Musing's musings

Why I love France

I went wandering for a post-prandial stroll this evening (it's just after 9 p.m. here in France), and for once I remembered to take my camera along--though I'm going to have to stop someplace on the way to the archives tomorrow morning and get more batteries: I'm down to my last pair, I've been snapping so many document photos this past week. Wandering through some of the byways in Colmar's pedestrian zone, I happened upon a monument I've walked or ridden past about three dozen times in the two times I've been to Colmar thus far, and never noticed. It's tucked away down a side street I'd never had occasion to bother with before now, and I probably wouldn't have ever thought of walking down it from the end I usually see, since all that is visible from that end is houses.

Anyway, a couple of things to know before you drop below the fold to look at this picture. First is that above the niche is an inscription in Latin, Veritas ex fonte, "Truth from the fountain." Second, the fountain itself is attached to one wall of what used to be the Palace of the Sovereign Council when Colmar was an imperial city, a building which now houses the Tribunal de Grande Instance (roughly the equivalent of a local circuit court in the United States, from what I can gather online) and a detachment of the local Gendarmerie. Just behind it is one of the local prisons. All of which makes the symbolism of the fountain itself all the more wry.

Intrigued? Follow me below the fold for a symbol of the real meaning of life.

Salut de Colmar!

Just a quick note to say I'm here in one piece before I go grab a shower to get the slime of travel off and then probably collapse for a well-deserved nap until it's dinner time. (It's just 5 in the evening here, and most restaurants won't start serving dinner until 7.)

The flights were good, though when we got to Paris this morning (ahead of schedule) we soon fell behind when the jetway wouldn't operate--so they had us go down stairs and across the tarmac just like in the olden days! Took forever to get the baggage sorted out, and there were two other incoming flights using the same carousel, so it was pretty crowded. By the time I got through passport control (I somehow seem to have skipped customs; I followed the signs for it, but they led straight to the exit) and found the bus to Paris, it was pushing 8 a.m. (we landed around 6:35). The bus took more than an hour to get from the airport to downtown (morning rush hour, plus Parisian streets), and then it took a good 10 minutes to find a taxi stand (in front of the Opéra, of all places) and grab a cab to the Gare de l'Est--by which time I'd missed my scheduled train.

But that was OK, because the one thing I seem to have forgotten to pack was my train tickets. Got another round-trip, but it was delayed for about half an hour because of unspecified problems at the train station. (I wonder, though, given that there was an announcement that trains in the Reims area, which we were passing around on another line, were being held up or cancelled due to what the announcement disingenuously called a "mouvement social" (translation: "social upheaval" meaning, probably, riots), might have had something to do with it. That meant I was automatically going to miss my connection from Strasbourg to Colmar, which allowed for a grand total of 10 minutes to change trains.

But that would have been easier than what I actually wound up doing. We pulled into Colmar, as we had pulled out of Nancy and Strasbourg both, half an hour late. There was a train leaving for Lyon that would stop in Colmar at 3:29 p.m.--or about two and a half minutes after our train stopped. Fortunately, it was only one platform over in the station, and it wasn't full. (I had to stand for the first hour or more of the three-hour trip from Paris to Strasbourg.)

It was cool, but sunny and pleasant in Paris, but here in the Vosges, it's a cool, cloudy, rainy, foggy, misty day--and I just love it. The mountains were simply beautiful from the train windows, wrapped in fog. And I'm happy to report that the vines in Champagne and Alsace are looking very well, so this should be a good year for both regions in the wine lottery, assuming nothing happens between now and the harvest.

Leavin' on a jet plane...

I'm off for a month's worth of work and fun in France. Posting will be sporadic; even though I'll have pretty regular internet access, I'm going to try to enjoy myself at least a little bit, in and around digging through carton after carton of dusty, musty old files. I expect there will probably be a few pictures here and there, too. Back home in early June, after which the real work gets going.

C'est fini!

Another semester under my belt!

