Stromae

I celebrated Thanksgiving in the most awesome of ways! I got myself a Lebanese sandwich (Halloumi cheese), Berthillon ice cream, and then I went to see Stromae!!

My friend Silvia was supposed to come with me to see him. She was due in from Trier (a small medieval town in Germany, near the border, where she's doing a postdoc) at 5, but then got stranded in Saarbrücken because the train to Paris was cancelled! It was very unfortunate...the later train would have gotten her in too late. So, instead of missing it, she decided not to come to Paris at all. I'll be going to Trier tomorrow morning. Mélanie joined me at the concert instead. And boy was it amazing!

A bit of background: Stromae is a Belgian singer whose name is obviously a pseudonym. It comes from the French slang language known as the "Verlan" (the word "envers" or "backwards" pronounced backwards). By that logic, Stromae is what word backwards? C'mon, you can get the right answer! That's right! Maestro!

Stromae hit the top of the charts with his "Alors on danse" (then we dance) which has become famous even in the US. It sounds like any other club song, with the strong beat and loud bass. But, the words are all painfully ironic, about how life is hard and all we do all day every day is totally useless, so we go out and dance to forget. Most of his songs are about one problematic aspect of everyday life, or social commentary, but put to a positive-sounding beat! They make you want to dance, except they're about: the fact that no one sleeps anymore, the futility of love, missing parents, suicide, sickness, etc. The New York Times wrote an article about him last year (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/15/arts/15iht-stromae15.html?_r=1&), in which they claimed he captured the disillusionment of an entire generation of Europeans. Judging from the attendance and participation at his concert, I'd say he is doing quite well for himself. There's even a rumor that he wants to retire.

Anyway, I spent Thanksgiving very thankful for Stromae and his catchy tunes and their contrasting ironic lyrics, and not quite as thankful for faulty European railway systems which prevented Silvia from getting here. But, I'll see her tomorrow at a big "Thanksgiving" dinner she's been planning with her friends in Germany!

Below I've added some of my (not very good) pictures from the concert, as well of three of my favorite Stromae music videos. Enjoy!!

Picasso Museum

Here are some pictures from the newly renovated and reopened Picasso museum which is a short walk from chez moi in the Marais! The day after my birthday, after Jess and I got breakfast and she left, I walked north, picked up a Berthillon on the way, and met my new friend Yao to see this new museum! Afterwards, we took a little stroll through the Marais. It was a lovely post-birthday day!

A picture he painted of the Sacré Cœur! Do you recognize it? 

I can't remember what this was. Might have been a guitar. He painted a lot of guitars that don't look like guitars!

This seems to be one of his kiss paintings. 

A nude. If he painted me like that, I'd be a bit angry. 

This is someone reading. If he painted me like this, I'd be okay with it. 

This is supposed to be a woman reading. Except she's clearly not looking at the book. 

A GOAT!!

The museum was beautiful!

The view was pretty nice too

There's Sacré Cœur, in case you didn't recognize it from Picasso's painting 

This might have been another kiss? 

Birthday in Paris

These next few posts are going to be a bit out of order. First, I'd like to talk about my birthday in Paris! This was my first time having a birthday outside of the US, and I have to say, it wasn't any different at all! All I did was spend my day being told absolutely nothing about what we were doing that night (it was a surprise organized by Jess and Mélanie) and then had a lovely evening surrounded by good friends (some old, some new) eating fondue and raclette.

The language of the evening was English, since Mélanie was the only French person. It might as well have been French, though, since Macs, Jess, and Jena all speak French fluently. For dessert, Andréa joined us as well, and so she, Mélanie and I started a French side of the conversation. It was too weird speaking to Andréa in English! Her English (like her French, Portuguese, Italian, and Spanish) is wonderful, of course. I just realized I had never spoken to her in English!

I even got presents! Mélanie got me northern French cookies which all have part of a sentence written on them and you can mix and match to write full sentences! Very Oulipian, and very appropriate, as was the accompanying book about the literary scene in Paris. And Jess got me traditional African jewelry, which is lovely and matches one of my new sweaters and the turquoise shoes I bought in Berlin perfectly!

After the fondue party (which, by the way, was at an amazing place Jess and I found a few weeks ago when the Beninese place was unfortunately closed. The waitress there is Italian and she gave us free wine when I spoke to her in Italian the last time. This time she just wished me happy birthday), Jess and I went to The Moose (the Canadian bar) where I proudly announced to the bartender that it was my birthday! At that point, the two people next to us announced that they were buying us drinks! Then, we all continued to celebrate my birthday well into the night because, after all, it was still my birthday in the US! Anyway, the next morning, Jess and I had a long talk about constrained literature and the mathematical aspects of Georges Perec's La vie mode d'emploi (Life a User's Manual, translated by David Bellos, of course!). So, clearly we didn't have too much to drink!

I didn't take too many pictures, but here is the "scandalous" chocolate fondue I had for dessert!

Paris celebrates Christmas before Thanksgiving!

Good thing Thanksgiving isn't a holiday here, because otherwise all the Christmas lights would be a little too early. Just for fun, I figured I'd show you some pictures I've taken.

By the way, some of these pictures were taken as early as November 11th!

