#life style cergy

[umichenginabroad]

Abhi in Paris

Week 15: Thinking about the future & relaxing times

Monday, April 22nd & Tuesday, April 23rd – The week started off much like any other quiet week in Paris. My first few days are dilled with the heavier classes, and I spend longer hours at ENSEA working on labs and other homework.

This week, Monday kicked off with a very interesting new class—the “Unit 3” component of the culture class I had been taking all semester. Each Unit is taught by a different professor and operates differently. This one was a blast – the professor is the fun-loving and joking type, and we managed to learn a lot about French culture related to the workplace from someone who spent most of his life in Corporate France & Corporate Europe. Tuesday was much of the same with a French test on past tense verbs and several more lectures in my Communication Systems & Signals classes.

Wednesday, April 24th & Thursday, April 25th – The next few days, as often occurs with my schedule, are free from classes, and I can use the time to relax and catch up on things. I enjoyed a beautiful run down the Seine River on both days, and as the temperature warmed up, I enjoyed more time outside. Paris is such an odd place. I’ve heard that back at Michigan, there’s several days in the 70’s with lots of sun, and yet, even approaching may, we are in the 50’s with overcast skies. Point being – you’ve got to enjoy any and all warm weather you get here.

I also spent some time shopping on Wednesday trying out a huge mall in Paris that sits right next to where I lived called Forum des Halles. It is mostly underground and connects to the metro station Chatlet les Halles I use to get to ENSEA every day. Although I walked around, I never really got the chance to explore too much until this week. It’s absolutely massive, but I really enjoyed perusing the shelves of all the French stores and looking for some possible gifts for family & friends.

Friday, April 26th – Friday started with a Part 2 of my French Culture class, where our professor was back it. It was a long 4 hour class, but we spent the first 2 hours coming up with an outlandish plot as a class of an American who comes to Cergy, France from a job as the CEO of Shake Shack after committing financial fraud to start Shack Shack a small kebab business, after trying a local place Shake Shake near ENSEA. It was an awesome time! Then, we spent the last 2 hours splitting into groups and having a “brawl” styled debate on differences between the French and American work systems that was just plain comical to watch. This has definitely been one of my favorite classes at ENSEA.

After that, I took the train back home and spent the evening enjoying the good weather with some friends by the Seine. It’s always a tradition to spend an evening on the banks of the Seine, having some wine and snacks. But this time, I unexpectedly got splashed by the wake of an oncoming boat!

Saturday, April 27th & Sunday, April 28th  – My weekend went by in a blink of more of the same—running, enjoying the weather, walking around the Southern parts of Paris and some more shopping. I was super excited to have my girlfriend Sneha, with me in Paris, on Sunday to celebrate out 1 Year Anniversary. We had an amazing time enjoying the weather, getting some drinks, and enjoying a very relaxing dinner with Eiffel Towers views. What better place to be than Paris!

A plus tard,

Abhi Athreya

University of Michigan, Aerospace Engineering 2025

ENSEA in Cergy, France

[a-2-z-news]

खराब जीवनशैली के कारण स्वास्थ्य संबंधी समस्याओं का सामना करना पड़ रहा है? सक्रिय रहने के लिए यहां 5 युक्तियां दी गई हैं

खराब जीवनशैली के कारण स्वास्थ्य संबंधी समस्याओं का सामना करना पड़ रहा है? सक्रिय रहने के लिए यहां 5 युक्तियां दी गई हैं

घर / तस्वीरें / बॉलीवुड / खराब जीवनशैली के कारण स्वास्थ्य संबंधी समस्याओं का सामना करना पड़ रहा है? सक्रिय रहने के लिए यहां 5 युक्तियां दी गई हैं जानना चाहते हैं कि जब हम कोविड-19 महामारी के तीसरे वर्ष में प्रवेश कर रहे हैं, तो बिना दवा के अपने आप को स्वास्थ्य संबंधी चिंताओं के शिकार होने से कैसे बचाएं? एक सक्रिय स्वस्थ जीवन शैली को अपनाने में आपकी मदद करने के लिए अपनी दैनिक जीवन शैली में ये 5…

[blackswaneuroparedux]

L'écriture est suspension pour moi de toutes les sensations autres que celles qu'elle fait naître, qu'elle travaille.

