And the Winner Is…Comté

Forty days is a lot, but still kind of short.  Exactly half of those days I woke up and scurried off to class, to train a sluggish brain to re-conceive the world.  The goal is not to translate, but to forge new paths of comprehension.  One at-first-mind-boggling conflation for me was that of sensory perception—sentir (“sense”) is used to describe feeling (physical as well as emotional), smelling, and tasting.  And parfum typifies scent as well as flavor.  But think of how evocative it is to, for instance, sense garlic: do you really taste alone without smelling?  Is the taste not accompanied by various sensations such as a peppery bite, a lingering pungency?

Will, does this have to do with Pokemon?

Speaking of complex flavors, after much sampling and reflection, I have concluded that my favorite French cheese is Comté.  It’s pretty much just fancy swiss cheese, but it’s perfect in every way.  Aside from traveling well, you can sink your teeth into it, it’s tangy and rich and bright, and it is fantastic alone and goes with everything.  Apparently lots of other people feel this way, as it is the most-produced AOC* French cheese.

*government quality regulation

Thank you for following along on this trip to France—and huge thanks to Marta for hosting me and sharing her life well lived.  What’s next is a surprise.  Tune in to find out if I:

- return to the regularly scheduled program “Antarctica Part IV: Ice-Shattering Adventures in Cargo Loading and Unloading”

- enroll in more gratuitous educational courses and “Teach English in Mystery Country”

- manhandle questionable meat while awaiting auroras at “Alaskan Winter Truck Stop”

The Future Simple

After a mere eighteen language lessons, we were asked to project what our lives will entail in 2040.  In class we took turns impersonating palm readers, and later I waxed poetic in my written homework.  Inspired by my fantastically-romantic writer-hero Patrick Leigh Fermor, I will swim the Hellespont at an advanced age (I’ll be 57)—and do him one better, reciting Byron’s verses in between breaststrokes (another Europe-to-Asia swim club member).  The future conditional (to say nothing of the subjunctive) is a beautifully nuanced construction.  In English it’s so concrete to say “If I see him, I will talk to him”; I rather like the French finessing of the verb to express the potentiality of the action, with conjugative elements of the infinitive, future, and imperfect all wrapped up in one word (“Si je lui vu, je lui parlerai”): I totalkperchancewill to him.

Crossing the bridge to the medieval quarter of Lyon, where verisimilitude = bed bugs.

All last week the city slowed.  One by one the bakeries put up notices of August closure and the dive-bomb buzz of motorbike engines lessened.  It was doubly surprising to find that Lyon, France’s second largest city, was simultaneously near-abandoned and stuffed with tourists.  Lyon, I cannot fathom why in the still of summer holidays you hosted some WNBA showcase with commentary amplified to fifty miles around until after midnight in addition to posting willfully atonal brass bands on every third corner.  And in case I didn’t get the hint that Lyon doesn’t like me…bedbugs.  Universe, you were supposed to check off the box for failed/traumatic youth hostel stay when I was, like, 20: why did you wait until now?

Luckily, the near future (at the moment of bedbug horror) was good.  In French, any plans further down the road than the next hour or so qualify for the future simple:  

-What are you going to do today?  

-I will meet up with a friend, we’ll catch up, go eat a delicious lunch, drink a glass of wine, and then walk around town for a while.  

No finessing layers of meaning into as few words as possible; just, simply, the future.

Weekly World News

A quick comment about last weekend: If ever a lame marching band smiled slyly just before a performance, the one that played “Get Lucky” in front of Trump and Macron at the Bastille Day parade did.

This modern art project is perhaps a comment on the city's motto: "Tossed but never sunk"?

And now back to food news.  It’s hard to believe, but the past seven days included a ham-cheese-béchamel pastry, duck kababs, unlimited pastis (one of those licorice-flavored alcohols), some eggs I flipped with technical precision, and real hot chocolate (a mug of cream + three chocolate bars).  Fear not—these delicacies did not distract from fermented and aged milk products: the rucksack was graced by six kinds of cheese before they slipped down my gullet.

breaking grammar news: I guess it’s not really any different than in English (“to make happy/sad/etc.”), but the operative word of expression in French is rendre, “to render.”  Perhaps the association in my mind is with rendering fat into soap, or some other very tangible, physical process.  Things got much sillier when our professor asked where he would party this weekend.  He was horrified by the outdated suggestion of la discothèque.  But none of us knew the amazing phrase the French use for “nightclub,” the term created either by forthright lesbians or thirteen year-old boys clumsily employing double entendre.  La boîte de nuit is literally “the box of night,” or colloquially “night-box,” and the cool kids just say they’ll meet up at la boîte.  Maybe our minds were in the gutter, but this all-too-apt name set off quite a bit of laughter.

Allow Me to Introduce Pierre

This week’s mini-journey was to the conjoined towns of Fontainebleau-Avon, to visit the Chateau de Fontainebleau, a royal palace for kings from the 1100s on through Napoleon Bonaparte.  I crossed one of Paris’s least-charming bridges to get to the proper train station, whereupon I was stymied by the variety of ticket machines.  (Thank you for psychologically preparing me for this day, NY Penn Station, with your three hostilely separate train lines.  Oh, you thought New Jersey Transit would take you to a destination in NJ?  Not if you’re between the Hudson and Mahwah…)  Eventually, ticket purchased and validated, we slowly creaked our way out of the city.

