My sister Anna came to visit this weekend. We had lots of fun. She is studying abroad in Cork, Ireland this year. So she flew on Ryan Air, which means that she got to experience the joys of the Beauvais Airport. Not for nearly as long as I did, though. Her flight to Beauvais was delayed by about half an hour, so I ended up waiting at the sad little bus parking lot at Porte Maillot for a little while for her. The guy who rounds up the passengers for the buses asked me where I was going (in English). I explained (in French) that I was waiting for my sister who was arriving from Shannon and said, “Mais les arrivées sont plutôt par là?” (“But the arrivals are over there, right?” or to engage in a more Benjamin/Spivak translation style: “But ze arrivals, zey are more over zere?”). He gave me a nice nod to show his appreciation for my knowledge of his ingenious arrival/departure system, and I went and waited on the grass, away from the crush of passengers trying to get on buses to spend two hours waiting at an airport where there is no source of entertainment.

Anyway, Anna arrived and we got on the Metro (the 1 to the 6 to the 4, rather than the 1 to the 4, because the 1 sucks, and the 6 is above ground and goes right by the Eiffel Tower). And we had gnocchi for dinner. The next day we went to the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, and Notre-Dame. We had dinner at a place called “Flagrant Délice,” which had a very good 10 euro menu (but the wine was really expensive). On Saturday we went up to Montmartre and then back to Notre-Dame so that we could tour the inside.

One thing we noticed was that everyone around us was speaking English. And yes, we were in tourist areas heavily populated by American and British tourists. But for a lot of the people we heard speaking English, it was not their native language. So even in Paris, English is apparently the global language.

Saturday night we went to B’s punk show. He is in a band called “Blutschwester” (Blood Sisters), which started as a girl band, but he auditioned to be their drummer and they liked him. The show was a lot of fun, even though (or perhaps because?) the band was sort of not very good. I particularly enjoyed the songs “Reise” and “Go Fuck the Bitch,” their closing anthem.

On Sunday we tried to go shopping, which we should have done on Saturday because everything is closed on Sunday. Anna wanted to buy a scarf in Paris. Near my house, the little discount stores were open. One of them had some scarves, but these were not ideal. So we walked around for a very long time looking for any store that was open. The Galeries Lafayette at Montparnasse was closed. Everything on the Boulevard St. Michel south of the Sorbonne was closed. We finally found one store open, “Miss Coquette” or some such, on Boulevard Saint-Germain, right after the Sunday afternoon rollerblading crowd passed us. Anna found a perfect scarf, and then we saw a bunch of solid-colored scarves behind the counter for a good price, so she picked up one of those for good measure. And we found a souvenir store open at the end of Saint-Michel. So we felt good about the shopping excursion.

And then we had dinner at Buffalo Grill, which is a French simulacrum of an American steakhouse, down to the polite waiters in cheesy cowboy outfits. The minute we sat down, our waiter brought us two “Welcome Salads.” The place has a cigar Indian outside, faux swinging saloon doors painted on the front, a totem pole immediately inside, a popcorn machine, a selection of cacti, and several video game machines. On the wall above our table was a map depicting Buffalo Bill’s tour route through Europe. The food was good, and the prices were reasonable. I think it’s my new favorite restaurant in the neighborhood.

We had our seminar with M.C. on Wednesday, at his apartment. His children’s cat kept poking her head into the room, with much curiosity about these six morning guests taking notes. That’s about half the group that was going to S.W.’s seminar, but it was quite convivial and collegial. We went to lunch at a sushi place afterward. I had the futo maki, which was cut in enormous slices. Katie confided to me that she had almost ordered the futo maki, but had been concerned about her ability to eat it. It was pretty challenging.

Then on Wednesday evening we hosted P’s birthday dinner at our apartment. That was fun. We had steamed artichokes as an hors d’oeuvre, followed by scallops with noodles. And K. had made a lemon cake, which we ate with raspberry sorbet.

