Working Backwards

As a result of my delinquency in updating this blog, I now have a lot of ground to cover. Like Billy Pilgrim, I feel unstuck in time: unglued and unwieldy.

Narbonne/Armissan

I spent the last week wandering around farms in the Narbonne area with my GIS course, lost amid the sea of grass, closely pruned grape vines (it is only March), and soil. We looked at a lot of soil. I know nothing about soil. No one wanted to tell me anything about soil, but rather they wanted to pretend that I knew something about soil. I spent a lot of time looking at the wind traveling through the tall grass and pretending I was in the opening segments of a Kurosawa film. A week without whiskey and without cigarettes may be enough to drive a man to the brink. Especially when this is taken with perpetual pissing rain, which gave way to extreme heat on the last day, insuring sun burn (I’m not red, I’m rose I’ve been saying ever since.) The French are as a whole obsessed with their own sense of the bucolic (a word that is, unsurprisingly, of French root). Apparently however, to call farmland bucolic is a bit of a cliché, my professor cheerily informed me. Bucolic implies a little hobby farm with a goat and a red barn at this point. And the number of goats in France is large. How much chevre do the French eat every year? A goat load. The things one thinks of to fight off creeping insanity. I should add also that soil comes in many textures, colors etc, however it was all pretty decidedly uniform in the region we looked at, a source of frustration to those organizing the trip. We will be spending the next week representing these findings on a GIS map, much to my immitigable delight. I am glad I was able to exercise my urban planning education so decisively.

I think France is a good country to go out of your mind in. Like in England, you can be stark raving mad and people will just figure you a bit of an eccentric. There is a certain French mentality of obedience to authority stemming from the age and tradition of society, while at the same time, their runs the counter mentality of the Revolution, 1968 and the rest. It is an interesting dichotomy to see as my fellow students became further infuriated with the general lack of organization and more importantly, just bad luck that characterized the trip.

I should add here that I saw the first hems in the seamlessness of modern French integration as conflict arose between the African Muslim students and French students. It came down to a matter of ham. The French, for reasons that I cannot quite comprehend, love ham. They put it in everything – and generally in 3 or four varieties (along with a whole other host of pork items, from tasty blood sausages, to less tasty ham tripe concoctions). As a result, lunches were required to include ham (and wine, which really, you don’t want to drink knowing you have an afternoon of scratching around the bush with a truncheon ahead of you.) The Muslim students of course protested asking that some chicken be brought along as well. This was done, but the result was a source of tension in which the French sneered at the chicken and the Africans sneered at the ham, both making allusions to the superiority of one over the other. So integration yes, but less cultural cross-pollination than one would arouse. I also managed to spark a schism among the African students in asking if there was a sense of sectionalism within African Islam, which parked a debate between two students which saw them arguing about various hadith despite the fact that both were Sunni and from the same general region of Senegal – which I feel says something about religion in general. I would like to qualify myself here by noting that the question was formulated as innocently as possible and that I had no intention of sparking inter-Islamic conflict. African Islam is always characterized as far more homogeneous than its Middle Eastern equivalent, but never doubt the ability of the human mind to find difference and exploit that difference as a mechanism for declaring someone else a heretic or apostate.

There was also a lot of “sleeping rough” which I will come back to shortly.

Easter

The Easter (or “Paques” if one is so inclined) holiday was an absolute delight. Religious holidays in a post-Christian country make for slightly confused affairs where everyone just sort of mills about and drinks a lot. Champagne and eggs for breakfast all week gave things a certain air of the surreal, as did being so pilled up that I rattled (a combination of necessity – I have been fighting a sinus infection – and recreation). As for sleeping rough, I somehow managed to sleep underneath a picnic table adjacent to the student café/bar at which non-stop Easter festivities raged long into the night. My reasons for this remain mysterious and elusive – but smile and nod when I hint at larger cosmic purposes.

Of Easter, I must provide the following cut and paste job (sorry) from an e-mail I sent out on the Sunday itself:

Easter is to be renamed Zombie Jesus and Chicken Bunny Day: on which a bedraggled and "holey" (zing) Jesus rises from the crypt to team up with the chicken bunny - a genetic abomination in which a mammal has somehow acquired an avian reproductive system that yields a confection of sugar, coco bean (does the chicken bunny photosynthesize too?) and milk. The two then engage in ancient religious rites of hiding the chicken bunny's vile, stillborn, chocolate offspring only for them to be discovered by small children - the horror!

