Of Productivity and Paradoxes

Well, it's here, whether I like it or not: the final weekend in Paris. I have succeeded in emptying my cupboards of all perishable items, leaving me with little guilt about living off of ready-made, market-fresh, Parisian goodness. It's market time, people!

I realized this week, though (now that my internship is officially over), that I never really said what I was actually doing at the Conservatoire. My biggest project was updating and cool-icizing a brochure for exchange students who come to Paris with the Erasmus program; I might have mentioned that. It was really fun at first. I entered French cyberspace at light speed, becoming intimately familiar quite quickly with the Mairie de Paris (http://www.paris.fr/) and metro (http://www.ratp.fr/) websites. I even created my own cartoons featuring a Ziggy-reminiscent exchange student encountering all the trials of international travel. Later, the project became much more tedious, and I spent weeks (literally!) making nitpicky formatting and grammatical corrections. "Non, cette police est trop grande," my boss would say ("This font is too big."). I would make the monumental and requisite change from 14 to 12. "Non, je n'aime pas trop cette police" ("No, I don't really like this font"). I would change the font (Times New Roman to Trebuchet MS). "Ce couleur, peut-il etre moins rouge?" ("Can this color be less red?"). Sure, why not. The changes were endless, and extremely frustrating.

In the end, though, the brochure (for your reading pleasure, in both French AND English) is beautiful! It kicks the pants off of the Conservatoire's other brochures in terms of user-friendliness and overall aesthetic appeal.

I also spent lots of time in the Mediatheque. My boss had initially planned to have me do some work in the library database: checking registered patrons, searching for doubled 33 records, etc. After about two weeks, though, I succeeded in finishing all the tasks she had planned for the summer! There is never a shortage of projects in a library, though. This week, for example, I went through all the (uncatalogued) CDs in the contemporary music collection looking for ones of which we already had a copy, as well as created library records for recent acquisitions and affixed labels to new documents. Exciting, I know.

But these past weeks have really been fun, if for no other reason than lunchtime. Yes, that may sound rather elementary school, but it's not just due to the food (well, not entirely). Since the Conservatoire's cafeteria closed two weeks ago, it gave all its remaining employees vouchers to use at several local restaurants. We are supposed to have one hour lunch breaks. Of course, when one takes time to walk to the restaurant, sit down, order, wait for the food, eat the food, wait for the food to be cleared away by the less-than-attentive servers, answer the inevitable question of "Un dessert? Un cafe?", eat the dessert or drink the coffee, and allow at least the requisite fifteen minutes of pre-bill digestion to take place, lunch can take a lot longer. This means that I have gotten to know my coworkers really well in the last two weeks. Over the course of du hummous, du caviar de poivron, des gombos, and du falafel (Lebanese); des brochettes, du riz, la miso, and des crudites (Japanese); or des nems, du potage, et plus de riz (Chinese); I have gotten the opportunity to hear about writing studios, hair salons, rice paddies, French expressions, Parisian concerts, the civil servant administration, woes with children, and numerous other topics from bona fide French people--all over the course of around 2+ hours.

At first, I felt very guilty about taking so much time to eat lunch. Here I was, raised in the water cooler and 15-min lunch break culture, taking so much time to eat that the pita bread at our favorite Lebanese restaurant had an opportunity to harden. Now, though, I have learned to appreciate this style of life. In the French workplace, or at least at the Conservatoire de Paris Berlioz Mediatheque, relationships and comfort come before efficiency. This is the reason, I feel, behind the "French paradox," and something from which, upon reflection, Americans could benefit.

France, you see, is in a constant tug-of-war between two modes of life, two epoques of existence. On the one hand, you have the ancient constructs--Versailles, the Louvre, the still-quaint-and-ever-so-common practice of going to the boulangerie for the daily baguette, fromageries, the valorisation of art. On the other hand, though, is the modern, more "western" world--efficiency, consumerism, supermarkets, tourism.

The remarkable thing about Paris, though, is it has managed to capitalize upon both of these modes of existence simultaneously. By funneling money into the "ancient", it ensures that monuments are well-preserved for the "modern", the millions of tourists who make Paris the most-visited city in the world. It provides for the unemployed by paying people to perform the dignified task (in all seriousness) of cleaning the streets so that visitors can go home marveling at the sanitation. McDonald's offers chocolate pastries in the place of apple pies, and cheese and jambon (ham) "a la parisienne" adorn its salads (the containers of which feature reminders to eat a balanced diet and exercise often). The artists of the ancient village of Montmartre now sell their work to gullible tourists, who sit for portraits and form the bulk of the painters' subjects.

This melange is epitomized, I feel, in a recent dance performance I attended. One of my coworkers (the relationship due to those two-hour lunch breaks!) had an extra ticket to a contemporary dance production, so she invited me to come along. It took place at the Palais Royal, a gorgeous neoclassical/baroque construct right opposite the Louvre. One can actually see the conflation of which I'm speaking in the building itself. While originally built as a palace for Cardinal Richelieu, it now serves as a government building, housing the French Ministry of Culture and the Conseil d'Etat. The front of the courtyard is composed of a modern art piece where pillars appear to come up through the ground, while the back is a formal garden complete with a fountain and nicely-trimmed hedges.

Then there was the performance itself. I don't mean to denigrade contemporary dance; it has its place. But, let's just say, it's not quite my thing. One hundred and ten (silent) minutes of watching people make odd movements on a stage is not exactly what I would tell the Make-a-Wish Foundation. Thus, I was extremely happy when music from a nearby brasserie started up a few minutes into the performance. It was an odd moment, hearing the horn and accordian music--so stereotypically French--played for the enjoyment of tourists, across the square of a building rooted in French history, accompanying the ultimate in dance modernity, dedicated to upholding the French tradition for the patronage of the arts. Yet, the juxtaposition was not at all unpleasant. In fact, for me, it made the whole spectacle more enjoyable.

Perhaps that is why I have enjoyed Paris this summer so much. One still finds vestiges of the fabled French charm, but it is often couched under a layer of modern efficiency that makes it easily accessible to the foreign visitor. Now, I would be the first one to admit that Paris has its problems, but I feel so blessed to have been able to spend this summer here. It has been such an enriching experience, one which, as I sit writing what may be my final blog post from Paris listening to seagulls along the Seine, I fully plan to repeat in the future.

Until next time, this is Rachel Dunn, Paris correspondant, signing off.

Au revoir!