passé simple

Across the street from my apartment is a bar ouvrier, always ouvert, which makes me feel less bougie without having to bouger to such vivant milieux as the poor immigrant neighborhood of Noailles. Once, as I was panting up the final hill of a long Mistral-whipped run, a burly arm stretched out from the patio to offer me a full glass of pastis...why didn't I take it? Today, thirsting for authenticity, I dropped in to ironically (?) caffeinate my nascent nihilism and entertained several auditions for the blog.

These days the blog game reminds me of the crack game, which reminds me of Flaubert's cracked cauldron and my stress-fractured foot (I ran too hard, droit au but), which stresses me out...also, as they say in France, I don't care, particularly. But, desperate to go home again, I succumbed to a soi-disant apocalyptic poet whose clichés matched my coffee and cigarette. He asked what I was writing in my carnet; "Je me considère comme bloggeuse..." Nonplussed (literally [conventionally] but not literally [à la lettre]...he could, in fact, have withstood bien plus), he waxed poetic about his own poetry, "lourde, lourde! et noire, noire comme le charbon," because "le cœur de l'homme est dur comme une pierre," and "l'homme est un loup pour l'homme"...he and he alone is on "le bon cheming." Putaing! Though he repeatedly posited that he was "positif," he was positively no positivist: "Les hommes imitent les femmes, les femmes imitent les hommes," he intoned, and this is why the world will end pretty soon ("Bombe! Bombe! Bombe!"). "Mais la sexualité est un continuum..." He just squinted one-eyed into the sun, and muttered something like "la fin du monde viendra avec un clin d'œil"...which is a metonym, I think.

Confronted with such fatalism, I donned dark glasses, lit another cigarette, cocked my head in a cute way, and couldn't help but wonder: what (besides no panties and jeans, no bra with that blouse, etc.) is really so necessary? I find simplistic fatalism makes a fat out of you, you might as well argue the essential link between l'être and la lettre, but enough...I should really stop smoking; je fume, tu fumes, nous fûmes...

Marthaseille

My parents are here, which makes me feel alternately like a long-suffering native and an insufferable tourist. I've spent all week shuttling, à la marwanienne, between their bourgeois enclave in Aix-en-Provence and Marseille, weakly weaving the threads of my life for their benefit and letting them unravel as I go back towards the looming beacon of Notre Dame de la Garde.

Before I went running last week, I joked to Marwan that I was going to smoke immediately afterwards, pour équilibrer, and by that gesture which inverts Romance to Realism, a gesture that, pour équilibrer, is itself Romantic, he literally had a perfect pétard waiting for me when I came back. This gave me a dangerous sense of my own power over him, such that these past two weekends when he has stood up me and my parents to go to work at Quick Quality Burger Restaurant, I'm more than un peu deçue, mostly because this conversation will never happen:

Marwan: Hello mister how are you yes I am fine, you do what in your life??
Dad: Well Marwan, I'm an employment lawyer.
Marwan: Sérieux?

My linguistic relations with my mother and everyone else remain emphatically phatic, and the longer I live in a foreign country and the more I watch this video the more I'm convinced that contentment lies in communicating without content, or at least devaluing content, and eating organic vegetables. I understand my students' extra-academic exchanges only when they turn meta, when someone thinks to whisper "Mais chuuuut, elle comprend ce que tu dis!", and, by an operation of metonymy, I can pretend that this is true. I asked young Yasmine if she knew what the message emblazoned on her t-shirt, SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL HOOKERS, meant; she mimed the action of hanging a coat on a hook, repeatedly, despairing that I would never grasp the concept...after a while I said Yes, Exactly.

Anatole France Nightmare

Asked "What would you do if you had one day to live?", my Asiangs were the most vocal respondents:

Jianjang: I would...rechercher...wanted! a boyfriends

Chinois: I shoot M. LeBoulaire, I shoot him him him, I rape many girls, I rob bank, I go in supermarket and voler video games, I apport them au ciel!!