Swisswatch

The Chimes of the Free Market Flashing

2010-07-20T20:53:00.000-07:00

Every day when I go to work, I see a fresh horde of tourists valiantly trying to Do Tourism in the financial district. They don't really have much choice in the matter: this is, after all, the first neighbourhood listed in their New York City travel guides, and even a decade after 9/11, most of these books still make an effort to say something nice about the area. Unfortunately, as anyone who thinks seriously about the words "financial district" will quickly realize, this a deeply boring part of the city. Visitors come blinking into the light at the Wall Street Subway Stop, and then, encountering a dearth of things to marvel at, turn around and take pictures of the Wall Street Subway Stop. Alternatively, they photograph their friends cupping the testicles of the financial district bull, which have been polished shiny by the troupes of equally original and hilarious performance artists who have come before.

All of which observations may invite the question, why am I being such a pompous, patronizing douchebag about the tourists in New York? Is it because I am insecure about my own less-than-resident status in the city? Or is it simply apish mimicry of other arrogant, tourist-adverse New Yorkers?

Yes and yes! But there's third reason as well: I have, through no merit of my own, discovered the prima financial district attraction. I refer, of course, to ringing practice at the Trinity Church bell tower.

Trinity Church is located on the western end of Wall Street. You can see it framed dramatically between two skyscrapers if you approach from this side, and I personally think it would be quite a powerful closing to a movie to have the prodigal day trader, horrified by what he has become, running up the darkened canyon of the street in slow motion to seek redemption at its end. The movie would probably downplay the fact that Trinity Church itself is something of a tycoon among religious institutions: for an annual rent that is literally one peppercorn, it has become one of the largest landholders in New York City. It's also got that certain intangible, spiritual kind of wealth that comes from having the first United States Secretary of the Treasury - the great Alexander Hamilton - lying dead in the backyard. No other church in the world can make that claim.

And then there are Trinity's church bells - twelve of them, to be exact. This is apparently a very large number of bells to have in a single tower, and, as I would later learn (and as my fictional Wall Street day trader already knew) such abundance has its drawbacks. "Other bands of bell ringers sometimes don't even want to talk to us at the annual convention," a member of the Trinity band informed me gravely. "They've got six, eight bells, and here are we a round dozen! You can see why they're jealous." He paused a moment, pondering the mysteries of human envy. "We're also a much hipper band than most of the others."

"Hip" is not the word that sprang immediately to mind when I climbed up three flights of stairs and a ladder into the bell tower and saw twelve sundry people standing in a circle, rhythmically pulling on ropes while staring fixedly forward. Apparently the rest of the students at my firm came to the same conclusion, without even needing to observe the scene for themselves. Of the eighty-odd people who received an invitation to go to Trinity Church - this from a lawyer who has long nurtured an unfulfilled love of bell ringing - I was one of only three who accepted. When I had asked my friends if they too were going, they looked at me pityingly, as though I had fallen for a very obvious prank.

But this was no prank. I should have made clear at the beginning, as it was made clear to me, that joking and church bells do not mix. "DO NOT LARK ABOUT IN THE RINGING CHAMBER" was the first rule set down in the instruction manual I was told to read when I arrived. The highly sensible ban on interior larking about also extended, as far as I was concerned, to actually ringing the bells. Just as pilots have to go to ground school before they're allowed to get in the cockpit, so did I, it turned out, have many long hours of watching people clang metal objects together before I could attempt this sacred art myself.

As a consolation, one of the ringers, a great praying mantis of a man in “Caltech Dad" T-shirt, offered to let me hold the end of the rope while he rung the bell. This arrangement effectively neutralized the deadly risk - literally deadly, the ringers frequently told me with relish - that I might ring the bell improperly, and freed my mind to absorb Caltech Dad's gentle stream of constructive criticism concerning my rope holding. In between the clanging and the “eyes forward!” (occasionally glancing somewhere besides straight ahead is a classic beginner rope-holder’s mistake), I also picked up some edifying lessons on practice of bell-ringing as a whole.

For example: did you know that there are several completely different ways to arrange a group of bells within a tower for ringing? Surely you did not. Probably the most familiar setup is the carillon, which is a group of bells organized such that they can be made to produce beautiful melodies by a single musician sitting as a keyboard. Absurd, no? The kind of ringing we were doing, on the other hand, is called “change ringing.” It requires one ringer per bell, along with much roaring and haranguing by the band leader to keep the many disparate elements in line. And don’t bother trying to produce such a frivolity as a “tune” from a set of change-ringing bells: can’t be done! Change ringing is the speed walking of the music world – a pursuit seemingly defined by its rigid restrictions and limitations – which probably explains both its circumscribed public appeal and the fanatical devotion of its few true disciples.

Instead of melodies, change ringers play things called “changes,” which are basically scales with various notes rearranged according to the dictates of mathematical formulae. The changes have names that sound like the labels for cruel British public school hazing rituals, including Pudsey Surprise, Old Oxford Delight, and the truly ominous-sounding Reverse St. Nicholas. They were introduced to me through the bellowing calls of the band leader, a surprisingly young Brit who looked like a bouncer and seemed oddly out of place yanking a rope in a two hundred year-old bell tower. With every jauntily-named new order, the algorithm guiding the order of bells would shift slightly, sending a new series of tuneless sound patterns echoing through the air.

So there we were: on a hot night in the heart of the financial district, where tourists scratch their heads and hard young men in Anderson & Sheppard suits pass each other without smiling, using math not to price derivatives, but to create beautiful (?) music! What kind of impression must we be making?

As it turned out, none at all. The windows in the tower are shut. The bells ring for hours, several nights a week. But nobody on Wall Street can hear them.

The Nibelungenlied

2008-01-06T11:16:00.000-08:00

Everybody loves a medieval Germanic epic. Hell, whether you’re a 19^th century Bavarian opera writer getting ready to sow the cultural seeds of the Nazi party, or just a regular Joe who likes to spend his spare time reading about slaying, you’ll surely find something to entertain you in these grand, guttural tales of armour-clad glory. And most likely you’ll find it in the Nibelungenlied, which covers the field of German epics to pretty much the same degree that the country of Australia covers the Australian continent. Unlike the country of Australia, however, the Nibelungenlied is the work of a literate man – a literate man with a hankering to write something really violent.

My own love affair with the Nibelungenlied began when Deborah gave me a copy as an enticement to improve my German. This would have been a fine plan except that she got me the English translation, entirely defeating the purpose, and soon any thought of profiting linguistically from my reading experience was forgotten in the tumult of great Germanic warriors slaying, and other equally Germanic warriors being slain.

Indeed, you might say that slaying plays rather a large role in the Nibelungenlied, to the exclusion of other, lesser devices for plot development. You can get a fairly complete understanding of the story simply by browsing over the table of contents, where you’ll find chapter titles like, “How Rüdiger was slain”, “How Dietrich’s warriors were slain to a man”, and (spoiler alert!) “How Dancwart slew Bloedelin.” In fact, of the last eight chapters, where the real bloodletting really gets started, only two titles do not contain some conjugation of the word “slay”: “How they threw the corpses from the hall” and “How the Queen had the hall burned down.” Resist the temptation to skip over these “chick lit” chapters, though: I promise there’s still plenty of slaying for readers who take the trouble to find it!

Given that the story is basically comprised of 50 or so unpronounceable names arranged in slayer-slayee pairs, how did the anonymous author manage to spin it out into something that takes many hours to read, and probably as many weeks to recite to the accompaniment of harps in the ol’ mead hall? As far as I can tell, it’s through the following three literary flourishes, which any modern author would do well to learn.

Be obsessively, childishly emphatic.

One of the main problems with non-medieval-Germanic-epic writing is that it leaves so much room for doubt and speculation, which can shake the very foundations of a reader’s confidence. Take the following trembling excuse for an assertion, from Jane Austin’s Pride and Prejudice.

"Elizabeth had mentioned her name to her mother on her ladyship’s entrance."

If your mind is caught in the taught grip of uncertainty right now, you’re not alone. Is this the first clue the mother ever had about her ladyship’s identity, or is it possible that she already knew? Can we safely assume that the name Elizabeth told her mother was the right one? For that matter, what is her ladyship’s name? Short of turning back the page to check, there is absolutely no way to be sure.

Now, put your troubled mind at ease with the medieval German equivalent.

"King Liudegast told Siegfried that his name was King Liudegast. Thus did Siegfried learn the name of his adversary, King Liudegast."

That is a statement worth stating!

