“ The system used in the North China plain is a strictly regular one. It has deep magical connotations: north being equated with black and evil, south with red, joy, life, and the sun. It controls very strictly the placing of all religious objects and permanent structures. Indeed, the chief use of the ‘south-pointing needle,’ a Chinese invention, was not for navigation at sea, but for the orientation of buildings. So pervasive is this system that the country people on this flat land give directions by compass points, and not by right or left, as would be natural to us. The organizing system does not center on the individual, moving and turning with him, but is fixed, universal, and outside the person.
— Kevin Lynch, The Image of The City
I wrote this when I was teaching English near Paris, in a city in a fairly poor city in the suburbs called Jouy-le-Moutier. The year there was full of a lot of fugue-like and directionless moments when reality suddenly interjected. This one is pretty amusing.
Being not from here, and being not fluent in the language or fully adapted to the culture(s) I’m amidst all the time, I often either feel serious self-consciousness (see comments on cheese in previous post) or the opposite. I missed the opportunity to pick up breakfast stuff at the store last night because I was at the movies (seeing My Winnipeg, an amazing film), so I was super hungry all morning and didn’t have time to eat anything until 11:20, when I leave my first school. I had 1.30€, which is enough for a snack at the bakery, and I got in line. I hadn’t had a brioche yet in France, so that’s what I ordered. I would eat it while walking to the bus stop; I should have had enough time. I was surprised when they gave me this spiky mass of bread that looked like an unwelcoming flower or an ocean creature, and I was worried about honks and other trouble on the way. This is not the nicest area. The thing was big enough to hide embarrassment behind, and the pleasure of its cartoonish size and good taste got me by. As usual I passed through scenarios in which I get mugged or threatened in some way, and this time the brioche was both a shield and a mace (and when I was halfway through: boomerang). The weight of the pastry turned my pace into a saunter. Things were getting protracted in all the bread, and I lost my sense of time. I rounded the corner for the bus stop right as the bus passed me by, and I knew I would have to run in order to make my next class. The brioche looked like a half-eaten starfish, and I tucked it under my arm like a stolen souvenir; as I started to run, my chewing sped up in proportion, and I was trying to keep the glazed crust from touching my jacket (I hate inappropriate stickiness). Would I have to throw the bread? The bus was starting to leave the stop when I arrived, and my fingers were so sticky that when I slapped at the window, they glued there for a second and left a print. My presence was not concealable, and I’m sure it was queer to behold. I was breathing heavily and so probably showing too much of the chewed bread in my mouth. My metro pass held to the tip of my finger like a magnet, and I almost fell over when the bus took off while I was taking another piece of the bread. I was conspicuously eating a large, garish pastry, and everyone could see that I made no effort to dispel this. How could I? Could I even explain the pseudo-reasoning leading me to this moment? The only hope for recognition in this situation is shared uncontrollable laughter, which no one seemed interested in. This is normally a thing that would make me sick with embarrassment, but I think my always-already-foreign existence made me comfortable with it, and I felt about as anxious as a dog rolling in the grass with a disgusting bone; I also felt like a human watching the dog enjoying itself, feeling glad that at least an animal can let itself go.
I may post some more of my old blog, but you can read the rest of it here: http://jtnorton.blogspot.com/
1 note
I have a problem with referring to all the amazing stuff happening in Egypt right now as a digital revolution. It would be silly not to recognize the role that the internet—as an alternative to state-run television in Egypt and to corporate media in the US—has played in both organizing the protests and in globalizing support. But I think we should step away from what is at times a self-congratulatory perspective, where we place our reasons for feeling so connected to what is happening in Egypt at the fore of the events themselves, in order to see what happened as a revolution in the organization of mass democratic movements. If the Egyptians revolutionized the use of something as global as new social media, the also made revolution out of things we, with only the lens of these media, might find trivial: urban planning (in the newly inhabited Tahrir square), neighborhood watch groups, food distribution, and medical services. The Egyptians called the bluff on power’s old lie: it’s me or chaos.
“ Mornin’ revolution! Today at Tahrir there’s a meeting at 9am for civil engineers to organize and do urban planning of the square! #jan25
— Just read this quoted in another blog, so I don’t know the original source—but I would love to see the minutes from this meeting.
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