Laura and I watched two movies this week: Brokeback Mountain (the French title is Le Secret de Brokeback Mountain) and In Her Shoes (the title was left untranslated). We watched them dubbed in French. Laura said that the first time she saw Brokeback Mountain she didn’t like Anne Hathaway’s acting but did like Michelle Williams. This time she felt the opposite. I thought maybe that had to do with the French actresses who dubbed their voices.

On Saturday I walked around the Montparnasse Cemetery. It was very peaceful, but with much less open space than a cemetery in the U.S. (Even if it occurred to someone to go running in this cemetery, you just wouldn’t be able to because the paths are so narrow.) They have some signs that map out the location of famous people’s graves, but by the time I found one of those signs I was ready to go. I decided I will have to go back another time to pay my respects to Tristan Tzara. (How does one pay one’s respects to the founder of Dada? Perhaps a ritualistic dance involving a toothbrush and a hard-boiled egg would be the most appropriate gesture.) I did see the graves of publisher Honoré Champion, aviatrix Maryse Bastié, the Citroën family plot, and Eugene Ionesco. Ionesco’s grave had an interesting epitaph: “Prier le je ne sais qui. J’espère: Jesus-Christ.” It’s not easy to translate, but it roughly means “Pray to whomever you want. I hope: Jesus Christ.” The second half could be taken as “I hope you will pray to Jesus Christ” or as the speaker’s own prayer to Jesus Christ. And possibly several other ways, but those are the two most appropriate possibilities for what it could mean on his tombstone. It would be interesting to find that quote in context, as it apparently comes from Ionesco’s journals.

Sunday afternoon I was invited to lunch at Vicki-Marie’s, in Fontenay-sous-Bois. I met Vicki-Marie at Thanksgiving. She has a charming little apartment. The other lunch guests included the daughter of a Hungarian scholar named Peter Nagy, who wrote a book entitled Libertinage et Revolution in the 1970s. Vicki-Marie sent me home with two big hunks of cheese, quite a few grapes, and more litchi fruit than I could eat in a year. I have been looking for litchi recipes online, but I’m not coming up with anything interesting. Well, there was a litchi lasagna recipe, but that sounds kind of ridiculous.

On Friday night, Laura and I had some friends over for burritos. Laura had found tortillas at the supermarket, but refried beans are evidently unavailable in Paris. So she bought red beans and we looked up a recipe for refried beans online. Now, the recipe said to mash the beans while frying them in vegetable oil for five minutes. So I heated the oil, and put the beans in oil. And we thought it would be good to add onions to the mix, and some spices. And I mashed the beans. Forty minutes later, I was tired of mashing the beans and decided they were done. And they turned out very tasty. But it took a lot longer than five minutes.

I went for a walk in the Parc Montsouris this afternoon. At 5:30 I started hearing loud whistles and I figured the police were trying to round up some hooligans who were up to no good in the park. But then the whistling continued and I realized the park was closing. I kind of wished the men who were blowing the whistles would also have announced, "Hey, the park is closing. Time to go." But all the French people seemed to know that the whistle-blowing meant it was time to go, and I followed their lead. On the way home I bought a baguette using all the change in my pocket, which amused the woman who sold it to me.

Tonight we returned to The Moose to watch football with P. The crazy model was there again, this time with two crazy model friends who were rooting for Seattle, against her beloved Chicago Bears. Apparently the Bear-fan model's name is Tanaze, and she speaks seven languages and has written a novel. I was struck by the excessive performance of American football fandom. I mean, they were really screaming at each other. It was like we were at the Cubby Bear, only there were some Seattle fans there, too. (OK, I have never actually gone to the Cubby Bear, so I'm basing my analysis on my imaginative reconstruction of what the Cubby Bear might be like. Most of my sports-watching in Chicago bars occurred at T's, while eating a $5 burger on Sunday afternoon. Oh, T's.) P's friend William invited me and Laura to join his "salon" and discuss Schopenhauer with him. We will see if that actually pans out.

