about me

I'm an Irish guy living in France. I like music, books, creative writing, art, history, vegetarianism, people, and chocolate.

blog roll

Why not check out these links?


Search

Sunday 16 November 2008

Books

I was just browsing Youtube videos and found this short stop-motion, which I thought was very sweet and cleverly-done. Bravo to Molly Green for making it.


Saturday 15 November 2008

Pink Elephants


Here in Reims, the Socialist Congress is currently taking place. It is part of a process during which members of the French Parti Socialiste have to agree on a new party secretary. This is a tricky task as they need someone popular enough to unite the whole Party. During a preliminary vote, Ségolène Royal, failed candidate of the last presidential election, came out with the highest number of votes — but only by a small margin. She is reasonably popular in France, but she is rather pro-free market and authoritarian, more a social democrat than a socialist. In fact, some believe that if she had become president, the only thing which would have been different from Sarkozy would have been the rhetoric. Which is probably true. But several big names in the Socialist Party are uniting against her : several candidates continue to fight for the leadership. When members of the Socialist Party actually manage to secure positions of power in their party, they stay there. Forever. (Because of this the French media nicknames them "the elephants"). And that's the major problem with the French Socialist Party. They spend so much time bickering that they don't concentrate on opposing the government — not in a responsible, constructive way. Which means that many left-leaning French people are sick of the party.

What are the alternatives? The Communist Party, which abandoned the dictatorship of the proletariat several years ago, is what the French Socialist Party was a few decades ago : truely Socialist and reformist. But their popularity hit an all-time low during the 2002 elections and they never quite recovered. Perhaps it's because they are perceived as not being very young and dynamic.
A truely popular figure among French leftists is Olivier Besancenot, a trotskyist postman and leader of the Revolutionary Communist League. He was one of the candidates for the French presidency last year and I went to see him speak one evening when he was in Reims. He was small, dressed in jeans and a jumper, without a tie, but he was the most charismatic of all the candidates. Man, he knew how to talk. He is known for his speeches —he never uses any notes, he just memorises them entirely or makes it up as he goes along! He is especially popular among young people, because of his youth and passion. I like many of his ideas, but frankly, they are really very utopian. But what really bothers me, however, is the fact that his party hasn't given up the idea of dictatorship of the proletariat and revolutionary struggle. Even if they never put it into practise, it's still in their manifesto, and I can't condone any party or politician who sees violence as a solution.
On the same line, there's the trotskyist Lutte Ouvrière ("Worker's Struggle") a party whose leader Arlette Laguillers is a running joke, partly because she's been steadily leading the party since the 1970s. She's a friendly wee granny now, but it's harder to pull off being a revolutionary at that age. And besides, the party has the reputation of working a bit like a cult or a Masonic lodge, because of its watertight hierarchy system.
That leaves no other real party to oppose capitalism and Sarkozy's increasingly thatcherist-gaullist politics. Well, there's the Greens, which I have a soft spot for, but they're not "watermelon" enough for me : plenty of green, but not enough red. It's hard to see to which extent they care about the people. They have a reputation of being a party for upper-middle-class bohemians...

It's hard not to be left disappointed by the Left.

What France needs is not so much a party as a movement, grassroots if possible, a sort of united popular front which would bring a viable alternative to capitalism. The French are good at protesting. Well, that's a first step, and "bravo" for that. But opposing is not enough. Creating, imagining, building and offering alternatives is the only way forward if the Left doesn't want to be left in the sidelines.

Thursday 13 November 2008

Anarchism : the next scapegoat?


Last week the SNCF (French national railway company) complained about several acts of sabotage which took place on its railway network. None of them put anyone's life in danger, and they apparently weren't done with the aim of derailing trains, but they had the potential of causing a lot of damage.
Just a day or two after the news hit the headlines, the French government anounced that they had already arrested a number of "suspected terrorists" : a group of "ultra-leftist autonomist anarchists".
What struck me (and a lot of French people) was that the government seemed to have moved very quickly... too quickly? Suspiciously quickly, at any rate.
Now all the newspapers are talking of the anarchist movement as if it's the next big terrorist threat. The people who were arrested were residents of an anarchist commune towards the South of France. According to Le Monde (the only newspaper which seems to have been unbiased in its coverage of the incident), there is absolutely no material evidence that they are in any way linked to the acts of sabotage. Which means that they are being detained only because of their political beliefs, under legislation which allows suspected terrorists to be detained up to four days without seeing a lawyer.
What really angered me is that Libération, which is supposed to be a centre-left newspaper, used the government's own terminology ("autonomist-anarchist movement") indiscriminately, tarring all anarchists with the same brush... as if anarchism was a single, monolithic movement, and a violent one at that. There is anarcho-syndicalism, pacifist anarchism, green anarchism, anarcho-capitalism, christian anarchism, anarcha-feminism... the list goes on and on. Lumping all those different ideologies and belief systems together is very unwise, and intellectually dishonest.
France has quite a strong leftist heritage, but not of a libertarian socialist kind... More of an authoritarian, statist type of leftism. The state is very centralised here, and it has been very strong for centuries : France has never had a strong parliamentarian tradition like in the UK or Germany. So I suppose that any ideology which attacks centralisation of power and a strong state is under threat of being targeted. And Sarkozy, although he is by no means a socialist, is firmly statist. Historians say he wields more power in France than Charles de Gaulle did back in the 1950s-1960s...
Is anarchism going to be France's next scapegoat? Only time will tell.

