Ooh, wow, my 20th post. A right milestone, this is. Little to report, but felt I might as well. My lit course had its second proper class today. Of course, a lot of time was spent recapping what had been said on the first class a month ago, which was dull but necessary, I suppose, and edifying to those who are incapable of taking notes. A grad student, I believe, had been there last week to tell us that the professor would be there, and to give out the readings for today. She collected email addresses today, downright high-tech. We’re to turn in short papers on the readings for next week. The professor explained the format and where to leave them at the FLE department, because next Thursday is a general strike and unless plans change there won’t be much of anything happening. Which means, for me, a 4-day weekend. Could be worse. We ended class early because the FLE department secretary–a tireless, hardworking man whose life’s mission is clearly to help foreign students not be completely baffled by Paris 8–popped by to inform the professor that some people had decided to carry out the oft-proposed idea of blocking the university completely, and were somewhat forcefully encouraging professors and students to leave. Why they decided to do this in the late afternoon, instead of in the beginning of the school day, is a bit of a mystery. But hey, whatever. I don’t even really mind if they go for all-out blocage and put the tables and chairs in the stairwells and whatever (provided, naturally, that there’s nobody in the building who might get trapped in the event of a fire). What I do mind is when a handful of students decide to do this, because they don’t actually shut the school down, they just take the furniture from a classroom or two–inevitably at least one where I have class–and the maintenance people clear it out the next morning and stack it in a hall out of the way where the students who actually have class have to go fetch it. I mean if you’re going to do these things, don’t do them halfway, okay?

Yeah, I’ll stop before this becomes another rant. Though part of me is intrigued by the puzzle of how one might best shut down Paris 8 with furniture… given x chairs and y tables, a doorways of width b… Enh, it would get boring.

Another note on language– I noticed today that French numbers have English numbers beat in one respect: compare English cardinal numbers “one, two three, four” and ordinal numbers, “first, second, third, fourth”; and the French “un/une, deux, trois, quatre” and “premier/première, deuxième, troisième, quatrième.” English has three numbers that aren’t too similar from one form to the other, whereas French only has one. Which does make things easier, or at least more logical, which is so nice when learning languages. I say this having suffered through my first grammar test, which was a pain and which I know I did badly on. There were 2 words I knew I didn’t properly convert from present to past tense, and doubtless many others I didn’t notice. Though at least I managed to get to class on time and understand the professor’s repeated, clear instructions, which puts me ahead of some of my classmates.

For some reason, I’ve noticed most of my French professors don’t get my name right. Which is odd, seeing as it’s more or less a francophone name, or so I thought. But two professors at Hunter and 3-4 here apparently can’t wrap their minds around “Julian.” It’s either “Julien,” or “Julianne,” or an approximation of the English pronunciation, “Djoolianne.” It might be a generational thing; all of those professors have been middle-aged or older, while my one younger French professor at Hunter had no problem pronouncing “Julian” phonetically as it would be said in French. Not sure why this is so hard, though. I expect teachers used to foreign students might also be used to trying to say said students’ names more or less as those students would say them in their native languages. The combination of that habit with an apparently non-standard orthography must be too much.

And, hey, this post deserves a picture. Ummm… here we go:

Pretty church-y thing near the MICEFA office.

Sometime last week this lovely little bit of paper appeared in my dorm mailbox (seen below in initial stages of filling-out):

It’s an Official Survey of some sort or other on housing and employment and whatnot. It claimed to be mandatory, but I got the sense that by mandatory they meant “something we’d really prefer you did even though we have no way of enforcing this besides sending someone to knock on your door and remind you that you really ought to do it if you haven’t already.” I filled it out dutifully. A bit of a drag; some parts I could skip altogether, since they didn’t apply to students in university housing, but others necessitated looking-up of terms and finding out numbers of départements and communes and whatnot. I deployed every linguistic resource at my disposal:

(Left-to-Right: clipboard, assorted bits of survey, Petit Robert, Oxford/Hachette, pencil, socks)

Yeah, okay, so it wasn’t actually that exciting. At any rate, I did my civic duty. Noted that the form was clearly supposed to be inputted into a database by hand, rather than scanned. I suppose French people really have a hard time letting go of good old-fashioned hard-copy bureaucracy.

