A J&B ad campaign showed up in France a few years ago, and I again saw one of the ads today. The whisky ad features two tag lines. The first, “So British!”, is also how the local press likes to describe Kate Middleton. The second tag line translates to “Born in London, distilled in Scotland.” If Wikipedia is a guide, the second tag line holds rather true, but I always find it rather funny that a “blended Scotch whisky” would brag about its English roots (in London, no less!). I imagine someone focus grouped it rather thoroughly and learned that, for the French, everything north of la Manche is basically London. So take a Scotch whisky, add the Queen’s Guard, and you’ve got a rather confusing ad campaign that makes perfect sense to French stereotypes about their neighbors.

But Britain plays a different role in an ad I saw a few times last year while watching English TV:

Here, the image is exactly the opposite. “You can’t beat local,” explains the Plusnet spokesman, pointing out that even the call center for the broadband provider is based in Yorkshire. Considering the cliché of the call center in India, or somewhere far off where labor is cheap but divorced from some kind of exotic, “imported” otherness, it’s to Plusnet’s virtue that its call center is “down t’road.” And in this age of crisis, it suggests that Plusnet is giving the Yorkshire economy a boost by providing call center jobs it could have easily outsourced to, again, say, India.

For J&B ads in France, it’s the (near) otherness that’s the draw: the appeal is that the whisky is “so British!”, not “as French as the person viewing this ad.” This is all pretty straight forward and typical about ads. Sometimes you want the product next door. Sometimes you need to go on a walkabout to find the exotic product you want.

So what to make of this, an ad I saw on (Irish) TV this weekend:

Cobra is a “splendidly Indian” beer, we’re told. If we don’t believe the voiceover regarding the Indianness of the beer with the Portuguese name, we have the stylised “कोबरा” beside the slogan. Then there’s the ad itself. The decidedly non-nostalgic images, playing up something more on the side of Darjeeling Limited than “Chaiyya Chaiyya” (I’ll wait for you to watch the clip again for the nth time), play up some kind of Indianness much like, I guess, Heaven 17 conjure up Yorkshire. But where Heaven 17 is played for (nostalgic) laughs, the effort here is edgily sincere. Hot, sweaty India is overcome by drinking the refreshing, splendidly Indian Cobra beer.

A beer that, as we’re told in the 26th second of a 30-second spot, is “Brewed in the UK.”

To me, the spot becomes disorienting to the extreme, as, whether it succeeds or not, it’s audaciously trying to do simultaneously what both of the commercials above attempt separately. On the one hand, you have orientalized, exotic India with its inscrutable, fractured scribblings printed on the pint glass. On the other, Terry down the way works the night shift at the Cobra brewery, and whatever it takes to keep honest jobs in Blighty, innit.

Anyway, if one doubts the orientalizing nature of the ad campaign, head on over to cobrabeer.com, rewatch the ad, and “enter our competition to win a splendidly Indian adventure” (train and Wes Anderson film crew not included).

Well, I should not have been quite as skeptical, as on Thursday, while I was distracted by a weekend holiday, Mélenchon expressed no interest in being in Hollande’s government.

Last week, the NPA asked Mélenchon to join them in resisting Hollande’s government (assuming the PS candidate is swept into power). While the two strains of the far-left may not unite in opposition, this makes me take Mélenchon more seriously than I did a mere week ago.

But I’ll wait for May 7 for further thinking about this. Let’s let Hollande win, first.

What I would rather discuss here, briefly, is how bizarre I continue to find it that the character is named “Megan” in the first place. In my head, I imagine they named her before deciding she would become a main character complete with her own French-Canadian identity mirroring Paré’s own. I lie to myself in this way since the idea of a French-Canadian born around 1940 named “Megan” is, simply put, really unexpected.

During the 2000s, the French form of “Megan”—”Mégane”—was, in fact, one of the most popular names for newborn girls in Québec. As Louis Duchesne notes, “Megan” became a popular name in the 1970s in the US before fading away in the 1990s. About a generation later, the French form became popular in both France and Québec, though the French popularity cratered once Renault introduced the “Mégane” in 1995. The car is unavailable in Québec, and the popularity of the name continued to climb, reaching heights its American counterpart never enjoyed.

Yet no matter how popular “Mégane” has been in Québec over the past 15 years, it was not on the map as a name in 1940. Hence, I would surmise, its English version, and the name of Don Draper’s new wife, was completely unheard of. Maybe she really is as good an actor as her waitress friends suggest, having invented the whole québécois backstory as part of her long con of Don Draper. (Relax, Mad Men fanatics, I don’t believe in the Megan Draper long con conspiracy.)

Needless to say, it was not empty. There was a group of people drilling police confrontation tactics like making sturdy walls against the police. There were scattered protestors with small signs and tables set up, and there were cameras everywhere.

The ubiquity of the recording eye was probably what was most remarkable. At least three teams of camerapeople were filming the drills, and then seeming security guards were also filming them. Then pro-Occupyers were filming the security guards, who were also being harassed by other pro-Occupyers. (Very DeLillo-esque.)

NYPD were, simply put, everywhere. Wall St. was completely blocked, Thames St. was closed to house a bunch of NYPD scooters, and Liberty Place was a parking lot for prowlers. Broadway featured police in three different types of shirts, and there was even a man who certainly looked like a police who was in a suit (that would be a fourth shirt, I suppose).

