Wasteland Wrap-up #42

Anxious times, nuclear posters, the IRA, La Femme...

Just a quick update this week. Like everyone else in the United States, I watched the whole response to the Charlie Kirk shooting with some anxious horror. It does feel like things are on a knife-edge, sometimes. And then they seem to blow over — for now. This psychological “will they, won’t they,” this constant sense of threat and horrible possibility, this is one of the things I was looking to avoid for the next several years by moving abroad.

And being away from it does help, because I know how it would feel to be in the place where this is happening, but one never really escapes its grasp, I fear, unless one is simply not paying attention…

On a lighter note… the gnomic phrase, “ANYWHERE IS BREAK TIME,” coupled with an absolutely impressively incoherent collection of graphics, adorns the coffee vending machine at Sciences Po…

The feeling that one has, that weight that comes with paying attention to the news, to watching the rhetoric heat up, to watching nonsense being paraded as gospel, that is the thing that’s hard to explain to anyone here. There’s a difference between looking at the United States from afar and thinking, oh, that seems off, and actually knowing what it is like to be there. That’s the part that I struggle to explain to the people I talk about this sort of thing here. The Parisians I have talked about the United States with all seem to want to believe that perhaps it isn’t as bad as it looks from over here — it’s ten times worse, I tend to say…

I’ve been reading a graphic novel collection of crime comics that I got from The American Library in Paris, and this one from 1934, written by Dashiell Hammett, was so poorly written that it is actually funny… most of the others are much better. “Hooey!”

But I’ve been keeping busy over here. I attended two talks last week, one entirely in French, and I understood some of the latter, so that’s something. The part of the language learning that I can feel getting better each week is being able to hear the words through the accent, to distinguish them. I still am often at a loss of understanding how they fit together — for the talk in French, I could understand the subject, but not the argument. But progress is being made, although it feels slow when one is still fumbling. I am thinking of enrolling for a class that is offered for postdocs, as that might help “get me over the hump” of it.

I did my Duolingo with Lyndon at the Jardin du Luxembourg the other day, and we got squawked at relentlessly by a gigantic crow, pictured in the tree above. Everyone’s a critic!

I also wrote up an exhibit for Doomsday Machines that I had attended in Manhattan just before I left, on nuclear posters, in case you missed it: