Madame Bovary

For Advanced French, my class is reading Monique Proulx's Les Aurores Montreales, which is a collection of short stories that document the lives of ordinary people in Montreal.

Makes me wonder if I am the way I am in order to perceive myself as beautiful and acceptable through others' eyes, or because I am who I am.  It's one of those cycles of reflexivity that is neverending and completely pointless to engage in.  One has to be confident and to simply not give a shit.  One thing that becoming relatively fluent in French has really made me want to do is speak in the 3rd person.

I just finished reading the nouvelle entitled Madame Bovary, after the novel of the same name by Flaubert.  In short, it is about the young housewife of an unexciting businessman who spends her days living quietly after a young adulthood of brilliance and creativity.  She waits every day for her two children to arrive home from school and her quiet, banal husband to return to soliloquize to the empty air about the details of his day.  Each morning with a dainty cup of black coffee, she reads the column of a journalist who writes brilliant, dark and cruelly stark pieces about ordinary people.  She reads every book he recommends, even though her husband dismisses him as "marxist."  One day, this journalist invites his readers, the ordinary people, to invite him into their homes.  Diane (the housewife) does so.  Anyway, long story short, her end goal is to seduce him, for he has liberated her with his words, made her aware of the depressing obscurity of her existence, opened her eyes, given her the information she needs in order to be sentient.  He comes over and she is completely herself for the first time in her life, describing her wildest dreams - and she is completely certain that she has tantalized him.  He leaves, but she is positive that he will return to consummate "their" outrageous desires.

The next day, he writes only a few lines in his column.  He is tired, he is through, he is convinced that his idea to write about the lives of ordinary people was a terrible one.  His folly was brought home by him by who he describes as a young suburban madam searching for her soul between astrology and pastries, a Madame Bovary far more disgusting and empty than she of the famous novel.  He will not write anymore.

It takes Diane a few reads to realize that this passage is about her.  She races to the bookstore to buy Madame Bovary and devours it voraciously.  She is unable to perceive the sense of the analogy, how she resembles at all the heroine of this novel.  She despises herself.  She knows that she must live, absolutely live, and dreams fondly of the taste of arsenic, soft and warm like black coffee.

Tuesday Night Update

Switched to red wine.  Will the headaches stop?

Even better today, despite walking to and from McGill in warm, driving rain and 33-degree temperatures.  Completely forgot to eat breakfast and didn't realize it until I was about to start work at 4.  I wore jungle green and retook the quiz I missed last Friday and I owned the nominalisation part, but I wasn't super sure when to choose the imparfait vs. passé composé for a couple of cases and I think I invented conjugations for s'agir and ressentir.  I'm not even going to check.

Recently, I have gone pretty much crazy when it comes to clothes, especially at last weekend's street sale.  I have bought all sorts of bizarre and awesome, colorful pieces.  Dresses with broad belts, translucent tops and white and blue denim miniskirts or pencil skirts in black and white polka dot.  Lots of marine stripes in all colors and plenty of amethyst, bright green and cobalt.  I'm pretty content right now on the wardrobe front.  Caspian bought me some gorgeous industrial-looking white gold loop earrings that are super shiny on the sides, but they look kind of die-cut and are matte on the long sides.  I love 'em.

Just trying to stay calm and positive.  Take pleasure in the small things.  I'm not normally an anxious person, but during those phases, life can be a nightmare.  I have to keep thinking about things bigger and more important than myself and my little problems.

Started reading Elizabeth Haydon's Rhapsody and was slightly affronted at the romantic virgin sex between...  A 13-year-old and a 14-year old.  ::sigh::  Really?  At least it was better than Fifty Shades of Grey (which was too awful and stupid to bother wasting time reviewing).

The Red Tent: Thoughts and Impressions

My friend S loaned me Anita Diamant's The Red Tent the other week, and I just finished it last night, reading the 2nd half in about three hours.

I will be honest and say that I loved it.  It's not a rational feeling, but a gut-deep appreciation for the way love, birth, death and beauty is expressed in the book.  The book wounds and it rends and it grates and it sighs and shouts joyfully under the sun and the moon of all things human and female.  It's fiction, and it would be inappropriate for me to pass any judgment at all upon it's so-called "authenticity" (which so many offended, super-Christian readers complained about in their reviews).  It makes me laugh when people get so up-in-arms when a book is labeled "religious fiction" and they pick it up, believing that "religious" has to mean "Christian" or else.

People complained that it drags on and on.  One witty reviewer snidely commented that it flies, "when tossed across a room."  I usually understand the reasoning for comments like these for many books, but in the case of The Red Tent, I'm completely baffled.  I couldn't put it down, maybe because I'm a woman and strongly drawn to goddess traditions, but I'm not usually so receptive to so-called "female literature," usually rejecting it as hokey or too New Age.  I have become very masculine in my values.