Monday 10 November 2008

Famine


Famine by Liam O'Flaherty follows a family of pratie farmers, the Kilmartins, as they face the potato blight, hunger, disease, the risk of eviction and British oppression in the Black Valley in County Kerry. The book is great in communicating what it must have felt like to struggle for life during the Great Irish famine of 1845-1849, and helps the reader understand why the trauma is so firmly engraved in the Irish psyche.
Liam O'Flaherty was a communist, and this is reflected in the novel, in which religious identity appears less important than class in defining dominant-dominated relationships. However O'Flaherty was no pacifist and this comes across very clearly, as he glorifies martyrdom, revolution and spreading blood for one's class and country. This talk of violence may seem naïve, misguided or even sinister to us today, but the book dates back to 1937, at a time when Ireland was a very young republic and was relying heavily on its set of Republican symbolism and myths to consolidate itself. But the novel does help give an idea of the suffering the Irish people went through during the Famine, which caused several of them to turn to violent revolutionary struggle.
The book is still relevant today as it deals with several issues that many people have to struggle with : identity, oppression, religious hypocrisy, violence/peace, and emigration.

There's No One as Irish as Obama...

Sunday 9 November 2008

Ch... Ch.. Changes

Hmm, I haven't blogged in ages... For once I actually have a valid excuse. I've been really busy these past few weeks. I started the second year of my Masters course : it's supposed to be a year where I can concentrate on writing my Masters thesis, but I have as many classes and more coursework than any previous year.
People in uni aren't too optimistic about the future these days. Partly because of the recession's promise of a new wave of unemployment. But also because our neoliberal government has made job cuts in the French "Éducation Nationale" for the second year in a row. Now there's almost no prospects for jobs as teachers or professors in university-level education, at least not in the field of the humanities... Which leaves must of us no other option than to "reorientate"—or leave the country. Which is one of the plans we're currently considering.

Monday 6 October 2008

Who's been sailing my airwaves?


The Dandy Warhols' ...Earth to the Dandy Warhols...

The album came out in the summer but I only got hold of it now. It's not revolutionary and it's probably not their best but it's classic Dandy psychedelia. The tunes aren't as catchy as Welcome to the Monkey House or Thirteen Tales from Urban Bohemia ; the songs are more similar to their earlier albums in that they need to be listened to several times to appreciate their true worth, but it's worth the effort.




Patrick Watson, Closer to Paradise.

I discovered this Canadian artist while listening to Deezer's indie pop/folk playlist. Closer to Paradise sounds a bit like what would happen if you got Jeff Buckley to sing on Radiohead's OK Computer, and enlisted Danny Elfman to play the glockenspiel, Tim Burton-style. Me likey very much.




Belle & Sebastian

I've been listening to them a lot recently, probably too much. What can I say... they're great pop songwriters! I can't say which album I like the best, but I've recently discovered their singles through the Push Barman to Open Old Wounds compilation. They've evolved quite a bit since their first album, but that's probably a good sign.

Thursday 25 September 2008

The Jungle


I finished Upton Sinclair's The Jungle just a few days ago. It's about a family of Lithuanians that has immigrated to the USA in the early 1900s, lured by the American Dream's promises of wealth and happiness, only to end up working in the infamous factories of the Beef Trust in "Packingtown", Chicago.

I was looking forward to the novel as I expected it to be a bit like Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath : both authors were investigative journalists and Socialists. Unfortunately Sinclair isn't as skilled a novelist as Steinbeck is : his characters are rather flat, so when the book's working-class hero,
Jurgis Rudkus, loses everything, it doesn't move you as much as when Tom Joad sees his family disintegrate. The plot isn't very solid, but it serves the author's purpose : to expose the gritty reality of life for the American underclass. And it's shocking : some of the things Sinclair describes are so horrible that he couldn't have made them up. He saw them during his investigations.

