Paris Apartment Research Articles

The Case of the Peculiar Story: Medical Investigation and the Detective in Edgar Allan Poe and Marguerite Duras.

In "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841), Poe invents the detective story in English, introducing his gentleman sleuth Auguste Dupin as he solves the locked-room mystery of two women found brutally murdered in a Paris apartment. In L'Amante Anglaise (1967), Duras revisits the detective form, fictionalizing the true 1949 crime of a woman murdering and dismembering her cousin in Viorne, France. These literary detective stories highlight the powerful but unspoken role of affective experience in driving what appears, on the surface, to be a forensic medical or psychological investigation. In both tales, peculiarity is an affective and cognitive force that, contrary to what the majority of affect literature argues, inherently moves toward resolution and closure. Using peculiarity as an analytical concept, we argue that the concealment / discovery binary must acknowledge its affective origins, breaking a barrier between narrative scholarship and medical practice.

Landscape Projection and Its Technological Use in Conceptualising Places and Architecture

The manipulation of landscape and the technological use of its views can be a strategy for place-making and a way of creating architecture and making it original. The methods used for this can be different, for example, by mechanically revealing and obscuring views, optical or film projection, directing the viewer to specific frames, using mirrors, etc. This approach is alternative and somewhat in opposition to the natural incorporation of the object into the landscape. In modernism, different architectural views of the surroundings were tested and used differently. These experiences are now transposed to contemporary architectural objects thanks to technological developments and the scenographic shaping of space. The article refers to the sources of transferring landscape views in popular dioramas and the effects of the development of photography, cinematography, and IT media. It describes the possible consequences of perceiving such a created landscape and more general—the world. An example of such a means of expression being fully and consciously taken is the now-defunct Charles de Beistegui Paris apartment. It was designed by Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret in 1929–1931. The apartment was selected for analysing as a case study and confronted with contemporary realisations that use various creative techniques involving the landscape.

Situations Come Together

Situations Come Together Jay N. Shelat (bio) Serotonin Michel Houellebecq Farrar, Straus and Giroux https://us.macmillan.com 320 Pages; Cloth, $24.30 Michel Houellebecq’s reputation precedes him. The French author is subject to controversy because his novels seem to unfortunately coincide with major acts of terrorism. For example, his 2015 novel Submission was released the same day of the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris, and the magazine serendipitously printed a caricature of Houellebecq on its cover the very day of the terrorist attacks. More contentious than the strange connection between his novels and political disruptions, however, are the novels themselves. Crass and politically incorrect, these books oftentimes disparage religion, women, and governments, and they are rife with vulgar violence and sex. Yet, Houellebecq remains one of the most popular authors in France, and he certainly maintains his position as one of the most disputed authors writing in the twenty-first century with his newest novel. Though subdued compared to his other works, Serotonin is akin to Houellebecq’s oeuvre in many ways. Sex and drugs abound, the narrator is severely depressed, and the West is on a downward spiral toward calamity. Yet, Houellebecq’s eighth novel, wonderfully translated by Shaun Whiteside, Serotonin differs from the rest of his works in its attention to the agriculture crisis and its relation to labor unions; this thematic focus, furthermore, violently presents itself late in the novel. Houellebecq makes clear that the action takes place in present-day France: “It was early summer,” the narrator explains early in the novel, “probably about mid-July, sometime toward the end of the 2010s — I seem to remember that Emmanuel Macron was the President of the Republic.” The narrator is Florent-Claude Labrouste, a forty-six-year-old agricultural scientist whose profound depression leads him to take “a small, white, scored oval tablet;” the new antidepressant is called Captorix, and it increases the level of serotonin in the blood and does “not encourage suicidal tendencies or self-harm.” This drug, Florent’s doctor makes clear, will not cure depression and comes with a few serious side effects, namely impotence and the loss of libido. This is one of the novel’s main contestations: Florent needs this medicine, but at what cost? He is forced to sacrifice his sex life and the one true pleasure he has. Florent’s depression worsens because of his impotency, and he chooses to go “voluntarily missing,” forgoing his career at the Ministry of Agriculture, his comfortable Paris apartment, and his indifferent Japanese girlfriend Yuzu to venture the French countryside. This voluntary exodus from society reifies Florent as alone in his struggle; indeed, he notes this loneliness to justify his decision. He ruminates, I too would become someone voluntarily missing, and my case was especially simple as I didn’t have to escape a wife, a family, a patiently constructed social environment, but merely a simply foreign live-in girlfriend who had no right to pursue me. Florent’s choice to abandon his life catalyzes the novel’s temporal disjunction as his long drives and [End Page 7] isolation spur remembrances of the bygone eras of his youth. Florent’s narration switches from key moments in his past to different places he visits while on Captorix in the present. The protagonist emphasizes the deluge of memories, “You plunge into the past, you begin to plunge into it and then it seems as if you’re being engulfed by it, and nothing can put a limit on that engulfment.” As with all of his novels, Houellebecq deftly weaves the narrative past and present together and presents their various players, characterizing the protagonist as a man defined not just by his past and present decisions but also by those who play key roles in shaping his worldview and understanding of himself. More specifically, these people are his numerous exgirlfriends (one of whom he meticulously stalks toward the end of the novel) and his best friend from college, Aymeric, a divorced milk farmer who struggles against the EU-sanctioned milk quotas in an attempt to curb the rising production across Europe. Interestingly, Houellebecq introduces this subplot with Aymeric and the EU quotas comes...

