Loose Ends
Édouard at Sale Bête has a nice post on yesterday's "Eagle and Coq" pair of Op-Ed pieces in the Times (see below). He makes his best observation in one of the comments: for John J. Miller to complain about French politics, but then to insist that France is unimportant, renders his prosy essay absurd.
It's Tuesday, which means that I have a French lesson in the
late afternoon. This week, I have really buckled down and begun writing a
paragraph on how to distinguish a Web log from an "ordinary" Web site (Thank you, Jordi Marcos). In French. After
M Portes corrects it, I'll publish it here. For the record, let me say how nice
it is (for a change, considering Microsoft) that Word is quick to recognize that
I'm writing in French, and to begin underlining only the words that are
misspelled in French. (A foreign language has to be selected as an alternate
first, I should note.) I also like the fact that the software imposes French
punctuation - as you'll see later today below.
Comment distinguer les blogs des sites Web ordinaires
Pour commencer, il faut qu’on sache ce qui c’est le site Web. Le site Web consiste premièrement d’un document, intitulé « l’index », écrit en HTML et classé au serveur d’un hôte Web. Cet index est la racine du site, sur laquelle tous les autres documents ramifient. Une fois téléchargé de l’Internet, chaque document est reconnu comme « page ». La langue HTML permet qu’on rajoute au texte des instructions invisibles au logiciel du browser concernant la navigation entre les pages du site et la présentation du texte.
Pour créer un site Web, on n’a besoin que d’un ordinateur, connecté à l’Internet et chargé d’un browser et d’un logiciel pour le téléchargement des dossiers, et d’une possession minimale de l’HTML. On écrit les pages et ensuite on les envoie vers l’Internet. C’est tout.
Le Web log c’est un genre de site Web qui de plus exige un logiciel consacré à l’opération des traits caractéristiques aux « blogs » (ou « carnets »), ce qui sont (a) l’organisation des archives, (b) la réception des aperçus qu’écrivent les lecteurs, et (c) les notifications reçues des autres sites Web et emmenés au sujet des nouvelles annonces. Les annonces du blog sont installés au fur et à mesure du téléchargement aux archives construites sous les rubriques mensuelles et catégoriques ; de plus, ils paraissent à la page principale du blog, pour une période déterminée par l’auteur. Au fin de cette période, l’annonce disparaît de la page principale, mais reste encore lisible aux archives préposées.
L’aperçu du visiteur c’est le trait le plus intéressant du blog (après l’ouvrage du propriétaire, bien sûr !). On ne sait jamais à quoi s’attendre. De plus, celui qui fait des aperçus peut inscrire l’adresse de son propre site Web, autant qu’on en ait un. Grâce au logiciel, l’adresse d’un visiteur paraît au blog en forme de lien, permettant qu’on lui rende des visites.
Je suis encore trop ignorant pour vous renseigner sur les notifications, mais je vous assure qu’elles sont très utiles aux experts.
Toutes ces merveilles arrivent sans que l’auteur ne fasse rien !
***
Instead of unloading the dishwasher, I've been wandering around some favorite blogs, finding improbable things, such as a roundup, from the San Francisco Chronicle, of Bay Area obituaries from 2004. Almost all the subjects died of some sort of cancer or of old age - mostly the latter - and there's no doubt that the selection is upbeat. But there's something grand about the very possibility of a bunch of upbeat death notices. This one is about Kenneth Hildebrand, a café pianist of whom the columnist Herb Caen was fond:
One night, when Mr. Hildebrand was playing at Masons in the Fairmont Hotel, Caen wrote, "feeling a heart attack coming on, he managed to get off a chorus of 'There Goes My Heart' before collapsing. He is now back at work, playing the best background piano in a town that is otherwise full of crash- bangers who think they're stars." Caen bestowed on Mr. Hildebrand an impromptu "Hemingway award for grace under pressure."
The Fairmont Hotel has a special pull for me, although I've never, in all my trips to San Francisco, been back. It was 1962, and I had just discovered The New Yorker. As something to read, that is. I would go down to the newstand every hour on the hour to see if the new issue had come out; the concept of "weekly" was slow to set in. I'd go back up to the room discontentedly and try to console myself with sketches for the New Yorker clone that I was going to publish someday, stealing all the typefaces and ingeniously entitled Quill.
