now for your irregularly unscheduled update
My second month in Paris! Already! And so many things to talk about.
Let's see--in typical Parisian fashion my students went on strike last Thursday. They ditched classes and protested in the street about the death of some university student in the south of France, who, in turn, had been protesting against the building of a dam. Though that is a tragedy, I'm pretty sure my students were just looking for an excuse to avoid classes for a day. My French colleagues all said, "Oh yeah, they find something to protest about around this time every year." The kids even blocked the street entirely, harassing cars that went through, setting off firecrackers, and burning garbage and the like. The police came and blocked off the street to keep cars from passing through at all. And the principal, while he tried to reason with the students outside the school, apparently got white paint dumped all over his brand new suit. When I expressed surprise that the police were simply blocking off the street, rather than trying to break up the riot (since that's virtually what it was), the other teachers looked alarmed at the very idea and said, "Oh no, that would turn violent very quickly. The students would fight back."
Oh, French people.... There is no one else like you--sometimes that's a good thing and, occasionally, it's not.
Also, apparently in France they don't believe in using substitute teachers? One of my co-teachers was sick last week, so class was just cancelled, and the students were allowed to leave school or do whatever for that period. Then on Monday afternoon, one of my co-teachers simply didn't show up to class. The hall monitor even went to look for her and couldn't find her anywhere. I could've simply gone home and told the students to do the same, but I decided to have a go at teaching the class by myself.
In more fun news, I had a two-week break for Toussaint (All Saints Day) at the end of October, and though I spent one week teaching some intensive English classes for extra dough, during the second week I got to go to Rouen!
Rouen is a lovely city in the northwest of France, just an hour and half away by train, full of ancient, half-timbered buildings, cobblestone streets, and the famous Cathedral that Monet painted so many times. It also happens to be the setting of the story that I've been writing for the last few months. It was awesome to finally go there and walk the streets myself, imagining the lives of my characters playing out there. I'll devote a blog post to it soon (on the DuffStuff blog!).
Also, I've joined a weekly orchestral workshop with the Surnatural Orchestra. They specialize in a very particular kind of group improvisation called Sound Painting. It was actually invented in New York by a big band director named Walter Thompson, but apparently it's far more popular in France than in the US. Here's a good example of it: (you can skip the first 30 seconds of the weird guy with the hat--I dunno what that's all about) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aS_r5dX0smU
Also if you go to the Surnatural Orchestra website and scroll down, on the left side of the page they have some recording samples, and I think the second one "Reconstitution" is pretty awesome! It sounds like music from an Italian spy film or something. http://www.surnaturalorchestra.com/
Anyways, learning a sign language for music is pretty interesting, and even though most of the time we end up with cacophony, I can really see the possibilities of it, especially if you mix sound painting with written music (which we sometimes do), or if you just have a group that's really great at improv-ing together. And the people there are really fun--we take a break half-way through every rehearsal and have a potluck meal together. It's a good group. :-)
Also, last weekend my friend Kim came down from Amsterdam for a visit! I haven't seen her since the last time I was in Paris. We spent most of Saturday together and it was like no time had passed at all. I'm hoping that I can go visit her and Ichwer several times this year. It's only a 3-hour train ride away, after all--infinitely closer than we were before!
I reconnected with my group of friends from the Greece trip as well. They're all kinda nerds (surprise) so we played Smallworld together, and then for Halloween, Delphine hosted a party where she really outdid herself with the decorations. They had a corpse in the shower and everything! :-D
Carl & "Bambi" (dressed as Dr. Who!)
Hostess of the Night: Batwoman! (aka Delphine)
Helene, the baby-killer
Can you guess who I am? (I think Amy would know...)
Last, but not least, I've found several lovely literary things in the last couple weeks. The first is Shakespeare and Co. (which I decided to visit after watching Midnight in Paris), a windy, creaky, nookish (yet suprisingly large) bookstore situated in downtown Paris, within view of Notre Dame. They have a piano in there, odd little couches, chairs, and cushins on which you can sit and read to you heart's content. It's a bibliophile's heaven. They also sell a little poetry magazine that comes out every two weeks called the Belleville Park Pages. It's more of a pamphlet actually: 14 unfolding, palm-sized pages of poetry by young, relatively unpublished writers. I think it's really lovely cause it's short enough that you can easily read it in one sitting if you wish, but it comes out regularly enough that you can always get more, and it only costs 2 Euros. (The creators said that their specific goal was to create a poetry magazine that would cost less than a pint of beer--so poor, starving artists and students can have their beer and their poetry too). :-D I even met one of the two creators of Belleville Park Pages as soon as I walked in the door of Shakespeare & Co. We just talked a bit, and he said if I'm a writer I ought to submit something. It just so happens that I recently wrote a poem that I rather like, so I think I will submit it!