The Easter weekend also saw the prevailing wisdom of a postmodern adage concerning poetry that I here coin: when in doubt - especially when dealing with the fairer gender - stop, grin like a jackal, and hit ‘em with a poem. Reading Chinese dissident poetry to Brazilians in English translation may not have had the desired effect; but it certainly warped expectations.

My latin jazz combo also played a gig the day before the run up to the holidays, and it went well enough that the band is going to continue. I like the band. It keeps me less crazy to have a regular venue through which to play music and as Albert Ayler once noted, “music is the healing force of the universe”. Then again, by the end, Ayler was bat-shit insane and this is madness was only further manifested through his music, so who knows.

Barcelona

I managed to get myself to Barcelona on the cheap – which when traveling in Europe is a bit like finding the arc of the covenant. What is really striking about Barcelona, apart from the overall grandeur of the place is how clean it is. One expects the same sort of seediness that one finds it Marseilles or the other large Mediterranean cities, but Barcelona is immaculate without sacrificing local color. Barcelona is a good city to get lost in. The main metro transfer through which the whole artery of the cities mass transit system runs is called the “passagia de gracia” which seems fitting – as there but for the grace of god go I. Barcelona is too big and too incredible a city to take in. Rather it takes you in and you just have roll with it. It is exactly like a Pedro Almadovar film – only enormous and crazier.

Traveling to Barcelona with a group of French students can be aneurysm inducing experience. While having ditched the group and tour of the city within the first 15 minutes of the first day (I actually want to see the city, not the tourist sites) I found myself forced to communicate in Spanish, French and English all at the same time. I ended up speaking the long language, to the wrong person more often than not. The Catalan Spanish that pervades Barcelona also represents a point of departure. It is as though French grammatical rules were applied to Spanish.

The city, despite its geographical enormity is densely populated. While the downtown area is touristy, and one can get by in English, the older parts of the city are very different. Bars with tapas and old Catalan men playing dominoes and arguing about everything from politics to football, to the weather jut up against the trendy areas. And of course there is the flood of Latin Americans – a shockingly large percentage of them Chileans who fled during the Pinochet regime and who have never returned. Much like a Roberto Bolano novel, they all seem to wear beards and long hair, work odd-jobs and lead double lives as poets, or more commonly, failed poets. They run stands that sell Che and Communist kitsch by day to unthinking American tourists and by night comport in bars and coffee shops.

One can stumble around the city and see high modernism and tradition at once. There are whole streets dedicated to preserving Gaudi architecture that embodies this. While there is progress there remains the sense that things can be left until manana. Still, this is the part of the Spain that never broke under Franco, that always resisted and one gets a real sense of that from the city as a whole. Self-determination is crucial to the mentality of the city. It is so made so as to be able to accommodate everyone. In the sort of place where people can live their lives without expectation and without upsetting a set social order. People are exposed to everyone and everything and so they practice live and let live. To me this is a certain high water mark of Western civilization – that interaction with the other and the willingness to accept it.

Stray Points

Point 1:

Absinthe should be made illegal. There is no telling what can happen under the influence of that unquestionably evil substance. Its effervescent green tinge should be the first warning sign, as should be the diabolic implications of the name of the oil: ‘wormwood’, from which it is fabricated. It holds an anise flavor that effectively renders it pastis’ evil twin. After a night of heavy consumption of the stuff, I found myself experiencing a day of reckoning for my worldly sin. It may have permanently broken my liver, and I still don’t think my head is quite right 3 days on. It should also be noted that the often hinted at psychoactive properties of absinthe are little more than myth; propaganda to sell a drink and to imbue it with an air of mystique, when really, you are just drinking very strong Ouzo. It is said that Ernest Hemingway invented a drink called, quite bookishly, “The Death in the Afternoon” involving absinthe and champagne. Like that parable on bull fighting, it is the sort of thing that you need to kill before it kills you. All the same, the small village that I had the misfortune to pass through, that distills the stuff needs to be razed. With a proof rating that scratching at 120, absinthe is far too strong for the consumption of animal, plant or mineral.