Even during our hour-long stay, there was excitement. Two men came bearing a 20-foot banner reading “OCCUPY WALL STREET.” I imagine they had been warned already by the police about it, since as they tried to plant it near a sculpture, the police immediately batted it out of their hands, and the two young men were cuffed and led away before the livestreamers had a chance to run half the length of the park to capture the skirmish (they had been covering the drills). The efficiency of both sides of the operation was surreal. A theater that has been well rehearsed.

Then I shot a minute’s worth of video of the drummers and police.

I do not have much more to say about #Occupy. There are many who are much smarter than I on this. But I do know that I was not the only person there in a tourist capacity. Tourists photographing Wall Street and the rest of Broadway were encouraged by the protestors to also take a picture of Zuccotti. One man shouted, “no tour of New York is complete without Occupy Wall Street!” and I, obviously, agreed with him. Going to the park was the only real (specific) goal I had of my trip. So this is my little spiel about #Occupy.

A day or two ago, a short typed up note appeared in the elevator ин my building. Usually, if someone has something to sell (like a chair), they will use the bulletin boards on the ground floor. Inside the elevator, the space is more regulated. But this man was persistent:

Cherche jeune demoiselle douce et sensible, pour rêver de réveils matinaux ornés de sourires puisés ailleurs que dans le reflet désespérant de son miroir en ce début de printemps…

(Votre voisin de palier)

Searching for a young, gentle, and sensitive maiden to dream, at the start of spring, of deep smiles adorning her waking up in the morning in place of the despairing reflection offered by her mirror…

(Your floormate)

By the time I saw this message, a response had already been added:

Jeune Demoiseau,[sic]

Accro de réveils matinaux
Je suis à fleur de peau
A la lecture de ton doux mot.

Ta Demoiselle
Douce et sensible.

Young Squire,

Already addicted to waking up in the morning
I’m overcome like a delicate flower
Blown over from reading your sweet note.

Your Maiden,
Gentle and sensitive.

Overnight, a third message appeared. I was lucky enough to photograph its incoherence, because shortly thereafter, it had disappeared:

À l’écoute de tes murmures, ô ma douce fleur
Je frissonne ả l’idée bien qu’ondoyante
En ces jours où mon espérance ne reste que lueur
D’une ivresse de ta plume évanescente
Qui se résoud obstinément à trancher mon triste cœur ?

Ton éternel demoiseau [sic everything]

On hearing your murmurs, oh my sweet flower,
I shiver at the idea although undulating
In these days where of my hope no more remains than a glimmer
Of the drunkenness from your evanescent quill
Which obstinately resolves to slice my sad heart?

Your eternal squire

So it started out desperate, then got a bit funny, and then got weird and redacted.

But how do you talk about entities that benefit from the publicity. In France, a soccer team won promotion to the top league this year whose full name is “Évian Thonon-Gaillard Football Club.” Now, teams in France frequently have complicatedly long names that indicate historical mergers and the like, but here the name is pretty clear: “Thonon” is short for “Thonon-les-Bains,” and it and Gaillard are two towns in the Alps, both along the Swiss border. “Évian,” however, does not refer to “Évian-les-Bains,” a town right next to Thonon-les-Bains. Instead, it refers to the Dannon mineral water that we know in the US as “evian.” Évian-les-Bains have their own team, after all, Évian-Lugrin.

Now that Évian Thonon-Gaillard FC are in the top flight and getting lots of press, the question becomes how to refer to the club. The local Grenoble newspaper offered a few variants to its readers in a poll: “ETG,” “Évian Savoie,” “Croix de Savoie,” or something else. “Savoie” is the name of the region, and the club was known as “Olympique Croix de Savoie 74″ when it was founded (via merger), and the logo retains the white cross on a red field that is the symbol of Savoy. Sports daily L’Équipe refers to the club as “Évian TG.” However, the stadium attendance site Stades et Spectateurs uses the name “CROIX-SAVOIE.” Calling them some form of “Évian” is free advertising. Calling them “Croix de Savoie” is anachronistic and inexact. Personally, I call the team the band of jerks who beat ASSE last weekend.

The example of ETG came up in a discussion on twitter about how soccer teams usually have many different names that are often rather confusing, especially from country to country. In the US, this doesn’t tend to happen. The Boston Red Sox are either “Boston” or the “Red Sox” (or both). Anything else is being literary (“Carmines”) or overly colloquial (“Bosox”). Sure, a term like “Sox” causes confusion when Boston is playing Chicago, but that’s the exception that proves the rule. So I was asked what the convention is in Lithuania, where, among other things, “Žalgiris” can refer to either a basketball team in Kaunas or a soccer team in Vilnius.

One thing even a casual glance at Lithuanian soccer reporting indicates is that there are quotes all over the place when it comes to team names. A team like Ekranas is never called “Ekranas.” It’s always either “„Ekranas“” or “‘Ekranas.’” To know why, we return to the question of how Lithuanian handles a “simbolinis pavadinimas,” or a company’s name that uses (non-standard) words in a non-standard context. For example, “ekranas” means “screen.” When it is in quotes and capitalized, the reader is alerted that the word is being used in a non-standard and proper manner. And these names are always in quotes.

