| As Wyclef put it...Gone 'til...December? |
[Dec. 5th, 2006|07:33 pm] |
OK friends, here I am. I know it's been three months since my last update. There are a few reasons for this. First, as you probably already surmised, I've been slightly busy most days settling in to life in this Paris place. Then, my Internet here only works when it feels like it, kind of like the people in this city. Finally, when I do have the time to sit down and write a little something, I simply haven't really been in the mood. I mean, it is pretty hard to encapsulate this experience to someone who hasn't ever done anything like this. It's not like I've been extremely busy, either, although December has brought talk of ominous phrases such as "devoir sur table" "examens partiels" and "contrôle continu." I don't have any idea what any of these things mean. What I do know is this: I had a 6-page paper due this last Monday, though it was in English, and then another small paper to do for the 10th, a midterm on the 14th, and another midterm on the 8th of January, THE FIRST DAY I get back from Christmas break. It isn't much at all, but compared to what I've had to do so far (i.e. nothing), it's sort of daunting. Who am I kidding. Compared to what Jane's doing at Essex and Gulu at Oxford, I'm basically taking a 10-month-long sightseeing vacation that involves occasional work, which, as long as I get 70% or better on, will transfer back to home as a big cushy A. I am not making this up. Oh, PS, this entry will be slightly longer than the Book of Genesis, since I have three months of stuff to blab about. That's just how it's gonna be. If you don't like the style I've developed of updating on a "whenever" basis with encyclopedic depth, tough. That's how I roll.
So. Unless I've talked to you since I got here, you don't know anything about my life in Paris yet. Where do I begin even? Let's start with classes, since I am ostensibly here as a student, even if I feel more like a hapless wanderer most days. I began with a weeklong debacle at the start of October in which I crisscrossed three separate Sorbonne campuses on ass-ends of Paris, searching for seemingly nonexistent class schedules, room numbers, anything, about, you know, what I can take this semester that will count for stuff back home at Tulane. I spent a lot of energy on this, because my scholarship lasts for four years and four years only, ergo, I want shit to COUNT. The literature that Beaufort gave us only included strange symbols and numbers followed by course descriptions - heaven forbid they decide on rooms and class times BEFORE printing the class booklet. (Do what I did - take a moment right now to drop and thank GOD you have PAWS or TOUR or whatever well-oiled online machine your nice US university uses to register for classes. You DON’T want to see the alternative.) Actually, the real reason for this at Sorbonne is much more complicated, as it involved certain well-entrenched snafus at the Sorbonne, like teacher availability, classroom space, labor disputes, and the like. Basically, the school is running on an antiquated system. I quote Carrie's dad, "That's how we did it in the seventies!" Bingo.
So, after going to about 1200 more classes than I needed to, I've decided on five of them. Two are actually at Reid Hall, which is an American study abroad center in Montparnasse, owned by Columbia, that holds JYA-type offices for a handful of schools, like Wellesley, SMU, Williams, etc. Tulane contracts certain professors each year to teach classes on an almost Tulane-exclusive basis, that is, we get small (less than 15) classes, with quality profs, that will transfer to Tulane much more smoothly than Sorbonne or Institut Catholique ones will. I'm taking Cinema et Litterature Francais, Wednesdays 5-7pm, which I LOVE. Our teacher, whom I've dubbed Grandpa Cinema, is, as Ashley put it, a Renaissance man. He's a former filmmaker who knows a little bit about EVERYTHING and each class consists of a different seminal film in the French canon, all with some rapport with literature, that is, they were books first, or the script was by an author, teaching us about French artistic movements and general French culture in the process. We've seen films by such greats as Cocteau, Louis Malle, Alain Resnais, and Jean Renoir. I'm taking in so much about this country's film and literary history. I hear he's teaching a second-semester class about film and its relationship to different 20th century movements in France, like the student revolts of May '68, and feminism. I'm there. Oh and his English is REALLY hilarious. He once described a racy film as "C'est un film Very Hot" and he uses the phrase "Big Joke" whenever he wants us to know that what he's talking about isn't serious. Ah, French people.