Ernest Hemingway: Artifacts from a Life ed. by Michael Katakis

Reviewed by: Ernest Hemingway: Artifacts from a Life ed. by Michael Katakis Kirk Curnutt Ernest Hemingway: Artifacts from a Life. Edited by Michael Katakis. New York: Scribner's, 2018. 212 pp. Hardback $35.00. Scholars fortunate enough to have visited the Ernest Hemingway Collection at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston understand what a treasure trove of material awaits discovery there. Not simply a repository for manuscript drafts and discards and correspondence—as valuable as those are for the simple reason that most of them remain unpublished—the collection also includes photo album upon photo album of images that few have ever flipped through, much less catalogued or requested permission to reproduce in a biography or critical study. Along with a large variety of keepsakes and ephemera, these goodies are hardly the typical flotsam and jetsam that your average pack rat accumulates over time. (It goes without saying that nary a description of the collection exists that does not describe Hemingway as a "notorious" pack rat). Rather, these objects, whether a scrap of paper, a ticket stub, or an expired passport, lend a material immanence to Hemingway's life nearly six decades after his death. Yet not every Hemingway aficionado can make his or her way to Columbia Point. In recent years, the collection has scanned bits and pieces for online access, most notably five volumes of Grace Hall Hemingway's scrapbooks on Ernest covering 1899-1917. Unless one is only interested in the writer's childhood and adolescence, though, the scrapbooks are fun but prefatory. They can only begin to challenge the visual stereotypes that stamp the culture's limited sense of Hemingway's iconicity, whether his beefy brio, that late-stage white Papa beard, or the omnipresent wine bottle. Most of these signifiers come from a handful of widely reprinted photos, from the 1924 image of the emerging author with his hands stuffed in his pockets outside the Paris apartment at 113 Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs to Yousuf Karsh's famous 1957 close-up portrait of the literary lion in a turtleneck sweater thick as a Bundt pan around his throat. There is so much more to the man to discover, though. The omnipresence of photos like these are one reason that Michael Katakis's handsomely designed Ernest Hemingway: Artifacts from a Life is such a game-changer. Hemingway scholars know Mr. Katakis as the formidable gate-keeper to estate permissions; what they may not know is he is also a talented writer, editor, and historian in his own right, with books on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Native American photography, and expatriation to his credit. As a curatorial guide to the collection, he offers in this coffee-table book an [End Page 134] arresting tour of cornerstone Hemingway moments that feels both fresh and visually intoxicating, punctuated with thoughtful commentary from Hemingway Letters Project director Sandra Spanier, Carol Hemingway, former Kennedy Library director Tom Putnam, as well as "text panels" by Declan Kiely and a preface and afterword respectively from Patrick and Seán Hemingway. Thankfully, Katakis eschews a strictly chronological organization, which can feel stultifying in its familiarity to those who study the biographical arc. Instead, he divides the book into thematic sections ("Beginnings," "Key West, Cuba, and Spain," "Artifacts from a Life," and "Endings") that collectively create the appearance of that crucial modernist device, the collage-like juxtaposition. This strategy—dare I call it cubistic?—emphasizes the contrasts in Hemingway's life and recreates the experience of scouring photo- and scrapbooks, where the randomness at any moment can transport us into the thickness of an associative memory. The verso to the table of contents, for example, features a Spanish Civil War-era Hemingway, looking slightly frazzled and unkempt with the tail of his necktie straying from his sport coat, staring warily off-center of the camera aperture (viii). Set against this photo (which also serves as the book cover) is a small reproduction of the writer's 1944 World War II noncombatant identity card. Even with a thinner hairline and a white beard, ursine but clearly combed, Hemingway appears healthier if not younger in this latter photo, if only because he...

Searching for Nelly Kaplan

Critic Joan Dupont went in search of filmmaker Nelly Kaplan, whom she had met at an awards ceremony in Paris over a decade ago. She was famous for one film, La Fiancée du Pirate (A Very Curious Girl, 1969), which had taken France and the international world of women's film festivals by storm. She had slipped out of sight; nobody seemed to know where she was or why. At the Cinémathèque Française, there was only a kind of embarrassment when her name was mentioned and no plan to show her films. This past year has seen a resurgence of interest in the work of Kaplan, and the restoration and rerelease of some of her work by Lobster Films. Dupont met with Kaplan at her Paris apartment to discuss past, present, and future.

The Blind Eye Within: Jacqueline de Romilly on Seeing and Aging

Abstract Jacqueline de Romilly (1913–2010), one of the preeminent figures of classical philology in France during the 20th century, is best known for her books on 5th-century Athenian political and cultural history. She may also be remembered as the second woman (after Marguerite Yourcenar) to have been elected to the Académie française (1988) as one of its “Immortals.” Less familiar to her readers are the biographical works she wrote late in life, among them Les roses de la solitude (2006), Les revelations de la mémoire (2009), and Jeanne (2011). These provide a window on her joys and on her regrets at having lived her life as a classicist. In Les roses de la solitude in particular, de Romilly, nearly blind and confined in the study and sitting room of the Paris apartment where she lived most of her adult life, gazes into her past, arrested by the sight of objects which have long figured in her daily life. Her heightened sense of mortality and near blindness focus the recollection of her past, personal and professional, around those objects and prompt reflections on a life both nourished and diminished by an uncompromising commitment to the classics.

Market heterogeneity and the determinants of Paris apartment prices: A quantile regression approach

In this paper, the heterogeneity of the Paris apartment market is addressed. For this purpose, quantile regression is applied – with market segmentation based on price deciles – and the hedonic price of housing attributes is computed for various price segments of the market. The approach is applied to a major data set managed by the Paris region notary office (Chambre des Notaires d’Île de France), which consists of approximately 156,000 transactions over the 2000–2006 period. Although spatial econometric methods could not be applied owing to the unavailability of geocodes, spatial dependence effects are shown to be adequately accounted for through an array of 80 location dummy variables. The findings suggest that the relative hedonic prices of several housing attributes differ significantly among deciles. In particular, the elasticity coefficient of the apartment size variable, which is 1.09 for the cheapest units, is down to 1.03 for the most expensive ones. The unit floor level, the number of indoor parking slots, as well as several neighbourhood attributes and location dummies all exhibit substantial implicit price fluctuations among deciles. Finally, the lower the apartment price, the higher the potential for price appreciation over time. While enhancing our understanding of the complex market dynamics that underlie residential choices in a major metropolis such as Paris, this research provides empirical evidence that the QR approach adequately captures heterogeneity among house price ranges, which simultaneously applies to housing stock, historical construct and social fabric.