You can find the same cut-glass clarity throughout the book. In Chapter 16, How Siegfried was slain, Siegfried is fatally stabbed in the back by his treacherous friend Hagen. A modern writer might carelessly leave it to the reader to figure out how Siegfried felt about all this in his dying moments. Amused? Bored? Thirsty? A man could waste valuable time pondering that chestnut.

But the author of the Nibelungenlied spares us the trouble. “Siegfried was enraged” he clarifies. And then – just in case any reader should think that Siegfried was being a bit of a drama queen about the whole thing – adds, “as indeed he had good cause to be.”

I dare anyone to find so much as a shadow of ambiguity in these words.

Spend a lot of time talking about sewing jewels onto clothes.

Mussolini is supposed to have declared, “War is to the male what childbearing is to the female.” Judging from the occupations of the sexes as portrayed in the Nibelungenlied, a medieval Germanic Mussolini would have been better understood proclaiming that war is to the male what attaching gemstones to fabric is to females, since, aside from mourning their slain menfolk, this is pretty much all women do. The author describes the entire stone-stitching process in detail near the start of the book, and then, inexplicably, does exactly the same thing 30 pages later. He restrains himself for the rest of the narrative, but continues to remind us every couple of pages that the clothes everyone is wearing do indeed have gems sewn onto them, keeping the reader in a state of fraught suspense lest he launch into yet another lecture about how this came to be the case.

As to the question of why exactly the author feels the need to talk so much about the finery of the clothing in his story, the text itself provides the answer:

"The ladies wore magnificent brocades and altogether many fine robes so that a man who nursed ill will against any must have been a half-wit."

In other words, the symptoms of severe mental retardation include not only the failure to appreciate fine clothing, but also the holding of any negative feelings whatsoever towards the wearers of fine clothing. So, the narrator would have to be stupid not to devote a third of the book to discussions of fabric and jewels – quite literally.

Repeatedly blurt out the story’s ending in advance.

Good authors foreshadow. But great authors spell out the finale in pedantic detail every couple of paragraphs, so that even a shrewd reader who skips over the table of contents will have no more surprises waiting for him by the time he reaches the end of the first chapter. It’s all the fun of watching a movie with an annoying child who has seen the movie before and can’t restrain himself from showing off his superior knowledge, except that the child in question is an 800-year-old German minstrel who can’t be bribed or threatened or distracted away.

And by blurting out the ending, I’m not talking about putting in cryptic prophesies in the mouths of oracles, Oedipus Rex-style. Such predictions generally leave at least some room for uncertainty as to exactly how the predicted events will come to pass: a thoughtless oversight, according to the standards of our good minstrel. In Chapter 16 – which already bears the title “How Siegfried is slain”, remember – the author can’t restrain himself from rattling off the name of Siegfried’s future murderer and his cause of death a full three times in the first two paragraphs. And these spoilers are around the 32^nd, 33^rd, and 34^th explicit descriptions of the event since the start of the book.

Thus, when the author finally summons some up some dramatic flair in the following paragraph, letting Siegfried’s wife rail on about some dream she has had about flowers dyed in blood getting trampled by pigs, it’s a bit hard to savour the grim foreboding of the moment. Sure, it’s nice of our minstrel to try to set the scene a little, but he has been proclaiming to us for the entire book exactly what the dream means. Using subtle foreshadowing at this point is like making a public declaration to your friend a year in advance that you will be throwing a surprise party for her, sending weekly reminders that describe the surprise party in every particular, meeting her on the day of the party wearing sandwich boards that say “I am Taking You to a Surprise Party”, quickly briefing her once again on the essentials of the event – and then, one minute before going with her into a house festooned with giant “Surprise” banners, remarking knavishly “Why, I can’t think where all our friends have gotten to!”

* * *

All that being said, I heartily recommend this book to everyone. Where else can you encounter euphemisms for killing that include "meting out pitiful wages" and "playing rough tunes", or listen to Kriemhild brag to Brunhilde that Kriemhild's husband raped Brunhilde on her wedding night? Short of actually visiting Germany, the Nibelungenlied is about as close as you can get to that simpler, more slaying-oriented world that we've spent the last 800 years trying to leave behind.

The World Beyond Switzerland

2007-08-16T16:03:00.001-07:00

An oxymoron? I once thought so too! But I learned that there's more to the trans-alpine universe than meets the eye. For example:

Morocco

My trip to Morocco marked the first time I have been approached in the street and told I was “very bad man”, the first time I have had my mother’s honour called into question for refusing to buy a glass of orange juice, the first time I have been declared a dead ringer for Denzel Washington, and the first time I have bought lukewarm meat stew from a roadside vendor and vomited on the sands of the mighty Sahara itself.

Aside from these cheap thrills, however, my time in Morocco gave me ample opportunity for a more spiritual kind of enlightenment. The curriculum began in the Atlas Mountains, where we befriended Mohammed, a local mountain guide, and spent the night with him on a hotel rooftop. First came mint tea and a cultural music exchange worthy of a Unicef commercial, with my friend Kristin and I naturally choosing “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad” as the ode most representative of our lives and times, and Mohammed waiting politely until we were done before launching into some more melodious and far better executed Berber tunes.

Quickly thereafter, however, our conversation shifted to matters theological. Mohammed was in the process of explaining the importance of women appropriately mourning their deceased husbands – respect, family honour, and so on – when a certain phrase I had never heard until that moment caught my ear. It was: “…or djinns will turn the sinful woman into a giraffe for an entire night and force her to run around and around until she is utterly tired.”

I asked him again to be sure I had understood his French correctly. Yes, he assured me, the penalty is always this. Moreover, he continued, there is a sure way for those who witness a frantically aerobic giraffe to ascertain what they are seeing: simply beat the animal savagely with a club. Then, in the morning, check if any of the village’s crop of unfeeling widows are sporting fresh concussions or internal bleeding.

Naturally this information piqued my interest in djinns, a crew I’d always previously associated with more innocuous activities like hanging around in lamps and breaking spontaneously into song with the voice of Robin Williams. But as Mohammed assured us, these loveable scallywags can do a whole lot more.

“Once, a man I knew heard a knock at his door, but when he went to open it there was no one there,” Mohammed told us. “Then suddenly he received a mighty punch in the face – it was a djinn who had attacked him. Another time, a man was hiking in the mountains when he was suddenly struck a tremendous blow across the back by nothing he could see. He was severely injured.”

“It sounds like djinns mainly just beat people up,” I offered.

“Oh no, not at all,” Mohammed hastened to clarify. “A woman from my village was in her kitchen when a djinn hurled a pot at her. Then it kicked her until she fell bleeding to the floor.”

“Do djinns ever do nice things to people?” Kristin wanted to know.

“Yes, of course!” laughed Mohammed. “Some people go many years or even their whole lives without being attacked by a djinn.”

So, in summary, djinns can administer ruthless beatings, or, if they are feeling exceptionally kind, refrain from administering ruthless beatings. They can also opt to indirectly cause people to undergo ruthless beatings by turning them into jungle beasts. Let's see any of your cultures produce characters this well-rounded.

My education was further advanced on a sweltering bus ride from Marrakech to the coast, for it was here that I saw my first Prophet. He wore long flowing robes and a baseball cap, and he carried himself with a graceful dignity that was undiminished even when he was standing at the front of the bus shrieking at the hapless commuters in his congregation to step up their donations.

His preaching shifted randomly between Arabic and French in a manner not unlike a drunk driver swerving from one side of the road to the other, paying no heed to the divisions of sentences or even words. I caught fascinating snippets of comprehensible speech. “You must not trust anyone!” he cautioned us at one point. Then some Arabic. Then “All your neighbors are scorpions. The world is full of scorpions and hateful … [more Arabic] You must love all people – why are you only full of suspicion?”

Having fully developed that thesis, the Prophet started on a lengthy Arabic binge. He whipped his flock into a frenzy of cheering and booing and laughing, building to a thunderous crescendo, at the peak of which he switched to French. “IT IS LIKE…” he bellowed. Then he halted, struck dumb by his own wisdom. There was dead silence.

“Like the wind!” an old man in front of me cried out suddenly.
“Like scorpions, I’ll wager!” someone else shouted, to general approval. This seemed the safest bet to me – our Prophet had already mentioned scorpions about a thousand times so far.
“Like you?” some suck-up offered.
“Like Morocco?” “Like Allah?” “Like dead scorpions?” – the ideas kept flowing for a good two minutes. Eventually the Prophet held up his hand for silence.

“Like … snow,” he said at last.

In the whole history of men in flowing robes making pronouncements, I don’t think there has ever been a more disappointing revelation. “The wind!” the man in front of me tried to argue, but the Prophet’s stern glance and quick demand for money put the old heretic in his place.

