Found on the stoop outside our building...

I think the poor guy hit a window. Tragic, really, but oddly beautiful.

Anagrammary

I've always been tickled by any form of word play (homonyms, palindromes, alliteration, ambigrams, you name it!) and a recent Facebook application reminded me of one of the more mystical forms of word play: anagrams. Throughout human history, various groups of people have investigated the potential of an anagram to reveal some kind of hidden inner nature of a person/thing. Louis XIII, one of France's 17th century kings, was a creator and connoisseur of fine anagrams, and even went so far as to appoint an official Anagrammist to the King! Even if the only thing anagrams are hiding is some Mad Libs-esque nonsense, they're still a lot of fun to think about. Here are a few I came up with the other day, using full names (middle names included).

For my artistic, dramatic brother: A Vetted Jubilant Mind, OR Dim, Jubilant Vendetta

(other, single words that emerged: invent, jam, jive, deviant, band)

For my science-minded sister, a prediction of career: Alter Nuclei to Emit, OR Total Nuclei Metier ('metier' is the French word for vocation)

(other, single words that emerged: electron, numeric)

For my father: Utterly Bald Got Retro

For my mother: Settle, Nutty Achiever!

For one of the St. Mary's hippies dearest to my heart: Hello, Sandy Henna

And for me...

A potential campaign slogan, should I ever choose to go into politics: Elect Cute Brat

A few cryptic but cool-sounding options: Celebrate Cute Light; Huge Electric Battle; Hectic Rebuttal Glee

A prediction of my future prodigious offspring?: Curl Begat Tech Elite

A slightly Shakespearean sandwich order: Bagel Lettuce Thrice

Keeping with the Shakespearean vein, a modern day adaptation of Hamlet's 'get thee to a nunnery!':"Get Her Celibate Cult!"

Instructions for my summer vacation (lecture means "reading" in French): Beach, Lecture, Get Lit

And finally, the telling hodgepodge of single words I was able to pull out: baguette, teach, brie--and then, of course, electric eel.

Ripples of the macabre

After my suicide and the Seine post, a friend of mine brought this to my attention. It's a series of still photographs of the Thames river, taken by American Roni Horn and currently on display in one of my favorite art museums, London's Tate Modern:

Her comments:

'I thought I would shoot the Seine or the Garonne, but these rivers don’t have the same energy. I don’t know how many people kill themselves in the Seine but it just didn’t look like a convincing suicide route to me. The Thames has the interesting fact attached to it that it is the urban river with the highest appeal to foreign suiciders. So you get people coming in from Paris to kill themselves in the Thames. So it has an incredible draw and one of the points about shooting the Thames was the fact that it’s darkness was quite real—it wasn’t just a visual darkness, it was a psychological darkness. Water is something one’s attracted to largely for the light aspect of it.'

Apparently I'm not the only one to find the topic eerily poetic.

(This is not a cry for help)

I learned today of a fascinating (at least to my morbid tastes) Parisian phenomenon that existed up until the early 1800s called the "filets de Saint-Cloud", a set of nets on the downstream end of the Seine used to recover the cadavers of suicide victims. Apparently jumping into the Seine was the #1 way to off one's self back then--between the lack of swimming skills and the high walls that made it difficult to climb back out, it was more or less surefire.

The reason I found out about this is that the Balzac book we read for yesterday, "La Peau de Chagrin," begins with its protagonist contemplating suicide-by-drowning. This got me thinking about how trends in suicide can reflect on a society. In the book, the protagonist's suicidal tendencies are indicative of both Parisian geography/culture and the bleak 19th century "mal du siècle" ennui. The same could be said of a lot of other literary suicides I've read through so far this year--sacrificial lovers' suicides at the tip of an épée in the medieval ages, which attest to a different perspective of honor, chivalry and passion; Madame Bovary's graphic death by pharmacist's arsenic, which could be seen as the product of strict 19th century marriages and oppressive gender roles and social codes and indicative of a new interest in/fear of science and medicine.

Yes! I thought to myself. Here's a gem to store away in that little jar labeled "potential thesis topics" in the corner of my brain. Unfortunately, a quick Google search proved that I'm far from the first person to have had this stroke of genius. *siiigh* However, my brief researching also turned up a few interesting statistics about French suicide--the non-literary kind, that is--that shed a little light on changes in French culture and differences between France and the U.S. and really got me thinking. It seems that as Seine suicides (more than 300 between 1795 and 1800!) became less frequent due to better swimming abilities and the improved precautionary measures of throwable emergency life rings, ladders, and regular police patrol of the water, Parisian suicides matched trends in Parisian life, switching to jumping from increasingly high buildings or under metro cars.

