My friends Meghann and Jacob came to Paris this weekend and stayed with me. On Thursday we went to lunch at a pleasant bistro in the Latin Quarter and then toured Notre-Dame. There was a service starting when we were just about finished there, and Jacob and Meghann asked me if I wanted to go to Mass. I said that was fine. It turned out to be Vespers. There was an usher who handed out papers with the words to the songs in French. The tunes were all really similar, so it was easy for me to sing along even when there wasn't musical notation to guide me.

I also went to the Louvre with them on Saturday. We concentrated on Egypt, Medieval decorative arts, and Italian Renaissance painting. We felt good about those choices.

There were quite a few Americans in Paris last week. We had some quality hangout time with Salena and Julie, along with P. and his visiting friend J. Salena found a really fun bar in the Marais called Dandy’s, and a bunch of us went there on Friday night to celebrate her birthday.

On Saturday night Laura and I watched the film Caché (Hidden) by Michael Haneke, the Austrian director I mentioned before. It was really interesting. I liked it much better than Funny Games, even though it was somewhat thematically similar (raising questions about property, and family relationships, and the social games people play). There was only one image of shocking violence, and I didn’t see it coming at all. We then watched several hours of special features, where we discovered that Michael Haneke speaks really excellent French, but tends to have his hissy-fits in German. Which certainly makes sense. He said that Caché was about the lines between truth and fiction, and playing with perspective.

On Monday we went to two exhibits: the Hogarth exhibition at the Louvre and "Public Portraits, Private Portraits" at the Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais. Both exhibits were excellent. The Hogarth was especially impressive. They had a painting on loan from the Yale Center for British Art, of David Garrick and his wife. It was one of my favorite pieces in the exhibition. At the end of the exhibit were a series of photographs by British artist Yinka Shonibare, depicting himself as a Victorian dandy in a series that clearly draws on (and critiques) Hogarth’s serials like “The Rake’s Progress” and “A Harlot’s Progress.”

And last night Laura rented Almodóvar’s film Volver, which we thoroughly enjoyed. Today I finished my last external fellowship application, so now I can finally work on my dissertation some more! I think I’ll go to the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal tomorrow and Friday. I’m pretty excited about that.