This is Dante, in Paris; I didn't take any good pictures at Fontainebleau

The chateau is decorated to the hilt: silk upholstery, 1,000-pound chandeliers, wall-sized tapestries of intricate weaving, and gilded curlicues abound.  I wondered how Louis VI* would feel about us plebeians in t-shirts and sandals shuffling past their magnificent acquisition of artisanship, pausing for five or so seconds when impressed by a sumptuous bedspread, and moving on rather indifferently.
*Louis the Fat, apparently.

In grammar news, I moved up to the A2 class and am once again proficient with the past tense.  The more wily imperfect (more delicious sounding in French: “l’imparfait”) is tough to pin down, though, as it is not only used for continuous past actions but also expressing emotions or states of mind.  As part of an exercise I didn’t realize was going to include explaining my deep inner motivations, I described to the nice Japanese woman behind me that I bring home rocks from places I visit.  A stone or rock is “une pierre.”  Now I will forever imagine all stones as small Frenchmen eagerly awaiting being picked up and carried in my pocket.

Les Kata

In ninth-grade French class, we each selected a typical French name, perhaps so that we would more likely stay within the confines of proper pronunciation, or to make the dreary task of learning such basic elements as the alphabet and how to say hello a bit more entertaining.  I chose Sabine because it sounded funny, not like a person’s name, more like a plant or mineral, and would allow for some disassociation/alternative personality.  I, Claire, was academically driven; Sabine was free to be mediocre, or formal, or whatever she may be.

I’m not nearly cool enough yet, but among those who frequently venture into the catacombs it is common to assume a name for the underground.  My second time down was less fraught and electrifying than the first (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQpz8kV3eZQ), but still enchanting.  We passed a memorial for a man that disappeared when retrieving wine from a basement, whose body wasn’t retrieved for 11 years; later, we explored a bunker built to protect civilians during the war that had poured walls and floors, finished with mosaic tile and had included plumbing.  We toasted each other with boxed rosé and cheap beer, and, because this is France, “junk food” included not only potato chips and M&Ms, but ham and cheese sandwiches, and a little jar of foie gras.

But most adventurously, we crawled, first on hand and knees, then pulled with arms and slid on bellies, through a narrow tunnel of earth adjoining our passage to the sidewalk grate (*note the backpack there for scale).  I was third in a line of six people.  Two more or less easily navigated that bit, and I would never be left for dead.  And yet I flushed with accomplishment—I hadn’t been afraid at all.

Les balcons

Things that happened in 48 hours in Paris:
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- Viewed approximately 8,000 charming balconies.

- Visited the doctor, almost effortlessly and at low cost, and got prescription face cream.

- Stumbled across a fancy Moroccan patisserie and devoured flatbread.

- The equivalent of an SATII aptly identified that my high school French of ten (oh shit) twenty years ago places me in the...beginner class.

- A brass band played outside Marta's apartment for an hour, including spirited renditions of Havanagela and Something to Talk About.

- Entertained a baby for nigh on forty minutes.  (*Well, was adjacent to baby while it entertained itself with wooden puzzle pieces and a book.)
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Don't worry, there's a whole month chock-full of grammar news coming your way.  Paris: Where Your Culinary Dreams and Scholarly Anxieties Come True.

News Brief: Cleaning Gross Things, Part 9 of 17

                                                                                                  Kelley Street ca. 1979

I have identified the home renovation equivalent of dicing bell peppers -- it is chipping tile.  A hammer creates the same callus as a chef knife, the repetitive motion exerts the same force on your wrist, and while it only requires 10% of your brain you must be careful not to obliterate the fingers of your non-dominant hand.  Though it would be fun to just smear a layer of concrete over the shitty old tile and go blithely on from there, it wouldn't be structurally sound; and so, we chip.

I washed ten-year-old, ten-year-old boogers off a wall.  And scraped, like a fine balsamic vinegar, 14-year-aged fridge goo from the floor.  But after steaming off the wallpaper and painting, the desperation that previously saturated every cubic foot of the place has ebbed away.  Once I wash the mold off the (never opened?) windows and new carpet is installed, we will have recovered the house from its midlife (geriatric?) crisis.

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*Background note: Mom and dad are fixing up our old house, which they've rented out ever since we moved, in 1990.  The front half (500 sq. ft. or so) was built in 1940, utilizing several tree stumps as footings.  Twenty years or so later, someone dug a basement, most of which is cinder block, but one side just disappears into the earthy gloom beyond.  The street remained unpaved until the mid-80s, and the driveway through next month.  It's located very close to popular downtown as well as the beach, yet the neighborhood languishes on the cusp of gentrification: seedy middle-aged men leer from their porches at all hours, and we think the house across the street is either a rehabilitation home for pedophiles or Mormon group living.  It is also near my favorite donut shop.