There is a fancy Vietnamese restaurant not far from my apartment. Tonight I was walking home from a kind of boring lecture on Diderot, and I passed this restaurant for the umpteenth time and actually looked at the menu. They had Pho, but it was awfully expensive. It was raining, and I was cold. And I have also really been missing Chicago lately. I thought that a bowl of nice Vietnamese soup would cure both of those ills. But it was really expensive (8.50 Euro), so I decided to keep walking, in spite of my intense desire for Pho.

Then when I got to the corner the light changed, so I couldn't cross the street. I took this as a sign that I should eat Pho. Beef, so that I could have a pitcher of red wine with it. It was so good. It was just like being at Pho 777 on Argyle, except the decor was more like Pho 999. And it was fancier than both, with a much better cut of beef in the soup. And I probably wouldn't have been drinking wine in Chicago. Maybe bubble tea. Anyway, it was just what I needed. So now that I know that Pho is possible in Paris (hello, history of French colonization), maybe I need to look for some cheaper Vietnamese restaurants. I'm sure there are some in the 13th arondissement.

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.

Happy New Year!

Laura and I had a New Year’s Eve party. At 3:00 in the afternoon, we thought no one was coming and it was just going to be the two of us eating chocolate-chip cookies and watching Casablanca. But the tide turned when Salena called to say that she and her sister would be joining us, after all. And then Bernie called and asked if he could bring eight friends with him. All told, we ended up with 15 guests. There were three Spaniards who wanted us to eat twelve grapes for the first twelve seconds of the New Year. This apparently represents the twelve months of the year. You end up with a lot of grapes in your mouth, but it’s nice to wash them down with champagne. Oh, and someone broke a chair.

The next day we got a nasty note from our downstairs neighbors about the “constant, daily, and unacceptable” level of noise that does not contribute to “life in a community.” I initially thought this was directly related to the party, but I can’t really tell. I think their biggest problem is with the kitchen chairs scraping on the floor, so I went out and bought some “patins feutrés” to put on the bottom of the chairs. Hopefully this will satisfy them. Our landlords are in town right now, and we showed them the letter. They said that the downstairs neighbors are very nice, but never said anything about noise when the family of five was living here. So that’s kind of funny.

Laura watched this awful movie the other night, called Funny Games, by some Austrian director. It is a psychological thriller about a family on vacation and the sadistic antics of these two twenty-something boys who invade their vacation house. I was watching the movie with Laura until I figured out that the skinny boy in the too-short shorts had killed the dog. And I said, “He killed the dog. I am done with this movie. It is not going to end well.” Ten minutes later Laura came into the kitchen and said, “You were right. He killed the dog.” After she finished watching the movie she told me the whole story. It does not end well. Sorry if I ruined it for anyone.

My reaction to this movie reminded me of my friend Susie, who was really angry with me for showing her The Long Kiss Goodnight because Geena Davis hits and kills a deer with her car (thereby triggering the memories that launch her exciting dual-identity odyssey). I had totally forgotten that the accident involved a deer. And I didn’t really understand why Susie was upset, since she was the person who had explained to me that watching gory movies sometimes requires suspending your suspension of disbelief. Well, not in those terms. I’m pretty sure her exact words were, “It’s all ketchup and plastic.” We were watching The Thing. The 1980s version with Wilford Brimley.

Anyway, I have learned two things from my reaction to the dog in this movie. 1) I’m good at reading narrative cues. I guess I already knew that. 2) My tastes are becoming so fixed that I’m not willing to give a chance to a movie if I don’t think I’m going to like it. I wonder if this means I’ll start leaving plays at intermission if I don’t like them. Or stop reading novels in the middle. Or give up on my dissertation if I start to get bored with it.

Oh. It all comes back to the dissertation. Blogging is so therapeutic.

And now I have realized that if I had known what the movie was about before I had started watching it, I probably never would have started watching it. Laura told me it was about "a family vacation gone awry," which led me to believe it was a screwball comedy starring the Austrian version of Chevy Chase.