, I argued that the literary critics play a crucial role in sizing up, interpreting, and synthesizing books for the reading public.

There are two primary issues here, as I see it: the role of the literary critic, and the role of the Internet. The latter is at the service of the former.  But the latter may also blur the definition of the former to the degree that one might think oneself a literary critic when one is in fact simply an amateur book enthusiast. 

One of the major themes of this latest polemic over the falling status of books has been the conflict between literary bloggers and book reviewers.  Online book reviews and litblogs are proliferating, but while the internet provides a soap box to anyone who wants one, it unfortunately is more difficult to police the quality of the reviews being generated (some of the most successful book blogs feature the most atrocious writing).

Pierre Assouline confessed on his blog that he is critical of journalisme citoyen, a label under which I think we can classify litbloggers : « Inutile de rappeler que c’est un métier, une technique, un savoir-faire, une expérience. Désolé mais non, tout le monde n’est pas journaliste, photographe, cinéaste, professeur, encyclopédiste… »

["There's no use protesting that [being a journalist] is a métier which demands technique, know-how and a certain amount of experience.  I'm sorry but no, not everyone in the world can be a journalist, a photographer, a filmmaker, a professor, an encyclopedist..."]

Surely, c’est un métier qui s’apprend, it is a skill which can be learned, given the proper amount of training; book criticism calls for a certain amount of enthusiasm, discernment, and the capacity to communicate to others the results of his perception.  At the very least, a book critic has "to help a reader make free and independent choices, not confuse fame or popularity with value, and must present real cultural values: rather than those created by the market," as Luisa Blanco suggested recently at the London Book Fair.

Still, a hierarchy within the profession must be defended; rising above the occupation of "book critic" to "literary critic" requires a wide breadth and depth of knowledge, along with a keener and innate sense of language and intuitive feeling of the empathetic resonance between texts.  But ultimately, a sense of absurdity and a capacity for great sacrifice are indispensable to a life as a book critic.  And passion.  Lots of passion. Tom Stoppard, in an interview about his trilogy The Coast of Utopia, had the following to say on the character of Belinsky, the literary critic obsessed with Russia’s need for a national literature: “His job was to find artists and encourage them. His was a combination of a noble calling and a pointless one. Whether people can find great artists without the help of any critic I don't know.”

The problem is, our society seems to be moving into an era when these sensitive souls are becoming superfluous-- if books matter less, why should book critics matter at all? And as aboard a ship that's gone dramatically off-course, there is conflict stirring within the ranks.

Critics of litblogs have accused them of being “parasites to traditional media.” They do not concede that blogs could in fact be forums for literary criticism, and on this point the haters have been roundly chastised.

Except they do sort of have a point, much as it irks me to side with anyone apart from the bloggers. The problem with the democratization brought about by the Internet is that it leads everyone to believe they are worthy of being listened to.  I am sorry to say, this is not the case, and I’m not sorry if this sounds elitist.  As someone who has exerted considerable time, effort, and financial sacrifice training in university literature departments , I feel entitled to my elitism. It is difficult to get accepted to a PhD program in literature, and even more difficult to stay the course for 8 years.  But I believe literature, literary criticism, and academic research to be of crucial importance to our culture and its continuance, so that is how I spend my days. 

But PhD or no PhD, blogs are the only place where young critics can make their voices heard, precisely because newspapers and paying outlets have tightened their belts on book coverage.  So when I pitch a book review to a place like the Boston Globe, I have no shot of getting my pitch accepted because I’m competing with my elders and betters: seasoned experts who are taken care of by their editors. It’s just not a dynamic sector of journalism or publishing, and no amount of talent, ingenuity, or training will get you in the door.  So you try another one, a virtual one, and instead of judging the success of the endeavor by circulation and letters to the editor you talk about hits and comments.

Apart from litblogs, at the same time as newspaper book reviews are disappearing, small literary magazines are cropping up left and right.  Certainly there is a reading audience out there, but they are perhaps become fragmented, specialized.  It’s the rule of the long tail, essentially-- those who want book reviews will go after them.

