October 24th. I almost let the blog get away. Nine days from the pestilential erection, as the French comic Coluche described French presidential elections some time ago, and it is close. Someone bland versus someone dubious. Is that where the Dubya comes from? Or Dubai, another oil connection. Fear drives the electorate. Bush has kept the beasts of the world at bay, kept them out of the USA. It's the old "there are not tigers here" joke. It's because of our pink toothbrushes. Come again? Yes, pink toothbrushes, have proven effective in keeping away tigers. Indeed none have been spotted here in some time...The Anthrax remains a mystery but not Oklahoma City.
Could you possibly not elect Bush? Shambles is becoming a way of life. When a man has got infallibility on his side then we are left out of the picture. As they say, you can either be right or remain in relation. He's so right the separation is a yawning chasm.
Paris is soft and civilized. It is hard to get mugged or raped here. There are drunks and the residents of the city, like most humans living in close quarters with many others, are not particularly joyful. However fear is not palpable. Isn't that an accomplishment? Now if they could lower rents.
If only Bush had been fellated. Not by his National Security Adviser. The ensuing investigation would surely have uncovered what anyone even moderately informed is aware of: God is not in the White House, the beast there does appear unleashed however. Fellatio appears to open the floodgates of outrage. Alas fellatio, I knew him well, it probably brought on the quadruple bypass for former President Clinton.
Kindness, Generosity and Compassion. Does this administration have any pretences in those directions? Even the betrayed "No Child Left Behind," (did they mean "no child of the left?), ask Senator Kennedy, can't be called in to defend the man.
In France, in many of the countries which also make up the world this ungenerous bully is remarkably unpopular.
Take a vacation across the border, Mexico, Canada, and look back north or south. There are answers.
Sunday, October 24, 2004
Wednesday, April 21, 2004
Return from the South of France
Traveling north-south throughout France is simple because, alongside the four major and loosely parallel highways, you have the TGV, or Train Générateur de Vent, the Wind Making Train. Seriously, it stands for Train à Grande Vitesse or High Speed Train, which indeed it is (200km an hour, for the Burmese, Liberians and Americans that’s 120mph).. It tends to blend the landscape, making it something that only someone in a hurry might glimpse at and find satisfaction in. What is the satisfaction of the hurried?
To understand the relationship between spectator and the spectatored, changing due to increases in close to the ground velocity, I propose using the "discrete cow" or "bovine body" threshold as the unit of measurement. In other words, if you are traveling above the speed that enables you to effortlessly distinguish gazing cows from the sheep grazing out there in the shared landscape, then your BBT (Bovine Body Threshold) or DCT (Discrete Cow Threshold) is greater than one and you have traded in vision for speed. Your train is moving faster than the speed at which you can comfortably pick out individual objects in the landscape. What your eyes see has been digitized while your brain and soul remain obtusely analog. So you do not tend to look out the window much. Some of the trains are double-deckers, though, and a second story view of the countryside above the embankments has an aesthetic charge. Unless you are in a hurry and don’t care either way.
Should you wish to travel east-west, or vice versa, your options are far more limited and the traveling will take place at a far more leisurely pace. There is still no TGV connecting Paris with Strasbourg, the seat of the European parliament, although you can head west to the tip of Brittany at top TGV speed. Why isn't the country crisscrossed? And as is so often the case, the answer lurks -or if you have a more benevolent world view, the answer putters - right below the lexical surface. France is whole hog secular. Ever since the 1789 Revolution, which makes France' democracy younger than the US’s, the church and sacred in general are taboo in public discourse. No headscarves in school, kippot are hidden under wigs and even the sacrosanct; at least for an American, rite of citizenship is replaced by a sterile bureaucratic transaction: You go to the Prefecture office on the 12, quai de Gesvres in Paris and they hand you your citizenship papers with less aplomb than the butcher your half kilo (livre or pound) of flesh. Hospitals, despite their secular vocation, are having to come to terms with the dying wishing for a little God-sanctioned assurance that this life is a preamble for heavenly things to come. We have God in airports, deployed in chapels, which you will admit is an opportunistic (even materialistic to paraphrase Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche) use of the divine.