- Annie Ernaux

Annie Ernaux was awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature, “for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory, declared the Nobel communication committee when awarding the Prize. Her work, which is mostly autobiographical, turned her in a prominent French literary figure from the unassuming teacher in literature at the University of Cergy-Pontoise. She wrote about 20 novels all around the theme of “impersonal biography”. Ernaux is 82 years old and has been publishing for nearly 50 years. She has long been feted in France, where she is one of the few female authors to appear on school curriculums. The extraordinary thing is how long it has taken the anglophone world to catch up. Despite a flurry of translations around the turn of the millennium, it was only in 2019, when her masterpiece The Years (Les Années) was shortlisted for the International Booker prize, that she began to be widely noticed. Ernaux began writing - in secret, without her then-husband’s knowledge - in the French tradition of auto-fiction, a term now bandied about beyond recognition. Les armoires vides (1974) and the two books that followed were novels based on her own life, written in a conventional form. The last of these, La femme gelée (1981) was about a married mother of two who has been “frozen” by domestic life. It offered a view of women in society that would preoccupy her for decades and led readers to assume she was talking about herself. At that point, she made an emphatic switch from fiction to fact: “No lyrical reminiscences, no triumphant displays of irony,” she resolved. She wanted to write about her late father, who had run a cafe in Normandy and from whom she had become distanced partly as a result of her education. Halfway through writing the novel she began to feel “disgust”. A novel, she later explained, was “out of the question. In order to tell the story of a life governed by necessity, I have no right to adopt an artistic approach.” Instead, she would “collate” her father’s words, tastes, mannerisms, and give an account not just of the man but of his generation and class.

It’s important to understand this about Ernaux’s work: though it is written in memoir form, she features largely as an observer or as a conduit to a shared emotion.

Despite their modesty and precision (many of her volumes run to fewer than 80 pages), the books aim to show something broader than any given self, which is why she is sometimes thought of as an ethnographer or sociologist. In the book she eventually wrote about her father, La place (1983), later translated as A Man’s Place, she admonishes herself: “If I indulge in personal reminiscences… I forget about everything that ties him to his social class… I have to tear myself from the subjective point of view.”

This viewpoint was combined with an extreme attentiveness to, and an erudite knowledge of, literary style. “This neutral way of writing comes to me naturally,” she said. “It is the very same style I used when I wrote home telling my parents the latest news.” La place was the first of her books that she felt was not “false”, and it marked the beginning of a life’s work.

Other volumes were borne of, among other things, terror (her mother’s descent into dementia), desire (a love affair with a married man), physical pain (an illegal abortion), familial pain (the death of an older sister Ernaux never knew), shame, grief and guilt (should she be setting any of this down at all?). “Literature is so powerless,” she writes. And, in Passion simple: “Sometimes I wonder if the purpose of my writing is to find out whether other people have done or felt the same things.”

The Nobel jury praised her for “the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory”. Her work is part of a European tradition of auto-fiction that has since produced Elena Ferrante, Karl Ove Knausgård and Ernaux’s young compatriot Édouard Louis. She now joins sixteen other French recipients for the Literature award. They include major French writers who became true leading figures of international literature of the 20th century: Romain Rolland (Nobel Prize in Literature in 1915), Roger Martin du Gard (1937), André Gide (1947), François Mauriac (1952), Albert Camus (1957), Jean-Paul Sartre (1964), Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio (2008), and Patrick Modiano (2014).

[inapat14]

Discover Michelle Porte’s movie about the French author Annie Ernaux

In 2019, I discovered a French documentary about the author Annie Ernaux created by Michelle Porte, which came out in 2013: Les mots comme des pierres. Annie Ernaux, écrivain. Michelle Porte is a French director, scriptwriter and documentary maker who has created numerous documentaries since the seventies. In 2011, two years after the publication of Les Années, the director encourages Annie Ernaux to narrate and open up about places, stories and events which have made an impact on her life. The aim is to understand and grasp her literary work, as well as reflecting upon writing, particularly when it’s autobiographical.

