New computer!

So sorry that this blog has almost fallen by the wayside. I failed to explain in my last post that I had been trying to sell my computer--and since I sold it, I could not motivate myself to write an entire blog post on my little ipod touch. But now I have a new netbook, which is tiny but it works well, and it is perfectly minimal, and I fell like I can fit it in my pocket.

So what's been going on recently? Well, the time between the end of the vacation and now seems really short, and time is starting to go by much faster in general around here. The most memorable thing: I finally had my day of walking around to small, private art collections in le Marais (3rd and 4th arrondissements). This was, to say the least, a great experience. I was a little worried that it would be more like scanning the pages of an Artforum--where there's just so much art and so many names that to stop and consider and submit everything to memory would take an eternity. And indeed when I read in my guidebook about the number of ''vibrantly international'' and ''essential'' art galleries (18 were listed in the Marais alone) I was sure that I would be left thinking that art is silliness, fashion masked as depth, the empty coffer of cultural meaning. I'm very glad that I was surprised. I minimized the number of galleries I visited to about 5 or 6, and I think that ended up being a perfect number. Many of these places were devoted to the work of one artist's work, like Galerie Maria Lund, which had works by the Korean artist Lee Jin Woo (I can't find info on the internet about him)--all I can say about his stuff is that it succeeded in making abstract expressionism appear like the product of natures sombre decay. At the Musée des Arts Derners, I saw the work of contemporary African artist Soly Cissé, whose work combined fantastic animals--somewhere between cave painting and Basquiat--with scientific note-taking and measurement.

(Sorry the image isn't much big enough, but you can get a sense of it) Other notable things were a video of the hands of someone reading braille (ok, maybe a little trite, but when I realized the conceit, I was really moved and found it surprisingly effective--something about the recognizable effort of reading conveyed by the hands, the speeding up and slowing down, the excitement and concentration, combined with the idea that we who can see can't read precisely because of this fact...) and paintings by a young German artist named André Butzer which I swear could be on the walls of Domy books in Austin or Houston.

Ok, so I could go blabbing forever about this, but I'll stop. I have also been working a fair amount, though I've missed two days recently due to train problems--once due to a strike and once due to a malfunction on the rail that stopped all traffic. Teaching has been so-so. I execute things well about half of the time, and I usually feel prepared enough for every class session. Sometimes I leave feeling like the students are incredibly well-behaved and motivated, and other times I feel like they couldn't care less and would prefer to just ignore me. Often times a single class class can be both over the course of a few sessions, and often their attention slackens if the head teacher isn't there to whip them into place (I'm not kidding, either--the teachers are harsh!). The nice thing about the job is that I don't have to take the student's fates as English-speakers into my own hands--if they want to work, I'm there; but if they don't, I have neither the power nor the time to force them. Also, I have too many classes (9) to take any one of them home with me, so the stress says entre les murs. This job does still leave me in awe of the power of certain teachers to fully transform a classroom. Indeed some of the teachers I work with here have that ability--no yelling, but a kind of calm command--though many of them bludgeon their way through it. Another good thing about school is the amount of French that I get to speak and absorb, both from the kids and from the teachers. I'm not sure how much English I could get away with with the latter--sometimes they speak with me, usually in single mauled phrases like, ''see you on the next Friday'', or ''where have you come from?''. Once a week I host a poorly-attended English conversation session, and we talk for a little bit about the weather or food in very slow English, and then we just speak in French for the rest of the time. However, I cannot hold myself too high above their heads, because when it's all the teachers around the table for lunch, I have an incredibly hard time following along. I always get the topics of conversation, and the general feelings of most people, but the details always escape me. Oh well, I will let this kind of thing be the test of my fluency. Maybe others will agree that poetry and chatter express the opaque secrets of a language.

Ok, once again I cannot write a short post, but I should stop now. This weekend I'm going to go to a place in the 20th arrondissement that serves free coucous if you buy a drink and listen to the jazz music--sign me up!

I leave you all with my thoughts on an advertisement that is everywhere in the Paris metro for the Wall Street Institute of English. At first I was disgusted by these things, but in a flash of understanding I realized the subliminal genius at work here: it plays off of our desire to either bite or grab the literal tongue itself which is then cleverly sublimated into a desire to learn a language (another tongue). The secret lies in the French, where the word langue means both language and tongue--clearly the advertisement is punning on that--and the phrase 'to learn a language', apprendre une langue, is extremely close to the phrase 'to grab or take a tongue', prendre une langue.

And what could the stupid uneasiness of this guy's expression and the viscerally unsettling painted tongue express but that torturous feeling one gets when a stranger is so close to them that it would be almost nothing (and indeed quite exhilarating) to touch their face, tickle them, blow on their hair? And where does one feel this more than on a crowded metro? In the end, a brilliant slight of hand by the Wall Street Institute.