To sum up the argument for the missing train let me recapitulate. France is longitudinally crossed by trains running from Lille in the north to Marseille on the Mediterranean. There is a TGV for half of the east west parcours, that being Paris-Brest. Notice that the cross in crisscross still lacks an arm. Incomplete crucifixion. Would the secular authorities of this country allow the construction of the final station of the railroad cross? The country would then be crisscrossed indeed, doing great violence to its secular calling. This anticlerical posture stops Parisians and Alsatians from being within easy visiting distance of one another. It made it easier for Tomi Ungerer to find fame and fortune in the US.
Traveling north-south throughout France is simple because, alongside the four major and loosely parallel highways, you have the TGV, or Train Générateur de Vent, the Wind Making Train. Seriously, it stands for Train à Grande Vitesse or High Speed Train, which indeed it is (200km an hour, for the Burmese, Liberians and Americans that’s 120mph).. It tends to blend the landscape, making it something that only someone in a hurry might glimpse at and find satisfaction in. What is the satisfaction of the hurried?
To understand the relationship between spectator and the spectatored, changing due to increases in close to the ground velocity, I propose using the "discrete cow" or "bovine body" threshold as the unit of measurement. In other words, if you are traveling above the speed that enables you to effortlessly distinguish gazing cows from the sheep grazing out there in the shared landscape, then your BBT (Bovine Body Threshold) or DCT (Discrete Cow Threshold) is greater than one and you have traded in vision for speed. Your train is moving faster than the speed at which you can comfortably pick out individual objects in the landscape. What your eyes see has been digitized while your brain and soul remain obtusely analog. So you do not tend to look out the window much. Some of the trains are double-deckers, though, and a second story view of the countryside above the embankments has an aesthetic charge. Unless you are in a hurry and don’t care either way.
Should you wish to travel east-west, or vice versa, your options are far more limited and the traveling will take place at a far more leisurely pace. There is still no TGV connecting Paris with Strasbourg, the seat of the European parliament, although you can head west to the tip of Brittany at top TGV speed. Why isn't the country crisscrossed? And as is so often the case, the answer lurks -or if you have a more benevolent world view, the answer putters - right below the lexical surface. France is whole hog secular. Ever since the 1789 Revolution, which makes France' democracy younger than the US’s, the church and sacred in general are taboo in public discourse. No headscarves in school, kippot are hidden under wigs and even the sacrosanct; at least for an American, rite of citizenship is replaced by a sterile bureaucratic transaction: You go to the Prefecture office on the 12, quai de Gesvres in Paris and they hand you your citizenship papers with less aplomb than the butcher your half kilo (livre or pound) of flesh. Hospitals, despite their secular vocation, are having to come to terms with the dying wishing for a little God-sanctioned assurance that this life is a preamble for heavenly things to come. We have God in airports, deployed in chapels, which you will admit is an opportunistic (even materialistic to paraphrase Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche) use of the divine.
To sum up the argument for the missing train let me recapitulate. France is longitudinally crossed by trains running from Lille in the north to Marseille on the Mediterranean. There is a TGV for half of the east west parcours, that being Paris-Brest. Notice that the cross in crisscross still lacks an arm. Incomplete crucifixion. Would the secular authorities of this country allow the construction of the final station of the railroad cross? The country would then be crisscrossed indeed, doing great violence to its secular calling. This anticlerical posture stops Parisians and Alsatians from being within easy visiting distance of one another. It made it easier for Tomi Ungerer to find fame and fortune in the US.
Saturday, April 10, 2004
Déjections Canines
Reading the news, any news, especially if it's newsworthy generates anxiety. We say it is "anxiogène" in French. The French language contains many useful words. Reading the news leaves us in a dejected state. Deject, from the Latin to throw down ( de + jacere) is the word used here in Paris to describe dog excrement. That remains its second meaning in English. Reading the news makes you feel like dog-doo. "Les déjections canines," which is not a dental description (e.g. ‘sidewalks littered with molars, incisors and canines’) thus refers to what dogs in Paris leave on the sidewalks in the wake of disrespectful masters. You are supposed to clean up after your animal here, though the fining for such a slight misdemeanor is still rare at present.
