Yay spring break
On Wednesday, my project team got to do our lovely educational walking tour of the 13th Arrondissement. Naturally, Wednesday was cold, windy, and partially rainy. Still, we managed to pull off the tour well enough. No pictures because I’ve posted just about all the interesting ones of the 13th and I didn’t bother taking any of the tour, really, since we were just going to the same places again–with the exception of the interiors of the Frigos:
Students by mailboxes.
List of artists/artisans posted on the outside of the building.
Students mounting the stairs–an actual spiral staircase that is not Of Doom by virtue of the fact that it’s suitably wide. See, French people can design sensible stairs. Sometimes.
The logo of Sacha Schwartz, whose workshop we saw. More on him to follow in a day or two. Rationing pictures and all that, don’t want to run out of Things Worth Posting after all.
I was expecting this Thursday to have even more students in the lobby and chairs blocking doors than usual, since they’d been escalating steadily and this was the last Thursday before break. But the lobby was rather bare:
Disappointing, no?
Grammar class was all about the subjunctive. Fun, that. We’re even using pages from the same textbook I used at Hunter. I’m confident I’ll forget it all again within a year. Which is, of course, frustrating, and more so than the usual quirks of French, because I actually rather like the idea of the subjunctive. Some parts of French are needlessly complicated, like the whole nouns-all-having-genders thing; talking of an object in a manner than connotes “male” or “female” adds little to no useful information, especially because the genders assigned don’t even correspond with cultural ideas of what is masculine or feminine. Subjunctive-vs-indicative, on the other hand, carries connotations of subjectivity vs subjectivity, which actually is does give you useful information, and adds nuances to the use of verbs beyond their literal meaning/denotation/definition. So I’d really like to get a handle on it, but apparently I can’t. Frustrating.
In my lit class, it transpired that apparently I hadn’t managed to email my corrected first paper, and the first draft of my second paper, to the professor. Of course, since the problem happened on my end, and there wasn’t even a record of it in my Sent Items, it would only be logical for her to assume that I hadn’t actually done the homework by the designated time; or rather, the only sensible policy would be to declare that it doesn’t matter what the reason is–since these things cannot be proven–and say that the burden of ensuring receipt of the assignment falls on the student. I mean, she apparently is relatively lenient with these things, so I don’t know if she’d actually penalize me for it, but I don’t like having professors think I’m lazy because that will unconsciously affect their perceptions of me, and therefore my grade. I mean, I did put it on my USB and go with her to the FLE office and print it up (learned lots of fun things about managing files on a French Mac, including that they apparently leave the error messages in English. So basically the user knows what’s going on until something goes wrong and they’re confronted with a bunch of night-indecipherable technobabble, in a foreign language, no less). And I was relatively aggressive in our in-class analysis of an excerpt from Monique Wittig’s Les Guérillères. That threw me for a loop because I’d overheard a student remarking how in the original there’s a lot of interesting play with gender that isn’t evident in translation, and I couldn’t find anything remotely resembling that, until I realized that he must have been referring to the use of the pronouns ils and elles, which I suppose an English version might have translated as they, though I’d think one would really do better to go with the men and the women, to preserve the meaning of the words, albeit at the expense of some of the connotations (since one does, I believe, use ils to indicate groups of mixed or uncertain gender composition).
On the way out, I came across the students’ latest tactic: not ever-larger amount of furniture in the halls, but a relatively well-executed little skit mocking the government’s reforms. I presume it wasn’t the height of theatrical brilliance, though I can’t judge that so well in French as in English; at any rate, it included one guy instructing his stockbroker to buy and sell shares of different schools, and ended with the lot of them beating Albert Einstein to a pulp because he lacked proper qualifications for teaching. Let it never be said that French student humor goes for the subtle. Some pictures:
Cheery poster with stock prices of schools.
President Sarkozy addresses the crowd.
The cast end with a song. The gentleman behind Sarkozy is Carla Bruni. The fellow next to him is Mr. Einstein. I forget the others because I’m not terribly well-acquainted with the names of French political figures.
More pictures and whatnot later. As I’ve said, I don’t want to run out of things to post.
