air pollution

Time to update your links/feeds!

2009-03-09T16:41:00.002-04:00

I'm moving! To wordpress in fact! All my posts are over there, though we've lost comments (Haloscan being annoying in any case). So change your links/bookmarks to: http://aiross.wordpress.com and your RSS feeds to http://aiross.wordpress.com/feed.

My first new post is up at the new digs. Go look and see!

15 Albums

2009-02-22T12:13:00.003-05:00

So I've been Facebook tagged. But I hate posting on Facebook. Instead, I'll do this here and then link from Facebook. Hopefully Jessica will count that:

Think of 15 albums that had such a profound effect on you they changed your life. Dug into your soul. Music that brought you to life when you heard it. Royally affected you, kicked you in the wasu, literally socked you in the gut, is what I mean. Then when you finish, tag 15 others, including moi. Make sure you copy and paste this part so they know the drill. Get the idea now? Good. Tag, you're it!

1) If You're Feeling Sinister - Belle and Sebastian
2) Parklife - Blur
3) Weezeer (Blue Album) - Weezer
4) Ben Folds Five - Ben Folds Five
5) Rent OST
6) XO - Eliot Smith
7) The Guest - Phantom Planet
8) Heartbreaker - Ryan Adams
9) Dig Me Out - Sleater-Kinney
10) Mortal City - Dar Williams
11) Summerteeth - Wilco
12) Exile in Guyville - Liz Phair
13) Poses - Rufus Wainwright
14) Bring it Back - Mates of State
15) This is It - The Strokes

I set this down with no comment, other than to note how 90s, how pop-y, and how downright bizarre (yes, Phantom Planet's The Guest changed my life; no joke. I taught a song from that album last year). I should also do a list of albums I wish had changed my life, but that I missed the right moment (I'm looking at you Black Flag, the Kinks, the Beatles...).

I tag Nathanael, Winter, Andygrrl, and AVPS.

Meanwhile, in Le Bourget...

2009-02-21T05:43:00.004-05:00

The scene, two days ago, across the street and a block to the left from my apartment:

Fortunately, the fire didn't claim any victims. Which means I don't have to feel bad about my assumption that the guy screaming "Ils sont morts!!" while wobbling down the street by the supermarket was, in fact, just a crazy person.

Friday Random Top Ten

2009-02-20T12:41:00.002-05:00

Work work working edition:

1) The KKK Took My Baby Away - The Ramones
2) Hunter - Björk
3) No Surprises - Radiohead
4) Tuff Ghost - The Unicorns
5) Fiery Crash - Andrew Bird [swooon]
6) Wedding Bell - Beach House
7) One of Us - Abba
8) Run - Air
9) Tell Me Ten Words - Idlewild
10)I'm a Cuckoo - Belle and Sebastian

Locating the resistance

2009-02-20T11:19:00.002-05:00

Matt Yglesias, attempting to inject some nuance into a discussion of German resistance to Nazism, ends up flattening the story himself. He argues:

The problem was that they [the Social Democratic Party] were undercut by a non-trivial Communist Party that absurdly alleged that there was no difference between social democracy and fascism (they used the term “social fascists”) and by the fact that when the chips were down, both the Catholic political movement and the traditional Protestant conservatives didn’t like Hitler but preferred him socialism.

I'm not an expert on the history of Nazism, but I have two points to make here, both relating to his first point regarding the role of the Communist Party. First, it's difficult to imagine a popular front forming in Germany after the SPD allied themselves with the far-right Freikorps in order to crush the Sparticist League in 1919, leading to the murder of Rosa Luxembourg and Karl Liebknecht. The centrists and traditional conservatives weren't the only one's more afraid of the far left than the far right. Perhaps, then, the Communists were shortsighted in not joining a coalition government with the SPD. But certainly murdering the communist leaders didn't help matters.

Secondly, let's remember who was on the streets of Berlin and other major cities, literally giving their blood in the fight against Nazism. When the SPD lost national power in 1930, quite legally mind, their faith in the strength of Weimar democracy, never the most stable thing, led them to accept with complacency the rule by presidential decree that would take place until the elections of 1932, the electoral victory of the Nazis, and the abrogation of civil liberties in 1933. The Communists, meanwhile, were fighting it out with the SA. Those not forced to flee in the coming years either died in concentration camps or continued to fight it out in the German resistance.

Down in Georgia...

2009-02-19T11:40:00.002-05:00

The H-HistSex listserv has noticed that Georgian (USA) politicians don't like queer theory. They point us to CNN's report:

What's sad is that the students don't seem to know any more about what these professors actually teach than the grandstanding politicians.

I admit it

2009-02-18T16:58:00.001-05:00

Nathanael may like to poke at Battlestar Galactica, but I still love it.

Yet another sign that Obamanie has gone too far...

2009-02-17T15:44:00.003-05:00

Here is a picture of George Washington, wearing an Obama hat, hawking an encyclopedia put out by Le Monde:

Libraries!

