The Journals of Rotation

Even a century after the French Revolution, only a fifth of the population was comfortable speaking French—mostly those living in the region around Paris in the North. Others spoke different languages, including Breton, Corsican and Basque, which had little in common with French. Most of the south spoke Occitan, a romance language distinct from French. Elsewhere, regional and local dialects known as patois were widely spoken, most of which were incomprehensible to each other and to speakers of standardized French. In 1851 the French economist Adolphe Blanqui (1798–1854) noted that the inhabitants were “two separate peoples living on the same land, living a life so different they seem foreign to each other.” Thus it required a massive state effort to transform citizens into Frenchmen and Frenchwomen. Over more than a century, the nation was imposed as the main identity framework through tools of the modern state, such as education, communication, the military, and administration, the nation was imposed as the main identity framework. In his landmark study of the creation of the French nation-state, Eugen Weber (1925–2007) noted that “the famous hexagon can itself be seen as a colonial empire shaped over centuries.” This claim is not as far-fetched as it may appear at first, as the state and the Parisian elite often viewed the rural French as “savages,” and the official understanding of its citizens did not differ much from its views of its colonial subjects. Indeed, there are stiking similarities between colonial rule in Africa and the creation of the nation-state within France. In the eyes of the state, in both cases, the French and colonial subjects needed to learn about values, manners, language, the country, and the nation.

in elementary school i figured out how to customize the classroom desktop's autocorrect to make Word change whole sentences. this made it appear almost like the computer was responding to you. you could, for example, type in "where did i put my keys", hit enter, and watch it switch to "you put them under the couch". this was before chatbots, and we were all 9 so i considered it closer to a magic trick than a tech one.

On of the queens halfway through the show, “Honey, are you straight?”

“Why does this character have to be Black?”

Happy tenth birthday to this post which will apparently haunt my notifications for all eternity.

Part 2