His muckraking novel shocked the nation, but not in the way Sinclair hoped for. Instead of striving to improve working people's conditions, all that the readers cared for were the parts in the books which dealt with the terrible lack of hygiene in the meat factories. (The public outcry actually led to a Pure Food Act).
"I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach", Sinclair lamented.

But what interested me the most about the Jungle was the fact that it's a Socialist book, written by a dedicated Socialist in 1906, just a decade before the Russian Revolution. It's a socialism that hasn't yet discovered the excesses it would lead to under Soviet rule, and yet you can already detect some of the seeds of this future state-socialism. For example, the ''people" are always referred to in a very paternalistic, patronising manner.
Yet Sinclair isn't completely utopian either; he very honestly states that Socialism won't solve all of the world's problems, that there will still be conflict, but he argues that it would be a better alternative to capitalism.

In the last chapters, once Jurgis has seen the light (Socialism is clearly described as a new "dispensation", a new "revelation"), he witnesses several discussions between Socialists with very different ideas : for example a debate about religion between a Swedish professor and anarchist and an American ex-minister. The latter argues,
in Tolstoyan fashion, that Christianity has been distorted by the institutional church and that Christ's message of peace, love and social justice has been forgotten. (It is worth noting that Upton Sinclair was himself some sort of a Christian socialist.) Something which was true in Sinclair's time, and which is equally true in Western christianity today, where the Church-body has become the church-institution, where spiritual and material salvation are seperated and where man-made rules become more important than compassion and love.

I'll finish with a quotation from the novel. Referring to a bunch of rich christians trying to evangelise the starving poor, the narrator exclaims:


"They were trying to save their souls- and who but a fool could fail to see that all that was the matter with their souls was that they had not been able to get a decent existence for their bodies?
"

Sunday 24 August 2008

Holidays...

I won't be posting for a while, as we're leaving in a few days to go on holidays for a couple of weeks. See you soon. =)

Wednesday 20 August 2008

A Really Inconvenient Truth

A Really Inconvenient Truth is an analysis of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth and a critique of capitalism by American eco-socialist Joel Kovel, who ran against Ralph Nader for the Green Party's Presidential nomination in 2000 .
If you're a hardened capitalist, you'll probably hate this video. Otherwise you should have a look.



The main point Kovel makes is that you can't try to stop environmental crisis and the thrashing of our planet without challenging the capitalist system, and all that it entails.
I really appreciated the fact that Kovel makes it clear that we, as individuals, have to change our lifestyle of unabashed consumerism. Too many socialists are busy attacking capitalism (which is a good thing in itself) but aren't ready to change any of their own habits.

Tuesday 19 August 2008

Horse before the week ends


I've just received the strangest phone call ever.






Phone rings.
"Allô?"
"This is (so-and-so), do you need horse before the end of the week?"
"Huh... Sorry? And you are...?"
"This is (so-and-so). Do you need horse before the end of the week?"
"Horse?"
"Yes, don't you need any?"
"I... think you've got the wrong number."
"Is this not (some phone number)?"
"Nope."
"Oh, sorry sir. Bye!"

Hope she finds the right number or some unlucky person will not be getting horse before the end of the week. Whatever that means.

Saturday 16 August 2008

Let the Good Times Roll

A good friend of ours, Donna, stayed at our place for four nights. She lives in the Netherlands now and we hadn't seen her for almost a year, so it was great to spend time with her again. We really enjoyed the fellowship ("yea the fellowship!") and spent a lot of time talking, often till the wee hours of the morn, catching up orelse re-dreaming the world. Other highlights included getting in the champagne cellars (where L works) and sampling the wine free of charge, a disco night, beer, watching the Omen (1976), going to cafés, complaining about society, beer, introducing Donna to (our version of) tecktonik dance and more beer.

Tuesday 12 August 2008

Amusing Ourselves to Death


Amusing Ourselves to Death : Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business is an enlightening book, and is an easy read. It was written over twenty years ago, back in 1985, but it's even more relevant now than it was then.
Its author, media theorist Neil Postman, is now dead, but Penguin published a 20th anniversary edition of the book, with a preface by Postman's son.

Postman argued that the change from the Age of Typography (the printed word) to the Age of Television has not only had a huge impact on Western culture, it has changed how we approach the issue of knowledge (epistemology). The written word can convey statements that can be either accepted as true or refuted, but images don't offer that possibility : they can ony be looked at.
The author illustrates this with the example of advertising : in the mid 19th century, advertisements in newspapers were paragraphs of rational discourse which gave information about the product. On 20th century TV advertising (and even more so on 21st TV as well as online advertising), slogans, jingles, music, pictures and videos are used, and there is no true description of the product itself : what is important is that it looks good on the silver screen. The actors are there not to give ant new insight about what they're presenting, but because they have pretty faces and look perfectly happy : implicitly promising the viewer that to reach a state of beatitude, all you need is to buy the latest car, or ipod, or chocolate bar.