A week later I discovered the open mic nights run by a expat literary group called Paris Lit Up. They have these open mics every Thursday night (and sometimes more) in this little artsy-hippie-punk-rocker-socialist-(you get the idea)-themed bar in Belleville, and though it's mostly expats, people come there to read things (both their own work and other's) in multiple languages. I went for the first time last week and I loved it. It seems like a really regular little community, and the readers and the crowd were excellent. Paris Lit Up also publishes a yearly poetry/short prose anthology of local writers, which I bought. ^_^ And they had a special guest that night: a professional, full-time poet from Wales named Mab Jones. She was frickin' hilarious! Her poems were witty and very accessible--she kinda reminded me of Shel Silverstein, only more rated R. :-P I talked with her a bit during the break, and I decided to go to the writer's workshop that she was hosting the Saturday after at Berkley's Books (another English bookshop in Paris). The topic was Moder Myth Mash-up, and though, honestly, the workshop wasn't really all that helpful in terms of writing, it was fun to spend more time with her, and the examples that she gave us of modernized myths (by P.J. O'Rourke) were also hilarious. So I bought her book, and she signed it for me. Yay. ^_^
I seem to be accumulating a shit-ton of poetry these days, and that's all right with me--especially since it's mostly by local people or people I've met. There's something exciting about that.
I also re-read Pride & Prejudice recently (which I love more every time), and Le Cid, a great romantic play by Pierre Corneille. Both stories are so great, and it's really helping me to see--from an analytical point of view--what it takes to make a great romance work. Of course that also brings to light the short-comings of my own novel-in-progress, but that's just the way of things, isn't it? I haven't been able to make as much progress with my story lately as I would like, but part of that is that I've been too busy going out and doing things. I've got to set aside an afternoon sometime to just really work some things out, and hopefully, now that I have a better idea of exactly what elements are missing from my story, it'll help me to come up with some solutions.
Well, I think I've rambled enough for one post. I'm sure I left a lot of things out, but life is always too big (or too small) to capture in writing. And as always, Skype calls are welcome!
Take care everyone. Till next time....
Let's see--in typical Parisian fashion my students went on strike last Thursday. They ditched classes and protested in the street about the death of some university student in the south of France, who, in turn, had been protesting against the building of a dam. Though that is a tragedy, I'm pretty sure my students were just looking for an excuse to avoid classes for a day. My French colleagues all said, "Oh yeah, they find something to protest about around this time every year." The kids even blocked the street entirely, harassing cars that went through, setting off firecrackers, and burning garbage and the like. The police came and blocked off the street to keep cars from passing through at all. And the principal, while he tried to reason with the students outside the school, apparently got white paint dumped all over his brand new suit. When I expressed surprise that the police were simply blocking off the street, rather than trying to break up the riot (since that's virtually what it was), the other teachers looked alarmed at the very idea and said, "Oh no, that would turn violent very quickly. The students would fight back."
Oh, French people.... There is no one else like you--sometimes that's a good thing and, occasionally, it's not.
Also, apparently in France they don't believe in using substitute teachers? One of my co-teachers was sick last week, so class was just cancelled, and the students were allowed to leave school or do whatever for that period. Then on Monday afternoon, one of my co-teachers simply didn't show up to class. The hall monitor even went to look for her and couldn't find her anywhere. I could've simply gone home and told the students to do the same, but I decided to have a go at teaching the class by myself.
In more fun news, I had a two-week break for Toussaint (All Saints Day) at the end of October, and though I spent one week teaching some intensive English classes for extra dough, during the second week I got to go to Rouen!
Rouen is a lovely city in the northwest of France, just an hour and half away by train, full of ancient, half-timbered buildings, cobblestone streets, and the famous Cathedral that Monet painted so many times. It also happens to be the setting of the story that I've been writing for the last few months. It was awesome to finally go there and walk the streets myself, imagining the lives of my characters playing out there. I'll devote a blog post to it soon (on the DuffStuff blog!).