An Interview with Henri-Jacques Stiker, Doyen of French Disability Studies

IntroductionCatherine Kudlick first met Henri-Jacques Stiker in 1995, and has remained in contact with him ever since. In early 2008 Kudlick interviewed Stiker in his Paris apartment where the cellar contained a veritable treasure-trove of books on every subject. An earlier version of this interview first appeared in the Disability History Association Newsletter in the spring and fall issues 2009.An Interview with Henri-Jacques StikerCJK: Of course the first question is how you came to this subject, why you chose to write on the history of disability.HJS: Very briefly, I studied philosophy, and here in France studies in philosophy end up being about other things. There are of course the big ideas and thinkers, and I don't compare myself to them. But I went into the humanities. It happened that I met a person with a serious disability who convinced me to study it, and so I put my skills as an anthropologist and historian into the area of disability.CJK: But how did this person convince you?HJS: Well, some encounters are decisive, while others are less so. This one was decisive because this person had something powerful, a real sense of drive, of conviction that well, it just seduced me. So I entered into the field of disability, even though I'm not disabled myself and didn't have any real experience with it.CJK: So there's nobody in your family with a disability?HJS: No, no one. I came to it through a chance meeting with someone.CJK: That's really interesting, because usually there's someone-a relative or someone close-who influences us.HJS: Well, I did have my training in philosophy, and as a result, what interested me most was historical anthropology, more than History with a capital H like trained historians do. I'm interested in grand representations, systems of thought, the structures beyond history, more than pure erudition. Out of this I attempted something that I think most historians would find ambitious, even a little mad-to trace the grand systems of western thought from Greek times to the present. For a true historian this would be an impossible move.At the same time, because there was nothing at all in this field, it seemed worthwhile to cover the big sweep of history before focusing on a particular moment.CJK: So you met this person who inspired you. But where did you turn for intellectual inspiration? books did you read? Did you plunge right into primary or did you look to theory?HJS: In France there was a pathbreaking book, that of Michel Foucault on madness [1976]. Foucault had shown that by going to a document you could analyze a whole epistemology, a whole period, etc. I did a little like he did, and asked myself, What did the Greeks think of disability, of infirmity? I'll go look at Greek texts. I plunged into Greek literature, I discovered, reinterpreted Oedipus. And there were a certain number of books, like that of Delcourt Marie [1986] who was a historian of Greece who wrote in the interwar years. In fact she wrote on this question of teratology, these monsters, prodigies. So there were texts that she discovered, and offered a number of her own hypotheses, which meant that I didn't start from zero.And there were other texts at the time that discussed mental illnesses such as the one by Jackie Pigeaud [1981], a specialist in the history of mental health in ancient times. Afterwards, I continued by asking, What did the Jews think? because of course the sources of western thought are part Greco-Latin and part Hebrew. I dove into the Bible to see what it said about all this. After that I got interested in the Christian Middle Ages. Here there were very, very few works on disability, but through texts on poverty I found references, so I went to the texts to see the books written by historians. Basically, I tried to have the most documentation possible for each of the periods.CJK: Did you know from the start that you were going to write a sweeping work like A History of Disability? …

Claude Vivier: a composer's life

Claude Vivier's haunting and expressive music has captivated audiences around the world. But the French-Canadian composer is remembered also because of the dramatic circumstances of his death: he was found murdered in his Paris apartment at the age of thirty-four. Given unrestricted access to Vivier's archives and interviews with Vivier's family, teachers, friends, and colleagues, musicologist and biographer Bob Gilmore tells here the full story of Vivier's fascinating life, from his abandonment as a child in a Montreal orphanage to his posthumous acclaim as one of the leading composers of his generation. Expelled from a religious school at seventeen for lack of maturity, Vivier gave up his ambition to join the priesthood to study composition. Between 1976 and 1983 Vivier wrote the works on which his reputation rests, including Lonely Child, Bouchara, and the operas Kopernikus and Marco Polo. He was also an outspoken presence in the Montreal arts world and gay scene. Vivier left Quebec for Paris in 1982 to work on a new opera, the composition of which was interrupted by his murder. On his desk was the manuscript of his last work, uncannily entitled Do You Believe in the Immortality of the Soul. Vivier's is a tragic but life-affirming story, intimately connected to his passionate music. Bob Gilmore is a musicologist and performer and teaches at Brunel University in London. He is the author of Harry Partch: A Biography.

