Electric Ladyland

Sancerre and the Huguenots

My father and I have been big fans of Sancerre ever since discovering it several years back at the Brick Cafe here in Astoria.  I just discovered that it has a Huguenot connection as well.  The town of Sancerre figures prominently in the Wars of Religion according to this article on the Siege of Sancerre.

Gives a Huguenot like myself much to be proud of except for, of course, the accounts of the devastation people endured during the time the town was under siege by Catholic forces.  I do find it interesting that the article references Henri IV at the end as well.  He was one of France's best-loved kings and a Huguenot.  He remained Protestant for much of his life until converting to Catholicism after taking the throne.

By chance I ended up learning much about him and the Huguenot cause during the summer I spent studying French in Pau, the city of his birth.  I was the only French-American kid among all students in the program and, on top of that, a Protestant as well.  Had no idea that my interest in learning the language of my heritage would connect me with much more than syntax, pronunciation and grammar but also a sense of the times that had led to my own family's decision to flee the country. 

Like many Huguenot refugees we settled in the Netherlands during the 16th century.  From there a pair of brothers came to the United States during the Gold Rush and began the American branch of our family.  Still Protestant to this day.  I wonder who it was who made the initial choice to leave the Catholic Church.  Was it a conversion of faith or of political opportunity?  What was the motivation?  I still wonder that today because although I may not practice much I find it fascinating that one person's decision more than 500 years ago set in course a series of migrations that led to my being born an American.  Had that not happened the family likely would have remained French.

This subject doesn't come up much when I talk with other people but it did a week ago when I got chatted up by a waiter at an Italian restaurant in Manhattan.  His name was Marcel and I noticed that it was French.  He then specified that he was a Huguenot and that spurred a discussion about the heritage we shared.  A rare conversation for me to have these days.  I was used to being around plenty of other French-American kids growing up in Western Massachusetts but being as they were all French-Canadian, they attended Mass while I had to go to Sunday School.  No one ever explained the reason for that to me until years later. 

Now things Huguenot don't figure centrally in my life but I have to smile when I happen to learn that a wine I love has a Huguenot link.  Who knew?

Time off

The weekend was a slice of all right.  Boy did I need that.

Went to the Green Market on Saturday and bought peaches, tomatoes, a ginger snap cookie, a hanging rosemary plant and a smoked duck.  I also had a sweet interlude when I went up to a gruff old farmer to buy some zinnias.  The guy looked a little off-putting but I was drawn to his stand of zinnias -- they were arranged in different color groups spanning the spectrum and if there's a constant about me, it's that I like variety and interesting patterns.  So I found it satisfying to pick ten flowers from the bunch, looking back and forth from one bucket to the next to see which color might go well with the others I'd already selected.  It took a little while but when I presented the final bouquet to him so he could calculate the charge, he had a wide smile on his face.  It's hard not to smile when someone finds wonder in something.  I'll have to go back to Mr. (Supposedly) Gruff Farmer Guy and buy some more over the coming weekend.  The zinnias I bought on Saturday are still radiating happiness on my kitchen table.  And they're flanked by fossil rocks from our ranch beach, which completes the aesthetic.  It reminds me of home and family.

What else... well, Saturday I spent mostly writing and doing errands.  Getting on the ball with "me" things.  Finally emailed that professor who's an expert in Obaku calligraphy to ask for his thoughts on my future plans.  Also posted for a roommate.  Laughed at how all the French people who replied picked up on my foodie references and confessed to me their obsession for food right off the bat.  Some ethnic stereotypes have a basis in reality.  It's all good to me because I'm French and I'm obsessed with food too so we understand each other.

Sunday I went to my first GRE prep class and took a diagnostic test.  Killed the verbal.  Finished in 15 minutes even though they allotted us 30.  I was really surprised at how easy it was.  I was also surprised at how I was able to work out the math problems fairly well despite not having done a problem in 13 years or so.  But I am feeling really good... if that's the sort of verbal section I'm dealing with then I'm gonna be more than all right.  One of our homework assignments was to separate Kaplan vocabulary flash cards into two piles:  Words I Know and Everything Else.  I did that last night and it was pretty funny seeing this huge Words I Know pile stacked up next to the itty bitty Everything Else pile.  I wonder how many English words I know.  It occurred to me that I'm already going to have a quote-unquote edge on this test because it's in my native language.  I'm a lot more fluent in English than in Japanese, obviously, but I didn't have a quantitative sense of that until now.

