Paris by limplight

Eleven months ago I threatened a flood of posts about my Pariscation. I intend to publish one post per year until I can afford to return.

The Tour de Franceophiles among you know that Paris is paved not with passion but with cobblestones. The cobblestone has several engineering advantages: it shifts flexibly with changes in humidity and temperature, it slows Paris’s frenetic traffic, and it has an air of old-timeyness that loosens tourists’ hold on their wallets.

Cobblestone is also a blasted holy horror to walk on.

My first day walking Paris, mere hours after I arrived, I stubbed my right foot near the Parc Monceau, cobbling my shin and leaving me with a piratical limp for the rest of the trip.

There may be a few lessons to learn from my Parisian peg-leg—forgo rigid-soled Rockports in favor of a shoe more forgiving of uneven bricks, and don’t walk like an American.

But there was also an unseen advantage to the limper’s tour of Paris: hobbling myself that first day forced me to go more slowly and deliberately than my otherwise nervous personality would allow, and made me familiarize myself with the benches of Paris. Paris—actual Paris, its nooks and neighborhoods—is a city of watchers, and in parks the folks sitting on benches are Parisian: the tourists are too busy racing about and stubbing their toes.

I sat hours in parks in nearly every arrondissement I visited. I loved the Parc de Monceau with its joggers and teens, the Square Louis XVI with its retirees and bored businessmen, le Jardin Catherine Labouré across the street from the Prime Minister’s home with its young chic couples and young chic kids.

Perhaps my favorite bench of them all was in a tiny little square at the corner of Rue Vielle du Temple and Rue des Blanc Manteaux on the edge of the IIe and the IVe, a tiny playground near the Archives Nationales that felt like the heart of the city: children in beautiful clothes whirling about like kids anywhere, light traffic audible from the busy places to the south, and the overhead hum of birds and laughter. There is no way I would have spent two lunches there had I not been so frustrated by my limp and needful of leg-rest.

For Certain Tourists

When I decided to visit Paris for 10 days of summertime lollygagging, I did what comes naturally to a grad student with too much unstructured time: I began researching les halles out of it.

European travel is a deeply classed thing, about as far from a human right as a good local pâtisserie to the American way of thinking. And so LUXE Paris differs from The Rough Guide to Paris more in branding than content: every travel writer assumes you need two pages explaining the virtues of the Louvre, and that perhaps you’re interested to learn that the Tour Eiffel was built for the World’s Fair of 1889, commemorating the centenary of the Revolution.

Perhaps this die-cast method of guide editing is the clearest marker that guide-readers are first-time visitors seeking a Paris Experience nearly identical to those their aunts and great-aunts had in prior generations. And like any earnestly self-conflicted student of the humanities I simultaneously reject and desire this mimetic Paris Experience. I’m exactly the sort of consumer who will scoff at the Lonely Planet Paris City Guide one afternoon but happily buy the identical Lonely Planet Paris City Guide app that evening.

But the issue runs deeper than cookie-cutter guides: the problem confronting the self-hating tourist lies in defining what it means to experience a city.

Must the tourist have walked the Route des Iles in the Bois de Vincennes? must he have eaten at l’As du Falafel? Tourism by obligation is a matter of mere ranking: if Musée de l’Orangerie > Musée Marmottan then you do the first and skip the second.

The practice of tourism by assimilation is centered on the performance of authentic local behavior—c’est à dire behavior the visitor has been taught to understand as authentic: snubbing a beautiful afternoon by reading Kristeva in the windowless inner room of the Café de Flore, par exemple. The assimilatourist will rent an apartment, frequent two cafés and un resto, and return home with an experience of an experience rather than a sense of the city.

Somewhere between these extremes lies the etymological tourist, practicing a tourism of movement (tours, from Gr. tórnos: a turn). The tourer has the advantage of Paris on the neighborhood scale, a semi-authentic experience qua flâneur, and a partial mapping of the city’s physical and social spaces.

This, in any case, is my theory.

In coming posts, I’ll assemble the Paris tourer’s guide I had to cobble together from diverse sources. This includes travel and tourist lit, history podcasts, and walking equipment sufficiently lubricious to ease the pudgy academic’s amorous entry into Paris afoot.

Wait, when did I subscribe to this blog?

I’ve always thought about dormant blogs with something of the same procrastinatory fondness of giving a student an extension: I’ll have one fewer paper in the weekend grading pile, and there’s always a chance it won’t come in at all. And so I’m always a little annoyed when a pleasantly dormant blogger rudely begins publishing again, unsettling the balance of readerly obligations I’ve finely engineered.

