Name Games

Yogurt singing, street names, and a truly perfect restaurant

Robert Doisneau, Paris, 1953.

Hello everyone. We’re back to good old prose paragraphs today, though don’t think I haven’t been hoarding factoids and fine points for the next list. I can’t resist sharing two words: sardanapalesque, which is an adjective that means decadently luxurious and alludes to the last king of the Assyrian Empire, and yaourter or chanter en yaourt, which are verbs for the kind of garbled singing you do when you’re trying to fake your way through a song to which you don’t know the words. Yaourter > bullshit, yes?

Jordan Mintzer and I promise to speak clearly on November 3rd, a.k.a. The Night Before Election Eve, when we’ll be screening and discussing Frederick Wiseman’s films about American democracy at the Pompidou. Info here. You can be the judge of how I did on Quotidien’s podcast “Fifty States,” talking about North Carolina in French. Elsewhere on the Substacks, I was pleased to read that Farah Storr considers me one of her favorite fashion writers, and honored that Ruth Reichl thinks of me as one of a new generation of “muscular, passionate, powerful” food writers who are “[speaking] up with clear-headed rage.” Thank you, Farah and Ruth.

I want to pass the mic for a minute to Carrie Frye, who has been helping me fine-tune my book manuscript. She is a formidable writer and this is her account of the devastation that Hurricane Helene has wrought in western North Carolina; of the Root Bar and its proprietary sport, rootball; of “what it was like to not really know what happened and to slowly start to figure it out.” Helen is the name of one of my best friends in North Carolina. Hélène is the name of a woman, supposedly a victim of a serial killer, that the protagonist of a story I worked on for a long time made up out of thin air. I am sitting here in Paris wishing I could take Carrie a hot meal and wondering how you pronounce Helene, the hurricane. They are saying “Huh-leen” on CNN, where Lara Trump, who grew up in the same town I did, said that she was incredibly concerned about people in North Carolina and continued to try to peddle the idea that FEMA money is actually going to migrants. I just finished Wright Thompson’s book about Emmett Till’s murder—about the entire immemorial system of exploitation, greed, and corruption that foments and hushes up racial terrorism in Mississippi and in America. I urge you to read it, too.

Names matter—to women in Japan, who are campaigning for the right to keep their names after marriage, to municipalities across France that are quickly unchristening squares, roads, and gardens named after the priest and sexual abuser Abbé Pierre, as Olivier Razemon writes, contrasting the ease of removal with the protracted fight over streets named after the brutal colonial governor Thomas Bugeaud. What percentage of streets do you think are named after women? 17 % in Rennes, 12 % in Paris, 11 % in Lyon, and 9 % in Bordeaux. In the village of Saint-Jean-d’Heurs, an official got tired of “the De La Fontaine streets and the de l'Eglise streets that we see everywhere” and suggested that the council start naming streets after musicians. Hence, Rue Celine Dion and Impasse Vianney. The youth are lobbying for a Place Jul, but, so far, no luck.

I find it endlessly funny that Gabriel Attal accidentally announced Lady Gaga’s engagement. Apparently she’s not mad at him. In other Olympic aftermath, the artistic director Thomas Jolly wants to organize “un grand spectacle offert à la population,” which I think is a horrible idea (can’t bottle magic, or re-brew it on command). Let’s applaud Geoffrey Sylvain, the manageur chargé des mascottes, for his response to complaints that the surprise-hit mascot Phryge resembled a sex organ: “This comparison didn’t bother us. On the contrary! If we could help locate the clitoris, our mascot had an additional utility.”

Paris graffito, 2016.

Did you know that more than 200,000 French people have been hunting for a golden owl since 1993? Well, now they’ve found him. That a gang of five women started robbing banks to feed their children in 1989 in the Vaucluse? There will be a film about them soon. Meanwhile you can read a profile of Fabrice Drouelle, host of my second-favorite radio show, Affaires Sensibles, or try to understand why it’s so difficult to get people to put shutters on Paris buildings, even though they’re an obvious defense against rising heat. Or maybe you’ve been wondering about those posters all over Paris, advertising a piano concert by a man named Omar Harfouch? The story behind them is even odder than you could guess. On the subject of yaourt-ing: I hadn’t realized that the Earth, Wind, & Fire song “September” was specifically about September 21st, until reading this article about why so many people share our wedding anniversary.

Now for the fun stuff. Our friends at the Comédie Française have written to say that you can now follow performances in English, using smart glasses that project subtitles directly on to the lens. (As a theaterphobe, I’ll be home watching “Hacks,” but let me know how they are.) I went to a perfect restaurant last week—PERFECT, I tell you, one of those ones you dream about but don’t think really exist—buzzing but chill; people of different ages in the crowd; an immediate sense of enveloping warmth, like you’ve just walked in from a snowstorm, even though it’s only rainy October; wine selection by conversation; food so brawny and bright it gets in the wool of your coat and your hair. There are gildas on the menu, pissaladière, stuffed mushrooms, and oeufs mayonnaise to die for.