Point 2:

The French higher education system leaves much to be desired. While it is more rigorous to get into the better French schools there still seems to be something missing. Classes take the form of grueling six hour days in which the same tired talking points are recycled again and again because after two hours of the same material, brains and throats begin to wither and die, leaving a 4 hour marathon to finish. I will give to the French that French students are somewhat better informed on the issues of the day than their American counterparts, but this seems to be a function of their being better served by the local news outlets. There also remains some scorn for intellectualism among many, and the same dislike for anything of genuine artistic merit. Schoolwork is a facsimile of the real thing as after the aforementioned marathon school days, it is hard to get students to do much of anything. In the classroom though, the worry again is that the Socratic impulse has been rendered but a shadow of itself. While Americans as a whole, as a matter of cultural conditioning seem to be incapable of such an impulse, the French are simply unwilling of exercising it. European groupthink?

Point 3:

This is not to say that European society as a whole is missing something – Europeans tend to be far better informed and far more capable of dialogue than most Americans. My above critique is limited to the youth, and it stretches across youth internationally. Perhaps it is an ease of responsibility or an accessibility of cheap entertainment that has rendered abstract thinking a thing of a bygone era, but it is a slender margin that will genuinely talk to you about anything beyond the purely humdrum. A colleague has recently told me that my tendency to pepper my speech with quotation is revolting and that a sense of humor that does not dwell in the excremental or the mundane is necessary of explanation as it is “not funny”. I am or still not sure what exactly to make of this, but I can only conclude that I am savagely out of touch with the Zeitgeist.

Point 4:

The Zeitgeist isn’t all that great anyways; in fact, the Zeitgeist can go and fuck itself.

Point 5:

“Fuck” is a word that still has velocity, at least on the printed page. While linguistically, its use as cheap filler when one is at a loss for something more clever has robbed it of its expletive power; something about in on the page makes what take notice. It is vulgar, it is direct and it is monosyllabic, which makes it especially primal. It’s addition in any exchange forces one to stand up and take notice. It punches, kicks and bites. It is then to be used sparingly. This is the sort of thing that can get one in trouble.

Point 6:

After careful consideration love in which response is expected seems to be in many ways dishonest. It is contractual, superficial and a form of emotional blackmail. The only honest love is that which is either universalistic or that which is unrequited. While the former is an unattainable ideal, the latter is a poisoned chalice. Love is a broken emotion that does few of us any good in the long run. It is fickle, it is agonizing and it is, outside of the universalistic, hopeless.

Point 7:

Hopeless isn’t always as hopeless as it seems, but then sometimes it is even more so.

Marseilles

Marseilles, the oldest and second largest of French cities is often referred to as a French Naples. One industrious German guidebook even goes so far as to call in the Chicago of the Mediterranean, which is getting there except that Chicago only wishes it could be half as crazy as Marseilles. The Ancient Greeks founded the city of Marseilles and used it as one of their principle trade ports to the riches of North Africa. It has subsequently morphed into a crusader capital and finally, one of the focal points of Byzantium before modernity yielded the traditional maritime empire null. Marseilles is filthy, colorful and fantastic. Its is well over half made up of immigrants, mostly from Italy, Greece, Spain, The Middle East and North Africa. People tend to have about them that Southern olive complexion that comes from spending the year working in the sun. Dark features and complexions. The women have about them the sense that they used to look stunning before befouling their looks with pack-a-day smoking habits that leave them looking ravaged. The city literally sweats the smell of seawater and anise.

The fist thing you notice about Marseilles are the colors. While France as a whole presents itself in shades of grey and black, Marseilles is a flash of yellows, reds and blues. Europeans, especially Northern Europeans love to go on about “the mentality of the south”, which one must admit, has been useful in explaining some of the personality quirks of certain Spaniards that I’ve known, and this is clearly on display in Marseilles. With this though comes a certain grittiness – its very much like its portrayal in the French connection. I spent a couple of hours in a bar watching Italian football with some of the locals, not one of them who had French as a first language, which in many ways made me fit in better, except the local pidgin of Arabic, French and Italian is so much more complicated than French that you have to be from Marseilles to speak it.

As an avid people watcher, Marseilles proved to be almost too much. The denizens of Marseilles are not necessarily attractive, but they are distinctive and that is worth far more. Marseilles even has its own fashion sense – either athletic jackets and leather or expensive, though highly baggy suits with ornate vests and occasionally, fez’s. The town as a whole has its own flavor. Like Chicago it is enormous and sprawling, however, like San Francisco, its growth is controlled by geographical constraints, with the sea on one side and mountains on the other. Mediterranean societies all seem to have their particular quirks. Looking out at the sea, you can’t help but think of the Ottomans, the Venetians, the Greeks and the other great Mediterranean Empires. I’ve been hungrily devouring Herodotus in the hours since I’ve been back, looking for something I’m not quite sure of.