We had our final "meeting" for my reading seminar on women and gender in eastern Europe tonight--essentially, the class part consisted of five graduate students handing in their papers to the instructor, after which she and her spouse made us comfortable, made us dinner, and regaled us with stories. I turned in my analytical paper for my other class last week (before I caught the cold, fortunately), so I am officially done for the semester. Still have an incomplete hanging over my head from last term, but I hope to be able to knock that off by the time the summer ends, and I'll be free and clear for the start of classes again in August.

And of course, now that all the endless grind of reading and writing is done, it's time for a whirlwind two days' worth of housecleaning, last-minute shopping, laundry, and packing. The limo driver will be here to take me to the airport at 8 a.m. Sunday morning, and thus far all I've got packed are essentially my research supplies--notepads, pencils, notes from last trip, all my official letters of permission, passport, reader's cards, that sort of thing. But I think for the rest of tonight I'm going to go plop down in the recliner, pour myself a finger's worth or two of Black Bush, catch up on a little TV, and relax for the first time in what seems like eight months.

Oh yes, it's verry nice!

I'm going to France! I'm going to France!

Don't know exactly when yet, but got the unofficial word from my professor tonight (who also happens to be the director of graduate studies) that my grant proposal is getting at least some funding. So I'm taking three weeks to ransack a couple of archives for materials I can use to put toward a dissertation.

Now if only airfares to Europe would drop under $1,000....

Thursday tourist-cum-hockeyblogging

Another full day in Washington for your 'umble blogger. Slept in this morning, as I was thoroughly knackered from yesterday's adventures. Did catch Casino Royale on pay-per-view at the hotel--and if you haven't seen it already, you should. May be the best Bond flick yet--keeps you guessing right up to the very end. (And Daniel Craig is a hunk o' burnin' love.)

In part of my travels yesterday, I took the time to visit a sacred shrine. And thanks to its being late in the afternoon in the middle of the week during the off-season, I didn't have to wait two hours in line to get in to see some really cool shit, like this:

That's the original fair copy of the Bill of Rights, though unfortunately (because people didn't know any better at the time and put it where the sun could get at it) you'd hardly know if I didn't tell you. They're re-remodeling the display, so I couldn't snap a picture of the Declaration of Independence, but I did get shots of all four pages of the Constitution, President Johnson's proclamation ending the Civil War, Ben Franklin's notes on a draft of the Articles of Confederation, and a copy of the Magna Charta, all courtesy of the National Archives, God love 'em.

Today I got to play tourist a little more before settling down to business. I hiked back down to the Mall after breakfast, and scored a ticket for the 10:00 tour of the Washington Monument--again without having to wait two hours to get in, or to be packed into the place without room to move or breathe or see anything. I also lucked out in that when I was ready to head down again, one of the rangers was starting a walking tour down the staircase, which has been closed to visitors since the late 1970s due to increased vandalism. Follow me below the fold for a few more shots from my touristic wanderings.

Still more things that make you go "Huh?"

Mustang Bobby has a great piece up this morning about the wingnuts' war on the Bill of Rights--unfortunately the only war they actually seem to be winning, of late. If you haven't read it already, you should.

He takes for his starting point Newt Gingrich's startling assertion, in late November, that if we want to win the War on Terra, we're probably going to have to abrogate the First Amendment:

And, my prediction to you is that either before we lose a city, or, if we are truly stupid, after we lose a city, we will adopt rules of engagement that use every technology we can find to break up their capacity to use the Internet, to break up their capacity to use free speech, and to go after people who want to kill us to stop them from recruiting people before they get to reach out and convince young people to destroy their lives while destroying us.

This is a serious problem that will lead to a serious debate about the First Amendment, but I think that the national security threat of losing an American city to a nuclear weapon, or losing several million Americans to a biological attack is so real that we need to proactively, now, develop the appropriate rules of engagement.

I'm with Bobby:

I guess I really blew it in the 1960's and '70's; I could have done a lot of drugs and messed up my mind so I wouldn't be conscious now and have to listen to this kind of crap. (It sounds like Mr. Gingrich did his fair share.) And for more jollies, read some of the comments of the people who agree with him (below the quote on the linked article). It sounds like a cocktail party at Nuremberg in 1936 just before the big show.