2009-02-09T16:17:00.002-05:00

I spend a lot of time complaining at the inability of the internet to function properly here in France. A large part of those complaints consist of wringing my hands over the necessity to actually go to libraries and flip through card catalogs in order to see what they have because their online catalogs remain incomplete (I'm looking at you BHVP). So, while the Catalogue collective de la France may seem great (in is great in many ways), anyone doing research in France should remain cognizant that it won't spit out every useful volume you could possibly find (though I'm pretty sure that the BNF part is fairly comprehensive).

Gallica2, set to replace the old Gallica in the middle of next month, nullifies any complaint I may once have had. Its a godsend for those studying the nineteenth-century. Every book on there is complete. Many of them have full text search enabled. You can add and organize your own libraries. Eat your heart out Google Books (which seems to have fewer and fewer complete volumes each day).

P.S. The beta version of the new University of Michigan library catalog ain't too shabby either.

Well, that's just great

2009-02-09T13:52:00.001-05:00

Did I mention that my parents are arriving in Paris to see me tomorrow:

PARIS: French aviation authorities say Paris' three airports will close for 14 hours because of a severe windstorm.

The civil aviation authority says Paris' Charles de Gaulle, Orly and Le Bourget airports will close from 8 p.m. (1900 GMT, 3 p.m. EST) Monday and remain closed until 10 a.m. (0900 GMT, 4 a.m. EST) Tuesday.

The storm is expected to bring winds reaching up to 60 mph (100 kph).

A statement says that such gusts could pose a safety threat to air traffic. No further details were immediately available.

People and Things That Need to Stop (3)

2009-02-09T11:15:00.003-05:00

Part three of a continuing series of people and things that need to stop:

18) French people who think that North American bands should be able to speak French by virtue of entering France
19) Passengers who continue to sit in the folding chairs even when this causes my face to impress itself on the window of the train
20) Anyone who thinks I want to be their friend just because they speak English
21) My baker
22) Tom Cruise (again)
23) 4 hour waits at the Prefecture
24) Neo-hooverites
25) Neo-liberals

Part 1
Part 2

Mitch McConnell is an idiot

2009-02-07T11:54:00.003-05:00

Via Yglesias, Mitch McConnell needs to go back to school:

But one of the good things about reading history is you learn a good deal. And, we know for sure that the big spending programs of the New Deal did not work. In 1940, unemployment was still 15%. And, it's widely agreed among economists, that what got us out of the doldrums that we were in during the Depression was the beginning of World War II.

Now students, who can tell the class why the beginning of World War II helped yank us out of the Depression?

Good riddance

2009-02-04T11:15:00.002-05:00

I'm glad I'm not the only one on the left happy to see Daschle go (linking to French news because that's what google gives me over here. Sorry).

And I'm especially pleased to see that I'm not the only one who thinks that Howard Dean would make a very nice replacement.

Uh oh...

2009-01-26T15:02:00.001-05:00

Strike!

I've had a whole bunch of small strikes since I've been in Paris; this is my first big one.

A small bleg

2009-01-26T10:22:00.003-05:00

I have a confession: I'm increasingly feeling totally overwhelmed by the idea of turning my work in the archives into a dissertation. It's simultaneously too much (documents, places to go) and too little (variety, surviving documents from certain dates). My photos vastly outnumber my notes. I could probably already write one chapter, but wouldn't know where to begin on the others. I need my (English language) books. And I don't know how much longer I'm here.

Advice? Particularly on the note taking?

Good bye!

2009-01-26T03:32:00.002-05:00

I took this photo right before I left for Cologne:

Back online

2009-01-23T10:56:00.003-05:00

Oh, mother of God, what did people do without the internet?!?

Well, it's a relief to be back online chez moi. The internet people had told my flatmate that we would have to wait another 7-10 days. So only 2 was a nice surprise.

Where were you when history happened?

2009-01-20T16:22:00.002-05:00

I watched the inauguration in a small café in Cologne, Germany. It was followed by excellent food, good company, and fine wine.

Back online, in Germany at least

2009-01-19T07:54:00.003-05:00

Continuing to reinforce my belief that we should take the internet away from France until they figure out how to use it, my apartment has been sans-internet the past week. Fortunately, I had already decided to meet up with a friend in Cologne for part of this week, so I of course found the one coffee shop in town with free internet.

Beware your spokesmen

2009-01-10T06:31:00.003-05:00

I'm as sympathetic as anyone to the goal of shifting the national dialogue on Israel and Palestine to one that acknowledges the deep shades of gray that tint an issue all too often portrayed as black and white. A short article on Talking Points Memo describes a slow shift in the House of Representatives towards such an acknowledgment, describing how 22 representatives voted "no" or "present" on a rose-colored pro-Israeli action statement instead of the 12 who did so in 2006. Great, whatever.

But the first comment to the post disturbs me:

"Capitol Hill is Israeli occupied territory." -
Pat Buchanan
McLaughlin Group, June 15, 1990

You know, it's hard enough being a Jew willing to criticize the actions of the Israeli government when we continue to praise the views of an antisemite, among other things, on Israel. (I still don't understand why MSNBC persists on giving this man a platform). The division between antisemitism and justified criticism of the Israeli government is one that hard line Israel supporters like to blur into nothing. Don't give them a helping hand.