On another note, I tried making tea this weekend, and for some reason whenever I boiled it in my pot it developed an oily scum on top. This was frustrating. I had to instead fill an empty soda bottle with hot water, add teabag, and heat on the kitchenette lamp:

And as for the other Thrilling Things that have been going on…

Actually, I lied. Nothing remotely thrilling has happened. Survey and tea is about it. There’s rumor that the school might or might not be completely closed tomorrow. Naturally nobody can tell us for sure. The whole strike thing is getting, frankly, annoying. Nothing against it really on principle. It’s actually nice to think that them young French student-types are all so politically engaged and such. Except when you realize how ineffectual it is. The problem is that any sort of people-mobilizing tactic designed to pressure a government into taking action will, after a few decades, lose most of its original impact. The first time you take to the streets, break out the picket signs, hold a sit-in, refuse to work, stop using buses, whatever, the people in charge aren’t entirely sure what to make of it, and you get all sorts of fun publicity. Then the novelty wears off, and all these things boil down, largely, to fancy ways of getting heads counted that show slightly more dedication than it takes to, say, sign a petition or phone your senator/MP/whatever. The symbolic impact and surprise value are gone; all that’s left are the bare bones of the action–the actual revenue lost to a boycott or a strike, the disruption caused by a sit-in/lie-in/whatever-in, so forth. Governments are not stupid, and they learn to deal with these things is such a manner as to cause minimal disruption.

Ergo the problem with a society where going on strike is such a knee-jerk reaction. Whereas Americans would probably start out with a strongly-worded petition (which would be ignored), then escalate to press conferences (mostly ignored) and generic signs-in-the-street protests (mostly ignored) and then great big marches on important places (still pretty easy to ignore at this point), French people start by going on strike, and are ignored by the French government, because said government is completely desensitized to the idea of people on strike. The public is used to it, the media is used to it, everybody is used to it. What this means is that, when they realize that they are being ignored (quelle surprise!), our wonderfully politically active French studentry has very little means left at its disposal to escalate the conflict. The severity of the strike can be increased only by a matter of (relatively little) degree. This has all the strategic flexibility and finesse of a game of chicken. It’s just a matter of both sides waiting for the other one to get tired and give up. It becomes, basically, a war of attrition.

And the annoying part, of course, is that those lovely students seem utterly oblivious to this. Their attitude, if anything, is self-contradictory. They seem to think that they should be admired for being more politically active than their counterparts elsewhere, and that they should be admired for belonging to a culture where such tactics are the default way of expressing political opinions. I suppose they can be admired for their willingness to inconvenience themselves for their cause, but the idea that there’s an inherent nobility in the willingness to go all-out at the drop of a hat– that’s frankly bewildering. I don’t suppose that this strategy is less effective than student movements in other places, and it gets points for a high level of cohesion and relative coordination (which is admittedly an easier task in France than in, say, the US, simply because the US has so many more people to coordinate).

But the students here lose points for originality, which is a significant asset in any attempt at effecting social change that doesn’t wish to resort to violence. Frankly, it seems clear to me that the next generation of social activism is going to be largely internet-based, at least in its high-level coordination and information dissemination efforts; France is going to fall behind quickly if in ten years they’re still handing out leaflets in lobbies. Of course, it would help if the infrastructure was there; French universities don’t even seem to give out student email addresses, or even collect students’ existing addresses to put together mailing lists. The mentality seems to be that if you want information, it’s your responsibility to seek it out. This might have been acceptable 20 years ago, but now there is simply too much information out there to expect people to put up with navigating whatever convoluted, semi-coordinated systems are in place. What it amounts to, in the case of the strike, is a bunch of people making a lot of noise that most of the world doesn’t hear. If they were really dedicated to effectiveness in their efforts, they would at least take the initiative to set up websites or — if even that’s too difficult — Facebook groups and Youtube channels.

Okay, I didn’t expect to go on a rant that long. Just frustrated, I suppose, because all of this really should be self-evident. It really seems, sometimes, as though French academia is still living in the 20th century. At the very least, their internet is firmly entrenched in web 1.0. It’s a place to put stuff, not a truly fluid and interactive information-sharing network. The US, certainly, has a certain amount of institutional inertia in this regard, but at least the universities there are making progress, however slow. Ending rant now. That is all.

