Les Expressifs

Starting yesterday, there's been some sort of street fair going on on downtown Poitiers called Les Expressifs. The idea seems to be to get together a bunch of street performers, plus some musical groups. I heard very loud rock music coming from the tent in the square in front of the Hôtel de Ville this afternoon, and this morning I watched a guy engage in pseudo-juggling (à la Renfest, rolling them down his arms and around his body and such). I'm pretty sure the story he was telling to go with it was some sort of political allegory, but a) I couldn't hear very well and b) I don't know enough about politics to get it even if I'd understood. There were a lot of crunchy-granola types (or whatever they're called in France) in attendance; in fact, I have a feeling this whole festival would be very at home in Vermont.

The actual point of going into town today was to get my receipt for my application for a titre de séjour (residency permit), which took all of five minutes but required an hour of waiting in line at the Préfecture. Everything administrated by the government, from drivers' licenses to citizenship applications, goes through the Préfecture - not very efficient, in my opinion. Waiting at the DPS is bad, but at least you're only waiting behind other people wanting their drivers' licenses. So that was a pleasant way to pass an hour's worth of my afternoon. On the other hand, I bought a nice scarf in order to blend in more readily with the French population (staying warm being a secondary motive).

I went to Bible study again last night, which was great fun (much more lively discussion/analysis of the text this time around), involved another dinner of crepes (never a bad thing), and was like a miniature cultural education in and of itself. I think I've finally properly decoded the ritual of les bises (cheek-kissing). If there's a female involved, two kisses are pretty much automatic (but occasionally just one; for example, you've boarded a bus and see four or five of your friends and are trying to greet them all while not falling down or knocking anyone over). When two guys greet each other, if they're related, they'll probably kiss on one cheek (more on greeting people you're related to later); if they're not related, they'll shake hands, varying from a warm clasp to a manly grasp depending on the age of the parties involved (manliness being inversely proportional to age, amusingly enough). That being established, the question is obviously when this ritual is necessary. It doesn't appear to be normal to thus greet people you live with (hence the two-related-men scenario only occurs if, say, Bruno's older son who lives in an apartment comes over to visit), unless you haven't seen them in a few days and/or they're leaving for a prolonged period. On the other hand, anyone you have even a passing acquaintance with is fair game, which means you'll probably end up faire-ing les bises with half the students in any given class every time it meets. People you don't know at all are equally fair game, sometimes as a precursor to an actual introduction, sometimes just to be friendly (several girls in my history class greeted my like this three weeks in a row before I actually figured out their names). If it's obvious you're foreign (like me), there's more likely to be hesitation on the part of the other party, though usually they can't overcome the impulse. Other foreigners are the trickiest, especially if you have no idea what part of Europe they're from: to faire or not to faire, is always the question. And the most tiresome manifestation of the habit is when leaving a gathering, whereupon you are morally obligated to kiss everybody in the room, which takes absolutely forever if everyone is leaving at once.

I leave you with a math problem: if a party of nine people is breaking up, in which there are five girls, four guys, and no relations, how many kisses will be exchanged?

At Waterloo Napoleon did surrender...

So tonight I went to see a movie with my host family. Mamma Mia, in fact. Dubbed in French, except for the songs. It was incredibly bizarre, partly thanks to the French, but mostly just on its own merit. For one thing, Colin Firth is getting old; for another, Pierce Brosnan really can't sing. And is a lot sexier as James Bond. Meryl Streep was pretty good, as was the girl playing Sophie. Much as I hate dubbing, they did a decent job finding French voices that matched the actors' voices, so it wasn't as jarring as it could have been when they broke into song. But dubbing as a concept sucks. I have no problem watching subtitles. Still, ABBA music is infectiously cheerful, so it was a pretty nice evening.

Other than that, I spent the afternoon wrestling with my translations. I made a decent effort at appropriately rendering the dialogue in the Song of Solomon excerpt, but I'm not at all satisfied. Apparently there are at least two different translations of the book in the university library, so I'm hoping to check those out after class. I'm very curious about how the professionals handled it. When I finished, I turned to my other French to English translation...which is an excerpt from Oscar Wilde's The Fisherman and his Soul. All sorts of fancy old-fashioned language. They aren't messing around with these classes. Really, I'm enjoying myself immensely.