I asked myself so many weird questions as I read this book, questions I've never pondered or ones I've scoffed at as barbaric and base.  What does it mean to be a parent?  A mother?  A girl?  A weaker subgroup among the strong?  Female?  Male?  My whole life, I was socialized to despise, feel dirtied by or at least be inconvenienced by my monthly cycles.  My husband, Caspian, was the one who really introduced me to the concept that it's good and natural and part of being female and should be appreciated, and this book helped to drive the power of real femininity (not masculine expressions of power by females, which are acceptable and valued by society) home to me.

When it comes to book reviews, I'm horrible at analyzing plot and literary devices and stuff like that, simply because I am such an instinctive reader and don't even pay attention to these things the first time through a book.  However, Diamant's descriptive skills entranced me.  I was enamored of Dinah's mothers, her lovers, the gritty, often barbaric, yet beautiful world she inhabited.

People nowadays fear the earth.  They separate themselves from it and entwine themselves in a glittering, false net of pop culture and fleeting, banal, unhealthy values and die in this state.  The book reminded me, once again, that the earth and time and the cycles that govern my body and the universe should not be ignored.

Love

Sometimes we love with nothing more than hope.  Sometimes we cry with everything except tears.  In the end, that's all there is; love and its duty, sorrow and its truth.  In the end, that's all we have - to hold on tight until the dawn.

- Shantaram

About Those Public Libraries You Have to Pay For

The United States has horrible infrastructure, virtually no public transportation, awful schools and an obesity epidemic...  But at least its public libraries are free and open to the public.

I was up bright and early on this the final day of vacation, armed with ID and satchel, and strolled the 2 miles to Westmount "Public" Library.  It's a beautiful place, right on the edge of a lovely park shaded by castles of the rich and snobby that meander up the slopes of Mont Royal.  I breezed in through the doors with a herd of elderly ladies, found the circulation desk and asked the clerk what I needed to do to be a member of this elegant "public" library.

In this terrible, horrible nasal Canadian accent, she asked me with pursed lips where I lived.  I told her the street, and she said, "That's in Montreal, not Westmount."

I looked at her in consternation.  Sure, Westmount is a neighborhood, but it's in the very center of Montreal.  So I mentally rolled my eyes and said, "And what does that mean?"  She informed me that I would have to pay an exorbitant yearly fee to access the library, as I was not one of the privileged residents of The "City" of Westmount.  Oh, and I'd also have to prove that I don't live in Westmount by presenting a utility bill.  I guess Westmount is like a papal state, holy and with its own zipcode and shit.  I asked her how much it costs for people who work and/or live in Westmount, and she looked at me haughtily and said, "Why, our library is free to Westmount patrons."  Some effing public library.

That's socioeconomic, linguistic and geographic discrimination!  So, the rich, white, English-speaking residents of Westmount get free access to one of the most beautiful libraries in the city, and us lowly so-called Montrealers have to break the bank for the same privilege?  It should be the other way around!  I stomped out of there ASAP and engaged in a bit of consolation shopping at Alexis Nihon.

Then I went home, fueled up with scrambled eggs and Gatorade, and marched my furious white butt to Atwater Library, an unaffiliated nonprofit library located in a beautiful heritage building.  I discovered that this library charged a flat fee of $20 per year for all memberships regardless of neighborhood of residence.

I met D, a bizarre old British lady with an intense love for putting books neatly away.  I also met D2, a short, rotund man with the fastest typing fingers in the West and the thickest glasses I've ever seen.  There was also V, a formidable, heavily-rouged, jewel-encrusted lady who took one look at my long and outlandish first name and said, "I'm glad you're built like a brick house [she traced an hourglass figure with her hands in the air] and not a refrigerator; you totally own that name."  I was shocked and amused for two seconds and then she was launching into an operatic rendition of some song (by whoever wrote "Leroy Brown" apparently) that refers to a roller derby girl "built like a refrigerator."  How she made these connections I will never know.

And finally, I met L, the shyest, politest guy with the most obvious crush on me.

I made sure that everybody at the circulation desk at Atwater Library knew how much I enjoyed the hilarious experience of signing up for a membership, and I loudly pooh-poohed Westmount "Public" Library, Westmount proper and the posh old sticks who live there (AND PARTAKE IN FREE LIBRARY SERVICES).

AND I got the two books I wanted.

Who am I?

"The facts of life are very simple.  In the beginning, we feared everything - animals, the weather, the trees, the night sky - everything except each other.  Now we fear each other and almost nothing else.  No one knows why anyone does anything.  No one tells the truth.  No one is happy.  No one is safe.  In the face of all that is so wrong with the world, the very worst thing you can do is survive.  And yet you must survive.  It is this dilemma that makes us believe and cling to the lie that we have a soul, and that there is a God who cares about its fate."

- Shantaram

In Which I Am Feisty

I have a phone interview tomorrow morning.  It's for a part-time job, but one that might be completely awesome and personally beneficial.  More to come later about that!

