Marseille Monoprix Scene

Vieille Dame (watching the thug in front of us carefully place forty forties of Heineken on the conveyor belt): Oh, ma vie!
Me: (smiles, carefully shifts bags overflowing with Kookai and kakis)
VD: Vous êtes bien chargée!
Me: Moi, je suis forte.
VD: Qu’est-ce que c’est votre signe?
Me: Um…je suis Vièrge?
VD: Il ne faut pas changer!

moi, émoi

In Paris Jennie and I summoned up our past with champagne and navettes, which while lacking the coquettish religiosity of cookies en coquille at least connote a textual shuttling back and forth. Alexandre played us a sonata; later, we clamored over his little English phrases. Romain called to say we could never go home again; the apartment en bas burned. Manon gossips that it was the landlord's drunk ex-wife, but Romain diplomatically assures me that on ne sait pas encore. I came back to collect my things to discover the lock blocked with an invisible sliver of glass. My key did no more good than when I repetitively enter the clé for the wireless internet. Later Romain, after admitting himself keyless and for once at my newly-keyed mercy, keyed up the exchange by mocking my atonal accent: Too-ahh-un-klay? Shut the fuck up.

Unsurprisingly I feel much more intimate with my roommates since relationships turned textual. Even Romain resorts to text message slang when having to tell me for the fifth time that he’s not there to let me in. Marwan announced on my wall, “I am your real/cyber friend right now!”, and Manon scrawled on a pink post-it, “QUI A MANGE MA MANDARINE???”, under which was written, “C’était moi, ça te derange?” and over which was written “OUI!!!” A new note was then posted, reading, “Si tu veux on peut partager les tampons, serviettes de bain…” followed by a vulgar view of an animal with the appellation “Romain"...for a little while our refrigerator was like a virtual Facebook.

Marseille Bar Scene or Lesson on the Present Perfect?

"I've never killed a kangaroo."
"I've never kissed the teacher."
"I have had syphilus."
"I've never slept with the teacher."
"I've never eaten oysters."
"Have you ever been pom pom girl?"
"I have had sex on a mountain."

Answer bank: Marseille bar scene, lesson on the present perfect

Gesamtwerk

If you have talked to me within the past 5 years, you probably know that my main passion in life is rewriting pop songs to make them safer for children and teach them positive lessons. I wanted to share the ones I have come up with so far so that you can share them with your children, and extend an invitation to you for any suggestions to put on my album.

1. Let's talk about snacks, baby
2. I'm nice 'cause I share (to the tune of "This is why I'm hot")
3. "If you wanna meet my brother" (to the tune of the Spice Girls song)
4. Cuddle Up (to R. Kelley's "Double Up")
5. Everybody Use the Potty (to the tune of "Everybody Rock your body")
6. Call on Me (to the tune of "Call on me," but the remix is about waving your hand in class eagerly when you know the answer)
7. I'm bringing Katie snacks or I'm eating healthy snacks (to the tune of "I'm bringing sexy back")
8. Trying to make me go to pre-school (to the tune of "trying to make me go to rehab")

If anyone had any confusions, this is obviously not Katie.

Seuils

On Friday the teacher told me, dreamily, that she had to go upstairs “for trip to England,” and Ynes, instead of correcting her essay on her dream life (“I have no dream, I am girl perfect but I will say about girl perfect too Paris Hilton”), took this as an opportunity to splay herself, lollipop in mouth, on Amir’s desk. I let her do her thing…Amir wasn’t really into it anyway, Ynes has serious skin problems. I was helping a beautiful delicate girl named Camille when a cry started up chez Ynes; she was straight up kissing Margot (not as sassy, much better skin). All the Arab boys were all “Lesbian! Lesbian!”, all the white boys were all “Be Quiet Please!”, I was all, “Sexuality is a continuum…” I told Ynes she should be more like Camille, who was a very good student and probably didn’t eat much sugar…Ynes was like “Yes, No, Yes, No, Yes, No,” a joke which I only enjoy(c)ed in retrospect.