Italy

Quick mental exercise: what would you do if someone asked you to compose “a hymn to life”? If you were just now struck by the idea of taking the skeletons of 4000 monks in diverse stages of decay, pulling them apart and playfully arranging the various components in a series of rooms organized by theme like attractions at a fun park (the Rib and Vertebrae Crypt, the Chamber of the Scapulas, etc.), and finally doing some interior decorating using a jaunty array of skull wainscoting, chandeliers made from fingers, and grinning corpses standing around in monastic robes – then maybe you should try to think of something a little less painfully obvious. That hymn to life (and they do call it this) has already been sung – in a church on the Via Veneto in Rome.

Inside the church, a plaque on the wall offers answers to frequently asked questions. Last on the list, seemingly as an afterthought, is an inquiry as to exactly WHY the building is littered with the grisly remains of thousands of dead monks in whimsical array. Luckily, a comprehensive answer is at hand. “Some of these monks were people of great holiness,” the plaque explains. The nature of this link – between a state of holiness on the one hand, and a state of having your pelvis serve as a structural support for a mantelpiece on the other – is left blithely unrevealed.

Spain

If you are – a) looking for a place to stay the night in southwest Spain and b) so Mother-Hubbardishly cheap that you refuse to give so much as a Happy Meal’s worth of currency to Hostelling International – then there’s a good chance you’ll eventually find your way to the Parque de Maria Luisa, in the center of Seville. Most likely you’ll head to the southeast corner of the park, which boasts the fewest floodlights and traffic-bearing roads, and there you’ll spy an inviting little patch of grass partially surrounded by shrubbery. You’ll lay out your sleeping bag without a care in the word, and slip into delicious dreams of nickels and dimes and a penny saved is a penny earned. Perhaps, at some moment between waking and sleeping, it will occur to you to wonder why I bothered narrating this whole rather dull process to you at all.

Your musings will receive a stern reply at precisely 1 a.m., when sprinklers will emerge magically from hiding and begin strafing you with ceaseless, uncaring Spanish brutality. Reeling away in your sleeping bag with all the agility of a burrito, you may suddenly realize through the noise of your own swearing that this might well be the reason why the park is so lush and green while the rest of southern Spain is a parched wasteland. You’ll also quickly ascertain, by a combination of sight and touch, that the range of the sprinklers extends over the entire park – which, I might as well tell you at this point, will now be securely locked, in cheeky defiance of the conclusion you and your friends came to the previous evening (namely, that the ten-foot spiked iron walls and gates were for decoration only). Eventually you’ll role into a dryish hollow and try to grab snatches of sleep from under the throbbing baseline emanating from an all-night dance club right next door, until 5:30 a.m. when the time will come to begin your walk to the bus station – begin it, that is, right after you climb over said ten-foot spiked iron gate with an 80 litre backpack while Spanish clubbers keep an amused eye on your progress.

Anyway, just think of those savings!

Pictures of Switzerland, Part V

2007-05-20T13:36:00.000-07:00

Not far from the blessed city that gave the world Calvinism, a sign offers a friendly reminder to keep your vestments fastened “under pain of fine.” There’s nothing remarkable about the Swiss threatening penalties for minor offenses – these are people who will happily give you a ticket for locking your bike outside of a designated bike-locking zone. No, what really shows off their righteous zeal was the fact that this sign was not placed anywhere near a beach or other such nudism-inducing site, but rather in a goddam forest at the edge of a canola field – miles from any municipal officer who might be able to administer the fine, or, for that matter, anyone at all who might see your shame. Except, of course, for a vengeful, pre-determinist Protestant God!

The Napoleonic uniforms rank among the more modern features of the Appenzell Innerhoden Landsgemeinde, or public vote. Though it boasts all the privacy of an elementary school popularity contest, the Landsgemeinde was hailed as the pinnacle of democratic evolution by 18^th-century philosophes. To succeeding generations of Appenzellers, this seemed like a pretty good reason not to change it ever again. And it was all going along fine until 1991, when one gender – who shall remain nameless – decided they wanted to barge in on the franchise and ruin it for everybody.

Somehow the old traditions have adapted – at least in this half of the canton. In the other (Deborah’s) part, the trauma of 1991 proved too harrowing, and the Landsgemeinde was abolished several years later. This past April, while the men and women of Appenzell Innerhoden raised their hands together, the people of Appenzell Ausserrhoden held a solemn memorial for their murdered democracy.

Also, the voting in Appenzell takes place with the help of swords. Why? Well, just you try and have a half-decent democracy without arming every adult man with a bladed weapon on election day, and don’t blame me when it turns into a childish farce.

A mild spring day. A peaceful bike trail through Switzerland’s Rhine Valley. What could possibly make this any better? If you answered “fill the road with bombs and never take them out”, then congratulations – you’re thinking the “Swiss government way!” Believe it or not, those metal squares in the concrete contain enough explosives to turn the whole river bank into a sandpile at a moment’s notice. And on the other side of the Rhine, you can see the reason for these wise precautions: like a colossus standing astride central Europe, the “Blut und Eisen” Principality of Liechtenstein.

The War on Poverty

2007-04-26T07:46:00.000-07:00

About a month ago I wrote about how hilarious it was that

Switzerland

had still not made a decision on my residence permit (see below). Back in those days, there was something harmless and droll about all this bureaucratic fumbling, something that made you want to turn your eyes heavenward and sigh, “oh those charmingly incompetent European functionaries! Whatever will they do next!”

Well, what they did do next was to reject my residence application, and only now do I see these befuddled government workers for the ice-cold Gestapo auxiliaries they really are. Not unlike my noble Mexican forbearers, I am being denied access to a land of freedom and opportunity and sizeable gold reserves. And why? Because, after six months of deliberation, I have been deemed too damned poor. And Switzerland, God bless her, is cleanin’ out the shantytowns.

Incidentally, by “poor”, they mean that my concubine and I lack assets sufficient to support me in Switzerland for a period of five years – well over a hundred thousand dollars by their calculations. The fact that I will not even be staying five more weeks in their jewelry shop of a country seems not to add a penny’s weight to my cause.

I’m going to go argue my case with the Police Étrangère next week. As I see it, the meeting is going to have a lot in common with an English aristocrat’s dinner party or a rapper’s life, insofar as its entire purpose will be for me to exhibit my wealth as flagrantly as I can. And if the Pol-Éts aren’t all agape when I light a cigarette with a fifty franc note, and then put it out by dousing it with 1979 Dom Pérignon? Well, then I can hardly imagine wanting to live here anyway.

The Two Hardest Things

2007-03-30T07:49:00.000-07:00

Not too long ago, I received an e-mail entitled Fwd: Fwd: Fwd: :) insprational Life quotes!!!1 You can imagine my excitement when I opened it, though of course I was careful to avoid plunging in too fast – such rare pleasures are meant to be savoured. So, for a delectable 30 seconds, I pondered gems of philosophy and science – “Life is like riding a bicycle: you’ll never fall off unless you stop peddling” – as well as just plain witty turns of phrase – “Life is a game, play it!!!!!” By the time I was finished, I was an immensely richer person, and I’m not talking about my bank account. Because, as you may or may not be aware, “True wealth comes from experiences, not money.”

But there was one quote in particular that stuck with me. Presented in the form of a three-line poem, it read:

The two hardest things to say in life
are hello for the first time
and goodbye for the last

If you’re feeling soothing waves of catharsis washing over you now, you’re not alone. But perhaps it has also occurred to you to wonder how qualified the author really is to give life advice to thousands of strangers, given that merely saying good morning to any of them would tie for the most difficult conversational experience of her entire life. She could be an official charged with bringing 18 impoverished children the news that they will be evicted from their house on Christmas Day, and also that she ran over their puppy, kitten, and parents on the drive over, and the hardest part of the whole speech would be the greeting at the beginning of it.

Still, e-mail forwards don’t lie. I decided it was up to me to figure out the deeper meaning of these words, and then apply them like a healing balm to every real and potential problem in my life. The reason I’m writing this all now is because I believe I have finally succeeded. With only a few additions, alterations, and a slight change in scope, the quotation could be presented as such:

The two hardest things to do as a foreigner in Switzerland
are to legally obtain a job
and to officially quit one

Let’s start with the issue of getting a job, but to begin with I should make a couple of things clear. The first is that, compared with a very large percentage of the immigrant population in Switzerland, my working prospects are blessed beyond all merit and proportion. I have a European passport, which allows me to bypass a lot official restrictions; I am not of Yugoslavian, Turkish, or African decent, which spares me from many unofficial restrictions; and I have my very own Swiss concubine ready at hand, which confers innumerable legal and personal advantages. You might well declare that Switzerland is my oyster, as indeed I do every day.