If things stopped there, it would be bad enough. But it gets worse. Politics and democracy are threatened by television. To quote Postman, "we may have reached the point where cosmetics has replaced ideology as the field of expertise over which a politician must have competent control". In other words, images speak louder than words. It doesn't matter what a politician thinks about climate change or social justice or immigration, what really matters (to the viewer at least) is how good the politician looks on TV, how he speaks, how he dresses, where he goes on holiday, how pretty his wife and children are and so on. This was already the case in '85 when the book was written ; it has become the same in France with Sarkozy, the King of Bling, and his groupie wife Carla Bruni (who advertises for her husband through her music albums, among other sings). If we've begun to chose our rulers because they look good on the telly, that is a very scary fact. Hitler looked good in uniform.

To conclude, there is also an interesting chapter on religion and its relationship with TV : with the likes of televangelism. I'm not going to go into the details, but basically, the author argues that even if isn't the intention of TV preachers (though I may suggest that often it is), the fact of turning a religious service into a show and more significantly the fact of turning themselves into performers is, ironically, a form of blasphemy : the preacher is glorified, not the deity.

The book is really worth the read. And it needn't make you feel guilty about watching the telly : the author himself argues that the only harmless TV is "rubbish" TV. TV is okay as long as it sticks to mindless entertainment. It becomes dangerous when it starts dealing with serious issues... as it inevitably turns them into a form of entertainment.

Thursday 31 July 2008

Eagle vs Shark


I enjoyed watching Eagle vs Shark a few days ago. It's a kiwi rom com featuring Jemaine Clement (Flight of the Conchords), with a quirky, offbeat feel to it, in many ways comparable to Napoleon Dynamite : it has nunchucks, weird animal drawings, and strange dialogue.
The soundtrack is great, most of the tracks are by New Zealand indie band the Phoenix Foundation.

If you want to check it out, you'll find the link at the bottom of this post, but hurry! Movies uploaded to Youtube usually don't last long these days.

Monday 28 July 2008

Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton

Last week I finished a book I had started to read months ago, but never had time to finish because of coursework : Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton. Published in 1848, the novel had a lot of influence in its day, as it highlighted the plight of ordinary working people in Manchester in the 1840s. Being both a literature lover, a history enthusiast and a socialist, I had high expectations. And I wasn't disappointed.

I'm not going to say much about the plotline because I don't want to spoil the story for anyone. But the novel centres on two working class families and the struggles they go through everyday : hunger, disease, death of loved ones, appalling living and working conditions...

Elizabeth Gaskell was by no means a socialist so I wasn't expecting to find any socialist critique of capitalism in her novel. But she was a social reformer. Although she didn't want to see the end of the capitalist system, she was genuinely concerned about the plight of the less fortunate, and she set out to let England know about the terrible living conditions of the working people in Manchester. In fact, she exposed herself to a lot of criticism from the people who frequented her milieu, who were often mill owners and "masters", of the class which she berated in her novel for not being attentive to the workers' needs.

But the most important theme in the novel is arguably the theme of reconciliation. Gaskell was a Unitarian Universalist, in fact married to a Unitarian preacher, and she strongly believed in human goodness. Many have criticised her for this, but I don't think she meant it in a naïve way. She does seem to have believed in evil. But in an age when most people believed the working class to be a horde of brutish, degenerate and evil animals (remember that this was the age of phrenology and misapplied Darwinism), Gaskell was really eager to show that these people were in fact human beings, just like their masters, and she actually tried to explain why they sometimes resorted to violence. If the characters she created (both working people and "masters") are almost always redeemed from their propensity for evil, and ultimately become reconciled to their fellow human beings and to God, I don't think it's because of any naïveté on her part, but rather because she believed that it was really possible for people to change, and hoped to see it come true.

Saturday 26 July 2008

Parisienne Walkways

L was off work for three days last week, so on Wednesday we took our bikes and rode down the old tow-path by the canal, until we reached the end of the city. We continued a little until we found a small dirt track which we cycled down. Then we put down an old towel on the long, wild grass by a sunflower field and enjoyed a picknick under the burny midday sun. We later found a few trees and enjoyed the cool shade.
It wasn't exactly the open countryside — there was a village and a rather busy road not too far away — but it was good enough. When we looked to the North, all we could see was fields, woods and tiny little villages. It was nice to be away from the urban landscape, and, even if only for a few hours, be immersed in a more pastoral setting.

