Commentary

An American in Paris seems to act as if he were on stage—the stage whisper becomes real to him. He assumes that he can just say anything that pops into his head, and with the combination of the foreign language and French reserved privacy, he knows that his comment will not blow back on him. It’s only too common—all the Stanford students do it—and somewhat unfortunate; it means that Americans see themselves as apart from the Parisian experience instead of integrated into it, like commentators for a sporting event.

The best one can do, it seems, is not to be too egregious. I think I conduct myself well; at any rate, some of the worst comments are not mine. The worst comment I heard today: walking across the crosswalk, I jerked to attention when I heard an American (a Texan) shout gleefully “Lookathat!” It was a man with a gnarled face and staccato walk who was trying to conduct himself with dignity; he had been forced to stop suddenly because of an oncoming bicycle. The windmilling effect of his arms must have looked strange, but still, have some sense.

****

Taking French class here in France has been a humbling experience. Not so much because of its difficulty or challenging new material. Almost nothing is new, in fact. Whatever progress has been made has been inspecting old foundations and overhauling them.

I’ve noticed that with many fields there is that re-examination of the basics. It is always frustrating to our notions of progress, because we tend to see progress as starting with a humble and solid base, followed by more and more building upon that base with grander and more ornamental structures until the crowning glory, mastery in your field. But it seems that the true masters build low to the ground, and their structures are flawless. To invoke a cliché, they do not build castles of air.

So while I may be frustrated by speaking the “a” or “ou” sound correctly in French, it’s absolutely necessary to build towards anything approaching competency, let alone mastery.

****

I’m still not sure the whole Stanford thing wasn’t a hoax, by the way. I refuse to believe the team that lost to UC-Davis, that blew an easy victory against a ranked UCLA team, that could’ve pulled a shocker against Notre Dame, that is only one year removed from a humiliating, dispiriting 1-11 season, could do something like this.

Where can the basketball team sign up for these kind of cojones…? Or a point guard or something. One or the other.

****
MINI-REVIEW: THE EMPEROR’S CHILDREN by Claire Messud (I couldn’t resist after 61 pages, for reasons that will become clear)

Whenever someone’s prose style is mentioned in book reviews, it is a positive. “Lyrical,” “luminous,” “affecting,” “sensuous”; I’m sure we can all name a plethora of our favorite vague descriptors meant to indicate that what we want to read is, in fact, good prose.

Claire Messud’s lavishly praised Emperor’s Children was escorted with the usual vague descriptors. But while the story itself isn’t so bad, Messud’s prose style is. Her prose style is a jumbled heap clogging forward progress.

Her verbs are not so bad and sometimes even very good. Her choice of “ogling” in reference to a woman scrutinizing herself for faults before an important dinner was a good one. But her nouns and adjectives put her in trouble: she loves to create a massive agglomeration, string them together, and leave the reader to pick around them slowly. And if there’s a license for using the dash in the middle of a sentence—like this—she should have it revoked for the safety of society.

Here are some actual quotations rather than invective:

“Judy spoke sharply but felt a burst of tenderness for her befuddled boy, as he wavered before her, almost six feet tall.” (pg. 16)

Read that to yourself. I get tripped up every time, either at “as” or “almost.” Rhythmically, the sentence is lacking. It’s due to the “almost six feet tall,” which is out of place both in terms of the action of the rest of the sentence, and also with the subject of the paragraph that it’s in. The better fit was with the unquoted preceding paragraph, which lingered over her son’s physique (lingering overlong on description is another Messud vice).

Here’s another example, longer this time:

“Judy Tubb and her son lived in a spacious but crumbling Victorian house on the eastern side of Watertown, off the road to Lowville, in a neighborhood of other similarly sprawling, similarly decrepit buildings. Some had been broken up into apartments, and one, at the end of the street, had been abandoned, its elegant windows boarded over and its porch all but caved in; but that was simply the way of Watertown. It was still a good address, a fine house on a fine square lot at the good end of town, as respectable as it had been twenty years before when Bert and Judy had moved in with their little daughter, Sarah, and Bootie not even on the way.” (pg. 18)

The first sentence suffers from the same problem as the earlier one. But then you run smack into the “It was still a good address…” sentence which confused me the first time I read it. I reread the preceding sentences, to see if I had missed something. I had not. The first two sentences talk about how the neighborhood is a collection of faded glories. Somehow we are meant to square this with the suggestion that this is still a “good address.” Perhaps you could suggest that this is a relative “good address”—you don’t want to see the other side of Watertown, is the suggestion. But this clearly is not the case, because we are assured that the house is “a fine house….as respectable as it had been twenty years ago.” Furthermore, later in the chapter, you have to grapple with the list of annoyances that have materialized since their first moving into the house. In other words, the logic of this paragraph is clearly contradictory. All right, you say trying to be charitable, maybe it’s a matter of Judy being in conflict with herself; she can’t accept the fact that Watertown ain’t as cool as it used to be. But this suggestion can’t be true either, because the narrative voice (although not clear in this excerpt) is clearly omniscient, and so therefore cannot represent her inner conflict. This process finally led me to the conclusion that the paragraph is illogical.

In the following chapter, we are treated to this nugget:

“She had only herself to blame [for her current annoyed state]: after two weeks alone in her parent’s house outside Stockbridge, up every night till the small house gaping out into the oddly restless dark, before retreating to her parents’ bed with a paring knife beneath her pillow and, on evenings when the deer, or bear, or who knew what, had snapped branches in the woods behind the house, with a chair propped, probably ineffectually, against the bedroom door, Marina had decided she need company.” (pg. 25-6)

Keep in mind that that is all one sentence, and what a bloated jumbled monstrosity it is. Clauses are heaped on top of other clauses in utter confusion, with the juxtaposition of the animals and the propped being the most perplexing. Once, however, I figured out what this sentence was trying to say (and keep in mind that it is the very simple sentiment of: Marina was afraid of intruders.), I was intrigued. Why does she feel compelled to take a knife with her to bed? What’s going on here? Well, to find out the answer, we are treated to two paragraphs of description of the house, with nary a menacing word to be found. Boring—what’s up with this pursuer? Then we find out that it’s an imaginary stalker—she’s making him up and she knows it. OK, interesting, where are you going with that? We are treated to three pages of backstory before that question is answered. Call me a philistine, but I prefer literature in which there is even a pretense of going about answering the questions posed by the story. Messud takes her time about it, and it doesn’t even seem as if she’s going for nuance, just piling on more and more of her “dense, chaste, luminously intelligent” style (to quote one of the blurbs at the back). She too often tries to avoid the natural idiom in favor of a “poetic” sounding one. Consider when one character is forced to “clean up cat sick,” not, “clean up after the sick cat” or “clean up the cat’s vomit” as 99.9% of reasonable human beings would say.

The book is not exactly bad, but certainly overrated given the reviews I’d read.

*****

No one wore bad clothes today. Don’t they know that this is a major source of entertainment for me?