I came to Marseilles only after a winding road trip through the south of France, lateral movement from one provincial tourist trap to the next. The town of Aigues-Mortes is nice and all, and very interestingly contained within a 13th century castle that looks like a leftover from the battle of Agincourt, but its name, more or less speaks for the town, which is, after 8:30, decidedly post-mortem. We also passed through what felt like half a dozen other Mediterranean tourist towns, none quite as decadent as, say, Cannes, but all of which lacked that particular lunacy that makes Cannes appealing in the first place. The beech was of course nice, but I couldn't help but shake that feeling of artificiality that one gets from those types of places. The French then do plastic resort towns almost as well as Americans then, they just haven't quite discovered, or are blissfully culturally incapable of comprehending, the marketing mechanisms that make American tourist destinations so lifeless. It gives one hope that perhaps, the American cultural empire, for what it is, has yet to become all pervasive.

Local Knowledge

The Mediterranean Winter has finally shown its true colors. Rain and ennui has descended upon Montpellier, but, I am told, it will soon pass. Gloom then seems to be the norm for the moment at least, but then again, I’ve lived in the Pacific Northwest long enough that there is nothing shocking here.

Local knowledge proves itself again and again to be invaluable. The problem with localized knowledge is that it must be earned, and usually through, to be charitable, painful “character building” processes. On the other hand, being an American in Europe does have in advantages. Europeans set the bar very low for the American intellect or ability to grasp much of anything and as a result, any display of knowledge or of being cultured is met with amazement. Such was the case with a particular Magyar who I managed to, gain the affections of through a working knowledge of classical music. She repeatedly stated how shocked she was not only that I had heard of Debussy, Ravel, Lssizt and Bartok, but that I could name pieces of music by them, and even, through use of computer, play them. And so I had found a gimmick.

Having a “gimmick” is very important sometimes. When one is, to coin a politically salient/correct term, “aesthetically disabled” – and I have been told that I have a good face for radio – one is driven towards some form of compensation. I have always relied on the verbal, if only because I find it hard to shut up sometimes, but in France, where my grasp of the French lexicon is not all that it could be, and as I have documented previously, I have had to find new, and far less verbose means of expression. This realization came to me after seeing borrowed bits of Blake, Colleridge, Wilde, and even Verlaine (in the original French no less,) crash to pieces on the shores of (mis?)translation and cultural impropriety. The local knowledge: the information of societal norms and cultural references that in many ways defines a society, is not mine. Here though, I had found a point on continuity with an intelligent and lovely European that did not center around an American pop-culture that I have never quite understood.

We decided that it would be one of those nice George Elliot novel type flings - the kind where everyone has a nice time; everyone learns a little something about themselves and leaves (and indeed there was a pre-existing time table do to the departure of my partner in fling’s impending return to Hungary). This of course, as always, gives way to the more Henry Miller type fling, which tends to end in ennui and dissatisfaction, but really, one must take ones “adventures” from time to time. The Victorians were all a band of sexually repressed prudes anyways. With the aid of a pocket dictionary I started trying to fall back on more flowery language, but without local knowledge this proved to be my undoing. As those that know me well know, I have a certain interest and tendency to comment on, interesting noses - especially of the Eastern European variety. This has resulted in a purely superficial admiration for the (familial Hungarian) Sarkozy government in France. The nose makes the state, but I digress. In an effort to convey this particular aesthetic quirk of mine, and in the hope of coming off as cute, I told the girl that I quite fancied her nose, using the French verb “envie” which my pocket dictionary assured me was both appropriate and safe. What those charlatans at Larousse failed to share with me was that the verb "envie" is used far more commonly as a euphemism for something far more "rigorous". This compounded with my correct translation of the part about the nose and you get the picture.

So while George Elliot giving way to Henry Miller seemed like a logical bit of continuity, the push to the literary world of the Marquis De Sade, and nostril penetration, proved to be too much. Unsurprisingly, certain forgotten “errands” were quickly remembered and I was left wondering, until a French friend clarified matters for me later that evening, what was so offensive about talking about a nose. I suppose the look of shock and horror should have been the tip off that my translation had gone a bit off, but I thought she was just touchy about her nose. Of course I tried to explain the mix up later, but when you need to explain later, it usually isn’t a good sign. And by then, in her mind, the possibility of culturally enlightened Americans had been forever muddied with grotesque, though unintended, sexual deviance.

