Maybe today I can finally get caught up to the present> I'm going to talk about continuing quotidien stuff first, and then special events. Here we go.
I'm starting to try to teach myself Python. It's not easy. For one thing, all I have for a reference is the Python tutorial copy-pasted into a .txt file that I cruise through in Notepad while I have the editor/interpretor open next to it. The thing is that it lacks a built-in graphical input device like VB6 does, so I can't rely on the interface to solve my coding problems, and it doesn't have the line-by-line GOTO structure that TI Basic does, so I simply have to learn how to thing around it. Granted, the GOTO-based languages can get unreasonably complicated when you have to remember which labels point where, but at least I was used to it. Right now, my biggest difficulty is that I don't know how to redefine global variables inside of functions, so if anybody can tell me how to do that, please drop me a line. Keep in mind that I know basically nothing about Classes, that's the next thing I'm gonna take a look at. I'm pretty sure that I can use Classes to do it, but I dunno. Also, maybe I'm jsut thinking about it the wrong way and my coding is running into problems that are caused by my TI Basic and VB6 preconditionning and I just have to figure out how to think around it. Whatever, it just feels good to be coding again. It's been too long.
I've been reading Germinal by Emile Zola, one of the great French-language authors. I read about a third of it a couple months ago, then took a break to read a bunch of Camus, and now I've come back to it. I'm really enjoying it. It's the story of an unemployed vagrant looking for work during the industrial recession that wreaked havoc during France's Second Empire. The book opens up with his becoming a miner, and eventually he incites the miners to strike against a policy change that they don't like. I've really been enjoying the book; one of the things that I'm impressed with the most is Zola's very balanced portrayal of the matter. There's a lot of ideological combat going on here; Etienne, the main character who incites the miners to strike, is a self-described socialist, and he sets out to threaten the capital and put the labor on top, but he becomes a sort of demagogue that gets kind of drunk with his own influence, and he ends up being not the most sympathetic character. Zola also identifies very explicitly the relation between the miners' devotion to their social cause and the religious zeal of fanatical Christians, and Etienne's position as a kind of prophet. Ultimately, Zola portrays socialism as a utopic pipe dream.
But! He spends a lot of time on the miners before they strike, and he paints a very miserable picture of their living conditions. They buy into a utopic pipe dream, yeah, but after having generation after generation of your family starve almost to death while being worked almost to death in a dark pit for a pittance is enough to make anybody grasp at straws. Sharecropping seems to be the American equvalent of the system that the mine in Germiinal seems to use; the Company provides housing and heating (well, coal, in this case) for its workers, so their dependant on the Company for their baisc needs. There are some stores in the Coaltown that I think are privately owned, but operate mostly by giving the miners credit that the miners' salary is never sufficient enough to compensate, so they're perpetually trapped in this cycle of debt. What's more, this goes on for generations and generations; one of the principal passtimes is having sex, because it's free and it feels really good, and that results in many children, naturally. These children consume resources, and are so a sinkhole for the family's money that could be going to, say, repaying their debt. To ease the financial load they are, these children are put to wark at early ages (7-10) in the mine so they can earn some money and, at the very least, be less of a drag on the household. Nevertheless, this is never enough to eliminate the debt, the child is chained to the mine as his or her parents were, ad nausiem. And it's really not pretty.
The third thing that Zola describes really well is the Capital, the Bourgois. They really are living in another world; it's reasy to see these Bourgois as the spiritual descendants of Royalty, living in a world entirely seprate from that of the workers' perpetual misery, and yeah, it's gonan be slightly exaggerated, but it seems very feasible to me. These are folks that have inherited fortunes and are used to a very hard lifestyle that has very little contact with the worker, who's considered as a slightly lesser, mildly disgusting being, much like a meadieval pesant. Zola does not depict the Bourgois very favorably; they're people living in an imaginary fairyland that couldn't possibly admit the misery of their workers. Don't they give them a roof over their head? Don't they give them heating so they don't freeze? Don't they pay them for their work? If they'd manage their money and their child-making a bit better, then they wouldn't be in the mess they're in! Unfortunately, the worker is kind of dumb, and so he can't figure this out and master his base instincts. This is why we're in charge of them and not the other way around. It's a very 'let-them-eat-cake' mentality, and Zola displays it in a very unflattering light. He doesn't attack them outright; "unflattering" seems the best word.
So we have the miners with a religious zeal that slowly deteriorate into a raging mob, led by Etienne; we have the Bourgois, totally ignorant of the raw deal they've given their workers and who refuse to admit the possibility that they might be able to manage things better; and what's more we're shown a brief image of a coal mining operation owned by a different company that is much more reasonable, and in which the system actually kind of works. At this other Company, the owner is right there, not a fraid to talk to his workers and explain that no, he can't give them a raise, because that would give him a net loss on every cartful of coal that comes out of the mine, which would eventually not let him pay them at all. Zola manages to be very balanced throught the story, and that;s what impresses me the most. His is decidedly not a one-sided account of things. I heard him described as a 'Naturalist,' but this wouldn't be a naturalist of the same type as Jack London and those, whode focus was on Nature, it's more like a breed of Realism, whose goal is to express things as they are and not distort them with a lens of subjectivity or personal inclination ("sine ira et studio"). I suspect that Victor Hugo also falls into this category, though he's much more explicit with where his sympathies lie. All in all, I really like Germinal. The style can be a bit thick at times, shades of Dickens, but all in all I've found it very enjoyable. Pick it up intranslation and tell me if you see hte same thing in it maybe.