I'm also forcibly, but these days, voluntarily, enrolled in a grammar class Fridays 11:30-1. We took a test at the beginning of the semester soon after my last update to see if we'd have to take this class or not. Only four of the 13 of us tested out of it, and Eckwall later decided she needed the credits, so there's 10 of us in there. I was originally none too psyched about GRAMMAR CLASS but thanks to the teacher, who is just plain NUTS/AWESOME and all my Tulane comrades, it's actually one of my favorite classes. Our teacher, Mellado, looks a little like Susan Sarandon and is a bona fide lover of language. Woman after my own heart. She loves this stuff, loves to teach it, and it shows. It definitely takes a special teacher to make Grammar fun. I've un-learned a lot of lies I've been told in my 5-6 years of serious French study, such as the use of the verb rencontre, and the true nature of past participle agreement. It sounds boring, but I swear it's not. The teacher is off the wall. Oh, and to add to the greatness, I got a 17.5/20 on the examen partiel last week (an 87.5% A), which is incidentally my only grade so far here. They really pile it all on at the end of the semester. This isn't a problem, really, and neither is the once-a-week class thing, since we only need 2 grades for the credit to transfer to Tulane, but it takes some getting used to, since it's definitely not how most American universities work. Next semester she's teaching an atelier d'ecriture (writing workshop) where we talk about idioms and how to deal with translating things. I probably will take it.
So as for Sorbonne classes, I'm in three, 1.5 of which are in English. I will explain. First, L5AN6309 Language and Civilisation in the US, Mondays 4:30-7. This is a back-to-back CM and TD (lecture and TA session roughly) which explains the 2.5hr length. First 1.5hrs is lecture. The class, this semester at least, talks about American English, which is really fascinating. We started in England with 17th Century Southern Standard English (or, Shakespeare talk), followed the colonists down the Mayflower, and are now talking about how the colonists and the settlers dealt with their new surroundings by inventing words (a process the teacher calls "colonial ingenuity") such as bullfrog, katydid, woodchuck, and lumberjack. In the TD we use TIME Europe Edition as a portrait of American English and discuss Americanisms such as bogus, high-five, cell phone, and dude. I'm really enjoying it and learning a lot, not only because it's 100% in English, but I've also learned a lot of fascinating (to me) etymologies. For example, did you know the word "moose" comes from an Algonquian Indian sentence word "mo-o-su" meaning "he trims smoothly" from their habit of eating the bark off of trees? And that's just Indian borrowings. We've also looked at French and Dutch borrowings. All the lecture notes are online so not many people (10/24) come to the lecture, which is kind of sad, but I love being there. There's only 4 other Anglophone kids in the class, including a guy from LSU (!) whom I haven't talked to yet - he always slips out of class right away and is asleep on the table before class. Being Anglo in the class is kind of interesting. Once the teacher asked us if we knew what the Western Hemisphere was. I'm not sure all of them did. The paper I turned in on Monday is from this class. We had to pick two states in different regions and explain their place names (rivers, cities, mountains, the state name itself) and what they can tell us about the state's and America's history. I did Wyoming and Ohio. I was tempted to do Louisiana, Lord knows there's plenty of fodder here - Grosse Tête, anyone? - but I decided I'd learn more by picking a state I knew nothing about (Wyoming) and then another one I knew some stuff about (Ohio - mom's family is all from there). It was a really educational paper to write, once I actually sat down the day before and wrote it. Next semester: tall talk and tall tales!
The second class at Sorbonne is L5AN0309HL History of English Tuesdays 12-1 and TD 3-4. The lecture is in one of those Hogwartsian "Amphithéâtres" (Amphi Gizot) that seat like 150. The prof, a charming, slightly effeminate bald Oxbridge type named Carruthers, uses a microphone to teach, which enhances the whole classical grandiose nature of it. I have the class with my Tulane friend Carrie, a fellow Linguistics major. We always sit in desk number 62. We've just finished analyzing a table of the Indo-Europeand language family and now are talking about how the Germanic group differs from the rest. Today we talked about the comparative method of linguistics and how we can hypothesize how "Proto-Indo-European," the hypothetical ancestor of ALL of these languages, using the example of the verb "am" which in the Classical Written Languages, Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, is phonetically roughly asmi, eimài, and sum, respectively. Therefore, the PIE word was something like esme or esmi. I found it fascinating that these (possible) people, 6000-8000 years ago somewhere on the north and northeast coasts of the Black Sea, (may have) spoke a language that gave birth to languages from English to Greek to Icelandic to Polish. The TD is in French (the .5 which is in French), and can be enjoyable sometimes, but mostly I zone out for an hour and manage to glean 3-4 "nuggets" of knowledge each time.