Walk in the Park

Wednesday: Not much in the way of interesting for classes. Not that they were boring, just nothing you would be interested in reading about. I'm surprised how easily I've adjusted to the long class periods, given that I found 1:15 French classes at Midd somewhat murderous. Wednesday evening I had dinner with Elizabeth at the crêperie in one of the university restaurants, which was excellent, then spent the evening hanging out at her house, making applesauce in the microwave (something which had never occured to me) and watching a very French movie on TV before heading to Les Bacchantes for an evening of French folk music/dancing. It was very fun, though I had more success with the couples dancing than the pseudo-contra dancing (turns out it's a lot harder with nobody to call the steps). My favorite dance, which can be danced to pretty much any music and of which I've forgotten the name, is a sort of cross between polka and merengue: one-and-two, three-and-four, one, two, three, four. I have a feeling a lot of waltz steps/turns could be adapted to work pretty well with it; I was itching to try open spirals or flip-flops, but a) I don't lead very well and b) the dance floor was small and very crowded. Oh well. It reminded me somewhat of Dr. Quiring's classes in College Station, plus alcohol and cigarette smoke. But people actually asked other people to dance in a non-sketchy manner, and it was all very social and fun.

Thursday: After not nearly enough sleep, we presented ourselves at a high school in a section of Poitiers I've never seen before (the city is actually quite large, there's just not much occasion to go anywhere other than downtown) to take the TCF (Test de connaissance de français, same principle as the TOEFL). It lasted an hour and a half and reminded me strongly of the written tests we took for Texas French Symposium in high school. I was torn between wanting to do well because...well, I like to be good at things, and not wanting to do too well as we'll be taking it again at the end of our stay to ascertain whether we've actually improved. (Un)fortunately, I don't think doing too well will be a problem. It wasn't awful, but there were definitely questions I wasn't sure of. It had an annoyingly SAT-like tendency to present two answers that each seemed about half-correct. Apparently standardized testing is subject to the same weaknesses in any language. I came home for the afternoon and intended to take a nap, but instead watched The World is Not Enough (Pierce Brosnan as James Bond is not at the top of my list, but he's a little bit swoon-worthy) before leaving with Brenda and her friend Magalie for Tours to see the sketches put on by Christelle's business school orientation program. The drive was gorgeous - an hour and a half of afternoon-sunlit farmland (the kind little kids draw pictures of) interspersed with clusters of houses, each with its own suitably ancient-looking church steeple. I saw plenty of signs for castles once we entered the Loire Valley, though no actual castles. I'm definitely scheming to return there, though. The sketches themselves were amusing parodies of commercials (business school, after all), but the best part was the musical interludes between acts. It doesn't get much better than "Hit the Road, Jack" in a French accent. It was followed by a cocktail party with absolutely gorgeous hors d'oeuvres and miniature éclairs and such (and absolutely fake chips and salsa, which amused me), and then the same drive home, which was not as pretty, what with everything being dark and me being tired.

Friday: More catechising in my history class, though we finally got to some actual French history in the last hour. I spent about 20 minutes being very confused because the city of Reims is pronounced more like "Rhince." Three hours of time-killing and a literature class later, I found myself with at least an hour until the prospect of a bus, so I decided to head downtown and check out the Parc de Blossac, which satisfies every cherished notion of a park (except perhaps the presence of an antique carousel). It's built partially on the remnants of some 12th-century ramparts, and from one end you can look out over the River Clain, which was sparkling charmingly in the afternoon sun. There are proper tree-lined promenades, a fountain, a grapevine trellis, and a grassy amphitheater. Sadly, I've lost my tourist instinct to take my camera everywhere, so I don't have any pictures yet. I'll definitely be returning. Upon returning home, I (sleepily) ate dinner with my host family (it's very comforting to know that French people occasionally eat fish sticks and mashed potatoes too) and watched Die Another Day, sadly concluding the Pierce Brosnan missions. Oh well.