Later Liz texted to ask if I was feeling extra textual. I wasn’t sure if she meant extremely textual or hors de texte; the opposite meanings cleaved. My frequent searches for “Marwan” break Facebook, rendering the Search function temporarily unavailable and proving him a force more powerful than the internet…finally he divinely intervened to friend, and duly poke, me. “Tu vis sur internet,” Romain said solemnly, and since I often confuse Roman-featured Romain with the romanesque romans I read, I assumed he was using the passé simple of “voir” instead of the simple present of “vivre,” which explanation he graciously accepted in his vast nobility.

I spent the weekend in Cambridge getting wankered with Jamie and some other chavs in bars of mythic nomenclature, discussing Lacan’s wanton equations, the Prussification and Proustification of Nietzsche, and why Nietzsche and Jeremy Kessler are against public education. I hitchhiked to the airport with some Dutch chavs catching the EasyJet back to Amsterdam. At the terminal I explained to the cashier ringing up my candy that instead of converting my extra pounds to euros I was converting pounds to kilos; that got a grunt.

After arriving in Marseille too late, hors d’horaires of the navette, I’m back in my propre appartement propre, poking Marwan, reading about la jalousie persane and, with my carnet épuisé, writing vignettes in the paratext of the Persian Letters. The last entry, évidemment, was written by Ice Cream Girl...Happy Hannahkah baby.

Hold on to your teenage daughter

Sorry for the delay; for those of you who aren't Katie, I had to skip work yesterday to take Josh to the zoo. I also missed the annual DANY holiday party, where everyone grinded with each other and Mr. Morgenthau and all around got their respective flirts on. Josh and I had a little holiday party of our own that consisted of him setting up a fishy tank in my room for about 3 hours in his adorable, autistically focused way while I made him my fiancee on facebook, if but for a brief, sweet moment/ I guess I had even more fun than that--when I rolled into work at 11 this morning, a few coworkers thanked me for writing "hey hotay ;)" on their walls very late, which I had no recollection of doing.


There are 2 main things on my mind these days--winter break and weightlifting. Josh M. and Josh K. are taking a 10-day vaycay in paris in january. Which honeymoon would I rather crash, I really can't decide. Although if Liz is going to Vienna I guess that settles things right off the bat--jk, love ya liz-a-licious.

(my coworker who said that thing about 3.8 gpa's being the cutoff just told me i'm "so hot right now," as i sit at the front desk answering other people's calls with one hand and picking my ear with the other. she also always says "heart it" and signs her emails "kisses" because she went to harvard but is still down to earth and girly, like alexandra parfitt)

as for weightlifting, a trainer at the gym with some unpronounceable hispanic name who insists on being addressed as "big e" approached me mid-deadlift the other day. apparently, while watching my "form," he came to the natural conclusion that i would be the perfect partner to train with for a bodybuilding competition. when i told Josh, he told me that big E had been hitting on me. of course i became livid that Josh didn't believe someone could possibly think i was good at something other than doing it, and, as punishment i told big E that I would be honored to enter the bodybuilding competition with him. so now i am training several times a week and taking 12 different supplements from GNC that give me insane fits of rage. Big E texts me regularly for encouragement; i just got one that said "hey whats up have u done any mussle resurch?"

work is getting so fucking boring. at first it seemed so stable and healthy to have this regular schedule. now every morning when my alarm rings, it's just ridiculous. i can't wait to quit and move to marseille with my mussle contest money.

le cru et le cuit

Mais si Julien l’eût aimée, il l’eût aperçue derrière les persiennes à demi fermées du premier étage, le front appuyé contre la vitre….

-Le Rouge et le Noir

Speech follows writing and I’m literally (physically, bodily) losing my voice; cigarettes remain my pharmakon of choice. I roll my own now, a heady mixture of tobacco and herbes de Provence.

For a while I thought life was punless. The only différance I savor in this vegetable world is that of slowly roasted sweet potatoes, and I sometimes even ruin it with raw radishes. John, something of a snide sniper, led willing assistantes up the winding, windy hill from Castellane. We sullenly smoked and for some reason sipped Scotch while Liz converted American GPAs to British (“You need a 3.0, which is…what, a 2.2?” “B,” John said flatly). These are dark times; when I turn on the Music Black channel, desperate to sing along to “Ayo Technology” with Marwan, I’m greeted with a literally black screen, void of the promised two hours of “Hits Black.” J’en ai marre de la technologie… My references are more subtle than accurate, more sentimental than artistic. If he had loved her he would have glimpsed her through the persiennes, but he was blind, not even jaloux of the jalousies!

