From our Editors: thoughts about Paris from Audrey

Reflecting on six years of French class

Audrey Deng is the Copy Editor at West 10th and the Arts Editor at Washington Square News. She is a sophomore studying Comparative Literature and English. Talk to her about Frank Stella's retrospective at the Whitney, because she's excited about that.In my mind, Paris exists in textbook images from high school, a series of impressions divided by semester. In the fall, French class was a sanctuary; we would sip hot chocolate while thinking about what we should/could/would do in the languid conditionnel tense, snow piling outside of the window. We would read about (and later eat) delectable French holiday pastries like Bouche de Noël and fondant cake. In the spring, we flung open the windows and projected images of tulip-lined streets to "La Vie en Rose." Paris, just saying the word Paris, implied panache. I felt that simply by being in French class, we students sat straighter, spines strengthened by speaking the language of a country heralded for its elegance.

Last Friday, on November 13, I went to my French class where we learned about the subjunctive (il est important que nous brossons nos dents!). I cooked oatmeal, wrote birthday cards, and Paris erupted into frightened chaos. Guns had fired in the Bataclan concert hall of an Eagles of Death Metal concert, along with bombings throughout the city, killing at least 130 people.The hateful act of terrorism scorches a sad chapter in the world's history, but humans have been sad before. The sickening feeling comes from the fact that it is becoming frighteningly easy to measure the passing of time not by how light illuminates the earth, but by how shadows shroud the globe in darkness.I went to a peaceful gathering in Washington Square Park to pay tribute to France, eavesdropping on the sad conversations held through clouds of sad cigarette smoke. Everything seemed sad. People stood sadly, conversed sadly, smoked sadly. Never, in my life, have I heard a sad French conversation take place in real life until that Friday. "Do you know anyone injured or dead?" one would ask another. "No, all safe, thank God. You?" So it went--and it was jarring.Understanding sadness in another language permanently changes the way one listens and reads and thinks, vous comprenez? It sharpens the vision, tightens the eardrums. Once you have heard those words of death and injury, the language and your history with it, changes. Tenses take on different meanings: the conditionnel is a call to action, the subjonctif is what we want to do, and the imparfait is the way we used to be. And French will never be the same to me.Il est necessaire que nous soyons gentils. It is necessary that we are kind.

From our Editors: why Su Young Lee writes

Su Young Lee—this year’s prose editor here. Currently a sophomore who hopefully and finally narrowed it down to studying English Literature, Journalism, and Creative Writing (fun fact, I’m indecisive). Why (How) I Write   I see a man with his daughter on his lap, brushing her hair away from her small sleeping face as if they weren’t sitting in the middle of a crowded subway train. I like their intimacy and decide that maybe I’ll write about them someday. I never do. I sit in a café and eavesdrop on a job interview as the man becomes increasingly and amusingly anxious, visualizing his half-uttered sentences in the air, full of ellipses. I sit in my room on an especially bad day and decide that the imagined tragedy of how I feel will look good on paper, but all I can manage is jot down a few phrases that all sound like half-finished lines from terrible poetry—my poetry—and I throw the piece of paper away. You see, I like thinking about writing. Sometimes I convince myself I’m really a writer because all I can think about is how something will look on a page.     Then I come to my senses and decide that a writer is probably someone who actually writes. This is discouraging because writing is kind of hard. I plan characters, conversations, odd little phrases but when it comes to writing them down and filling in the gaps I find that I’m not a writer after all. Not a writer I’d like to be, or maybe I think I should be, the clichéd artist tortured by the task of translating their genius onto paper. The only thing I’m tortured by is my fear, laziness, lack of inspiration. While everything I see and hear and feel I think about writing down, it’s rare that I actually do.     This is partly why I sign up to a creative writing class. People say writing comes from the heart, the soul, from whatever other metaphorical body part, but honestly sometimes I just need someone to make me write because otherwise I never will. I have to make it inevitable because when I finally start writing I confirm what I suspected all along—that I hate writing.    This is the process of writing that I loathe: in bed. I don’t like sitting on a desk because it seems like I’m doing work, even though writing is really hard work. I put on some music before I decide that it’s distracting. I stare down at a blank piece of paper—or Word document. I tend to start with paper the first few times because I think writing by hand is romantic but I throw down my pen and hate myself finding I have more scribbles and crossed-out words than useable material. Blankness is encouraging—threatening—and maybe promising. The ugly blacked out words, however, are sad visual reminders of my failure that I’m too conceited to stand.     But if I hate it so much, why do I do it? Despite all the complaining and self-loathing, there’s something addicting about the adrenaline that comes with writing, beyond the effects of all the caffeine I consume. It’s the starting that’s hard, but once something is on the page the next words tumble after each other. I let myself ramble. When I finish the piece (the draft) it’s like finally letting out air after holding my breath. It’s at that moment when I close my laptop and go to sleep, because I conveniently write in bed, that I think I have found the reason I write. The feeling of satisfaction. There are a lot of other and often forgotten reasons too, like how I want to be eloquent but writing is the only way I can achieve it, how I like to hide behind the anonymity of words on paper, but how I also like the intimacy it provides. Sometimes I hate it because having to write something interesting is a reminder that my actual life is unexciting, but maybe I like that I can live through the pages I write. I don’t know if that’s sad. Sometimes I think being a writer means being sad—dragging up things that have happened, bad things, or things that never will.        Ultimately though, being a writer means writing. I may hate the act of writing but I love its effects, a similar relationship I have to cooking and actually eating the food. Hate the labour, if you will; devour the fruit. If I want to be a writer there’s really nothing else for me to do but write. That’s the one thing that all writers of all genres have in common—writing words, instead of just thinking about them. No matter how bad you think you are or how much you dislike the physical act of writing, writers write. So to all you aspiring writers: give yourself deadlines, make others give you deadlines, find some way to force yourself to put words on a page.