Today: Almost nothing. I finished one translation and tried to start another, but it's a passage of Toni Morisson's Song of Solomon, and there is no good way to render it in French. Either I don't attempt to represent the dialect and strip the text of half its meaning, or I render it in some French dialect that has completely inappropriate sociocultural/economic connotations and adds a layer of meaning for native French speakers not present in the original text. It's impossible. I'll try again tomorrow. Instead, I watched Licence to Kill and determined that Timothy Dalton is not worth it. I'm definitely getting some sort of cultural education by being here...I'm just not sure it's particularly French. Ah well.

Small Victories (Requiring a Marathon Post)

It's been nearly a week since I posted - apologies. I have been both busy and tired. I will try to briefly* sum up (I wanted to say resume, but realized that only works in French - apparently the language immersion is working!) what I've been up to.

Thursday: Meeting with M. Paoli to choose courses. That was something of an organizational nightmare. On the one hand, we are much "freer" than French students in our ability to pick and choose what we want to take. On the other hand, the system really isn't designed for that. Practically everything I wanted to take was on Monday or Wednesday. The schedule I came up with doesn't particularly closely resemble the one I'm following this week. Oh well. Afterward we had apéritifs with the group, on the college (buying alcohol for its students? Cultural education, I suppose...). Several of us decided that smoothies were a legitimate alternative to cocktails. The funniest part was listening to other people trying to order a White Russian or a Bloody Mary - pronouncing them in English and not being understood by the waitress. I left early, courtesy of the bus system. Sigh.

Friday: "Cultural orientation" meeting with Viviana, to learn about even more forms to fill out and things to buy, including housing and civil responsability insurance. As it was explained to us, if, in opening your shutters in the morning, you should happen to knock a flowerpot of the windowsill and onto someone's head, civil responsability insurance will pay for their hospital bills. It was a very long and somewhat stress-inducing two hours, but we were recompensed with pretty amazing pastries. Macaroons are not the same thing as they are in the states - they are squashier and far more delicious. That evening we (my host parents, Christelle and I) had dinner at the new house of Magalie and David, friends of my host family who had been staying with us the week before. It was delicious and included homemade tiramisu. Then Christelle abandoned ship to go hang out with her friends, leaving me to be dragged by Brenda, Bruno, Magalie and David to a real live French discothèque, Les Bacchantes. I was already exhausted, so I watched them dance exuberantly to 80s music (which sounds the same in any language, apparently) into the wee hours of the morning (2 a.m., to be exact). It led me to wonder whether my middle school teachers rocked out like that on the weekends...I did in fact see some very good ballroom coexisting with the gyrating on the same tiny dance floor, including lindy hop, a complicated waltz-like thing, and even some two-step. I was, however, grateful to get home and collapse into bed.

Saturday: J'ai fait la grasse matinée -- literally, "the fat morning" -- i.e. I slept in. We did some house cleaning, I read more of La gloire de mon père. In the evening, Christelle invited me to come with her to the house of one of the women who goes to her church, an American ex-pat who's been a French citizen for 20 years now. We played Guitar Hero, for which I have developed a certain fondness, and some trivia game on the Wii, which I did not excel it given that I don't read all that quickly in French and don't know much about French culture/history. Which Christelle went out of her way to choose at every opportunity, in retribution for my beating her at Guitar Hero. Anyway, it was fun.

Sunday: Church turned into church + picnic + dinner/Guitar Hero/Wii tennis at the house of the same friend. I learned to play pétanque, a traditional Provençal game quite similar to Bocce (but with more rules). I'm not very good at it. It's really fun, though, and it's like a scene right out of an old-ish French movie set in the countryside - a group of men gathered around a cluster of boules, gravely discussing the scoring and using all sorts of unlikely implements as impromptu measuring sticks. My language comprehension probably improved in leaps and bounds that day, as that's the largest number of people I've interacted with at any one time. It's getting marginally easier to understand people I don't know.

