the cassandra pages

In French, please

The Office de la langue francaise (OLF) is launching a "sensitization campaign" to remind business owners in Montreal's downtown of the language laws requiring French to be the language first used in greeting customers, and to appear first, and twice as large as English, in any signage. The program is coming out of a recent survey designed to study how language is being used in the city's downtown core; the goal of the OLF (and the Quebec government) is to preserve the French character of the city. The survey revealed that French was the language of greeting 83% of the time, and the language in which customers were served about 90 per cent of the time (I'm surprised by that; it seems like less to me.) Apparently the survey was carried out because of a lot of complaints in the French media that too much English was being used in the city's business district. The OLF used 40 "francization counsellors" to conduct the survey; it employs seven other inspectors to enforce the language law.

Heading toward Spring

We arrived back in the city an hour before J.'s French class tonight, ate a hasty dinner, bundled up, and walked the ten or so blocks to the school where his class meets. It's -12 C., cold enough that you feel your nose hairs thickening and then freezing. We were almost late, so we walked as fast as we could, J. striding slightly ahead of me - he has longer legs - and listening to me plead every block or two for him to go just a tiny bit slower. I left him near Eglise St. Jean-Baptiste and walked quickly up to Marie-Anne and down St. Denis, past the fancy shoe and clothing stores with their bright red SOLDE signs ("SALE"), the Maison de Torrefaction (coffee roasting), the jewelry shops, and sidewalk cafés where, the other night when I passed them, hardy patrons in parkas were sitting at outdoor tables drinking beer.

By then the fronts of my legs beneath my jeans were freezing, and I stopped in a Renald-Bray to browse for a minute and warm up. This one had little literature and lots of children's books, travel books, gardening, erotica - most marked "Prix Choc" - the bright colors and warm air a huge contrast to what was going on outside. I was the only shopper in the store, and didn't stay long, just enough to begin to feel my skin warming up, and neither of the sales clerks even looked up from the books they were reading at their desks. At the corner of rue Rachel I crossed the street and walked quickly back toward home.

It had been a clear day for driving, and Mt. Mansfield and Camel's Hump were snow-covered and beautiful. I drove as far as St. Albans, where we stopped for gas, and then J. took over; there were no cars at the border and the Canadian customs official waved us through after a perfunctory check of our cards and a jovial rendition of the usual questions: "Any tobacco, alcohol or firearms in the vehicle with you today?" As J. drove, I quizzed him on irregular French verbs and their past participles: suivre/suivi; boire/bu; vivre/veçu; I tried to remember the conjugations for the imparfait.

Mute and unaware they were French at all, the snowy cornfields rolled by, and along with them, behind the windrows of tall poplars, the stone farmhouses  where farm families spoke easily together. It was 3:30 pm when the city appeared in the distance, the faint shape of St. Joseph's Oratory and the tallest downtown buildings forming a single silhouette with the mountain itself. "It feels like the days are getting a little bit longer,"J. said, thinking out loud.

"Yes," I said, closing the grammar book and looking ahead. "It really does."

Why Bother?

“When the Québécois are en vacances,” J.’s French teacher told the class, “they often go to countries like Morocco, Tunisia.” She hesitated and then qualified her statement: “Well, they don’t often go to Algeria!”

It’s true; both in spite of colonialism and actually because of it, the French have always had a close relationship with the Arab world. I’ve been startled at the volumes of Middle Eastern literature in the French bookstores – so much more in translation than is available in English, with the first translations of works by Arab authors often appearing in French. It as true in Lebanon as well: Beirut - Beyrouth - was the Paris of the Mediterranean, and Paris is where many expatriate authors, both Christian and Muslim, have gone to live upon leaving their homelands. Of course, as last year’s riots made clear, the situation for less-well-off, less-illustrious Arabs in France is not quite so happy. In Montreal it is more so. 

From Syria and Lebanon, Armenia and Alexandria, my in-laws always intended to come to America, and their second language was English. But French was my father-in-law’s third language and probably my mother-in-law’s as well, after their native Arabic and Armenian. English may have been the language of opportunity and commerce, but French was the language that proved you were sophisticated. In their New England home, French phrases often peppered the conversation. But when J. mentioned that he had started taking an intensive French course, his father was surprised.

“I admire you for taking it on at your age,” he said. “Are you learning to read, or to speak?”

