Paris (Sunday May 27th-Wednesday May 30th) aka Museums and Munchies

Day 1:

No sleep on the flight in, but the food was surprisingly good. Go KLM! There were no crying children or whimpering mini-dogs in a woman’s carry-on. A good sign.

When we finally arrived in Paris, two obnoxious women of unknown origin cut in front of us in the tourist information line where we were attempting to find out about museum passes and a less-expensive mode of transportation to the airport. They felt that the poor woman behind the counter was lying to them that there was no accomodation option in classy hotels in the downtown area for less than 50 euros a night. Our hotel is five metro stops (and a transfer) from even the Latin quarter and is it over 350 euros a night. Now, it’s a VERY nice hotel, but it puts what “Classy” would be in perspective, doesn’t it? This was the first appearance of tweeddle-dee and tweedle dum. My aunt has quoted my mother: “For fifty euros a night, the rooms comes with pets.”

We went for dinner to a restaurant recommended as “casual” by the concierge. It cost a small fortune (which was not pleasing), but the food was excellent. I ordered my steak rare and it came…RARE! The french fries were moist and a little sweet (yummy!) and i had a vegetable mousse (eggs created the fluffiness i think) that was scrumptuous. We shared a piece of almond-apple pie. Apparently my French is “pretty good.” I have to laugh.

Day 2:

Woke up at 2am. I would attribute this to jet lag but for two mitigating factors: 1) I hadn’t been able to sleep at my parent’s house since moving back in last week either; 2) usually i can sleep anytime, anywhere - and 2am is 8pm - my usual after-dinner “i want a nap” time. My uncle called at 4am and scared the daylights out of us. My aunt couldn’t fall back asleep, but since i now had company in my insomniac adventures, we mapped out the rest of our stay.

The morning’s breakfast led us on a wild goose chase for a bakery, Julien, recommended by the guidebook recommended by Zach (Let’s Go), but it was closed despite the book saying it was open 7 days a week. We were not pleased, but the Louvre soothed our poor spirits. We spent over six hours in the building but only visited one wing. We also met an American woman who decided to share with us that “the writings are useless because they are not in English.” I explained the concept of Roman copies of lost Greek originals to her and then ran for cover. I discovered new favourites: Muller and Chardin while revisiting old faithfuls like Claude Lorraine. I didn’t make it to either the Boticelli’s or the Da Vinci’s, but am planning on returning in the future - oh i must!

We breaked for lunch around 1:30 and went on ANOTHER wildgoose chase. La Carte Blanche no longer exists despite it’s being recommended by Let’s Go. We ended up in a pokey little bar filled with Parisians on lunch break who gave us the evil eye for intruding. My aunt was served a hamburger with a fried egg on top. I had a salad. The salad was good. The hamburger was supposedly surprisingly good. I will be trying this at home when i get back.

Exhausted, we came back to the hotel after perusing a mediocre gift shop (the museums here have nothing on the Metropolitan’s) for a power nap. At nine we did our best to find another of the suggested restaurants in Let’s Go. This one, Vavin, near us. We got lost, hailed a cab, and made it just before closing time. Lucky thing too, because there kitchen was just about to close. The flamiche (leek quiche) was FANTASTIC as was the rhubarb pie. Yummies. We did not get lost coming back to the Meridian Montparnasse, though there was much debating in front of every map.

Day 3:

Woke up and walked to the Catacombs. Got there early so we decided to go for a cafe creme, hot chocolate and croissant and a cafe/restaurant on the corner. Yum. We then walked around in the catacombs (buns of steel) and were pleased to see the light of day after 2km of tunnel. Next time i will be sure to do the sewer tour. We metroed over to the train station and headed over to Versailles. The gardens were just lovely, but the inside was a little…well…overboard. You see one gold-plaited piece of furniture you see them all, but then again, i am not a huge fan of the decorative arts.

Upon arriving back at the hotel, i took a bath and read with a glass of red wine until it was time for our nighttime tour of Paris which began with a cruise down the Seine. Then we were shuttled around all the main sights by van. Though this was rather kitch, it was pleasant too because otherwise our heavy museum schedule would not have permitted these stunning views. Unfortunately, the tweedles made an appearance again. A mom and daughter from Maryland were in the van with us on a two-week tour of Europe which included a day and a half in Paris. They asked questions, didn’t answer when you responded, and called the Haagen Dasz ice cream store “exquisite.” Oh my. There was also a moment of freaking out over the hotel where Princess Diana was staying when she died in the car crash. I managed to not be snarky…but the moment of jaw-dropping over the sparkling lights on the Eiffel Tower was enough to make me hurl. Clearly there is nothing to see in Maryland.

