etnobofin

I imagine a conversation. We pick at blades of grass between brown sandals. The illogic of our story spins skywards over the city, soaring in the blue miracle of it all.

I imagine a conversation. You describe how an afternoon rainshower pulls the dust from the air, leaving distant hills vacant and sparkling.

I imagine a conversation. Somewhere during the music, you tell me I am made of dust, and I am surprised that this makes me happy.

I imagine a conversation. It is on a beach with footprints. We laugh as islands rise from the ocean like fish.

I imagine a conversation, which stretches for hours across a damp basement in summer. A storm tugs at the corner of a window. We snigger at our fragile bravado.

I imagine a conversation, among northern snowbanks that lie immobile by the roadside. Our talk is careful like chess, with voices muffled by whiteness.

Wanganui/Whanganui – a nice town. Pity the mayor talks without thinking.
(Image: JuergenSchulte)

Let’s rant for a few paragraphs about the apparent ignorance of Michael Laws, the mayor of Wanganui. He’s complaining about the New Zealand Geographic Board’s plans to consult the public on the names for the North and South Islands, which may (shock! horror!) involve officialising the Maori names for the islands, alongside English. Michael Laws claims that double-naming is impractical, disrespectful and not-done-elsewhere:

“Where else could you go in the world and the locals have actually two different names for everywhere?”

Well, um, lots of places. Especially in Europe. Bruxelles/Brussel has got along fine for years with names in both French and Flemish. In France, Strasbourg/Straβburg/Strossburi and many other Alsatian towns feature bilingual roadsigns. All license plates in the Republic of Ireland feature the county of registration in Gaelic, and Wales is increasingly bilingual in its place names and administration. Amazingly, none of this has led to the collapse of civilisation.

Even Montpellier-Montpelhièr, which thanks to its university has been a chauvinistic outpost of French usage in an Occitan-speaking region since at least the time of Louis XIV, acknowledges its Occitan heritage with Occitan street-signs in the old town.

I wouldn’t mind so much if Mr Laws was displaying his ignorance in a private capacity (he is reasonably well-known media personality in his own right in New Zealand). But his statement was made in an official press release in his role as mayor: that’s unacceptable.

Mr Laws is of course rather more exercised about this issue than some mayors, since there has been a decades-long dispute about the spelling of Wanganui (in the local Maori dialect the river and the eponymous town are rendered with an aspirated “wh” sound as Whanganui). Wanganui is largely accepted among European-descended inhabitants, while local Maori claim precedence for Whanganui.

Rennes-Roahzon-Resnn (France). Image: graham chandler

I’m always slightly ashamed how many anglophones view bilingualism as some kind of threat. In everyday practice in bilingual regions of Europe, locals go on using whatever name they feel most comfortable with, and everyone understands. In most cases, it’s not a big deal.

Bilingualism is not “cultural zealotry”. As the one place in the world where English and Polynesian languages coexist officially, New Zealand’s linguistic particularities should be encouraged and highlighted. It may even be a competitive advantage: my French classmates were fascinated to see that my NZ passport is printed in English and Maori.

Maybe Wanganui/Whanganui should be twinned with a few other cities around the world that get along fine with two versions of their name. Perhaps Biel-Bienne or Turku-Åbo ? These cities might teach New Zealand how to become more adult in its treatment of language.

Street names in Turku-Åbo (Finland). Image: ansik

Image: Marcus Wright

Cy Winstanley and Vanessa McGowan are two New Zealand-born musicians based in London. Their songwriting/band project is called Her Make Believe Band. They’ve been recording their first album, and the first tracks are up on MySpace.

Years ago, back in Auckland, I played in a big band with Cy and Vanessa. Part of a web of musical contacts that now forms a network that these days spans the globe. When I knew them, they were playing a lot of jazz, and wasn’t aware of their mutual love of country music.

Image: janasfotos

You hear a lot of that country sound on these few tracks, but theres are lot more too: rich string arrangements and Fender Rhodes on Lonely Soul Blues, and assured song structures that recall Paul Simon. Cy’s voice on Last Hour is quite stunning – does this remind anyone else of Mark Hollis’ classic solo album ?  If these few tracks are a guide, then the full album could be very, very good indeed.

