Ten Little Chances to be Free

Maybe if I blather on LiveJournal about my French essay it will help me write it. Of course, then I'll have to do the double work of translating it from LJ-ese into academic-ese, and thence into French academic-ese. But at least I'll have written stuff?

( Rambling on queerness in French Romantic literature: GO. )

In any case, uh. The tension of "secrets" that are tacitly understood but left unsaid, the idea of the elephant in the room, and the pain of having to deceive on an everyday basis are all huge themes in this book, working on several levels between characters, author, readers, etc. This is one of the few books I'm studying that were actually written by a queer author, and while Olivier is a good analysis of the general shittiness of impossible love and impossible situations, Aloys gives you those painful moments of recognition where you realize Custine is writing about the closet before the concept of the closet existed. I leave you with quotes:

"As long as we only speak in order to respond to the disapproving silence of others, as long as all our words are nothing but defenses of ourselves, we cannot judge the world with any justice. If our existence is an enigma to the eyes of others, theirs becomes an enigma for us, and our efforts to communicate with them are in vain: to our eyes they are always spectators, and to them we are nothing but actors. No personality, no mind can resist such false relationships; they influence not only our manners, but even our most intimate feelings."

"I learned the infernal art of deceiving without lying; or at least of making the truth serve a lie: my best disguising was when I spoke of what I felt. I would reveal a part of my impressions, but I would hide their source; I found the language of passion in the agitation of my heart, but I was careful not to let anyone guess the object of this love, profaned by my trickery; in short, although I had been born with a soul free of fraud and calculation, through the false position where my weakness chained me I became the most impenetrable and two-faced of men. Hearts that were created for truth, when they give themselves over to lies, have a great advantage over hearts that are fundamentally perverse. They keep a veneer of innocence that no artifice could fake, and what primitive virtue they have works wonderfully to conceal their degradation."

The ideas that gave rise to this post are wiggling around and fermenting in my brain; I've been wanting to write something longer on the subject, but didn't have any concrete ideas; today I had a "Eureka!" moment: "I know what I'll do, I'll contact the French department about doing some sort of independent-study project on representations of the sexual Other in French Romantic literature!"

A bit of poking on the department website reveals that an honors thesis is out of the question, as I'm not a French major, and even if I were I wouldn't have a snowball's chance in hell of getting a year-long honors thesis approved without pre-planning in my junior year. However, semester-long special studies projects are open to "qualified juniors and seniors from other departments," and I think a year in Paris and five 300-level French classes = qualified.

Reasons why this is a bad idea:
- I am nominally a computer science major and people already tend to forget that and think I'm a French major
- Although I've done plenty of independent learnin' on the subject, I've never taken a queer theory (or even a women's studies) course in my life and haven't even read any Foucault or anything and am generally hideously underqualified for the "representations of the sexual Other" part
- Therefore I might end up taking like six classes spring semester--one or two advanced CS courses, ancient Greek, a French class on the Romantic novel, intro to queer studies, and special-studies project
- High probability that as soon as I start poking around in academic journals I will discover people who have already said everything I could possibly say on the subject, more eloquently than I could, and probably as background remarks prefacing some more specific subject

Reasons why I'll probably try to do it anyway:
- IT WOULD BE AWESOME OKAY
- I've already read most of the stuff I'd be writing about--everything except Aloys and Fragoletta and some more Duchesse de Duras novellas
- I already know who I'll ask to be my academic advisor for it--she's a specialist in Romantic-era France, I took her class on 1830 two years ago, and when I submitted a final essay that was full of "lol Dumas wrote his memoirs LIKE HE WAS THE HERO OF AN ALEXANDRE DUMAS NOVEL" she gave me an A and submitted it for a department prize
- It would probably count as social science, meaning I'll have completed the distribution requirements for Latin Honors and be able to graduate cum laude (unless my grades take a serious plunge in senior year)
- Schadenfreude makes the world a better place to be, so if I end up with six classes I will improve my housemates' lives immensely

So my assignment due tomorrow for one of my orientation classes, which I've been putting off all weekend, is "Write two to three pages on the role of François I in the French Renaissance." I am starting to suspect it is a sick joke the professor is playing on his American students, a sort of "Welcome to the French university system! This is how our essays work." Because it looks like such an innocent question. Until you realize that there's nothing more specific in the assignment, and yet essays are supposed to follow strict requirements for form, and how much outside research are we supposed to be doing anyway? It's a huge subject because François I pretty much WAS the French Renaissance, and two to three pages is so short that I could probably cough up the whole thing just regurgitating what he's told us in class. Except he probably doesn't want that, because he gave us a short reading list, but the stuff on it is not in the tiny library Smith maintains in their Paris building. So, uh, how much research does he want us to do, and how much evidence of said research does he want us to exhibit in our paper?

