David's Surefire Tip for Driving Prostitutes Wild

Carry a large umbrella!

Perhaps I should elaborate.

The plain people of Ireland: Yes, please do, you've got our attention!
WhippingCats Management: Silence, rabble! etc etc

As I was just about to explain, in any large city, prostitutes are going to be a feature of the landscape. Here in Paris, depending on the route I choose to walk to school, I can take the Boulevard St Denis, which will take me right by all the Asian prostitutes clustered outside Gibert Jeune, or I have the option of taking Rue Blondel which is where, not to put a tooth in it, the over-the-hill prostitutes hang out. Actually, the French term for what they do is "faire le pied de grue" (they make the foot of the crane). Or, if I put my mind to it, I can avoid both blocks in question, but on a rainy morning it's not the first priority. So on Thursday morning I found myself launched down the Rue Blondel, where the "girls" were clustered unusually densely, with only my umbrella to defend myself. Let me tell you, they just LOVED that umbrella. They kept leaping out of the doorways to better admire it. Or perhaps it is an accepted superstition among the filles de joie that "un mec qui porte un grand parapluie sera muni d'un grand .... portefeuille*".

In other news, on Thursday evening I was having dinner in my favorite little neighborhood cafe, when I was witness to a touching scene. This enormous, multi-generational, American family party of about 16 people piled into the banquette for dinner. They ranged in age from 8 to about 80 and the quality of their French seemed to decline by generation; the grandmother's French, in particular, was really good. It turns out that she had gotten married in the church across from the cafe and the next day, two generations later, her granddaughter (also present at dinner) was getting married in the same church. This warmed the cockles of even my unsentimental heart. I bade them my good wishes as I left; they were entirely charming and I hope the wedding went off without a hitch.

*: You can look it up; translation engines are a dime a dozen these days.

Special Bonus Poetry Post

It's a rainy night here in Paris. Let's hear what our resident poet, sad-sack* Paul Verlaine, has to add to the mix:

Il Pleure dans mon Coeur by Paul Verlaine

Il pleure dans mon coeur
Comme il pleut sur la ville.
Quelle est cette langueur
Qui pénêtre mon coeur ?

O bruit doux de la pluie
Par terre et sur les toits !
Pour un coeur qui s’ennuie,
O le chant de la pluie !

Il pleure sans raison
Dans ce coeur qui s’écoeure.
Quoi ! nulle trahison ?
Ce deuil est sans raison.

C’est bien la pire peine
De ne savoir pourquoi,
Sans amour et sans haine,
Mon coeur a tant de peine.

It Rains in My Heart (English translation)

It rains in my heart
As it rains on the town,
What languor so dark
That it soaks to my heart?

Oh sweet sound of the rain
On the earth and the roofs!
For the dull heart again,
Oh the song of the rain!

It rains for no reason
In this heart that lacks heart.
What? And no treason?
It’s grief without reason.

By far the worst pain,
Without hatred, or love,
Yet no way to explain
Why my heart feels such pain!


Thanks for that, Paul!

*: He really does appear to have been a miserable poor sod; of course his doomed affair with Rimbaud didn't help matters much.


I think we need a nice cat poem to counterbalance Paul's depressed and depressing omphaloskepsis (= "nombrilisme", en français)

Once a certain cat and cock,
Friendship founded on a rock,
Lived together in a house
In the land of Fledermaus.
Each loved music in his way,
And the cock, at break of day
Chanted: Cock-a-doodle-do!
Kiki-riki--Kuk-ru-koo!"
While his cat friend, in the middle
Of the night, would play the fiddle.
Sometimes they would play together
--Handsome fur and fancy feather--
And the pair would dance and sing
While the house with joy would ring.

from Vikram Seth's "The Cat and the Cock"

Scenes from an Education

In general, I've been fairly happy with my progress with French to date. It's definitely harder than Spanish, but this trip, in particular, it seems as if I have been making noticeable progress. Correct pronunciation remains a major challenge, however, and in recent classes I have been focusing on phonetics, trying to minimize my accent.