Friday Random Top Ten

2009-01-09T03:36:00.003-05:00

Do I Stay or Do I Go edition:

1) Looking for Astronauts - The National
2) Underwater - Architecture in Helsinki
3) Float On - Modest Mouse
4) End of a Century (live) - Blur
5) Ex-Lion Tamer - Wire
6) Great Release - LCD Soundsystem
7) Dancing Queen - ABBA
8) Beautiful Child - Rufus Wainwright
9) As Ugly As I Seem - The White Stripes

10)Vegetable - Radiohead

Searching for Sources

2009-01-08T15:43:00.003-05:00

Tomorrow I'm returning to the Archives de Paris in an attempt to solve a surprising problem. Without getting into the details of my argument, my project revolves around two sets of sources/frames of reference. The first are general discourses of the city, mostly by urbanists and public hygienists, but by others as well. The second are public sexual practices, primarily by prostitutes and pederasts, but anything revolving around the public pursuit of pleasure counts. I expected to have difficulty finding archival sources for the latter, but the opposite has occurred.

Now, I know exactly where to find urban discourses outside the archives. Baron Haussmann, the Prefect of the Seine who remade Paris during the Second Empire, wrote a three volume memoir. Guidebooks proliferated throughout the nineteenth century, especially around the times of the universal expositions. Nicholas Papayanis's Planning Paris before Haussmannillustrates the multitude of published sources I can find in the libraries here in Paris (though his most important institution, the Bibliothèque administrative de la ville de Paris, is closed and has been for over year; it's supposed to reopen this year). Not to mention the city literature, exemplified in the French case by Victor Fournel's Ce qu'on peut voit dans les rues du Paris [What one sees on the streets of Paris] and brilliantly analyzed in the American case by John Kasson in Rudeness and Civility. There are plenty of well-trodden monographs by well known writers that will be useful and I have every intention of using.

What I wanted to do, however, was also locate some of these discourses within the thought processes and institutional mechanisms of those who actually carried through urban transformation: those working within the administrative rather than those running and/or commenting on it. Those "on the ground" so to speak, making specific recommendations as to what should be built, where something should be built, and, most importantly, how something should be built. The documents preserved from the various administrative services tasked with building and conserving Parisian spaces -- and there are thousands of cartons of them -- largely resist revealing any though process at all. They remain, in other words, extremely useful for tracing the details of how a particular space looked and developed, but refuse to reveal why and how that development took place.

So tomorrow I'm going to attempt to find this type of evidence at a higher level of administration, namely in the records of the deliberations of the Municipal Council of Paris and the records of the Prefect of the Seine himself. Perhaps the whys and hows weren't left to those who implemented urban design. Put differently perhaps the transformation of Paris was so centralized that those closest to the spaces under construction weren't left any flexibility to determine the mode by which such change would take place. Deliberation seems to have been out of the hands of those closest to the city's transformation.

Random notes

2009-01-08T15:35:00.003-05:00

1) Thank you Rémi for telling me how much my French has improved since arriving. Sometimes you really need to hear something like that.

2) Andrew Bird, prognosticator:

I know we're gonna meet someday in the crumbled financial institutions of this land
there will be tables and chairs
pony rides and dancing bears
there'll even be a band
'cause listen after the fall there'll be no more countries
no currencies at all
we're gonna live on our wits
throw away survival kits
trade butterfly knives for adderal
and that's not all
woah!
there will be snacks, there will
there will be snacks!

Ok, not really, but I really really love that verse. From "Tables and Chairs" off the Mysterious Production of Eggs LP (2005).

3) France is cold!

4) I'm glad I went through with submitting my article; anxiety was certainly unfounded. Details soon, I hope.

Thank God...

2009-01-06T13:10:00.000-05:00

...the Daily Show is back.

Paris gets its revenge

2009-01-06T11:12:00.003-05:00

Apparently resentful that I loved Nice so much, Paris decided to kick it up a notch today. First, the sidewalks outside my building have never seen salt before. They don't even know it exists. I should probably just write a future post right now about how I fell on the sidewalk and all the French people started laughing at me. Then, the police archives were closed for the morning. From 10-12 to be precise. For a meeting in the reading room. That's not too bad you may think. But then don't forget that the archivists refuse to deliver documents between 12 and 2. So I was going to be lucky if I saw anything before 2:30p (they close at 5:00p). Ok, I think, I'll just go run a quick errand (my one success: I bought a new French grammar book [much cheaper in France]) and then hop onto the Metro over to the Archives de Paris, a straight shot on line 11. "Oh no you don't!" Paris exclaims. There's an accident at a stop right before mine, so the train wasn't running past the midway point on the line. So I then had to transfer to line 2, then to line 3, then to line 3bis. I finally saw a document at around 1:00. Not that any of them were useful today, mind you.

And my neck hurts.