The following day we went to Paris. I don't have any pictures or film because we chose not to take our camera this time. It can be fun "documenting" trips but it can also be a hassle — I usally have more craic when I'm camera-free.
We started by visiting the Panthéon, which is right in the middle of the Latin Quarter, beside the Sorbonne university. Originally built as a church, the Panthéon is an impressive edifice which, since the revolution, has basically served as a temple to the French nation-state. All the "great men" of France are buried there. It's not the kind of thing I'm usually into, but it is a must-see. Also some of my favourite authors are buried there : Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas. There are also the tombs of Voltaire, Rousseau, Jean Moulin (a famous French resistant), Victor Schoelcher (France's William Wilberforce), Louis Braille (the guy who invented the alphabet for blind people) and a host of other supposedly "great men" (most of whom I'd never even heard of, to be perfectly honest). Significantly, there is only one woman buried in the whole Panthéon : Marie Curie. It speaks loads about the place of women in society, even in a modern secular liberal democracy, where men and women are supposed to share equal rights... *sigh*

On a lighter note, I was almost entombed in the Panthéon myself . I went to the toilets, which are underground, and after hearing the door bang behind me, I realised that there was no knob on my side of the door. I had to phone L several times (you're supposed to turn your phone off in the place) before she answered. Eventually she set me free. Otherwise I might still be entombed in the Panthéon, alongside Voltaire and Zola.

After that, we strolled round the Latin Quarter and found an old 2,000 year old Roman arena which was dug up at the end of the 19th century. There were very few people around, it was incredibly quiet, which is really bizarre when you're right in the middle of Paris. It was as if we had been taken back in time for a few minutes.
Our tummies were rumbling by then and we went looking for a vegetarian restaurant that I'd read about on wikitravel.org, but it was nowhere to be found. Several of the joints in the area seem to have closed down, and it wouldn't surprise me if the vegetarian restaurant was one of the first to go, seeing that less that 1% of French people are vegetarians, and that they're basically seen as eccentric radicals, possibly even traitors to French-ness for refusing to eat meat, the base/staple of all French cuisine. (Thankfully we are tolerated — we're just a couple of eccentric foreigners, after all...) So we settled for an Indian restaurant which served great meat-free dishes. There was a menu at only 10€, which was great value, as the food was realy good, the quantities reasonable, and the restaurant was rather classy. Even the kama sutra picture hanging on the wall was rather tastefully drawn.

In the afternoon, we went to the "Musée du quai Branly". Now this is a museum which drew quite a lot of controversy when it opened in 2006. It's a tribal art museum , with artefacts from Asia, Africa, Oceania and the Americas. It was originally called "Musée des arts premiers" (lit "Museum of First Arts", a euphemism for primitive art), which understandably caused uproar from some circles. Thankfully the term was dropped.
It's the biggest museum of its kind in Europe, and it's incredible to see all these objects and works of art from all around the world. What is really good is that they are treated as art, on the same level as the paintings you'd see in the Louvre. I expected the museum to be very patronising and condescending and... well, French, but it wasn't at all. What impressed me the most was the Americas section. It was the most colourful section in the museum. There was everything from headdresses to clay pots, from robes to combs... The other sections were great as well, of course. The African ceremonial masks and the Melanesian decorated skulls were fascinating (albeit in a freaky kind of way). My only disappointment was that the Asian section was rather small. There was very little from Nepal or India. But if you're ever in Paris, you should definitely check out this museum... it's really worth the visit!

In the evening we met a friend of L's who used to live in Marseilles, and who is currently an intern working for a famous French newspaper (L'Express). And it was that evening that I lost my Starbucks virginity. Yup, until then I'd been Starbucks free. Mostly because coffee makes me sick, but also because I'm not ready to pay to 5€ for a hot drink. So I took a kind of raspberry milkshake, which was way too sweet for me. American-style sweet. I know a lot of people get their kicks from Starbucks, but it didn't do anything to me. Maybe it's just because I'm coffiephobe.

Well, that was the end of our day.
And the end of this post, seeing that it's so long that it's getting out of hand.

Monday 21 July 2008

The Sound of Place


Découvrez Neil Young!


You've probably noticed how smells and odours can bring back memories of people, places and events that were sometimes long forgotten. For example, the smell of certain types of manure always reminds me of Ireland, because that was always the first thing I smelt coming out from the aeroplane once it had landed in Belfast International airport. Or the smell of rice boiling in milk brings me back to when my late grandmother would serve me steaming hot rice pudding in a tiny bowl with a blue flower pattern when I was a child.

