Some good times, some not so

I promised a while back to give a sense of the view from the terrasse and library of the Foyer--not a shabby place to mark journals or hold office hours, eh?  That's the Jardin Luxembourg just past the first buildings in the foreground.

On Tuesday we had the second of our group outings, and I was glad to have waited until the weather improved.  As in the past I tried to coordinate with the Grand Tour group, and the combination is always good for both classes: there's something about the effortlessness with which the city unrolls in front of you when you're floating on the water, as compared with the constant struggle with traffic, smoke, pedestrians, and so on, that makes an evening boat ride a tonic for tired tourists.

Taking a 9 PM boat means you get the last light on the buildings, though you don't have a big show at the Eiffel Tower yet.  I don't know--there's something truly magic about this place, even as one of my students aptly reminded me of how she can't look at Notre Dame without thinking of the hundreds of people who died building it.  That is actually on my mind quite a lot these days, having spent a good chunk of last weekend reading about various wars and sieges and occupations, and realizing that Paris is "special" in ways that are not always 100% honorable.  It's easy to forget how close it was to being destroyed at multiple points in history, and how what saved it was not necessarily honorable deal-making and deal-breaking.  Even the boulevards and cafes, when you dig deeper, owe their existence to brutal "urban renewal" projects that displaced hundreds of thousands.

Here's my colleague and ancien combattant Victor, trying to relax after another day leading the Grand Tour.  It is such a circus, that program, and I can hardly believe I've signed up to do next year's rendition.  There's always something, and he's got his hands full this year with logistical and personnel issues.  I was incredibly lucky last year, although I really did not relax completely at any time--one snatches little breaks and keeps planning, keeps foreseeing, yet no matter what you do, it can blow at any seam: a student can crack up, a tour arrangement can get lost in a bureaucratic shuffle, or an operator can lose his license (as happened to me last year, necessitating a quick charge-up of the corporate credit card).

Who knows what shot will become popular with the Summer Abroad publicity people?  Maybe something like this one.  The smiles are genuine, and life is (temporarily) good.

The rest of the week went fine as far as the teaching went tolerably well--felt a little like pulling teeth getting discussion going a few times, but there were also some good moments where unexpected participants made good contributions (instead of the Usual Suspects).  This is the time when students are starting to get tired, and punctuality suffers.  For some reason there's also a tendency for people to just get up and walk out instead of waiting for the breaks--I've never been one to issue hall passes, but is it true that an hour is too long to expect college students to maintain attention?  Damn, what an old fogey I am becoming!

Thursday night was the long-awaited match-up between France and Germany in the Euro Cup semifinals, and after marking some journals I watched with interest after the excellent conference call with Alex and Amelie and Jared.  Unfortunately, I was too lazy to cook something so I took a chance during halftime, and bought a plat a emporter from a kebab place around the corner. Mistake! Big mistake!  The next morning I had that unmistakeable what-crawled-up-me-and-died feeling, and I spent a good chunk of the morning in the bathroom.  Not good.

Also not good was this odd ironic comment that greeted me as I went down the stairs to collect a couple of late revisions at the Foyer in the early afternoon: I don't quite understand why these little gifts appeared on the doormats of my downstairs neighbors.  They are not in residence, since there's major construction happening (hence the floor protection), but maybe they pissed some other neighbor off and this is the payback.  The doors downstairs have been open more than usual, so maybe this is payback for that as well, but the little doggie-gifts were definitely not what I wanted or needed to see in my state of digestive unrest.  Yes, Paris is full of surprises, isn't it.

So I took a brief walk around this afternoon after a loongg sleep in (merciful) after eating only a bit of rice with tamari last night, an had that strange sense of envying everyone who was munching away on anything they wanted.  My right ear is again stuffed up in some bizarre way, so I am definitely in that whinging mode, I am afraid.  Luckily it's the weekend--I really want to be past this before the Normandy trip on Monday, because the last thing I want is to be leading a trip hoping for bathroom breaks.  Ooof.  Tonight I go to a movie with Martha, and old friend of Amelie's family, and dinner afterward, and we'll see how I do.  Fingers crossed.

A Weekend Spent Mostly Behind A Book

The view across rue Seguier from my front window

My entire weekend has been pretty intensely devoted to something I have spent precious little time doing for many years--Improving My Mind.  Studying again.  Reading and annotating (Stein).  Reading and not annotating (a couple of web articles about Stein; a huge and wonderful social history of Impressionism / Paris that I found in Raquel's apartment, missing some pages where plates have been razored out but still immensely fascinating); a history of the Nazi Occupation and its aftermath (When Paris Went Dark).  A Review of French Grammar I found in the apartment. Lots of stuff.

