War and Memory

Today is the 11th day of the 11th month.  A holiday that I grew up with as Veteran's Day, which if I had any time off school at all, was lumped onto the nearest weekend to make it a three-dayer, and which, since I it is meant to honor the veterans of all foreign wars, was easily confused in my mind with Memorial Day.  Not so here.  This is very specifically Armistice Day, the anniversary of the end of what was supposed to be the war to end all wars. 

I spent the night in Nevers last night, and when I finally made my way outdoors, into a very cold and rainy morning, it was just past 11.  As I headed into the Place Carnot, the large square at the edge of the city center, I came upon a crowd of mostly older people, standing grouped around a statue that I had never really looked at before, but which I now realized was a memorial, with a female anthropomorphic personification (probably France, or possibly Liberty)  standing by the side of a soldier.  Today it was hung about with flags, and there was some kind of a ceremony going on at its foot, with speakers, a brass band, and military personnel--both army and navy--in uniform.  I did not stay to watch the proceedings, mostly because I couldn't see more than the top of people's heads through the crowd, but after I had circled through the city center (to get a pain au chocolat, I admit) I came back to the Place Carnot to sit in the Cafe l'Agricole and watch the end of the ceremony through the window.  It finished with all the the official participants forming up behind the band (which included a souzaphone and buglers whose horns were hung with blue, white, and red) and marching off down the street.

Watching that kind of an event I was struck by several things.  One is that the dress uniforms for the French Navy are completely awesome.  They include white berets with red pompoms and white spats.  Unfortunately, I didn't have my camera with me, and when you google "French sailor uniform" the most appalling things come up, so I am not able to illustrate this point.  You will have to take my word for it.

On a less frivolous note, witnessing the ceremony also made me think a little bit about how the world wars (both One and Two) are remembered very differently here.  The event I saw was a very somber one, and that was not just, I think, because it was a cold gray day and the members of the citizenry who were interested enough to show up were older people.  It really was a memorial, and not a vaunting of military glory.  It made me think about the fact that the last war that took place on American soil passed out of living memory a long time ago.  That is a big difference about being here.  Of course, there aren't many people left who fought in World War II, let alone in World War I, but the memory still feels very close, especially of the second.  There is another monument, not half a block from where I live in Cosne, that commemorates the site where a handful of members of the French Resistance were tortured, killed, and buried by the Nazis.  That is not the sort of memory of a twentieth century conflict that you would see at home.  All our wars are far away, in time or in space, and perhaps that helps us keep the awareness of their brutality at more of a distance.  I am not saying that French culture does not have its own myths and blind spots about national conflicts (as I spent most of last fall having drummed into my head by the inestimable Carol Gluck, everybody has myths about the second world war and their part in it), but it is a different set of myths.  Perhaps, as an outsider, I see them more acutely than somebody who has grown up with this memory of wars fought with battles and casualties practically on ones doorstep within the lives of our parents and grandparents.

Avec mes souvenirs, j'ai allumé la feu...

 ...Mes chagrins, mes plaisirs, je n'ai plus besoins d'eux...

On the one side, La Môme herself, on the other, Marion Cotillard in the 2007 film.

I just finished watching "La Vie En Rose," or "La Môme," as it is called in its French distribution.  It was not the easiest film to watch, mostly because the bare framework of events of the artist's life were so bitterly painful.  Not only did the misfortunes of Edith Piaf's life use her up, but she used herself harshly as well--living experience to the hilt, yes, but also destroying her body in the process, so that by the time she died at 48 she was so wasted and frail she could have been 85.  Aside from the dolorous subject, the film itself was difficult to follow (and not just because I am still struggling to understand all the French vocabulary).  The narration jumped backwards and forwards in time so much that it was almost impossible to get a sense of the causes and effects of events.  People came into and fell out of Piaf's life, and it was very hard to understand the whys and the wherefores of it all, let alone her responses to specific events outside of a general passionate imperiousness and brutal suffering.  Perhaps the crazy-quilt sensibility was the intention, though--it certainly suggested the chaotic and unstable nature of Piaf's existence, and the way that good fortune and calamity both seemed to fall out of the sky onto her head.