And here’s pictures from the rest of the tour of the Parc de Bagatelle:

A building. Also water.

A cave, w/ waterfall!

Building up close w/ sphynx-y things.

Statues on other side of building.

The restaurant at the Parc. Not sure why this one came out b/w, I probably had the camera on the wrong mode. Anyway it’s rather dramatic, no?

Flowerpot people!

Class walks dramatically into brief sunlight.

Twisty-path tower thing. We went up it at prof’s direction.

View of Parc from up top of twisty-spiral-path-thing.

Also you can see the Eiffel Tower form there, kinda.

Also there was cuddly kitties!

Oh, and a week or two ago I went to the Cité de la Musique because my old T-shirt from there has basically worn out. Unfortunately the gift shop didn’t seem to have any T-shirts, so I had to get an Ode to Joy music box instead. And took pictures in the park there:

A little canal-type thingumy.

Big slide thingy.

Me + red structure of sorts.

Me + another one of those melodramatic skies.

Apropos of nothing, a pub by the National Library.

A bit of the wall at Les Frigos, a building of artists’ workshops.

And a place across the street from the dorms where they apparently store traffic signs.

Wednesday, the Découverte de Paris class went on its first lovely field trip, to the Parc de Bagatelle. Naturally, this was the first gray day after two weeks of happy pretty sunshine. The professor maintained that she’d telephoned the Cosmic Weather Department and asked for clear skies. As proof that this worked, she offered the 15 minutes, towards the end of the trip, that the sun was actually out.

Photos, of course:

Walking down the highway to the parc.

Entrance to the parc.

From a pagoda, the world is so tidy. Or something like that. Apparently these parks were designed to transport people to lovely faraway places in the comfort of their own nation. Ergo, a bit of pseudo-Chinese orientalism.

Professor + Peacock.

Peacock sans Prof.

Paons sur banc.

Ducks in row.

Back to the allegedly international aspect; this is apparently supposed to be an alpine stream.

Me in front of aforesaid stream.

A rather more impressive specimen of the streamlike variety.

We had lunch here. I think. Might’ve been another cave.

I suppose I’ll post the second half of the tour tomorrow or such. It seems if I don’t ration out the photos I really have nothing to post most of the time, and then I go somewhere and end up with a glut of striking pictures.

The university strike continues, of course. At lunchtime on the tour of the parc the professor decided what we really needed was to talk about it. This boiled down to her and an Austrian student arguing for 20 minutes. If we’d been speaking English, or if this had really mattered as a class-participation thing, I would have jumped in and pointed out a few dozen logical fallacies being committed; but that, really, would only have encouraged them.

I’m getting quite tired of people on both sides of the issue saying that Sarkozy’s reforms would make the French system equivalent to the American system. I suppose the error is understandable. In the US, people pay more for college than they do in France at the moment; under Sarkozy’s plan, people in France would pay more for college than they do at the moment. So it is perfectly natural that the casual observer would mistake one system for being identical to the other, just as a casual observer might confuse a house cat with a buffalo because they both have four feet.

Personally, I think that if a country insists on making political discussion the national sport, it really ought to do it right. At the least, they could acknowledge that being woefully uninformed about other nations’ political/economic/educational systems is supposed to be Americans’ shtick, and it’s really rude to steal our act like that.

At any rate, the grève continues, and Paris 8 gets more and more demonstrative as time passes. Apparently they’re traditionally the most into this kind of thing. On Thursday there were students walking around the dining hall carrying broken chairs to use as drums, announcing the demonstration that was happening that afternoon, just in case we’d missed the posters or the flyers. They did this just about as long as the dining hall was open. Of course, that wasn’t very long–for whatever reason, it’s only open from 11:30 to 2:00. I’m sure people with 12:00-3:00 classes are thrilled at this arrangement.

So anyway, the current front of St-Denis:

And I’m assuming this web of red string was either a guerrilla art installation or some form of protest:

That’s it. I told you things have been uneventful.

