Recently in Culture Category
Your Score : 92 credits
You're an extreme sci-fi geek! You're probably wearing your very own homemade TRON costume right now!
 |
I received 92 credits on The Sci Fi Sounds Quiz How much of a Sci-Fi geek are you? |
| Take the Sci-Fi Movie Quiz | |
Can a good soul help me find where this statue can be found, and who made it? I've been told this shot was taken in Buenos Aeres, but that it can be seen in Europe as well. I find it particularly beautiful.
P.S. my French readers are more active, as always ;-). Thanks to Coremaker, this seems to be a gargoyle, the "Gárgola del Puente del Reino en Valencia" in Spain. Here are more pics: 1, 2.
P.S. 2 And KA writes that those are four statues decorating the Del Regne bridge in Valencia. They were designed by Salvador Monleón, the engineer who built the bridge.
I like Paul Graham's essays, a lot. But I must admit I feel like Jeremy Keith.
Among the many things that our friends from the U.S.A. don't get, are cultural differences. The slogan of the European Union is "United in diversity". I guess that sentence just doesn't make sense for most of them. I know a lot of folks in North America, and the ones who can grasp that concept have extensively travelled outside their continent (when they're not children of immigrants). It's a matter of priorities I guess. When on top of your list are money and oil, your perspective is surely different than when it's peace and quality of life (outside the office, that is). Also the fact that we have entire countries, with their own language, that have barely more inhabitants than Paris must be some kind of mystery for a huge number of people. Funnily enough, it's always from people who can only speak one language: English. And they're still surprised each time they discover it's not even the first language out there.
But can you trust people who think that food is an unfortunate necessity of life --and eating a waste of time-- when it's a pleasure? I really discovered that in New York, where too many folks there seem only fascinated by the "experience" of huge fancy places with obsequious waiters carrying pepper grinders longer than a full baguette, and a lot of other tricks designed to make sure they're not paying attention to the food served there.
Oh well, let's take this with a bit of salt. The French may not go anywhere but my intuition tells me that French isn't going anywhere either ;-). Funny, really.
Happy Hol Merry Christmas!
Merry is better. It means drunk.
It's 100% Champagne tonight here. I guess that 13 bottles for five will be enough (we had 14 but we couldn't resist popping one earlier and we're not superstitious ;-). And for those of you who always fall for the big marketing French brands such as Veuve Cliquot, try some much better quality-price ones such as Ruinart and Deutz, you'll be surprised.
And as we say here, in the land of political incorrectness, joyeux Noël !
I'm learning my way into being a better San Franciscan. It seems to me that it boils down to this: be a happy onion. Let me explain, starting with the onion part.
I heard once Woody Allen saying that the worst winter he ever experienced was a summer in San Francisco. If you want to survive here, you need to dress with layers. Lots of layers. In short, all San Franciscans are onions.
And happy ones. Actually happiness seems to be a social requirement here if you don't want to end up isolated like a Bush supporter at the Pride Parade. At least that's what my personal usher and best local friend tells me. This trait is much harder for the Parisian I am than dressing in layers -- don't peel a French onion too far or you'll cry ;-). Anyway, here is my first foray into that spirit:
Lanet -- Wanna go to a concert tonight, the Four Seasons? Have you heard them?
Me (the French way) -- Lanet, someone who's not heard les quatre saisons is either deaf or dead.
Me (the local way) -- Honey, I would love to hear the Four Seasons for the 400th time!
If I ever settle here, I'll have to start a village gaulois.
BTW, the concert was great, thanks ;-).
Or "Anti-Bush film tops Cannes awards" as the BBC puts it, or "'Fahrenheit 9/11': Connecting With a Hard Left" as the Washington Post puts it.
Funnily enough, Michael Moore's own web site is still sporting old news from before the ceremony. The man surely is overwhelmed by now ;-).
I can't resist to cite Bill Humpries and his What's a Pam Door?:
- Moore got more publicity.
- Quentin Tarantino, chair of this year's jury, got to throw a huge bomb.
The chattering classes on the Right have been fed raw meat, and can now rant on about French perfidity. (Even if the international jury was chaired by an American.)
I can't wait to read the Shorter DenBeste on this.
- The chattering classes on the Left count coup (see first paragraph.)
I can't wait to see this movie and, hopefully, Americans won't have to wait until after the election to see it too!
Apropos of the Janet Jackson affair -- which quickly passed my radar and was instantly moved to disposable memory with the label "typical American 100% violence/0% nudity tolerance imbalance" -- Adrian Holovaty has an interesting take on participatory journalism:
Well, we all know what happened during that performance. And I saw it -- live. Er, I thought I saw it. I wasn't sure. The camera cut away so quickly that I couldn't really tell what'd happened.