That brings me to the larger question: when will we reach the point where we finally say "enough!" of these attacks on America in order to save "America"?

That is particularly true today, the 65th anniversary of the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor that precipitated the United States into the Second World War. As important as remembering today is, it is no less important that we remember how we reacted to the events of 65 years ago and why that was a bad thing. That is the best argument I can make against Gingrich's folly.

If we start ripping passages out of the Constitution wholesale, the terrorists have already accomplished their goal. All that remains for us is to roll over and expose our undefended belly to them for the coup de grâce. I don't think that's what Gingrich really wants. It is certainly not what I want.

It's official: Worst. President. Ever.

I predict that by this time Monday, the Mighty Wurlitzer of the right-wing noise machine will be in full-throated hue and cry against the lib'rul media and its lackeys in academe. The mouth-breathers in Right Wingnuttistan will be rounding up pitchforks, torches, tar, and feathers, trying to figure out where Amsterdam Avenue is, and how to get to midtown Manhattan without getting any New York cooties on them.

Why? Because Eric Foner, the DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University, has written a thoroughgoing indictment of the Bush presidency that will appear on the front page of tomorrow's Outlook section in the Washington Post (h/t to dmsilev at Big Orange, who spotted it first). Entitled "He's the Worst Ever," Foner's analysis contends that Bush is poised to drop straight into the dustbin of history--and deservedly so:

[Andrew] Johnson, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge and Richard M. Nixon occupy the bottom rung, and now President Bush is a leading contender to join them. A look at history, as well as Bush's policies, explains why.

At a time of national crisis, Pierce and Buchanan, who served in the eight years preceding the Civil War, and Johnson, who followed it, were simply not up to the job. Stubborn, narrow-minded, unwilling to listen to criticism or to consider alternatives to disastrous mistakes, they surrounded themselves with sycophants and shaped their policies to appeal to retrogressive political forces (in that era, pro-slavery and racist ideologues). Even after being repudiated in the midterm elections of 1854, 1858 and 1866, respectively, they ignored major currents of public opinion and clung to flawed policies. Bush's presidency certainly brings theirs to mind.

Amazing what turns up

...in the pages of history books and homework assignments. I was working through this week's book for my seminar on the empire and modern Britain (Edward Said's classic work Orientalism) when I came across a series of quotations that Said had dug out of a 1972 article in, of all places, the American Journal of Psychiatry. Here's the passage in question:

"...it is a notable fact that while the ...value system demands absolute solidarity within the group, it at the same time encourages among its members a kind of rivalry that is destructive of that very solidarity" ...only "success counts" and "the end justifies the means"; [they] live "naturally" in a world "characterized by anxiety expressed in generalized suspicion and distrust, which has been labelled free-floating hostility"; "the art of subterfuge is highly developed in [their] life, as well as in [this ideology] itself"; [their] need for vengeance overrides everything, otherwise [they] would feel "ego-destroying" shame.

--Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1994), pp. 48-49

Life is good...for right now

After quite a busy start to my new job, and a stressful week, I managed to get myself to the airport yesterday and on my plane to Minneapolis. We took off on time (first time that's happened to me, flying with American Airlines) and landed early, with hardly any bobbles.

Nevertheless, the flight was anything but comfortable. A full plane (11 people on standby when we left) meant they only had center seats remaining when I got to the ticket counter to get my boarding pass. I spent the better part of two hours wedged between an Oriental guy who could play linebacker for some professional football teams (or at least college), who needed all of his seat and about half of mine, it seemed, and a fidgety sales rep for Mitsubishi, who also seemed to want some of my space.

Got to the hotel, though, checked in, managed to finish up my reading in time to get my reading analysis e-mailed to my professor for last night's class. And then I splurged and bought myself a birthday present--in the form of a ticket to last night's game between the Minnesota Wild and the Los Angeles Kings.