For the next few days I’ll here bloviate about the planning and execution of a trip to Paris. I promise I won’t be offended if you take the occasion to unsubscribe. (If you’d prefer that I be offended, let me know and I’ll do what I can.)

Et al., et cet.

One of the great pleasures of working in the Writing Center is having the opportunity to experience how students approach academic writing for the first time. Watching talented students stumble over comparatively easy rules—et al for et al., “Quotatation”. for “Quotation.”—reminds me every day how arbitrarily academics have settled questions of style.

Incidentally, why do we continue to write et al. in Latin? Is and others somehow demeaning—do collaborators feel fancier in an abbreviation from a dead language? Why not reduce the Latin to its typographic equivalent—(Jones& 2004)—or simply to a +?

In a perverse way, these students’ struggles have convinced me to write my current chapter not in my usual belletristic prose (in my advisor’s generous characterization), but in a prose accessible to any slob unlucky enough to pick it up.

There is a feeling of risk to this exercise.

A quick note on the neuroscience of reading

I’m sure it has been noted before, but Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid (2007) makes a persuasive defense of literary instruction. The goal, she writes, is to transform fluent readers into expert readers:

If a common letter pattern or a word like “bear” appears to an expert reader, it will trigger its own network, rather than individually activating the large number of unrelated individual cells responsible for the lines, diagonals, and circles within its letters. This operating principle is the working example of the biological maxim “Cells that fire together stay together,” and is the brain’s basic tool for creating ever larger circuits that connect cell assemblies into a system of networks distributed across the entire brain. (146.)

The more networks the reader has, the more quickly s/he can read a text. More importantly, synaptic networks make the reading process more efficient, saving brain space for higher-order intellectual work—inference, analysis, critical evaluation, and the other skills we are desperate to teach our students and to practice ourselves.

If the goal is to make expert readers, literature has two advantages over other sources—online or professional, say. First, literary writing is with few exceptions richer in analytical and inferential material than other kinds of writing. Second, literary writing promotes sympathetic reading in a way that other kinds of writing often cannot.

Those two advantages are topics Wolf discusses, but there is a third that I think her review implies: literary writing rewards and often requires rereading, which I would assume would make a reader more expert.

I can’t help but wonder if we should use some of those valuable hours at the beginning of an intro lit course reviewing the science of reading. If that class is the last literature course a student ever takes, oughtn’t it make a strong case for the medical and ethical value of reading?

Is that an author photo you see before you?

We found a mossy staircase leading to a short quay on Orcas Island, and I couldn’t resist. Sadly, I had neither my leather bomber jacket nor my pipe at the time.

A delectable morsel of Proust

From “Sainte-Beuve and Balzac”:

Besides, I must point out that Balzac [ . . . ] conferred privileges on dukes that Saint-Simon, for all his high opinion of dukedoms, would have been quite dumbfounded to see bestowed on them. “The Duke gave Mme. Camusot one of those swift glances by which the lords of the land can analyse a whole lifetime, and often a soul itself. Oh, if the judge’s wife could have known about this ducal gift!” If the dukes of Balzac’s day indeed possessed this gift, it must be admitted things have, as one says, somehow changed.

Proust on Art and Literature, 174–5.

If you’re sick of Proust, this blog will return to its regularly-scheduled disquisition on Rushdie in about a week.

How rules about indentation have ruined (my) literary analysis

Here’s what the sixth MLA Handbook for Writers of Whatnot (2003) says about blocking quotes:

If a quotation runs to more than four lines in your paper, set it off from your text by beginning a new line, indenting on inch (or ten spaces if you are using a typewriter) [ . . . ] (3.7.2, p. 110)

A typewriter! In 2003!

Chicago is more generous:

A hundred words or more—or at least eight lines—are set off as a block quotation. (11.12.)

For institutional reasons, grad students in English tend to be slaves to MLA—its handbook it certainly a hell of a lot shorter, even if it was last updated in 1965 and has nothing useful to say about citing “electronic” sources.

The very fact they are called “electronic”—what if you want to cite your Roomba?—tells you everything you need to know about MLA-la-land.

The rules are for close readers. You don’t need to quote more than four lines of text if it takes you a page of analysis to explain why Blake’s symmetry is all “fearful”—hell, it took Northrup Frye an entire book. MLA wants analysis so close it’s practically microscopic, and microscopes make it science, right?

Here’s the thing. I’m writing about Proust right now, or should be, and Proust can’t write a prepositional phrase shorter than four lines—even eight lines is pushing it. So I end up doing one of two things.