So I did what any self-respecting Internet-junkie would do: I flipped open my laptop and hit the Web.
CNN had nothing. MSNBC had nothing. Neither did the New York Times, Washington Post or Chicago Tribune. Google News didn't say anything about it, either. I checked a bunch of other big-media sites but couldn't find any coverage.
He found the story breaking at Fark:
Read the archived comment thread to see the story unfold. There were first-person accounts of watching the event. There was background information. There was analysis and piecing-together of the facts. And, most importantly, there was an effort to distribute any and all raw information about the incident, mostly in the form of high-resolution TV-screen-grabs and video.
It was clear that all of this was fueled by a desire to get to the bottom of the story -- a desire not unlike that of a professional reporter.
Could this have been a glimpse of the future? Could a much more traditional news story be covered in the same way, given the right mix of a dedicated audience and enabling technology?
A refreshing view and interesting questions, from a journalist, compared to the usual reactions of ignorance, doubt or contempt that many journalists display to micro-publications on the Internet.
Meanwhile, in the country which goes for all the violence but no nudity, Matt Haughey writes that he'd like to someday live in a country where a quick nipple shown on TV isn't the end of civilization. Well Matt, Damelon Kimbrough suggests a place (warning: link is not work-safe). A very nice place, I concur.
The BBC announces that production is under way on the Tertiary Phase of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, with episodes due to begin airing on Radio 4 in spring 2004.
"Every sci-fi fan wants their old show to be reborn. Fans of Doctor Who have a new series to look forward to, and Thunderbirds fans have a feature film but Hitchhikers Guide fans have both."
Yummy!
More readings:
- Update: The Register's take (I love when I blog something before it appears on El Reg :-)
- The BBC's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy fan site.
- Douglas Adams "official" site.
- Floor 42, another fan site.
- Google search on Douglas Adams
Note to my friends who tell me (with a slightly jealous voice) that my English writings are too difficult to understand: I have tried to read the Hitchhiker's Guide in English many, many times, and it's frankly too difficult for me to grab all the jokes. I pay my respect to the French translator, who wrote on the back cover of almost every book in the series that he would never do it again and did a terrific job each time! And I mourn Douglas Adams just as every fan.
Jason Kottke wonders about Bilingual conversations. The comments thread after his post is worth reading. Here is my take at his questions.
- Does the subject matter, um, matter? Are sports more "English" and politics more "Spanish"?
No, politics is more French, as is cursing apparently :-). In my technical field, I tend to use English, but I could use French although with some conscious effort and not for everything -- e.g. I dislike the French "toile" which I never use for "web".
- How much of language switching is about brevity? Maybe people base word/phrase choice on how quickly they can speak a particular phrase in a particular language.
Nothing. Unless you are referring to the ability to express yourself faster in one particular language, which then would be (for me) in a particular context or subject matter (see previous question).
- Or is it expressiveness? The "perfect phrase" for what a speaker is trying to convey to their partner might exist in only one of the two languages.
Yes, it can be. Truer with expressions.
- How do the grammars mix...if at all? Would a French speaker use English syntax when speaking French (or vice versa)?
No, that would be franglish or franglais. Syntax do not mix well. Codeswitching vocabulary is probably more frequent.
- Does code switching happen in writing as well, or is it strictly non-verbal?
Less likely, because you can afford more thinking time while writing, and can re-read and correct. I believe that codeswtiching happens mostly in verbal form because you cannot dedicate a lot of brain power to monitor your speech while expressing your thoughts.
- How fluent does a speaker have to be in both languages in order to codeswitch fluidly?
I guess the more fluent, the most fluid (ahem, I hope that is the correct form ;-).
- How much does a speaker's primary language determine language choice? Does their ability to codeswitch improve if they were bilingual from birth?
I don't know. It seems related to the previous question (being fluent), and the next one.
- Will a strong codeswitcher speak to his partner's stronger language?
The question I'm then tempted to ask, is how much codeswitching comes from a deliberate choice vs. an unconscious one?
- If one person finishes a remark in English, will her partner start her remark in English? What would prompt them to go back to the other language?
That probably cannot be generalized. I discussions with bilingual colleagues, we tend to follow a switch, but not always.
- Are some combinations of languages not amenable to codeswitching? Is Italian/Japanese codeswitching possible?
Not a clue. But I'm amazed at the huge amount of fast, almost natural codeswitching I can hear everyday in Paris between French and Arabic or African languages. That is fascinating, sometimes I can almost follow a conversation when the switching is near 50% or more French (I know this is impolite, but what can I do when two people speak out loud next to me in the subway? Get an iPod? May be.)