I think I'm going to fall back on the old introduction-three arguments-conclusion format we all learned in middle school, with the three arguments being roughly "François I symbolized all the newly hip and cool values coming out of Italy at the time," "François I instigated the importation of the Renaissance into France pretty much singlehandedly," and "the centralization of having the whole damn Renaissance personified in one guy was so uniquely French, and for bonus points symbolized cool new ideas like humanism and individualism."

Yes, I post about my homework to LJ. Deal with it. And yes, I am worrying waaaay too much about an assignment that probably won't even count towards my GPA. I just have no. freaking. idea. what I'm supposed to do or how Real! Live! French! Essays! work.

I got everything done Friday/Saturday. Did not even want to THINK about my French essay since I finished it--I essentially researched and wrote a seven-page essay in two days, including two all-nighters and maybe a three-hour nap somewhere in there. I finished it and emailed it to my professor literally five minutes before the dress rehearsal for the concert on the day it was due, repeating "done is better than good, done is better than good" like a mantra to keep me from editing it to death and missing the deadline. I then steadfastly refused to think about it all weekend, because it was seven pages of nonsensical bullshit I'd come up with at three in the morning and I was probably going to get a D on it.

Today I wake up to an email from my French professor saying "Your final essay was so great that I took the liberty of submitting it for the annual French department prize; I hope you don't mind."

sjl;asdfasdf universe, this is not encouraging me to develop good study skills!

Okay, packing is DONE. I stayed up all night loading shit into the car and mom drove off with it at nine in the morning, leaving me to freak out about my essay in peace.

I have my sources. Not many, but according to the teacher three will suffice: an eyewitness account of the July Revolution--that would be Dumas--a general history of it, and a third source of our choosing. I have a general outline for the first half (which is going to be about how Dumas's account resembles a novel as much as a nonfiction work of memoir/history) and vague ideas about the second half (how the novelistic approach compares with a general history and another participant's bare-bones account of the action). Now I just need to sit down and produce seven pages of double-spaced bullshit in passable French.

Yeah I know you guys probably aren't terribly interested in my schoolwork, but this is LJ, it's meant to be self-indulgent and navel-gazing. Consider this the nerdy version of, say, posting eleventy billion pictures of my cat.

Edit: It's almost eleven pm and I'm a little under halfway done with the paper. Looks like I'm going to be staying up all night two nights in a row. Fuck my life.

So that "The Year 1830" French course I'm taking? In the past few weeks it hasn't been directly engaging my nerd-squee too much, as we'd been covering Balzac and Stendhal and the invasion of Algeria and I have discovered that to get automatic A's on essays in this class all I have to do is claim it's all about Napoleon. HOWEVER, the biggest unit in the class (in terms of importance; Stendhal was probably the longest, fie) is the Revolution of 1830, and we have been ordered to go forth and find a primary-source account of the revolution to talk/write about. We were given a list, but it did not include Dumas père's 100+ page account of the three days he spent running around with a gun building barricades. So I got the instructor's permission and went to hunt down said account in the library.

You guys... I have only been in the French history section of the library. I didn't even know where the French lit section was until today. This is probably a good thing since if I had stumbled upon it on a day when I had less to do, I probably would've sat around there gawping until I hyperventilated and passed out. As it was, I grabbed volume 6 of Dumas' memoirs, yielded to temptation and checked out a copy of George Sand's Horace too, and only spent about ten minutes drooling over the fifteen-foot length of floor-to-ceiling bookshelf packed with every work by Victor Hugo one could possibly conceive of. We're not just talking complete works in the original (including like sixteen different editions of Hernani), we're talking about a huge and ancient copy of Les Misères (!!!!) that was too heavy for me to get it off the top shelf and a gorgeous 19th-century German translation of LM printed entirely in blackletter. It makes me SO HAPPY.

...also, the last time this volume of Dumas' memoirs was checked out was in 1938. (The first time appears to be 1914.) This is both sad and kind of amusing. The girl at the circ desk had to fiddle around with both books for a few minutes because both of them were too old to be in the computer.

Also also, unless someone else got there first I will be doing my final project in Theory of Computer Science on the workings and aborted history of the analytical engine. If someone steals my topic, the backup is Enigma machines, but... come on, what is more awesome than Victorian cog-driven computers? Oh yeah, that's right, Victorian cog-driven computers programmed by Lord Byron's daughter.

Apparently my life is just not interesting enough to write about anymore.