If you’re reading this in New Zealand, Her Make Believe Band is playing some shows in Auckland in May and June. Don’t miss them.

Once you’ve reached a certain level in speaking a foreign language, new words become your enemy. What you must keep learning however is context, and clichés. It seem that further success becomes  a matter of choosing which new things to retain, while letting other things slide back into opacity.

For example, when I’ve been on walks in the countryside around Montpellier, people have taught me a whole lot of new words for flowers, plants and insects I’d never seen before. I forget the words immediately: partly because my interest in botany and entymology is fleeting, but also because these are not words I can use in a daily context, except when I’m out wandering in the garrigue with French-speaking friends.

(By the way, la garrigue itself is a useful word to know in Languedoc – it’s the name used to describe the local countryside outside the towns – calcified rocks, dry hills and low shrubby “forests”. It’s a nice word that can be compared to the use of  la plaine and les vallées in Alsace as conversational shorthand to designate the two main geographical zones of the region: the Rhine river plain and the valleys of the Vosges.)

New vocabulary is just treachorous. Often my brain freezes up when it tries to put together disparate French words into intelligent sentences. My favourite stumbling block word is réaménagement (improvements/renovations): the open-vowelled articulation between the “ré” and the “a” trips me up every time. But if the words can be fitted into a cliché that I’ve consciously or unconsciously learnt, the language flow more freely.

My observation is that native speakers talk in a limited number of idiomatic clichés – verbal shortcuts  and combinations of words that convey particular meaning. I read somewhere that the average English speaker’s daily functional vocabulary is around 1000 words (I can’t find the reference), and it’s probably similar in French. So with a few thousand words and a few hundred contextual phrases in French, you can work your way around most situations.

As an anglo-saxon, it’s important to come to an acceptance that your French will always be peppered with unintentional anglicisms, (as Goscinny so brilliantly lampooned in Astérix chez les Bretons) and I know that my accent will never disappear. But occasionally French phraseology erupts in a conversation with such astounding beauty that you know you’ll remember and use it yourself. Take this recent example:

Les casques de ski se sont démocratisées ces dernières années.

This was uttered by my friend who was commenting that everyone these days wears ski helmets. The belle tournure of the phrase and his choice of active verb was (to me) striking. The use of the reflexive se démocratiser avoids the cardinal French sin of using the passive voice, and verb itself appeals – literally he said “Ski helmets have democratised themselves in recent years“.  To anglophone ears at least, the idea that an article of clothing can undertake a political act is a pretty original thought.

And so “Se démocratiser” (and the slightly more workaday “se banaliser”) have entered this speaker’s verbal armoury for good.

I’m learning new words, but new vocabulary is no longer really the challenge. The real game now involves further mastering the frameworks that make my words easily comprehensible to francophones: finding neat ways to construct questions or provide generalised responses for situations.  Sometimes, it works like magic, but sometimes, hidden booby traps still appear.  Il faut faire toujours attention.

Driving north from Montpellier feels a little like driving north from Auckland. Under an April sky the low clumps of bushes of the garrigue resemble the particular green of manuka, and the calcified cliffs recall the clay banks beside State Highway One as it crosses the Brynderwyns.

But soon enough the car crests the brow of a hill, and the spell is broken. Instead of the long strand of Waipu Cove opening up on the left with Whangarei Heads hard and black on the horizon, there are acres of vineyards, (still leafless stubble at Easter), and the ridged vastness of the Cévennes marching northwards into the Massif Central.

The A75 is almost empty, a gleaming new autoroute that aches for traffic. Six underutilised lanes snake up a canyon past Lodève, and into the clouds.  On the Plateau de Larzac, the fog is so thick that the cars in front disappear into gloom. The odometer ticks over, the only witness to passing scenery that remains invisible behind the grey.