Day 4:

We got up at a relatively good hour (9 i think) and walked to our breakfast spot of the day before for crepes aux confitures. We then got on a metro for the Musee D’Orsay to ogle the Impressionists. Around five we walked over to Notre Dame, sat and stared, then went for gelato and ended the evening at the James Joyce Pub. The irish stew was fab! But the stay had not gotten us any bubbly yet, so we stopped at a grocery store for provisions: sparkling white wine, pate, crackers and sticky cheese (as well as the ever-important madeleines).

The verdict on Paris: the weather was shitty which was well, shitty. There was too much to see for such a short visit. I would love to live here, but am unsure how anyone affords to. Next time there are still many monuments on the list to visit, but most importantly, i must go theatreing. There are posters everywhere and it was killing me…i need a travel companion whose French is good enough…any takers?

I love writing postcards…you can have one if you send me your address.

My itinerary includes the following stops: Paris, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Copenhagen, St. Petersburg, Klapeida, Taillin. If you would like your postcard to arrive before i get back - i suggest asking for one of the two first sites. Otherwise, it will arrive when it will arrive.

As such, this will likely be my last post for a while. There will be pictures on facebook. Have a nice three weeks!

The following is an editorial which appeared in the Globe & Mail on April 18 which sums up my position is this whole “Muslim women and their attire” rather nicely.

When young Muslim girls were barred from a tae kwon do competition Sunday in Longueuil, Que., because they wore a hijab (head scarf) under their helmets, the province looked ridiculous. The incident showed how the passions a-swirl over minority religious observances are leading to a rejection of harmless differences. People, get a grip.

The Muslim girls, from 10 to 14, were hardly adherents of an extreme, Taliban-like vision of the world in which girls and women live under severe constraints. Far from it. The girls were part of the province’s mainstream, competing in martial arts (which involves a great deal of kicking) against other children of all faiths. These girls are not passive or cloistered. They are, as the children themselves might have put it, “out there.” This is a good thing. It ought to be encouraged.

And was the hijab a safety risk to them or their competitors? It is hard to imagine how. The hijab, which is soft, is worn under the helmet. Nor does it confer an advantage on the one who wears it. In other jurisdictions, wearing a hijab in tae kwon do competitions does not seem to have been a problem. Tyseer Aboulnasr, a former dean of engineering at the University of Ottawa, is a black belt in tae kwon do, and competed for more than a decade without her hijab’s becoming an issue.

As if all this were not silly enough, the competition involved a foreign import; tae kwon do is Korean. Quebeckers, like others worldwide, have taken the sport to heart. There’s an obvious irony in insisting on the purity of a foreign sporting tradition at the expense of the religious freedoms of Canadian girls and their families.

Some Quebeckers are loading far too much emotional and political freight onto the issue of the reasonable accommodation of religious minorities. Sometimes a head scarf is just a head scarf; it does not put Quebec’s culture and values at risk. It is a personal and private choice.

But the passions in Quebec have become unmoored from common sense. This winter, an 11-year-old girl in a hijab was barred from a soccer tournament. The province’s Chief Electoral Officer, in the face of violent threats, reversed his position and announced that women could not wear the niqab (veil) while voting, even though Quebec has rules in place that give voters other ways to prove who they are. A small community, Hérouxville, passed a resolution against the stoning of women, as though the presence of Muslims in Quebec made this an imminent threat. Mario Dumont, head of the Action Démocratique du Québec, praised Hérouxville’s “cry from the heart,” and within weeks rode from obscurity to Leader of the Official Opposition.

Not every private choice by a minority group is harmless. Genital mutilation, honour killings, prearranged marriages of pubescent girls, even the wearing of turbans instead of bicycle helmets by children — all these go against the grain because they cause direct harm to the vulnerable. The public’s outrage should be reserved for these extreme expressions of difference.

Those in Quebec who reject minor differences such as hijabs on young athletes are acting against the province’s interests. Quebec will not unite its people by these rejections. It will drive them apart.

2007 CTVglobemedia Publishing Inc. All Rights Reserved.

I would like to let out a resounding: “If you don’t like your cushy, overpaid, highly-protected, government salaried job - why don’t you try working in the private sector like the rest of us you whiny fucks” to the maintenance workers who feel the need to look a gift horse in the mouth.