The Parisian attitude to this dejection is revealing. For a long time, several thousand years in fact, if we trace the origins of the city back to the Parisi in 300 BCE, no one cared what your dog did. Dry humping was probably better accepted than public copulation but doggy’s need to excrete wherever its sphincter saw fit was universally recognized. If you lived in the suburbs and the neighbor’s toutou, French for house pet, generally a dog, shat unfailingly before your gate, this would soon grate. Your territory does not extend, sensu strictu, to the space before your gate; the public sidewalk. On the other hand, a never-ending encounter with dog waste as an extension of your private domain, is usually felt to be aggressive. Fourteen years ago I politely asked a dog walker to steer his excreting dog into the street, as opposed to the middle of the sidewalk, where master and chien were fully collaborating in public-sullying. The dog owner’s outrage was manifest and barely controllable. I quickly moved out of fist range, remaining close enough to witness an apoplectic attack, should that occasion hopefully arise.
Nowadays things are different. Sort of. Children have been walking in it for as long as sidewalks existed, which is only since the Second Empire in the Nineteenth Century. The elderly do “vols planés”, unwilling flying glides which may appear hilarious to the onlooker while resulting in hospitalization for the victim. The quaint claim that walking in it brings good luck is just another way of saying that yours could not get any worse. You do not see the down and out stomping in it to reverse the wheel of fortune.
The culturally astute query might ask how is it that the majority of Parisians seem to have so easily accommodated to this blight for so long? It has something to do with the French relationship to personal and private and public space, and a tolerance for odor, all of which for an American would be unimaginable. In France the body often still has its odor, its perfume if you will allow me. Despite the propaganda to the contrary, people do shower and wash, perhaps not as often as Americans. There is, though, nothing near the American obsession with deodorants and antiperspirants.
An example of an American attempt to bring the sanitized and odorless into France is the Estée Lauder perfume campaign for ‘Beyond Paradise.’ It features the sort of woman who could not possibly have body odor of any kind, neither good nor bad. I can imagine her as an immense, tender and tasteless chicken nugget, deep fat fried… The perfume will apparently take up where clean, smell-less and sanitized skin have left off, the deep fat fry for the industrial chicken flesh.
I will be gone for a week, it's the spring holidays!
Reading the news, any news, especially if it's newsworthy generates anxiety. We say it is "anxiogène" in French. The French language contains many useful words. Reading the news leaves us in a dejected state. Deject, from the Latin to throw down ( de + jacere) is the word used here in Paris to describe dog excrement. That remains its second meaning in English. Reading the news makes you feel like dog-doo. "Les déjections canines," which is not a dental description (e.g. ‘sidewalks littered with molars, incisors and canines’) thus refers to what dogs in Paris leave on the sidewalks in the wake of disrespectful masters. You are supposed to clean up after your animal here, though the fining for such a slight misdemeanor is still rare at present.
The Parisian attitude to this dejection is revealing. For a long time, several thousand years in fact, if we trace the origins of the city back to the Parisi in 300 BCE, no one cared what your dog did. Dry humping was probably better accepted than public copulation but doggy’s need to excrete wherever its sphincter saw fit was universally recognized. If you lived in the suburbs and the neighbor’s toutou, French for house pet, generally a dog, shat unfailingly before your gate, this would soon grate. Your territory does not extend, sensu strictu, to the space before your gate; the public sidewalk. On the other hand, a never-ending encounter with dog waste as an extension of your private domain, is usually felt to be aggressive. Fourteen years ago I politely asked a dog walker to steer his excreting dog into the street, as opposed to the middle of the sidewalk, where master and chien were fully collaborating in public-sullying. The dog owner’s outrage was manifest and barely controllable. I quickly moved out of fist range, remaining close enough to witness an apoplectic attack, should that occasion hopefully arise.
Nowadays things are different. Sort of. Children have been walking in it for as long as sidewalks existed, which is only since the Second Empire in the Nineteenth Century. The elderly do “vols planés”, unwilling flying glides which may appear hilarious to the onlooker while resulting in hospitalization for the victim. The quaint claim that walking in it brings good luck is just another way of saying that yours could not get any worse. You do not see the down and out stomping in it to reverse the wheel of fortune.