Which brings me to the second point: namely, that in spite of all these assets, I have never managed to obtain work legally in Switzerland. Five months after I first applied for a work permit, four months after the date the Police Étrangère promised I would receive it, and two months before I will finally quit my job and leave the country, bureaucrats are still hotly debating whether or not I should be allowed to extend my summer tourist visa until at least the end of 2006. All the work I’ve gotten so far has been on the understanding that my papers should be arriving any day now – which, to be fair, is no more than I’ve been told by the three government offices and one private contracting agency that have passed my file down the line like the baton in a relay race. But even as my legal right to remain in the country for another day remains in question, I am required to pay every month into a fund that will support me when I finally retire in Switzerland some forty years hence. It’s a pretty damning indictment to compare any country’s government bureaucracy to the one in France, as all of you who were in Grenoble can attest, but I think Roman Switzerland comes close to deserving it.

Now let’s move on to the thorny issue of quitting a job. I am leaving Lausanne at the end of May, so I gave my boss my two-months’ notice yesterday. She told me to put it in writing and send it to her. Accordingly, I went home, typed up a one-line letter, put it in an envelope, and dropped it into her mail slot at the office this morning. This seemed a trifle formal for a language school where two years is considered a long time for a teacher to stay, but no matter. Formality is nothing new among the Swiss, whatever their reputation as free-wheeling, salsa-dancing party animals.

Later this morning, however, my boss told me that even this was insufficient. It wasn’t enough to just give her notice: apparently, I had to walk one block to the post office, buy a special express-delivery stamp, and send the notice back to the office. She even advised me to hurry, so that it would reach her by the afternoon. Standing there listen to her explain that she needed the very letter she was already holding in her hand as soon as possible had a nonsensical, Alice-in-Wonderland feel to it. And yet this is the standard procedure for leaving every job, large or small, throughout the whole country.

So, five francs and a half-hour wait at the post office later, I am now permitted to quit the job I was never allowed to have in the first place. But I’m not letting it get me down. As a very wise person once told me and everyone else on their mailing list, “In three words I can explain what I've learned about life: it goes on.”

A Short History of Racism

2007-03-26T12:35:00.000-07:00

While staying at my grandmother’s house in England this past week, I managed to find, after an exhaustive search, an old obscure children’s book called Epaminondas and His Mama’s Umbrella. I had been greatly looking forward to reading this literary treasure ever since my brother gave it a glowing report following his own visit to my grandmother a couple of years earlier. Nor does the book’s renown stop with him. Even such a discerning information source as Wikipedia has a stub article about old Epaminondas, which observes that the work contains “some racist overtones and stereotypes.”

Now, perhaps I’m being overly sensitive, but to me this statement seems only slightly more understated than pointing out that Mein Kampf is tinged with hints of anti-Semitism. The fact is that Epaminondas and His Mama’s Umbrella is dazzlingly, spectacularly racist. The story centers a black boy called Epaminondas, whose grandiose name is offset by his mighty and ponderous stupidity. All day long Epaminondas goes around misunderstanding simple instructions, eating grass, and prancing around in straw hat, while his mother offers such kind encouragement as “Laws a massy me, you am a stupid coon!” (italics original; all grammatical errors made by the black cast are helpfully highlighted for the edification of the reading audience). It hardly needs mention that Epaminondas has a pair of fire-engine-red lips that take up three quarters of the space on his gawking face, or that the adjective “black” is carefully inserted in front of almost every body-related noun in the story (to wit: “Epaminondas waved his black hand to his black mama, then turned on his black heel and started off, but immediately tripped over a piece of old cornbread and fell right on his black face, while Black Mama screamed racial epithets in his black ear from the bottom of her black throat.”) I can just imagine a smug British child of the 1950s chortling away at this display of stark idiocy. I know exactly what he would look like, too, for when I checked the title page, I found there printed proudly the name of my own father. “He loved that book,” my grandmother confirmed when I delightedly showed her my discovery. “It was right up there with Little Black Sambo, Little Black Quibba, and Little Black Queesha.”

All this is hardly shocking; indeed, if you have parents about the same age as mine, I’d wager that they read the same horrible books when they were young enough to find the idea of a child misplacing an umbrella hilarious. Rather, I’d like to turn this all around to my one unflinching purpose: criticizing Swiss society. Because in this country, you see, such themes are not only the embarrassing relics of an older generation. When Deborah was in primary school, her teachers organized such activities as the group game “Who’s Afraid of the Black Man?”, in which scrubbed Alpine children fled from a classmate in the role of a hungry Native bent on devouring them. After she came home, she could turn the tables by feasting on chocolates called Mohrenchöpfli – “Little African’s Heads” – as indeed kids can to this day. So too can they play “Black Peter,” the Swiss version of the classic Anglo-Saxon card game “Old Maid,” which, let’s be candid, is itself hardly a showcase for enlightened liberal values. But even if our version does pack in the patriarchy, it at least refrains from recreating apartheid in game form, as players rack up pairs of nice white people while desperately trying to exclude poor old Black Peter from the society. And while North American kids are doubtless just as heartless and prejudiced as their Swiss counterparts, they can at least be proud of the fact relatively few of them dress up as “Negerli” for Halloween.

I could go on with this moralistic finger-pointing, and indeed I will do just that, but now I will speak from my own personal experience. Last June, during the height of World Cup frenzy, I went to a bar in St. Gallen with Deborah and her dad to watch the Switzerland-Togo match. Now, I should say quite frankly that up until this point, I had always gotten about as much enjoyment from watching the players on a soccer field as I had from watching the grass. But viewing the game in a run-down Swiss drinking hole proved to be a novel and interesting experience, if only because everyone watching the game got so into it, and by into it I mean appallingly racist. Every time a Togolese player made a foul, took a fall, or touched the ball with his foot, curses would fly like missiles from the assembled multitude, usually pairing some or other dark-coloured substance with some or other part of the human body. Most of what was hissed and screamed against the unfortunate opposition can’t be repeated here, but there was one memorable incident that was comparatively so benign that it seemed almost charitable. During a lull in the hard drinking following Switzerland's 2-0 victory, a faint strain of reggae reached us from the radio of a passing car. Out onto the street jumped Deborah’s father, a spry and jovial patriot, where he screamed at the driver of the car to “turn off that fucking Togomusik!” Prudently, the traitor obeyed.

Pictures of Switzerland, Part IV

2007-02-22T08:47:00.000-08:00

Canton Appenzell Ausserrhoden yet again puts the civilized world to shame with its New Year’s Eve traditions, which feature men dressed as tree spirits roaming around town terrifying children. If photographs could but speak, you would right now be serenaded by blood-curdling shrieks, interspersed with melodic yodeling.

A hunting trophy plate, as displayed in the house of a kindly old man where we stayed in Brienz, Canton Bern. Brienz is the acknowledged Mecca of Swiss woodcarving, together with that most venerable of subdisciplines, Swiss wild boar-sex woodcarving.

Just a regular Swiss chalet with solid concrete walls, barbed wire entrenchments, and steel-framed sniper holes, right? Wrong. Believe it or not, this is no cozy mountain hut at all, but rather a cleverly-disguised military bunker, set up to protect the border with France during World War II. Even today, its proud message lives on: better think twice before begging for help at this farmhouse, all ye tempest-tossed refugees from lands afar! (Canton Vaud)

Speaking of World War II, did you know that Switzerland’s plan in the event of a German invasion called for all men of military age to evacuate the northern plateau, home to 70 percent of the Swiss population, and camp out in the Alps for the duration of the occupation? And who could blame them! Amid attractions like the Bergün sled run in Canton Graubünden (above), the longest of its kind in the world, what would the boys care if Fritz ran roughshod over women, children, and the entire productive region of the country?

The Delicate Art of Pursuasion

2007-01-09T00:57:00.000-08:00

October 20, 2006,

Advertisements in Switzerland are much better than in Canada. It’s not just that Swiss ads are more skillfully executed – although that too is an important factor – but also that the products they promote are simply more worthy. Back home, most of the billboard space goes to idle vanities like cars, jeans and donation drives for the children’s hospital, but only head-in-the-clouds eccentrics ever try to push that kind of shit in Switzerland. Here, the bulk of the advertising is about just one thing: dairy products. And it would be a staunch vegan indeed who could withstand the cunning, calcium-rich advances of Swiss milk marketing.