1. I perforate my essay with block quotes, leaving great gaping gobs of white space that shout “look at me! I’m not offering useful analysis on this page!”

2. I break a 189-word sentence in 4-word chunks and pretend I can hang my argument on those chunks.

Over to you, dear commenter: do I give up the façade of close reading and quote the occasional word to prove the book I’m writing about is the book Proust wrote? Or do I surrender close reading altogether and talk about books wholly in theoretical terms?

What do Rushdie’s slums look like?

A colleague kindly pointed out that my attack on Rushdie’s realist critique of Slumdog Millionaire came across as praise of Slumdog rather than critique of Rushdie.

Here, then, is a critique of both, with a special Sunday bonus critique of the New Yorker.

One of the more remarkable scenes in Slumdog Millionaire is the visit of a milquetoast American couple to “real India”—they have paid our protagonist several hundred dollars for a poverty tour. Meanwhile, their driver’s car is stripped practically to its frame.

The movie seems to cast the slum tour as naïve and probably offensive thing—a slum is not a zoo—but isn’t the movie itself something of a slum tour? How is its unabashed surveillance of Mumbai slumdwellers any different than those naïve tourists’?

Here is a trip to the Bombay slums in Midnight’s Children (1981):

Clutching at her handbag, my mother [ . . . ] enters these causeways where poverty eats away at the tarmac like a drought, where people lead their invisible lives [ . . . ]. Under the pressure of these streets, which are growing narrower by the minute, more crowded by the inch, she has lost her “city eyes”. When you have city eyes you cannot see the invisible people, the men with elephantiasis of the balls and the beggars in boxcars don’t impinge on you, and the concrete sections of future drainpipes don’t look like dormitories. My mother lost her city eyes and the newness of what she was seeing made her flush, newness like a hailstorm pricking her cheeks. Look, my God, those beautiful children have black teeth! Would you believe . . . girl children baring their nipples! How terrible, truly! And, Allah-tobah, heaven forfend, sweeper women with—no!—how dreadful!—collapsed spines, and bunches of twigs, and no caste marks; untouchables, sweet Allah! (Penguin 91–2.)

Like Slumdog, Rushdie approaches Indian poverty from the touristic perspective of the wealthy. His goal might be mockery of the privileged position, but this just means that the slums serve him as a mirror in which we see the moral poverty of westernized India’s middle class.

You could argue that a more serious engagement with poverty in urban India comes in the guise of the narrator’s foil Shiva. (The narrator and Shiva are born at the same second in the same hospital, one into a wealthy family and one into a poor family. They are switched.) Shiva uses his deadly knees to become something of a crime lord and class avenger—a Dharavi Robin Hood, perhaps.

There are meaningful ways the switched-at-birth story of Midnight’s Children varies, in its impossibility, from the fairy tale of Slumdog. For one, Rushdie is a better storyteller than Boyle, and is clearly more thoughtful about the history of wealth in India. Midnight is more of a riches-to-rags story, a critique of the extremist, separatist impulse driving the political tectonics of India.

Nonetheless, Rushdie’s slums are no more possible than Boyle’s: they are almost a caricature, a convenient contrast by which we can understand the middle classes who are at the center of his story.

Now here’s your bonus critique.

Katherine Boo’s “Letter from Mumbai: Opening Night” in February 23′s New Yorker tells the story of what one orphan resident of Gautam Nagar did on the evening of the Mumbai premiere of Slumdog Millionaire. This is another bit of poverty tourism.

The New Yorker enjoys this trick, sending someone to a place no New Yorker reader would voluntarily go, and sending back a “Letter from Mumbai” or a “Letter from China” or from wherever else its intrepid reporters go to observe something that will edify its fascinated middle class readership.

And, yes, I’m among the fascinated: I read the New Yorker‘s Letters, I watched Slumdog Millionaire, and I have read all but one of Rushdie’s novels. That uncomfortable voyeuristic curiosity that turns human beings into caged animals is nevertheless central to the action of literature, though I have yet to find text that can address the reader’s curiosity without exploiting the subjects of that curiosity.

Sourcing a blurb

In a conversation with a friend about Lolita, an interesting problem arose. This is the cover of the second Vintage International edition of the book:

In the upper left corner is the blurb “The only convincing love story of our Century” —Vanity Fair. You can imagine why this characterization could be a problem. I have never had the great luck to teach Lolita in a course, but just by looking at this cover I can imagine conversations in intro lit classrooms across the country centering on this practically anonymous quotation.

So I decided to track the source down.