I have a lot of impatience with the profusion of celebrity biopics in recent years, and with the assumption that an actor is accomplishing a great feat when they take on what could be argued is merely an impersonation or caricature.  Isn't it a greater feat as an actor to make the audience believe in the vitality and the verisimilitude of an imaginary person?  I could go on a length, but the NY Times review of the movie expresses my criticisms on that front a lot better here.  

Although I agree with that critic's point about biopics, I am not sure about his assertion that American's cannot appreciate how great a star Piaf was.  This American certainly does, and--although I definitely had my reservations about the film--I thought that the amount of her actual music that it included made in an experience well worth its limitations.  Marion Cotiallard is a fiery actress, and she channeled a lot of brimstone for the role, but I though the real star of the film was the actual recording of Piaf's voice.  Her songs lifted up the film, and brought it together.  Milord, L'hymne à l'amour, L'accordioniste ....  As I watched, I waited for the great songs to come on, one by one, and finally, at the end, when I knew it was coming, she sang the greatest: Non, je ne regrette rien.

The End of Vacation

I am finally back in Cosne-Sur-Loire, after what seems like a very long time, even though it was only a week and a half.  I am certainly not complaining about having vacation, but I was getting tired of living out of a suitcase (Omar, however, does not seem to have a problem with it)

I took that picture when I was in the final throes of repacking my suitcase, yet again, at Aurélie's place in Nevers.  Every stop I made on the trip, this task became harder, because I kept adding to the things I had to fit inside my suitcase--a bottle of wine from Kellen's vineyard, a new skirt from Promod, a comic book....  Graphic novels, or bandes dessinés are HUGE here, which warms the cockles of my geeky heart.  I certainly picked up enough souvenirs of les vacances de Toussaint, enough that now I have to practice a little more frugality, at least until the end of November.  Being a tourist is certainly not the best way to save money!

Tourism can certainly be fun, though, although I always have to force down my fear of appearing to be the ugly American with a camera in order to get the pictures I know I will appreciate afterward.  The past Monday was an especially good day for photos.  It was my last full day in Lyon, and I was staying once again with Clara.  I had come into the city the night before to attend her Halloween party (a cultural ambassadorship of sorts, with delicious home-cooked food), and because November 1st was a school holiday for her we were able to spend the day together.  Unfortunately, everybody else was on holiday too, so there was a distinct lack of open shops, museums, and restaurants.  We were, by good fortune and after much searching, able to find a good lunch at a delightful little place that Clara remembered and recommended.  It was pleasant for it's decor as much as for it's food--eating there was like sitting inside of a vintage hatbox; it was all pink and cream and little wicker chairs, and it reminded me a bit of Kitchenette in NYC.

After lunch, tried to go to the park, an effort which included rides on several buses and a tram, and an embarrassing amount of walking around with no idea where we were.  We finally did get there, though, and it was well worth our perseverance.  The time of year was just right for the leaves to be breaking into golds and oranges, although they had not yet begun to fall from the trees, and so we had many gorgeous views of autumn foliage.  The place was also full of people; partly, I imagine, because everything else was closed and everybody's children were out of school, but also because it seemed to be a very community-friendly site.  There were lots of things that would have made me clamor to go to the park and have adventures, if I was under ten: a zoo, a little paddle boat pool, a pond with ducks to feed...Of course, you didn't have to be under ten to enjoy it: Clara and I paid two euros each to ride a little train that went at the thrilling speed of a middle-aged jogger and took us all the way around a little island in the middle of the park's lake.  Very nostalgic and satisfying.

Mice and the Middle Ages

It is a rainy morning here, the sort of weather that makes you glad you can sit inside and drink tea without having to worry about going anywhere.  It's good for a lazy vacation Saturday, although I'm glad it held off yesterday.  Aurelie took me to see a nearby village called Pérouges in the afternoon, which had preserved almost in its entirety its midieval architecture.  Walking through the little slanting streets over stones that I would hate to think of trying to pull a cart over, it was as if we had slipped beneath the layers of development of the last 500 years and were catching glimpses of the way the village might have looked in the days when towns of burgers were first beginning to form, creating environments where commercial relations took on nez power and the old feudal ties of landed lord and hereditary vassel began to decay.  Townships like this, which look like the antithesis of modernity to us today, were actually the cutting edge of developments that would lead to secularism, captitalism, revolution, and a host of other big concepts--at least if my stuffy, Intro to the Later Middle Ages professor of last year is to be believed.

