Wasteland wrap-up #65
A first week at French class, an abandoned railway, ethnographic films, The French Dispatch, the nuclear war planner's mind...
The last week was my first “real” week of my French class, a course for adults offered by the city of Paris at a steep discount over other such courses. We haven’t gone over anything that I didn’t already in principle know from my Duolingo (it has just been a review of basic verb, pronoun, and adjective conjugation, and some other basic grammar and vocabulary), but I’ve been impressed at how much it has seemed to help my brain with the French uptake.
If I were to speculate (and it wasn’t just a placebo effect), it feels like the experience of going to a formal class, sitting there with other students and an instructor, and being “on the spot” for being called on (I even had to go up to the chalkboard at one point, to conjugate the verb écouter, “to listen”), has caused some kind of switch to be thrown in my brain. I have read that a slight addition of stress improves language acquisition, which is why whenever one spends much time in any foreign country one starts to notice all sorts of language patterns even in languages you don’t speak at all (when I was in Japan, it “clicked” at one point that the character names of each of the cities we were in were on every license plate). And of course the context of education matters a lot, as every teacher knows.
Whatever the cause, it has been very fun to experience first-hand. Even now when I continue with my Duolingo I notice that my brain is much more effortlessly translating the French sentences I am giving, seeing them as “wholes” rather than “collections of words to be individually deciphered.” And going over even basic review in the classroom setting seems to be “cementing” a lot of basic concepts that I already basically knew but perhaps had to think about too much (and was thus prone to overthinking).
The classes are also fun just in general. The instructor is great — she speaks continuously in French but is always at a level of vocabulary and grammar that is appropriate for the class level, and articulates very clearly, and does all of this with an atmosphere of good humor that makes one feel comfortable, even though one’s brain is constantly a little bit stressed by the language. It makes the two hour class (twice a week; there were more “intensive” courses on offer but I was afraid they would really constrain my schedule too much) go by very fast.
My other classmates are also interesting and I hope to get to know them better over time. We are all étrangers — “foreigners,” but also “strangers,” which is an interesting linguistic lack of distinction — as one would expect, all adults, but the age range varies (I was for the first class clearly the oldest one there, but in my last class they had reshuffled some people from other classes and a few other members joined who were at least my age if not a bit older), as do the backgrounds and walks of life.
During the introductions I took some notes of the nationalities: American (at least one other aside from myself), Australian, Egyptian, Filipino, German, Indian, Iranian, Japanese, Peruvian, Polish, Russian, Tibetan, and Ukrainian. Their proficiencies seem to vary, too — some seem more comfortable talking but don’t seem to know the grammar very well, some seem very good on grammar but bad on talking, etc. Many have taken French classes before; my pure-Duolingo approach seems unusual. So I feel I am neither the best nor the worst prepared for the class, which seems about where I ought to be.
It has also been interesting because I haven’t been a student for some time now! It has been about 20 years (!) since I did actual coursework as a student, in graduate school, and since then almost all of my time in the classroom has been as a teacher. I am a much better student now than I ever was before. Perhaps that’s about motivation to some degree, but it’s also because as a teacher one can’t help but see students self-sabotaging all the time and think about how that’s not the way to learn anything. And I also have given a lot more thought to how the brain learns things over the years, which perhaps helps.
So now that the tables are turned, I am absorbing every word, thinking about every response, taking notes on everything even if I know it (because the act of taking notes is an act of synthesis), and so on. And I am also appreciative of the work of the teacher, perhaps because I can see better what her “craft” is having been in that position myself, and am perhaps tailoring my own approach to the class as to what I would desire of a student in my own classes (my phone is away during class). And, in fact, on Wednesdays I go from teaching my own course at Sciences Po to being a student in my French course.
So all of that is quite good and makes me feel like taking the course was even a better decision than I thought it would be when I signed up. The Duolingo approach (which I am still doing, every day) has been very useful and gotten me surprisingly far, but most of my gains with Duolingo have been quite slow except for vocabulary and reading (I can read at about a B1 level, which is enough to read a newspaper and understand most of it), and I am just not sure that an app can get one’s brain wired around speaking and listening correctly (Duolingo has an “AI chat” talking feature and it is pretty terrible and I think not helpful at all; certainly it is nothing like having actual conversations with actual humans).