France's most (in?)famous tall building, the Eiffel tower, has had more than 350 successful jumpers since its construction in 1889, with the annual rate down to about 4 or so in recent years due to new precautionary measures. (Most Parisians still remember a high-profile incident last year, in which tourist plunged to her death on the glass ceiling of the same Eiffel Tower restaurant where I spent Thanksgiving...eesh). The most recent statistic I could find for the Parisian metro was from 2006, and it puts annual metro suicides at either 70 or 150, depending on who you ask, with definite spikes after holidays and vacations. (In comparison, the D.C. Metro got flak from the media for having a record-high 9 suicides last year. Granted that's comparing D.C.'s 5 lines and 2 million riders to Paris' 19 lines and 3 million, but still.) In fact, Parisian suicides outnumber Washingtonian suicides in general. The rate of suicides in Paris is 23 per 100,000 residents, higher than the national rate of 17, but MUCH higher than Washington D.C.'s 6 per 100,000 and the U.S. national rate of 11. (The method is also different; while firearms don't even figure in the statistics here, they are overwhelmingly the most-employed method in the U.S., which only proves that we REALLY need to get our gun regulations under control.)

So why are so many more frogs croaking ? Theories out there include a lower rate of religious fervor (which would account for less of a spiritual support network as well as less moral interdiction), racial/economic tensions in the urban suburbs of Paris, and, most recently, an increasingly oppressive workplace environment. What I didn't discuss in my previous post on the workplace in France is that finding a job in France is much more difficult than it is in the US. The economic crisis has pushed America's unemployment rate to where France's has been for a while--around 10%, and unlike America, France isn't expecting it to go back down. With many service positions filled as careers, part time/temporary jobs are much harder to find here, and with an education system that pushes you to make a vocational choice early in life and a regimented system of competencies/requirements that makes it difficult to switch careers, it's easier to feel "trapped" in a job you don't like (which you then don't want to surrender to unemployment).

Or maybe it's something different entirely. To come full circle with this post, modern French literature is marked by a series of rather depressing philosophical/literary movements that reveal a bleak worldview. Is the outlook of this literature descriptive? Or just intellectual? Making ties between real life and fuzzy fictional universes always gets tricky. In any case, this research was enough to sober me and turn me away from such a depressing thesis topic. I'll stick to women's rights and courtly love from now on.

I got my cheveux cut today...

...and here is the result. I had a late-night crisis about giving up on my growing-it-out efforts but a few minutes of Photoshopping cleared that right up. I look terrible with long hair (and also with no hair...glad I didn't do the "baldies for boobies" campaign with the hippies last spring). And now that it's cut, it feels SO much better. I think that front part is too short to sit well once it gets wet and recurls--we'll see tomorrow--so might have to invest in a cheap blow-dryer.

Doing the whole training center thing was an experience. The salon consisted of a big room full of female coiffeuses in training dressed all in white who were getting systematically flirted with/criticized by a handful of gay male stylists in black. (Seriously, not one of the "expert" stylists was a woman, or straight-seeming. I guess hair is the one industry where gay men get to be privileged...oh wait, yeah, and French studies...). My coiffeuse was cute, although her hyper-speed French was very hard to understand over the blow-dryers. I've been having this problem lately with French women between 25 and 35 who, after hearing that I speak the language pretty well, speak to me in "valley girl" French. I guess I should be flattered but it's really frustrating to follow and embarrassing to keep asking them to repeat what they've said. Luckily, once we got through with the introductions and discussions of what I wanted I became nothing more than a mute practice head to be combed, dried, straightened, turned, sheared (Jean Louis David cuts exclusively with electric clippers) by a handful of people. I spent half an hour with straightened hair and decided that with the right cut that could actually look kind of cute, except that I will probably never care enough about hair to devote the time to straightening it.

Other than that, not much news. Been feeling migrainey for the past few days and worse today...waiting for the other shoe to drop. (So yes, I'm just tired in the above picture. Not emo.) It's always the weird symptoms that bother me more than the pain...the inability to filter out sounds (I kept getting distracted by the traffic noise during class, and the Metro was a nightmare) the sensitivity to light and movement and especially the way it seems to interrupt my communication skills. Stringing together sentences in English gets harder, it's like I have a chronic problem trying to think of the right word. French is even worse. Unfortunate timing, because we had an in-class essay today that I probably bombed, and I have a 20-minute oral "exposé" tomorrow morning...