Suddenly the cloud parts and a silver tower looms in clear air. The car whispers onto the Viaduc du Millau.  Statistics will tell you that this bridge is the tallest road bridge in the world, reaching 343m vertically from the valley of the Tarn, and shooting 2.5km horizontally across the void. 

A backward glance, however, reveals the genius of the thing: an elegant, almost delicate piece of artwork that deigns to carry a section of the French motorway system.  The viaduct stretches back into the clouds, and you fancy you can spy the curvature of the Earth in its span.

If the A75 was fair empty of vehicles, the D999 through the Canyon de la Dourbie is perfectly desolate. Chalky cliffs rise high above the road, occasionally crested with the ruins of a castle, or a nunnery, or ridgetop hamlets that are mere smudges on the Michelin map.

The very precarity of Cantobre draws you off the planned route: a huddle of houses so improbably balanced on a knob of rock that it seems they might all collapse into the canyon at the slightest breath of wind. And yet Cantobre survives: its stone ramparts now host the holiday residences of well-to-do couples from the Netherlands and England, and a freshly painted Saint-Thérèse sighs heavenwards in the small clifftop church.

The valleys broaden. Signs welcome drivers back to the Gard département. But one surprise remains on this journey: a roadside sign announces that you are passing over the only spot in France that has its antipodes on dry land: the nondescript village of Alzon is the opposite end of the planet from the Chatham Islands. The odometer reels off 300 kilometres, but the road trip finishes with a reminder of how far you’ve really come.

Image: JaHoVil (Creative Commons)

Easter morning dawned all grey with rain in the south of France. Turned on the TV and of course France 2 has its usual Sunday-morning religious programming: just in time to hear some thoughts of Monseigneur Saïd Elias Saïd, head of the Maronite church in France, (they’re Eastern Catholics of the Syriac tradition). 

He concluded with the words of the Paschal Homily of Saint John Chrysostom, one of the fathers of the Eastern Church in Antioch. The words were written in the 4th century, but still offer a compelling conception of grace.

“If anyone has labored from the first hour, let him today receive his just reward. If anyone has come at the third hour, with thanksgiving let him keep the feast. If anyone has arrived at the sixth hour, let him have no misgivings; for he shall suffer no loss. If anyone has delayed until the ninth hour, let him draw near without hesitation. If anyone has arrived even at the eleventh hour, let him not fear on account of his delay. For the Master is gracious and receives the last, even as the first; he gives rest to him that comes at the eleventh hour, just as to him who has labored from the first. He has mercy upon the last and cares for the first; to the one he gives, and to the other he is gracious. He both honors the work and praises the intention.

Enter all of you, therefore, into the joy of our Lord, and, whether first or last, receive your reward. O rich and poor, one with another, dance for joy! O you ascetics and you negligent, celebrate the day! You that have fasted and you that have disregarded the fast, rejoice today! The table is rich-laden; feast royally, all of you! The calf is fatted; let no one go forth hungry!”

Happy Easter to everyone who reads this blog, wherever you are and whatever you believe!

Lebanese-born author Amin Maalouf is the first commentator I’ve heard who frames the current financial crisis as a logical conclusion of the end of the Cold War.  His ideas are laid out in his most recent book (March 2009) Le dérèglement du monde : quand nos civilisations s’épuisent (“The world’s moral dissolution: when our civilisations exhaust themselves”).

Maalouf was interviewed for last Saturday’s Rue des Entrepreneurs on France Inter. Although his argument may be a little reductive, his thoughts were interesting enough that I transcribed them. An English translation is below, and a copy of my transcription is available if you want to check the accuracy.

Image: gavinandrewstewart (Creative Commons)

AMIN MAALOUF: “I think that the current economic crisis is a symptom of a moral dissoluteness, a dissoluteness which goes back a long time in history. It’s tricky to find the cause of an event, but it’s possible to date this [crisis] generally from the fall of the Berlin Wall.

[The fall of the Wall] was the end of a certain kind of world. At the end of an era like that you need to take stock and decide what you want to build on the rubble of the world that’s just collapsed. In reality, we didn’t do this.