This is actually one of the things I fantasized about when I took this job, although last weekend, my previous opportunity, I ended up marking in-class journals, re-working Raquel’s draft schedule, and obsessing over trying to get sketches and drawings of the Tahoe cabin ready to pdf and send to an architect friend—that and taking some long slow Clydesdale (Percheron, I guess) runs while babying my prone-to-cramp calves.  Yes as I implied earlier I am giving myself a crash course catching up / getting ahead of the readings for A in P (thank goodness for the more leisurely schedule compared to the windsprints of the GT), which is actually a true pleasure: it sounds insane to say but I know how to read a Henry James novella and really get into it and be able to teach it.  This is a strange reminder of what after all was the metier that I thought I was going in for, back before the demographics of the late 1980s job market (lots too many white men chasing way too few jobs)  and my quixotic choice of emphasis ("Not another Shakespeare scholar.  Don't you know we're revising our curriculum to emphasize more relevant texts?") as well as my own self-sabotage ("Mr Stenzel spends too much time on his teaching and not enough on his publication efforts") led me to the career I had at UC Davis.  Eventually this career became a nonstop diet of writing courses leavened with the occasional Summer Abroad (dealing with some wonderful students as well as a bizarre mixture of travel-struck naifs, "fun"-bent Greekies and archly posing pseudo-sophisticates).  

This is half the hallway before my trap(ezoidal) door

I was talking with someone before I left about that twilight time before the writing program’s Amicable Divorce from the English Department, when the unanointed lecturers were occasionally allowed to toil in massa's vegetable garden (and teach literature courses for their sabbaticalizing betters) instead of toting dem bales of composition cotton while singing spirituals of solidarity.  Prepping a new lit course was a heady undertaking, extra work done in breaks and on the fly: crafting new writing assignments, re-reading old works and old notes, slamming up new reading lists and staying a week ahead of the undergrads (mea culpa).  Those were exciting times, kind of what I am feeling right now, the joy of flexing intellectual muscles and being satisfyingly tired from the workout.  The unspoken goal for all of us back then seemed to be to kick ass and be so much better than the more-published Academic Senate competition that the sagacious students would actually look for the non-professors on the at-first-generic yearly schedules, with STAFF instead of a professor’s name denoting someone who knew how to make a lecture interesting, or run a real discussion, or write comments neither snarky nor vague.  Of course when your competition was too often has-beens or never-weres preternaturally talented at putting undergrads to sleep despite the uncomfortable desks, with or without whispers of Inappropriate Behavior thrown in, it didn't take all that much to make a good impression.  The fact that we lecturers so seldom had the luxury of repeating a literature course lent the whole enterprise a desperate calm, I don't know how to describe it.  There was no way to justify the amount of work one put in, yet somehow we kept doing it.

Having the time to study, and to reflect on these and other matters, may be one of the best benefits of this month in France.  It’s hard to admit in some ways, but one outcome from the overwork on Project Palaces the past year is the realization that I really cannot keep up the extent and intensity of the physical work I was doing—some of you readers know about the lingering peripheral neuropathy (tingling-wake-you-up-hurting fingers and hands), general aches, and specific pains--and the creeping conviction that as I approach the Big Six-Oh I could and should ratchet that whole aspect back to a sustainable level, preferably a low level, and maybe pursue and develop some of the not-as-physically-demanding-or-damaging talents that I still apparently have.  It takes a 2 x 4 upside the head, but He Can Be Taught.  My fingers are returning to normal, mornings no longer agony the way they were a bit more often than I admitted at the time.  I'm stretching every day (using the pink yoga mat that I plucked as it rolled across the Quai des Grand Augustins the day after I got here--I looked around in disbelief, saw no claimants, and walked home with it under my arm.  Not even dirty.  Can I get an "Amen!"). 

Voila the pink mat AND the styrofoam table-shims

On the downside, all the sitting is taking its toll, and that stretching may have to be ratcheted up: this morning I started thinking about the ergonomics of this place and realized the table is simply too low.  My legs have been getting super tight, even as I attempt to stand up, walk around, and stretch every 15 minutes or so.  Yet I find myself sitting sitting sitting as I get stuck into a book, and I forget the physical side.  Oy.  This morning I found a hunk of styrofoam that was being tossed, took a knife to it, and carved four blocks about an inch and a half thick, and big enough to accept the four skinny wheel that this table rolls on.  So far it's a decent choice: the wheels sink into the blocks just enough, and the angle of my knees seems healthier.  We'll see.