But this implies two things: one, that book reviews should only be read by a specialized segment of the population, and two, that the mainstream newspaper-reading public should feel no obligation to be interested in books.

Which revisits my initial thesis, which will be further developed (with some help from Nardac, Michael Silverblatt, and Susan Sontag) in part three.

On books as sweaters (part 1 of 3)

When did books become totally irrelevant to the life of the majority of the population in the US?  The one purpose they could be counted on to serve, that of entertainment, has been gradually replaced by the movies, the television, the Internet, the MP3 player.  The other function of the novel, for instance, to instruct, has been usurped by reality television. The reading masses who in Victorian England made Dickens and Trollope and Collins bestsellers and kept Mudie’s lending library in business today are now learning how not to behave from the derelicts on "The Real Housewives of the OC."

The next sector up of the reading public is reading whatever Oprah (the Mudie of the 20th century) tells them to.   And still more sophisticated readers ignore Oprah and listen to the New York Times, which is not much more reliable.  Not that there’s anything wrong with Oprah’s picks, or the NYT anointed.  They’re usually fine.  But very rarely is the writing anything great. 

You know what is great? Their marketing team. The amount of negotiating it took for those books to get under the nose of the right person at the right time.  Sure, they all have a basic level of excellence.  But they are reduced to commodities instead of texts. In this schema, it is irrelevant to establish why Special Topics in Calamity Physics is inferior to On Beauty.  People will buy and read both because the New York Times told them to, and who cares about the difference?

I care about the difference. 

It’s like that scene in “The Devil Wears Prada” when Meryl Streep coolly explains the trickle-down theory of fashion: that what Andie thinks is an anti-choice (throwing on the first sweater she sees in her closet in the morning) is actually a choice that has been made for her by the people she thinks are irrelevant to her life: those at the very apex of the fashion industry (who are responsible for the sweater’s existence).  And you’re right to assume that in this schema, books are sweaters.  (It’s just that On Beauty is Chanel whereas Special Topics is J. Crew).   The people who buy Oprah’s books are making a non-choice.  They’re just bringing in pizza because they’re too lazy to cook.  Nothing wrong with pizza.  But what’s wrong with cooking? And besides—who are you going to trust to recommend something to eat, Oprah or a food critic? Both, probably, but I would hope more credence would be given to the trained professional.

There are only five freestanding book review sections left in the country and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution fired their book editor two weeks ago.  This is bad, and over six thousand writers and book lovers  have signed a petition asking the AJC to reinstate her. But does anyone actually care if book reviews have their own section in a newspaper or if they’re just thrown in with all the other arts coverage.  For that matter, why should books get their own section?

I can’t really give you a convincing enough reason. I can only shake my head and say wistfully that books ought to be much more important than they are. Books do everything the other arts do and they do it more articulately.  Books teach us to be functioning, expressive individuals.  Movies and television give you empty lines to repeat while you get drunk with your friends. Books make you think for yourself.

« La littérature peut beaucoup, » writes Tzvetan Todorov in his recent essay La littéreature en péril. « Elle peut nous tendre la main quand nous sommes profondément déprimés, nous conduire vers les autres êtres humains autour de nous, nous faire mieux comprendre le monde et nous aider à vivre.  Ce n’est pas qu’elle soit, avant tout, une technique de soins de l’âme ; toutefois, révélation du monde, elle peut aussi, chemin faisant, transformer chacun de nous de l’intérieur. »  (p. 72)

“Literature can do many things.  It can lend a hand when we are profoundly depressed, open us up to the other human beings surrounding us, help us better to live and to understand the world. This is not to say that it is above all a means of healing the soul; nevertheless it can be revelatory, and transforming.” (p. 72)

“Literature has a vital role to play,” Todorov argues, but in order for it to do so it must return to the status it enjoyed up until the end of the 19th century.  This is where literary critics come in.  So you want to read something other than what Oprah tells you to? Great! But without book reviews in newspapers—at the very least—where are you going to find out what’s worth reading?

Ah yes, that’s right.  I forgot.  You’re already there.  You’re here.  The internet. 

We'll talk about that more, next class.  I promise I won't leave you hanging.  But this is long enough for now.

Go on to part two