Thus, Sunday brought a repeat of the all-too-familiar scene with Daniele -- I take the newspaper, stumble through reading a paragraph out loud, only to be greeted with the critique "C'est pas mal*, mais il y a quelques petites choses ...."  (Not bad*, there are just a few little things to work on ....)
What were these "petites choses" that constitute the main barrier to improving my pronunciation, according to Daniele? Easy enough -- my consonants are fine, I just need to work on my vowels.
That seems doable, right? I left, feeling moderately encouraged about my progress.

Switch to yesterday morning's class with Agnes. The other student had left with a migraine, so it was just one-on-one with Agnes. A perfect opportunity for some phonetics practice, right? I take the newspaper, stumble through reading a paragraph out loud, again to be greeted with the critique "C'est pas mal*, mais il y a quelques petites choses ...." And what, according to Agnes, were the "petites choses" that were holding me back, and needed extra work. Simple -- my vowels were just fine, I just need to work on my consonants!

But at least now I know what stands between me and full mastery of French pronunciation.

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZéèàçùîôâêû  !!!!!!

§@^#?£$%µ@@@##£§§§!??


*: Note that this is the highest praise one can ever hope to receive from a French person; they all have a common gene that prevents them from ever expressing positive sentiments such as unmitigated approval, unstinting praise or admiration, or - Dieu forbid - actual unbridled enthusiasm. On the French evaluation scale "pas mal" represents high praise indeed.

Book Review : The Queen's Throat

Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality And The Mystery Of Desire by Wayne Koestenbaum
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Full disclosure: I am a gay man. I enjoy opera, find certain operas to be truly sublime. But I am not an opera queen

Koestenbaum writes with a kind of feverish elegance that is impressive. But this book - a set of highly idiosyncratic meditations on opera - just bristles with cringe-inducing stereotypes. In particular, his apparent willingness to embrace the 'gay man as ostracized outsider' role is distinctly unappealing.

I enjoyed two of the book's seven chapters - Koestenbaum's reflections on "The Callas Cult" and the final chapter, in which he singles out moments in opera which he finds particularly affecting, and attempts to explain why. (Though he's not always able to provide a particularly coherent explanation, his passion does shine through, and it's always interesting to hear about other people's favorite opera moments.)

I found the remaining five chapters to be a curious melange of the weirdly fetishistic and the worst kind of deconstructive excess. The following excerpt exemplifies these two problems:

"I've always been fascinated by the spindle hole. Everything on the record's face conspires to highlight it: the price circles it; the label and the round window in the protective paper envelope echo its shape....
The hole makes no single anatomical allusion. It makes many. It isn't reductively equal, even in the listener's unconscious, to any part of the human body. But it has always spoken to me of the emptiness at the center of a recorded voice and the emptiness at the center of a listener's life and the ambiguities in any sexual body, including a homosexual body, concerning the proper and improper function of orifices."

He goes on, I regret to report, to devote even more space to the contemplation of a record's label, its grooves, the turntable, and a myriad of other objects remotely associated with opera. I'd like to say that his passion for opera shines through, but for the most part I found his ruminations oddly detached. The musings of a collector, and not of a lover of opera. Had he focused more on the music itself, and not the trappings that surround opera, this would have been a better book.

But if you like the kind of drivel exemplified by the paragraph quoted earlier, then this is the book for you. I was disappointed.



View all my reviews

Some Stuff you Will Have Missed if you are not on Facebook (not suggesting that you should be, because you actually have a life)

Everything goes better with a top hat.

Or a fedora.

Things could be worse. You could have tit juice conjunctivitis.

If these confirm your prejudice that Facebook is a time-wasting sump of vapidness, well then, my work here is done.

The answer to yesterday's mystery question can hardly have been a mystery to anyone with access to a web browser (if that doesn't include you, how the heck did you get here?). Bruno Magli makes fancy SHOES.

Mystery Picture

Good heavens! What could these be? The bodies of dead Franciscans, come to an unhappy ending? No, I bear my former educators/tormentors no ill-will.

Tune in tomorrow, when the mystery shall be revealed.

'Tis the season

Yes, I'm still here, skulking around the apartment. But with a definite added quota of mental energy, even if my cold still lingers a bit.

