What I really enjoyed about France

I am going to make some comments here that are likely wrong.  They are based on my observations at the moment, that is all.  Please sprinkle liberally with the phrase “to me.”

What is so appealing about France?  Culture – the arts, history, even philosophy – is a normal part of public and private life.  Quotations of poetry, references to painters, discussions of wine or food or you name it that includes the history of the subject.  The humanities historicize everything.

Why are the humanities so prominent in normal life?  Because French humanities education is so good.

Why is the education good?  I suppose this goes in a circle. Because the culture values the humanities.  I don’t know.  But French school children are taught directly how to think about – no, let’s be careful, how to talk about, how to write about, but there begins thinking – art, novels, film, and so on.

I would routinely go to films where large blocks of seats were reserved for school groups.  Wong Kar-wai, King Kong, Charlie Chaplin.  High school kids at the former, grade school in the middle, quite little children at the Chaplin.  I began to expect it.  Similarly, I learned to expect large numbers of children at the opera, or certain music and dance and theatrical performances, and most of all at art museums.

At a different level, the French president can, in public speeches, say things like “Who understood Baudelaire better than Walter Benjamin?” and no one bats an eye.  This is normal.  Sorry, I could only find the speech, from the 2017 Frankfurt Book Fair, in German.

The French criticize their own music education.  I suspect they are comparing themselves to their neighbors, to Germany and Austria – hardly fair.  They criticize their language education.  Why can’t they accomplish what the Dutch do?  An American hardly has any place to comment.

French culture is more top-down and elite-driven than in the U.S., yet the split between high and low culture is less important – maybe unimportant.  Everyone reads Asterix.  The resentments I see in the U.S., in both directions, are minor in France.  Liking poetry or jazz or theater is all right; having no interest is all right, too.  The arts do not work so well as class signifiers.

It must be hard to be a genuine cultural protester in France, to try to reject French culture, which has a literature full of weirdos and literal criminals.  Everything is embraced so easily.  Maybe too easily.  Maybe that is a criticism of the French arts, that the appreciation is too enthusiastic.  I am not the one to make that criticism.  I loved it.

In the United States, literature, reading, feels like a hobby, one of many.  In France, it feels like participation in civilization.  This is appealing, for many reasons.  Perhaps it just pumps up the importance of my hobby.  I don’t think so.

***

I remind myself that although I am writing at the blog again, I have no fixed schedule, no quota of pieces, no godly purpose.  The easy ways to see if I have written something are an RSS reader – how I keep up with all of you – and the email subscription off to the right somewhere.

Thanks for the immediate comments on my adventure with French.  Encouraging!

Literary culture envy

German literary culture is healthy, lively, worthy of our envy. This is a vague concept, I know, and I don't want to exaggerate. A big German bookstore looks a lot like a Borders, and the bestseller lists look a lot like ours, all thrillers and other Krimi novels.

The New Republic recently had a cover and a couple of articles about the American "crisis in book reviewing". I'd link to it if it were worth reading. They should have pointed to Germany - there's a lot more serious book reviewing in a lot more newspapers. There's also a German-language magazine, Literaturen, that's like The Atlantic, except devoted entirely to literature. Pretty great. I don't think we have anything like it.

Here's a funny example of what I mean from Austria. In a way this is cheating. Austria only has a population of 8 million or so. So the standards for being a celebrity are a little different there than here. Still, what a shock to see, on the cover (the cover!) of Austrian tabloids (tabloids!), teasers for reviews of Peter Handke's new novel. Handke was once, probably no longer, a likely Nobel Prize-winner. But he is also a genuine avant gardist, with no interest in any sort of mass audience. It's not like seeing The New York Post announce a review of the new Phillip Roth novel. More like the Post reviewing Walter Abish or William Gass.

Even funnier, in a way, was the tabloid Heute featuring, again on the cover, juicy, shocking details from the tell-all memoir of an ex-girlfriend of Handke.* I don't mean to make light of this, but it made me wonder exactly what Roth or Cormac McCarthy would have to do to make the cover of the Daily News.

* If I understood this correctly, on which one should not count.**

** Update: I did not understand it, but I was close enough for my point, so I'll leave it as is.