I’m not nostalgic for the world prior to the fall of the wall. I consider that the Soviet system had manifestly failed in economic terms, that dirigisme had showed its limits. This can be seen in how China and India have started to develop themselves by getting rid of dirigisme.

Image: aur2899 (Creative Commons)

But at the same time, we came to the wrong conclusion. We thought that we could take the market to its logical conclusion – a market without limitations, without scruples. We unthreaded all the concerns, the idea of “social capitalism” – everything that had been accomplished within capitalism to humanise the system. We thought we had to roll all that back…

…at an intellectual level, it’s true that the fall of the Berlin Wall represented the end of a certain ideology, and I have no nostalgia for the ideology or for a world split between marxists and anti-marxists. Simply, we drew the conclusion that the era of ideologies was over. Everyone fell back on their loyalties, particularly religious loyalties. We find ourselves today in a world that’s difficult to live in, where our loyalties are expressed with violence.“

INTERVIEWER: “So [the fall of the wall was] a mistaken victory, you say?”

AM:“A mistaken victory in terms of economics, a mistaken victory in terms of ideology, as well as a mistaken victory for international relations. It was the end of a confrontation between two blocs, the triumph of a superpower who became the sole superpower. And at the same time the behavious of this superpower has not been above reproach! It’s difficult for people to behave properly when there’s nobody opposite them watching.“

Image: KCIvey (Creative Commons)

Image: Michael Marlatt (Creative Commons)

Yesterday I received a Facebook message from one of my best and longest-standing (real-world) friends that he was going to de-friend me on Facebook, because my Twitter messages were flooding his Facebook front page. There were so many Tweets from Richard that he couldn’t see any news from any of his other friends.

Now, before Facebook recently changed its front page to a livestream, this didn’t happen: the older update feed was prioritised largely by user, so there was normally only one update (status changes, new photos, “David took a quiz and discovered he should marry an: asparagus” etc) from each friend on the frontpage.

The logic of the new FB livestream however, is that it prioritises the feed simply by newness – which means that hyper-active users (especially those with their Twitter synched to Facebook) get seen a lot more than “normal” users who might log in once a day or less.

Essentially, my Twittering (and that of many others) has been swamping my friends’ FB livestreams. This kind of defeats the main use-case for Facebook: to allow regular people be able to keep in touch with other regular people. And this contact is kind of spoiled if its disrupted by maniacal out-of-context chatter such as “zOMG I just saw a pigeon” / “@stephenfry LOL” / “Hey guys! Lets see if we can turn #irrelevantcrap into a trending topic. 1,2,3 GO!”.

So, to cut a long story short, I’ve de-coupled my Twitter feed from Facebook. It didn’t seem fair to everyone else I know on Facebook. Although I will miss some of the great feedback I got on my tweets via my Facebook-only friends.

If current trends continue, we’re all going to be interacting more and more via social media services such as Twitter and Facebook (and whatever comes next). We haven’t quite defined the modes of politesse that are required in this environment: how much chatter is too much? Is it rude to ignore a direct message or an @reply? Is it best to aggregate all our social networking tools into one massive Friendfeed, or keep separate silos for our personal and professional lives?

It’s all a bit blurry at the moment. However particularly for expatriates, good management of social networks is increasingly important. Currently, my networks are pretty well silo’d. They break down like this:

• Twitter: the one I use the most. Enables inane and wonderful conversations with a motley bunch of real-life friends, professional contacts, interesting people encountered online, as well as Darth Vader, Stephen Fry and Ceiling Cat.
• Facebook: 98% real-world contacts. If I went to school with you, played music with you, or you’re a cousin, this is where you hang out. A few old workmates and time-honoured online friends also make the Facebook list.
• LinkedIn: my online professional rolodex and CV. This is where colleagues and business contacts get filed and where I ignore friend requests from Guptil in Bangalore.
• RSS Feeds: Yeah I still run good ol’ Feedreader. Not really a social networking tool, but it’s still the only way to realistically follow blogs.
• Email: If you’re really really old or have close genetic ties to me, I can’t be bothered teaching you about social networking sites. Lord knows that getting you onto Skype was enough of a struggle. Just remember to resize your photos before you attach them.