Monday: First day of classes. I arrived early, as instructed by M. Paoli, to check the bulletin boards, since we'd been assured our classes probably wouldn't meet when and where they were supposed to. Sure enough, I ran into the professor of my first class as she was marking the new time (about fifteen minutes from that moment). Only one other girl and I showed up for the new earlier hour, so she sent us away and told us to come back at the regular time and we'd just have a shorter class. The other girl invited me to go have coffee (so much for stuck up French people, right?), which was nice. The class was not so pleasant. It was basically sentence diagramming, but in French, so I didn't understand any of the terminology. I'd decided to drop it within about fifteen minutes. I was hoping to change to the first-year version, but alas, it doesn't fit with my schedule. I then had a good long time to kill until my next class, so I went into town to open a bank account (turns out I need one if I want to apply for something called the CAF, which reimburses a portion of what you spend on housing - which is a lovely thought), which actually went smoothly. I was a little impressed with myself, since the last time I did anything of the sort, it was in English and my mom did most of the talking. My second class of the day was the thème section of my translation class; in other words, French to English. I ended up in the wrong class for the first fifteen minutes, which was awkward, but eventually made it to the right spot. The professor is British by birth, and rather stuffier and more brusque than any French person I've yet encountered. The focus is more on utility than literary nuance, which isn't what I'd hoped for, but it will still be good practice. It's also weird translating into British English, especially as the professor is quite sure that her answer is the only correct one. In sum: it was a long day.

Today: Second day of classes went much more smoothly. The oral interpretation section of my translation class is going to be great - the professors (one French, one American) are really nice and there's no lecture, just lots of practice. Today there were no grades being given, so in a completely uncharacteristic move I volunteered to go first and translate a short introduction, given in English by the American professor, into French. I was shaking like a leaf, but I think it went passably well. Then we had the version section of the class, English to French. That professor is what I was hoping for in the other class - very interested in literary conventions, given to long speeches about word choice, etc. Only it's translation into the language in which I don't really understand nuance. Too bad. Also, he was very adamant, even threatening, about the sanctity and purity of the French language (not kidding) and how he would dock the most points from our translations for misconjugated French verbs. I'm going out to buy Le Nouveau Bescherelle: l'art de conjuger before the next class so as not to pollute his native tongue with my gross grammatical errors. My third class was in comparative literature, and was a bit of a mess. Nobody had the books, including me, even though the professor swore she'd ordered them at several bookstores in town at the beginning of the summer. There weren't enough presentation slots/subjects to go around, so I don't have one and thus have no idea where my course grade is going to come from. When I asked her, all she said was, "We're a little disorganized in this department. Don't worry about it, everything will work out" (the French equivalent thereof, anyway). So we'll see.

Now it's dinnertime, and a rather tasty odor is emanating from the kitchen, so I will bid you adieu, faithful readers.

*So yeah, about that being brief...if you made it this far, you deserve a medal. Thanks for your attention!

Le repos

Today I did nearly nothing, which was exceedingly pleasant. I had a brief run-in with the micro-onde (quite literally, microwave) this morning in attempting to defrost a baguette (freezing them works really well for keeping them fresh, as it turns out) - it kept making noise after it was done reheating, so I kept pressing buttons trying to stop the noise, which probably made it worse. Eventually I left it alone and it stopped after about 15 seconds. But still, weird.

After that I devoted myself to being slothful in a foreign language (mostly): I watched "Chariots de feu" ("Chariots of Fire"), which is an amazing movie, though I cheated and watched it in English with French subtitles because I absolutely can't stand dubbing (the translations were interesting, though). The last time I saw it was in early middle school, and I have since become familiar with Gilbert & Sullivan, the Allegri Miserere, and the hymn "Jerusalem," giving me an overall much greater appreciation for the soundtrack. I wish choir were still a popular thing for young boys to partake in. They have such amazing voices. 

I then started in earnest on La gloire de mon père by Marcel Pagnol, which I only yesterday discovered was a book before it was a movie, and so promptly searched out and bought it, along with the sequel Le château de ma mère. Reading in French is slow going and not the relaxing experience it is in English, but I made it nearly to page 100 in a sitting, which is a lot better than I usually do on books for French class. I can see why they decided these books would make good movies - they're very visually descriptive, and the narrative voice of the little boy is hilarious (it makes me happy that I can understand humor and puns in a foreign language).

