Swisswatch
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
The Chimes of the Free Market Flashing
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.
Sunday, January 06, 2008
The Nibelungenlied
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!
- 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.
"King Liudegast told Siegfried that his name was King Liudegast. Thus did Siegfried learn the name of his adversary, King Liudegast."
- Spend a lot of time talking about sewing jewels onto clothes.
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 32nd, 33rd, and 34th 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!”
Thursday, August 16, 2007
The World Beyond Switzerland
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
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.
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 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
“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
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.
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
Anyway, just think of those savings!
Sunday, May 20, 2007
Pictures of Switzerland, Part V
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 18th-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
Thursday, April 26, 2007
The War on Poverty
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
Incidentally, by “poor”, they mean that my concubine and I lack assets sufficient to support me in
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.
Friday, March 30, 2007
The Two Hardest Things
are hello for the first time
and goodbye for the last
are to legally obtain a job
and to officially quit one
Monday, March 26, 2007
A Short History of Racism
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.”
Thursday, February 22, 2007
Pictures of Switzerland, Part IV
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! (
Speaking of World War II, did you know that
Tuesday, January 09, 2007
The Delicate Art of Pursuasion
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.
Tuesday, December 19, 2006
Small Nation
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
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
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.
Friday, November 24, 2006
Pictures of Switzerland, Part III
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.
Tuesday, November 07, 2006
When in Rome
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.”
Monday, October 23, 2006
Pictures of Switzerland, Part II
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
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.
Saturday, October 21, 2006
Pictures of Switzerland, Part I
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.
Tuesday, October 10, 2006
In Search of Swiss Culture
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.
Monday, October 09, 2006
The Speaking of German and the Being of Retarded
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.
Saturday, August 26, 2006
Time Capsule
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.