Saturday 17 March 2007
An American Reflection on the European Union ..... A Note on Notes 1
By David Pitt, Saturday 17 March 2007 - 02:28 :: Good
I read, with varying degrees of regularity, though in somewhat this order: MSNBC, Yahoo, the Economist, the Financial Times, Wikipedia, Forbes, Fortune, Newsweek, Time, and very occasionally the New Republic. While I didn’t quote any of them directly, probably some of this cowboy’s opinions came from them. Also a word on footnotes. Forty years ago at Santa Monica City College, and then particularly at UCLA, it was very necessary for me to laboriously learn, and slavishly* follow, correct footnoting and attribution procedures. Otherwise you couldn’t get an ‘A’, (or a ‘B’ for that matter). Forty days after finishing school I began to forget. Cowboys can forget, but probably you can’t.
Continued below / Original appearance December 18, 2006 / RC1 471 / © 2006 / EUS
Is it or isn’t it? They mention the rose line found in St-Sulpice in the Da Vinci Code. Or is it the copper line symbolic of the 0 meridian that ran through Paris when Paris claimed the 0 meridian? Who knows? A mystery. We do know the organ case designed by Chalgrin, and the organ restored by Aristide Cavaille-Coll in the mid 19th century is world famous. All 100 stops and 6,700 pipes. We do know that the wall frescoes in the Chapel of the Angels are by Delacroix, and well worth a look. We even know that Victor Hugo got married there. Perhaps he dallied under the chestnut trees out front perusing the magnificent edifice as I did. I could see a mixture of styles and epochs since it took over 130 years to build (1646-1780). Hopefully he was a little more observant than me. I did not know nor note that the north tower was completed by Chalgrin in 1778, but the south tower was left unfinished by Maclaurin in 1749.
Many consider him to be the greatest French short story writer ever, and the father of that format along with horror fiction. The 1880’s were his most productive and prolific period with over 300 short stories, 6 novels, and assorted other works mostly associated with travel. Guy de Maupassant was closely associated with Gustave Flaubert who was his mentor and he was a contemporary of Zola and Henry James. He was a precise and careful writer who often detailed common place episodes that revealed interesting side lights. Perhaps his best known short story was Boule De Suif (1880, Ball of Fat). It concerned a prostitute and a Prussian officer who delayed a coach during the Franco-Prussian War. This masterpiece is said to have had an influence on John Ford’s classic Stagecoach. Maupassant is often compared to Edgar Allen Poe and many of his later stories bear similarities. Sadly he had suffered from syphilis since his 20’s and thus his health declined and mental disorders increased. By 1891 he was considered insane and he died two years later.
He founded the ‘Naturalist Movement’ in literature which is a nice way of saying ordinary, a soft word for realistic, which really means frank, and often means dark, which can be equated with lurid and sordid. His closest parallel in American letters might be Upton Sinclair who undoubtedly read Emile Zola, as he was just 40 years his junior and their style and content are the same. He pioneered the serial social commentary in the guise of family saga with ‘Les Rougon Macquart’ which ended up as 20 volumes between 1871-1893. The best known of the sequence was La Bête Humaine (The Beast in Man,1890)which belatedly became a movie by Renoir (1938) and Lang (Human Desire, 1954), as did many of the other books in the series. His J’accuse (I Accuse) in defense of Alfred Dreyfus reopened that case and led to the eventual exoneration of Dreyfus. A couple of my favorite quotes from Zola: “The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.” And, “I am an artist...I am here to live out loud.” Perhaps a little too loud.
“Victor in Drama, Victor in Romance; Cloud-weaver of phantasmal hopes and fears; French of the French, and Lord of human tears” so wrote Alfred Lord Tennyson in To Victor Hugo in 1877. Hugo was huge. They built the Panthéon after his death and then they buried him in it. Best known for The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Les Misérables he was a prolific 19th century Romantic novelist and poet. His political views were in and out of fashion and he was exiled in Jersey and Guernsey for 19 years during the time of Napoleon III. You could fill a book with his quotes – in fact he did – several of them. His most famous regarded an idea whose time has come – but I never get tired of:“Have courage for the great sorrows of life, and patience for the small ones”
France was blessed contemporaneously with the three talented founders of French Drama: Molière, Racine, and Pierre Corneille. What a 17th Century flowering! They were major rivals, and Molière won the race, but here we are primarily concerned with the latter. Corneille’s four major masterpieces were: El Cid (Le Cid, 1637), Horace (1640), Cinna (1640-41), & Polyecute (1642-43); another 21 plays followed of varying strength. His heroes had an abiding sense of duty, they subordinated passion to obligation and were paragons of moral vision. They glorified the will at the expense of emotion. Today that might be refreshing. He retired early and was embittered late in life because Racine, who copied much of his work, had became more popular at the time. Likely he would be pleased that in the three legged race for this list Molière and he made it, but Racine stumbled and didn’t.
On December 28, 2004 I came running home and told my sweetheart: Eureka, I found it! Turned out I had stumbled upon what every Frenchman knew was there to begin with. In fact, had been there since Roman times. Still, it was the street that I had always pictured in my mind as the quintessential French street; and that I had never found. Even Ernest Hemingway had found it before me, as he lived just a block away (they really don’t have blocks here, more like convoluted triangles). Known as the “Mouff” it is a charming, winding, picturesque and famous ‘typical Paris street’. It teems with people, stores, groceries, cobblestones, students, and restaurants. In the morning it is a real life street market (till 1:30 PM). The church Saint Médard, with its checkered history relating to the Jansenists, is here, as is La Contrescarpe Café. Also a fine little fountain dating back to Roman times. Find them all a wee bit faster than I did.
The Great Loop or The Big Buckle. It’s an epic battles of man vs. the machine; man vs. time; man vs. the mountain; and man vs. man. It’s the team and the individual heart – the choreography of the group balanced against solitary strain. The precision of a well oiled machine in the team time trials, and the personal fight against the ticking clock in the individual ‘contre la montre’. The lyric beauty of balance with the interplay of the elements time vs. distance. The superb group dynamic of getting near and then the singular brilliance of the solo rider to the top of the mountain.