Also, I've joined a weekly orchestral workshop with the Surnatural Orchestra. They specialize in a very particular kind of group improvisation called Sound Painting. It was actually invented in New York by a big band director named Walter Thompson, but apparently it's far more popular in France than in the US. Here's a good example of it: (you can skip the first 30 seconds of the weird guy with the hat--I dunno what that's all about) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aS_r5dX0smU
Also if you go to the Surnatural Orchestra website and scroll down, on the left side of the page they have some recording samples, and I think the second one "Reconstitution" is pretty awesome! It sounds like music from an Italian spy film or something. http://www.surnaturalorchestra.com/
Anyways, learning a sign language for music is pretty interesting, and even though most of the time we end up with cacophony, I can really see the possibilities of it, especially if you mix sound painting with written music (which we sometimes do), or if you just have a group that's really great at improv-ing together. And the people there are really fun--we take a break half-way through every rehearsal and have a potluck meal together. It's a good group. :-)
Also, last weekend my friend Kim came down from Amsterdam for a visit! I haven't seen her since the last time I was in Paris. We spent most of Saturday together and it was like no time had passed at all. I'm hoping that I can go visit her and Ichwer several times this year. It's only a 3-hour train ride away, after all--infinitely closer than we were before!
I reconnected with my group of friends from the Greece trip as well. They're all kinda nerds (surprise) so we played Smallworld together, and then for Halloween, Delphine hosted a party where she really outdid herself with the decorations. They had a corpse in the shower and everything! :-D
Carl & "Bambi" (dressed as Dr. Who!)
Hostess of the Night: Batwoman! (aka Delphine)
Helene, the baby-killer
Can you guess who I am? (I think Amy would know...)
Last, but not least, I've found several lovely literary things in the last couple weeks. The first is Shakespeare and Co. (which I decided to visit after watching Midnight in Paris), a windy, creaky, nookish (yet suprisingly large) bookstore situated in downtown Paris, within view of Notre Dame. They have a piano in there, odd little couches, chairs, and cushins on which you can sit and read to you heart's content. It's a bibliophile's heaven. They also sell a little poetry magazine that comes out every two weeks called the Belleville Park Pages. It's more of a pamphlet actually: 14 unfolding, palm-sized pages of poetry by young, relatively unpublished writers. I think it's really lovely cause it's short enough that you can easily read it in one sitting if you wish, but it comes out regularly enough that you can always get more, and it only costs 2 Euros. (The creators said that their specific goal was to create a poetry magazine that would cost less than a pint of beer--so poor, starving artists and students can have their beer and their poetry too). :-D I even met one of the two creators of Belleville Park Pages as soon as I walked in the door of Shakespeare & Co. We just talked a bit, and he said if I'm a writer I ought to submit something. It just so happens that I recently wrote a poem that I rather like, so I think I will submit it!
A week later I discovered the open mic nights run by a expat literary group called Paris Lit Up. They have these open mics every Thursday night (and sometimes more) in this little artsy-hippie-punk-rocker-socialist-(you get the idea)-themed bar in Belleville, and though it's mostly expats, people come there to read things (both their own work and other's) in multiple languages. I went for the first time last week and I loved it. It seems like a really regular little community, and the readers and the crowd were excellent. Paris Lit Up also publishes a yearly poetry/short prose anthology of local writers, which I bought. ^_^ And they had a special guest that night: a professional, full-time poet from Wales named Mab Jones. She was frickin' hilarious! Her poems were witty and very accessible--she kinda reminded me of Shel Silverstein, only more rated R. :-P I talked with her a bit during the break, and I decided to go to the writer's workshop that she was hosting the Saturday after at Berkley's Books (another English bookshop in Paris). The topic was Moder Myth Mash-up, and though, honestly, the workshop wasn't really all that helpful in terms of writing, it was fun to spend more time with her, and the examples that she gave us of modernized myths (by P.J. O'Rourke) were also hilarious. So I bought her book, and she signed it for me. Yay. ^_^
I seem to be accumulating a shit-ton of poetry these days, and that's all right with me--especially since it's mostly by local people or people I've met. There's something exciting about that.
I also re-read Pride & Prejudice recently (which I love more every time), and Le Cid, a great romantic play by Pierre Corneille. Both stories are so great, and it's really helping me to see--from an analytical point of view--what it takes to make a great romance work. Of course that also brings to light the short-comings of my own novel-in-progress, but that's just the way of things, isn't it? I haven't been able to make as much progress with my story lately as I would like, but part of that is that I've been too busy going out and doing things. I've got to set aside an afternoon sometime to just really work some things out, and hopefully, now that I have a better idea of exactly what elements are missing from my story, it'll help me to come up with some solutions.
Well, I think I've rambled enough for one post. I'm sure I left a lot of things out, but life is always too big (or too small) to capture in writing. And as always, Skype calls are welcome!
Take care everyone. Till next time....