“It's mostly conversational, but we do a lot of writing exercises, so we’re certainly learning to write to some extent.”

“Is it French French, or Canadian?"

"It's Canadian."

"You mean your teacher is Canadian?"

"She's French-Canadian. Quebeçoise."

"So you aren't learning real French?"

"Is American English 'real English?'"I put in.

He gave me a withering look, and didn't answer. Then he said, “Why bother?”

“What?” we both said at once.

“Why bother!” he repeated.

“That's where we live! We need to learn to speak the same French that is spoken around us." He was clearly unconvinced. "Why did you study French?” I asked.

“To read Molière, of course!” he announced haughtily. I had my doubts if he'd ever read any. There was no point explaining that the written language was essentially identical, or even that I had spent years learning to read French and it did me precious little good when I needed to call a plumber. Apparently we had just dropped through one of those unseen holes that tended to crop up in conversations like this, and our interlocutor was walking on.

“Oh. Well, we are just trying to do our grocery shopping and talk to our neighbors," J. said.

“I see,” he said, and shrugged; the conversation was over so far as he was concerned. “Well, good luck!”

Could this be you?

An 86-year-old Montreal man, originally from Seattle, whose four-room apartment is totally filled with books and papers is told it's a hazard that must be cleaned up - he says these are the research materials for the book he has been working on since 1949. Read the story (via Montreal City Weblog) It starts rather badly, but I was happy that the ending is more compassionate.

Asked if he could survive without his books beside him, Butcher said categorically, "No, I'd rather be dead. My only purpose in life is to get my book written, and if I can't, I'd rather be dead now."

Accepting Responsibility

I am trying to imagine an America where this headline could be talking about our government, and our citizens.

(This article has a little more about the U.S. involvement in the case, if you haven't been following it.)

Near East Links

The Bastard of Istanbul, by Elif Shafak, a book about Turks and Armenians, is reviewed here. The article talks about, and compares, Turkish authors Orhan Pamuk and Eli Shafak. Shafak, a woman still in her 30s, has also been much in the spotlight due to her controversial subject matter and stance. Unlike Pamuk, whose work truly is worthy of critical acclaim, Shafak is young and the attention, it seems, is more because of the issue than because of the quality of her work - however, we'll give her time. I'm still interested in reading the book.

When I was reading about the Sundance Film Festival (where a documentary called The Bible Tells Me So, featuring Gene Robinson and several other gay individuals, is being premiered) I also noticed the presence of a new animated film based on the graphic novel Persepolis by the expatriate Iranian writer/illustrator Marjane Satrapi. Looking around on the web, I found this Salon interview with Satrapi - it's from 2005, with insights into Iranian and American culture that I think will surprise you.

The Line of Beauty

A few nights ago, I finished The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst, the 2004 winner of the Booker Prize. I'm still thinking about it. The book is beautifully written, and I admired that, just as I admired the construction of the narrative. Throughout, we see the protagonist, Nick, growing slightly older, and drifting further and further into a world of deception and inevitable disaster - and the narrative takes us along in the same tone, where Nick sees and yet doesn't see: somehow, suspended in a dreamworld he never imagined inhabiting, nothing bad is really going to happen to him. And yet, of course, it does.

I admired the writing, but I found precious little to like in the portraits the author paints, or the situations the characters inhabit. One tries to like Nick, and there is a lot about him that is good, especially his love and depth of understanding for art and beauty -- which he recognizes, to his sorrow, are not shared by the people around him who have the power to acquire whatever they want, and for whom art is a symbol of wealth, power, and a means of exchange.

An interview with Peter Rose of The Australian Book Review talks about the intersections between the world of this book and the author's own life, something any reader of this novel will be curious about. Hollinghurst did go to Oxford; he is gay; and says as a young man he was indeed something like Nick, the young protagonist of the book. But the author says he's never even been inside one of the Kensington mansions he describes so vividly in his book. His goal was to write a book about the times - the 1980s - both in terms of the political atmosphere of Thatcher's Britain, and what was happening in the lives of homosexuals as AIDS first became known as a threat, and then as gay men first began dying of it.

"It's a book about decadence. It's about the lure of the aesthetic life, but also its dangers. Nick lives in a world of his own sexual preoccupations. I hope the reader is aware of the terrible things happening outside the scope of the novel."