Sorry, Hannah Geller is busy or does not answer

I bought a coat too sophisticated for my tastes; the sleeves are of an opulent amplitude. Manon marvels as I eat whole huge pears. I think I’m losing my voice (literally literally, in the lettered sense). Liz invites me to an assistants’ night out: salsa dancing at the Cuban bar. I didn’t even feel like thinking of a piquant pun on salsa/sauce/getting sauced. “Past my bedtime, but salsa it up for me!” “Will do, catch ya later gator.” I went to sleep for 14 hours.

BA me manque, but I’m doing my best to preserve the delicate détente he established with my roommates, a peculiar balance of alienation and amity. For la plupart of an epic phone conversation with H Face, Romain dangled some jewelry in front of my face.

Romain: C’est à toi?
Me: Non…
Romain: T’es sûr?
Me: Oui…
Romain: Tu ne l’as jamais vu?
Me: Non…
Romain: Euh…je l’ai trouvé par terre, du côté de mon lit.
Me: oOoOo
Romain: [blushing and changing the subject, as if such innuendo were not the express purpose of this exchange] Et Akbar, il est parti?

I have a new batch of terrible Tuesday brats, but Zakaria, ever the prophet, swooped down amongst them and warned in a whisper, “Elle comprend! Elle comprend!” They still talked shit, but they also flirted with me more. I switched to Lucky Strikes, which remind me of my friends out on the west coast, who quote Hefner lyrics on Facebook walls to remind themselves of each other...my coat floats through my thoughts with embarrassing buoyancy.

rich text format

I was so happy the other day that even the gravest texts bore a lilt of life: that Hopkins poem about the fell of dark, ominous tidings from Liz, Fumer peut entraîner une mort lente et douleureuse. Someone actually told me "Franchement vous êtes jolie," and I hadn't so much as asked him for directions. Frankly France is lovely, maybe it's that Provençal light...or maybe it was the Adderall after all. I promised M. Laval, slouching all through his chemise, to be more vigilant in monitoring my casier; I dropped a désormais in conversation, which perked up his posture perceptibly.

Meanwhile poor Andrew reads his practice LSAT passages for the écriture. Last night he explained to me a thought experiment about an Indian, a basket of figs, a note...it sounded like a nice dream.

décalage horaire

Romain grows nobler every day; he never misses an opportunity to use the subjunctive. The other day, with a faraway look in his eyes, he ordered Marwan to clean the kitchen table, and the latter saint obliged with savage servility, scuttling low and dark around the bright blue Ikea...it was like something out of Moby-Dick, or Frankenstein.

I chat with Oskar (Oscar?) in his Texas persona, laid back but quick. I remind him he is exquisitely textual, many-personed, of a rich unreality; that's him all right.

I've had periods of dull mania. The delicious idea of eating Nutella on the subway, je suis folle, I shelve it. A sudden gust of wind and toutes mes feuilles se sont enfuies...I don't want them back (I do, I do). I rock in the wind and recite to myself. Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours...are all the lost like this? Romain whistling en haut, the wind turning and turning in the wide outside.

communicable diseases

Some odd evenings I stumble into the souk by accident, making through creative navigation a labyrinth of only slightly serpentine alleys...the score from Battle of Algiers pounds in my head as I dodge darting children and guard my cache of grenades. Last night I made courge spaghetti à la JE dining hall, then forged a new nexus of the virtual and the real by half-consciously ashing on the discarded radio of my lungs. Later I used Romain's computer, the sole to siphon the neighbors' internet, and managed to taper on the foreign keys, which would arouse Liz's jealousy if her erotic imagination were as virtually mediated as mine.

Still I try to engage Liz in critical inquiry, knowing full well it will degenerate into a performance of political correctness.

"So, gays in the military...?"
"It works in Britain, and, like, Israel..."
"Yeah well there's this crisis in, like, heterosexual male subjectivity..."
"No I'm pretty sure homophobia, the Red States, some general wants gays to burn in hell..."
"...the fear of infection from within, the emasculation of being under the homosexual gaze, you know the Lacan thing about bathrooms?"
"Isn't that what they used to say about black people?"