Today was good... took a much needed comp day.  Slept late and woke up to a call from a college friend.  Said he'd been expecting it to go to voice mail since he assumed I was at work, but I said "Nope, comp day."  Turned out he was in the neighborhood on business so we went to a local Italian cafe for lunch and had panini sandwiches.  I had bresaola with arugula and parmesan with a lemon aioli dressing.  We both had cupcakes after that.  Good times.

After that I did a couple of errands and then Dad showed up.  We hung around and gossiped in the kitchen, then eventually made our way out to dinner.  Hit up Cavo and sat in the backyard garden.  With tonight's beautiful summer weather it was a meal to remember.  Highlights included salmon and tuna tartare, lamb and filet mignon.  There was a muscat dessert wine that impressed me too. 

Now I'm looking ahead to a busy week.  Got work tomorrow, then I'm up with the roosters to board an early train to D.C. for business.  That'll be hectic but I love D.C. and I get to meet up with my friend Mike for dinner at an Ethiopian place afterward so that should be fun!  Then Thursday's roommate interviews and Friday holds the promise of corned beef and hash for breakfast with Fred, then some work, then dinner with Valeta followed by Superbad, a movie I've wanting to see, like, super bad.

I have a feeling this week is going to go super fast...

Bastille Day

It was Bastille Day today.  I didn't even realize it until the end of the day.  Spent several hours listening to MC Solaar and when I got home, I ran across a fellow Franco from my hometown on Facebook who I had never realized even spoke French -- but there it was on his profile.  Conjured up some sentimental feelings about our shared identity.  I used to sometimes think he was an annoying pipsqueak (once tried to show me up in front of our English teacher thinking I was lying when I said I knew how to spell every word on our vocabulary test -- I spelled every word correctly then and judging from his profile he still can't spell now) but this little surprise changed that somewhat.  I did buy three kinds of cheese today without even thinking twice about it, come to think of it.  Periodically I go trolling the Internet for sites that are geared towards us French-descent types but generally the French sites are either (a) for French bashers or (b) for people who, gee, don't speak any but just love the culture and would like to go there sometime.  I have no problem with the (b) case but where's my (c) Franco-Americans?  Allo?

Communications protocols

Anybody remember this?  I remember this!

It's been a while since I've dealt with it, though.  I've been a Mac user since System 7 so OS9.2 isn't exactly unfamiliar territory, but I gotta say it's been a while.  I switched to OSX years ago.  Seeing as we run a Windows shop where I work you'd think I wouldn't run into any Mac tech support issues but today I actually ended up helping someone who was running OS9 and needed to set up DHCP on the Mac laptop she bought in 2002.  OSX was already out in 2002.  But anyway, I had to dig into the memory banks to help this young lady amidst plenty of other things going on simultaneously (lawyers calling for contract negotiations, office renovations and relocations).  I was actually pretty tickled that I remembered how to set her up.  The only thing was that once that was done, her IE was woefully out of date.  I don't blame Microsoft for not supporting it for OS9 anymore.  I set her up with iCab and it wasn't great but it worked better than IE.  Oy.

So no sooner did I opine on social networking than I got a request from a friend to join yet another social networking site -- Facebook.  Am I done now?  Yeesh.

It occurs to me that there are now a gajillion ways in which people can get in touch with me.  Let's see if I can list most of them.  Phone, email, text message, IM, postal mail, in person, social networking sites... and many of these are in duplicate.  I've got three phones -- two work, one personal.  Text messaging on both cell phones.  IM for both work and home.  Fax at work.  Postal mail for both work and home.  The list goes on.  It doesn't usually matter so much except for those comical moments when I have someone in my office, the phone is ringing, IM is flashing and an email just came in.  Oh, and someone's knocking on the door.  How does one process all this input anyway? 

Even with the tech-enabled networking you can't replace good old fashioned connections made between people.  Yesterday I discovered quite by accident that a consultant I'm working with grew up in the town next door to where I grew up.  Just over the river.  Who knew?  That was a real surprise.  We are going to have to go get lunch and make all the connections.  It's a small town area out there in Western Mass and everybody knows everybody.  And as I'm browsing through Facebook right now I see someone I went to high school with.  Haven't thought about him for a million years.  I see all the French names too (big secret nobody seems to know about:  Massachusetts has a reputation for being Irish but there are tons of Francos where I grew up).  Yep.

