Bonjour everybody,
This month I moved to Paris!!! That’s it that’s the newsletter. For me this is absolutely monumental, a huge change and completely different. Yet it feels so normal. Maybe because I also have friends who have moved to Paris or even more extreme (by distance and cultural similarity) destinations like Berlin, Lombardy, Buenos Aires and Santiago. Maybe it’s because almost everyone I’ve met here has moved to Paris from their own respective home countries. Whilst it may feel like routine now to get up and get the RER change to the métro and go to class, to wander through the Quartier Latin, visit incredible museums and eat a baguette everyday (more on that later), I never want to lose the feeling of awe I have of this city everyday that I’m here. I need to remind myself more that what I’m doing is extraordinary, that Paris is a slightly ridiculous place in both a wonderfully lovely as well as chaotically difficult sense.
I live in the 14th arrondissement, it sits in the southern part of Paris between, unsurprisingly, the 13th to the east and the 15th to the west. My specific part of the 14th is called the Cité Universitaire. Nestled between Parc Montsouris and the Périphérique (Paris’s ring road motorway) it is a massive park comprising of more than 40 student residences, housing 12,000 students from all over the world. I live in the Maison du Portugal, originally intended only for Portuguese residents, now housing students from all over the world as well. My housemates are mostly Portuguese with others being from Denmark, Germany, Italy, Japan, Panama, the USA and Korea. This melting pot makes life in the house exciting, not to mention being totally immersed in a foreign language. Not French, but Portuguese - whenever I am in communal spaces. This year I’m taking a beginners Portuguese course - hopefully by the end of the year I’ll be fluent
Spending time outdoors in Paris is something I love. Using the city’s bike-scheme, Vélib’, is an amazing way to see Paris and I spend far more of my time on a bike looking up at the stunning apartment buildings than at the bike lanes I ride in. My local park, Parc Montsouris, is a wonderful little gem, inspired by London parks and with ample green space to escape from the city. I’ve met friends there a few times and it feels like my own corner of Paris. It also sits a two minute walk away from my local bakery, whose traditions (a type of baguette, but much better than your average baguette) I eat one of every single day, either with a meal or by itself, for the astonishing price of 1,40€! And these things are seriously good, solid crusty outsides with a gorgeously hollow crumb that looks like the cross section of Bornean cave they are light and airy, thick and hearty, absolutely everything you could ever want.
Music - My New Favourite
Irish post-punk band Fontaines D.C.’s fourth album Romance was received gleefully by me when it came on to streaming in late August. An already prodigious catalogue followed up with another killer release. 2019’s rough and ready Dogrel, 2020’s manic A Hero’s Death and 2022’s reflective masterpiece Skinty Fia all build to this: an eleven track exploration of romance and love. Quality seeps through the record with lead singer Grian Chatten belting and crooning in equal parts across the band’s most accessible project yet.
My pick of the bunch is the closer, ‘Favourite’. It’s one of those songs that sounds like it’s been around for years, a feeling of dreamy nostalgia floating through the irresistible guitar chords that ring out over its 4:17 runtime. Chatten sings ‘It’s a far cry from bed radios / And days spent playing football indoors’, indeed Romance is a much more polished effort than the band’s perhaps nostalgic previous projects but Fontaines D.C. maintain their cheeky charm and poetic lyrics to mark them as one of the best bands of recent years.
Film - Corsican Uprisings
This was a big moment for me, seeing a French film, in France, without any subtitles. I sank in to a cushy red seat at the Grand Action in the 5th arrondissement to watch À son image (English: In His Own Image), which tells the story of Corsican photojournalist Antonia and her involvement with the Corsican independence movement of the 80s and 90s.
In a flashback, the film opens with a gloriously sun-kissed sequence of Antonia shooting a couple’s wedding photos and then driving along the coast of the island. Following this flashback’s rather abrupt end we are transported into an excellent scene of a local village party, tinged by the Corsican nationalist movement, as we meet other key characters such as Pascal, Antonia’s militant partner. The energy in this scene is electric and the film continues this throughout. Cries for independence from France and gun shots are combined with delicately crafted wide shots over the course of the film that show the impact of the FLNC (Corsican National Liberation Front) on the domestic lives of those involved.
This film swept me up and its 110 minute runtime flew by, however the thick Corsican accents that make up most of the dialogue meant it was a challenge sometimes for my non-native ears to understand the French spoken in the film. Afterwards I looked up the history of the conflict and it is absolutely fascinating - I would highly recommend reading about it and watching this film.
Book - Yorkshire Moors
I opened up Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights for the first time this September. It’s one of those books that has always seemed to me insurmountable, a mountain of literature, glaring down at those who attempt to scale its mossy walls. Coupled with its mythical reverence it was published in 1847 and so the wall of Victorian English was another to be broken.
This swirling and stormy novel was a challenge, but an engrossing one. Despite at times containing typically 19th century vocabulary and structures the novel is approachable. Reading it is an immersive experience and the pages flew by. I was plunged into the wild, brooding world of the Yorkshire Moors as the love between Heathcliff and Catherine plays out we get a glimpse of a man descending into madness. Heathcliff is one of the darkest and most cruel characters I have ever read and his obsessions with Catherine, controlling and torturing those who wronged him and their descendants mark him as singular in the novel.
Over the course of three weeks I was in the eye of this storm, this rugged novel takes your expectations and flings them out the window. Cruelty is currency and innocence is cannot be recuperated out in the crags.
That’s all for this month, thank you so much for reading. Feel free to respond and let me know any thoughts you have.
Lots of love,
Luca
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