We didn't really communicate anything...I wanted to make a pun about AIDS but thought that would communicate too much, although it only would have been topical.

recoucou

Romain’s in Rome, doing as the Romains do. Maelle counseled Liz to le taper; on va voir. Meanwhile Marwan, previously and temporarily the holder of the key to my happy home, retains an impish power over me. I let him use my phone and risk missed calls from pompiers, I share my chères cigarettes cher… In the kitchen I play Joy Division on repeat. These days the sincerely sinister, most notably in “Nip/Tuck,” seems to me gauche, but something about this music strikes me obliquely as right. My most sober pleasure is deriving etymological jeux de mots, more or less recherchés, as a dangerous supplement to the ever-errant righting and rewriting of my senior essay.

My mother, whose primary mode of communication is phatic, writes me e-mails just as saccharine and impersonal as the local news. One such missive literally included the phrase “Now on to sports,” as if either of us cared about the World Series, followed by detailed information about the household pets. Pious Parker had a stroke, but according to Mom’s most recent report his recovery is “nothing short of miraculous”; he’s back to begging for zucchini. To lend some levity she jibed that the dogs have sent her to the ER more times than I ever did in those tumultuous teenage years, once upon a time, which was just once, actually, just literally one time.

I drink wine alone, which isn’t done. False rhyme, the gap between writing and speech. I’m having trouble with English homonyms, I can’t write “write” write. I spend a lot of time on false rhyme, true ones too, and tongue twisters: “Ta Katie t’a quitté, qu’attends-tu, t’es cocu!” and so on.

Boucles-du-Rhône

A passable night s’est passé at the boîte; I was only asked “ça va?” one intolerable time. After a few hours of joyless dancing I drank too many paillassons, heavy on the pastis, with the predictable effect of feeling like I was being walked on, and that my function in life was forever to lie, flat and unremarked, on some kind of seuil. Soon I realized that I truly loved Stephane, the coloc who never was, as his red vest shone through the crowd, and a nymphet in a pantsuit popped a chili-peppered chocolate in my mouth; half I laisser tomber in my lap. Upon our return Romain and I found our apartment infiltrated with marins-pompiers, whom I half-hoped I knew, and Manon slumped in a wheelchair, having trop bu, à l’américaine.

My students are mostly assholes, especially Zakaria, a skinny pariah who flatly refuses to complete his worksheets. Most of these worksheets, granted, are inane, heavily focused on anagrams (LRAISUNJLTO? are you serious?), which are so lightly delightful in modernist literature precisely because they serve only for convoluted self-reference, figurative only in the sense of being both literally and not at all à la lettre. But I adore some of the gamest gamins, most notably a little boy with soft blond hair and a huge head who speaks to me in sweet quick French. On the last day before la Toussaint I was helping him with his rédaction on Karim, the Rebel of the Forest, when the sonorous bell a sonné, at which point he stood and said gravely: “Madame, c’est les vacances là.” I also harbor good humor for Rafiq, who when asked to approach the board and write a sentence in English produced instead his mnemonically-optimized phone number and a sly clin d’œil in my direction. Thug life.

I’ve finally been paid, in euros Gott sei dank, and I celebrated by buying a cahier for students preparing for their bac in German and an expensive hair product that holds, I'm told, the key to making boucles de rêve of my undreamt-of locks. Liz and I tried to come up with costumes for Halloween, but the best we could do was sexy assistante de langue, sexy fetish of cultural capitalism, or un enfantôme, a perversely Siamese calembour nabokovien for an aborted fetus.

leavesdropping

I’ve developed deeply textured emotional attachments to every male figure in a position of power vis à vis me: the forlorn proviseur at my school whose square and sloppy bisous eschew decorum, the soft-spoken English teacher who wears chemises of clean white linen, my antique-featured roommate Romain, the arbiter of my unappetizing tastes. The other day, as I was cooking dinner, he leaned over my leeks and accused me of having fouiller dans sa chambre…I bristled, not unpleasantly, before remembering that I had, to recover my purloined chewing-gum. I blamed Liz, ma copine new-yorkaise, which he thought was hilarious.