I’ve been meaning to mention that my recent trips to the 13eme have given me the opportunity to use, repeatedly, the #14 line, which may be the nicest subway I’ve ever ridden. For starters, the tracks are blocked off from the platform by plastic barriers with doors that only open when the train arrives, so there’s no need to guesstimate where the train doors will be. The floor is level with the platform, no gap to step over, the cars aren’t separated from one another, and the layout of the seats isn’t nearly as cramped as in the standard metro design (though they’re still individual seats, not benches, so you can’t just squeeze together and make more room during rush hour). It’s very quiet (seems to run on tires, not metal wheels). Everything is automated, including the doors; stops are announced clearly, and they even let you know which side the platform’s on. This is a marked improvement of standard Metro hospitality, where you have to open the doors yourself, and you’re rather screwed if you’re not familiar with a station and can’t see the sign out the window (this is hard enough for me, since my head is higher than the windows when standing; I can only imagine it’s worse for blind people, who can’t even awkwardly lean down to peer at the signs on the station wall). The not-announcing of stops, frankly, bugs me a lot; it’s not that much to ask a conductor to say a couple words at each station. They make up for this with the downright deferential tone they adopt when you reach the end of the line; whereas the MTA gives you a polite but firm directive to Please Leave the Train, the RATP Invites You To Descend.

As far as letting you know where you are, the Paris buses are much better; all the ones I’ve been on have LED screens and recorded voices announcing stops; the screens let you know estimated time to future stops. The buses are low-floor, with multiple entrances and exits. For some reason, though, you can’t use a ticket to transfer from bus to metro or vice-versa, which is kind of stupid; you’d think they’d want to encourage connections between different parts of the mass-transit system, not discourage it.

Some other things French people have got right: numbering floors in buildings. In some places, including the dorms, the ground floor is simply designated “0,” which feels a bit odd, but the important thing is that it’s consistent: 1st floor is the 1st above the ground, -1st is the 1st below it, etc. The US varies, sometimes using 1 as the ground floor, sometimes using it as the 1st-above-ground (and then there’s the Hunter dorms, which get the worst of all worlds by labeling the ground floor as 1, the next floor as the Mezzanine, the next floor as 2). The important thing with such systems is that they be consistent, and the French seem to stick pretty well to one way of doing it, so they get points here.

I also appreciate their use of the 24-hour clock. It does feel a bit sterile and technical when you’re not used to it, and it has a little bit of a learning curve (as I recall from my days at the Brooklyn DA’s office, where a lot of documents use the 24-hour clock because cops use the 24-hour clock), but it is simple, and logical, and eliminates a lot of potentially complicating ambiguities.

The French have also got bakeries down to an art. Unfortunately, that apparently means that they see no need for any other significant means of distributing bread. It’s impossible to find normal bread; it’s either baguettes and rolls, or weird knockoff pseudo-Wonderbread, in brands like “American Way,” “American Sandwich,” and “Americans Allegedly Eat This Stuff On A Daily Basis Isn’t That Amusing.” In general, French grocery stores are stocked with stuff that’s a little too French. There is a notable — not total, but notable — lack of diversity in the foods available. There’s some standard ethnic food, if you’re charitable and call couscous and pasta sauce and such ethnic food, but not a huge amount.

This is as good a place as any to complain about the bags at French supermarkets. You have to bag your own stuff, which is fine by me — probably leads to a decrease in overall bags used, which is all eco-friendly — but they don’t have bag dispensers. There’s just a wad of stuck-together plastic bags at the end of the cash register that you have to peel from one another. This really makes things pointlessly complicated.

In the end, really, I think there’s one thing that the French are completely backwards about: the way they say numbers aloud. Everything’s all right up through 69; then you hit 70, which is spoken “sixty-ten.” 80 is “four-twenties,” and 90 compounds both ticks into “four-twenties-ten.” Seriously, people? There’s a reason we switched from Roman numerals to a base-ten system. It’s simpler and more logical. Is it really too much to ask that you arrange your words the same way as the numbers they represent? This is one of the two areas in which the English language is undeniably superior to the French (the other is our realizing the complete pointlessness of assigning genders to inanimate objects). No, English isn’t the most efficient when it comes to numbers, but would you rather say “ninety-nine” or “four-twenties-nineteen?” In fairness to the French language, this usage isn’t absolutely ubiquitous; Belgium, for instance, uses words for seventy and ninety, while — according to my dictionary, at any rate — the Swiss have been so bold as to use a word for eighty. So it’s not the French language that’s the problem, but rather the peculiar French national obsession with keeping said language fixed at some arbitrary point in its evolution.