And, since we're at loose ends, and everybody's so angry with me for publishing paragraphs in French that they won't even comment anymore, I'll tell a story from the Fairmont stay that the family used to find hilarious but that I now find simply revealing. My father was attending a natural gas convention (INGAA, I'm sure), and he had taken a suite in the then-newish Fairmont tower; our rooms looked toward the Bay Bridge. During one of the parties that my parents hosted, I got my sister to accompany me to the newsstand on one of my hunts (I wouldn't see a new New Yorker until days later, in, of all places, Clinton, Iowa, my father's hometown - where the barber, unaware that I was an adopted child, assured me that I would never go bald). When we got back into the elevator to return to the suite, the car was full of grownups whom we knew from the convention. They joked with us in the manner of the times, and when the elevator stopped, we all got off and walked down to the end the corridor, entered the suite and resumed passing hors d'oeuvres. (It was the middle of the afternoon, but I was wearing a jacket and tie and my sister wore a dress.) We would exchange pleasantries with guests whom we knew and move along. When I came to Bertha Sanders, the lovely wife of a man who was senior to my father, however, she asked me, "Robert, whatever are you doing here?" I chuckled politely and observed that I was passing hors d'oeuvres. That was very nice, she replied, but my parents and their suite were one floor upstairs. What I can't remember is whether we said anything to the occupants of the suite before we slipped out, went upstairs, and soon had everybody laughing.
Comments
My French is not up to the post you mention today. (You might consider translating it for us peasants in the future!) Anti-French sentiment in this country is nothing new. I still have a Village Voice front page from the 70's entitled, "1001 Reasons to Hate the French", incl. the classic reason that any country that sells nuclear reactors to Iraq and thinks Jerry Lewis is a genius should be hated. What Americans refuse to understand is that the French hypocrisy/anti-Semitism is just different from ours. Part of it is that we still smart from having stupidly followed them into Vietnam despite Dienbienphu and had to tolerate their hypocritical tut-tutting afterwards. The French are just as corrupt as we are but Americans think our campaigns are somehow holier and our intentions somehow better than everyone else's and they aren't, necessarily.
Posted by: PPOQ | January 4, 2005 03:26 PM
Although this site presumes linguistic omnicompetence, I did render what I took to be Édouard's most amusing observation en anglais.
Posted by: R J Keefe | January 4, 2005 03:34 PM
PPOQ, well put. The French and the Americans are both remarkably arrogant, but we USAers for generations have managed to perpetuate the myth of our arrogance being driven by purity, and that somehow it's better. It's not better.
By the way, do you know that "PPOQ" roughly renders, in the style of Duchamp's "L.H.O.O.Q.", as "granddad on the ass"?
Posted by: Max | January 4, 2005 04:00 PM
I was not aware of the rough rendering of PPOQ. But I laughed when I read it. And it was a painter who started calling me that, as a matter of fact. But that is, as they say, a L O N G story and not suitable for most tender ears.
Posted by: PPOQ | January 4, 2005 04:33 PM
"...writing a paragraph on how the difference
between Web sites and Web logs. "
Perhaps better would be: writing a paragraph
about the differences between Web sites and Web
logs.
We likely can post here in any
language, but English will serve us best. And, although I don't
consider myself a peasant I think that PPOQ does make a good suggestion
that non English language postings be accompained by an English
text.
Posted by: Jordi Marcos | January 4, 2005 04:58 PM
Bienvenue, Max.
Posted by: R J Keefe | January 4, 2005 05:05 PM
Merci, M. Keefe.
I agree that it makes sense to include accompanying English text, even if I've always been amused by the now-old-fashioned way that the New York Review of Books would routinely quote passages in French, and occasionally German or Italian, without an English translation.
Posted by: Max | January 4, 2005 08:38 PM
Believe me, you don't want to read my little essay on blogs for content; it could not be more pedestrian. It is there simply for readers of French to - evaluate. M Portes assured me that all of my mistakes (which he corrected) were of the kind that a poorly-educated Frenchman would make. What a compliment! Seriously: to have made no errors that even a drunk and totally uneducated Frenchman wouldn't know how to make.
Posted by: R J Keefe | January 4, 2005 08:47 PM
Max was once mistaken for a frenchman by a french mugger on the Metro. This did not prevent the mugging, however. Actually, he is routinely taken for a native until he makes a gender error. (Tooting husband's horn since won't do it himself.) My french is good enough to say J'apprend meilleur que je ne parle, which unfortunately makes people think I understand more than I understand. "Why do you not speak french," ask the waiters, "when your husband is a Frenchman?"
Posted by: Biscuit | January 4, 2005 09:00 PM
Max just informed me that what I thought I said so nicely in french was not at all what I do in fact say so nicely in french (I swear). What I say, he says, is ""je comprends mieux que je ne parle" When I practice, I can get quite good at it.
Posted by: Biscuit | January 4, 2005 09:04 PM
I know how well Max can speak French; indeed, I'm still chuckling over torchon dégueulasse, as he so pithily dismissed the National Review in a comment over at Édouard's. For the analphabètes in the audience, I shall translate: "disgusting dishrag."
PS: Édouard is an all-American guy who grew up in Atlanta (or something like that) and now lives in the West Village. I kid you knot.
Posted by: R J Keefe | January 4, 2005 09:37 PM