dissonance

You know a bar is probably a good one when it is named after Pieter Brueghel the Elder. When his beardy face is on the wooden sign that hangs outside by the door, and inside, paintings and drawings, especially the one of the impossibly giant fish with the contents of like the entire ocean spilling out of its mouth. And there is this jazz band playing, and the drummer has a red mohawk and is wearing a red sweater and a red jacket, but none of them are quite the same shade of red. But I wasn't really looking at him, or any of the musicians..I was looking at the double bass leaning beautifully in the corner, and I was wondering to myself, why would you be playing an electric bass right now instead....? They were good though, really.

I think that the French think that art is a waste of time. Which is ironic because Paris used to be the artistic center of the universe, and also the government pays artists to stay alive and make art (really it's true). But I think the general attitude is that it's a waste of time. And you certainly don't study it in school. For example François is apparently quite good at drawing and used to do it a lot when he was a kid, but I was talking to him about it last night and what he said to me was, "now I don't have time." Well clearly that isn't true. He's 17 and trying to go to medical school in a couple of years, but he certainly "has time." He spent like 9 hours playing violent video games yesterday.

Something my students will do sometimes, is when I give them something to do, they will look up at me and say, "but this doesn't inspire me." Well I'm sorry, but if you were the ones who got to decide what we do in class, we would sit around eating cookies and talking about Spongebob (bob l'eponge). It's not like I pay absolutely no attention to what interests them. For example next week we are going to talk about a Bob Dylan song, since they told me they like Bob Dylan. So much better than Bob l'eponge.

I know I talk about language a lot, but you must forgive me, because it's what's in my head. Lately I've been experimenting with "debates" or really, "disagreements" in French. Désaccord can mean disagreement, and it can also mean dissonance, like in music. The French language lends itself to disagreements, but once you disagree, the problem is that you then must defend your disagreement. Then it becomes complicated, and even hours later after much reflection and WordReference.com, you come to realize that there are somethings you simply cannot say in French. This is of course a preposterous statement since French is "the most superior language in the world." (People around here truly believe that, and they will tell you so. Even if they speak no other languages. This astounds me daily.) Then you think to yourself, well, since language frames the way that we see the world, maybe the person with whom I am discussing  has never even had the thought that I just tried and failed to translate.