Four Paragraphs and Thirty-Three Characters

This weblog, journal, commonplace book - or in honour of Claude Levi-Strauss, parole - has had a long, dilatory, and largely uninteresting gestation.  Insofar as I may be permitted to impose my authorial interests, the Historiae Bellovacenses arose from my desire to record my impressions of a year spent in L'Oise, teaching small French children to speak English.  I hoped, essentially to continually present the kind of details which filled my early emails home in a more independent form - id est in a context less at risk at degenerating into brief reassurances about my physical wellbeing, and less prone to being displaced by Skype conversations.  (Of course, the independence of blogspot is tarnished by Google's ownership of any posted content - but then, I do live in a Home for Young Workers, and what good proletarian isn't alienated from the products of his labour?)

 Yet, after the initial excitement of registering this weblog, I found myself unable to start writing.  I didn't delude myself into thinking that the Historiae Bellovacenses would obtain many, if any, chance readers, but I still felt that the theoretically public nature of this work demanded a different kind of writing.  My mother, no doubt, would be happy to read her darling son's reflections on the spurious differences between French and Canadian culture, as noted at the local hypermarché, but the Historiae needed to be somehow a cohesive work - more selective, more stylish.  Even more than that, it needed to convince itself that it wasn't really a weblog.  I'd spent happy years reading the weblogs of aquaintances, and even friends, for the sole purpose of wallowing in the insalubrious borderlands of voyeurism and intellectual superiority, and it was essential that the form of my own verbal meanderings - the unfortunate presence of “blog” in the URL notwithstanding - allow me to continue to enjoy my position among the ironoscenti.  As I say to my students, while clutching at my hair - It's Difficult!

And so I wrote free verse poems about the difficulty of first looking into the cheese aisle in the Saint-Quentin HyperU when one didn't possess a mini-fridge.  A description of my bus ride to school cleverly sought to return English to a prelapsarian, paratactic state.  In the course of trying to capture the irreproducible feeling of sitting on a metal seat between two other men, and musing appreciatively about the superior frothing in commercial, as opposed to household washing machines, I poured out a deeply tedious narrative of my first trip to the laundromat.  I usually gave up.  When I did finish (for how hard is it to finish a poem about cheese, entitled Elegy?), I put off publishing.  And once it had been put off, it seemed, like a prophylactic, best not put back on.  To introduce a boring story by saying “yesterday I went to the laundromat” might be regarded as a misfortune - to introduce it saying “The Wednesday before last I went to the laundromat” would seem like carelessness.  And so the Historiae remained a void - some zeros, a few ones, and then a whole lot more zeros.

But then I went on vacation, thanks to an holiday which no small French children actually seem to celebrate.  And in Amsterdam, my computer was stolen.  Gone along with it was the hastily and pretentiously named subfolder of My Documents called "Ecrits" - and with it, all reflections on cheese and microprocessor- controlled laves-linge.  Their loss has been liberating.  Rather than being failed postings, they have now attained the glory of uncertainty.  Like Schrödinger's Cat they are and are not; at once written and erased, they both live and die as digital whispers at the bottom of the Prinsengracht, in the backroom of a gullible pawnbroker, or in a “refurbished” Toshiba Satellite laptop, with three green and one red vertical lines marring the screen, and a recently formatted 80 gigabyte hard drive.  This is not the beginning of the Historiae Bellovacenses, a text no sooner born than fragmented, but the sequel to the absent presence of the words and photographs which record, inaccessibly, an October beneath the bells of Saint-Etienne.

So let us go then, you and I............

Our Story So Far, wherein the Author Details the Scenes of His Exploits

After all that, the actual form which the Historiae will take might, dear reader, remain shrouded in some obscurity.  In essence, this will be a chronicle of my Bellovacum, an evocation, in words and photographs of noteworthy places, intriguing urban scenes, peculiar cultural activities - in short any thoughts, edifying or not, which I deem worthy of inclusion in my personal historical record.  There may also be some gristly bits of historical or geographical information, and some of these may even be factual.

Among the teachers with whom I work, Bellovacum does not rate very highly.  For several, it seems to be a place of exile - a not-Paris, and therefore a no-place.  Others seem resigned to its provincial status - and amused at my claims to find it interesting at all.  But, perhaps simply because of the novelty of living in France, I do find Bellovacum interesting.  I like that the city bus which takes me to school stops next to a roadwork crew not to engage in confrontation à la St. Clair West, but rather to deliver coffee.  I like that a dark plume of smoke seen from that same bus turns out to be not a house fire, but a bonfire, lit by dairy farmers to protest the difference between the retail and wholesale prices of milk.  I like that the centreville McDonald's comes to a grinding halt to allow a group of schoolchildren, their faces painted for Halloween, to visit the deep-fryers.  And I really like being able to buy baguettes for €0.37.

This is my Bellovacum.  Welcome.