I have the most senseless desires. I eat food that doesn’t taste like anything; I drink our Tuesday two-euro vin mousseux like water. Mornings I step out onto the balcony and can’t tell if it’s cold. The sun is so present, but I can’t tell in what capacity. I make useless resolutions daily. Don’t drink so much, don’t participate in drunk anglophone debates about which city has the world’s craziest drivers, go to the mountains. I went to the mountains. It was breathtaking, heartbreaking, but it didn’t last long enough. Now what? I’m going to visit Jamie at Cambridge, insha’Allah…it will be just like that time at Les Deux.

Mr. Bricolage

I packed too many clothes, all of them wrong. We’re going to the South of France, let’s bring lots of pretty dresses! I would have done better to exchange my amour-propre for a sale amour…hélas, Marseille is a properly dirty place. The problem is less that your pretty things will get dirty and more that the prettiness is an affront to the dirtiness, that some unspoken code of squalor has been violated. The other day I wore a white frilly number that elicited complete sentences from passerby, all in low level monotone, like some collective and automatic communication of a warning.

En tout cas my home life improved briefly when I cooked for my roommates; they loved this little tart I whipped up, the fennel was an inspired addition. Romain regained his zest for literalizing the rhetorical by pointing out my pieds noirs, the product of flimsy flats in the muck of Marseille and in turn an apt figure for my being literally dépaysée, and I impressed Manon, a big fan of “Les Experts: Miami,” by telling her I know David Caruso’s daughter…which is a lie, I can’t even see her Facebook profile. But then Marwan absconded with my clé, continuing a key metaphorical strain in literary tradition and my recent life. Because I could never go home again I waited for Liz outside her school, chainsmoking like a sullen lycéenne. Chez Liz our viewing of Arrested Development, my only pleasure, was arrested by the arrival of her colocs’ friends, who warmly and repeatedly complimented Liz on her French…I asked where to get good pomegranates, but nobody knew.

it's a well-known mystery

Dinner with Liz again and another American with mindless aspirations for travel and books. We made lentils and talked for a while about European cities in the vaguest terms. Ohhh, let’s take EasyJet to Amsterdam! Meanwhile Manon sulkily skulked around the kitchen, licking the cap to her yogurt and staring into space. She has most recently accused me of eating her canned petits pois; nothing is more unlikely.

The most acute foreignness I experience here is in the unexpected inversions of the familiarly strange to the strangely familiar. The other day, rejected by the hardly welcoming Acceuil after arriving too early for work, I was browsing in the euro-fifty section of my local librairie when I stumbled across a volume that literally (à la lettre) and literally (literally!) had MAHMOODY emblazoned on the spine…of course it was nothing other than Jamais sans ma fille.

I’m tired all the time and can’t afford any antioxidants. I might be reduced to drinking the goji berry juice I brought as a novelty but that no one seems to find very interesting. It just sits there on my desk…the rainforest-tree-bark color of the bottle matches my Ikea.

coup de Man

Last weekend I had dinner with Liz and her colocs, who are nice enough despite their reductive politics; postcards reading SARKO=BUSH are plastered on the walls among an impressive array of multi-cultural capital, including my favorite fetish of authenticity, an African mask straight out of a Sembène film. Liz and I lovingly peeled Persian cucumbers and I sneaked some skins. When Lucas cracked an egg I felt compelled to share a joke, a staple in my father’s repertoire, often inflicted upon waitstaff at moderately-priced French restaurants:

Q: Why are French omelettes so small?
A: Because in France one egg is “un œuf”!!!

Lucas doesn’t speak any English, but he got this one right away…he just pretended not to, to be polite. Later I was borne by national feeling to a boîte de nuit. My cohorts, a pair of marins-pompiers and their elfish copines, kept tousling my hair and asking me “ça va?” I found this unnerving because in most social situations, no matter how hard I strive to m’amuser, I always look like I’m about to cry…in the past this has inspired such self-fulfilling inquietudes as “Are you sure you’re ok?” and “Eat, eat, have a zooloobia!” Naturally I burst into tears and was appeased only when someone explained that en fait it’s quite normal to ask “ça va?” with great frequency over the course of an evening. The pompiers drove me home at daybreak and I awoke at five p.m. to an empty apartment; the newly installed internet router taunted me with ambiguously flashing lights. I’m pretty sure it works, but my roommates haven’t told me the password, and I don’t know quite how to ask them…the password for the password, the key that is itself a code, a metaphor for feeling like everything is a metaphor, but for what? I spent all night eating bitter pomegranates in front of TF1. Every television commercial in France features Zinedine Zidane, which brings back stark memories of last summer; he is the only celebrity who has ever figured in my dreamlife.

les pieds noirs

Everyone here eats yogurt, and at all times of day; Danone makes a great one with figs. Babies’ bottles are filled with Evian.