Lest it seem I’m being too partisan in last paragraph’s rant, allow me to present as counterbalance a lovely little corner of the internet where some French person lambastes English’s claim as the Best International Language. Please note that many of this person’s arguments are against total strawmen (has anybody who’s not a total idiot claimed the English spelling/pronunciation is logical? I don’t think so. Nor have I heard anyone claim “There’s only one English”), and the note on vocabulary demonstrates a singular ignorance; anybody who thinks that look and appear are precisely the same word probably has no business writing about English. The fact that most people don’t exercise the language to its full potential doesn’t mean that it lacks that potential. So while this page’s arguments are generally stupid, it does a bang-up job of identifying some of the most glaring illogicalities in English, particularly written English.

(incidentally, I cam across that site from a link on a site that contains a fun essay detailing the failings of Esperanto.)

I swear this was supposed to be a short post. Huh. Maybe I should post more often, and more concisely.

I haven’t posted in almost a week, mainly because, well, the title says it all. The most exciting thing that’s happened in my never-ending quest to make sense of this city is my going to the 13eme Arrondissement again to check things out for the upcoming class project thereon. On Wednesday, the teams met to discuss their projects with the professor. When our turn came, it seemed her idea of “discuss the projects” is “ask the students vaguer-than-vague questions (e.g. ‘What interests you in life?’) and then give them advice on how to wander about the neighborhood in question.”

Okay, when I put it like that it sounds a bit patronizing, which I don’t mean it to be; I appreciate this professor’s relatively low-key style, since I have to deal with more intense stuff in other classes. Her approach to research is a bit more touchy-feely than I’m used to (not that I’ve got anything against an emphasis on direct interviews with people, but when she started bringing up reincarnation…). And I’d already decided I wanted to take a look at how the Bibliothèque Nationale and the newer area as a whole does or doesn’t integrate itself into the existing neighborhood, so when she started asking very vague questions I had to answer very specifically and pedantically in order to nudge her towards telling me to do what I had to do in order to do what I wanted to do.

In the end she did advise going to the mairie of the arrondissement and getting information on what went into the planning of the development. I’m also interested in knowing what went into the choice of street names, after discovering the following assortment:

I think you can tell a lot about a place by what it names its streets.

Anyway, we did end up going to the mairie, and even found a nice man at the information desk who spoke English; during this outing, broken English started replacing broken French as our lingua franca, since apparently the 2/3 of my teammates who were there speak English a bit better than French. It’s certainly easier for me to understand English with a Finnish accent than French with a Finnish accent, though I’m somewhat depressed at the loss of this opportunity for practicing my French, which is seeming more and more inadequate every day.

Some more pictures:

The thing above the door makes me think of carpenters’ plumb lines; it also makes me think of the sort of thing that falls and impales people in CSI: Miami.

This apparently is the largest Chinese supermarket in Paris. I think it even has its own Wikipedia entry, but I’m too lazy to go check.

A rather adorable little passage off of Rue Jeanne d’Arc, which is otherwise notable for taking street-theme-naming to an extreme. At least 2/3 of the businesses on said street incorporate its name into their title, including — if I recall correctly — the Joan of Arc Bakery, Joan of Arc Hardware Store, and Joan of Arc Creepy Beauty Salon With A Window Display Consisting of Disembodied Mannequin Hands Sporting Disturbing Fake Nails and Covered in a Thin Film of Dust.

In another Wacky and Entertaining Misadventure, I tried to cash my traveler’s checks after school on Tuesday. I took the #13 to Opéra, the closest stop to the American Express office; I didn’t have an exact address, but I’d seen where it was on Google Maps, right at the end of the Boulevard Lafayette. After I found said Boulevard, i walked along it looking for the trademark blue-and-white sign of American Express. In doing so, I learned a Deep and Significant Truth about Human Existence: apparently, every second business on the Boulevard (or was it Rue?) Lafayette has a blue-and-white sign.
Question:
Can you find the American Express sign below?