Local knowledge earned. I am wizened and certainly not bitter – and who can be bitter when the error in question is that funny? Not quite my finest linguistic moment, but it solves any future problem of entanglement. And sometimes, it is better to simply be happy when it rains.

Little Drop of Crimson

I’m staring at the single drop of blood on my lapel. It is a scarlet thing that won’t seem to come out no matter how much I rub at it. My hand shakes a little. I apply a little more club soda and salt and the lapel finally comes clean. I take a breath and turn back to nursing my beer, now with both hands.

Three hours ago I’m walking down one of the main drags in Montpellier. Its one of those beautiful Mediterranean afternoons where the sun distributes its life giving rays sparingly. I’ve just finished some quick grocery shopping and I’m looking for a café where I can tuck into my paperback and maybe have an espresso. A man just ahead of me, in full motorcycle regalia guns the engine of his 250cc Yamaha and peals into the narrow street. He doesn’t see the car and the car doesn’t seem him. They collide with a sickening thud sending the rider flying down the road as the bike slides into the curb. In the moment he is airborne, it is a if time has stopped. I stand open mouthed, seeing the inevitable. Grim determinism rears its head. Some primal instinct tells the man to tuck. Brace for impact. He tries to coil up, but not quickly enough. He hits the ground with a wet smack, bouncing and skidding before coming to a stop.

Me and a shopkeeper - out for a smoke - are on him in seconds. The legs sit at right angles, splayed apart in ways they shouldn’t be. He’s still conscious but in shock, hasn’t realized what has happened yet. He has searing blue eyes buried in the recesses of his helmet. They look at us pleadingly. I am going to see those in my dreams for months I can’t help but think. Finally he moves an arm, but barely, meekly. He is starting to feel the gravity of what happened. I tell him not to try to move, but now he is struggling to pull off his backpack, which has been twisted onto his front and the straps of which seem to be cutting into his side. We try to hold him down, but he is fighting at it, and we are worried that we are only going to hurt him more by restraining him. His legs don’t move. The shopkeeper and I look at each other then try to help him get the pack off. I reach for a plastic clasp and undo it, while the shopkeeper whips out a knife and cuts one of the straps. We very slowly and carefully remove the thing. A crowd has surrounded us now; a sea of cellular phones and French voices floods my periphery. The driver is out of the car too, panicking, crying, crying, and shouting at everyone. Grief and shock spilling from him in a flood of emotion. Someone from the crowd tries to calm him down, keep him away. Some semblance of sanity and control seems to have been restored. Then the blood begins to bubble up. Christ, there is a lot of it. It has its own smell, salty and sanguine. The shopkeeper, who I later learn is named Francois, rips off his belt and a woman from the crowd hands me a scarf. We pull it tight around where the blood is bubbling from, hoping that the paramedics will be here soon and that we haven’t made things worse. The blood flow seems to slow. Still the legs don’t flinch. Now he is clawing at himself again, looking for something. He is incoherent, sputtering requests, commands, prayers, while the blue eyes continue to cut into me. He continues to search himself with broken hands as we continue to push down to keep pressure on the wound. Finally he pulls loose, with twisted fingers, a cellular phone from a pocket and half says something about needing to call his wife. I help him manipulate the buttons, and then help him hold the thing up against the helmet. He coughs into the phone for a bit, half formed words fueled by adrenaline and delirium, and then the hand suddenly loosens its grip on the phone. He closes his eyes for the first time. This worries me and I try to talk to him. His eyes flutter open again. He emits a low grown that sounds like nothing I have ever head before.

