What I Don't Miss

People often ask me what I miss most from the United States. While there are some intangibles such as optimism, volunteerism, and friendliness that are harder to find in countries like France, the truth is that the things I don't miss are more tangible and more visible.

I think one of the reasons I have ended up living in Europe is that it's easier to find good food and decent public transportation here than it is back home. Yesterday I returned from a week and a half vacation in my homeland, where I was struck by the absence of both yet once again.

Here in France there is a bakery on almost every corner; fresh bread is cheap and plentiful, even if it's not as whole grain as in Germany. Fast food has a growing market share, but even people in a hurry are likely to grab a sandwich made with all fresh ingredients from the local bakery as McDonald's. Meals are a programmed part of life, a time to savor something in good company, not a necessary time constraint to have energy to keep functioning. The word "foodie" doesn't exist in French; only in American culture do we need a word to describe someone who actually appreciates cooking and eating.

Also, I can get almost everywhere without a car. If there's no metro, there's a bus or a bicycle. It's a pleasurable experience to walk from point A to point B. One night during my vacation, I tried to walk to Walmart to pick up a few things for the next day. I ran straight into an interstate with no footbridges or other means of crossing and had to return to the hotel. In the morning my friend took us the short distance in his car.

I used to resist when foreigners mocked Americans for being fat. I said, "Look at me. I'm anything but fat. My whole family is like this. Most of my friends too." But as I look at the photos of high school friends on Facebook and as I observe my fellow Americans on trips back home, I can't help but agree with the critics: maybe America is undergoing an obesity epidemic. Based on the American culture of food and transportation, it makes perfect sense.

I love the American emphasis on practicality and convenience in so many domains of life. But when it comes to food and transport, if nothing else, I much prefer Europe.

French Anti-Americanism

If you aren't already following The Browser's "Five Books" series you should. They ask an expert about his or her subject by way of five books, and the expert explains how each book sheds light on the subject.

Today's post is an interview with historian Richard Kuisel about one of my favorite subjects: French anti-Americanism. Describing Philippe Roger's "The American Enemy", he states:

If you go back to the 18th century there is an expression of cultural superiority. French intellectuals saw America as a rude country of immigrants lacking any cultural eminence. So there is a Gallic condescension operating here. Even to this day there is a belief that the French are the guardians of culture and we [Americans] are the purveyors of some kind of cultural pap. Roger is trying to ridicule this discourse which he finds biased, hypocritical and uninformed. He is trying to remove a toxin from French intellectual life.

I will never forget my oral exam on the French foreign language exam I took after my year of studying abroad here in France. (Both the oral and written exams were fascinating examples of French chauvinism and anti-Americanism.)

The subject was cultural preservation in a changing world, and the professor basically told me that Americans don't have a real culture. We are just a mix of many different cultures.

The French, of course, have a real culture.

No need for me to rail on about the subject. Check out the interview and maybe even read the books. Lots of good stuff there.

William Carlos Williams and Paris

Many moons ago, William Carlos Williams, H.D., and Ezra Pound were students together at the University of Pennsylvania. Like me, Pound never finished his Ph.D. in Romance Languages at Penn. Williams became a doctor. His self-portrait still hangs in the rare book room of the Penn library. Later they all went on to become recognized masters of the poetic craft.

Williams' life, however, diverged from the others. He remained in the United States while the others chose to live in Europe. His poetic choices paralleled that decision. And his relationships were affected as a result. As I read these anecdotes from a recent New York Review of Books article, I couldn't help but think of that dynamic:

The most painful experience of insecurity, Leibowitz shows, came in 1924, when Williams and his wife left Rutherford, New Jersey, for a trip to Paris, then the world capital of modernism. The whole time, Williams was certain he was being scorned by people like Ezra Pound and H.D., his old acquaintances from the University of Pennsylvania, and he reacted with preemptive anger. “I ground my teeth out of resentment,” he wrote, “though I acknowledge their privilege to step on my face if they could.” Invited to a premiere, Williams deliberately wore a ratty tuxedo: “It was intended as a gesture of contempt and received just that.” Told that the writer Valéry Larbaud wanted to meet him, he responded self-abasingly, “Who is this man Larbaud who has so little pride that he wishes to talk with me?”

But the major focus of Williams’s resentment and insecurity was undoubtedly Eliot. A chapter of Williams’s Autobiography is titled “The Waste Land,” but it contains only one paragraph about Eliot’s poem: “Our work staggered to a halt for a moment under the blast of Eliot’s genius which gave the poem back to the academics. We did not know how to answer him.” Williams, who went directly from high school to medical school, was put at a disadvantage by Eliot’s show of erudition. With American avant-garde writers generally, Williams claims, “literary allusions…were unknown to us. Few had the necessary reading.” Late in life, he confessed in an interview that he was “insanely jealous” of Eliot, “who was much more cultured than I was.” (Rather movingly, Leibowitz writes that Williams, invited to share a stage with Eliot’s admirer Allen Tate, “armed himself against possible attack by reading George Saintsbury’s A History of English Prosody, vowing not to be humiliated or viewed as an ignoramus.”)