Answer:
No, you can’t find it, because it turned out that Google Maps — when zoomed in just a little bit more — reveals that there’s a tiny little street right by the end of Lafayette, hidden behind the Opera House, created for the purpose of concealing the American Express office; it also turns out that you can’t find this out until you take the Métro back to your dorm room, since the sign on the park gate saying “Wifi Accès Libre” turns out to be French for “We like to see foreigners sit on a bench, open their laptops, and spend five minutes trying hopelessly to access one of the unlocked networks that flickers in an out of existence in a cruel and sadistic dance of flickering-ness.”

We were not amused.

But we did end up finding the American Express:

And we cashed some of our checks, and we were happier.

I talked to my grammar professor after class to get up to speed on what the deal was with the in-class presentations people were giving. I figured it wasn’t the whole class doing those, since there’s 40 of us, but I wasn’t sure if people who weren’t giving presentations had to turn in extra written work or something. She opined that my level of French was good enough to give a presentation, so I said I would, since I know I can do that and it removes any issue of having to make up for it with other work or whatnot.

There had been a number of students waiting to talk to the professor before me. The fellow immediately in front of me had given her a paper on some early-20th-century French film version of Antigone. At some point when I was talking to her, the professor apparently conflated me with that student, because she suggested I do a presentation on Antigone since I evidently knew it pretty well and it’s a story with universal themes about stuff. I was too busy frantically attempting to recall what I did know about the play to realize she was getting the two of us confused, until she started writing down the other guy’s name in her schedule of presentations instead of mine, an by that time I’d already agreed that it was an absolutely splendid idea.

It shouldn’t be too hard to pull off. I’m thinking a brief summary of the play, addressing the themes of duty-to-conscience-vs-duty-to-the-state and including a lively and humorous account of all the deaths and convoluted familial relations, possibly accompanied by a chart on the blackboard (because anything involving Oedipus’s family tree is good for a laugh), before launching into the universal-themes stuff, mentioning that everybody from Carl Orff to Bertolt Brecht has done stuff based on the story, then getting into the shifting notions of the role of the post-Enlightenment state and the parallels and differences found in cases such as conscientious objection. Last year’s Religion and Public Policy class notes should supply everything I need.

Oh, and speaking of Oedipus makes me think naturally of Tom Lehrer:

Huh, so I didn’t really have much to say in this post, yet I managed to use over 1100 words to say it. I’m talented, aren’t I?

It is currently approximately 11:18 PM / 23h18 here in Paris. Around 8:45 PM, I put a load of laundry in the wash, in our tiny little laundry room. Three washers, two dryers, seems like they could have put a bit more but it’s right downstairs and it’s only €3 so I don’t mind having to wait. Within reason.

Tonight was not within reason. The dryers were in use, with the same person’s stuff, for over two hours. This is not what I’m ranting about, though. Some people leave their stuff in forever. Fine. You deal with it. I decided to be a nice polite person and not take their stuff out of the dryer. This was a mistake.

At about 10:10 PM, I discovered that, for whatever reason, the residence locks the doors to the area with the laundry room at night.

There is a term for such a policy: sheer idiocy. We’re college students! When do you expect us to do our laundry, during class? Do you actually want to encourage everybody to do it on weekend afternoons, which are already default laundry-room glut times? What benefit can you possibly get from locking off that area at night? Is some student going to sneak into the gameroom next door and make off with the foosball table? I’d say they were being hyper-security-conscious, but these are people who would have you turn on the hallway lights yourself if you want to be able to see on your way to the elevator. This isn’t one of those French things that’s a quaint little tradition, or one of those things that’s inefficient but pretty; it’s simply stupid. It’s even worse than the dearth of stores open week-round (the French idea of an enjoyable weekend pass-time, apparently, is a lively game of guess-which-supermarket-is-actually-open-today; this is complicated by the fact that those open on Sunday are generally closed on Monday).

That’s all I have to say, really. I’m just astounded at the utter pointlessness of this policy. I should be getting to be so I can wake up bright and early tomorrow and put my clothes in the dryer.