A Haircut for me, a Nobel for Djebar?

Some of you may know that I came to Paris with the goal of growing out my hair. It has now gotten to that "oh-my-god-give-me-a-freaking-razor-already" point of annoying. Here is a 100% real picture of how I (feel I) look. I have also realized that if I'm going to grow out my hair, I'm going to have to actually..you know...DO things to it. Like brush and blow dry and mousse. I'm a fan of my comb, handful of gel, air-dry and go! routine. Also, I have decided that I look even younger with longer hair, which makes my already existing problem of being assumed to be a teenager worse. I now have an appointment for a 7 euro cut at Jean Louis David's training studio next week (a stylish chain that gave me the best haircut of my life for free the last time I was in France...ask me for the story, it's a great example of me being stupid and having things work out great regardless).

Exciting news: Assia Djebar has been nominated for this year's Nobel Prize in literature. We find out Thursday if she "wins" or not...fingers crossed, but I just checked the nomination list and she's up against some pretty steep competition.

In other news: I visited Chateau Vaux-le-Vicomte last Friday with the (snotty, trust-fund, intimidatingly fashionable) undergrads. I don't have a whole lot to say about the actual Chateau...if you've seen one before you'll understand, they're beautiful but all pretty similar. Apparently this is the Chateau that inspired good ol' Louis to build Versailles out of a desire to out-do it (he succeeded, of course, but it's impressive nonetheless). It's also where Moliere and Jean de la Fontaine hung out all the time, where Man in the Iron Mask and Marie Antoinette and many more French movies were filmed, and also where Tony Parker and Eva Longoria were recently married. Whoever they are. Seriously, I had no idea (to the disdain of aforementioned undergrads), but if you do then feel free to be jealous.

Basic summary: beautiful, meticulously manicured gardens. Many lavish rooms, each with a theme pattern or color (meaning that the fabric on the couch matches the walls, which always reminds me of that scene in Garden State where he's wearing the shirt made out of the wallpaper fabric). Trompe l'oeil ceilings, adorned with classical paintings. The occasional "exotic" artwork imported from a colony--in this case, a pretty inaccurate painting of Istanbul and a few wall-mounted candle sconces painted to look like African arms bearing a light (creepy).

Being the foodie that I am (I love that they've created a word for that...it sounds so much more distinguished than "pig") my favorite part of the visit was our gourmet lunch. Quiche and salad to start, duck for a main and chocolate fondant for dessert, with wine and home-baked bread throughout, of course. We had to take a walk around the grounds before getting back off the bus to work off that Thanksgiving-esque sense of food lethargy. Delicious.

Last Night's Disturbing Dream

I had the strangest, most terrifying dream last night. In my dream, I was someone else, in another, pioneer sort of time period—I want to say late 1800s. I still had curly hair, but I was wearing petticoats, boots and a gingham work dress. In the past I had left home for some reason having to do with work and money, and gone to live and work in a little town in the middle of a grassy plains, with mountains on the horizon on either side. I had been there for some time and I loved my neighbors, many of whom happened to be gay and in couples and had sort of formed a small inclusive community unnoticed by the outside world. Until the day when a macho guy from my childhood showed up unexpectedly (I think he had some intention of checking up on me to eventually marry me), realized the Truth about my community and angrily rode off before I could do anything about it. When he showed up again at dusk it was with a lynch mob, and I watched in horror from the sidelines as they ransacked the town and tortured its inhabitants. Suddenly, it was if I had a time-turner, and the dream sped backwards to right before the attack. This time I threw myself at the macho leader guy, telling him detailed stories of the humanity of the townspeople (not all of whom were gay, but those who weren’t seemed to get punished even more for permitting this “sinful” life style) in a futile attempt at mercy. He flung me aside. I ran up to him from behind, throwing myself at him and punching. In real life, I punched the wall by my bed and woke up crying.

The dream was truly eerie for several reasons. Never can I remember ever having a dream in which I wasn’t playing myself—sure, I’ve had dreams where my version of self is slightly off from reality, but this was different. I’ve never had a historical dream. I’ve also never had a dream this grounded in detail. When I looked at the people in my community, I saw years of memories with each one of them, and when I looked at the man, I guiltily remembered his lonely childhood and the specific incidence of teasing in the schoolyard that had driven him into a bitter adulthood. Finally, unlike most dreams, this one hasn’t evaporated immediately after I awoke. Roll your eyes if you want, but it all makes me feel as though I tapped into something weird.

And on that odd beginning note, off to my first day...