Well, lately, listening to music has had more or less the same effect on me. It didn't bring memories back to me, but it made images of places pop up in my mind. For example, listening to Nick Drake's third and last album, Pink Moon, brought to my mind the picture of hilly woodlands under a dark starry sky, with the slender trees bending in the wind, and the top of a church steeple somewhere in the distance behind one of the taller hills. Joni Mitchell's Ladies of the Canyon painted a Provençal landscape in my mind's eye, with its blue mountains, proud poplars, lavender fields circling a quiet little market town waking up to the soft morning sunlight. My favourite Neil Young album, On the Beach, reminds me not of the coast or the sand, but of the open sea ; the ocean, dark but not agitated, failing to reflect the pallid sun ; the impression of loneliness, sadness, but not despair. It's probably no wonder, because the album itself is rather melancholic and bleak.
You might be wondering what I've smoked. But that's what music does. It sings to parts of us which are beyond our intellectual reach, beyond our conscience.

Tuesday 8 July 2008

France's Last Taboo


Violence is a terrible thing, and anyone that knows me will know that it is probably the thing that I abhor the most. There is worse, though : domestic violence (aka spouse abuse). As if dehumanising one's neighbour and oneself by giving in to violence wasn't bad enough, some people act in this way towards the very person they are supposed to love and care for : their partner or spouse.
Amnesty International campaigned to make more people aware of this in France last year, and it doesn't seem to have worked. This morning, while logging on to Yahoo to check my email, I noticed that this issue was making the headlines of Yahoo News France.

According to the article, a French governmental body which measures the country's crime rate (the OND) found that in 2007, spousal abuse had increased by over 30%. That year, 410,000 women reported having been abused in some way by their partner or ex-partner. This represents 2% of France's female population. Apparently 20% of cases of spousal abuse go unreported — and unpunished!
There also cases where men are the victims of spousal abuse : 0.7% of the male population in 2005 and 2006.

But the issue of domestic violence is terrible not only in itself, but also because of the fact that it such a taboo in France. Speak to anyone in France, and they will deny that it is a problem. At most they will say that it is something which only happens in Muslim or working class families (which isn't true, by the way. It happens in white and middle class families as well).

There is a fair chance that you personally know a woman who has been abused by her partner or ex-partner, but that you know nothing of it. It's very hard to know if the victim doesn't speak out : very often, the victim will keep it a secret for fear of reprisal or because she loves her partner nonetheless.

I know someone who told me that she was attacked several times by her boyfriend. She didn't seem alarmed by the fact, and when I suggested that she should break up with him or call the police if it happened again, she said she couldn't do it, because she loved him.
I'm not one to underestimate the strength of love. Love is patient ; love heals. But it's no excuse for keeping quiet about mindless (or premeditated!) acts of violence, especially when it happens within a couple — the relationship which is designed to be one of the only safe, trusting and nurturing havens on earth.

The taboo must be broken.

Sunday 6 July 2008

Bicycles


Découvrez Queen!


I'm just back in from a bicycle ride. Very refreshing! L and I each bought a city bike last week. So far, we've been used to going everywhere either with the bus or on foot. Now we can go to places that are not at a walkable distance and where buses don't go. We'd been hoping to get bikes for a long time now, and with the sales on and the summer here it was the best time to do it!
Here are a few reasons why using a bicycle is cool.
  • It's fun!
  • It's much healthier than taking the car or the bus. If like me you're not really into running/jogging, or team sports, cycling is a good alternative to keep you active and on the go.
  • It's handy for groceries... I attached a basket to the front of my bike, which already attract a few strange looks. It's not considered a typically "masculine" thing to do in France, but people should get over it. In the Netherlands and Flanders, it's the norm!
  • It's cheap! No need to pay the bus fare as often, and it's (literaly) costs nothing compared to all the money you have to put into a car... no petrol, no insurance, no MOT test...
  • Last (and most importantly), it's eco-friendly. There's no CO² coming out of a bicycle! There are so many people over here that take the car just to drive a few hundred metres down to the bakery for their baguette. Worse, in our cities we have lots of SUVs and 4x4s roaring down our streets, driven by upper middle class mothers with fake tans and sunglasses driving their model kids to the local Conservatoire (the notoriously snobbish French music school). Maybe they are scared of leaving their enclaved suburban homes or snazzy city-centre dwellings for the urban jungle of ordinary people, and feel protected behind the wheel of their safari-style vehicles? I think those cars should be prohibited or severely restricted in urban areas. If you aren't a farmer or a forester, frankly, you don't need one, so give it up!