Not everything in Pérouges was a relic, though, and I came upon this personal vehicle that would have fit right in in my home town:

Because it was the off season, and a cold and windy day the town was relatively empty, with the tourist museums shut, and the only visitors the few families who had brought their children to wander the streets. (I imagine that, as a six-year-old, this would be an even more awesome place to visit).  The quiet was actually quite nice, though, and it felt appropriate to the setting.  Aurélie and I did some exploring >>

...Then we went to taste the town specialty (Aurélie said, "Of course every little town in France has their own food that is a particular product of the locale").  In this case it was the galette de Pérouges, a sort of a flat cake baked with sugar on top, something like a sweet pizza.  We tried it, along with tea and coffee, at a little restaurant that had been serving the same cake since it opened in 1912.  The interior definitely suggested that little had changed there in the last 98 years.  The walls were decorated with old-fashioned china and brass cookware and the waitresses with lacy aprons and little caps, and we were able to warm ourselves in the heat of a large open hearth while we ate.

Unfortunately, we were not the only ones to treat ourselves yesterday.  The other adventure of the day was an escapade of Aurélie's cats.  She has two, brother and sister, who she brought with her from Nevers for the holidays, and who are enjoying the country life a little too much.  While we were sitting watching a movie after dinner that evening, Omar, came trotting in from the garden to show us what he had found--a mouse, and one that had not yet succombed to his attentions!  We proceeded to have very girly responses (squealing, and staying out of the way), while Omar began to enjoy himself with the poor mouse, letting it run here and there, and then catching it again, while it sqeaked pitifully.  After a while we convinced him to take it outside to finish it off, and we were just breathing a sigh of relief, when he brought it back again, still alive.  This time I, after much dithering, tried to rescue the mouse, using a dustpan and a rolled-up magazine, which prompted Omar to take it outside again.  This happened about three more times--mouse came in, made brief and increasingly failing runs for freedom, I approached with the dustpan, and Omar retreated, carrying his prize.  At last he came in and, having decided that the game was over, finally killed the mouse and proudly ate it in front of us.  There was a lot of crunching. 

Relieved that it was finally over, we were settling back to watch the movie, when Biscotte, who had been watching Omar jealously the whole time, trotted in with her own mouse!!  Mercifully, this one had already given up the ghost, bu Biscotte was determined that this would not spoil her fun, and she commenced to play with it, flinging the corpse the air and leaping about while we groaned and tried to avert our eyes.  After far too long (for us) she finally gave up and polished off her own as well, but it was rather too much like being a spectator at the Roman games for my taste.  I know they're cats and they can't help their nature, but still...!

Biscotte, looking innocent--don't be fooled!

From Dijon to Lyon, and What Happened There

So I wrote yesterday that I was going to try to sync up my blog life with my actual life, a manipulation of time and space akin to the machinations of a mad scientist... but I forget myself.  Suffice it to say that this posting may be a little long, but bear with me; it will not end up like this.  Away we go...

So, the reason that I had to be in Dijon on Tuesday, October 26, is because, in order to verify my visa de longue séjour and ensure that I would not be summarily deported in a surprise attack by immigration services, I (and all the other assistants) had to submit to a medical examination.  This is to ensure that we are not vectors of swine flu, AIDS, TB, ebola, scabies, etc., etc., and that our presence will not result in any population-threatening pandemics.  Fortunately, I was deemed perfectly healthy, and I made it through the process with only a minimal loss of time and dignity.

France is a fairly bureaucratic state (as I think one or two people have pointed out before) and the process of getting verified took, what with the line of 20-odd assistants scheduled to be seen in one afternoon, about three hours.  I am seemingly-incapable of showing up prepared for these appointments (when I got my visa at the SF consulate, I had to go through the line three separate times, since I kept leaving out vital copies of things) so I had to leave at one point to go get a headshot taken at a local mall, and I covered myself with idiocy at one point when the nurse, in the course of asking rote questions, demanded, "Et vous êtes enciente?" (Are you pregnant?) I thought she said, "Et vous êtes en bonne santé?" (Are you healthy?), and so I responded with an emphatic "Oui!"  ....Oh well.  I tell my students that you have to submit to a certain amount of humiliation when you want to learn a foriegn language, and I suppose the best teachers lead by example.