Annie Ernaux was born in 1940 and is one of the principal authors of our time since 1974, when she published her first novel Les Armoires vides. She is seen as a sociological writer, addressing intimacy, love experiences, social determinism, and the difficulty of personal development and growth through separation from our roots.

 From home to school, the past materialized in places of memory

During 52 minutes, the camera puts us into the author’s private life, highlights the different places which have made her life, starting with this house “which protects” in Cergy, where she has lived for thirty years. But the previous ones are not less important, from family house to school, from Lillebonne to Yvetot, we are invited to discover her childhood landscapes, those she has never forgotten. However, retracing the traces of her past is not always an easy experience, according to Annie Ernaux we would need to "be satisfied with memory, that is where it is".

Thus, this documentary is about the young girl she used to be, the adult she has become, it’s also about her mother, feminist before the word, a woman who could behave “like a man”. Annie Ernaux says about her: "I undoubtedly made myself both for her and against her".

 Writing as a necessity

The author also evokes the child she was, impatient to go to school and learn to read, then upset when she learns from her mother, at the age of 10, the existence of an older sister who died a year before her birth (L’autre fille, Nil, 2011). There will also be the adolescence and the growth of desire, the hope of love, the first emotions, and the rejection of authority. She also confides on the context of writing her first novel: “a period of very great suffering”, which make Les Armoires vides a life-saving story, a way to forget her feeling of “carrying suitcases of dirty clothes”.

But how is it to write about her own life? Annie Ernaux defines her writing as "material", it’s like "writing with a knife". She expresses herself in a precise, refined, sharp writing style which makes it universal, a writing coming from the depths, which carries within it something heavy, violent and real. She writes “to take words out like stones from the bottom of a well or a river”.

 Thus, Michelle Porte signs here a very beautiful film, sensitive and moving which manages to put into image the words and the silences of Annie Ernaux. This collaboration is the fruit of the same quest: an intimate one, which allowed the publication of the book Le vrai lieu. Entretiens avec Michelle Porte, published by Gallimard in 2014.

It is unfortunately difficult to view Michelle Porte's work anywhere other than at festivals or within the scope of special screenings. For those interested, stay tuned for upcoming programs because this documentary is not available on the Internet and does not exist on DVD.

[ladystylestores]

Graphic novel on the Tiananmen Massacre shows medium’s power to capture history

As a young man in Beijing in the 1980s, Lun Zhang felt like he was taking part in a new Chinese enlightenment.

The country was undergoing paramount leader Deng Xiaoping’s “Reform and Opening Up,” and previously sealed-off areas of knowledge, arts, and culture were becoming newly available.

People who had only years before been living in the stifling, hyper-Maoist orthodoxy of the Cultural Revolution, in which anything foreign or historical was deemed counter-revolutionary, could now listen to Wham!, hold intellectual salons in which people read Jean-Paul Sartre or Sigmund Freud, or even publish their own works, taking aim at previously sacred political targets.

“In those days, our thirst to read, learn and explore the outside world was insatiable,” Zhang writes in his new graphic novel, “Tiananmen 1989: Our Shattered Hopes.”

But with this intellectual awakening came a growing frustration with the pace of reform in China, particularly how economic liberalization was taking precedence over any suggestion that the Communist Party give up its tight control on the country’s politics.

An apocryphal quote attributed to Deng captured the mood at this time, that “to get rich is glorious,” but for many people, it was increasingly apparent that only a handful were becoming wealthy, while others were suffering due to growing corruption and the destruction of the social safety net.

Small demonstrations against graft and for greater political reform ballooned into what would become the 1989 Tiananmen movement, in which hundreds of thousands of people protested across the country, with the largest demonstration in Beijing led by workers and student groups.

The pro-democracy protesters occupied Tiananmen Square for months, even holding meetings with top officials. At the time, many felt hopeful that these actions would bring about wider societal change in the one-party state.

