Paris in the the winter

Short update for those keeping score at home. Paris is pretty nice, much better than Munich in almost every way. My roommate is a highly mysterious but very nice Argentinian woman, who manages to both be a psychoanalyst and write a book about Borges without, so far as I can tell, ever leaving the apartment. My room itself is more of a cell or a garret than a room, but it is not without charm.

Although human contact has been minimal, compared to my month in the wilderness (January) I have been a social butterfly. Today, in the library, a young woman across the table handed me what I thought was a note. I got excited about this, thinking that it was some admirer from afar giving me her number. I've heard tell of this kind of thing happening, although it has never happened to me. I was all prepared to let her down gently and was actually composing this in my head in French when I realized that it was not a note at all, but a Kleenex. Because, you see, I have been kind of sick recently and had obviously run out of Kleenex and my face was covered in snot. So what I read as attraction was pity and/or disgust. Story of my life!

Speaking of which, one of the quirks of Paris is that at the swimming pools everyone is required to wear a Speedo. It's a regulation. This seems so stereotypical to me that I couldn't believe it. It's almost like a policeman came up and said it was against the law to bathe, or to not wear striped shirts and red kerchiefs. And if you don't have a Speedo, or have left your Speedo at home, every swimming pool is equipped with a Speedo-brand Speedo vending machine! It's just like the sort of machine that usually dispenses M&M's, but it dispenses Speedos. You can also buy bathing caps there, which are another requirement.

In other random news, I thought that "In the Air" was horrible. I can understand, though, why it has been so praised: it has a twist (the ending), but it's a false twist because what's really different about this movie is the OPENING, so the twist just brings us back to convention and normality. So it gives us the sappy feelings we want re: the economic crisis, but the movie pretends that's not what it's doing.

This review (http://www.tnr.com/book/review/gulag-humor) is going to give me nightmares. Why would The New Republic pick out a random academic press book, and then review it and say it's too academic? Is this going to become a regular thing? I mean, it's good for academic books to get press but not if they are going to be criticized for being academic! This is like when Pitchfork sometimes picks completely random bands nobody has ever heard of and gives them a terrible review. What's the point except to make other bands/academics nervous?