For those of us who actually have to work, here is the schedule (thank God for the essential services act):

Public transportation services will be available during the following periods:

Monday to Friday

Morning : From 6:00 to 9:00

Afternoon : From 3:30 to 6:30

Late evening : From 11:00 to 01:00

Saturday and Sunday

Morning : From 6:00 to 9:00

Afternoon : From 2:00 to 5:00

Late evening : From 11:00 to 01:00

Walter Laqueur’s The Changing Face of Antisemitism (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006)

“At the present time antisemitism, by whatever name, is still much more than a mere historical memory.” The last sentence of Walter Laqueur’s most recent publication effectively sums up his two-hundred plus page project in seventeen words. The Changing Face of Antisemitism provides an overview of antisemitic thought as it manifested itself from the diaspora to the twenty-first century. This hefty task is made more manageable by focusing on different motivations for antisemitism: theological, xenophobic, racial and reactionary. The thematic approach permits comparisons, for example between Stalinist and contemporary Islamist antisemitism, that might otherwise go unnoticed. A detailed index combined with a textbook-like structure of eleven free-standing chapters focusing on the relationship between Jews and a ‘new’ discriminator makes finding specifics a simple task. Unfortunately, it also leads to redundant claims and examples in already constrained space: Laqueur harps on the point that though a few Jews in Central and Western Europe attained a level of affluence that inspired envy and animosity, they were not the norm. On three separate occasions he uses a bracketed “for example, the Rothschilds,” a technique that is not only repetitive, but unsatisfactorily cursory. Furthermore, it is not the first reference that provides the reader with a brief description of this imminent family, but fourth and last (175). This instance is representative of what appears to be the main fault in an otherwise well-argued piece—over-condensation of a vast, immense, topic.

The thrust of Laqueur’s argument is difficult to miss. The antisemitism of the contemporary world have little in common with its precursors. The radical left’s rejection of Zionism, capitalism and globalization is depicted as a particularly nefarious because its main adherents deny the discriminatory elements of their stance. The Changing Face of Antisemitism presents this trend in antisemitism as more akin to the theologically based persecution of the medieval Church than the racialism of Nazi Germany:

Jews were regarded with distrust unless they made it abundantly clear that they actively participated in the struggle against capitalism, imperialism, globalism, and, in some cases, the existence of a Jewish state….There was salvation through conversion (189).

The links made between different ages of antisemitism are both insightful and credible, though they do lead this particular reader to wonder if the antisemitism of the New Left is more a rejection all that is not New Left, i.e. the ideological other, rather than any specific aggression towards Jews in particular. Perhaps in a more detailed account, Laqueur would have been able to provide an analysis of possibilities similarities to the rejection of Christian fundamentalism that would further bolster his argument.

The most obvious form of antisemitism prevalent today is the antisemitism rampant in the Muslim world. Laqueur makes the obvious, yet still necessary point, that of course in the wake of the Six Day War, hostilities arose between the victor and the dispossessed. The Changing Faces of Antisemitism argues, however, that the hatred of Jews in Muslim countries arose as further justification for opposition to Israel, rather than causing it. Laqueur points out that “millions of people were expelled from their homes after World War Two in Europe as well as in Asia, but eventually they were resettled and the situation was normalized within a generation or two” (204). The Peace Process after the Six Day War (see timeline on pg 23 of June 2007 ISRAFAX) has been obstructed by a number of factors linked to antisemitism. The rule of Palestine by a minority which had lost their status as the chosen people by refusing to convert to Islam is but one cause of a hatred that Laqueur has shown is not constant across historical eras within the Maghreb and Levant. More importantly, opposition to Israel and the perceived Jewish influence in politics and economics has borrowed from the conspiracy theories of the past and “been used as a lightning rod both by governments and Islamists….[without which] the underlying aggression would find other outlets” for demonstrating anti-Americanism and anti-Westernism (206). The Changing Faces of Antisemitism provides us with an innovative, historical and genealogical troupe with which we can approach the current conflict in the Middle East – in which the Six Day War is but one miraculous chapter.

The above will be published, in a much shorter, edited version in the June 2007 ISRAFAX - my first published work ever. I get to have a big smile, yes?

Towards the end of this past semester, a fellow student of mine whom i respected muchly decided i was much “cooler” than he had ever thought because i read fantasy. I love fantasy. I love plot-driven narratives and snappy dialogue no matter the “genre.” There are elements of this article i agree with wholeheartedly, and others which really get my goat.

I can’t stand Wuthering Heights or Emma, but i love Austen and Elliot. Characterizations of literature as “boy” or “girl” or by genre denies each author’s unique style.

Nabokov does an excellent description of style which i used in that god-awful Proust/Nabokov paper that could have been great had i not written it in under fourteen hours. Ah well, everything can’t turn out as well as my pear butter…there has to be the occasional flubbed meringue.

What boys might actually want to read

By Ruth Dudley Edwards

Unabashedly swiped from The Daily Telegraph (online edition) on May 18th, 2007.

The superciliati are sniffing away disgustedly at extracts from a list of 170 books that 11- to 14-year-old boys might actually enjoy.

The selection has been endorsed by Alan Johnson, the Education Secretary, who is chucking a modest sum of money towards getting copies of the tomes into school libraries.

