Le 31 mars

Le 31 mars 2011, Pessac, France. Le printemps est largement épanoui. Les feuilles des arbres s'écartent. C'est comme une bénédiction.

Art History

I know practically nothing about art or history, so I have been trying to study a lot for my test tomorrow. Of course, I have ended up just going off on a lot of fun internet tangents instead. I read most of the French Wikipedia page on the history of the corset... this was because I was originally looking for the French term for choker (ras le cou), because I was pretty sure I'd written it down wrong in class... my notes said the French words for rat-of-ass (rat-de-cul) with a question mark beside it.

Anyway, that's what the model is wearing in Manet's Olympia. I've noticed a lot of differences between the French wikipedia and English wikipedia pages about the painting. If I had time, I would go into some examples but I should get back to studying. I'll just say, I think in order to understand a piece of art you need to know the history of the country whose citizen painted it. So it's nice that Olympia is at Musée d'Orsay and not in some godforsaken Anglo-Saxon country.

I also stumbled upon this:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1310438/Kate-Moss-poses-cover-Bryan-Ferrys-album-Olympia.html

Olympia is an early pin up? What? I have no idea who this musician is, but I think he's totally got the wrong end of the stick here. I'm basing this on you know, well, one class and some Wikipedia research. But hey, it was a class taught by a curator of a French art gallery. And that Wikipedia research was bilingual.

Oh, but the reason I wanted to blog right now was because ''shawl'' is spelled ''châle'' in French. How crazy is that?

''1662, originally of a type of scarf worn in Asia, from Urdu and other Indian languages, from Pers. shal, sometimes said to be named for Shaliat, town in India where it was first manufactured. ''


I'm going to have a hell of a time remembering how to spell that on the test tomorrow.

Rebecca Black and Cyber bullying

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CD2LRROpph0

I think most people who use social networking sites on the internet (ie Facebook) will have seen the youtube video for Rebecca Black's song ''Friday''. This song basically became popular because people think it's really terrible.

Rebecca Black is actually a 13 year old girl whose parents (both veterinarians) paid a couple thousand dollars for their daughter to record this song and make a video. She's taken a couple years of vocal lessons, and she did not write the song. When she went to record a song she chose between ''Friday'' and a song about ''adult love'' but she related more to Friday since she said she hadn't experienced ''adult love'' yet. I watched her interview on ''Good Morning America'' and she seemed really sweet and humble and said that she didn't think she was the best singer, but she didn't think she was the worst singer. They asked her about the meanest online comment she'd had and she said that someone told her to go cut herself.

Rebecca Black: there is nothing wrong with you or your song. The lyrics are in no way more inane than any other hit pop song that is released nowadays. If this song had a bunch of references to drinking and sex nobody would even have commented on the vacuousness of it. I think this is a catchy pop song. I think the lyrics are appropriate for a 13 year old.

As far as people who say that this is the worst song they've ever heard, I don't know if they sit at home listening to Beethoven all day, but there is a lot of really terrible music being made nowadays. For example, I hate metal or punk music. I can't listen to music that lacks a melody. There is music being made that is just like being slammed against a wall of angry noise. I wonder that people enjoy this. I wonder if there is something very dark and twisted in their souls to make them want to self-flagellate with this aural punishment. Dark and twisted like the souls of people who want to tell a 13 year old to cut herself because her song captures the meaninglessness of pop music quite aptly.

Esperanto

 "C'est abus de dire que nous avons une langue naturelle; les langues sont par institution arbitraires et conventions des peuples." (It's misuse to say that we have a natural language; languages are by institution arbitrary and conventions of peoples.)

François Rabelais

There are a million tangents I could go on on Wikipedia. Actually there are over 3.5 million in English. Every once in a while I'll read a French page too.

Tonight I'm going to see Cyrano de Bergerac, so I was reading it (in English) on Project Gutenberg. That is a good website too. I got kind of distracted and started at looking at books they had in Latin (I'm learning Latin right now). Then I looked at the books they had in Esperanto (La Aventuroj de Alicio en Mirlando ...)