WORDS WITH MY DAUGHTER

8 4 Y W O R D S W I T H M Y D A U G H T E R E L I Z A B E T H B . J O Y C E A N D K A Y L A A L L E N Mary Katherine Joyce 1 9 9 1 — 2 0 1 0 fierce fun kind Mary Katherine and I sat in a tiny, one-room studio in Paris. A corporate apartment, plain, functional, and utilitarian, completely at odds with my imagination of what a Paris apartment would look like, and so incongruous with the promise of its classic, baroque exterior. The Wig Lady stood before us, a kind, maternal woman from Belgium who made wigs for the movies. She told us she had a thirteen-year-old daughter. She then asked my daughter to take o√ her crocheted beret so she could examine her hair. ‘‘Now I will make a mold of your head for a wig,’’ she told her. ‘‘What about a weave?’’ I asked. She looked directly at Mary Katherine. ‘‘You can’t have a weave yet. Your hair is still falling out, and there has to be strong hair for the weave to attach to.’’ 8 5 R Mary Katherine didn’t say anything but her face became a mask betraying zero emotion. The Wig Lady then carefully cut a sample of Mary Katherine’s hair so she could match her color and gently, so as not to disturb any of her remaining hair, wrapped her head in cellophane. ‘‘I do it this way,’’ she said, ‘‘so the wig will fit snugly and convincingly.’’ Then she looked into Mary Katherine’s eyes and said, ‘‘Listen, you are going to have to accept losing your hair and wearing a wig, at least for a while.’’ She pointed to her left eye. ‘‘I lost this eye when I was a child. Now I wear a glass eye. It wasn’t easy, but I had to make peace with it. I am the child who actually got her eye poked out by the sharp pencil parents are always warning you about.’’ We didn’t laugh. I don’t think she meant to be funny. Mary Katherine shot me a look of warning. I twiddled with the ring on my index finger, a ring with a real glass eye set in it that I’d worn every day since my husband, Bill, gave it to me on my thirty-fifth birthday. I discreetly turned the ring around on my finger. The Wig Lady said, ‘‘So you see, I kind of know what you are struggling with.’’ Then she added, ‘‘By January, Mary Katherine, enough of your hair should have grown back to get a weave if you want.’’ ‘‘If I do get a wig, can I wear it all the time?’’ Mary Katherine managed to choke out. ‘‘You can,’’ the Wig Lady said. To this, Mary Katherine replied, ‘‘If I wear a wig, I never want to take it o√. I want to sleep in it and brush it and be able to wash it in the shower just like my real hair. I want it to be as long and thick as my real hair.’’ We had heard that wigs could only be a certain length and definitely not as long or thick as Mary Katherine ’s real hair. Still, I relaxed a little, realizing that Mary Katherine had been actually considering the reality of a wig. ‘‘Everything,’’ said the Wig Lady, ‘‘can be done.’’ A realization hit me. Before I couldn’t comprehend why my daughter was obsessing so much about wanting a weave rather than a wig. But with her simple question, I realized that Mary Katherine’s wig worries were not so much about what other people would think about her being bald but about how she would feel. 8 6 J O Y C E A N D L E S C U R E Y Baldness or a wig would be a constant reminder of her illness, and she just wanted to feel normal again. She had hoped a weave would seem more natural. Everyone...

Joie de Vivre: Secrets of Wining, Dining, and Romancing Like the French par Harriet Welty Rochefort

Civil War because it focuses almost exclusively on the war of words in France, in the press, between supporters and opponents of intervention, showing how French journalists and writers—some admirably objective, others violently partisan—at once expressed but also manipulated public opinion to suit their ideological purposes. Through the lens of French newspapers, the reader is treated to op-eds, reports from Spain (including from the battle front), outright propaganda, and current events (frontier incidents,the delivery of arms,the arrival of foreign volunteers,and espionage activities). However, it remains uncertain to what extent public opinion was swayed by the press since opinion polls had not yet become the norm to gauge it. In all likelihood the press is still the most reliable barometer of public opinion—though we should note that the truth is usually the first victim of war. This original, meticulouslyresearched , and well-written study features several useful appendices, including an annotated list of important personages and a brief history of the French press. It will be well-received not only by specialists but also by the general reader interested in 1930s France. St. Norbert College (WI) Tom Conner Rochefort, Harriet Welty. Joie de Vivre: Secrets of Wining, Dining, and Romancing Like the French. New York: St. Martin’s, 2012. ISBN 978-1-250-00456-7. Pp. 304. $25. In her third guide to the French lifestyle, Rochefort identifies joie de vivre, reveling in the moment and taking pleasure in all things, as the key to understanding what the French are about. She discusses male/female relations, small pleasures and attention to detail, savoir-faire, conversational style, and contrarian behavior as cultural traits, leisure,the French woman,food,wine,and the associated rituals.Her summary: pleasure is not sinful, time is not money, work is not your life, expressing yourself is good for the heart, the French think of the pleasure of others and“put out for them”(303–04). Her account is more a synthesis than a chronicle, and not overall original, but the style is engaging and she offers a welter of examples. She is most acute on: conversation; Americans’ food issues; the reasons for French insouciance as well as pessimism, compared to Americans; and generally looking for what is instructive rather than problematic about other lifestyles. She is good at unpacking French cultural logic, although given her thematic approach this involves some repetition and some procrustean squeezing.As she acknowledges, she has deliberately not sought to resolve contradictions (even grouchy service fits in). She usually follows a protocol of observation first, then an explanation, and finally—but not consistently—the exception(s) to the rule. She has for example several interesting if familiar pages on la Parisienne, but only one sentence acknowledging there are few Parisiennes on the Metro, and only belatedly brings up the question of equality with men as a kind of footnote to her 250 FRENCH REVIEW 88.2 Reviews 251 lengthy and admiring portrait. Rochefort draws principally on her own experiences, her French husband and his family, and her circle of friends, as well as quoting frequently from other American writers, most often Edith Wharton (implying cultural continuity). These are also the limits of her vision, however. She and her husband live in a trendy quartier populaire but we learn that they own their apartment and have a second home near La Baule. Her in-laws have downsized from their large Paris apartment and also own a home in the country. Moreover, she reports the trend toward second homes got “democratized” in the 1970s, by which she seems to mean other Europeans are buying in France, not less affluent French. Her scattered allusions to the contrary notwithstanding, and given her shopping priorities, we have to wonder which France she is really talking about, in terms of place, social class, variation in general. And to which America she is comparing that France. More pointedly, how much does she really know firsthand about today’s America(s), having grown up in a small Midwest town, moved to France after college over 40 years ago and lived there longer than here? Even accurately interpreted behavior is not perforce characteristic of a majority...