The culturally astute query might ask how is it that the majority of Parisians seem to have so easily accommodated to this blight for so long? It has something to do with the French relationship to personal and private and public space, and a tolerance for odor, all of which for an American would be unimaginable. In France the body often still has its odor, its perfume if you will allow me. Despite the propaganda to the contrary, people do shower and wash, perhaps not as often as Americans. There is, though, nothing near the American obsession with deodorants and antiperspirants.
An example of an American attempt to bring the sanitized and odorless into France is the Estée Lauder perfume campaign for ‘Beyond Paradise.’ It features the sort of woman who could not possibly have body odor of any kind, neither good nor bad. I can imagine her as an immense, tender and tasteless chicken nugget, deep fat fried… The perfume will apparently take up where clean, smell-less and sanitized skin have left off, the deep fat fry for the industrial chicken flesh.
I will be gone for a week, it's the spring holidays!
Friday, April 09, 2004
Hello
I am writing from Paris. Daffodils are in bloom and the pollen from birch and other trees whose names I know only in French is causing respiratory havoc. Yesterday thousands of people were evacuated from one of the suburban trains and thereabouts for fear of a bomb. The info came from the CIA, which may reassure those who thought our spy agency had lost all credibility. Never a prophet in your own land. For the time being no bombs. We prefer the absence of bombs to even their putative presence.
It is quite amusing that one of the tacks of the overfunded Bush camp is to portray Kerry as a Frenchman. Is this the acme of insult in the US now? Have you forgotten your love for Jacques Cousteau? Kerry is actually rather tall for a Frenchman. The craggy looks might work though. Should Bush be portrayed as a perpetual frat boy? Though we shouldn't pick on frat people, most of them don't live very long.
From here Bush's credibility isn't credible. You are wonderfully well documented over there on the several generations of bushwhacking that have churned up the body politic of that great free nation, the formerly Masonic USA. Being well documented in France, is sometimes a challenge. Paul Kagame, the Rwandan president, embarrassed a French delegation when he baldly named France as one of the instigators and organizers of the Rwandan massacre. There are several books in French and English which more or less substantiate this point of view. It is still something of a kick in the solar plexus to be told that to your face.
America doesn't seem as free as it used to from here. A recent issue of Spectrum published by the IEEE described the various budget attributions and Homeland Security has come out the winner. A positive side effect is that Wyoming patrolmen can now communicate with firemen and the latter have firefighting apparel that will protect them in some of the fiery situations they formerly faced wearing only conventional duds.
I am writing from Paris. Daffodils are in bloom and the pollen from birch and other trees whose names I know only in French is causing respiratory havoc. Yesterday thousands of people were evacuated from one of the suburban trains and thereabouts for fear of a bomb. The info came from the CIA, which may reassure those who thought our spy agency had lost all credibility. Never a prophet in your own land. For the time being no bombs. We prefer the absence of bombs to even their putative presence.
It is quite amusing that one of the tacks of the overfunded Bush camp is to portray Kerry as a Frenchman. Is this the acme of insult in the US now? Have you forgotten your love for Jacques Cousteau? Kerry is actually rather tall for a Frenchman. The craggy looks might work though. Should Bush be portrayed as a perpetual frat boy? Though we shouldn't pick on frat people, most of them don't live very long.
From here Bush's credibility isn't credible. You are wonderfully well documented over there on the several generations of bushwhacking that have churned up the body politic of that great free nation, the formerly Masonic USA. Being well documented in France, is sometimes a challenge. Paul Kagame, the Rwandan president, embarrassed a French delegation when he baldly named France as one of the instigators and organizers of the Rwandan massacre. There are several books in French and English which more or less substantiate this point of view. It is still something of a kick in the solar plexus to be told that to your face.
America doesn't seem as free as it used to from here. A recent issue of Spectrum published by the IEEE described the various budget attributions and Homeland Security has come out the winner. A positive side effect is that Wyoming patrolmen can now communicate with firemen and the latter have firefighting apparel that will protect them in some of the fiery situations they formerly faced wearing only conventional duds.
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