Um. I did get together with elyse24601 and a friend who lives in my house on Friday. We watched the last three-quarters or so of the incredibly bizarre 2000 Les Mis miniseries--the one where EVERYONE BUT COSETTE is a massive sketchball. Valjean? Pervs on Cosette; nuff said. Javert? Got his PhD in lurking from Conspicuous University; also, John Malkovitch wtf; also, black leather trenchcoat. Thénardiers? Were sketchy enough in canon, but now there's random gross PDA that may or may not involve their kids. The Mother Superior of the convent? Grim and creepy and obviously chain-smokes if her voice is any indication. Eponine? Skeevy and goth and tells Marius she'll show him Cosette's house if he'll sleep with her. Marius? Fugly; also, AGREES to skeevy Eponine's proposition. Fauchelevent? Has that "I know your name is Jean Valjean because I listen to you talk in your sleep" moment. Enjolras? ...okay, he's cute and ambiguously slashy, but he does shoot Fauchelevent in a crowning moment of WTF.

Actually, there were so many crowning moments of WTF that it's not even worth it to enumerate them.

Also, it is snowing like crazy and I have sixty pages of The Red and the Black to read and a bunch of Latin subjunctive forms to memorize by tomorrow. Woe. And I spent breakfast talking with my friends who are biochem and physics majors, which made me wonder why the fuck I never got to take a real hard science class except biology in 10th grade, which in turn made me wonder why the fuck I got shunted into the remedial dumb-kid science classes after I left middle school. The official excuse was that I "clearly wasn't very good at math," AKA I was a straight-A student who got a C in algebra under an incompetent teacher. But I have to wonder whether those two X chromosomes had anything to do with the assumption that I shouldn't bother my pretty little head with AP Chemistry and all the scary math it entailed.

At any rate, I really regret never having taken a "real" chemistry or physics course. (And no, the "Matter and Energy" bullshit I got stuck with in high school does not count; it was where they put all the kids they thought were too dumb to take the real thing, so we could learn the basic concepts and move on with our lives.) It's something I cannot fit into my schedule at all at Smith, but I wish I could; maybe after I graduate I'll take community-college courses or something.

Sorry I haven't been posting much but WAUGH STUDY-ABROAD APPS SUCK. And mine is due in four and a half hours so I really have no justification to keep poking at the essay section--I should just print that motherfucker and stop worrying about it.

So, now that I have a free afternoon I've been doing more study-abroad running around... I'm going to keep chattering about this until my application is sent and the decision comes back, because it's not at all certain that I'll be allowed to go. I don't have the requisite number of French courses, but I'm fairly sure I can count on glowing recommendations from two professors and my academic advisor. There's a committee that decides on admissions to the Paris program and I've talked to two of the three people on it; the head of the committee (who will be directing the program when I'm there and has extra clout) is all for it and told me he'd push for my admission if necessary. And that made me happy until I went to see last year's director (also on the committee) and sat there getting tutoyée for ten minutes as she told me she Couldn't Make Any Promises and This Is Very Irregular and You Might Not Be Able to Take Computer Science Courses There and the upshot is that her opinion will depend on how I do in the Year 1830 class. Or rather what the professor of that class tells her about me.

Thankfully, nobody told me my admission depends on taking two French classes this semester, so I'm dropping Medieval and Renaissance France. (Well, sort of--Very Dubious Lady "understands that it might be too much work to stay in both, but if you drop it we'll only have one class to evaluate you on and I won't be able to promise you anything," which is probably the closest I'll get to an admission that it's not essential to take both.)

I also finally found a course catalog for Université de Paris VI's computer science department, though not a list of what will be offered in the fall. But that's something I'll be talking over with the study-abroad advisor in the computer science department on Thursday. (Augh, so many people to talk to!)

My schedule's a little wonky and its eventual configuration will depend on how anal the French department is, but so far...

Discrete math: Is what it is. The first class was too introductory for me to get a sense of it, but the professor seems okay.

Latin: We had a quiz on the first day, okay? And the prof opened straight to chapter 23 and started talking about participles as though he expected us to have read it already. I liked Crazy Drill Sergeant Latin Lady better.

Medieval and Renaissance France: It seems interesting enough but... I hope I'll be able to drop it, because it looks like a fuckton of work on a subject I'm not terribly passionate about. I mean, if I keep it I'll probably have most of a medieval studies minor purely by accident, but my schedule is way overloaded and he wants us writing two pages of homework a week minimum.

The Year 1830: Fuck yes! I was not honestly sure whether my French was high-level enough to take this, but it totally is, and I was totally responsible for about 2/3 of the class discussion just by squeeing about Delacroix. It looks like it will be a lot of work, especially oral presentations, but it also looks like it will be totally worth it and the work will be on really shiny stuff like Hernani and Balzac and caricatures and first-person accounts of July 1830. (And Stendhal. Ew.) And the teacher keeps dropping random trivia like how long it took to travel from Paris to Lyon at the time. (Four days by diligence, or forty-eight hours by mail coach driving night and day.) This is going to kick my ass and be utterly awesome.

Tomorrow is Foundations of Computer Science, aka the class with discrete math as a prerequisite. That will be... interesting.