Ariadne's Veil by Ioana Ieronim

reviews The city of Kraków, where Davidson taught for a year as a Fulbright scholar, figures prominently in this collection . Strolling around Jordan Park, surrounded by the busts of esteemed Poles, including poets, the American poet experiences “history’s pulse,” perhaps without realizing that she herself wills that experience into being and is thus part of the commemoration. After all, she is, not unlike her heroine Mrs. Schmetterling, “Any century’s woman,” whose “imagination is / pressed like a tiny chestnut blossom between the pages.” But ironically, and victoriously , Davidson is also mapping out “the enormity of space,” where one’s sense of belonging evaporates as much as it allows one to cling to “a possibility for more // than dissolution.” Indeed, this book is filled with poems that sing and cry, and while doing so they echo with “an ancient call” that keeps us company when we search for God, watch “cumulus clouds rising above a death camp,” or free the “soul’s wilderness” to spread “like milkweed / in the garden plot that no one owns.” Piotr Florczyk Santa Monica, California Ioana Ieronim. Ariadne’s Veil. Bucharest. Contemporary Literature Press. 2013. isbn 9786068366647 The story of Ariadne’s thread leading Theseus out of the labyrinth is a useful metaphor for the strands that bring this book to the reader out of what had been cultural obscurity. First, although Ioana Ieronim established her reputation with poems written in Romanian—some of which, notably The Triumph of the Water Witch, were translated into English—in recent years she has written in English, a decision, or rather a process, she has described in Poetry International. Second, publishers like Contemporary Literature Press (editura. mtt1.ro) are making available to an international audience work that previously would have only been nominally published. While the medium is less important than the message, it represents real progress for all writers and readers. In the first half of Ariadne’s Veil, Ieronim plays variations on the myth. The Minotaur is killed offstage, but Ariadne’s memories of him blend with images of Theseus, whose identity, as well as hers, becomes less certain and more elemental as the sequence progresses —or rather proceeds, since the only real narrative line comes from the 68 worldliteraturetoday.org Hassan Najmi Gertrude Roger Allen, tr. Interlink Books Committed to write the elderly Mohammed’s life story before he dies, the unnamed narrator struggles with the constant suspicion that Mohammed is spinning lies about being Gertrude Stein’s close friend and guest in her Paris apartment. Yet his growing fascination with the experiences inside Stein’s elite circle makes him hope that at least some of the stories could be true. Orlando Ricardo Menes Fetish University of Nebraska Press The cumuli and bilious forms that skate across the horizon of these poems call up a sense of longing through their invocation of the spirits of past ancestors. Well versed in the uprooted life of an immigrant, Menes’s profound references not only convey local color but also bring the essence of his family history eye level with the reader in these striking verses. Nota Bene reader’s knowledge of the myth. At one point, Ariadne’s perspective is reduced, or refined, to a vision of “these things that one cannot speak,” perhaps drawn from “this sense before knowledge.” Some of these matters lie in depths—labyrinthine, mythic, psychological , physical—that can be plumbed by words, even those “meant to cheat,” which “speak the truth.” The sequence ends with the image of “Swans on the Lake,” a striking, nonsensual , and at the same time erotic evocation of grace and harmony. The book’s second half, “Songs and the Day,” refers sparingly to the myth (though an anthropomorphized laptop with erotic overtones appears in both halves). However, rhythms of all sorts—natural, poetic, physical— reveal glancingly what lies beneath our individuality and even our humanity, “these things / teasingly beyond our reach / though they were ours once upon a time.” At the same time, words are omnipresent, tempting like a gleaming ripe blackberry: “the word I need / in my line,” guarded by “nettles and thorns” but ultimately valuable in visions “not fully communicable / and yet communion.” These...