This evening I went shopping briefly with Brenda and Christelle at a papetrie (stationery store) to look for school supplies, which are fun in any language. Though I really, really miss my Mead student day planner - I've had the same one every year for many years running, and it's the perfect size, layout and lack of clutter. I'm kicking myself for not bringing one with me. I found one by Clairefontaine (which appears to be the most popular stationery brand over here, and isn't nearly as expensive as in the states) that works, but still...it's not the same. Here ends the lecture on French school supplies.

Tomorrow we have individual meetings with M. Paoli to choose classes. I know I want to take History of Religion in France and a translation course. I suppose I'll fill the rest of my schedule with literature classes. I asked Christelle to look at the bus schedule and confirm that the buses I want to take tomorrow really do exist, which she did, so hopefully tomorrow I will conquer the bus and not vice versa. We shall see.

Nitwit, Blubber, Oddment, Tweak

The operative word being oddment. To the left is my new favorite desktop image from Pixelgirl Presents. They have a pretty fantastic collection of desktops for people who like colorful, busy backgrounds as well people who really don't like clutter. Or just for the same person in different moods.

In the same vein, my grumpy new Adium dock icon, the devil duck. I think he's cute and feel quite bonded to him. You can find him and others like him at the Adium Xtras page. You should probably get Adium first. FYI, it's a multi-protocol instant messaging application that works with all the major clients and a lot of ones I've never heard of, is highly customizable, and obviously has lots of fun and completely useless add-ons. Its biggest drawback is lack of AV support. Also, Mac only. Sorry, PCs... ;)

And finally, I am addicted to Firefly. I've never really bought TV shows or movies off iTunes before because I don't think the resolution is good enough (and still don't), but I have fallen prey to the ease of downloadable content. Hopefully I can get the rest of the season (how sad that there's only one) on Netflix before I spend much more money.

From Scholastic Trammels Free

Since I'm taking J-Term off to hopefully regain a state of good health, I've had a quite a bit of time to fill. I've been doing so in the past week by hanging out at operetta rehearsals. It is a Saint Michael's tradition for the upper school (grades 7-12) to perform a Gilbert & Sullivan operetta every January, this year's being the Mikado. I participated in five of them (Sorcerer, Gondoliers, Patience, Ruddigore, Yeomen) in my SMA years, but this is the first time I've had a chance to watch one of the productions. Considering it's not a voluntary affair (which means even the kids who would normally be "too cool" for theater have to don tights, wigs and facepaint and twist their tongues around Gilbert's tricky lyrics), it's not bad at all. This is the first time I've heard the Mikado (except for Three Little Maids, which practically everyone knows), and it's definitely funny, but probably the most politically incorrect G&S I've encountered. The directors found it necessary to expurgate several instances of the n-word, rewriting some lyrics in the process. My question for you, dear readers: is it right to engage in clandestine editing of an author's work to render it palatable to modern audiences? Should there be an "official" expurgated G&S? Should it be left as-is for authenticity? I am undecided, though I think especially for a high school performance it would be inappropriate to leave such an offensive word in the lyrics. Ponder, ponder.

I leave you with one of the fun new words I've learned from Mr. Gilbert:

persiflage |ˈpərsəˌflä zh |
noun formal
light and slightly contemptuous mockery or banter.
ORIGIN mid 18th cent.: from French persifler ‘to banter,’ based on siffler ‘to whistle.’

