N'importe quoi

I was reflecting today on narrative: that is, the way we make sense of our lives through organizing central filaments, selecting some details and rejecting others as superfluous.

One could even call this process inevitable. Len, my ex-roommate, who does research in neuropsychology, tells me that creating narrative is an indispensable part of human consciousness. He also points out that even in the world of science, which holds objectivity as a central goal, it's not the data that gets attention and notoriety: it's the researchers who can create the most compelling story to fit that data.

This tendency is even more pronounced in writers. Just as growing up in a language forms our sense of hearing (something I learned recently in my French linguistics class), so growing up with my nose in books and notebooks shaped the way I put together my experiences.

I can't help making stories.

But I just spent several hours hunched over dense academic treatises in French, and so I'm inclined today to indulge my--and your--lighter side with a few bits of miscellany. Less stories than vignettes.

In order to take this even less seriously, I have labeled the sections in Carrollian fashion.
Fit The First: Frenglish

Those of you who know Engrish will have a good idea of the inevitable problems of translation. There are plenty of awful translations in the world: most unremarkable, some hilarious. Save clothes and such (mostly in Asia) where the English words are meant to be trendy rather than significant--I'm thinking in particular of a photo of a Japanese girl wearing a sweatshirt that reads "No man will ever fancy me"--they're generally of the "lowest bidder" category: small restaurants and stores, and other operations unable to afford a good translator.

Some bad translations involve a simple matter of orthography. I remember a notable example in Italish: the menu of a tiny family restaurant in Siena whose English subtitles listed, among other desserts, "Ship's Milk Cheese."

Others make the mistake of translating word for word and not taking the target language's grammar into account. Observe, for example, this sweater that I found at the popular women's clothing chain Etam:

Perhaps this is a command?

Other translation issues are more insidious: they involve translating not just words and phrases, but cultural concepts. My French teachers (and Emily, my aforementioned darling classmate-savante) explain that sometimes a word or phrase can be perfectly grammatically correct, but for some unnameable reason, it just doesn't sound right to a native speaker. As they say, ça fait bizarre. 

Such is the case, in English, with these bits of faux-graffiti that lined the walls of the escalator in a clothing store for teenagers (don't judge me; I'm on the hunt for a couple of cheap coats). I rode up and down the escalator a couple of times to catch as many as I could; a few of the pictures are soft (I've provided captions in those cases), but native English speakers will easily see the bizarre, which consists mainly of an utter lack of effort to provide context:

"I want to play cowboy & indian"
"broken glass"

"NEVER again... well, maybe next week? peut-être"
"where is my moustache?"

"Bling bling/ diamond ring &/ that new thing"

Below: "SALSA QUEEN FASHION PRINCESS"

The culinary world is always happy to intermarry cultural traditions. All happy marriages are alike (c'est-à-dire, delicious), but each unhappy coupling is unhappy in its own way. Oddly, the KFC and MacDo (McDonald's) seem wildly successful here; I've got one of each on my walk home from the Métro station and I've never seen either one empty. But the direct imports are a lot less unsettling than this French-Tex abomination I encountered on the way to the library:

Buffalo Grill
A french steak caché in a américain burger.
Buffalo French Beef
Frenchy Burger [shout out to Mo Pie]
Effeuillé de Charolais
Avec sauce roquefort et fromage de chèvre

Why am I so enchanted with these? I suppose it's just a comfort that I'm not the only one making daily cross-cultural errors.



Fit the Second: Autumn


I grew up without real seasons. In a sonoran desert year, there's the Hot Season and the Less-Hot Season, with one (optional) monsoon each. Teachers assured us that those four seasons prettily pictured in coloring books and described in children's poems really did happen--somewhere else.


Then I moved to the Bay. San Francisco just does whatever it likes; its seasons are its own. But I got real joy out of the first time the leaves changed color in Palo Alto. There's one kind of tree in particular that goes violent, lipstick red, long before it drops any leaves. Others go half-gold and stay half-green. But, unbothered by snow or true cold, the leaves are in no hurry to drop and sometimes don't even get around to changing color until December or January.

Here in Paris, the leaves are changing and falling right when they're supposed to. It's glorious, and so ordinary. As the leaves fall onto the sidewalk, the rain softens them and the heavy foot traffic mashes them into leaf-paste, which now coats the soles of my shoes. Sometimes a leaf the size of my hand just drops, without warning, on my head; I look around, panicked, and shake it off before I see what it is. Then, every time, I'm charmed all over again.

The most remarkable thing about this, to me, is how unremarkable this is to everyone else.

So, naturally, my impulse is to lean on every bank and banister and stop on street corners to document the fact that, yes, just as my teachers said, autumn does really happen somewhere. In November, no less.

Hold on: I'll prove it.

Eglise Saint-Gervais-Saint-Protais. See Fit The Third.

Fit The Third: Sacred and Profane

The photograph above was taken during a fit of wandering. Now that my days are filled, I don't do as much of it, but I make it a point to find an hour--or even half--alone, a couple of days a week, to flâner. It's the way you discover amazing things in a city. It's part of my process of mental and emotional map-building in a new place.

One of my favorite things to do during this time is pop into every church I pass. As aforementioned, I don't believe in God. But I do feel a humanistic, cultural reverence for churches, and while I don't know a lot about architecture, like many mild dilettantes I get a thrill out of identifying an obvious feature or two. Traditional choir stalls, for example, or flying buttresses.

So when I saw the church pictured above, just above the Seine, in the 4e, naturally I had to go in.

Here, one notes signature Gothic arches, says the dilettante.

What began as an ordinary church visit turned slightly less ordinary when I saw sisters of the order of the Communion of Jérusalem in traditional habits (h/t to Katie P for the order).

Now, I'm no stranger to nuns. I did go to an all-girls Catholic prep school, after all. And one of my colleagues where I taught was a nun for 25 years in a very strict, traditional order. But whenever I see nuns in habits, I feel a strange affection for them that really can't be described as respectful. I just want to smile at them and watch to see what they're up to.

Turns out, these ones were about to do some church cleanin'.

As the mingled candlelight and sunlight filtered through the vitraux cast a patina on the stone floor, worn smooth over centuries, the nuns gathered buckets and Monsieur Propre and a vacuum cleaner and got to some holy work.

Well, even in these gorgeous old churches, someone's got to faire le ménage.


Hélas, I will be very busy in the next few days and will not return to you before my birthday. I'll see you on the other side of 24.