I proceeded to read the Wikipedia page about Esperanto. I always thought it was kind of a joke. The only thing I thought of when someone said Esperanto was that William Shatner made a film in Esperanto.

Here are some interesting facts from the article:

''Esperanto is the 26th language.^[3]Worldwide, there are 6,912 recognized languages.''
''There is evidence that learning Esperanto may provide a superior foundation for learning languages in general, and some primary schools teach it as preparation for learning other foreign languages''
''The first World Congress of Esperanto was organized in France in 1905.''
'' Esperantists were killed during the Holocaust''


I think the ideals of the creation of Esperanto are pretty beautiful. The creator, Lazarus Zamenhof, wanted to create a ''an easy-to-learn and politically neutral language that would foster peace and international understanding between people with different regional and/or national languages''.


All in all, a very interesting article. A very interesting concept. I actually say an Esperanto club meeting poster on campus here a few months back. I think I would quite like to learn Esperanto. I'll probably wait until I'm back in Canada though so I can focus on learning French right now.

Littérature Français Actuelle

"Finalement, ce qui constitue l'ossature de l'existence, ce n'est ni la famille, ni la carrière, ni ce que d'autres diront ou penseront de vous, mais quelques instants de cette nature, soulevés par une lévitation plus sereine encore que celle de l'amour, et que la vie nous distribue avec une parcimonie à la mesure de notre faible coeur."

Nicolas Bouvier, L'Usage du Monde

(Loosely translated as: In the end, the very bones of existence are not family, a career, or what others say or think of you, but the few instances of this nature when you are lifted up by a levitation that is more serene than that which you feel when you are in love... I'm still trying to work out what the last part means or how it could be translated.. if anyone knows, post a comment).


Littérature Français Actuelle is probably my favorite class I'm taking here. I still hate analyzing literature, but my prof has a way of lecturing where everything she says is interesting, whereas I usually feel that literary analysis is extremely dull.


Today we were studying an excerpt from L'Usage du Monde by Bouvier. We are working right now on the theme ''Le Voyage'' in the excerpts my prof chooses for us. Bouvier apparently traveled a lot, and traveled slowly, over land, on foot. 


I know a couple of people who take life slowly and are present in every moment. I really admire that. I agree with the idea of the slow voyage: travelling on foot, meeting people, being open to spontaneity and getting lost in the journey. However, I tend to be somewhat of a control freak, so I get anxious when I don't have a plan. 


Most people feel like they don't have the time to take a slow voyage. Time is a luxury. I can't help feeling that time is a burden. I don't hear many people complain about having too much time. Sometimes I feel like I'm being crushed under the weight of the hugeness of every moment. 


To return to Bouvier's quote though, he's talking about the exquisite moments that happen during one's travels. I don't think these moments are confined to people who are travelling though. It seems to me that if a person is living a certain way, even in their hometown, they can capture a few moments of ecstasy. Travelling just seems like a short cut. For some, anyway.

The Missing Button

One of the stove top knobs in my dorm has gone missing again. Last term one went missing, and then the second, so I had to go to the housing office to complain because I couldn't cook anything any more. The upside to the sometimes deplorable conditions of student life in France is that whenever I need to complain I learn new vocabulary words. When I first arrived I learned moldy carpet (moquette moisi). There is no French word for knob, they use bouton, the same word that is used for button. En revanche, the French have two words for ''river''. A ''fleuve'' is a river that flows into a sea or ocean, and a ''rivière'' does not. Vive la langue française!*


*The French also do some wild things with punctuation: there is apparently supposed to be a space between a colon and a preceding word. This goes for some other punctuation marks too,  I think the exclamation mark is included but I'm a bit hazy about the details. One thing I'm pretty sure of.. when a nationality is used as an adjective the first letter is not capitalized... hence ''la langue française''.