Awash with such interests of the unreconstructed male as adventure, crime, horror, violence, sci-fi, spies, sport and obscure facts, the books are geared towards pleasure rather than self-improvement - which is why they have a chance of seducing some of the millions of youths who think reading is a girl thing.

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But the critics are crying “Where are the classics?”, aghast to see names such as Jeremy Clarkson and Jack Higgins as recommended reading. Well, apart from Mr Johnson’s childhood favourite, Tom Sawyer, along with many modern novels, Riveting Reads includes Robinson Crusoe, Treasure Island and Frankenstein. But, frankly, I wouldn’t care if it had Jeffrey Archer at the top, as long as it can get boys reading.

The feminisation of education and the ensuing triumph of political correctness have turned generations of boys off reading, not least by urging them to get in touch with their feelings and despise that part of themselves that wants to see heroes biffing villains.

This trend was just beginning in the late 1960s, when, in Cambridge, I was teaching day-release apprentices. All of them had to be force-fed Lord of the Flies in the hope that they would become ashamed of their baser male instincts.

This was the moment when boys began to associate reading with being preached at. They were discouraged from reading about anachronistic boarding schools, or Nelson beating the French, or sword fights, or shooting down enemy planes, or William, Ginger, Henry and Douglas beating up Hubert Lane and his gang.

Instead, they were to address the grim reality of sink estates and warm to examples of diversity such as Mary lives with Eric and Ernie, or whatever it was called. Mostly, they stopped reading and embraced violent films and video games. This was not surprising. Fact 1: boys are boys, not girls. Fact 2: people will not enjoy reading unless they have learnt to see it as pleasure.

So the success in the 1990s of Harry Potter was unexpectedly good news for reading, although its echoes of Greyfriars and its epic battle of good against evil have appalled the literati.

They’ve all been buying smelling-salts by the bucket-load, and all the more so since The Dangerous Book for Boys became a runaway best-seller.

Literary snobbery is as risible as it is damaging. As a crime writer, I inhabit what is sneeringly dismissed by the back-scratchers of the review sections as a genre, i.e. a kind of book enjoyed by the little people.

Loosely, a genre is science fiction, romance, comedy, crime or anything else you find in publishers’ lists separated from pure literary fiction, which is, of course, what wins the literary prizes that are mostly judged by the fashionable literati.

So a fine writer such as, say, Reginald Hill, is not even considered as a contender by the kind of people who brought us The Bone People and Vernon God Little.

There are many consolations for those of us consigned to the category of genre fiction, not least that we are much more popular than our self-consciously literary condescenders.

I eschew the company of literary writers; I adore the crime writers. We laugh at the pretensions of those who think themselves our betters and we enjoy each other because our backgrounds and preoccupations are so disparate and therefore so interesting.

We include, among our number, vets and spies and solicitors and teachers and nurses and linguists and journalists and erstwhile prostitutes, criminals and murderers.

We are Left-wing and Right-wing and religious and atheist and straight and gay and happily tolerant of each other. We write of the darkest aspects of the human mind, but we often write, too, of the triumph of love and trust and reason.

I inhabit what Reg Hill once described as the “Jane Austen end of the crime-writing spectrum”, but good friends of mine explore torture and betrayal and gore.

All human life is there. As a crime fiction enthusiast who knows many of us said to me: “Through crime fiction, I’ve learnt about life as it is lived in every part of our society and I’ve come to like and love people I would once have dismissed as perverts.”

What’s more, because we can deal with our demons and murder our enemies on the page, we are singularly free of anger and are notoriously nice people. Having no belief that we are a superior form of literary life, we do not take ourselves seriously, but laugh a lot and rejoice when any of us hit the big time.

When Ian Rankin became rich, we were delighted, not least because we knew he needed money to look after his severely disabled son.

But what marks us out, as it marks out most other writers consigned to various genres, is that we write to entertain.

We want a reader to pick up one of our books, become hooked on page one, stay rapt till the end wondering what is going to happen and then demand the next in the series.

That is what Alan Johnson and the School Library Association are trying to do for British boys. Good luck to them.

• Ruth Dudley Edwards writes satirical crime novels about the British establishment

from a self-imposed ten-day hiatus from the blogosphere.

Triumph (noun): A public celebration in ancient Rome to welcome a returning victorious commander and his army.

Julius Caesar couldn’t run for consul and have a triumph. He opted for the latter.

I still have too much work to do, but it’s only problematic because i insist on doing the social things i couldn’t for so long. I will manage. My triumph is the completion of this ever-so bothersome degree. Now i just have to resign myself to the loss of the best friends i have ever had…thank the lord i am returning to the only girl i would actually want to try out lesbianism with…LOL.

Kraft dinner with swiss chesse and green peas sounds yummy, doesn’t it?