As peculiar as this sounds, we do this regarding works of art in English. We talk about “the novel ‘Ulysses’” (using New Yorker style!) or about “the song ‘Happy Birthday to You.’” In Lithuanian, you’d write things like, “the hotel ‘Hilton.’” Yet if the name itself indicates that it is a company (and what kind of company it is), then quotes are not necessary. So we’d write “American Airlines,” not “airline ‘American’” or “airline ‘American Airlines.’” The examples the Supreme Lithuanian Language Commission gives are instructive, if kind of funny, in my opinion. It’s “UAB Užupio kavinė,” because from the name it’s clear that it is a café. But it’s “akcinė bendrovė „Lietuvos draudimas,“” because the name (which translates to “Lithuania’s insurance”) doesn’t make it clear that it is a company. Either way, the commission agrees with my journalist friend from the top of this post: a writer is not forced by Lithuanian language rules to respect airBaltic’s marketing strategy. In proper Lithuanian, they would be called “UAB oro linija „Airbaltic.“”

Things get even more complicated when trying to figure out how to decline names of companies, but I’ll save those five rules for another post. And then there are the rules for naming companies, which, if I read them correctly, suggest that airBaltic could never have registered that as a company name, had they been founded in Lithuania.

As far as I can tell, there are three men named Corentin (it’s a Breton name) who are memorialized in some way in (slightly greater) Paris: Corentin Cariou, Corentin Celton, and Corentin Cloarec. Cariou has a métro station and street named after him. Celton, a métro station and hospital. And Cloarec, a street.

Corentin Cariou was a communist councilman to the council of the 19th Arrondissement. Appropriate for his name, he was born on the edge of the earth, in the coastal village of Loctudy in Brittany. In his early 20s, speaking barely any French and being illiterate, he leaves the life of the sea to go to Paris, where he gets involved as a syndicalist. Long story (on Wikipedia) short, once the Communist party is made illegal during the Daladier government, Cariou is arrested. He escapes in early 1940 to Brittany, regroups with his wife and child, and returns to Paris to undertake clandestine operations. In late 1940, he’s arrested again by the Vichy government. Once the Soviet Union declares war against Nazi Germany, communists are freed to participate in a war previously considered “imperialist.” But repressions against communists in France continue, and now Cariou is under the watch of the Germans. In response to an attack on a German sentinel in the 19th Arrondissement, the Nazis decide to kill 20 “communists and Jews” in their custody. Cariou is among them, and he is shot in a forest on 7 March 1942.

Corentin Celton was, like Cariou, also born on the edge of the earth, this time in the village of Ploaré, which no longer exists. He also left behind the life of a fisherman to move to Paris, where he also got involved with the SFIC, the French faction of the Communist International. After working in the hospital that now carries his name, he began a bunch of union-related administrative posts. In 1939, he returns to work as a nurse in the army. After being demobilized in 1940, he continues working as a nurse, but increasing legal anti-communism forces him underground. In 1942, he is caught using a false identity, and after initially being sentenced to three years, a second hearing changes the sentence to death. The Nazis execute him outside of Paris on the antepenultimate day of 1943.

Corentin Cloarec is the occasion of this post, since the street bearing his name is only two blocks away from me. A Franciscan monk at the Couvent de Saint-François in the 14th Arrondissement (and right beside the street now named after Cloarec), Père Corentin is charged with providing support for the Résistance in the Denfert-Rochereau area. After being named in a list of Résistance members given under torture, the monk is visited by two young French members of the Abwehr, who shoot him. He dies before he is able to get medical attention. Thousands attend his funeral. A Franciscan who was working as an interpreter for the Germans had advance knowledge of the execution and tried to warn his fellow brothers, but it was, obviously, in vain.

Saturday, walking down rue du Père Corentin, I saw that a sign for the supermarket G20 had had some editorial content added. The G20 has two entrances, from both sides: one on rue du Père Corentin (which takes one straight to the organic section) and the “main” entrance on avénue du Général Leclerc (another man with a history relating Paris and World War II). The sign that was augmented announces that there are two entrances, one from each street, and it points to the entrance on rue du Père Corentin. In a bit of coincidence, the sign sits right beside a memorial to Gustave Pommier, a 26 year old man from the countryside, who, as a lieutenant in the FFI, was killed in a raid on a Nazi garage. That area near the plaque features, these days, both a large Citroën garage and an RATP garage for buses.

The editorial content is what’s interesting here, though. First, “Pére [sic] Corentin” is circled, and someone has added “FUSILLÉ pendant que PAPON BOUSQUET etc. FAISAIENT CARRIERE eux.” Father Corentin was shot while Papon, Bousquet, and others were making their own careers, then. So the first comment serves is a pedagogical moment reminding the reader of the situation of Père Corentin’s martyrdom while collaborators like Papon and Bousquet (and do read their Wikipedia entries!) were just cutting their teeth on selling out their countrymen. It’s a little historical gift, I suppose, to people walking down the street.

The second remark, however, I suppose is written by a different hand, and its target and means are much more acute. “FUSillE SANS ROLEX lui,” it reads, pointing to the plaque for Pommier, suggesting that, as for him (Pommier), he was shot without his Rolex on. Its mode is both historical and especially critical, considering the geography (and toponymic issues) at hand.

Not all those shot by the Nazis should be considered equally.

I may also mention that the book was written… where the libraries are not well equipped for European studies… Hence it is possible and even probable that I overlooked things which I ought to have considered and that I occasionally assert something which modern research has disproved or modified… On the other hand it is quite possible that the book owes its existence to just this lack of a rich and specialized library. If it had been possible for me to acquaint myself with all the work that has been done on so many subjects, I might never have reached the point of writing.

(from Mimesis)

Some silver lining?