La France: Sounds and Smells

I had laser eye surgery in September 2009 and since then I have not been able to see as clearly as I used to with glasses or contacts. Understandably, there have been times when I've been quite upset about this. I remember one of those times when I was talking to my mom about going to France and how disappointed I was that I wouldn't be able to see things over in Europe as clearly as I wanted to see them. My mom also has less-than-perfect vision, and she travels to Europe every Spring. She told me that even if I couldn't see it the way I wanted to, I would still be able to experience all the smells and sounds and tastes.

The smells, sounds and tastes in France tend to be pretty pleasant. I currently have a head cold so I'm not smelling as well as I usually can. Yesterday in class people were complaining about a bad smell and my teacher opened the window. Then we realized that it was coming from the construction next door. I could faintly smell it, and was grateful that my nose was plugged it because I could tell that it was a really strong, unpleasant odor. Later, on my walk home from class, I walked past a guy and the scent of his cologne managed to waft past all the mucus into my nose. My friend A. is right about every man in France smelling like a boy on his way to a Grade 8 dance.

Grocery Shopping

One of my favorite things to do in a foreign country is go to the grocery store and see what people are eating. I like to check out what the people ahead of me in line are buying and imagine what kind of meals they might be cooking.

Today as I approached the supermarket I saw a roly-poly man coming out (the stereotype is true... it is much rarer to see this in France than back in Canada). Anyway, he was holding in his arms two boxes of coca-cola upon which were balanced a package of bacon bits and two containers of crème fraîche.

I suppose I shouldn't judge... I put maple syrup on my pasta sometimes.

genialischer kitsch - Tchaikovsky, kitsch of genius

Introduction:


Elton John and his partner have a child. This child's godmother is Lady Gaga. How do I know this? I read an interview with Elton John's partner in Macleans magazine. Elton John's partner, David Furnish is the man responsible for bringing us ''Gnomeo and Juliet'', which my boyfriend thinks is an awful premise for a film, and he was wondering where anyone would get the idea of using garden gnomes to tell the story of Romeo and Juliet. I said that gnomes were ''in'' right now. He disagreed. I said, ''kitschy things are cool right now. Look at the success of a website like Etsy''. So we started to argue about whether kitschy things are cool, but I was already on a wikipedia tangent to see if I really understood what kitchy meant...


Objective:


Define the word kitschy. Bonus points for etymology.


Method:


Google the following search terms: ''kitchy'' ''kitchy etymology'' ''kitchy defintion'' ''camp'' ''camper'' (I went off on another tangent).


Results:


Kitsch is a German loanword. Some of my internet sources tell me it means trash. Some essay written by some girl from the department of art history at The University of Chicago said that some people suggested it was an inversion of the French word ''chic''. Which would kind of make it Verlan, but the word kitsch has been around since the 1925 markets in Munich, which as far as I know is longer than Verlan has been around. 


Apparently I am not the only person confused about the definition of kitsch. Pretty much every website I went to said something different. I think the most useful definition was from wordnetweb.princeton.edu ''excessively garish or sentimental art; usually considered in bad taste''. I like this definition because my boyfriend agreed that ''cutesy'' things are in style, and I'm going to say that ''cutesy'' and ''sentimental'' are basically synonyms, so we can both be right.


Conclusion:


1. Kitsch is cool.
2. Gnomes are kitschy

*The ''camp'' tangent:

Wikipedia made a connection between kitsch and camp by saying something about postmodernism in the '80s. Then wikipedia says that camp  '' refers to an ironic appreciation of that which might otherwise be considered corny''. Depending on the website, I was reading that the word ''camp'' is either from 17th century French, or French slang ''camper'', meaning ''to pose in an exaggerated fashion''. I was not able to verify this. The closest I got was ''Établir, placer quelque chose avec décision et vigueur'' which would be ''establish, or place something decisively and with vigor (or with effect)''.

You know, it's not really cool for someone to admit that they don't know the definition of a word that's always being tossed around. I've become a lot more comfortable than I used to be admitting that I don't know the meaning of a word that somebody is using. Sometimes the other person defines it for me, and I learn a new word. Sometimes they can't define it and I realize that we're having a pointless discussion because neither of us knows what we're talking about.