Du jour by Jacques Jouet

Hassan Najmi Gertrude Roger Allen, tr. Interlink Books Committed to write the elderly Mohammed’s life story before he dies, the unnamed narrator struggles with the constant suspicion that Mohammed is spinning lies about being Gertrude Stein’s close friend and guest in her Paris apartment. Yet his growing fascination with the experiences inside Stein’s elite circle makes him hope that at least some of the stories could be true. Orlando Ricardo Menes Fetish University of Nebraska Press The cumuli and bilious forms that skate across the horizon of these poems call up a sense of longing through their invocation of the spirits of past ancestors. Well versed in the uprooted life of an immigrant, Menes’s profound references not only convey local color but also bring the essence of his family history eye level with the reader in these striking verses. Nota Bene reader’s knowledge of the myth. At one point, Ariadne’s perspective is reduced, or refined, to a vision of “these things that one cannot speak,” perhaps drawn from “this sense before knowledge.” Some of these matters lie in depths—labyrinthine, mythic, psychological , physical—that can be plumbed by words, even those “meant to cheat,” which “speak the truth.” The sequence ends with the image of “Swans on the Lake,” a striking, nonsensual , and at the same time erotic evocation of grace and harmony. The book’s second half, “Songs and the Day,” refers sparingly to the myth (though an anthropomorphized laptop with erotic overtones appears in both halves). However, rhythms of all sorts—natural, poetic, physical— reveal glancingly what lies beneath our individuality and even our humanity, “these things / teasingly beyond our reach / though they were ours once upon a time.” At the same time, words are omnipresent, tempting like a gleaming ripe blackberry: “the word I need / in my line,” guarded by “nettles and thorns” but ultimately valuable in visions “not fully communicable / and yet communion.” These lines could be applied to Cristina Ioana Young’s lovely photographs , which for the most part accompany rather than illustrate the poems. But Ieronim’s poems are rightly the center of attention, further establishing her as a significant anglophone presence. Robert Murray Davis University of Oklahoma Jacques Jouet. Du jour. Paris. P.O.L. 2013. isbn 9782818019733 Jacques Jouet’s latest book of poetry responds in key ways to a work that appeared fifteen years ago, Navet, linge, œil-de-vieux (1998). The dimensions of that latter collection, 938 pages in three volumes, were imposing ones, just like those of Du jour; and once again the appearance of a book like this underscores the courage of Jouet’s publisher, the Editions P.O.L, coming as it does when poetry is such an embattled cultural commodity . Yet the most striking similarity of these two works is that both of them put on display Jouet’s commitment to the principle of poetry as a daily practice, as a gesture profoundly interwoven in the fabric of ordinary life. Beginning in the early 1990s, Jouet resolved to write a poem a day “until the end of my own days,” as he puts it here, whatever other writing projects might engage him on any given day. The first of those experiments involved poems each addressed to one specific reader and sent to that reader in the mail. Thus, where many poets might dream of being read by millions, Jouet’s wager was more modest: each of his poems would be read by at least one person, but that person would be deeply and immediately engaged in his or her reading. Other kinds of experiments followed: poems inspired by accounts of events in daily newspapers, poems involving portraits of individual people , poems addressed to the subscribers of Navet, linge, œil-de-vieux, and so forth. Chronicling Jouet’s labors from 1994 to 2000, Du jour leaves the impression of an artist exceptionally devoted to his craft, one, moreover, whose attitude with regard to that craft is refreshingly matter-of-fact. Rebutting the notion of inspiration, and refusing the kinds of obscurantism in which poetry is often wrapped, Jouet insists instead that poems need not be produced in absolute agony: “Composing verses...

À nous deux, Paris! by Benoît Duteurtre

“une vie étrange, plus que la mienne et la mienne aussi, des histoires, un passé qui n’en sont pas moins vrais” (11). Readers are thus forewarned to pay attention to the equal import of an unknown past and an unexamined present that comprise something larger than the character’s life. Elias Oberer, who speaks the lines quoted above, is the contemporary consciousness readers follow as he learns of his grandmother’s suicide and, more out of duty than affection, makes her funeral arrangements. This over-arching narrative has neo-classical tightness, but the solemn ritual of finality is experienced as mostly undramatic and empty quotidian. Elias is anxious to move from the present of this death—uncomfortably evocative of other deaths—into a future that is vague and directionless (he is a free-lance writer without much conviction and with no evident attachments). What makes his character intriguing is the emotional intelligence he possesses: Elias picks up on language, tone, and gesture, but mostly to avoid connections with others. A tacit woundedness laced with guilt compels him to rebuff others. Interspersed with Elias’s near un-historied story are his forbearers’ stories, of which he seems ignorant. His great-grandfather, Moshe Herschel, was a Polish merchant who survived two occupations to land in Paris; during yet a third occupation, he courageously strategized the release of his wife and daughter (Elias’s grandmother) from the hands of the Milice. This testimonial of selfless love escapes Elias’s knowledge; he only knows of Moshe’s eventual extinction in an unspecified death camp. In the next generation, a Swiss Catholic grandfather is revealed to be a man confused by his own homosexual orientation and caught in a marriage that lasts seventy years. Elias only knows that his grandparents had no intimate life for a full half-century. These histories, were he to know them, would go a long way to helping Elias understand the imperious and passionate nature of his grandmother, her understandable grief, and even the significance of her suicide. It is one of the poignant points of the novel that Elias ignores his own history at the peril of his relationships, of the future family he casually assumes he will have, and even of his own identity. This first novel by Doux is an achievement. The author’s beautifully controlled prose does not indulge in the sensationalism its historic content might suggest nor does it proffer a trite resolution of tribal and self-identities finally reconciled. Lawrence University (WI) Eilene Hoft-March Duteurtre, Benoît. À nous deux, Paris! Paris: Fayard, 2012. ISBN 978-2-213-62998-8. Pp. 333. 19 a. This novel relates the exuberance of protagonist Jérôme Demortelle’s rent-free year in the French capital for the supposed purpose of earning a university degree in art history. Thanks to his grandmother whose Paris apartment is empty, Jérôme has twelve months in which to experience social, musical, and sexual awakenings. Set in the year 1980, the novel also revisits the popular Parisian youth spots of the time 270 FRENCH REVIEW 87.2 Reviews 271 like Le Palace, Mother Earth’s, and the Centre Pompidou. For readers of a certain age fortunate to have lived in Paris between 1968 and 1980, À nous deux, Paris! commemorates a nocturnal City of Lights that captivated and disappointed its adoring young inhabitants, both native and foreign. Jérôme endears himself to the reader through his bravado and naiveté. He believes that a well-established musician will ‘discover’ him for what he really is: a pianist with unequalled talents, even though he is only mediocre. He therefore commits himself to frequenting night clubs in the hopes of encountering his future benefactor.The jobs that he lands,however,are far from ideal: for instance, he works as a secretary-accompanist for Mina, an aging, temperamental rock singer struggling to keep her career afloat, and he provides the background music for two Cuban brothers cutting their enormously successful first record, but receives no royalties. Nevertheless, Jérôme is elated for having found work in “le monde du spectacle” (71), his chosen future milieu; and although unpaid for his piano accompaniment...