More on the closure of Library.nu:

• Association of American Publishers press release
• Library Closure of Type .nu (by Alan Toner)
• Library.nu a fermé et c’est une catastrophe (by Yann Leroux)
• Library.nu R.I.P (mourned via Borges by Lawrence Liang)
• Library.nu: Modern era’s “Destruction of the Library of Alexandria” (“My first difficulty was finding anything about it in English” by Sean Johnson Andrews)

First, the new website is entirely available in English. The old version seemed to have an English veneer that quickly gave way to French pages as one dug deeper into the site.

Second, and far more importantly, it is now possible to buy Vélib’ passes online using US credit cards. The credit card swipe thing at the actual kiosks still requires a card with a chip in it (so a Canadian or European-style credit card), but you can e-commerce your way to a one-day, one-week, or yearly pass with your old style American MasterCard or Visa. This finally makes Vélib’ wholly accessible to the American community. Of course, this now means that I no longer have to send a check and RIB in to renew my yearly account, too. Welcome to the glorious Twenty-First Century!

Third, the price structure for the annual plan has changed. As the site notes, there are now four schedules for annual plans. What used to cost 29€ and be the only available option is now called “Vélib’ Classic,” but there is a “Passion” upgrade for 10€ more. Paris is more or less entirely crossable in 45 minutes (north-south), making the Passion upgrade rather tantalizing for big commuters. There are also two options, at lower price points, for students.

Fourth, Vélib’ has raised the prices of the 1-day and 7-day tickets. What used to cost 1€ and 5€ now cost, respectively, 1.70€ and 8€. These prices are still, of course, ludicrously cheap, and now there is no reason not to unleash a massive wave of tourists on these bicycles.

——

This all said, I have started to feel the pinch of Vélib’ and have learned to appreciate what a fragile ecosystem it actually is. The station nearest me, which held about 50 bikes, was closed in the spring, so that work could be done on the street. It has still not reopened. At first, I was able to reliably get a bike at a station just a bit farther away, but then that station became empty in the morning. This emptiness has spread from station to station such that now, the nearest station to me that has bicycles in the morning is over 600m away.

Since the tram, on the other hand, is a mere 50m away, one can imagine how a certain laziness has set in, where I give up and pay the 1.20€ (or whatever it is) to ride the tram to work. I understand that 600m is not a terrible distance to walk, but it does add time to the commute, and it further shows that, for some reason, my neck of Paris, which used to be reliably served by bicycles, is now a bit of a wasteland. I don’t know how it is elsewhere at 9am, but I know that it was not like this before, so, basically, cry cry, I want my old station back.

Immediately, out came the haters. But Ravi’s two points are worth addressing: population density counts for something, as does bus access, right? Fine. But, most markedly, I’m explicitly not asking about transportation access as a whole. To do that would then also involve bringing in questions of commuting and the like–and I only coded Parisian (and near Parisian) Métro stops, not the system as a whole, and I only measured my Chicago maps for Chicago, not Chicagoland. It goes on. My question was simple: no matter where I am in Paris, what’s the furthest I am from a Métro station? The answer is about 700m. What would that same number look like in Chicago? This then explains why in Chicago I seldom feel close to an El stop, whereas in Paris, the Métro is unavoidable. So I was explicitly not asking the questions Ravi asked. And I’d argue that I didn’t ask them since they don’t change the answer.

So let’s tackle population density: First, in my area calculations of Paris, I included the two huge forests. “No one” lives there. If you take the forests out, then basically all of Paris is within 700m of a Métro station. That was the point of the initial exercise, and that’s why I’m hung up on this dumb number of 700m. So there you are: about 2.2 million of a possible 2.2 million Parisians live within 700m of a Métro station. The number of Chicagoans is, clearly, different. Some percentage of the possible 2.6 million Chicagoans live within 700m of an El stop. I’m going to guess that it’s not 100%. I’m going to guess it’s not even 84%, which would yield 2.2 million Chicagoans, making the number equivalent to Parisians. Whatever the number is, it’s much, much lower, as is evident from any acquaintance with Chicago. So even if I cut out O’Hare, the Stockyards, the Port, Beverly, whatever, it’s still simply not the case that everyone lives in the teeny little disks on the Chicago map. My point, however, is that everyone does live in the teeny disks in Paris. In that case, this is all self-evident: Paris is denser than Chicago in terms of population and train station coverage. Cheers.

As for the bus question, I’m not a crook explaining Chicago’s terrible transportation coverage in order to sell you a monorail. I’m making a comparison between like modes of transit. As I responded, in Chicago the bus system is obviously there, in part, to cover up massive holes in El coverage (as well as provide redundancy). As in, it’s evident that the bus goes to places that the trains just don’t. But saying that “Chicago ain’t that bad. We got buses, too!” is not the answer here, since even if El + bus + Metra provides public transit within 700m of everyone in the city, Paris manages a similar level of coverage with just a subway system.¹ If you add in the buses & trams, then public transportation becomes ubiquitous in Paris. Taking note, then, of the density of the bus system within the city, which runs not redundantly with the Métro, it’s possible that we start hitting numbers like 250m when it comes to the question of “how close is public transportation at all times?”

Five Parisian commutes. (click to enlarge)

Which brings me back to what spurred this little investigation: the anecdotal feeling that public transportation has a profile in Paris that it simply does not have in Chicago. I don’t think there exists a “what about…?” that makes my anecdotal suspicion turn out to be wrong. It’s just a question of how right it is.

Also, I can only get population data at the Arrondissement level for Paris, which is probably not terribly interesting.