Finally, after what feels like hours, I hear the wail of sirens and we are bathed in flashes of red light. The crowd parts ways like the Red Sea before Moses and the emergency technicians followed by the police step through. One of the three EMT techs looks at us, then the tourniquet, gives us a nod of approval, a pat on the shoulder and takes over for me holding the wound. The other two unroll a gold foil blanket. They manage to move the downed rider into the ambulance in a matter of minutes, and are gone, careening down the boulevard. I never did get the rider’s name. The next twenty minutes are a daze. It is as though I am watching myself. I am talking to the police in my broken French, hoping for semi-coherence. The driver is finally calm, he gets the name of the hospital where the man is being taken and gives his statement to the police. The crowd begins to disperse. I look at my hands for the first time. They are stained crimson, but there is none on my clothes except for the drop on my coat. Once things have dispersed, the shopkeeper shows me into his shop and we clean up in the sink in the back, saying nothing to each other. After this we step outside again. The shopkeeper and I shake hands and exchange names. “Bonne chance.” He says to me. He is one of those tall, thin stoic types, but I notice his hands shake, just a little, as he lights a cigarette. “Bonne chance.” I reply as we part ways. It seems to be the only thing appropriate to say. And we both mean it.

It is the randomness of violence that seems to be the most striking thing about it. Violence is dehumanizing. It reduces to pulp and artifice what was once living breathing organism – reducing life to little more than a waste product. Violence comes suddenly and horribly, doing its damage. It is that randomness; that chaos of action that gives it much of its power. I remember reading accounts of Beirut during the civil war in which regular violence - bombings, gunfights and destruction - became so commonplace that people began to fail to react to it. It becomes unreal, or simply part of the scenery. Here though, violence remains very real. It is the suddenness of it that shakes you more than anything. The things that pass through ones mind, in those moments of horror as the damage in done, and in the immediate aftermath, that are telling. Violence hammers home ones values. Violence is the great equalizer; which makes it all the more terrifying.

I take a pull from my beer, exhale, and think: I’m glad to be alive.

Vampire for the Lord

France is a country that possesses in its character a certain sense of beaten back Catholicism. The French remain latently Catholic. This manifests itself in an Evelyn Waugh-esque studied conservatism of person that gives way to hedonistic impulses born from prolonged self-repression. With the high secularism apparent in the modern French societal idiom, this poses an interesting dichotomy. As for myself, while I personally want as little to do with Catholicism as possible, I must admit, I have, how shall I say this, never missed an opportunity to “take communion”. It is a culture then that loves to imbibe the blood of Christ, even if it agrees with me that perhaps the body tastes better with a bit of Roquefort. I am then a quite proper vampire for the Lord. A positively liturgical drinker if you will; albeit one who delights in the more macabre side of Catholic literalism.

Which is entertainingly where my prior knowledge of Montpellier came from before living here. Certainly, I’ve visited France before but I’ve never been this far south. The Montpellier regional wines however, are noted by Thucydides (though sadly not Herodotus, who remains the favored Greek historian). These wines may have slid some since then, many holding a slight metallic bite that is not necessarily bad with food, but which seems to be the impact of the international decision in recent years to ratchet up alcohol contents of wine, which in my mind has damaged the flavors. But I digress. The Greeks clearly knew something of Montpellier as they left their share of borderline creepy artifacts to be restored and considered by the population of the city in the years that followed. For example:



I think that I am also beginning to feel a certain dislocation vis-à-vis the English language. While it is easy enough to speak English in France, vocabulary limits dictate that certain things can simply not be discussed; as I also lack the French vocabulary to breech certain subjects. It is interesting to feel ones linguistic capabilities slowly drift away, to be mangled on the shore of platitudes. It genuinely pays here to be demure, coy even. The French, deep in their Catholic recovery are reserved, and often plane spoken. The hedonism only boils to the surface at certain carefully considered moments.

I spent last Saturday in the Pyrenees, two hours to the northeast of Montpellier. The snow stood in marked contrast to the Mediterranean. Again, blood of Christ for breakfast makes a bountiful if slightly disorienting morning. I have every intention of attributing this to the ‘religious fervor’ induced by early morning consumption of the bodily fluids of the heavenly host rather than its alcoholic content. It is clear to me that we need reclassify wine as food, leaving the ostentatious and often time unfair characterization of ‘booze’ to the harder stuff. We, (my party and myself and not to be confused with the royal we) of course moved on to the harder stuff as we charged down the side of hills in uncontrollable sledges, often colliding with the mountainside, trees, and I hope not small animals. The snow was nice, playing out a blanket of the virginal that we insured was soon to be irreversibly defiled. Following this was a long, semi conscious bus ride home and a celebration of such indisputable gusto that it was days before I was able to declare myself free of hangover.