Europe's Last Word

Europe's Last Word

The Cosmos of the Paris Apartment: Working-Class Family Life in the Nineteenth Century

Drawing on Bachelard's notion of “cosmicity” this article investigates the living conditions of Parisian working-class families in the second half of the nineteenth century. Nineteenth-century social critics claimed that the lack of privacy in urban apartments made decent family life impossible. However, evidence from judicial dossiers concerning attentat à la pudeur (intimate assault against children) illuminates the lived experience of children and their families in Paris apartments. Rather than a sharp divide between public and private, children experienced their apartment homes as the core of a social and spatial world under the surveillance of parents, neighbors, and other children.

An Auteur for All Seasons: An Interview with Eric Rohmer

An Auteur for All Seasons: An Interview with Eric Rohmer Bert Cardullo Retraction French Forum Inc. and the University of Nebraska Press, publisher of French Forum, are retracting the following article: Bert Cardullo, “An Auteur for All Seasons: An Interview with Eric Rohmer,” French Forum 33, no. 3 (2008): 123–36. The journal’s editorial office and publisher accepted and published the article under a good faith warranty from its author regarding the originality of the material. However it has recently come to light that said warranty and trust were knowingly violated by Professor Cardullo, whose submission recreates in full an interview conducted by Graham Petrie that first appeared in Film Quarterly 24, no. 4 (1971): 34–41. French Forum Inc. and the University of Nebraska Press are committed to the highest standards of publication ethics and are thus compelled to retract the plagiarized material from this database. In so doing we wish also to express our sincerest regret to Film Quarterly, Graham Petrie, and our readers with assurances that we will do all in our power to prevent such reprehensible circumstances from rising again. The following interview took place in April 2008 in Eric Rohmer’s office in a Paris apartment building. bert cardullo: I’d like to focus our discussion today on your Six Moral Tales, M. Rohmer, because they constitute your first, and arguably most important, series, to be followed of course by the Comedies and Proverbs and the Tales of the Four Seasons. eric rohmer: That’s fine with me. It was with the Moral Tales, you know, that I came to the conclusion that audiences and producers would be more likely to accept my ideas in this form than in any other. Instead of asking myself what subjects were most likely to appeal to audiences, I persuaded myself that the best thing would be to treat the same subject six times over—in the hope that by the sixth time the audience would come over to me. It is better, in fact, to see the Moral Tales—and the Tales of the Four Seasons or the Comedies and Proverbs—as a distinct collection. There is a relationship between all the films in each of these three series, and that is where the real interest lies. The public often tells me that I make films which resemble each other, and it is right, but this is normal on my part because I am a complete auteur—that is, someone who creates the film, who treats the subject, and at the same time I am the man who shapes the image. bc: Let’s begin with a little background. What happened to the French New Wave, anyway? er: Well, it’s not the New Wave anymore, I can tell you that! We’re old now. Obviously Truffaut died some time ago, but both Claude Chabrol and Jacques Rivette have made films recently, and Godard—I [End Page 123] understand that he is preparing to make another film. If we have the same cinema as when we started out, or if we have evolved, it’s not up to me to say. It’s true that Godard has probably grown more as a film-maker, but he has grown away from the public, whereas Chabrol has become a more commercial filmmaker. Still, I think we are all loyal, more or less, to the same principles we had when we first constituted the New Wave. Myself, I have kept the same idea of cinema and I always do my films in my own little way: films that are not too expensive. I like shooting nature, even when I am in a studio, and I give extra importance to the poetry of cinematography. So I am still very much adhering to the theories I expounded in my early film articles. As for the accusation I sometimes hear that I am not “modernist” or “leftist” enough, I say that I am not afraid of not being modern; you have to go against the grain of the times, I believe. That said, I have always been interested in using new technology. The first article I ever wrote—even before my work for...

Auschwitz (review)

Reviewed by: Auschwitz Tim Cole (bio) Angela Morgan Cutler . Auschwitz. Ullapool, Scotland: Two Ravens Press, 2008. Paper £9.99. ISBN 1906120188. In part, Angela Morgan Cutler's Auschwitz is an example of a recent genre that combines Holocaust travelogue with family history. Like Daniel Mendelsohn's The Lost, Cutler seeks to uncover the places where family members lived and died. This search begins in Auschwitz, but ends up taking in Budapest, where her husband's grandmother lived, and the Blagovshschina Forest near Minsk, where she died. The journey begun in Auschwitz ends in Berlin with its Holocaust memorial and Jewish museum. Throughout, Cutler is interested in asking questions not only of her husband En's family's past, but also of Holocaust representation and memory in the present. The latter is a fairly well trodden path, with little new in Cutler's meditations on Holocaust tourism, or the possibilities and impossibilities of writing about Auschwitz. More interesting is one family's journey to (re)connect in some way with the lives of an Austro-Hungarian Jewish couple incarcerated in the Maly Trostinec camp and murdered in a nearby forest. When they reach this forest, En digs a hole and buries stones with messages written on them by family members, as well as a treasured doll from childhood. It is in many ways the end of their quest, and a symbolic burial of sorts for the grandparents En never knew. Alongside this story of travelling back to the Holocaust past comes another aspect to this intriguing book. Throughout, the text is interspersed with verbatim e-mails. These reveal Cutler's discussions with a variety of friends, but in particular with the Jewish-American writer Raymond Federman, himself a Holocaust survivor, who was hidden in a closet in their Paris apartment by his mother just before the rest of his family was taken to Auschwitz. Federman's story interweaves with the family story Cutler pursues, but he also becomes a critical friend in the process of writing Auschwitz. What is striking for someone rooted in fairly traditional academic writing practice is the extent of self-reflection on the act of writing integrated in the text. In particular, there is much on the dilemmas thrown up by writing Auschwitz. In one e-mail exchange, Federman claims that, "you cannot write about Auschwitz in a normal organized controlled way – it has to be a mess – the writing must be as obscene as Auschwitz was/is" (41). Elsewhere Cutler suggests that, "the only way to write this, as always, is to write digressively" (103). The place for messiness and digression in writing of this past and present is explored throughout the book. Not only are more familiar pages of descriptive [End Page 143] travelogue interspersed with e-mail correspondence setting up those journeys or Federman's comments on life and writing, but passages of prose are also broken up with a précis of a recent dream – or rather nightmare – that Cutler had. Through a combination of experimental form and intense self-reflection on the struggle of writing, Cutler offers both a story of journeying to Auschwitz, Budapest, Minsk, and Berlin as well as her own story as a writer engaged in trying to make sense of her husband's family's past and her own present. Although some may find the degree of self-reflective questioning potentially tiring or self-indulgent, it does, I think, challenge the ways in which those of us who are academics writing the Holocaust craft our narratives. In particular, it suggests the possibilities of laying bare the process of research and writing more clearly, as well as a greater degree of self-reflection upon constructing narratives of this past. However whilst reading, Auschwitz does, given the intimacy of e-mail exchange, mean that we get to know Cutler and Federman as much as we do the Holocaust stories they reflect on, there is one person who, in some ways, is almost missing from the text. This is En, Cutler's Jewish husband, who is a child of survivors, although he "hates the term Second Generation Holocaust Survivor" (313). He is only given to us through Cutler's authorial voice...