Really, though, in the hall of fame of surreal official experiences (in which for me, the pride of place is still held by my visit to the Post Office of Jaipur: Kafkaesque in the extreme), it was not that bad.  I got to stand in a miniature elevator while they hoisted me up to take an x-ray of my lungs, which was a sort of a bizarre fun-house experience, and at the end of the appointment I emerged with an officially-stamped visa (stamps are very powerful here) and an image of my lungs, somewhat like this <<.  Apparently, I am in no danger of ending up like a consumptive heroine of the 19th century.

After my afternoon of inspections, I took a train to Lyon, arriving only an hour and a half after I had intended.  Parliment has finally voted on the issue of the age of retirement, and the strikes are gradually dying down, although the government's actions were ultimately unswayed by the activity.

I stayed my first two nights in the city of Lyon, which really is a city--my first in France.  It is really beautiful here, and very accessible.  I think Lyon is a similar size to San Francisco, in that there is plenty of cosmopolitan presence and things to do here, but it is not overwhelmingly huge, and you can walk most places.  Otherwise, you can take the metro, a very modern-looking and new affaire, with automated trains, which prevents them from going on strike.  (I am confident though, that if machines evolve to the point of independent intelligence, that while the machines of other countries may make war against humainity or consign us all to a virtual reality and harvest our life-forces for energy, the machines of France will form syndicates and strike regularly.) ...Anyway, back to my tourtist-ing around Lyon:

Clara, my hostess with whom I had the rare (for me) and pleasant experience of going from new acquaintence to friend in a manner of hours, took me out to see the sights of the city on the first morning I was there.

Lyon is centered around two rivers, the Rhône and the Saône, and two hills, something I appreciate a lot, as it always gives me some reference points to orient myself by.  The two hills are referred to as "the hill that prays" and "the hill that works," because the latter was the traditional site of the Lyon silk industry, while the former was the site of the Cathédrale de Fourvière.  Clara and I went up to it (which is where this picture was taken) and it really was up!  There is a cable car, à la San Francisco, that takes you at an incredibly steep angle up through a tunnel inside the hill, and you emerge at the top to see the arching buttresses--gothic in evocation, but 19-century actual date of construction and in level of fru-fru decoration.  Cracks about the bishop's bird stump aside, though, it was really quite beautiful, both up close and from the foot of the hill, which we walked down afterwards, along a switchbacked track through a woodsy park.  I love the way that parks inside cities can make you feel as if you have been transported to a separte peace, outside the urban sphere--I think it comes from having gotten to know Central Park in NYC.

At the foot of the hill, we emerged from the park in the old part of the city.  This is the space between the two rivers, the "presque-îsle" (almost island) as it's called.  It makes much more sense to me the way that old cities always cluster around natural waterways or in other logical habitats, unlike their younger, post-industrial cousins, which get built on swamps (Huston) or in the middle of deserts (LA).  The quarter we were in was a neighborhood of Italian merchants during the Renaissance, so it was full of narrow streets with tall, balconied buildings and "secret" courtyards and passageways--very Romeo and Juliet.

I would like to add photos of all these things, but after my last upload, the computer I am currently using refuses to add any other files, just to spite me, so I will once again have to wait to update images until the technological stars are in better alignment.  I will just finish by adding that, my second day in Lyon, Clara took me to meet Aurélie, whose parents home just outside the city is my current port of call, at the Place Bellecour, the largest square in western europe, which turned out, at that particular moment, to be occupied by what might be the last hurrah of the strikes.  There were riot police in full outfits, marchers carrying flares, syndicate affiliations, and even communist flags (!!), and people yelling over the PA about the spirit of the worker and the rights of society.  Even in protest, French rhetoric is expressed in ideal and theoretical rather than personal terms--something I find very different from the US.