My favorite part oftentimes about HistEng Tuesdays is lunch with Carrie in between classes. We get a crêpe somewhere and shoot the shit about our latest adventures of the past week - girls, boys, wine, the usual. Sometimes Carrie's friend Ashley Computer comes. She's a writer girl from DC who graduated from WashU St Louis and I like the cut of her jib. She spent a semester in Florence (Firenze) and she's not afraid to use big words in front of us. Her last name isn't actually Computer but they met in the computer labs at the Fondation dorms and there's so many other Ashleys floating around that it works. Anyway, it's nice to get that time with Carrie, or anyone else whose company I enjoy, just because we're so strapped into this junior year abroad magical mystery tour adventure that we sometimes forget to stop and say hello to each other, you know? So that's HistEng.
Finally is L1FI20LF Linguistique Générale Thursdays 10am-12 which is really the only class I don't enjoy going to, for multiple reasons. It's in French. I took it because I thought I could use a good entry-level introduction to this whole linguistics deal. Turns out, the teacher, who means well and is a nice lady, just isn't really my style. She has a halting style, stopping frequently to check the accuracy of a date or anything else, to the point that one starts to doubt her degree of expertise. Heck, I don't even know what her expertise is. It's an L1 class (100-level: classes go L1-L6 for the 6 semesters of the undergraduate degree), so Lord knows where Sorbonne plucked her from, but the class, besides being in French and at 10am (which is about as early as this guy goes to class), just isn't that exciting. The kids in it are mostly uninterested freshman-types, and it just gets really awkward when she asks us a question and we all just stare back at her dumbly. I am afraid to speak up in class, one, because I'm not really in the mood once I step into the class, and two, I'm not a native speaker and I don't want to be That Guy who butchers the French language. Half the time I don't really know what's going on. We've talked a LOT about signes/icones/indices and the difference between them, which isn't that exciting either. But I have a midterm next week in that class, so I need to, as they say, "bossez bien." (~work hard) I'm going to see what I can do about dropping it in favor of a Reid Hall class on 20th century French history (5th Republic!) next semester.
So those are my classes. I'm also enrolled in Sorbonne PE - team handball class Mondays 2-4 (haven't gone to it yet, been out of town or writing a paper), and am taking a free Modern Greek class Thursdays at 7:30, which is cool, in the first 2 sessions I've learned the alphabet and a few v. basic phrases, but I've missed the last 2 because I was out of town (England Thanksgiving weekend with Jane and Gulu - more later) and the next week I was late and if you're late you have to stand at the doorway and you can't see the board because it's in a weird place. Phew. All told, I ony have 2-2.5hrs of class a day, which might sound like the life, but it's sort of a double-edged sword, because I tend to sleep as late as possible before class, erasing like half my day by the time I get out of class. This town, man, I tell you what, it just SUCKS your time away from you. And she does it slyly, too, without you noticing. You get lost, this place is closed, you have to take this other metro line, you find this cool used CD store, you get a panini and an Orangina here, then you find a thrift store, remember what you were SUPPOSED to do, and before you know it it's like 6:30 in the evening and you've accomplished jack. Paris is definitely nothing if not a wanderer's city. Which is good for me, except when you ACTUALLY have things to do.
Speaking of which, I need to go to bed - it's getting to be 2am and tomorrow I have my medical visit to get my residency permit. You need one if you're going to be in France longer than 3 months. They have to make sure you haven't brought any big scary American diseases here, like, upper body strength. I suppose that's the idea. I dunno, je m'en fou, it's France. Apparently one year they sent a Tulane girl home because they thought she had X disease, then she got it checked out in the States and they found NOTHING. So the doctors aren't the highest caliber. Wish me luck.
Man. I haven't even gotten into the majority of the fun stuff yet - daily life here, French people, weekend trips, food, apartment life, etc. I have a few amusing anecdotes too, along with the requisite philosophical musings on the nature of being "an American in Paris" but I don't think I can cut it tonight. Plus this is long enough already. So y'all can salivate and wait for the next entry, which I should have the time and motivation to do sometime before I go home for Christmas on the 23rd. (Oh yeah! BR/Tulane kids - I'm going to be home the 23rd to the 1st...expect a call/visit! If any Tulane kids read this, are any of you besides Mr. Tate going to be in Nola??? Pleez? I want someone to visit before I go see Dirty Dozen and Soul Rebels on the 29th at Tip's...) Suffice to say for right now that in sum, I'm doing quite alright, even if the weather sucks (rain and clouds and wind DAILY since Thanksgiving) and the novelty of living and studying in a major world city has worn off. (More on that later.) Much love and good feelings to everyone out there. And happy consumerism season!
RPB
"My fake plants died because I did not pretend to water them."
-- Mitch Hedberg |
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