oneirophrenia (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
oneirophrenia) wrote2006-03-21 12:15 am
oneirophrenia) wrote2006-03-21 12:15 am
Vive la France! Or something.
I've been teaching myself French in order to read Baudelaire and Rimbaud in the original, which really surprises me...because I used to call French "the language of submission and limpwristed jerks." But it's actually a surprisingly beautiful language! And I'm taking to it amazingly quickly. This goes right along, though, with a buddy of mine recently telling me that I'm a gay 19th-Century French poet reincarnated as a straight 20th-Century American horror writer. Bizarre combination, but true.
The thing is...I used to think of the French as a bunch of cowardly cheese-eaters and assholes. But lately, with their advancing attitudes on digital rights and open culture, their dedication to letting their culture advance rather than stagnate under the burden of conservativism...hell, I think they might be OK folks!
But the only way I'd move to France is if I could zip through a wormhole to Paris in the 1840s, the 1890s, or the 1920s/30s. I'd spend every fucking day drunk as a lord, lounging around cafes with various dissolute artists and poets, swilling absinthe and coffee (and absinthe mixed with coffee, too, most likely), writing manifestos on Truth and Human Stupidity and the Abject Useless of All Art but That Which Offends and/or Sickens, smoking pounds of opium resin, eating lots of cheese, throwing francs around like they were going out of style at any and all brothels I would cross, passing myself off as a "mental chirurgeon," and--best of all--spending every night not otherwise occupied at the cathouses with hanging at the local circuses with the sideshow freaks. Oh, 'twould be a wondrous time!
The thing is...I used to think of the French as a bunch of cowardly cheese-eaters and assholes. But lately, with their advancing attitudes on digital rights and open culture, their dedication to letting their culture advance rather than stagnate under the burden of conservativism...hell, I think they might be OK folks!
But the only way I'd move to France is if I could zip through a wormhole to Paris in the 1840s, the 1890s, or the 1920s/30s. I'd spend every fucking day drunk as a lord, lounging around cafes with various dissolute artists and poets, swilling absinthe and coffee (and absinthe mixed with coffee, too, most likely), writing manifestos on Truth and Human Stupidity and the Abject Useless of All Art but That Which Offends and/or Sickens, smoking pounds of opium resin, eating lots of cheese, throwing francs around like they were going out of style at any and all brothels I would cross, passing myself off as a "mental chirurgeon," and--best of all--spending every night not otherwise occupied at the cathouses with hanging at the local circuses with the sideshow freaks. Oh, 'twould be a wondrous time!