Monday 30 June 2008

The Forester

Here's one of my latest poems. I've posted it here 'cause it's not too long, but it's also on my poetry blog, A Postmodern Bard.

The Forester
I met you in the woods on a dark autumn day
When a fair young fawn, fleeting, Ied me astray
Through the deep green clouds, into the clearing
Where you held court with the oak and yew trees.
A red flannel shirt and denim slacks were your robes;
An empty packet of cigarettes, your sceptre.
Your beard was an ancient thicket, sage and regal,
And your long sylvan hair was your silver circlet.
Your eyes were black and deep, bottomless wells
Wisened by the water of life you always
Carried in the pocket of your duffle coat.
I was a lost child, under a moonless canopy,
Seeking a star that might, perchance, light my way.
You never said a word, but slowly raised your eyes,
And with your arms outstretched, you parted the emerald sea.
We never said a word, but I went, and you wept,
Your smile stinging my back with my own shame.
When I turned around for a last glimpse of you,
I saw you swinging your axe, bringing it down,
Felling timber for your own funeral pyre.

Tim, 17 June 2008

Velvet Ukulele


I've been thinking of buying a ukulele lately. It looks fun, it's handier to carry to the park than a folk guitar, and it sounds great... A bit like strumming a regular guitar with a capo on the 10th fret. Before buying one, I was checking if there were any uku ressources or tutorials on the web — I'm no autodictat — and while searching I discovered a singer called Jem Cooke. A Youtube video of one of her songs, "Miss You", was on a ukulele tablatures website, and it's quite good. (I included it in this post, below). She has a beautiful voice. I especially like her softer, simpler songs, which have a folkie ring to them. She sings in a "soul" style, so if you don't like Adele or KT Tunstall's vocal style, you mightn't like Jem. But it's definitely worth check her out her Myspace page anyway, here.



I've also started listening to Velvet Underground again. It had been a while. I'm especially into their third (untitled) album, the one with "Candy says", "Pale Blue Eyes" and the like. Listening to it again made me realise how much of an influence Velvet Underground and especially Lou Reed were to modern indie folk/accoustic bands. I had read about it but I had never actually noticed it myself before. You can hear their influence in some of Belle & Sebastian's early material, for example... even in a Devendra Banhart song (I can't remember which one) I was listening to earlier.
It's also interesting how people change. Lou Reed used to be one of the wildest rockstars around, now he's releasing meditation music, practises tai chi every day and is into Eastern spirituality.

Saturday 28 June 2008

To beer or not to beer

We just had a small end-of-year, post-exam party Thursday night. Some of the people who were supposed to come weren't able to in the end, but it was still good craic, and it also meant that there was more punch for us (on top of that, a couple of the guests didn't drink because they had to drive home afterwards). One friend of mine, Manu, who was a teaching assistant for a year in Swansea (Wales) stayed at our place overnight. We drank beer and watched Flight of the Conchords until the wee small hours of the morning.
The next day, the girls went shopping (it's the sales here) so Manu and I waited for them in the Blackface, enjoying a pint. When the girls had finished, we met them in a café, for yet another pint. So basically Manu and I spent most of the day in pubs, or drinking beer, but it was great to catch up and just chit-chat — something I hadn't got doing for a long time.

Monday 23 June 2008

The Great Beyond



Sometimes, just sometimes, pictures speak more eloquently than words. This is certainly the case with these photographs of the Marseilles skyline, taken by D, my bro-in-law.
Nature is so beautiful that on rare occasions, it leaves you wordless, breathless and reaching for the ineffable. I'm not trying to get all metaphysical on your arse, but it does make you think.

When I lived in the country, I used to spend more time in nature, in the woods, in the fields, or watching the starry sky; and it's true that it would make me slow down, enjoy what was around me, and wonder where such beauty could come from. It's something I miss in the urban bustle of Rheims, but such pictures show that even when you live in the city, you can catch glimpses of the Great Beyond.

Check out the pics here.

Saturday 14 June 2008

Dark Night of the Soul















It's been over a year and a half that we haven't been part of any church or community. L works every Sunday so it's not even possible for her to attend anywhere, and I've long given up looking for a place of worship where I feel I can belong.

Yet I don't see my churchlessness as an entirely negative thing. After all, I had become tire
d of the fundamentalists and the crackpots ; tired of hearing the same old moralising sermons or congregation-pleasing rethoric over and over again ; tired of the criticism of anyone different or the promises of health and prosperity. Tired of church in general, at least the way it is done in this city. The only thing I really miss is the sense of community, the fellowship. But even that was never very profound. Superficiality is something we Christians major in.

