etc.

Almost French: Love and a New Life in Paris, Sarah Turnbull
Published August 2003

Today was a good day. I woke up early, spring-cleaned the deck, brewed tea, pulled up a freshly-hosed deck chair, and read in the warm sun all day. This is one of the books I read. Sarah Turnbull is an Australian journalist who took a year off to travel the world, serendipitously met a Frenchman in Bucharest, planned to visit him in Paris for a week, and ended up never leaving. Her portrait of Paris is earnest and resolute, she holds no punches in articulating the many frustrations of living in a city that isn’t patient with expatriates, yet she manages to do justice to the rapture of someone who finds herself accidently living in the most beautiful city in the world. I couldn’t help but compare this book to Gopnik’s, which I also liked a lot, but probably not as much as I liked this one. Gopnik certainly doesn’t glaze over the particular annoyances of French bureaucracy or their often insular culture, but whereas these annoyances are humourous anecdotes in Gopnik’s narrative, they play a very real role in Turnbull’s honestly recounted expat-experience. Most of all though, this book made me long to be in Paris again, more than any other Paris-lit has (and I’ve read a number) and, in my mind, that alone is enough to recommend it.

I should have forced myself to sit down and write about this film as soon as I’d seen it and not let these thoughts marinate for over three weeks, as I have done. Suffice it to say that I loved this film, truly, like I never believed I could. I’m waiting for the 2 volume DVD to watch the two back-to-back. It fills in the plot that I found seriously lacking in the first and, if I had my druthers, Vol.1 would be 50% shorter than it was and Vol.2 would be tacked on to the end of it, and it would be a normal film, you know, just one film (as most films are).

First off, happy birthday Meredith! Go over and offer your wishes too (and apologize for my pokiness with her gift).

You already know all about my love/hate relationship with RSS; what you don’t already know is that about once every month I hit a mind-bending level of fed-up-ness with the amount of daily reading I want to do but have no time to do. To wit: this morning, I sat down with a bowl of granola and a cup of tea and started picking my way through my list of daily reads. That was at 8:30am. It is now 10:04 am. On any given day I don’t have 1.5 hours for supplementary reading, and I almost never have enough time to go back and catch up on all the posts I’ve missed, so my reading has had to become more and more selective, and then once a month that fed-up-ness hits and I feel like I’m merely skimming and not really engaging in any of it. It is at this point that I usually mollify myself with an investment in hours of filling-up on everything I’ve missed, and so I’m better again, and so starts the cycle again.

Feeling like it might be time to make a change, this being a week of changes, I’ve decided to really put all sorts of solid effort into RSS again, so I’d like you to please tell me what aggregator you use and why you like it. Forget all my railing from the past, I’m starting from scratch this time and my only selection criteria for now is that the reader has to be free (not just for trialing, I mean free, period. I’m not ready for any sort of monetary commitment). Thank you.

And since we’re not exclusively about complaints and whining around here, I’m happy to report that I’m reading books again. Hundreds of books can pile up on my reading shelf (and they have) without inducing any sort of catch-up anxiety in me. There’s a lesson in there somewhere.

Baby Bloc, for activists in a family way. file away for one day. [link via monumental mistake]