Crackdown

Zhang was on the square that spring, when the protesters put forward seven demands, including for democratic elections and an end to state censorship. He was there as the crowds paid tribute to the late reformist leader Hu Yaobang, and he was there as the occupiers sang and danced on what had become the people’s square.

He was not there when soldiers opened fire on protesters and fought with them in the streets of the Chinese capital. He was not there when the tanks rolled in. Zhang was in the suburbs of the city with another activist, recuperating in preparation for what some thought would be a last push before the government gave into the protesters’ demands.

“When we heard the army had entered Beijing, we tried to reach the square, but our efforts were in vain,” Zhang writes of when they learned of the bloodshed.

Far from reaching the center of the city, Zhang’s attention turned to escape: the authorities were rounding up prominent protesters and leaders, and he was worried about arrest. He fled first to rural China, eventually becoming one of dozens of Tiananmen protesters smuggled into Hong Kong by activists in the then British colony.

An excerpt from “Tiananmen 1989: Our Shattered Hopes.” Zhang (pictured wearing a sash on the bottom left) was a young sociology teacher in the late 1980s. During protests, he was in charge of management and safety. Credit: IDW Publishing

Graphic novel

Zhang eventually moved to France, where he has lived ever since, and is teaching at the Cergy-Pontoise University near Paris. While he writes about the Chinese economy and geopolitics, he has largely left out his own personal history prior to this month’s publication of his graphic novel.

“I worked with (French journalist) Adrien Gombeaud, who wrote the script for the format,” Zhang told CNN. “We read some graphic novels about historical events, and together came up with the plan, for example, to imagine a theater scene to link all the parts of the story.”

While the Tiananmen Square Massacre has been widely covered in the media and in documentaries, with many focusing on the iconic image of the Tank Man or utilizing archive footage from the square itself, much of the events leading up to the infamous night have been lost to history, available only through witnesses’ accounts. Zhang said that the comics format provided a key means of capturing the emotion of the demonstrations, in a way that does not necessarily come across in text.

“It is difficult to find a satisfactory way in which this kind of big event is reported, in my opinion,” he said. “In some reporting on Tiananmen, the authors didn’t reflect enough on the will of students to cooperate with the authorities in peacefully reforming China.

“When you take into account the emotion involved, we can understand why the peaceful way of demonstration was chosen, why there was the huge hunger strike.”

After the initial script was written, the authors worked with French artist Ameziane to develop the comic’s visuals, by sourcing images of the various characters, and referencing archival photos of era-appropriate objects, such as clothes, cars and teacups from 1980s China. “We spent a lot of time in discussions on how to arrange the scenes, how to convey the essential message, what limits we might have on a given page. It played to the style and skill of our painter,” Zhang said.

The shift in artistic style is most notable in the scenes depicting the massacre itself. Prior pages feature white backgrounds and muted colors, but as the crackdown begins, the pages turn to black, with a heavy use of oranges and reds. Ameziane’s illustrations become looser and full of movement, emphasizing the chaos and panic experienced by the characters.

The book is structured in several acts, with Zhang as its narrator. He said the play format was an obvious storytelling device, given “the protest movement itself felt like a drama, with its different phases akin to great acts.”

Comics journalism

Zhang, Gombeaud and Ameziane’s book joins what has quietly become a major strand of modern comics: graphic journalism or historical comics dealing with topics that were once considered out of the art form’s remit.

American cartoonist Art Spiegelman’s “Maus,” a Pulitzer Prize-winning account of his parents’ experiences as Holocaust survivors — with the Jews depicted as mice and the Nazis as cats — has long been considered a masterwork in the graphic novel genre.

While adult themes and history were features in comics long before “Maus” debuted in 1980, including in Spiegelman’s own work, its use of accessible, black and white art combined with a sweeping historical narrative broke into the mainstream, and set a new standard for “grown up” comics with political subject matter and potentially upsetting content.

Works like Maltese-American Joe Sacco’s ground-breaking comics journalism in “Palestine” or “Safe Area Gorazde,” and French-Iranian Marjane Satrapi’s “Persepolis” have further driven this trend, with the latter turned into an Oscar-nominated movie in 2007.