Books For People Who Aren't Sure If They Like Books

Hello friend. How are you? It’s been a long time. It’s been over a year since I last assigned you a book to read. Did you manage to power through that 192-page book in the 388 days it has been since I last spoke to you? I hope so. I didn’t want come back too soon and spook you off. I just want you to be comfortable.For those of you who were able to finish Civilwarland in Bad Decline, I have another recommendation. For the rest of you who need another 388 days, take your time. I’ll check back with you on December 2, 2013.Swimming to Cambodia is a book by a fella named Spalding Gray. He was asked to play a role in the The Killing Fields, a film about the Cambodian Civil War. Swimming to Cambodia juxtaposes his adventures and shenanigans while filming a Hollywood movie against the real story and history of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, and the result is simultaneously gut busting and gut wrenching.I bet you’re asking yourself “Hey Conor, I get why you’d recommend this to a smarty-pants who likes books, but why would you recommend it to somebody who doesn’t like to read?” I’ve got three major selling points for you my friend.It’s funny. Spalding Gray has a mastered a sort of dirty neuroticism that reminds me of the hypothetical baby-fusion of Woody Allen, Harmony Korine, and Hunter Thompson. A decent-sized portion of this book deals with Gray, a neurotic and gawky man in his 40’s, trying to conquer his fear of the ocean while high on opiates. It is exactly as good as it sounds.It’s short. The edition I’m holding in my hand is a scant 133 pages, and when you take into account how large the type and how small the pages are, the final page count becomes even less intimidating. I managed to plow through this in two hours while waiting for a train home before Hurricane Sandy.It’s smart. The parts of Swimming to Cambodia that aren’t dealing with a man stoned out of his gourd coping with his hydrophobia are extraordinarily insightful and powerful. If you were to ask me before this book what the Khmer Rouge was, I probably would’ve responded “A video game character.” Though the subject matter is often lighthearted, Gray is capable of switching gears instantaneously. The story takes wild nosedives that leave you at the precipice of despair, before Gray finally pulls up on the controls and resumes talking about wanting to marry a hooker.Look. I’m not a dummy. I know how these things work. I assign this book to you, and you just sit around on reddit procrastinating until 2 AM, when you panic, realize you won’t be able to read the book, and desperately scramble to look for a movie version. Then you leaf through Google and Sparknotes, hoping to find somebody who has made a list of the differences between the film and the book, so that you can come back to me appearing as prepared as possible.Rest easy my friend: I’ve got you covered. Swimming to Cambodia was originally written as a monologue. It was designed from the get-go to be watched.

"He broke it all down to a table, a glass of water, a spiral notebook and a mic. Poor theatre—a man and an audience and a story. Spalding sitting at that table, speaking into the mic, calling forth the script of his life from his memory and those notebooks. A simple ritual: part news report, part confessional, part American raconteur. One man piecing his life back together, one memory, one true thing at a time. Like all genius things, it was a simple idea turned on its axis to become absolutely fresh and radical."

-Theatre Director Mark Russell on Spalding Gray

Jonathan Demme, the man who directed Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia adapted Swimming to Cambodia for the screen. However, this is not a scenario in which you’d have to scramble around the Internet trying to find out any differences between the book and the film. I’ll make this easy for you:  there are none. The exact same thing you see on screen is right there in your book.Now, don’t get me wrong: I’m not necessarily suggesting that you only go and watch the film. There are a few things that might go over your head if you’re not paying full attention, and it definitely helps to be able to flip back. By no means am I saying that this book will make you feel dumb, but as it deals with Cambodia, a place I’m assuming you’re not familiar with, sometimes the names and other proper nouns can get confusing. It’s not a particularly difficult book, but it will definitely keep you on your toes.I’ve saved my trump card for last. If I haven’t won you over yet, listen up. There’s a story in the book about John Malkovich telling a dirty joke. So, get on that man.-Conor Burnett, Prose Editor

Thanks and Joan Didion

Thank you to everyone who submitted their work to the 2011-2012 print edition of West 10th! We will be reviewing the submissions over winter break. Expect to hear from us regarding your submissions in February!On a side note, we noticed that Joan Didion is discussing her new book Blue Nights at Symphony Space tonight at 7:30. From their website: "Didion discusses her deeply moving new memoir about her daughter, and her own fears and thoughts about growing old, in her first book since the National Book Award-winning The Year of Magical Thinking. As with that memoir, in her new one, Didion confides and confronts her fears, frailties, and sorrows about her life as she looks back and forward.  In conversation with her nephew Griffin Dunne (After Hours).""Time passes. Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember."—Blue NightsTickets and information here