I think combining something like Duolingo with an in-person class might round-out the deficits inherent to a formal class as well — only a few days per week, not a lot of instant feedback on things like homework, limited ability to adapt to individual needs, etc. Anyway, we shall see!
Last week I saw notice that the ethnographic documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman had passed away. This was hardly a surprise — he was 96! — but as someone who has been watching his films for a few decades now, and often assigns them in classes and recommends them to colleagues, I heard of it with a somewhat heavy heart.
Wiseman’s documentaries for me have always been the “gold standard” for what contemporary ethnographic examination of “first world” society looks like. I believe the first Wiseman documentary I saw was Near Death, which I saw as an undergraduate at UC Berkeley in a course on “the History of Death” (I always did seek out cheerful subjects), taught by Thomas Laqueur. In graduate school I saw Primate in a course on “Filming Science” taught by Peter Galison and Robb Moss. And independently of any course I have watched High School, Hospital, Meat, Essene (about a French monastery), Welfare, Boxing Gym, and probably some others that I am not recalling immediately.
These are not fun films to watch. They are studies. They require immense patience and concentration. Some of them are frankly shocking but not in a fun way. During Primate, one gets a truly intimate look at how primate study takes place in a scientific setting, and it is, well, not an easy thing if you are someone who cares about the mental and physical states of other animals, much less fairly intelligent ones. There is one scene in particular where, after carefully attending to a Rhesus monkey, the scientist in question neatly decapitates it and begins to remove its brain. It is done clinically and no doubt as a matter of complete routine, but one gets no notice that it is about it happen, and the viewer has already spent some time with this monkey.
But that is, of course, a window into how science is actually done in laboratories, and the very mundanity of that rendering of the living monkey into a monkey’s brain — the true object of study — says something profound about the scientific approach to the world. I say this without judgment of science for this; that is where its power of description comes from! But it is not how we like to talk about how science works, because it is in fact quite disturbing to see the living world rendered into data, coldly and clinically, and absent the narrative context that we usually wrap around this activity to make it more acceptable to the public.
That’s the value of an ethnographic approach, and that’s the value of Wiseman’s films. It is not so much that they “let you see things as they are” — Wiseman himself was clear that there was an editorial mind at work, that the films were necessarily incomplete and heavily manipulated records — but it does let you see things closer to how they operate in the mundane, day-to-day, on their own terms. It is a closer view, anyway, than these institutions typically present to the public, for good reason.
Anyway, in case you missed it, for Doomsday Machines last week I wrote up a discussion of Wiseman’s 1988 film, “Missile,” which is about the training of launch officers for Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles in the mid-1980s. The film, I emphasize, is tremendously boring, but tremendously important if you are someone interested in how these kinds of institutions function. I know of no other source that gives quite as good a view of what it means to be a nuclear launch officer:
A reader pointed out in the comments that the final simulated launch sequence in the film, with the two women (and from which I took the thumbnail above, which is an amazing subversion of the normal “nuclear keys” trope, if only for the fingernail and all that it signifies alone), is available on YouTube:
I find the analog 24-hours clocks they use in the silos — seen in the sequence and in the thumbnail above, and in a earlier portion of “Missile” the instructors emphasize how important it is for the officers to learn to tell time on them — a fascinating artifact in and of themselves. I have never really noticed them but apparently they are common in many “official” contexts, and George Orwell has the clocks “striking thirteen” in 1984 as a symbol of the militarization of his future society. Fascinating stuff.
OK, that’s a lot for one week — I was feeling guilty about the lack of Lyndon photos last week, so I tried to make up for it this week! Next week I will be taking the Eurostar again, as I am giving a talk about the new book at the London School of Economics next Thursday. I am getting to be an old hand at this Eurostar thing…
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