This post is becoming epic, and although Hugo might approve, I am realizing that it might profit me to go out and enjoy the nice weather while it lasts, since I am once again in the countryside.  I almost achieved my goal of bringing my blog up to the present moment, but sadly, this incongruity in the writing space-time continuum has yet to be corrected.  I suppose the reality is that I will always have more to say...

Until next time, though, I think this is it!

....and, pictures!

I have finally gotten to a place where I can upload photos, courtesy of another kind hostess, this time in Lyon, so I can add some pictures to illustrate my long weekend in the Dijon countryside.

I realize that this picture is not hugely demonstrative of my location, but I can assure you that the landscape behind me is full of vineyards (see below).

Another friend of Kellen's who was also staying with her in the upper dormitory-like room of home (it's not quite a chateau, but still a big country house) said to me, "It's too bad you weren't here a few weeks ago during the harvest."  I'm not sure I agree--the harvest time is, as one might only imagine, very tourist-y, with lots of visitors descending on the little villages and hamlets of the region to exercise their noses in various caveau de dégustation.  I liked the emptiness of the tiny towns (although I certainly wouldn't want to spend more than a weekend or two away there, as I am a city girl at heart), and the vine fields, even stripped of their fruit and beginning to lose their leaves, were a beautiful burnished amber.  Even in fall, the land is surprisingly verdant-looking to me, since I grew up with the surrounding the Bay Area and ringing the Sacramento Valley, which stay a the nice golden brown of a tray of muffins for approximately nine-tenths of the year.  I ran along the road from Kellen's place to a nearby chateau on a truffle farm (really!) Tuesday morning before leaving, and I was able to take in a lot of the scenery, although after a few days of some reprieve from the damp cold of Cosne it had become frigid, and I felt as if I was battling a a sharp-toothed and unreasonably-agressive wind both ways.

Looking back, it seems amazing that wine-tasting at Kellen's (which is what is going on in this picture) was only three days ago.  Since then, I have gone back into Dijon, spend almost three hours having a very French bureaucratic experience getting medically certified to remain in the country, taken the train to Lyon, and had a day of tourism and excellent food with a new friend, but that will have to wait for the next posting--I don't think my blog is ever going to catch up with my life!

Wine Tasting

This morning I had had an experience that--improbably as it seems, given my northern-CA background--was totally new to me.  I went wine tasting.

Sadly, pictures again will have to follow, but I will try to do my best with words.  Kellen took me in the morning to her vineyard, Domaine Lucie et August Lignier, to sample some wines with a couple visiting tourists.  I'm afraid I displayed my ignorance rather forcefully in front of these pleasant New Yorkers, since I have the bare minimum of sommelier knowledge.  Listening to Kellen describe the process of winemaking and the evolution of taste over the life of a wine bottle, I felt as if I was getting a fleeting glimpse of an entire self-sustaining world's worth of knowledge, with its own sciences, cultures, and lore, and I asked many elementary questions, such as "What are tannins?" and "Why are white wines white and red wines red?"  Although Kellen was happy to answer everything I asked, no matter how simplistic, and I learned a lot, I don't think I am even now in any way prepared to give a discourse on winemaking.  One thing that did strike me powerfully, though, with my historian tendencies, is the way that wine, with its long maturation period, and immense range of variation between terroir (the earth it is grown in), vineyard, wine-maker, and vintage year, is like a historical document, in that it records the specificity of a particular time and place.  Like a historical document as well, its story changes over time.  A particular vintage can develop in taste over time, it can "go to sleep," and "wake up" again, it can have bottle shock and become unpleasant until it resettles--like a bit of historical evidence that becomes more and less important as fashions in history-writing change.  Maybe I am pushing the history-metaphor a little far here, but I found the idea of a product that can last for years, and that can grow and change, but always retain certain characteristics evocative of its origins, a very powerful one.

On a less philosophical (pretentious?) note, it was really cool to go down into an actual vaulted wine cellar, like one Montresor might have felt at home in, watch Kellen uncork a giant barrel, and suck some wine out using a tool reminiscent of a giant eye-dropper, and give us each a sample, which we then slurped and spat like pros.

A votre santé!