Un nouvel indice de risque immobilier pour le marché résidentiel parisien

Résumé Cet article vise à mettre en lumière les facteurs directeurs de l’évolution du marché immobilier d’habitation de la région parisienne. Cette recherche est réalisée à partir d’une base de données comprenant près de 276 000 transactions de biens immobiliers d’habitation en région parisienne sur la période 1982-2005. Un modèle factoriel permet d’appréhender le lien systématique entre le prix des biens immobiliers d’habitation et un jeu de variables économiques ou financières prédéfinies. La mesure de ce lien met en exergue les « fondamentaux » du marché immobilier et permet de construire un indice fondé sur une approche multi-factorielle. Cette méthodologie identifie les facteurs explicatifs de l’évolution des prix de l’immobilier d’habitation à Paris. En tant que facteurs systématiques, ils représentent l’évolution fondamentale du marché et, par comparaison avec les indices existants, ils peuvent faire ressortir des comportements spéculatifs en période de crise. Le modèle factoriel peut aussi aboutir à des prévisions sur l’évolution des prix de l’immobilier d’habitation.

Bedside Manners in Dorothy Parker's "Lady with a Lamp" and Kay Boyle's My Next Bride

Viciously unfair and unfunny, said Donald Stewart. (1) Shrill ... clothes for an elephant on a mouse, wrote Pauline Pfeiffer. (2) Ernest Hemingway's poem about Dorothy Parker, a Tragic Poetess--Nothing in her life became her like her almost leaving of is famous for its nastiness. The poem, with its scurrilous references to Parker's Jewish background, suicide attempts, and abortion, shocked and offended Hemingway's friends when he gave a public reading of it at Archibald and Ada MacLeish's Paris apartment in 1926. (3) Though ostensibly about Parker, the cantankerous poem and its hostile reception also say much about the uneasy social, cultural reception of abortion in the early twentieth century. At stake for the poem and its listening audience is the question of how to respond to women having abortions. In its representation of Parker, a Tragic Poetess embeds its own response, expressing through satire its discomfort with the sentimental abortion speech it ascribes to Parker: To tell how you could see his little hands already formed You'd waited months too long that was the trouble. But you loved dogs and other people's children and hated Spain where they are cruel to donkeys. Hoping bulls would kill the matadors. To celebrate in borrowed cadence your former gnaw and itch for Charley who went away and left you not so flat behind him And it performed so late those little hands And were there little feet and had the testicles descended? (4) The poem plays off a modernist revulsion against sentimentality to mark its aborting woman as a pariah, self-indulgent, hypocritical, and unworthy of the sympathy she solicits; yet at the same time, the ruthlessness of the poem's parody cuts against itself to elicit from readers the very sympathy for the aborting woman that the poem ostensibly resists. In a layering of responses, the woman's sentimentality unnerves her audience (the poem's speaker), while at the same time, the anti-sentimentality of the speaker unnerves that other audience, the readers/listeners of the poem. An anxious and angry response that itself garnered an anxious and angry response, the Tragic Poetess, and the scandal that surrounded it, enact the awkwardness of responding to women having abortions and express as well an ambivalence toward sentimentalism's place in early twentieth-century abortion politics. Though detractors of sentimentality often dismiss sentiment and sympathy as narcissist lip service, awash in emotion but unable to affect the crises they bemoan, (5) the context of criminalized abortion witnesses the material productivity of sympathy and sentimentality, showing them to be currencies that profoundly affect women's lives. As Leslie Reagan observes, during the years of criminalized abortion, a woman's ability to procure an abortion often depended upon her ability to affect her doctor's sympathies. Sympathy for their female patients, she writes, drew physicians into the world of abortion despite legal and professional prohibitions. In the 1930s, this sympathy for women seeking abortions prompted a rewriting of the American Medical Association's abortion statutes. Swayed by the economic hardships of the depression, the AMA elected to liberalize its abortion policies to allow doctors to consider social conditions when adjudicating therapeutic abortion cases. Prosecutors, too, took a softer line on illegal abortion. Though more and more women were seeking and having abortions during the 1930s, the number of abortion interrogations and prison sentences for abortionists and women having abortions decreased during the depression. (6) This essay looks at how two depression-era abortion narratives--Dorothy Parker's Lady with a Lamp (1932) and Kay Boyle's My Next Bride (1934)--recover a modern sentimentalism to broker the return of deviant aborting women to normative, middle-class society. …