etnobofin

Once again, etnobofin is moving cities. In the last 13 months or so, we’ve been living in Oxford, Birmingham and Montpellier. And from the beginning of October, we’re going to be calling a new town home.

I’ve accepted a job offer in Paris. To have found an interesting and challenging job in France during the current crisis is perhaps not a miracle, (hopefully my skills and experience have something to do with it) but it certainly makes me feel fortunate, and just a little proud that I’ve taken the next step along the journey I outlined earlier in the year.

This move should provide a little more permanence than the past twelve months. 2008 and 2009 have been necessarily unsettled (inevitable when you’re doing a international degree across two countries) I’m looking forward to the challenge of settling down for a while in the 5th largest city in the world by GDP.

I’ve followed klari’s blog for years, and a while back a now-defunct Parisian jazz blog called samizdjazz, so I’m excited about being close to a lot of musical happenings of various kinds. And I’m hoping that I can use some of my time in Paris to get back into playing some music.

However, if posting in the next month or so is sporadic, it’s because I’m moving across France, finding an apartment and starting a job. It’s gonna be busy, but it’ll be worth it. Thanks again to everyone who reads the blog, I hope you’ll find the impending Parisian adventures interesting!

There’s been a conspicuous lack of posts this last week.  Classes and a weekend trip to the mountains have not helped. Normal service will resume shortly. Meantime, here’s a photo from the weekend.

Les Allues, Savoie, France

Like most pretentious and moderately creative people I know, I’ve always wanted to write a novel.  There are a few ideas and some stubs of chapters (brouillons) lying about, but I still lack the discipline or the drive to actually complete the task.

In the meantime, this blog keeps growing, and I realised recently that in fact, this blog is my writing project.  I put far more energy and time into it than I should. I love that a few people read it and occasionally comment, but it’s really personal satisfaction of having written something that drives me onward.

Which is why my database crash of October 2007 was really, really annoying – I lost all my posts from March 2006 to October 2007, including some work I was quite proud of.

Yesterday I discovered that some of my lost posts (mostly October and December 2006 and January 2007) had miraculously been saved in the Internet Archive. So with a little HTML trickery and a couple of hours work last night, I reloaded them into the blog in their correct chronological order.

It was fun to re-read some of the writing from this period, which I thought I’d lost forever. A few highlights include:

• a tear shed for the manner of Saddam Hussein’s death
• some musings on the miraculous properties of tea
• the first YouTube video I ever made - Skiing in Slovenia
• a rather gorgeous dawn over the rooftops of Oxford

Next week, I’m moving myself and the blog to France. The big plan is to make it a semi-permanent move: I’m doing the second part of my course in Montpellier, but after that I hope to get a job and live in France for a while. It’s neither a plan to solve world hunger, nor a particularly ambitious plan, but it’s a plan.

Attentive readers may know that I lived in France before – albeit briefly, before Bush II was President. Some of my writing from that period is on the blog.   My time in France knocked a few rough edges off me, but it obviously didn’t put me off the country, and now I can’t wait to go back. If I don’t go now, I’ll never go.

France is no paradise. Believe me, if I wanted to preserve my francophilic tendencies, I’d restrict my contact with the country to a couple of weeks holiday each year. As a place to live, France is no better or no worse than any other country in western Europe. But France has quirks. These are my confident predictions for the first month:

• I speak good French, but I will make a complete fool of myself at least once a day with something I say
• I will nearly be run over at least once, because I’m not used to cars driving on the right
• I’ll say I understand 80% of what’s being said, when I really understand 50%
• There will be AT LEAST one enfuriating Catch-22 involving a missing document, a bank or a bureaucrat
• Somebody will ask me if I’m German or English or American.  And when I tell them “Nouvelle-Zélande“, they’ll think I’m from Denmark.

Place de la Comédie, Montpellier. Image: Wolfgang Staudt

I’m also going to be doing all my coursework in French: I’m less worried about the classes than about writing assignments.  It’s going to be a challenge, but worth it.  Either I’ll crash and burn spectacularly, or I wont.

It’ll take a few months of pain to acclimatise. But over time, things will get better.  The language will come back.  I’ll get more assertive in queues and start drinking Volvic.  I’ll make some friends and start talking with my hands (no, really, it will happen). I’ll get up to speed again with current affairs so I can laugh at the jokes in Charlie Hebdo.

And of course, France and I may fall out of love. I may hate living there. I may give up and go home. But I hope not.

So, over the next few months I guess I’ll be blogging about different aspects of life in a “new” country. There’ll definitely still be posts about non-French things, but if etnobofin seems a little, well, préoccupé, please forgive me.

Derek Bailey – What’s New?
From Ballads: Tzadik [Buy]

Happy New Year ! - I wish that 2007 brings with it everything you hope and dream for.

For 2007, things are going to change around here. Recently, doing some maintenance on etnobofin.com, I got thinking about what the heck it’s all about. For a short time, while peering under the bonnet, (that’s “hood” in many North American dialects, comprenez-vous?), hands smeared with excess oil and burning my nose on steam hissing from the radiator, I did seriously consider driving the whole rickety contraption off a cliff to join the estimated 2.72 million abandoned blogs drifting about in cyberspace.

After all, if etnobofin were abandoned this blog would be in good company – for some really interesting music blogs shut up shop in 2006 as their authors found that other lives and other people required more attention – the work of david fenech, ecrivains.org, samizdjazz, and ianB’s various projects notable among them.

However, the decision was eventually taken not to throw the kitten kaboodle out with the bathwater.

Instead, etnobofin.com will become more inclusive in its subject matter. Music has largely dominated these pages since March 2005. To be honest, there are so many great music blogs out there now doing a better job that I can ever do, and ultimately it’s not clear that I can continue to spin a cohesive narrative out of personal musical interests that are increasingly divergent. (More on that another time).

What will etnobofin.com be about in 2007? Well, like everything it’s a work in progress. It’ll adhere more closely to its mission statement. While music will not disappear from view, it will break the “only-cover-one-topic” rule of blogging and will possibly include more about journeys, writing, naïve stabs at politics, spiritual bits and bobs, ripping yarns, stupid stuff.

Miles Davis will have to learn rub shoulders with Marc Chagall and Ingmar Bergman and BBC Radio Four and scottish islands and cups of tea and candles and the necessity for sleep.

My hopes for etnobofin.com in 2007 are that:

- it will become more interested in people

- it can be honest and humble

- it will smile and laugh at itself

- it’s readers (no matter how few) will be interested and entertained

So that’s where we’re at. If none of this sounds like fun, delete your RSS feeds and Favourite links right now.

The mechanics of storytelling generally demand a beginning, a middle and and end.

So, here’s a beginning. Bon, voilà .