In other news, I'm still in indecent love with my iPhone.  Oh, and calligraphy starts up again tomorrow.  I have a big Tanabata assignment to turn in before the end of the month.  Can't wait to get started.  Speaking of Japanese art, last night I went to pick up my Ehon poster at the framing shop and on the way back, I did a little recon on two relatively new additions to the neighborhood.  One was Gyro Mania, a Greek joint just off 30th Avenue.   The people were unbelievably sweet and the sheftalia gyro I got was delish.  The second was Esparks Coffee, where they had a cute sign up saying the following:

Socrates drank hemlock!
Romeo drank poison!
You drink coffee!
You're smart!

Word... I may be smart and still ticking but my decision to have a coffee last night probably had a lot to do with my getting to sleep after 2am... *Cough*

What up my Frenchman?

Tom DeLay was on the Colbert Report the other night and he busted out a little of the French solidarity with Colbert, which was kind of funny.  DeLay referred to himself as "another Frenchman who never surrendered," to which Colbert replied "Don't you mean the only Frenchman who never surrendered?"  Admittedly I am French and biased on that count but man is that getting old.  Surrender schmurrender.  I'm not sure where DeLay was going with that "Frenchman who never surrendered" bit -- I think he was mixing that up with his general pro-Southern rhetoric -- but he really set himself up for a joke about cheese-eating surrender monkeys.  And you don't want to do that with the quick-witted Colbert's mischievous eyes on you.

So I don't know... it's a little odd to see people bonding over their shared Frenchness on TV (shared Irishness, shared Italianness, shared Jewishness, sure -- but the French, well, they're really keeping it on the down-low I suppose) but I gotta say I'm not finding much of a reason to bond with The Hammer.  And even Colbert's not sure he'd want to get on board with a Colbert-DeLay 2008 ticket because there is the small matter of DeLay being... what's the word... indicted with the possibility of heading off to jail.  Hm.  Cheney's French too.  I'm not feeling well represented here...!

Sarkozy elected, Colbert congratulates

So Stephen Colbert may be 3/4 Irish but he still took time out to comment on the French elections because "I don't pronounce the T in my last name."  In a very humorous film noir spoof he congratulated fellow conservative Sarkozy in French (not too bad French, all being said and done, especially since he doesn't speak the language).  It was pretty cute but it did bring up that question in my mind:  how does the French diaspora relate to national goings-on in a country that may be connected to them by family name but not in a real everyday life sort of way?  I have friends of other ethnic backgrounds who have varying affinities for and levels of consciousness regarding the current political climate in their countries of origin.  And this being France, I could cry heigh ho to find another person of French descent to give me their perspective.  Anyone out there?  What are you thinking about all this? 

French-bashing

Oh no.  According to The Colbert Report there are news reports that the French dislike themselves even more than the American dislike them.  I guess the Americans can feel self-satisfied about having gone on their anti-French rampage with the Freedom Fries and conspicuous pouring of French wines down toilets.  I wonder what reasons the French gave for not having such a high regard of themselves.  The article also didn't mention how Americans view themselves.  Are we satisfied with how we are?

apple tv, the decline of french consciousness

my apple tv arrived today.  you may not be seeing much of me for a while. 

it's almost done copying my itunes library.  not sure what i'm going to test out first.  did i mention that i bought a new TV too?  hooray for tax refunds.  my old-school 1995 TV is finally being decommissioned in favor of a flat-screen LCD model that should last me just about as long.  i hooked it up to my laptop with a VGA to DVI adapter and watched some star trek:  the next generation on DVD right now.  (it had been my winter resolution to watch star trek:  the next generation from beginning to end.  i don't consider winter finished so i haven't broken the resolution yet.) 

this is sick.  sick as in awesome.  it's christmas!  i haven't felt this gadget-giddy for a long time. 

in other news, yesterday i attended a meeting at which there was a passionate presentation on the future of american jewry.  the presenter brought up the high percentages of interfaith marriages and relationships and threw out all sorts of statistics indicating that jews who tend to date or marry outside the faith also tend not to practice or participate in basic rituals.  the people around me had a lot of different opinions and feelings about this. 

being one of the only non-jews someone asked me for my take on it.  i got distracted with someone asking me for tech support right then but had i had a chance to answer i would have said i didn't feel weird at all.   i come at it from a different angle being a non-jew with a jewish mother.  mom went the other way, converting into the faith and then marrying a jewish man.  i imagine she represents a statistic of, oh, .0007% of the population?  i'm not even sure what statistics mean in terms of direct personal relationships.  i can only comment on what i know, the things i have observed among the people who are close to me.

