summer reading

[Michael Eisenstadt]

Jon Ford wrote:
 >
 > I'm sorry I misread your post. I did a lot of reading in French this
 > summer as the people whose house I was staying at had a quite large
 > labrary, and good paperbacks are amazingly cheap in the small format
 > editions avalable in major bookstores. I read Sartre's book
 > "Reflexions sur la question juive"  that you mentioned  last year and
 > found it interesting up to a point but finally repetitious and without a
 > strong ending.

But the first half of the book, the deconstruction of the
psychology of the antisemite is masterful.

 > Also,  his comments on working class lack of anti-semitism seem very
 > distorted by his communist views-- ie., the working class is always
 > clear headed and sees the exploitive class game for what it is. HA!
 > Probably a lot of working class French are today Le Pen supporters.

not probably, its a known fact

 > I also read a lot of books by Duras (she was involved in a resistance
 > cell that helped save Mitterand from the gestapo). The biography of
 > Mitterand I read gave  interesting insights the occupation period  and
 > the period after it, as well as Mitterand's early roots in the right.
 > At least he was no anti-semite. As for franco-arab writers, I
 > discovered a n energetic young author, Paul Smail, whose first book
 > ,"Vivre me tue," was made into a film this spring. He followed up with
 > an egocentric journal called "La Passion selon moi." This kind of
 > literature has a completly different approach to alienation and other
 > French literary themes  you can see in some of the existential and new
 > wave novels,  although Smail is well-read in both French and American
 > literature (" Vivre me tue" uses "Moby Dick" as a parallel to his
 > cultural awakening in the novel, and the narrator considers himself a
 > kind of  franco-moracan Ishmael figure. These books  (in the J'ai lu
 > series) are hard reading because Smail uses so much slang and many
 > arabic expressions, but a newer argot dictionary can help. When I was
 > there I got the Larousse dictionnaire du francais argotique et
 > populaire (2001). At least I could follow the narrative and get some
 > of the major curses.
 >
 > By the way, I also read a recent biography of Victor Hugo. I never
 > cared much for his poetry or overblown novels, but what an amazing
 > literary and political  figure. Hugo was a major influence on
 > liberation movements around the world, particularly during the years
 > he was living in exile  in the Channel Islands.

looks like you've caught the French bug (too).

If you want to get up to speed in understanding spoken
French, your computer can help. I first started listening
to the Notre Dame station because they speak so slowly but
it didnt take much time for their sanctimonious bullshit to
become unendurable. I usually listen to http://www.france-info.com
but their feed isnt all that great fidelity wise and there's
way too much sport reportage. For better fidelity (thus easier
to follow) there's http://www.bfm.com which is business
oriented. My French friend recommends france-culture.com
but I find their interviews of authors unbearably pretentious.

Mitterand was a truly disgusting figure. Of course the
rest of the French political crowd is equally disgusting
and corrupt: the onctuous hypocrisy of Chirac, the egotism of
Pompidou (and Mitterand), the criminality of Valery
Gisgard d'Estaing -- blood diamonds for his wife from
African dictators -- and the phony aristocratic particule
(de) he gussied up his name with. and on and on.

Mike