On Monday, I received a somewhat baffling e-mail. It was from Harry and David, a corporation that would dearly love for you to think of them as just these two avuncular fruit-growers somewhere in Oregon (not the meth-lab ridden Oregon, obviously; the fruitier, lusher, more mythic part). They are kind of like Ben and Jerry, if you replace ice-cream by delicious pears, and Vermont by Oregon.

The Plain People of Ireland: Is there a point to this meandering?
Whipping Cats Management: Security! Get these rabble out of here; I thought blog policy was perfectly clear - the plebs are allowed to "contribute" only in the comments section.
Whipping Cats "Security Officer" (a pimply teen): Right-ho, guvnor!

Anyway, this missive from Harry and David was to inform me that they had prepared my "holiday gift list", and that a simple nod of acquiescence on my part (with some vital credit card info, natch) was all that was needed to send packages of happiness criss-crossing the land. As if happiness were that simple, something to be commodified and dispatched at will.

But my real point is - What the heck, Harry (and/or David)? Hold your horses there just a minute! You sent me this message on September 24th. Just what "holiday" did you have in mind here, gentlemen? Yom Kippur? Since when do I have a gift list for Yom Kippur?

I think we all know what holiday H & D had in mind. But I am going to pretend that marketing for the Christmas season is not already in full swing, and that in fact H & D were exhorting me to celebrate the arrival of autumn.

Yes, indeed. Fall is here. I wonder what the poets have to say about that. Here is John Keats, in a generally upbeat frame of mind:

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness

Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;

To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,

And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;

To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,

And still more, later flowers for the bees,

Until they think warm days will never cease,

For Summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?

Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find

Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,

Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;

Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,

Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook

Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:

And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep

Steady thy laden head across a brook;

Or by a cider-press, with patient look,

Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?

Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,-

While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,

And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;

Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn

Among the river sallows, borne aloft

Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;

And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;

Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft

The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;

And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

 

How about some Rilke?

 

Herbsttag

Herr, es ist Zeit. Der Sommer war sehr groß.
Leg deinen Schatten auf die Sonnenuhren,
und auf den Fluren lass die Winde los. 
Befiehl den letzten Früchten, voll zu sein;
gib ihnen noch zwei südlichere Tage,
dränge sie zur Vollendung hin, und jage
die letzte Süße in den schweren Wein. 
Wer jetzt kein Haus hat, baut sich keines mehr.
Wer jetzt allein ist, wird es lange bleiben,
wird wachen, lesen, lange Briefe schreiben
und wird in den Alleen hin und her
unruhig wandern, wenn die Blätter treiben. 

 

A U T U M N  DAY

Lord: it is time. The summer was immense.
Stretch out your shadow on the sundial’s face,
and on the meadows let the winds go loose.

 

Command the last fruits to be full in time,
grant them even two more southerly days,
press them toward fulfillment soon, and chase
the last sweetness into the heavy wine.

 

Whoever has no house now, will build none.
Who is alone now, will stay long alone,
will lie awake, read, get long letters written,
and through the streets that follow up and down
will wander restless, when the leaves are driven.

 

Translated by John Felstiner
19 February 2011

 

(There are many bad translations of this poem; John Felstiner's wonderful version is a jewel)

 

In closing, let's hand the microphone over to Monsieur Paul Verlaine, on whose home turf we will be spending the greater part of this particular autumn. Paul, what do you have for us? An "Autumn Song"? Just the ticket.

 

Les sanglots longs
Des violons
De l'automne
Blessent mon cœur
D'une langueur
Monotone.

Tout suffocant
Et blême, quand
Sonne l'heure.
Je me souviens
Des jours anciens,
Et je pleure...

Et je m'en vais
Au vent mauvais
Qui m'emporte
De çà, de là,
Pareil à la
Feuille morte...

 

Perhaps we could have that in (rough) translation?

 

With long sobs
the violin-throbs
of autumn wound
my heart with languorous
and monotonous
sound.

Choking and pale
When I mind the tale
the hours keep,
my memory strays
down other days
and I weep;

and I let me go
where ill winds blow
now here, now there,
harried and sped,
even as a dead
leaf, anywhere.

 

 

God, no, Paul is off his meds again!