Finally, for fun, I close with this quick little Google Map I made of the five possible commutes I can take between home and work. The shortest distance, in blue, is the walk. It is about 4.35km and takes me about 50 minutes. I could also take the 62 bus along most of the same route. It would shave time off the total, but I don’t know how much; I don’t time myself when I take it. The next shortest is the bike ride, which is in green and 4.55km in length. It takes less than 20 minutes. The more commonly taken bus solution for me is the T3 tram with a transfer at Porte d’Ivry to the PC2 bus. It’s aqua on the map. It takes less than 40 minutes and runs 4.96km.

Next are the two Métro solutions: in pink is taking the M4 from Porte d’Orléans to Saint-Michel and switching to the RER C to go to Bibliothèque Nationale. It takes over a half hour and runs 9.95km. I can’t believe that there was a time when this was my daily commute. Finally, in purple, is the University’s recommended commute, which involves taking the RER B from Cité Universitaire to Châtelet and swtiching to the M14 to Bibliothèque Nationale. It also takes over a half hour and runs 10.35km. Anyone who knows me well knows what kind of existential pain these last two commute options bring, but they do serve to make my ancillary point about the Parisian bus system: it’s there to cover up holes in the Métro system, which already doesn’t have much in the way of holes. But, yes, getting from the southern edge of the city to the southeastern edge can be tricky if you don’t have recourse to the bus or tram.

1. I think it is probably the case in Chicago that one is rather close to a bus at all times, considering that Chicago buses tend to run on the grid at half-mile increments. That means that you can expect to be .25mi (or 400m) from a bus at all times.

Vélib’ coverage in Paris. (click to enlarge / make useful)

When I made my Paris Métro map, the joke was that the next step would be the leap in order of magnitude between subway stations and Vélib’ stations. For those who don’t know what Vélib’ is, it’s the Parisian bike-sharing system that I’ve already described in great detail. But I knew there was no way that I would hand geocode each station (there are over 1200 of them), so I put the affair off. But this morning, I wondered if I could possibly reverse engineer a list from snooping around the Google Maps widget that Vélib’ offers. This widget I use every morning when deciding where I’ll get my bike and where I’ll park it. Luckily, a bit of sleuthery led to this XML file, which has the latitude and longitude of each station.

Once I’ve got that, the rest is kids’ play. Parse, parse, plot, plot. And now I’ve got this map here, which is so busy and full of information that it’s nearly impossible to understand. But one thing is certain: my initial guess was that one was hardly ever more than 350m from a Vélib’ station. That turns out to be about true. Not including the two Parisian forests, there are only handfuls of areas within Paris itself that are more than 400m from a Vélib’ station. It’s a remarkable amount of coverage that makes me realize how outrageously extensive this project was (and continues to be).

Still, there were a few kinks in the data that I found worth a remark. Two stations, 20018 and 20048, both in the 20th Arrondissement, had latitudes and longitudes that were, well, identical, and, also, in Algeria, prompting more than just me to make jokes about racist civil servants in the Mairie. What’s interesting, further, is that neither of the two stations appear on StreetView (I’m not about to bike up to the 20th to check in person). One, 20048, is marked on OpenStreetMap at the proper address, 110 rue de Bagnolet. The other, however, is listed at 2 rue Hartignies, which does not seem to exist. There is a 2 rue Harpignies in the 20th, but there is no Vélib’ station there on OpenStreetMap. Now if you go to the Vélib’ Google Maps widget and type in either station number, it will take you to Algeria and tell you that bikes are available there. Is this an error? Maybe. Is it coding trickery to prevent copying, along the lines of a trap street? Also possible.

Vélib’ wastelands in Paris. (click for Google Maps interactive)

Back to the coverage, though. In short, the map is so dense that I decided to experiment a bit further, so I created a shapefile featuring only the places in Paris that were more than 250m from a Vélib’ station. I then converted it to a KMZ, and you can open it in Google Maps by clicking here. I’m a bit proud of this interactive little Google Maps thing, so please have some fun with it, if you like. I used a quickly drawn outline of Paris for the clip shape, so it’s not a perfect fit to the Maps interface, but we can notice a few things right away about Vélib’ coverage in Paris proper. First, if you’re in a forest, you’re more or less completely out luck. This makes sense. Also, if you are in the middle of a railyard, you probably are rather far from a Vélib’ station. Most of the swaths along the northern edge of the city, as with Métro patches, are devoted to trains racing out of the city, so it’s not terribly necessary to have bikes where only trains go.

But I find it more interesting that along the Seine, it is hardest to find a Vélib’ stand where tourists are most likely to be: between the Louvre and the Palais Royal as well as near the Eiffel Tower. It’s not a complete dead zone, of course.¹ All of Champs de Mars is within 400m of a Vélib’ stand, and only a teeny bit of the park by Trocadero is more than 400m from a stand. But, still, Vélib’ing is trickier if you’re engaged in touristy activities, which is, actually, only fair. Vélib’ is useful for tourists, and they can use it all they want, but it should not be (and obviously was not) designed with the tourist in mind. The rest of the patches within the city largely correspond to either parks, railways, or hospitals.

I will close out this post with a link to a short presentation on the French ESRI site about Vélib’, which shows what a huge GIS project this was, involving planning at massively different levels of scale, such that the system works exactly as it should, despite a huge population in constant transit with shifting demands. Hopefully I’ll be able to supplement my own maps here in the future with Parisian demographic data or something else entirely.