\Okay, enough of that. Nineteenth Century French literature is an obscure interest at best. What you really want to hear about is the Grandmothers' visit. Two grandmothers visited the Parietti house for the 22nd, 23rd, and 24th of May. I'm not entirely sure whose grandmothers they were, but they were realted to the family. The one was rather quiet and didn't say much. The other was always going on about how great things were. I'm all for how great things are, it's an important component to my personal philosophy, but this was enough to get kind of irritating after a while. There's a French word that I'm starting to shy away from using: "beau." This is a fairly commonly known French word, and you may think it quite inoffensive. Well, during the Grandmas' stay, I heard it a lot because the Exclamatory Grandma used it a lot. I heard a lot of, "Oh, c'etait beau," and "Oh! comme c'est beau!" and mavy variations on this theme. I started to dislike the word beccause in her presence it took on a connotation of superficiality. I got the impression that she used the word "beau" to exhaustion, rendering it meaningless by associating it with almost anything. I felt like she was naming the superficial, not the essential of a thing in declaring it "beau." If something struck her in the right way, "Oh, c'est beau." It was just the first impresssion she was judging, not the depth of the thing itself. What really annoyed me was that many of the things she declared "beau" were things that I value very highly as well. In all honesty, my consternation was a bit unjustified. It seems to me like it might have been a shocl reaction to the fact that her own philosophy was startilingly similar to mine, and that grated. I can and do try to justify my way of expressing how great the world is through wierd means that probably are unfounded, but in my hear of hearts I think that it was a mirror that reflected myself too well, and I didn't like to see it. Still, as I say, I can't help bu try to justify it by telling myself that I was appreciating things on a different level than she, trying to understand a bit what was behind a thing rather than just be carried away by its pretty packaging, but I have no way of knowing if that's true at all or not. I can guess at what she's thinking, but most of her judgements happened to agree with mine, os I can't arrogate myself to thinking that I can honestly understand stuff better than she. Also, she flattered me a lot, and flatter bothers me because it goes straight to my head. You know me; I am not ashamed to declare how great I am. But I expect everybody else to acknowledge their own greatness as well; when they start praising me, I get kind of annoyed because they're supposed to be keeping me in check. Don't tell me how great I am, I already know. I want to hear about how great you are, so we can rejoice in our communal greatness. IT might be that, in praising (or at least flattering) me, I get the feeling that they're putting themselves down, and I don't hold with that. OR maybe it's just that I can't take flattery seriously. All in all, I liked this grandma, but she managed to exasperate me anyways, and I'm not quite sure why, though I suspect it has something to do with how similar to me she is.
The 23rd, while the Grandmas were still there, I took a tour of the museums of Brussels. The 23rd was a Sunday, not a Monday, so the museums were mercifully open. I went to see the Magritte Museum and the Musee des Beaux-Arts. Magritte was Belgian, not French; Belgium has a very rich surrealist tradition, with James Ensor, Magritte (who produced, after all, some of the most well-known images of surrealism[though Dali's 'soft clocks' probably take the number one sopt]), and Paul Delveaux, with doubtless others that I'm too ignorant to cite. It took me a little while to warm up, but once I going Magritte was way cool. One thing is that the museum was laid out in chronological order, and the stuff Magritte did earlier in his career is just not as interesting as the stuff he did later. Magritte did a little of everything, too. He experimented a lot, he did some sculpture and film in addition to his painting, within which he tried a lot of different stuff. He did some Fauvesque stuff that I would not have guessed was Magritte if it hadn't been in the Magritte Museum. They also had some Magritte quotes up on the walls, and one that struck me was Magritte talking about the "liberating power of the image." When I considered that, the whole of Surrealism made a different sense than it used to. The liberating power of the image. Huh! It's true, and many of Magritte's paintings, having been predicated on that principle, exhibit it to a great extent. You see an image, and that liberates your mind a bit. IT introduces associations that could not have been there before. I knew that a large part of Surrealism was trying to express the unconcious without the intervention of the concious, but you can think about it a bit differently, too; by obseving the unconscious conciously, we can consider things in a light that we would be incapable of doing otherwise because rationality gets in the way. And just looking at some of Magritte's paintings, I could see how this mechanic might and did work. That was great. And now, I've fulfilled one of my touristic duties, I have seen the Magritte Museum, I now have the right to reenter the US, and they won't send me back at O'Hare. "Oh, no sorry, you didn't visit the Magritte Museum, we're sending you back to Brussels on the first available flight."