And the milk ads, with their lovingly-drawn depictions of Heidi skipping through flowery meadows, along with excerpts from her book in three languages, are only the beginning. There are also the chocolate ads, the yogurt ads, the butter ads, the cheese ads – all of which you can of course find in most other places as well, but with nothing like the level of propagandic saturation that the average Swiss is subjected to. Nor are these staples the only sources of lactose on offer. Even the national soft drink, Rivella – perhaps the most heavily advertised product of all – is made from a by-product of the cheese-making process.

As you can imagine, the enormous quantity of dairy ads packed into this tiny country forces marketers to be ever more imaginative in promoting their own particular brand of bone-building goodness. For a culture-starved North American like me, raised on a tradition of milk advertising where the entire creative process was reduced to deciding which underemployed celebrity to adorn with a hilarious white moustache, it was uplifting to see the how much the Swiss companies think outside the box. And none, in my opinion, has shown more originality than the Stein Cheese Factory, which has launched an energetic campaign near Deborah’s home town.

Now, the Stein Factory does two things. It produces cheese for sale, and it offers tours that take visitors through the mysterious world of cheese creation. Accordingly, you might think that ads for the factory should either promote the quality of the cheese, tout the value of the tours, or somehow combine the two. But Stein’s marketing strategy shuns such mundane solutions – indeed, it shuns any connection to its own goods and services whatsoever. Rather, their ad shows a scowling man brandishing a club in the direction of the viewer, while a caption demands “so, you haven't gone to visit the cheese factory, hm?”

And so for one glorious moment, the modern idea of advertising as an enticement to buy a product is eclipsed by a more pure and noble form: as a threat to batter someone with a blunt object unless they buy a product. No wonder this country consumes so much dairy.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

P.S. - In the time since I wrote this, I've noticed a surprising number (one, to be exact) of other ads that make use of the club-threat motif, the juicy Freudian implications of which I leave to the reader to decipher. In this rare non-dairy promotion, a self-described "strict language school" offers ominously to teach you "a lesson." Presumably this is to be effected with the aid of a stick held at crotch-level by a man so unimpeachably strict that he wears two extended seagulls as a headdress.

Small Nation

2006-12-19T17:59:00.000-08:00

December 7, 2006

Living in Switzerland, I’ve encountered two main schools of thought regarding Canada. The first sees us as a kind of Cinderella to America’s wicked stepmother, under-appreciated but essentially perfect. This view is especially popular with people who have just finishing watching Bowling for Columbine, who make up a surprising proportion of the European population. “It’s so amazing that your country has no crime!” I’ve had the compliment paid to me on more than one occasion. “I guess because you’ve abolished poverty. You guys should try and teach those oil-crazed Yanks that they can’t solve all their problems with guns and stark racism.”

The second perspective, markedly less gratifying, is that we are basically the same as our southern neighbours – a bit more snow and mounties perhaps, but certainly close enough to allow the adjective “American” to fit comfortably over the lot of us. Deborah herself is a great proponent of this viewpoint, and delights in using the word to characterize all manner of things, from tacky Christmas decorations to private schools to obesity, whether they’re in any way specific to the United States or not. In her eyes, even knowing the lyrics to “O Canada” is an American trait, insofar as patriotism and jingoism are American qualities (no one in Switzerland can sing more than four or five words of their own baffling excuse for an anthem). Nor do any of the other trappings of Canadian culture do anything to qualify us for an independent identity. If Pierre Trudeau were trading for beaver pelts with Bob and Doug McKenzie in a packed hockey stadium on Empire Day, the whole event would still be American, if anyone in attendance were fat or had bleach-blond hair.

Still, you can’t really blame the Swiss such oversights: they have their own identity issues to resolve. Like the rest of the people of Germany, they’re still struggling to find their voice after the atrocious wars and genocides they inflicted on the world during the last century. And so, in the interests of helping them along in a spirit of brotherhood, I have prepared a small list of things that I have found to be uniquely, categorically Swiss. Please read on.

Swiss Essentials: An Ambiguous View of Large Carnivores

2006-12-19T17:46:00.001-08:00

To go to Switzerland is to visit a country extremely conscious of bears. Pretty much any time the Swiss see an opening for a bear in a story or an emblem, they will stuff one in. Deborah’s birth-city of St. Gallen, for example, was supposedly founded after a bear brought a bundle of firewood to a wandering monk, who decided that was as good a reason as any to found a settlement on that very spot. But even this distinguished pedigree does not win St. Gallen the right to be called “city of the bear”, since that honour was already reserved for Bern, which rather cruelly keeps live bears in a pen downtown. Furthermore, three Swiss cantons (including Deborah’s) have bears on their coats of arms, and given that these appear on every licence plate and passport, as well as on flags distributed around the principal towns, it’s probably not an exaggeration to say that people in these cantons look at hundreds of images of bears every day.

And yet when an actual bear crossed over into Switzerland last year, the entire nation was in an uproar. Faced with the first wild specimen in the country in decades, Switzerland quickly formed a multi-national coalition with Austria and Germany to bring an end to the overwhelming security threat. As a team of seasoned bear trappers and Karelian elkhounds was hastily dispatched from Finland at several hundred thousand euros’ expense, divisions plagued the home front. Bavarian President Edmund Stoiber called the visitor Problembär, but reporters lovingly christened him Bruno, and covered newspaper front pages with stories of his frolicsome exploits. What could be done with him to appease both the grumbling farmers and the strident environmentalists? Finally, the Germans came up with a compromise they thought would please everybody: they would slaughter the bear, and everyone would go home. Some Swiss lamented this final solution, but many no doubt breathed a sigh of relief that they could once more enjoy their flags, license plates, statues, wall murals, and foundation myths in peace.

Incidentally, while all this was going on, I was in the Rocky Mountains with Deborah, who very courageously came hiking every day in spite of her overwhelming fear of our savage Canadian bears. But old Deborah wasn’t just going to walk into the jaws of death unprepared – no, she held the beasts back with a continuous litany of Swiss German children’s songs. “When the singing stops, we’re both dead!” I shrieked every now and then to keep her spirits up. We emerged each evening from the woods unscathed, and improved in our knowledge of kindergarten pop culture to boot. Why this solution never occurred to anyone in Switzerland, widely considered to be the Mecca of Swiss German children’s songs, is entirely beyond me.

Swiss Essentials: A Different Take on Magazine Promotions

2006-12-19T17:41:00.001-08:00

It’s quite possible that you don’t spend a lot of time pondering magazine promotions, and I must say that I share that failing. However, I’ll wager that when you do take some time out of your busy day to give the subject a good think, your mind is mostly turned towards things that might actually influence your decision to buy a magazine. For instance, The New Yorker at one time gave chic, erudite anthologies of its cartoons to subscribers, while Maxim continues to cater to all our enter-to-win-a-once-in-a-lifetime-chance-for-a-Budweiser-Beach-Party-with-Jenna-Jameson needs.

And what is Switzerland’s answer to these gleaming golden treasures dangled before our adoring eyes? Well. A couple of months into Deborah’s subscription to Die Weltwoche, a sort of higher-brow Swiss Newsweek, a package arrived for her in the mail along with the latest issue. “Gott sei Dank! It has come!” shouted a jubilant Deborah, tearing the wrapping to shreds with Teutonic efficiency. And once the manifold layers of paper, cardboard, and plastic had been cleared away, there lay before her, bathed in glory, a single pair of sensible black socks. “A perfect fit!” crowed she, breaking into an impromptu jig, while I turned my attention to the accompanying letter in the hope of finding some clue as to her wildly disproportionate elation.

It began by congratulating loyal subscriber Frau Weber on her ownership of the new socks in the warmest terms. “And this is not the last pair of socks you’ll be receiving!” the letter went on magnanimously, deftly allaying my worst fears. Apparently, a new pair would be laboriously packaged and delivered every three months for the next year, the staff of the Die Weltwoche evidently considering that a one-time delivery of all the socks would simply be too much excitement for the average Swiss consumer to handle. And judging from my own limited sample, they may well have been right.

Pictures of Switzerland, Part III

2006-11-24T03:39:00.000-08:00

Looking at this picture of the Fälensee, the first thing you must be wondering it why the lake is so much darker than any other body of water you've ever seen. Well, like many other mind-boggling natural phenomena, this one has a very interesting and accurate story behind it.

It all begins with a simple farmer, who was grazing his cows by the shores of the Fälensee on a warm summer’s evening. As he strolled around the clearing, doing whatever it is farmers do while their livestock are feeding, his mind turned to questions theological.

“God - ha! Don’t believe in him one bit!” declared the farmer to himself. “For I am an atheist.”