1. Of course, Saint Michel and Hôtel de Ville do not suffer for lack of Vélib’ stands. My imagination says that the tourists drift more westward, though, once they have seen Notre Dame.

El coverage in Chicago (click to enlarge).

The last time I rapped at you, I talked about Métro coverage in Paris. I felt like Paris was exceptionally well covered by the Métro, and I used math to prove that basically one is never more than 700m from a Métro station in the city. How, though, does that coverage compare with Chicago? Would you be surprised if I said that Chicago ends up looking rather awful in comparison? How much worse, would you guess? If 700m is the maximum in Paris, what would you guess is the maximum distance from an el stop in Chicago? 1km? 2km? More?

After wrangling a bit with the GIS data available from the city itself as well as the CTA data from Steven Vance, I can build a simple buffer map much like the Paris map from the previous exercise, and the results? They ain’t pretty.

It is a bloodbath, in fact. Whereas in the previous exercise, the buffers were 250, 500, and 700m from the Métro, In this map on this post, the buffers are 1, 2.5, and 5km from the stop. In other words, everything that is dark purple is between 2.5 and 5km from a CTA El stop. Areas that are tan are parts of Chicago that are over 5km from a CTA El stop. But even if we just look at the 2.5km discs, we see that what feels like a third of the South Side is abandoned when it comes to the El. Pullman, Beverly, Rainbow Beach. All these neighborhoods are, literally, miles from the El. Even the parts of Hyde Park east of the Metra tracks (hot pink) are over 2.5km from the Green Line.

Ah, but what about the Metra, then? Surely some of these coverage gaps can be accounted for with the Metra, right? OK, let’s add them, as I included RER stations in my Métro map. And, fair enough, once you add in the Metra, nearly none of Chicago is more than 2.5km from a train station of some sort (dark blue for CTA, dark green for Metra). But, still, I’m using largely inflated scales for these maps to try and get something like the coverage of Paris. So, as a final map, I’ll dial the buffers back down to Parisian size: 250m, 500m, and 750m, just so you can compare, side-by-side, Parisian coverage with Chicagoan coverage.

Métro coverage in Paris (click to enlarge).

Anecdotally, I have felt since moving to Paris that one is never, ever too far from a Métro station. This is in contrast with Chicago, where one can be literally over a mile from an El stop. But I had not, until now, measured it out. Similarly, last year, a friend, who was living in the 18th, asserted that where he was living was the farthest one could live within Paris from a Métro station. I wondered if he was right, and, if not, where one would actually live to earn that distinction.

Enter Quantum GIS. Not having an ArcGIS license last year, I decided to try and use FOSS tools to answer these questions, but I couldn’t get the software to play nice.¹ One more year has elapsed without an ArcGIS license, but in the meantime I have learned to control qGIS a bit better. So despite the fact that this question is over a year old, it’s only recently that I’ve been able to return to it.

First, the data. It comes from the nightly collection of OSM data available for download at Geofabrik. I then added the Métro stations by hand. I only added stations within Paris, though I included a few just outside the city if I thought they might affect the results. For the purposes of this map, the projection is the NTF (Paris) / Lambert zone I.

Second, the buffering. The lightest buffer is 250m. The middle buffer is 500m. The dark buffer is 700m. In other words, everything that is white and within the Périphérique (vaguely visible as the dark highway in the map surrounding the subway stations) is more than 700m from a Métro station.

Yet it’s interesting to look at those white sections in greater detail: in the southern part of the city, those points are all served by the T3 tram. So if I had included it (I didn’t since you can’t transfer for free with a t+ ticket between the Métro/RER and the tram), they would stop being white. Furthermore, some of that white space is covered by sports fields and cemeteries. The tiny white triangle on the south side with the RER B rail running right through, however, is part of my daily commute. It is right by the huge Sainte-Anne Hospital. The white square on the eastern edge of the city is right by the Père-Lachaise Cemetery. I’ve been around there before, and, well, let’s just say that I quickly understood that I had to take a bus to get home. The wedge in the north, where the rails from Gare de l’Est start bending eastward, features industrial railyard-type stuff. Like much of the edge of the city on the north and south, it is decidedly not residential.

So basically, one can assert with confidence that there’s nearly no chance that one lives more than 700m from a Métro stop in Paris. If one lives in an Arrondissement that is only one digit, there is nearly no chance that one lives more than 500m from a Métro stop. In fact, the only places in the first 10 Arrondissements that are more than 500m from a Métro stop are: right in the middle of Champ de Mars, in the Seine near Quai d’Orsay, the area surrounding the Église du Val-de-Grâce, and the block between the canal and the Hôpital Saint-Louis.

The Métro is everywhere, Paris is ridiculously well-covered, and I’m glad I’m finally figuring out qGIS.

Next up: Vélib’? Maybe. Not really. Actually really.

1. Specifically, I was having lots of trouble getting the data to project correctly. I still don’t have as good a grasp of projection as I do in ArcGIS, but at least I seem capable of reprojecting data.