Still,
I don't see my churchlessness as an entirely negative thing. I have learnt more in these past two years than I have in all the previous years of my existence. I don't know if I've grown : I haven't started putting all these things into practise yet. But I've learnt.

But this process of discovery has come with a price. The more I search for the truth, the more I realise I have to leave my old mindset behind, like a dark - but warm - cocoon. I have never felt so liberated as I do now, yet at the same time, I have never felt as scared and
doubt-ridden. In fact, sometimes the only thing I am sure of is Christ. Yet He has never felt as far away. I just can't feel his presence the way I used to. I have never felt as abandoned.

I think this might be my dark night of the soul.

The dark night of the soul is a period in one's spiritual life when one feels lonely and abandoned by God ; it can last for a few days or for most of one's lifetime. I wanted to look into the subject more. St John of the Cross, the 16th century Spanish Christian mystic, counter-reformer and poet, first coined the term, in a poem and later a commentary of the same name.
According to St John of the Cross, some of the symptoms are a feeling of abandonment, a fear of losing oneself on the road, of backsliding or of losing one's salvation ; an intense yearning for God while being unable to feel His presence ; a difficult and unsatisfying prayer life.

To explain the reasons why God puts us through this, the poet uses the analogy of a child nurtured by his mother. A day comes when the child, used to the sweetness of his mother's milk, has to let go of her breast, separate from her and learn to walk. The child's weaning is a very distressing period of its life, it loses all sense of security, yet it is essential if it is to grow. In the same way, when someone gets to know God, there is at first a sweetness and a sense of satisfaction when he or she prays or talks to Him. But this is sometimes taken away so that the believer may learn to rely on God without the pleasure of his senses, be it peace of mind or intellectual satisfaction ; so that he or she may learn to grow spiritually, and not to go to God simply to get something from Him, but to seek to serve Him and follow His will.

According to the mystic, it is something that happens to a large number of followers. The book reassured me a lot because it seems to correspond, more or less, to the period I've been going through. John tries to give an explanation for it, which, to me at least, seems rather satisfying. During the dark night of the soul, God tries to make us realise how lowly we are, and teach us to rely on Him even when our senses seem to indicate that we are alone and abandoned.

I just hope it doesn't last too long.

On a dark night, Kindled in love with yearnings—oh, happy chance!—
I went forth without being observed, My house being now at rest.

Friday 13 June 2008

Evil Cymbal-banging Monkey


The other day I was speaking to a friend about things that used to freak us out as kids... you know, things like monsters under the bed, great aunt Martha or Father Christmas.
My childhood trauma - and one I shared with my brother - was linked to the evil cymbal-banging monkey toy. Yes. The evil monkey toy. Fear its wrath!

On my brother's 8th or 9th birthday - I can't quite remember - my Dad gave him a video cassette of a film, Merlin’s Shop of Mystical Wonders. It sounded like an innocent, child-friendly fantasy story. My brother watched it, alone. And was freaked out. He asked me to see it again with him - you know how fun it is to freak yourself out - so I watched it with him. It turned out to be more of a horror film than a kiddie's movie. The first part of the film (which is set in contemporay America) is the story of a sceptical journalist who borrows a book of spells from Merlin and ends up iniating himself in magic - only to find himself confronted with a zombie cat, his wife's blood, and a demon apparition.

The second part deals with a cymbal-banging monkey toy which is stolen from Merlin's shop, and ends up as a present for a young boy. Trouble is, the toy is haunted by an evil spirit, which tries to destroy the boy and his family. When left alone, its eyes light up red. Each time it bangs its cymbals, something dies. It sets the house on fire, withers all the plants in the home, kills the family dog, and almost causes the kid to die in a road accident. When the boy's father manages to bury it in a field far from home, it somehow manages to find its way back with the family. In the end Merlin comes to take it back, so there's a happy ending. But still... freaky film.
I was probably about 14 when I saw the film, so it didn't give me any nightmares... but it was pretty uncanny. Now the
evil cymbal-banging monkey toy is a kind of inside joke between my brother and me. Someday I'd like to find the film and watch it again - for old time's sake. I wonder if any other unsuspecting kid was freaked out by Merlin’s Shop of Mystical Wonders!

It's funny, though, how memories like that stick with you all your life - especially the unpleasant ones. It seems that we let our lives become much more affected by the negative things that happen to us than by the positive things. Maybe someday I'll learn to be less cynical and pessimistic, and begin reflecting on all the wonderful things that have happened to me, and - as they say in France - "see the world in pink".


Emerald Champagne

rambling on...

Theme Modified by me and licenced under MIT License

Your Blog Title | feed

5ThirtyOne and Blogger Templates design | Top