But that is not all, oh no, that is not all! On the 30th, Mme. and M. PArietti were kind enough to take me to France, to the city of Metz, to see the branch of the Centre Pompidou that has installed itself there as house for temporary expositions. Of course, these expositions have the wieght of the Centre Pompidou behind them, so they're not going to be any sloch exhibitions. The one we went to see was called, "Chef-d'ouvre?" or "Masterpiece?" and was billed as an examination of what a masterpiece was. It was in quasi-chronological order, or at least the first floor was, starting with the middle ages and the etymological origins of the term (at least in French, but I imagine they're very similar for English) when the term was used to designate the final work an apprentice artisan made to demonstrate that he had become a master in his own right and was now competant enough to cease his apprenticeship and work for himself. Slowly, the term lost its industrial connotation and gained more of an artistic connotation. One peice that's particularly stuck with me was a statue from the 16th or 17th century. IT was modled after a decomposing corpse, a skeleton standing upright with the flesh of his head and chest missing, his clothes no longer dovering him here and there, and his finger and toe bones sometimes poking out; he was holding a heart aloft in his left hand and was regarding it, his right hand on his ribcage. IT was really a very startling image, one that's taken a prominent place in my memory. I just felt a great emotion eminating from this un-dead corpse contemplating the humanity that he'd lost and was doomed never to recover again. Not alive, not dead; it was very striking.
And of course, what would an examination of what a Masterpeice is be without a bit of Marcel Duchamp? They had one of his officially sanctioned replicae of his "Bicycle Wheel" there, and I enjoyed its presence very much. They also had a guy's store; this was a guy who sold everything he saw as a work of art, and who maintained his store as a work of art as well. He publicly displayed his "everything is art" philosophy, and eventually his store was dismantled to be reconstructed in museums. That was really cool. I hae to say, the expo curaters really knew what they were doing; they had a really good juxtaposition going on. They had a 17th century biblical scene right next to some extracts from one of Max Ernst's collae novels, they had a period copy of the Mona Lisa right in the middle of photographs of scratchings on walls, the original Grafitti. All in all, I was kind of dissapointed that Dada dind't have a larger presence there, but it was definately there, and you could say that it made its presence felt, because practically the whole or Modern Art would be impossible without Dada to pave the way. They had some rather mangificent stuff there, and I had an absolutely marvelous time looking at it. Oh, yeah! I got to see an original JAckson Pollock! That was cool. It was also in front of the Pollock that I heard an old grandma complaining about the fact that that stuff was considered "art." She pointed at something, maybe the Pollock, and asked her companion, "Who decreed that this is a work [of art]?" That really made my visit complete. She did say of the Pollock, "I could do that," or something of the like. They had a video of Jackson Pollock working on plexiglass or something, so the camera was below him and you were looking up at him dripping paint onto the glass. She cited that video as evidence that Pollock was a crackpot that didn't know what he was doing. I feel obliged to point out that Pollock had a particular style that's hard to imitate; not everyone can drip like Pollock dripped. If you look at some Pollock stuff and then try to do it yourself, people familiar with Pollock can easily identify it as not possibly Pollock's. At the very least, I don't think the fact that you could do it makes the work worth any less. Still, listening to her old person compplaints completed the exposition for me. It was very awesome. I didn't have all the time that I needed.
I would be remiss not to mention our trip on the way there. It was marked by one major particularity: we picked up a hitchiker who solicited our help at a gass station. HE wasn't just any old hitchiker, though; he was a Franciscan Monk. And yound, too, he was only twentyp-three or something. He told me the story of Saint Francis, who irst sought happiness through pleasures of the flesh, then who tried to be a knight, and then who prayed and heard voices and renounced wealth to live a life of poverty based on giving instead of having. The Fransiscan order developped following his example, living simple lives and making it their primary mission to put the means to help themselves into the hands of the poeple who hadn't them. Didier thought that he was kind of crazy, but he didn't seem particularly crazy to me. It was kind of incongrous to see this monk in his blue monk's habit with a backpacking backpack riding in a car, but listening to his story, he didn't seem any more crazy to me than most people. He'd sought, and he'd found. He decided that he wanted to be amonk when he grew up and to help people. I can dig it. I don't think that's what I want to do when I grow up, but I don't think his choosing his own life's work, his own happiness, is as crazy as all that.
Now, it's late, and I've got to wake up early tomorrow to go into Brussels and hit up a couple museums, so Im'a stop now. See you before too long, I suppose. I'll definately put at least one more thing up before I leave for the US; June is my last month here. July 1, I get on the plane for the US. In all honesty, I don't regret my time here at all, I wouldn't trade it away, but I am ready to come home. Where my music's playin, where my thoughts escapin, where my love lies waiting silently for me. When I think of my love, I think of all my video game colsoles, and then I laugh, because I really do miss them and am looking forward to playing with them again, but I realize that video games cannot possibly serve the same pupose as romace would. It's not a good idea to cunfuse the two, that'll lead only to hardship.
Anyways, Peace! I hope to be seeing you again soon.