I’ve also managed to abandon my recently acquired habit of smoking; in the midst of a city-wide Mardi Gras celebration no less. As a result, my body is deep in a nicotine crisis. My newly carcinogen starved lungs can’t decide whether to thank me or simply play dead. This weekend, I finally see the Mediterranean, which is some consolation.

Babel

The gift of wit is one which is fleeting, and, in a language that one is only semi-proficient in, it is unreachable. Il ne traduire pas, the French say and as Steve Martin once noted, "it is as though they (the French) have a completely different word for everything." As an American, I have been abandoned to the other International students (and there are a lot of them). The factionalization and ghettoizaton of the international student community has proven to be the way of the world here. It is true, the French students will interact with you, but as a foreigner they regard you somewhat differently. Us internationals all have one thing in common: our French isn’t quite up to snuff so we speak in contorted pidgins. It is as though the Tower of Babel tumbled down upon us, spiting our attempts to reach the sublime, or at least the coherent.

The cost of everything in Europe remains astronomical, especially when one is trying to live on dollars in a country that is paid in Euros. My Spartan studio, which will bleed me dry over the course of the year, is comfortable enough despite its simplicity and its situation within the foreign student ghetto means frequent interactions with the ever-shifting allegiances of ethnic groups. Are the Brazilians or the Czechs now in ascendancy? Are the Germans and the Belgians conspiring against the Italians? Somehow, the in-jokes aside, and like the European Union it all holds together in a sort of sub-Machiavellian pseudo utopia, although it does lead to interesting group dynamics.

The ever-shifting set of tongues I have had to learn for survival purposes (as simply French will not cut it) has reasserted my appreciation for dissonance and disharmony. Sometimes white noise can have its value. Such was the underlying idiom in classical composition during the 20th century, but no matter, Stravinsky, Shostakovich and the rest were lunatics, tortured by the totalitarian parading as the utopian. But this is the 21st century, and we have the one Universal: club music – which is the same everywhere. Club music is what happens when thousands of years in the evolution of music theory; counter-point, harmony and the rest is suddenly abandoned. It stands in rugged juxtaposition to humanities' supposed societal evolution as a whole. The Universal language breaks down to American club hits that have been subsequently exported to an eager European audience. And so the Tower of Babel will be restored. Through club music.

Europeans love everything American, but mostly the pop culture. They watch our mass media and expect us to have some kind of insights into it, and often I don’t have the heart to tell them that so much of it is simply trash. The fascination with my Americanisms places me in a weird position of cultural identification with a culture that I have never quite clicked with. Such are the caveats of identity politics. This became all the more chilling upon my collision with a gaggle of drunken American girls – the most decadent imaginable – ripping across the main boulevard screaming about their need to defecate to anyone and everyone who would listen. They were the sort of puritan raised Minnesotans who one really wonders if American affluence has managed to defeat natural selection by failing to weed out. For the first time in my life, I simply pretended not to be able to speak English, and wondered if Dante would have reserved an as of yet unnumbered circle of hell for them. A French girl I was with asked me: “Is everyone that vulgar in America?” The best I could respond with was, “Well, only in the Midwest.”

Montpellier itself is an interesting city. It is a mix of old Europe and high modernism, and all presented against the backdrop of the Mediterranean. The skies at sunset turn a shade of lavender that I have never seen before, the sun’s rays refracted at just the right angle to coax the unique from the spectrum - dragging the invisible into the visible. Masonry of a bygone age marks the buildings – buildings that have stood for centuries. The grand boulevard in the center of the city sits only a hundred yards from an arc de triumph while a still functional (as a result of restoration) Roman aqueduct feeds water to the lower reaches of the city. Artifice outlasts Empire. Buildings hold as men crumble into the dust, taking with them their bitter secrets and shames. And of course, Montpellier has its suburbs, its strip developments and the like, but they are not as obtrusive as their American counterparts and they are certainly less far reaching.

Montpellier is without the bide culture of Paris – that culture that allows French men to walk around with that sort of twisted confidence that can only be gained when one hasn’t showered in weeks, yet one knows that ones cock is clean. This lack of self importance in turn further endears Montpellier. It’s vaguely quaint, but still, you can’t turn a corner without breathing history. One can imagine 19th century intellectuals, smashed on opiates and absinthe, rallying here to avoid actual work. This aside, the town is without intellectual pretension; the idiomatic expressions are down to earth and salty. Coarse verse rarely fails to delight. As I ruddy myself with scotch and night falls swiftly, I am left thinking, "this will do."