I'd like to add that switching between languages, for me, requires some time and energy to properly switch my thinking first. When I've successfully switched my thinking to the language I want to speak or write, I don't have to dedicate too much energy into monitoring clashes. When I'm tired, this process gets difficult or sometimes fails -- i.e. I think in French but speak in English, the worst situation (the opposite can be true) -- which then requires a significant amount of energy to correct the resulting frenglish. Additionally, and I think this is related to the power of English vs. my mother language, I have the feeling that it now takes me more efforts to avoid using English words in French than the other way around (this is related to my professional field). But I'm consciously keeping codeswitching as low or inexistent as possible, an effort that -- I hope -- is visible to the bilingual readers of my two weblogs.
Oh, and now I curse in English ;-)
The New Yorker has published an article by Adam Gopnik titled The anti-anti-Americans, a point of view of an American about France and Paris.
Before I tell you how great this article is, there are few things I need to complain about. This is just because I’m French, so I’m expected to complain.
First, Bertrand Delanoë is pictured as the “green and gay mayor of Paris”. He is socialist, not green. So, let’s say he’s the socialist and gay mayor of Paris. Although this is as relevant as depicting Chirac as the right-wing and heterosexual President. Oh, sorry! I’m a little ahead of my time in that thinking, we’re just not there yet (but that the head of the capital city and one of the most prominent and popular political figures in France is overtly gay will help a great deal).
Secondly, and I’m starting to believe that our social system is so far away from anything conceivable for an American that it must be pure science-fiction, Gopnik makes two misleading shortcuts about the recent conflict raised by the “intermittents du spectacle” (part-time workers in show business, as he translates it).
Basically, for thirty years or so part-time actors and night-club bouncers and musicians in France have had a ridiculously generous unemployment-insurance deal, which, owing to the precariousness of their situation, lets them work for about three months to collect a years worth of unemployment insurance.
The span of the insurance is long indeed but it is only a fraction of their salary, which is not known to be particularly high (I don’t know of a high profile actor in France who benefits from this system). But the main point, which Gopnik completely misses, is that those who benefit the most from this system are the show business companies and the State. It helps companies save about 25% on employment taxes compared to the normal social system and they profited from it as much as they could, bringing all their personnel, including the switchboard operator, under this “intermittents du spectacle” regime. It also helps the State (as well as regions and cities) diminish cultural spending by forcing troupes to organize themselves as companies or non-profit organizations and hire themselves as part-time workers (it’s technical, but the point is that it is cheaper for a public body to pay a bill than to subsidize a theater.) If you miss the factual evidence that those who benefit the most from this system are those who are at the top of the food chain, you are missing the root cause of the conflict. I don’t think that the switchboard operators who get fired every three months so that their employer can save on their social costs would qualify this system as “ridiculously generous”!
When the country and its joys can be shut down by part-time trombonists, however, something is wrong, or at least ridiculous.
Considering his colorful and accurate description of French strikes and protests, I’m sure Gopnik knows better. Those strikes did cause problems to many festivals this summer, but they did not even come close to shutting the country down. Watch France during September, that’s usually when the serious “shut down the country” business happens.
End of the compulsory complaint, resuming normal report.
I liked the article a lot, actually. I have not read the books he mentions except Emmanuel Todds Après lEmpire (After the Empire). I would certainly not rate Todd’s book as anti-American, unless you are using Bush’s scale (if you don’t agree with me, you are anti-American). This is a must-read book to me, but I don’t know if it has been translated in English.
What is striking, and a little scary, in Paris this year is the absence of anti-Americanismof a lucid, coherent, tightly argued alternative to American unilateralism that is neither emptily rhetorical nor mere daydreaming. (In fact, it is easier to find this kind of argument in Britain than in France.)
We took five days to (re)visit Paris along with two American friends, and I’m happy to report they are still alive. Actually, I think they loved it :-).
For the first time, French people care about their houses, a leading French journalist complains in shock. That was always a little England thingand now you find intelligent Parisians talking all the time about home improvements. This narrowing of expectations and horizons is evident already in the French enthusiasm for cartoon versions of French life, as in Amélie, of a kind the French would once have thought fit only for tourists. It has a name, the Venetian alternativemeaning a readiness to turn ones back on history and retreat into a perfect simulacrum of the past, not to reject modernity but to pretend it isnt happening.
This is, to me, the most thought-provoking part of this article. It should be noted that Amélie (the movie) did get this critic when it was released — a film depicting a clean and nostalgic vision of a France that do not exist anymore (provided it ever existed in the first place). I also heard the same exact critique of Lartigue’s vision (as being nihilistic).
But is this exercise of shielding ourselves from an unwanted reality only a Parisian, or even French trait? And isn’t the fact that we are aware of it, and feeling uncomfortable about it, a positive sign? Don’t give up hope on France, we’re not ready to stop complaining about our friends and everything anytime soon!
[Thanks Edouard for the link]