Will this list of social media tools be the same 6/12/18 months from now? Almost definitely not. In the interim, I’ll just try to remain interesting and relevant to my friends and contacts, and not annoy them with excessive wittering about what I ate for lunch.

Catch y’all online. LaterZ.

Image: Ben Harris-Roxas (Creative Commons)

On a recommendation, I recently ploughed through Robert McCammon‘s Boy’s Life. McCammon is not normally the sort of author that appeals to me, (not being a big fan of horror/fantasy). However Boy’s Life really worked. I loved its uncomplicated melding of magic and mundanity, its vivid descriptive tone and unforced evocation of life in smalltown Alabama in the 1960s.

Ostensibly a murder mystery, Boy’s Life is really a collection of episodes in the life of Cory, a 12 year-old kid who is discovering his calling as a storyteller. The book never loses this sense of wonder, slipping with ease between tales of summer days on the baseball diamond and back-yard conversations with ghosts. Cory’s Zephyr is a Harper Lee-style smalltown, refracted through a funhouse mirror: ineffectual sheriffs, snarling Klansmen and shotgun-wielding junk collectors share the stage with a ferocious river monster, flying dogs, an ancient voodoo witch and (of course) a dinosaur.

The suspense is occasionally stunning: some events in the novel are so completely unexpected that they strike with near-physical force.   Sometimes it seems that McCammon can’t resolve or propel the narrative forward without summoning hideous dei ex machina at the last minute. But this is barely a failing: it is in these moments of crisis that McCammon’s writing is strongest.

As a semi-autobiographical novel of a child growing into the world and confronting the gift and necessity of writing, Boy’s Life bears some comparison to David Mitchell‘s Black Swan Green.   Mitchell’s story of a year in the life of Worcestershire lad Jason Taylor is darker and more tightly-woven. But in both novels the boys’ imaginative universe is a small town, populated by near-mythical characters, presented against a backdrop of real-world outside events (in Zephyr it’s the civil rights movement and Vietnam; in Black Swan Green it’s 1980s Thatcherism and the Falklands War).

In an endearingly English way, Black Swan Green thrives on loose ends, ambiguity and Jason’s unease with his role in the world. The novel orbits around a dissolving marriage and inevitable divorce.

By contrast, Cory rides roughshod into danger and mystery, calls things as he sees them and seems implausibly unperturbed by frequent physical injuries. Boy’s Life possesses an almost conservative concern for family unity, culminating in a clunky epilogue in which the narrator returns to Zephyr 25 years later and we discover what’s happened to the main characters in the interim (basically: college, wedlock and socially respectable jobs).

Black Swan Green is, as a piece of art, more far subtle and definitely more interesting (I own an autographed hardback copy, ’nuff said). But Boy’s Life is immediately satisfying: a heartfelt romp through boyhood. In its best moments it’s dizzyingly good. Just watch out for dinosaurs.

Image: whateverthing (Creative Commons)

St Richard of Chichester, sculpture by Philip Jackson

I was waiting outside the classroom today when somebody walked past and breezily called “Bonne fête, Richard!” It wasn’t my birthday, so I was momentarily baffled until I realised that April 3rd is my saint’s day.

Last time I was in France in April nobody mentioned it. This time I even got a free beer from the manager in the caféteria at lunchtime. (Poor students – even MBA students – always appreciate offers of free beer).

A quick search on Google reveals that Saint Richard (1197-1253) was an English scholar and bishop. His biography has little in common with mine:  born into a gentry family, he spent his early life working as a labourer on his brother’s farm. Despite crushing poverty, he managed to study theology at Oxford, Paris and Bologna, (and even became chancellor of Oxford University). He lived in exile in France for a period with Edmund of Abingdon during the latter’s banishment. After his return to England, Richard’s nomination to the post of Bishop of Chichester caused a conflict between Henry III and the Pope.

As well as being the patron saint of Sussex, his deathbed prayer is remembered today, especially in the musical version used in Godspell:

Thanks be to Thee, my Lord Jesus Christ

Day by day.