The popularity of comics and graphic novels has only grown in recent years — with the help of blockbuster film adaptations. This has happened in conjunction with the rise of comics journalism, in everything from newspapers to dedicated publications such as The Nib, which has long recognized the medium’s ability to tackle serious issues, interweaving reporting with satirical cartoons.

Sacco has talked about how the use of comics, the presentation of the artist and writer as a figure in the story, helps remove “the illusion that a journalist is a fly on the wall, all seeing and all knowing.”

“To me, drawing myself signals to the reader that I’m a filter between the information, the people and them. They know that I’m a presence, and that they’re seeing things through my eyes,” he said in a recent interview.

This is very much apparent in Zhang’s book, as he uses his role as narrator to critique both the protest movement and himself.

“Tiananmen 1989: Our Shattered Hopes” cover. Credit: IDW Publishing

Asked once about whether drawing helped him deal with being the child of Holocaust survivors, Spiegelman answered: “I’ve had therapy, and I’ve made comics. The comics are cheaper.”

Part of “Maus” deals with Spiegelman’s guilt over his difficult relationship with his father and in comparing his problems with depression and work to the experiences of his parents. Zhang too writes in “Tiananmen” of his own survivor’s guilt and of questioning his decisions made as a younger man in the midst of history.

In an interview, Zhang said he did not write about Tiananmen for so long, because his role, his involvement, seemed inconsequential compared to what some went through.

“The way I saw it, there were many people dead or wounded in the aftermath, and many people lost their jobs; their families were never the same after,” he said. “The real heroes were the ordinary students and people in (Beijing) and other cities. By comparison, what I did personally didn’t seem worth telling. The most important thing I could do was live my life in a way that wouldn’t dishonor the dead.”

He was eventually convinced by an editor to write the book last year, around the 30th anniversary of the massacre. “She convinced me that I had a duty to the memory of that time,” Zhang said. “I accepted it. ‘No justice, no peace,’ but I think also, ‘No memory, no justice.'”

“Tiananmen 1989: Our Shattered Hopes,” published by IDW Publishing, is out now.

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[a-2-z-news]

कोरोनावायरस: एक नए अध्ययन के अनुसार, सबसे जोखिम भरी गतिविधियाँ जो आपको COVID-19 के संपर्क में लाती हैं | द टाइम्स ऑफ़ इण्डिया

कोरोनावायरस: एक नए अध्ययन के अनुसार, सबसे जोखिम भरी गतिविधियाँ जो आपको COVID-19 के संपर्क में लाती हैं | द टाइम्स ऑफ़ इण्डिया

वायरस वॉच स्टडी द्वारा किए गए एक शोध अध्ययन में कहा गया है कि खरीदारी, सार्वजनिक परिवहन का उपयोग करना, काम पर जाना COVID-19 संचरण के लिए शीर्ष योगदानकर्ताओं में से हैं। अध्ययन में कोविड-19 महामारी की दूसरी लहर के दौरान विभिन्न गैर-घरेलू गतिविधियों में 16 वर्ष से अधिक आयु के मानव व्यवहार को ध्यान में रखा गया है, जब गंभीर प्रतिबंध लगाए गए थे और सितंबर-नवंबर 2021 के दौरान जब कोई प्रतिबंध नहीं था। 7…

[a-2-z-news]

जुंगकुक, जिमिन और अन्य बीटीएस सदस्य फिट रहने और अच्छा दिखने के लिए इन पागल आहार हैक का पालन करते हैं

जुंगकुक, जिमिन और अन्य बीटीएस सदस्य फिट रहने और अच्छा दिखने के लिए इन पागल आहार हैक का पालन करते हैं

लाखों प्रशंसकों द्वारा प्रतिष्ठित, बीटीएस सदस्य “एवर-परफेक्ट” आकार और आकार में बने रहने के लिए पागल आहार की आदतों का पालन करते हैं। 2021 में, बटर अमेरिका में 1.89 मिलियन डाउनलोड के साथ चार्ट में सबसे ऊपर था। Source link