Little did he know, in the stillness of the Alpstein mountains there was somebody listening to his rash words – somebody called God. “An atheist, eh?” pondered the Almighty. “Well I can’t have that! That’s why I’m going to take out my rage on the real culprits: those vile cows.”

And it was about that time that God began hurling targeted lightening into the valley, which not only killed the cows instantly, but had the additional effect of picking up their bodies and depositing them in the lake. Troubled by this sudden development, the farmer ran down from the mountains and told his story to a number of credible historians, who set down a true account of it for all posterity.

Meanwhile, the bodies of the wicked cows sunk slowly to the bottom of the Fälensee. And since, as everyone knows, there is nothing blacker than the electrocuted cow-corpse of an unbeliever, the formerly pearl-white lake became quite the darkest little pond in all the world.

One of many memorials commemorating Switzerland’s valiant participation in World Wars Eins & Zwei.

Grown men bicker like children at an impromptu public chess game in Geneva. Even on rainy days, these Titans’ battles draw sizeable crowds.

Perhaps the best feature of direct democracy in Switzerland is that no town, however small, ever suffers from short supply of partisan posters. As a fearmongering device, rampaging dinosaurs are actually pretty tame: a group opposed to a proposition to increase workers’ benefits is currently decorating Lausanne with pictures of cackling witches and werewolves menacing small children.

When in Rome

2006-11-07T13:40:00.000-08:00

October 30, 2006

Having spent most of the summer lost in a great guttural fog of Swiss German, it’s been nice to pass some time in Lausanne, in the French-speaking part of Switzerland. Here, for the first time in months, the spoken word has supplanted the ringing cowbell as the most lucid and comprehensible noise in my immediate environment, and umlauts no longer hover like thunderclouds over every sign and billboard.

But this isn’t to say that life in a francophone environment doesn’t hold some interesting linguistic surprises. Upon arriving here, for example, I learned that I wasn’t in French Switzerland, as I’d always thoughtlessly termed it, but rather Roman Switzerland. Likewise, the people I saw around me turned out not be called Pseudo-Frogs at all: they are the Roman Swiss, or just plain Romans for short. This seemed strange at first, and, if truth be told, still does. This very morning, the cover of the newspaper bore a picture of a bratty-looking teenage Genevoise, whose chief claim to fame appeared to be her unilateral declaration that she was “the Roman Paris Hilton!!!” (a desperate shortage of newsworthy material being the price Switzerland pays for its harmonious clockwork society). Was she right to slam the door shut on the legions of bratty-looking teenage Italians who coveted the same title, and seemingly had a much better claim to it? Apparently, yes.

As mere alien residents in Lausanne, Deborah and I don’t count as Romans, but we learned recently that we qualify for an even better label. While filling out a form for the Bureau of Immigration, we discovered that, in the eyes of the Swiss state, we two are naught but concubines living in a state of concubinage. This, apparently, is the term the entire French-speaking world uses to describe non-married couples who live together, perhaps because harlotage lacked sufficient exotic flavour. To be fair, it’s true that this sense of the word concubine exists in English as well – indeed, the Random House Unabridged Dictionary lists it as the first definition. But that doesn’t change the fact that the next listed meaning is “a woman residing in a harem and kept, as by a sultan, for sexual purposes,” nor that Roget’s New Millennium Thesaurus offers floozy, strumpet, tart, and good old-fashioned prostitute as plausible synonyms. Nonetheless, I’m very much looking forward to integrating this word into my day-to-day conversations when I get back to Canada. “This is my concubine Deborah,” I will announce to friends and relatives. “Ah yes,” I’ll smile reassuringly at their confusion. “Didn’t I tell you before? We’ve been living in a state of concubinage for some time now.”

Anyway, what the hell does the Random House Unabridged Dictionary know? The fools actually define the word Roman as “of or pertaining to the city of Rome.”

Pictures of Switzerland, Part II

2006-10-23T04:54:00.000-07:00

Deborah and I put on tricks to confound the local villagers in Glarus, site of Europe's last execution for witchcraft.

Fleet-footed swine and a confused child strut their stuff at the races at Olma Fair, St. Gallen. In Switzerland, pigs are raced for entertainment and high-stakes gambling, while horses are carved up into sausages for human consumption. Furthermore, cows are entered into national beauty contests that everyone seems to take very seriously.

An age-old Swiss tradition in Rütli: waving red flags to scare away prospective immigrants.

Lake Oeshinen, in the Bernese Oberland. Hiking in Switzerland isn't so different from hiking in British Columbia, except that the trails are maintained to an engineer's standard by the military, and there's a goddam helicopter-supplied restaurant on almost every hilltop.

The Rites of English

2006-10-23T04:32:00.000-07:00

October 20, 2006

For the past few weeks I’ve been working as a teacher in a language school in Geneva, but I’m leaving after this week in order to find something closer to home. This is too bad in a way, because it will mean the end of my daily communion with The Method. The Method is the teaching approach we’re supposed to use to bring the light of English to our benighted francophone students. It’s also, I imagine, about as close to organized religion as corporate language instruction ever dares venture. “Just trust in The Method,” our boss would say repeatedly during our two-week initiation period for new teachers, smiling benevolently upon us. “Its ways may seem strange to you now, but in a few days they will become part of you.” Being living embodiments of The Method, however, did not give the teachers the right to interpret its doctrine for ourselves. In fact, the very word “teacher” turned out to be a misnomer: as our starry-eyed trainer was fond of reminding us, “it’s not you who teaches. The Method teaches.”

If you’ve read this far, you might be getting curious as to what exactly The Method entails. Well, it’s pretty simple. The instructor fires prescribed questions at beginner students extremely quickly, then interrupts their stuttering replies and answers the questions himself. The students are thus left confused and humiliated, and whole learning process can begin again. This goes on for fifty minutes, and never once is any student allowed to formulate a sentence without the teacher cutting in and taking the words out of his mouth.

Such an approach may sound strange enough to the uninitiated, but even more peculiar is the actual material we teach. For one thing, we introduce new vocabulary in an order that an infidel might call random: the word “madhouse”, for example, is taught before the word “hello.” And the many of the prescribed questions border on the macabre. They begin innocuously enough – “What colour is this pencil?” – but very quickly proceed to some quite different themes. “Is it pleasant to see a dead person?” the method probes, and later asks casually: “If you jumped from the top of a very tall building, would you definitely die?” (“Yes,” the hapless student is forced to respond, “I would definitely die.”) This last provides a nice segue into an inquiry introduced a couple pages later: “Why do people kill themselves?” “Because they have failed in life!” The Method thunders at the students through the humble medium of the teacher, drowning out their flawed, hesitating responses.

Pictures of Switzerland, Part I

2006-10-21T06:20:00.000-07:00

Glowering patriots on board the boat to Rütli, site of the heavily-secured Swiss national celebration. The well-groomed young gentleman in the foreground, whose shirt bore the message "Heil Helvetia!", was grabbed by police immediatly after docking.

Deborah's house and one of her neighbors in the middle of Herisau, Appenzell Ausserrhoden. Despite being the largest town in Appenzellerland's two cantons, Herisau proudly features farm animals crammed onto almost every urban grasspatch big enough to hold a badminton court.

Sometimes an eight-foot-long phallic wind instrument is just an eight-foot-long phallic wind instrument: alphorn players celebrate Swiss nationhood with a venerated stereotype.

Combining Italy's sun and scenery with Switzerland's capacity for running a country that isn't a flagrant embarassment to the European continent, Il Ticino is probably the best place in the world.

In Search of Swiss Culture

2006-10-10T13:49:00.000-07:00

June 20, 2006

At dinner with Deborah’s family, I asked her mother, Vreni, whether there were many cuckoo clocks in her part of Switzerland (my imagination, you see, is sadly limited). “No,” she replied, “we have very few colours here.”

The response gave rise to more questions than it answered. Was Vreni saying that the land was too drab and monotone to offer the necessary inspiration to the tortured artistic geniuses who poured their souls into making the clocks? That hardly seemed likely; Appenzell bursts with more country-fresh colour than an entire family pack of Fruit Loops. Or could it be that she meant there was a shortage of paints in the region with which to decorate the jaunty little timepieces? This seemed more plausible, insofar as it could form a semi-workable plotline for a Swiss-flavoured children’s cartoon. Herr Müller, the kindly old clockmaker, is in a fit of hand-wringing grandfatherly panic the night before the county fair, with a shopfull of unpainted cuckoo clocks. Will the deficiency be made good at the last minute by a plucky paint-carrying chipmunk named Brushstroke?