Wanted to make sloppy joes for dinner yesterday. Lacked microwave with which to thaw ground-beef patties. Recalled experiences in past weeks involving items placed on kitchenette shelf above neon lamp. Deduced that if lamp could melt package of Mars bars, lamp could thaw beef patties. Thus a new tool was created: the Julian Joiris Microwaveless Defrosting Device for the Relatively Speedy Remediation of the Frozen State of a given Freezer-Stored Foodstuff:

Diagram A: Two plastic-wrapped frozen beef patties atop the Device.

Today 3/4 of my project team actually managed to get together to go to the Bibliothèque Nationale. We walked around for a couple hours, managing to communicate to one another in mostly intelligible French with odd bits of English, and took pictures and so forth, went inside the library, which is very pleasant. Pictures (taken Friday, have not yet uploaded ones from today):

On the edge of the library plaza area. The tower seen between the plant things is part of the Frigos, which (according to a student who did more research than I) is some sort of artist-y type thing.

In the middle of the library plaza is a big garden, about 3-5 stories below ground level (which is istelf maybe a story or two above street level of the neighboring area).

The library seen from a bridge across the Seine. See cute yellow jumping child figure!

Nice mosaic-esque archway.

Old train-station type thingy.

Colorful graffiti on side of aforesaid train whatsit.

More aggressive graffiti on neighboring wall.

I like the double-façade thing on this building.

Back to school tomorrow. I’ll have my first MICEFA class in two weeks. I’ve taken to riding the bus to the train station here. At first I didn’t even consider it—I’m used to routinely out-walking the M23 in New York—but I noticed the buses were passing me here, not the other way around, and then I rode the bus back with another student and it only took 5 minutes. People actually respect the bus/emergency vehicle/municipal vehicle/taxi/bike lanes here, probably because they’ve got those huge boulevards where you can actually fit them:

See?

The campus right near the dorms–which is, I think, one of the Sorbonne things–has apparently gone completely on strike:

And that’s about it. Nothing exciting going on here.

Yesterday I discovered that my grasp of French grammar has, in the past year or so, inadvertently defenestrated itself onto a detonating explosive and been killed in a shooting accident. The class I switched over to is going through stuff I know, and that I know I know, but that I can’t seem to do. I know when to use the imperfect and the past-perfect and the simple past and all that, but it seems I can’t do it anymore. I managed to get 7 out of fifteen problems wrong on our in-class exercise: 3 because I used the wrong tense, 3 because I had the right tense but couldn’t remember the right word to use, and 1 because I used a conversational rather than literary register. At least we weren’t being graded on it or anything, but it was rather demoralizing.

I appreciate English a lot right now. It’s nice to spend most of one’s time dealing with a language that only has two tenses ( the “future tense” is really indicated by the conditional mood. I understand this is supposed to be a common feature of Germanic languages. Thank you, Eng 331, for teaching me such useful trivia) and doesn’t have single-word infinitives. This does mean you have to use a lot of different arrangements of the same words to convey different ideas, but you don’t have to remember so many different forms for each word (French, to make things even more fun, loves having different forms of a given word sound just about identical to one another, mostly because some genius at some point decided that the letter e followed by just about any other letter should be pronounced [e] or [I]).

My project team for the Discovery of Paris course was trying to meet this afternoon to walk around the Bibliothèque Nationale and its environs. We tried to coordinate via email, in French of varying proficiency, and in the end 2/4 of us went there, and were there at the same time, but failed to find one another (cell phones didn’t cooperate, and we were going to meet at the metro station but it turns out it’s a huge station). Nice neighborhood. I’ll upload pics. I’m sure I’ll have a lot to say about it for our project, mostly from an urban-planning perspective, fun comparing this recent development of the area to Haussman and to Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs in New York. Not inventive enough to make a project on its own, of course, but after specializing, through two semesters of honors seminars, in studying transportation in urban planning, I tend to automatically evaluate places by their transportation infrastructure, whether they’re structured as paths or destinations, pedestrian friendliness, emergency access, etc.

I finished my box of couscous today. In memoriam, I offer these recipes:
Couscous with beef bouillon.
Couscous solidified, refried.
Couscous left on stove too long, slightly dehydrated, stuck to pot.
Couscous added to frying frozen hamburger.
Couscous with peas.
Couscous added to frying frozen hamburger with peas.
Couscous with peas added to frying frozen hamburger.
Couscous, peas, and fried hamburger all prepared separately but put in one plate.
Couscous with peas with hamburger fried, broken into little bits, and added to pot.

