The French Journal

A word or two of explanation...

While working on another writing project, fulfilling some professional obligations, and handling a few personal matters, my time for the blog has become very limited. I have no real opportunity to research and dig for the new items that give me pleasure and teach me new things about my beloved France, and that I get joy from sharing with you.

I'm going to put The French Journal on hiatus as I work through the crunch period. My apologies.

Sarko the Vulgarian

Let's start the day with a commentary from The New York Times entitled "A Lowbrow in High Office Ruffles France."  Its premise: culture-loving France, used to leaders who hobnob with poets and intellectuals, is somewhat aghast with the antics of its Celine Dion-loving, text-messaging, jeans-wearing president. The main hope for the future? The new Mrs. Sarkozy. One interviewee "speculated the other morning that Ms. Bruni and her sister, a filmmaker and actress, might make a kind of project of the president, culturally speaking: Pygmalions to his Galatea." Hilarious.

Commenters! Merci!

It's evident that travel -- and the work that accumulated at home while I traveled -- has kept me from regularity (ahem!) during the past week or so. The worst is over. I'd like to thank the visitors who commented over that time. A few notes:

• Mimi:  If you make great macarons, you are my new best friend forever.
• Too Many Frogs, etc.: Good luck with Mamam! Take her for a run!
• France Tales: Thanks for the Carcassone info. I hope I can take your recommendations some day.
• La Belette: We were had! But thanks for stopping by.
• Towards Paris: Great to meet you! As reported, however, the Tower is safe.
• Learn French with the Bible: Hope you saw my hat-tip yesterday.
• Anne Marie: Elaine S. has her uses!
• Polly: Glad that it evoked good feelings for you. Moms are important.
• Blue: I had fun (About this time of year, New Englanders forget what warm weather is. The trip was a pleasant reminder.)
• Bob, Bob, Bob: Thanks for you loyalty! I'm glad the site is remembering you (but don't get too comfortable).

Everyone else! Thanks for coming by! And there's lots of good reading in the embedded links above.

The flip side: Traveling to Paris with Mom

There are plenty of stories about family visits to Paris, and how to negotiate the city with kids in tow. A recent article in the Austin American-Statesman has a different equation: taking one's mother to Paris. Mom, in this case, is in her seventies, and has developed a late-in-life passion for art. And like all mothers, she frets about what might go wrong. Once in Paris, however, her joy is apparent, as is her daughter's joy in sharing it. A trip to the Louvre is an epiphany. The daughter, who habitually does outdoorsy trips when vacationing, concludes: "I wasn't sure how a more urban vacation would feel...I shouldn't have worried. I got a surge of happiness of another sort visiting Paris with my mom. She told me it was the best trip of her life."

Low gear/première vitesse

FYI. I'm out of town this week, so although there will be new postings over the next several days, they will be less regular and fewer in number. I'll be back to normal next Monday.

Linguality and me: First impressions

One of my favorite Christmas gifts last year was a membership in Linguality, a book club which features recent works in French annotated with vocabulary lists to assist with translating. Here are some first impressions.

I'm a finicky reader, and in a normal year I read between 30 and 40 books, not nearly enough. I usually discourage friends from buying books for me -- unless I've mentioned a title -- because my reading time is so precious that I want to spend it on items that interest me. I'm fond of nineteenth century fiction, books about France, good modern fiction like Anne Enright's The Gathering, a few mystery writers, books about movies, and an occasional wild card. I enjoy long reads.

I offer this background because anyone who joins Linguality puts his or her trust in the tastes of the editors, unlike, let's say, The Book of the Month Club, where there's a main selection but other options are possible. Perhaps, as Linguality's catalog grows, older titles will be offered as alternatives, but for now you must take what you are given.

A Francophile in NYC, Part 2: Shopping, Eating

More on my NYC visit: this time, shopping and restaurants.

Following the Met, I went for a stroll along Madison Avenue to window shop, and my Francophile spirit called me into a couple of spots. First up was La Maison du Chocolat, familiar to me from blog entries I've posted about the most expensive chocolates in the world. I might have been able to resist if the candy had been their only offerings, but they also carried macarons and displayed them in the window; a person can only be so strong. The macarons -- sweet, flavored, fluffy clouds -- were promptly inhaled. The chocolates have not yet been sampled; I intend to ration them carefully -- starting tonight. (I will not write daily entries about each little bite.)

About a block or two further along was another chocolaterie, Debauve & Gallais, a place that had sentimental appeal to me because one of their Paris outposts was near to an apartment I'd rented a few years ago. Because I'd already spent most of my cats' inheritance at La Maison, I passed by D & G --tristement but solvent.

Near Rockefeller Center I returned to a favorite bookstore: La Librairie de France. Mostly, I go there to browse; the place is notoriously expensive, even moreso with the exchange rate. I held in my hands a copy of Alabama Song, this year's Prix Goncourt winner, but couldn't bring myself to spend $60 for a small paperback. There are more affordable items in the store's basement.

Word is that the store -- the oldest tenant in the center plaza -- will lose its lease next year due to high rents. It's a bit of an outrage: the tenants that have taken over other storefronts are merchants like Crabtree & Evelyn, which you can find in every mall in the USA. La Librarie says they will maintain their on-line business.