At the outset he claims to have gone “all out” with not eating meat, like me. I would hardly consider myself “all out.” First, I’m not a vegan, despite having been a vegan for a few stretches of a few months. Second, I’m generally a “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”-type of vegetarian. At restaurants, I’ll avoid food that I can nearly guarantee has meat in it (nearly every soup unless it says otherwise), and if there’s a large doubt, I’ll ask. But I won’t push the issue to demand separate cooking spaces, etc. There are people who do that, and I respect their decision, but though I’m against meat contamination, the main thrust of my not eating meat has to do with reducing consumption.¹

The first question Aras asks is about the ethics of throwing away already owned meat instead of eating it. Everyone approaches this differently. When I stopped eating meat, there was still tons of meat in my mom’s house, and none of it got thrown away. In fact, there still manages to be a ton of meat in her house that doesn’t get thrown away. If Aras included his whole family in his scheme, then it was simply a peculiar scheme, that I’ll return to below.²

The next question has to do with eating at a formal event. Basically, Arai, it does suck. That’s the life of being a vegetarian in the Western (or, in the case of Vilnius, wannabe Western) world. You are nearly always an inconvenience, especially to extended family members who keep forgetting your dietary restrictions. Before any big dinner function (wedding reception, say), I’ve gotten into a habit of eating a meal on my own, since I know that the bread and salad at the table won’t be able to compete with the night’s drinking afterward. I have fond memories of sitting in a parking lot in Rosemont, IL, eating a stuffed spinach pizza from Edwardo’s by myself to prepare for a Šokių Šventė banketas.³

Airlines are getting better about serving vegetarian food, by offering it as one of the main choices, instead of as a special dish, though there are certain limitations.⁴ Banquet halls are also getting better, but we’re still a far ways away from being normative. When Medieval Times offers a vegetarian meal that isn’t steamed vegetables with a cup of melted butter, I’ll know things are ok.⁵

This bends into Aro next question, of “if real vegetarians are ever caught so off guard.” No, we aren’t, since we understand that we live lives that are, despite increasing visibility, outside of the mainstream. I know to eat before a wedding reception. I know to bring snacks aboard an airplane. It’s like having a game or something ready with which to occupy your child when you’re about to embark on something that will test her patience. You anticipate and prepare, two verbs that are central to any adult’s vocabulary. And you enjoy being surprised when you’ve overprepared.

And sometimes it means not being a part of a certain social circle, or understanding that you can never fully be a part of a certain social event. For example, I love my friends, but I’m sick of going to barbecues at their houses. No matter how many delicious “sides” there are and how full I can get off them, we can’t escape the fact that the centerpiece of the event, and what the host usually prides him or herself with the most, is a giant slab of carefully, lovingly prepared meat. Similarly, my friends in Chicago go to a rodízio every year. I simply decline the invitation, since $40 for an all you can eat salad bar (and it is a good one!) is an obscenity.

But, considering how scarce meat was in the western world until about a century ago, and how scarce it continues to be throughout much of the world, an all you can eat meat buffet (as well as a night devoted to pushing the limits of said buffet) is its own obscenity.

Finally Aras brings the issue to Vilnius and about being a vegetarian there. I’m not as much of an expert on this topic as Ed (who eats fish) or my friend Veronika, who has been a militant vegetarian for the near decade she’s lived in Vilnius, but I do know a few things.

First off, there are certain cuisines/restaurants one simply avoids. The rodízio is one example. German restaurants and French bistros are another. These culinary cultures are simply not accepting of vegetarian lifestyles, and one anticipates this in advance. When I go to a French restaurant in Paris, I know that I will either be eating some kind of omelette or a pair of measly “entrées” (sides) while my friends go to work on half a pig. It’s funny that Aras specifically mentions Bravaria, since it was another German restaurant in Vilnius I was planning to go to over the summer until my suspicions (there won’t be anything there I can eat) were confirmed by the menu on the web.

Next, one learns of places that do have decent vegetarian meals, without having to resort to going to Balti drambliai all the time. Briusly and Beirut (while it stays open!) both offer multiple vegetarian dishes of astonishingly good quality. Sue’s has an even more expansive (and expensive) menu. Even my over-maligned Tres mexicanos serves its vegetarian clients multiple dishes (I think there are five things on their menu one can order without meat without ordering it specially).

But even local Lithuanian cuisine, based as it is on farmers who were too poor for meat, has greasy, starchy, non-meat alternatives, making places like Čili kaimas or Amatininkų užeiga perfectly fine dining options. Furthermore, the crêpe/blini/blynai culture of Eastern Europe gives both sweet and savory options that never even come near meat. One won’t convince me that Теремок in Moscow has a tastier thing on the menu than their “Блин ‘E-mail.’” So it’s not the case that because Vilnius lacks “vegetarian restaurants,” it’s difficult for a vegetarian out there. In fact, I never felt particularly without a place to eat, unlike in Paris, where one can get sick of cheese omelettes. Furthermore, Vilnius is much more amenable to drinking and dining than the US is, where usually if I’m out drinking with friends, I’m limited to pub food (read: nachos, french fries, or something else deep-fried).

So what’s the crux of my response to Aro post? Something about how being a vegetarian is not personally terribly difficult, but it does still have a non-trivial social cost, one that Aras felt in passing, remarked upon, and then abandoned, since, for him, this was merely a one-month experiment. I, for example, and Aras has witnessed this personally, try by all means to weasel out of dinner parties, knowing that I’m, simply put, a pain in the ass. Most people I know are not used to preparing vegetarian dishes (or considering the extremely wide array of non-meat dishes outside of omelettes and pasta), so I know I’m a burden when they invite me over. Some families, like Aro, I’ve learned are up for the task. But I can’t hold it against my stepfamily for not being similarly adventurous.