In my humble opinion, Sarah Palin is a lout who appeals to louts.

Today, between job-hunting sessions and general housekeeping duties, I finished reading Charles Stross' The Family Trade.  I found it pretty entertaining, but there was something significantly off about it.  The heroine, a successful young woman, becomes assertive, and then aggressive, and then vulgar and finally completely unlike her original self.  At first, I sort of liked her, even if she was a little bit dry and difficult to know.  By the end, I sort of despised her and wondered where her true fire had gone, and why it had been replaced with a machine gun.  Her flagrant use of expletives and propensity to call other young women "baby" or "babe" just really effing irritated me!  Who does that?  Not only that, but it is almost embarrassingly obvious that the author is slinging around some technological jargon of which he only marginally understands the nuances.  I kid you not, the main character was described as having to replace the "hard disk" of a digital camera after storing 1000 pictures.  Memory card, mayhap, would have been the proper term.  The author was going for edgy, but ended up gauche, with a hint of kitsch.

Also, the main character goes, in a span of two weeks, from underpaid journalist content with her relationships and middle-class lifestyle, to a power economist, international relations theory expert, weapons master, poli sci guru and large-scale political manipulator.  She also ends up having an uncanny, even unlikely head for machination, and it rang false to this reader.

Wow, I ended up railing on that book.  Guess I hadn't really thought about how I truly felt about it before sitting down to write this post.

I am restarting Ian Irvine's The View from the Mirror series, and this time I'm going to finish it!  Locus had it right, though, in labeling the series "...a worldbuilding labor of love."  Sometimes I have to labor through the worldbuilding, which is completely unlike me, and saying something.  At least his characters act oddly on a consistent basis!

Dichotomy

You know, I'm a strange dichotomy of craving [intellectual] hard work and being terrified of it at the same time.  Maybe I'm just terrified of working hard at something I dread and find utterly banal.  We'll see how I do next week as I'm borrowed by a new supervisor whom I find interesting personality-wise, although I'm worried about a new management style.  I think I am found pert and uncensored.

There has to be a place for me.  I started reading my Linguistics textbook.  Immersing myself in material that's actually around my reading level was like swimming in cake.  Or something.  I even got out a highlighter and marked passages I found particularly interesting and information that I hadn't known before.

Dreaming of Montreal

Still no news from Montreal International, but we're hopeful that information will find its way to us soon.  Caspian took a test to apply for a really dynamic and neat position in his company, and it was brilliantly written and backed by a whole lot of passion (not to mention some neat concept art by one of his best friends).  I probably shouldn't be as optimistic about his chances as I am, but hey, optimism is fun!  Despite my moods, I consider myself to be a pretty optimistic person.

In addition to local news, the New York Times, occasional forays to CNN, PolicyWatch, the Washington Post and the Chicago Tribune, I've started reading the Montreal Gazette to learn more about the political and social environment there.  Looks like the heat wave that has gripped SE USA is plaguing Quebec as well, but on a smaller scale.  I'm comforted to hear that it does indeed get up to 90 degrees in Montreal...  But the thought of winter is pretty terrifying to me.  I guess if I have all the right clothes...

I have several books going right now, a couple of which I've already read.

Currently Reading:

Kushiel's Dart, by Jacqueline Carey - Probably one of my favorite books/series of all time.  The passionate, sexy, brilliant and dynamic story of a very unique courtesan and how she changes a world.

Sabriel, by Garth Nix - The first of the Abhorsen trilogy, it's the story of a young necromancer and her fight to save her father from an unknown fate.  A compelling universe with fascinating characters, and one of my most favorite books.  Another interesting, flawed heroine.

Walden, by Thoreau - An old classic detailing Thoreau's sustainable, responsible, purposeful existence in a small cabin at the edge of a pond.  His dated prose can be both ponderous and poetic.

Buddhist Scriptures, Edward Conze, ed. - A survey and an introduction to important Buddhist writings.  I really need to pick this one up again, I got a bit frustrated with the male centrism.

Books I Intend to Read:

Linguistics, Adrian Akmajian et al. - I have this weighty tome waiting on my shelf and I haven't been able to forego my favorites to start relearning about one of my passions.  Probably a prudent read now that I'm about to be forced (happily) to learn Quebecois!

Quebecois Dictionary and Phrasebook, Renata Isajlovic - One of they very few I could find that wasn't for rookies or basically a children's book.  We'll see how it performs when it arrives in a few days.

Berlitz Self-Teacher:  French, Berlitz editors - An older French textbook and very substantial, from what I read in the reviews before purchasing it used.  While I'm a veteran language-learner, I haven't spent much time at all studying romance languages (does Latin count?) and should probably begin at the beginning.  I don't think I'll have a huge problem with grammar or writing, but pronunciation, on the other hand...