Fiddle Me This

Music was a pretty big part of my life in high school, but here at Midd I feel like I practically live and breathe it (not the way music majors do though - they're just nuts). J-Term feels so incomplete without music rehearsals nearly every day, but I've been making up for it by going to see some interesting musical performances. A friend from home commented that I've been in Vermont too long when I start getting really into folk music, but I've found a new love - fiddle. It doesn't even have to be particularly good fiddle playing. There's just something about the sound that's really energetic and happy. I love the campus band Dawn's Basement, who play rock music with fiddle, but this weekend I experienced fiddling in its natural habitat - Appalachian folk music, performed by the female duet Mayfly, who are a subset of the folk band Sugarblue. I've never liked the idea of folk music, possibly because I thought it didn't involve good singing. Obviously I'd just never heard good folk music. Mayfly's close harmonies, catchy rhythms, and of course fiddling make for some pretty exuberant songs. Also this weekend, I saw a Slavic-language folk choir, which was the most entertaining concert I've been to in a while. Slavic folk songs have the greatest lyrics, an inordinate number of them involving cabbage. In a sort of bizarre connection between these two concerts, it turns out that members of both of them participated in Village Harmony programs, possibly the coolest music camps I've ever heard of - though I wouldn't go to the one in Republic of Georgia, as the description says it's not for those who require daily hot showers. Singers among you should check it out though.

pants Brit. informal rubbish; nonsense.

I admit it - I am a big fan of The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series. I just read the fourth and last book, however, and was exceptionally disappointed. I wasn't terribly impressed by the story line, and felt that the characters remained fairly static, but that isn't my main complaint. What bothered me was the fact that the characters generally took a moral nosedive. Amid the masses of catty fiction for teenage girls (think of popular series like Gossip Girl, The Clique and It Girl), it's nice to find something that I wouldn't actually mind my younger sister reading. While the first three Sisterhood books weren't all sweetness and light, the characters made choices, faced the consequences of them, and generally learned some important lessons. The books didn't necessarily preach against drinking, premarital sex, etc., but they steered far clear of glorifying them, something I greatly appreciated. You may find my view stuffy or prudish, but I believe kids don't need to be thinking about that sort of thing, and as for the "growing with your audience" argument, do those topics really make the story any more mature? Personally, those aren't my criteria for maturity. But I digress. The fourth Sisterhood book slipped off its moral high ground and left the characters making some fairly suspect choices with less than severe repercussions. The general message I took away was that growing up means losing your inhibitions. In small doses, that's a fine message, but it really ought to come with the caveat that some inhibitions are there for a reason. That's my stand on the matter, anyway. And you ought to read the book, if only to round out the series.

As an aside, no offense meant to anybody who reads catty teen fiction. It's pure brain candy, and I certainly indulge in it myself. It's only a problem when that sort of thing is all that younger girls are reading, without the realization that it's trash. There's no reason not to eat candy, as long as you don't go around thinking it's broccoli (or insert healthy food of your preference here).

Jaw-Dropping, Mind-Numbing Stupidity, a.k.a. MTV

Having lived in a cable-TV-free home for most of my life to this point, I am still surprised at the depths to which popular culture can sink. I'm also fairly surprised to have that revelation in a setting like Midd. You would think that, bright, intellectual students that we are (that was only partially sarcastic), we would want to watch something that might engage our big brains just a tiny bit. Far from it. At the gym today, I caught the end of My Super Sweet 16 and the beginning of Next, both of which left my jaw literally hanging open at the sheer tastelessness of it all. The former was nothing of a revelation, really - seems like a lot of reality shows are about pointless extravangance, cattiness, and girls acting too old for their age. The latter, though, seemed like something that ought to be a SNL parody of a dating show. The whole thing was so badly conceived and executed that I'm amazed they manage to get funding. The premise of the show is that one person has a lineup of dates to choose from, and at any point on the date can reject them for the next in line - the dates receive money for each minute they stay in the running. As a concept it could be a lot worse, but the sick, juvenile, spiteful "humor" was so contrived and over-the-top as to be utterly, unbelievably unfunny. Here's what I remember of one exchange among the prospective dates, some of whom had already been rejected: "What's that on your face?" "She put kabuki on me." "She did a dookie on your face?" "You look like dookie!" - all punctuated by raucous laughter. Painful to read, isn't it? That's the sort of joke third grade boys might find funny. I cannot fathom any girl ever dating one of those guys. And this is the sort of cultural message one of the nations more popular entertainment networks is broadcasting. Drugs are illegal because they make you stupid. Shouldn't shows like this be illegal on the same premise?