The First Dispatch

Greetings, all, from this delightful new web-space I have found. I am still working on the decor — I draw inspiration from old-school, practical, static websites, and spearmint. Let there be green borders and html tables. I think it beats WordPress; I think this delicious bowl of home-made yogurt I’m eating beats Yoplait. In both cases, doing it yourself is much easier than it appears. Already, a bit of wisdom for you, and we haven’t even really begun. Best of all, Papa Bezos is letting me have the site for free (for now). He is… like a man that gives home-made yogurt to the ignorant masses. May his starcraft be swift and his cruise ships gargantuan.¹

It is good to once again have a keyboard, time, and a patient audience. Indeed, I have decided to renew the Wlog, as the people once called it in a bygone age… With time, however, comes refinement, and I have settled on the more palatable Will Writes Writs from Bressuire (WWWB, ‘wub’, ‘huh?’). What was the impetus? I have been in France for a month now; an update was in order.

I graduated from college this past year with a degree in Francophone Studies, a minor in history, and little idea of the future. What I did know, however, was that eating good food, hanging out with the French, and teaching English would never fail to be enjoyable. An application, a plane ticket, a panicked covid test and a train: je suis là. It has been excellent so far. I work 12 hours a week, leaving 156 hours for running, fiddling with code, chatting with roommates, watching professionals play Age of Empires, playing the world in chess, sleeping, and cooking.

The cooking! I, like most young Americans, had grown used to the skilled work of a rotating cooking staff, then a cafeteria. There is no better place to be cut from the culinary cord than France. Simply put, tasty, nutritionally-dense food is cheap here. The resurgence of the whole food diet in the States, the heavy altar soaked in full-fat milk, butter, oils, minimal processing, and good-natured snobbery towards the uninitiated, has long been the mode-de-vie in France. A mac and cheese made with emmental, a nutty, salty cheese, and thick cream is many miles above our cheddar and milk variety. The French diet does not hide from decadence. It’s part of a larger culture of living large, la joie de vivre. Hence, perhaps, the cigarettes and the odd snail.²

My day job, as it were, is teaching English. I teach at three schools, two of which are in Bressuire and one of which is a thirty minute bus ride away. The students are mostly impressed by my American-ness. The high schoolers are generally able to carry on a conversation in English, the middle schoolers, not at all. In one class, the teacher had me walk around the room and ask students questions. I felt a bit like Effie Trinket during the Reaping, enthusiastically choosing victims, or perhaps Zeus charging in his iron chariot, fist full of thunderbolts disguised as nasally syllables, leaving confused looks and craters in his wake. Ahem. I tend to prefer small group discussions, speaking slowly and getting to know the students. Working with a smaller group removes the brutal reactions of French students towards a peer who speaks English poorly. Many of my colleagues, assistants and English teachers alike, express frustration with French language-learning culture: there is little appetite for linguistic risk-taking and making mistakes. The French system’s heavy focus on grammar reinforces the fear of mistakes and detracts from the more important goal of effective communication; the end result, I think, is poor English compared with the rest of Europe. The teachers I work with, however, are well aware that communication is essential, and that is my primary task: converse! Coax! Encourage! Use my novelty to spark curiosity! On that note, here are some questions I tend to receive from students:

• Why are you in Bressuire and not Paris?
• Have you met any celebrities?
• Have you watched Squeed Game?
• What do you miss from the United States?
• What do you think of French society?

To which I respond, in order: I like small towns, none that you would know of, no, American boisterousness, great language, great food, poor sidewalks. I do have other critiques of French society, but they are difficult to discuss with the French. So I will burden you with them. For instance, the French approach to widespread racial inequality is to either claim it does not exist, or that discussion of race obscures the deeper issue of class, or that it is the fault of immigrants who do not wish to integrate. The French bureaucracy cannot collect statistics on race, further obscuring racial inequalities; France is officially a “colorblind” society. In my experience, however, the French, like I think all humans, see race, and have expressed blatantly racist ideas to me in a way that most Americans would not tolerate. The French (and, increasingly, I am referring to white-passing French) claim they do not have the “history” (of slavery) that we Americans do and, as consequence, can be casually racist, or use race to identify people, (“that Arab over there”) without feeling guilty. This idea ignores centuries French colonization in Africa and the practice of slavery in the French-controlled Caribbean. Historians, mostly outside of France, have claimed France’s colonial history displays the “authentic tendencies” of modern French society.3 In writing this, I place myself in the long tradition of American scholars using French social theory to critique France (‘postcolonialism’, the idea that colonial legacies persist after official decolonization, relies on the work of 20th century French scholars Frantz Fanon and Edward Said). To which the French say: silly, bougie Americans, go home with your ‘woke’ culture! At least, in the States, we try.

The countryside surrounding Bressuire is magnificent, and I have had many opportunities to explore on long runs. Here are a few images.

With that, I must leave you. Thanks for reading! Until next week, most likely.