Why I'll never go to Cafe Cluny in Greenwich Village again. There's a restaurant location in Greenwich Village that's special to me; my friend Michael had worked there. Even though the decor and name and menu change regularly, I return now and then, because it's a place where I can recall many good times which Michael and I shared: great food, hanging out at the end of a shift, joking with the chefs and staff. When I researched the site before my trip and discovered that it was now a French bistro, I immediately made reservations. What serendipity! Or so I thought.

First, the good news: The food isn't bad. It's not stand-out -- a frisee salad was overdressed, and my short rib main course tasted great but looked sloppy. Yet I've had much worse.

Even faint praise, however, is not in line for the service and atmosphere. A small place, the restaurant's current owners have overpacked its rooms, and the noise level is close to painful. The service people swoop down to remove your plates before you've finished chewing the last bite. But what really made me hate Cafe Cluny was that we -- out of towners and newcomers -- were seated in a high traffic spot that the staff knows is uncomfortable. This problem wasn't severe at the start, but when -- about the time I ate my appetizer -- a party was seated at a table near me, the host came by to warn me I should sit closer to my table because of the passers-by. In other words, she knew this was a problem spot and I was the sucker they gave it to. For the next forty minutes, my chair was kicked, I was jostled by the speeding bus boys, other customers rubbed against me. By the end of the main course, I was so angry I couldn't speak. (If this problem had been evident before the meal had begun, I would have asked to be moved, but our food was already being served when the shoving began.)

Given the turnover at the location, I'm hopeful that some day a new restaurant will take this one's place. Until that happens, I'll never return. They've murdered some lovely memories.

Rerun: The Great Directors

If you want to study French cinema, let me offer an approach. Following is a list of the great French directors, plus the title of at least one of their masterpieces. Anyone who wants to learn more would benefit from checking out the oeuvres of these artists.

There are too many links for me to manufacture, so for more information, go to the International Movie Data Base (IMDB).

• Bertrand Blier, Trop belle pour toi/Too Beautiful for You
• Robert Bresson, Journal d'une cure de compagne/Diary of a Country Priest
• Alain Cavalier, Terese
• Marcel Carne, Les enfants du paradis/Children of Paradise
• Claude Chabrol, La femme infidel/The Unfaithful Wife
• Rene Clair, Sous les toits de Paris/Under the Rooftops of Paris
• Henri Clouzot, Les salaires du peur/The Wages of Fear
• Jean Cocteau, Beauty and the Beast
• Jacques Demy, Les parapluies de Cherbourg/The Umbrellas of Cherbourg
• Michel Deville, Péril en la demeure/Death in a French Garden
• Constintan Costa-Gavras, Z
• Julien Duvivier, Pepe le Moko
• Able Gance, Napoleon
• Jean-Luc Godard, Breathless
• Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Amelie
• Patrice Leconte, Ridicule
• Jean-Pierre Melville, Army of Shadows
• Marcel Ophuls, La pitie et le chagrin/The Sorrow and the Pity
• Maurice Pialat, A nos amours
• Alain Resnais, La guerre est finie/The War is Over
• Jean Renoir, Le regle de jeu/Rules of the Game
• Jacques Rivette, Celine et Julie va bateau/Celine and Julie Go Boating
• Eric Rohmer, Ma nuit chez Maud/My Night at Maud's
• Claude Sautet, Un coeur en hiver/A Heart in Winter
• Jacques Tati, Les vacances de M. Hulot/Mr. Hulot's Holiday
• Andre Techine, Les roseaux sauvages/Wild Reeds
• Bertrand Tavernier, La vie et rien d'autre/Life and Nothing But
• Francois Truffaut, Jules et Jim
• Agnes Varda, Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse/The Gleaners and I
• Jean Vigo, L'Atalante

This is a beginning.  If you have other suggestions, please add them!

Rerun: My favorite Paris guidebooks

I've been to Paris five or six times in the past several years, but I still pack a small library whenever I travel there. Here are the guidebooks that I usually take with me.

• Walking Paris by Gilles Desmond has thirty walks in different areas of the city, each of which lasts about two hours. By now I've completed most of the walks, and they've added immeasurably to my enjoyment of Paris. I've poked around alleys, passages, little museums, parks, cemeteries, and more. For those of you who want to get away from the heavily traveled tourist routes, this is the one to get (although, to be frank, tourists are everywhere in Paris; it's just a matter of how many).

Walking Paris is overdue for an update; once or twice it may advise you to go someplace that's no longer accessible (there's usually an easy workaround). And it may not be the only guide you'll need for a first trip. Despite these qualifications, it's one that I treasure.

Rerun: La Langue

It seems as if I’ve been trying to learn how to speak French for decades, and if you count intervals, I have. I could almost write a version of The Twelve Days of Days of Christmas:

Twelve language CDs

Eleven little textbooks

Ten adult classes

Nine private lessons

Eight Champs Elysses

Seven Paris Matches

Six dictionaries

TV5!

Four years of high school

Three terms college

Two workbooks

And a neighbor who comes from Canada!