I was ready to accept this comforting explanation and move to discussions of fondue and Swiss Army knives when Vreni dropped me another clue. “Lots of Yugoslavians,” she offered, “but few colours.”

This detail made the plot more complicated. Were the Yugoslavians trying to manufacture paint and not succeeding? Or, on a more sinister note, were they trying to stop Brushstroke from making his delivery, perhaps because they wanted the first prize in the county fair clock-making contest for themselves? Impossible to tell, but I feigned understanding. “Not as many colours as Yugoslavians,” I agreed thoughtfully.

“Not like the United States,” Vreni added. “Lots of colours there.” This was true, I realized as soon as she said it. All other attributes aside, the US really was a land of paint plenty. In the sequel, I reasoned, Herr Müller and Brushstroke would probably move there.

“It’s still a big problem in the United States, no?” she pursued, leaving me more puzzled than ever. What was the big problem? Surely not a bountiful supply of paint? Was there yet another challenge in store for dear old Herr Müller? “Which problem do you mean?” I asked, trying to sound nonchalant.

“The Ku-Klu Klan,” she responded simply. And suddenly the clockmaker’s shop, the paints, fretful Herr Müller and his bright-eyed woodland brethren vanished like a puff of smoke from a burning cross.

I brought Deborah’s mom up-to-date on English racial terminology, and tried to persuade that I was not, contrary to how it may have seemed, scoping out the possibility of joining a local white-supremacist chapter.

If you’re still wondering about cuckoo clocks (enunciate carefully now!), it turns out there aren’t any of those in Appenzell either. As I learned, they’re actually an invention of Southern Germany, not Switzerland, and only irritating tourists ever ask about them.

The Speaking of German and the Being of Retarded

2006-10-09T08:36:00.000-07:00

July 27, 2006

When I was five years old, my kindergarten teacher contacted my mother with bad news.

“Nicholas is a very different child,” Mrs. Ross confided. “I think he’s the most different child I’ve ever seen in my 20 years of teaching.”

She then invited my mother into the class to observe what she meant. In one particularly memorable demonstration, which has ever since been one of my parents’ most cherished anecdotes, she assembled the class on the floor, and then told us to go back and sit at our desks. Everyone did so, with one exception. I remained slack-jawed on the carpet, gazing out the window, dumb as an old tin bucket.

“Perhaps he’s iron-deficient,” my teacher offered hopefully.

Alas, medical tests soon shattered this charitable hypothesis, and poor Mrs. Ross was left shaking her head. “He’s just so different,” she offered at last. “He’s not on the same level as the other students. He doesn’t seem to grasp what’s going on around him. I’ve seen nothing like it in my 20 years of teaching.”

It’s hardly an auspicious start to be ranked not only the most retarded child of a class, but of an entire career. Still, having managed to get through the first 22 or so years of my life without swallowing more than the average number of shiny objects, I had begun to nurture hopes that Mrs. Ross’ grim prophesies were misguided. Would I be able to live a full life just by trying hard and being myself, as Arthur the Aardvark promised me every afternoon?

As it turned out, no! This summer, I found myself reduced once more to a simple-minded state – and yet again there could be no blaming the problem on a lack of iron. But almost: this time my deficiency was in German.

Now, like any other freedom-loving patriot, I grew up thinking of the German language less as a mode of a communication than as an available feature to add colour to a villain, like a rakish sidekick or a disfiguring scar. So it was difficult, when I first arrived in Switzerland, to actually contemplate learning to speak this rude tongue myself. At Deborah’s extended family reunion, rather cruelly scheduled for three days after our arrival, I only smiled affably and chuckled when barked at. And if any of the myriad aunts and cousins had been instructing me to go sit to my desk, I would have been blissfully unaware.

But very quickly my lack of German knowledge began to have dire consequences. And while it’s true that harping on about charming linguistic misunderstandings is a staple of very bad travel writing, it's also true that I have never pretended to rise above this level. In any case, one debacle occurred when I was trying to explain to some Swiss people the workings of a traditional Swiss game that Deborah had taught me to play in Vancouver. The game consists of two people rapping a couple of hard-boiled eggs against each other while chanting pagan doggerel (this being what the Swiss were doing when the rest of Europe was building mighty empires). I had expected my listeners, being Swiss, to recognize what I was talking about immediately, but I hadn’t counted on my exceedingly poor command of the language. What I had thought meant “tapping eggs together” actually meant “striking testicles”, which won me some strange glances from my listeners as I gushed about how quaint I found this supposed staple of their culture.

A more troublesome misunderstanding occurred a bit later on a train running through central Germany. The conductor twice favoured me with a stern lecture whose only intelligible word was “wagon,” so I assumed I was sitting in the wrong car and got up and moved. Joke’s on me! Turned out she was saying that the train was about to separate in half, and both my wagon and I were shipped off to an end-of-the line station in east Bavaria, where I had plenty of time to ponder the curse of Babel while I spent the night in a ditch by the station.

The only really successful German conversation I have had so far was with Deborah’s wunderbar grandfather, Ernst. After an indecipherable preamble, he told me I had beautiful teeth. I told him he had beautiful hair. We parted as friends.

Time Capsule

2006-08-26T09:02:00.000-07:00

August 12, 2006

Many people visit Europe in order to get in touch with history. This has always been a primary interest for me as well, but in all the many months I have spent here, I can honestly say that I never had such an intimate and visceral response to the past as I did today.

Deborah and I were driving home from Italian Switzerland, where we had spent a week’s vacation with her family. Our return route went by way of the San Bernardino Pass, one of the most important byways in Europe since ancient times, and we spent several hours exploring the towns and fortifications that had accumulated over the ages to exploit the strategic position of the valley. Moving on past ruin-dotted Chur, the oldest city in Switzerland, and through the sleepy wooden hamlets of Heidi’s own canton, we finally made it back to Deborah’s house. We were furiously hungry.

In the eating frenzy that followed, I blithely consumed the remainder of a jar of reddish sauce I found in a corner of the fridge. As I was putting the very last dab on a slice of zucchini, Deborah glanced at the jar and observed cheerily that the listed best-before date had come and gone some six years ago. Indeed, by some grand cosmic joke, the six-year anniversary of the expiration was this very week.

This gave me pause in a way that no mouldering Roman tower or precious cobble-stoned tourist town had ever done before. Six years is, after all, more than a quarter of my entire lifespan. And six years ago the world was a very different place. In the time that has elapsed since the Sauce forever ceased to be safely edible, four Olympic games have run their courses and the global population has increased by almost half a billion. When the World Trade Centre went down, the Sauce had already been festering for over a year; by the time of the Hurricane Katrina, it had been dead long enough to be eligible for sainthood. The end of its term predates the end of Arafat’s, Chretien’s, and Clinton’s – even, technically speaking, that of the second millennium. Six years ago I was but a half-grown schoolboy of sixteen, without any of the cares of age – food poisoning, parasites, intestinal cancer, and so on – to weigh me down. And even at that far-off time, the Sauce was pushing the limit of acceptability.

This, in any case, was my intimate response to the past. I’m still waiting to discover just how visceral it will be.

Unplanned Parenthood

2006-08-25T15:56:00.000-07:00

July 26, 2006

In the mood for a riotous lark, I decided to take a trip to Berlin with my friend Kristin. We travelled using a Deutsche Bahn special offer – the “Happy Weekend” ticket, which, according to the company, “offers all sorts of ways in which you can save money. Even at night, in your sleep.”

Ha, ha! Good one, Deutsche Bahn! The idea that night could have anything to do with sleep for a discount traveller on German rail is a merry jape indeed, and one which slyly draws attention away from the real purpose of “Happy Weekend”: namely, to thoroughly punish poor people for not having more money. The low-price journey from Switzerland to Berlin was scheduled to be a mere 26 hours, with 11 separate trains and one night spent in a railway station. However, because only a witless indigent would actually consider it possible to make almost a dozen razor-tight connections without a single train being delayed, our trip actually took some 37 hours, with 15 transfers and a bonus night spent lying awake on the garbage-strewn platform in Chemnitz (née Karl Marx Stadt), fantasizing about our savings and our upcoming 4:15am train departure.

I could go on about my disappointment that the Germans had dropped the ball on the one thing their kultur is supposed to have mastered: efficient trains that run on time. But I’ll leave that for someone else to pick up – God knows they already have enough to apologize for. Instead, I’d like to relate an incident that happened during our first train station bivouac, when our starry-eyed reverence for the “Happy Weekend” ticket was still whole and untarnished.