Yet I am plagued by a kind of homesickness that only Eric Schrode or Hannah could really understand. I really thought my roommates loved me. They have provided me with fresh basil, furniture from Ikea…my room has its own potted plant, vaguely reminiscent of a yucca. But I fear that my colocs have had a change of heart. Our bisous are fewer and farther between. In my dreams they tell me that we have to find a new apartment; sometimes these dreams end by the sea, sometimes in dark houses filled with knickknacks. I’ve begun to dream with the calculated authenticity of movies: my dream-self speaks in English, but with a heavy French accent. Romain has confiscated my cache of American chewing-gum, and in retaliation I have eaten nearly all of the chocolate-peanut butter candy I brought to impress my students. I’ll have to ask my mom to send me more, and I’ll have to lie and say my roommates ate it all…which is so unfair to them, they eat nothing but seasonal vegetables, lean protein, and yogurt.

the evidence of experience

In French, the word expérience is more often used to mean "experiment" than "experience," implying a certain resistance to the typical American fetishization of experience: an experience (e.g., the "life-changing experience" of going to France!!) is not an end in itself, but rather a means to a greater understanding, a mere although by no means purely utilitarian part of a larger epistemological enterprise.

The experience of my job orientation has led me to the understanding that little bits of linguistic jouissance such as the above have little practical effect, because there are too many Americans in France, and because in benevolent racism as in warnings about fat and sugar content in food (Pour votre santé, veuillez visiter mangerbouger.fr), France is more American than America.

Yesterday, the fresh-faced representative from the American consulate regaled us with stories of her own life-changing experience, in Guinea. Turns out, her authentic native Guinean acquaintances, concerned for the future of this jeune fille à marier, suggested that in order to obtain a husband, she should sacrifice a white cow (not all by herself ha-ha she didn't have to like kill it!), wrap the tongue of a bull in fabrics of many colors, present rare fruits to a mother of twins, and dance around in a circle. After punctuating this authentic account with some nervous giggles, she explained that were it not for her deep respect for the culture, her willingness to really put herself out there and humor the adorably godless heathens, she would, uh, she would never be the...she would never have had that experience. La tautologie encore... Luckily I was able to shoot a glance infused with disgust and smug awareness at my favorite fellow assistante, Liz, a sharp-tongued fellow traveler on the neocolonalist safari that is Marseille. Liz and I tend to fetishize our experiences of neocolonialism almost as much as neocolonialists fetishize the experience of the other...but our recidivist cultural capitalism is what makes us so authentically American.

Today, the woman in charge of our program announced that this year's crop of assistants includes two real Chinese people, whom she promptly produced and made to speak in French...she stood there between them for about five minutes, grasping their arms, waiting for someone to take a picture.

allegories of desire

Paris is exactly itself, as evidenced by this oft-repeated conversation:

"T'aimes Paris?"
"...Non."
"Mais c'est Paris!!!!"
"..."

Marseille, however, n'est pas Marseille. A sense of difference pervades the place. I feel about as much and as little chez moi as I do in LA.

Today I underwent the much-hyped and inexplicably obligatoire chest x-ray, supposedly a great affront to American modesty, and they didn't even make me take off my shirt. I was so ready to be cool about it too. On the plus side, I probably don't have tuberculosis, and they let me keep the x-ray. Un souvenir!

For lack of internet in the apartment, my roommates and I spend our days taking turns saying words in English; they say a word, after initial confusion I comprehend and repeat it en américain, hilarity ensues. It reminds me of Proust a little.

I start teaching on Friday. Tentative lesson plans include talking about movie stars and distributing candy filled with buerre de cacahuètes, an American delicacy. I've so far convinced the landlord, to whom my tenancy is and shall remain unbeknownst, that I am the petite amie of one of my roommates...again a source of mirth for all. Things are going so well I don't even begrudge not having consistent access to Facebook's vortex of insatiable desire, and am even happier for it, probably for the same reason French people don't eat that much.