I have friends who abandon their vegetarianism when it’s polite to do so. I certainly do many, many things out of politeness only, and I used to eat shellfish this way. It took my mom about three Christmas dinners before she remembered I don’t even eat shellfish anymore, so I politely ate the stuff, especially since I saw how proud she was of the effort she went through to make a dish just for me. But these days, I would simply refuse, as I simply can’t eat shellfish anymore. It grosses me out, as does all animal flesh. When I tackled vegetarianism here last, I wrote that going back to meat is simply not an option anymore. This isn’t an experiment; it’s a way of life.

This whole post I have avoided trying to compare the social cost of not eating meat with the social cost of being a recovering alcoholic. There are obviously vital differences I can’t even begin to imagine. Yet I find it slightly instructive that it’s the example I kept wanting to return to. You’re a person who, for whatever reason, is cut off from what remains a vital social component of your cultural life. And you also know that there is no going back–no returning to that cultural life. All you can do is wait for everyone to join you, pretty much, to wait for culture to change. It’s not worth it (or even the case, for me) to feel sorry for yourself about the differences. You just anticipate and prepare, over and over.

1. On the other hand, I generally don’t “eat around meat,” which Aras did during his experiment.
2. On a side note, I would certainly not choose a winter month for an experiment in vegetarianism, unless it’s an experiment on “how bad can things get?” The variety of food available in the wintertime is much lower, and that’s felt acutely by vegetarians. I’m glad I’m not yet sick of potato leek soup.
3. Friends were jealous when I later told them what I ate for dinner, when they compared it to their rubber chicken. Of course, I also paid the $50 or whatever for food I didn’t eat. Thinking about functions in that way is an exercise in madness. If I considered a banquet ticket to include the price of the food, I’d never go to another banquet again.
4. This truly is tragic. American Airlines used to offer a vegan meal, a vegetarian meal, and a Hindu meal. Despite how impossible it is to get in a special meal request with them, the Hindu meal was always fantastically aromatic in comparison to the steak and potatoes everyone else would eat. AA apparently drew some Venn diagrams, however, and collapsed all three into a simple vegan meal that I’ve never found particularly exciting. Too bad!
5. The fact that during the epoch the restaurant celebrates pretty much no one on Earth ate meat with any regularity causes the vegetarian option to serve as a complete insult.

[Anti-racism and anti-sexism] currently have nothing to do with left-wing politics, and that, insofar as they function as a substitute for it, can be a bad thing. American universities are exemplary here: they are less racist and sexist than they were 40 years ago and at the same time more elitist. The one serves as an alibi for the other: when you ask them for more equality, what they give you is more diversity. The neoliberal heart leaps up at the sound of glass ceilings shattering and at the sight of doctors, lawyers and professors of colour taking their place in the upper middle class.

I bring this up to remark upon the surprise I felt when I noticed that only one other student besides me raised her hand. I was pretty certain that in a class of 30 English lit grad students, there’d be more than two who were children of doctors.

Keeping this in mind, I’ve been intrigued by many of the debates about the gutting of humanities funding either at SUNY Albany or in England, as part of the Lord Browne Report. Martin McQuillan’s piece, which I made my class of French undergrads read, talks about how by turning its back on funding the humanities, the state is leaving the study of such things to just the rich. The humanities are being privatized, he warns.

Even more pithily, on the humanist list, Alexander Hay worries:

I fear the worst case scenario will be the most likely one: Most people will go to university to do a vocational degree in the vain hope this is how they get a job, whilst the Humanities and Social Sciences wither on the vine until they become something only rich, privileged people do.

My reaction to this was… isn’t that already the case?¹ The reason, above, that I was so surprised that I was the only other progeny of a physician in my class(room) was because more or less my entire cohort was similarly class marked. It may be different at universities other than mine, but at my university, it certainly does not seem that our division is handing out degrees to large populations of people coming from bottom quintile households. I mean, it’s not like we sit around talking about ski trips to Gstaad, but it’s also not true that, by (selfishly) going off to graduate school in Humanities, we’re wasting our intellectual capital that could be better served by getting a good job with which to feed our parents and siblings.

I wish I had the Google skills to figure out the median household income of every entering humanities PhD student. If I had to bet, I would even give odds that the median is above the US median. I’d even give better than 1-1 odds that it’s higher than the median of entering freshmen. What’s more, I wonder if the median household income of parents of students finishing their PhDs is even higher. I’m willing to be wrong on this, but I’m not so sure I am. My own experience (at, of course, a private university) informs my confidence. It’s a confidence massaged by years of preppy snobbery, doncha know.

Thomas H. Benton, referenced in my last post, boils down the community of appropriate humanities PhD seekers to four categories. One, those who are getting the degree as a credential to improve their current position at their current job, I’ll not consider here. The other three are those who are independently wealthy, those who have spouses who can support them, and those who are hilariously well-connected enough to get jobs in academia. In other words, Benton, almost two years before the Browne Report, is arguing in favor of what Hay is afraid of becoming the norm. The future hasn’t been canceled, as McQuillan quotes Graham Allen. It’s just already here. And maybe it has been here for a while.

When the pushy undergrad in the Xtra Normal video asserts that “money isn’t important to me,” she’s probably right. She’s probably in the same position I’m in–not a financial burden to anyone while, at the same time, not (financially) burdened by others (or by their expectations). I suspect that it takes a certain kind of preexisting class position to make that leap, to dare to say something like “money isn’t important to me.” After all, no parent with class mobility on the mind brags about how their brilliant child is going to be an anxious graduate student barely making five digits when he or she grows up.

1. I can see that Hay does not mean graduate study here, but I do. I’m not at all attacking Hays here; I’m just registering how the comment struck me.