Kristin and I had just staked out some fairly comfortable benches in the Basel train station and were getting ready to go to bed (saving handfuls of cash all the while, don’t forget!), when we were approached by a woman and a small girl who seemed to be preparing to do the same thing. The mother immediately began speaking to us in rapid German. She and her daughter were from Poland, she explained, seemingly very eager to show off her command of her adopted language.

We were duly impressed, but only in the kind of abstract way that a tone deaf person might admire a symphony. For, with the exception of her statement of nationality, the guttural waves of German washed over Kristin and me without triggering any glimmer of understanding. When there were gaps in the monologue, we responded with various non-verbal signs of incomprehension until I finally remembered the German words for “I don’t know” and began chanting them repeatedly like a charm against evil.

This evidently made a very favourable impression on the mother, because the next thing we knew we were the acting guardians of her child while she scampered out the door into the Basel night. Keep in mind that, up to this point, the only things she knew about us were: A) that we were loitering around a train station after hours, and B) that we had failed to understand a word she said. Apparently this was all the proof she needed that we’d be great surrogate parents.

An awkward situation ensued. Should one of us stay awake until the mother got back (assuming that was her plan)? Should we try to find out where she went? Should we start putting money away now for summer camp and college? All this thinking about doing the right thing was tiring work, however, and pretty soon we had both fallen into carefree, money-saving sleep.

I woke up a few hours later, to the sound of the girl crying “Mama! Mama!” Mrs. Responsibility still hadn’t returned, and I was at a loss of how to fill the void. After a moment’s consideration, I settled on that tried-and-true parenting staple: glancing around the room uneasily while waiting for events to sort themselves out.

And, in perhaps the only stroke of luck we experienced in the whole wretched 37-hour odyssey, they did. Our linguistically-gifted friend came stumbling back into the train station, the screaming from the other bench stopped, and my night of passive child-rearing drew to an ignoble close.

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“Parentage is a very important profession," George Bernard Shaw once stated, in words guaranteed to elevate enormously the status of any story that quotes them. “But no test of fitness for it is ever imposed in the interest of the children."

“Also, don’t ever believe a damn thing you hear from a German rail company,” he is reputed to have said, off the record, directly after. “The trains saunter in late like unfaithful husbands, the special offers are a cruel joke, and the station platforms make very poor beds indeed. The Germans have really dropped the ball on the one thing their kultur is supposed to have mastered.”

A Word About France

2006-08-13T01:07:00.000-07:00

July 21, 2006

France is, according to my guidebook, a land of contrasts and contradictions. No need to get excited about this just yet, because, as you may know, this is precisely what every guidebook says about every country. But France, I think, merits the cliché more than some of its more innocuous neighbours, if only because of the manifest contrast and contradiction between the draconian rules put in place to enforce cleanliness, and, notwithstanding, the unrelenting filth of the entire country.

I fist noticed this grim phenomenon two years ago, when I had just moved into student accommodation at the start of a student exchange in Grenoble. Now, this residence, to put it mildly, was not what you would call spanking clean. Tiles regularly disengaged themselves from the inside of shower stalls and colonies of mushrooms would swarm to take their place. Dirt and hair middens collected in the potholes in the linoleum floors of our rooms and could not be extracted without archaeological implements. As for the single kitchen sink, which I shared with 21 other people plus a shadowy population of illegal squatters, it was a rare and wonderful day when I could see to the bottom of it. The vast majority of the time the drain was plugged beyond all hope of deliverance, while an oily, chilli-coloured soup slowly congealed over top of it.

All this was well known to the residence staff, but despite numerous complaints and even some organized protests over the living conditions, they opted to follow in the proud tradition of their predecessors by doing absolutely nothing about them. “No need to curry favour with this batch of whiney students by upgrading to a post-medieval sanitation level,” I could imagine a grubby little bureaucrat preaching to his minions. “If last year’s experience is any guide, they’ll all be dead of cholera within days anyway.”

And yet to say that they were completely indifferent to matters of cleanliness would be an error, and a serious one. For – and this is where my guidebook scores points for perceptiveness – there was one hygienic rule that they held to so vigorously as to almost compensate for their laxity regarding all the others. Let the showers turn into tropical micro-ecosystems, if that was God’s will. But if any fool tried to do something so filthy as attach a toilet seat to any of the residence’s ostentatiously seatless thrones, it would be a matter not just for the building personnel, but for the long arm of the French law itself.

I know this because I was that fool, on my very first day in residence. I had already scandalized the concierge with a number of provocative questions that morning, including a saucy inquiry as to whether fridges were permitted in our rooms, or anywhere else in the building, for that matter (“Il n’y a aucune question!” was her shocked reply. “Les frigos sont beaucoup trop dangereux!”) But when I had the gall to suggest that I might buy a toilet seat or two and attach them myself, the already excited concierge reached a new pitch of indignation. She stared at me as though I had just stated my intention to spend my time in residence manufacturing plague bacilli (a process which, for that matter, was already carrying along splendidly in the building without anyone’s help). “It’s completely against the rules,” she sputtered after a struggle. And then she said – and I’m not making this up – that it was responsibility of the French ministry of health to ensure that no one in the university put anything on the toilets as vile as a seat.

For two years now I’ve been trying to imagine how this works. Does the ministry of health have some kind of hotline that people can call to bring agents to the scene of a toilet-related offence? “Officer, officer, I was peering out from among the foliage in my shower and I saw something unusual about the john! It might just be another cockroach colony, but I’m afraid someone might have added a s-s-s-seat!” Or is their role more in the realm of search and surveillance, like the narcotics division, checking up on public toilets with sniffer dogs and the like? Either way, they seem to be applying their efforts a bit inconsistently; many of the other parts of France that I’ve visited seem strangely to tolerate toilet seats like the rest of the developed world, sometimes even accepting them as fixtures. A sickening degree of leniency, yes, but that’s what you get with a nation of such free-wheeling contrasts and contradictions.

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“But that was two years ago!” you might well protest, “and France is a land of spontaneous revolution. Could it not be that something has happened in that time – call it ‘modernization’ or what have you – that has turned the country into one of consistent and predictable cleanliness?”

Maybe this is the kind of question you pose to yourself often – God knows it is for me. If so, you were wise to begin reading this entry, because, having been back in France last week, I now have the definitive answer – and it may surprise you.

July 18, 2006 was a day of Saharan temperatures in Dauphiné, and the townspeople were keeping cool in the traditional way – surrounding themselves with great billowing clouds of cigarette smoke and sipping piping hot coffee. Being made of weaker stuff, Deborah and I decided to make our way past the overflowing cafés to the public swimming pool.

Now – and this must be distinctly understood – this was an outdoor swimming pool in France. Such a state of affairs demands the recognition of a few inescapable facts. In the first place, it means there was a flock of pigeons on permanent patrol over the pool, as indeed there is over every part of every French city, like so many feathered Luftwaffe bombers waiting to unload. Secondly, one must consider that all the pavement around was scattered generously with evidence of the passage of dogs. And finally, because this was a seedy neighbourhood in the southish part of the country, every toilet in the changerooms was of the elegantly minimalist “Third World Chic” variety – essentially a hole in the floor that does its job pretty much exactly as well as you would expect. The pool was, to put it bluntly, in a state of siege as far germs were concerned.

France’s filth, then, had stood the two-year test of time. But this was, of course, only half the battle – to maintain its position as a true ‘Nation of Contrasts and Contradictions,’ France would have to demonstrate once again a ludicrously inadequate and misguided effort to save face in the sanitation game.

I never really doubted that such an effort would be forthcoming. Indeed, as I tiptoed over the minefield of dog leavings on the pool deck, I knew with the certainty of a Greek tragedy that I would somehow be found too unclean to go into this unclean pool – the only question was what the reason would be. Unflossed teeth, perhaps? Smudged googles? A passport from a toilet-seat-tolerating country?

I needn’t have looked so far afield. When I got to the ticket window, the hairiest specimen of a man I had ever seen demanded to see the bathing suit I was carrying. When I duly presented my swimming shorts, he signalled to his security guard, and together the two of them informed me that I had to leave. Mind you, the problem wasn’t that my suit was dirty, threadbare, or even unfashionable – it was that it was comprised of too much fabric. Who would have guessed that the greatest health risk to French bathers comes not from the plague-ridden birds, the dog droppings, the Calcutta-fresh bathrooms, or the errant garbage – but rather from the few square inches of polyester that separate shorts from Speedo-style trunks. The latter, you see, are the only male swimming garment compatible with the pool’s rigorous level of germ-busting propre.

Defeated and baking hot, we stumbled back to my friend Kristin’s apartment for a cold drink. How grateful I was, in spite of everything, that she had taken the unimaginable risk of keeping a refrigerator in her house.