Writing my dissertation at the Bibliothèque Sainte Geneviève

This is the line for the Bibliothèque Sainte Geneviève this afternoon. It is right next to the Panthéon (which is hideous right now, since it's been under construction since I got here...), and is generally considered one of the most beautiful libraries in the world! This line is standard. You just have to wait and wait and wait. When I studied abroad in Paris oh so many years ago, I think I went two or three times. I liked it a lot, but you lose so much time in the line that you end up doing all your reading outside rather than inside!

Well, not anymore! I am now the happy owner of a "carte rose" (a pink card), which allows me to bypass this line completely. Yes sir! Now I just waltz past the crowd, right up to the door, and the guard lets me in! Am I the luckiest person in the world? Well, maybe not. It is just a library, after all, and I'm not even sure I can take books out. But, it must be worth it if there are so many people waiting in line, right???

This is a (not so great) picture of the inside. Gorgeous, right? Imagine would a good picture would look like! It's also very quiet, because everyone in there is very serious. They have a very poor free wifi connection and not tons of light (since it's pretty cloudy in Paris nowadays), but if you're typing on the computer, I suppose that's ideal. 

Today in this library, I spent maybe 3 hours refining my dissertation introduction. It is now 22 pages long and includes a detailed chapter summary. It also—thanks to a very long Skype conversation with a professor in Maine last night—explains exactly why this work is important in today's academic context, lists the reasons why I am the only person alive who can do the work (well, maybe not in those exact terms...), and expands on the reasons why I chose these chapters and why I put them in this particular order. 

Anyway, I was happily productive today in this lovely workplace. Maybe I'll go there again soon!

The Grand Opening of the OuLiPo Exposition

On Monday evening, I skipped my Hebrew class (and will probably never go again) in order to go to the "vernissage" or grand opening of the new exposition about the OuLiPo at the Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal. If the name sounds familiar, it's where the Perec archives are located (see previous post), and it's also coincidentally enough the home of the OuLiPo archives. Camille (one of the two organizers of the transcription project) did the whole thing and sent out invitations to everyone participating in the project, as well as the beautiful catalogue (which she just gave me in person). It felt very exclusive, especially to get to see the exposition before the official start date, wandering around the displays in the presence of real Oulipians (a few of whom I actually spoke with!).

The exposition is basically a more organized version of this blog and contains just about all the information that was in my first draft encyclopedia entry had. It has basic background information, pictures of every Oulipian, documents and even the typewriter on which Perec wrote La vie mode d'emploi! My favorite part were the ludic exercises, little games for the inclined museum-goer. You could play with Marcel Bénabou's proverbs, recombining them into new nonsensical phrases; or you could try to make a "snowball" poem whose verses increase by a certain number of characters each line.

For anyone who might happen to be in Paris soon, the exposition is at the Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal until 15 February. Here is the information: http://www.bnf.fr/documents/cp_oulipo_expo.pdf

And here are some pictures from that night:

A comic book in the form of a Möbius Strip, which means it goes on FOREVER since a Möbius Strip has an infinite number of sides. 

Calvino's drafts for "Comment j'ai écrit un de mes livres" 

More of that

Perec's typewriter on which he wrote La vie mode d'emploi

Beninese food

My friend Jess visits sometimes on the weekends, and last weekend we ate Beninese food! Even though the point of her visit was to see Antigone at the Comédie Française, after not getting the last minute tickets, Beninese food was definitely not a disappointing second choice—I had been dying to try it! Jess Fell, by the way, spent the last two and a half years in Benin, a small country in West Africa. She was teaching English through the Peace Corps and living in a small village. She was lucky, though, and had running water and electricity (unlike some other volunteers). Anyway, she had been telling me about how delicious "amiwo" is since getting to Paris in September, so I was very intrigued.

Background on Jess: She and I met our last year at Hopkins, after I had gotten back from my semester abroad and she had gotten back from her year abroad. While we were coincidentally both in Paris, we didn't know each other, since Hopkins only has meet-and-greets for people studying abroad immediately before leaving, and Jess left in the fall. We met in Wilda Anderson's class on Dumas and Verne, and then spent our entire second semester writing our senior theses together while idolizing ENS graduates. Needless to say, we've both grown a lot since then, and no longer think the ENS is all it's cracked up to be.

Anyway, after Hopkins, Jess did a year-long teaching assistantship program in France, teaching English in a high school in Bordeaux. I visited her that January and got food poisoning, but at least I got to see Bordeaux in the middle of the worst winter on record...after that, Jess went right off to Peace Corps, learned several African languages, taught English in a village for years, helped an entrepreneur with his project to give electricity to more people, and was otherwise awesome. Now she is a student at France's premiere business school, the HEC. It is located in a little town outside of Paris, called Jouy-en-Josas, and so you can imagine how happy I am to be the closest I've been to Jess in over three years!

Beninese food: AMAZING. Except Jess informed me that there were a few key differences between what we ate and "real" Beninese food. First off, the tomatoes were actual tomatoes and did not taste like "red plastic." Second, the chicken was amazing!! Apparently in Benin, the chickens lead very hard lives, and don't really taste like that. Anyway, I really loved this food. Especially the "piment" (spicy sauce) that was so spicy that we went through several pitchers of water. Anyway, here is a picture of the experience! I'm just happy Jess found a Beninese restaurant in Paris, because I've been trying to find Puerto Rican Mofongo and it hasn't been going so well...