Pictures to upload tomorrow. Sorry, I’m lazy.

This week, after all of last week’s intro stuff, real classes are starting at Paris 8. Well, all right, I’ve had about 1.5 real classes. Actually, 1 real class, because they were both about 1/2 classes. Except one of them was half of a double-length class. So yeah, 1.5 classes.

Yesterday was my first real class of Comprehension and Analysis of Texts. The professor announced her intention (which she’d mentioned last week as a possibility) of going on 1/2-strike. The class is from 9h00 to 12h00; she’ll be starting class at 9h30 and ending it about 11h00. So it’s just as long as a regular Hunter class, but only once a week. I had my first class of the “Discovering Paris” course today. The professor was a half-hour late, but that’s not as big a deal as it could be, since the class lasts 6 hours (12h00-18h00).

Wow, I just realized I’ve been writing all the times in French. What I mean is I have class Tuesdays 9:30-11:00, and Wednesdays from 12:00-6:00.

Anyway, the Discovering Paris class comes highly recommended (I first heard about it because the MICEFA has a highly recommended class that involves walking tours of Paris; when some of us inquired about that, we were told that we should do the one at Paris 8 so long as we were there, since the MICEFA one is based on the Pars 8 one). Today was logistics, introductions, course description, forming groups, etc.

As for actual class content, the only real real class I’ve had is the analysis-of-texts one. We spent a lot of Tuesday learning the acceptable ways of approaching questions and structuring academic documents in French, with a lot of attention paid to the things said implicitly rather than explicitly (the pragmatics of the language, to use linguist-speak). The professor had us play Spot-the-Presuppositions with sentences, e.g. “He put on his coat and went outside,” which presupposes that A) he was not wearing his coat before he put it on and B) he was indoors before he went outside (and also C) that he has a coat, thus D) that the coat is a coat, thus E) that coats are a thing which can exist, thus F) that existence exists, similarly G) that he exists and H) that indoors and outdoors exist and I) there is a quality of ownership that can be used to distinguish his coat from other coats by virtue of the fact that it belongs to him… and so on, but I gather these weren’t important, since the professor didn’t mention them).

At any rate, it seems that the French academic establishment considers it bad form to attack underlying assumptions made by a statement or question you’re asked to respond to. Thus, if someone asserts “The main reason children don’t read nowadays is the influence of television,” you are can talk about the impact of television, and about the other causes that are implied to have an effect on children’s reading habits; but you can’t say that, actually, children nowadays love to read and whoever wrote the original statement ought to be committed to the Quincy Magoo Memorial Home for the Terminally Unobservant.

This restriction, I think, is a shame. I’m all for using artificial limits in exercises and practice situations; it’s a great way to learn to work creatively around obstacles. But in any real-life situation, if one has to react to a statement, it’s often very useful to simply attack whatever assumptions support the statement. If you can knock away the foundation, or force it to be modified or qualified, you’ll have a much easier time dealing with the ensuing conclusions.

Because this is such an effective tactic, of course, it can become a crutch; again, I think it’s a good idea to practice different ways of approaching things. But to put this off-limits entirely? That means that whoever asks the question has total control over the rules of engagement. It’s like asking a defendant “What were you doing on the night the victim died when you killed him?” The American approach to these things is a bit like a game of pool; the teacher gets the first move, and the student has to deal with whichever balls are left on the table, wherever they are–but there are options. The French approach is also like a game of pool, except the student is the cue ball.

All in all, this makes me happy that I’ve only got to deal with one semester of writing French papers in French for French people. I also ate at the St-Denis cafeteria for the first time today. I’d only ever been to the little sandwich place in Bâtiment A; the cafeteria proper is nice and big and serves decent institutional food at low prices (€3,83 for a big plate of food, two sides, and a drink). Oh, and more pictures:

The courtyard of Building A.

Tracks near the dorms. Lookit pretty park thingy on the side!

Stairway go down to pretty park thingy!

St Denis in the morning.