speaking for myself, hearing people discuss the future of their ethnic identity threw up some questions in my mind about my own ethnic identity.  no one is even having a discussion about the future of franco-americans and their rate of assimilation as far as i know.  not to be dramatic, but i think it's already over for us.  out in western mass, where i grew up, there were tons of french americans around me (larocque, lafleur, laflamme, etc etc) but even in french class we never talked about our shared heritage  (i wasn't french-canadian and i wasn't catholic either, being huguenot, but still...).  you would have thought it would have come up at least once.  even our teacher was of french descent and he didn't feel a need to bring it up.

i've personally never dated anyone with my own heritage and i don't have any friends who come from that background either.  there are some ethnic and cultural traditions i am going to have to work hard to preserve for my children if i have them someday.  in terms of religion it's going to be a little harder since i don't practice but i'll want them to understand our huguenot heritage.  they should at least know that much.  ultimately it'll be their choice what they want to incorporate into their lives but they should be aware and have it available to them.  i'm glad i did.  it means something to me. 

on a side note, there are a few interesting historical parallels between the experiences of the huguenots and the jews.  as i was reading wikipedia's article on huguenots it mentioned that after the wars of religion ended, huguenots' french citizenship was restored.  this may be the first example of the right of return being enacted into law.  i remember reading on some huguenot listerv once upon a time that theoretically this right of return could even extend to the living descendants of huguenots expelled from france (although this right was revoked in 1945), but i doubt anyone could win a case on those grounds today.  it would probably be easier just to move to france and file the paperwork for naturalization as everyone else does.  intriguing, though.

allez-y!

perfect news item for a franco railfan:  the french have set a world speed record for bullet train travel on conventional rails (on nonconventional rails that record of course belongs to the japanese).  félicitations les français!  apparently they celebrated by slicing open bottles of champagne with sabres à champagne.

and what's better, that record was set on a new link between paris and strasbourg.  that's nice to know for future reference because strasbourg's where i'd be headed first if i were to go hunting my long lost relatives and ancestral grounds.  i remember just barely making a flight from strasbourg to paris in 1997.  would have preferred a high speed train but they didn't have one yet.  i had the pleasure of riding the TGV that same year and can say that it was a very smooth trip. 

can't believe that was already ten years ago, the summer i celebrated my 21st birthday.  as i was living near the basque country, my host mother and sae, the japanese girl who was also homestaying in our apartment that summer, bought basque treats for the special dinner we had that night.  that was a good summer and i'm glad i turned 21 in france.  it was special.  i hope i can go back to visit this summer.

cultural authority

i had another interesting exchange with my russian francophile colleague today at the office.  i've been having some difficulty focusing when wearing contacts so today i just gave up and switched to my snazzy glasses.  he saw me in the hallway and was like "wow, nice new glasses" in english, but then a few minutes later i got an email titled "les lunettes sont tres jolies" with this text in the body:

Need help with keeping my French on life support, you know...
I meant, need practice... so corrige mes fautes s'il te plait quand tu as du temps

however, he forgets he's talking to a lapsed franco girl here... it's been a long time since i was really "up" on my french (and i was never up on my french the way i'm up on my japanese although i always had an innate affinity for the atmosphere which i chalked up to my french heritage) and i would just be going on instinct if i were to attempt correcting his french.  there was just that one bit "les lunettes" which should have been "tes lunettes" as far as i can tell (and maybe "le temps" as opposed to "du temps") although i'm not sure i want to be on a tutoiement basis with him. 

since my dad punked out on me with our proposed family trip to france this summer and i'm traveling to anglophone ghana rather than francophone sénégal on business this may, i've lost the two major reasons i had for brushing up my french.  c'est tellement dommage.  but mom and i have been tentatively exploring the idea of going to france together and i have to say it's not a half bad idea.  it would still be a family trip and besides, she actually speaks some french albeit prosaic debussy-style lyrics rather than quotidian french.  we would probably have a lot of fun, though.

in the meantime, it's interesting to see how i'm viewed as some kind of arbiter of the french language.  french people are famous for being sticklers about proper language use and i am no different, but that's generally where my native english is concerned and only true to a lesser extent with french and japanese.  i'll try to help where i can, however.  i can relate to the desire to keep a language alive.