Another interview, in the Guardian, took place the day after Hollinghurst won the Booker, and has more details about his career and the uncomfortable label of "gay writer" that has been attached to his name.

As I read the book, and now, reading these interviews, I'm disturbed by some stereotyping. For one thing, Hollinghurst is labeled and pigeon-holed, as is the book itself, into some category of "gay fiction" which demeans it just as much as books that are labeled as "women's fiction" or "black fiction". The book is an important portrait of at least three major aspects of the 1980s: the AIDS crisis, the political world during Thatcher's time as PM, and the rise of extreme wealth, decadence, and self-centeredness which marked the 1980s and are still with us today. But because I have been writing so much myself about the issues of gay rights and have seen so clearly what opponents use as their weapons, I know that the book's portrayals of insensitive, irresponsible promiscuity and drug use, while perhaps accurate for their time, add fuel to the arguments of those who want to condemn homosexuality and homosexuals in general. Furthermore, Nick's lover Wani - perhaps the most decadent character in the book - is the son of a Lebanese father who fled Beirut and moved to London, became fabulously wealthy, and received an honorary title of "Lord" - yet the son (another Oxford graduate) spends incredible sums of money, indulges in the riskiest kinds of sex, keeps a "pretend" girlfriend, and consumes enormous quantities of cocaine. It may reflect a significant aspects of British culture in the 1980s, but if that isn't a stereotype - and an unhelpful one for these times - I don't know what is. In order to win such a prestigious prize, shouldn't the author be able to deal with these subjects with more nuance? Or is that, perhaps, his point - that in 1980s London (or even now?) there was no nuance: this is how these particular "types" of people were perceived, and that is what he wants to show us?

Although the critics seem to have focused on the themes of gay sex and the decadence and corruption of the wealthy, what I found most interesting and moving about the book was, in fact, the subtext alluded to in the title: a sensitive person's response to art, and the question of whether art can, in fact, save us. The very best passage in the book, for me, takes place during a concert in the Kensington house where Nick lives - the home of a wealthy MP and his family; Nick was secretly in love with the straight son of this family when he was at Oxford. The concert is being put on by the MP as a way to impress guests, and the musician is a young female Russian pianist who he "discovered". We hear everyone's reaction - their boredom, their ignorance of the music, their false reasons for promoting it and attending it, and it is a painfully accurate description - as I learned during my own days on the board of a fine arts organization - of how many wealthy people use art to further their own ends. But at the same time, we also hear Nick's running commentary on the woman's playing of the particular pieces - and it shows us his knowledge, his love, his compassion for the challenges faced by the musician, and his own emotional response and understanding of that, too. In this music, Nick finds what he seems to have been looking for in sex and in drugs and in rubbing up against wealth.

So I had high hopes, for a few more pages. But Nick can't hold onto it, and his world slowly unravels -- and that, perhaps, is an accurate portrait of our times too, and not a stereotype at all.

Feed Test

At Dave Bonta's urging, I'm changing my feed settings to publish full posts rather than excerpts. My reasoning has always been that I spend a lot of time making my weblog look the way it does - I'm a designer after all - and I've wanted to encourage people to click through and read the post, if they're interested, on the site. That's what I do when I go to Bloglines - I use the service to see what's new, and almost always go to the actual site to do my reading, coming back each time to Bloglines which I use as a kind of hub for my blog reading excursions.

But I gather from talking to Dave and other readers that this is not the way a lot of people use their aggregators - and in fact, not publishing a full-content feed discourages or even stops many people from reading my posts. So I bow - reluctantly - to technology, acknowledge that the words are more important than the visual content, but hope that if your feed doesn't publish photos, you will still go to the site occasionally and see the visual content as well.

Let me know if you have any trouble with the new settings. The last time I checked, the feed was still publishing as excerpts, despite the changes. I'll keep after it during the day and try to get it squared away.

UPDATE: I think everything is working fine now. I've exported by own Bloglines subscription list to the new Google Reader, and will be trying that service out over the next week or two - it seems very good to me.

Why We Blog Survey

You might be interested - I was - in responding to this well-constructed, fairly quick survey for a blogger who is preparing to give a talk about the medium in Vancouver.

Extraordinary Invitation

In a surprising and unprecedented gesture which acknowledges their existence if not their claims in full, Turkey has invited Armenian leaders from the diaspora to attend the funeral of the slain journalist, Hrant Dink. (from the International Herald Tribune)