Visa La France

When I first started my visa application to move to Paris, I had the website automatically translated from French to English which then caused my truncated last name-first name combo to be rendered as: DEATH1 Ricky James.

It’s quite hard enough having to attend to the administration of your desire without the addition of mid to industrial strength portent.

There have been other hurdles.

Whenever I have quietly told someone that I want to live in Paris for a year or three and they attempt to speak French to me, my only impulse despite learning the language very slowly for the last 850-odd days is to respond in my long dormant German. Fully-formed, otherwise long forgotten German that springs forth like a 40,000-year-old spore from the melted permafrost of the Arctic circle2.

I’ve been watching French movies to acclimatise to the language but this has managed only to make me nervous beyond measure. During the nostalgia-heavy Arrête avec tes Mensonges — renamed Lie With Me in the English translation of the book on which it is based — I experienced what could only be described as a sort of panic attack flavoured with the twin shame of linguistic and existential shortcomings. I barely understood a word of it and had to put the English subtitles on in disgrace. The men in the film were gay and kind of sad, but at least they were gay and sad and could speak French.

By film’s end, I was all a-tear — j’ai pleuré — but I was doing it in English. If I wanted to be sad and monolingual I could have just shut my eyes and had a little rest.

All this worry may be for nought. I had my visa meeting on Tuesday morning in the city. The office was the size of two wardrobes. It had precisely two staff: a woman at the front desk who reminded me an awful lot of the hotel manager from season two of The White Lotus and a bird-limbed, officious little man about my age who spoke with a pan-European accent that suggested the work of processing visa applications might have been tolerable, even worthy, were it not for the people who wanted them.

‘I have a 10.45am appointment,’ I said to the woman when I arrived. Without looking at anything but my face she replied sharply: ‘France?’ I saw her pull this same trick on another person who arrived after me except that time she shouted: ‘Denmark?’

What fun, I thought, to be able to detect on a person the desperate scent of their preferred voyage. Though this office seemed dedicated to only a few European nations, which took some of the magic off the performance, I still wondered what frazzled aura might trigger the woman to shout, say, Belarus.

The four of us able to squeeze cheek-to-jowl in the waiting area — sufficiently motivated, you could swing a cat in there but it would not have ended well for the cat — bonded fast out of necessity. In some cultures, we were now considered married.

When the partner of one woman was taken into the back room3 for biometric scans and photography we could hear everything, despite the amusing pantomime of the closed door.

‘You have to straighten your fingers,’ the visa man said.

‘That’s as straight as they go,’ the other replied.

In the waiting area, his partner interpreted for us.

‘He’s not going to be able to straighten them,’ she said, ‘he split his hand open years ago’.

Then, with the timing and delivery of seasoned comics, we heard her partner ask: ‘What does red mean?’

‘Red is bad.’

I had an easier time of it because I wanted to be dux of the biometric machines and scored green green green for Australia. As to my actual visa application, the jury is out. I’ve no idea what I am doing. Turns out that wanting to move overseas is just a lot of admin, my premier weakness, and as I retrieved my supporting documentation for the primary application I realised that some of it hadn’t printed out at the business supply store in Boonah I’d gone to the previous day. Yeah, we have one of those. Because we’re an industrious and civic-minded people.

The type of visa I’m applying for is embarrassing but I swear it made the most sense. It’s a national talent thing for artists and/or for people who are recognised as having an international or national reputation and standing in certain domains, including literature and the arts, who wish to create their work in France.

One must obviously prove this state of affairs and I had collected a dossier for this purpose. After being called to the front desk by the woman with the nose for national spirit, I discovered that most of the documents supposed to show the man of note I claimed were among the ones that failed to print.

I showed the woman the single media release print out I could find and she scanned it, almost in sadness.

‘Does it have your name somewhere,’ she asked, unable to spot it.

My name was there, though at this point it seemed more upsetting to point it out.

Whatever happens, I’m going to Paris for three months from June but beyond that I can’t say what will transpire. None of my planning here has been what you might call orderly, reasonable or even technically qualifies as planning. I was looking at rentals back in Sydney or Melbourne late last year, in a bid to re-enter the world a little bit by venturing out of my solitude, but the cost seemed so crazy to me for the level of excitement (zero) the prospect brought.

And then a far more worldly but much younger fellow in the Melbourne office (ever was it so) who knew I was learning French asked why I didn’t just apply for one of those artist visas and move there instead?

Wait, they just let you move to Paris to write a book?

Maybe he hated me and just wanted me gone, who can say, but I went and checked and they do indeed. Subject to a few caveats, notably that you can afford to support yourself. I’m not sure I printed out enough of that documentation, either. To the visa woman in the office it must have seemed as if this man who claimed to be somebody in his home nation, with the means to live independently in Paris for a year or two, had arrived with no way of proving either and it was now up to her to decide whether to snuff out the last of the light that flickered behind his eyes.

If any of this can be said to have a rationale, other than the reflex to escape self and country, it is to wake my brain up. To be somewhere completely new and at least linguistically apart, if not entirely culturally — I’m not moving to Vietnam, for instance — will at least force myself to crawl out of the spiritual lassitude that has overgrown me as a weed.

Not much else is settled. I think I will still be working, at least some of the time, in my day job. Both my editor and me are pretending this isn’t happening and have been since December and look, he knows me well. He might be right. I hope he’s wrong.

If I do not let go and embrace a little bit of uncertainty now then I know what my future looks like, more or less, and it isn’t thrilling.

Having just turned 38 and having necessarily spent my entire adult life hustling for good work, extra work, more work and even hustling for mental health4 I have the luxury of making a choice, sensing that the rest of my life will be shaped by whatever I choose to do now. I never went backpacking in my 20s; took no gap year. I never travelled overseas for myself until February and March 2020 and then the world said alright then that’s enough of that for a while.

The other painful fact here is that the book I want to write in Paris is fiction, the book I have been threatening to write for 12 or 15 years now (when was 2008?) and for various flimsy but not totally insubstantial excuses has never actually materialised. I needed more time, I told myself; more inspiration, more skill, more of more! Less robodebt! More living.

What if, and I mean this sincerely, I am just not capable of writing fiction? What if, like at least half the people I’ve spoken with about Paris, I hate the city? I told an old school acquaintance of mine about moving when I ran into her the other day at a cafe in town and she told me a 25-minute story about the time she went to Paris and got mugged. Which is not to discount how scary that experience would have been for her, and I’m certainly silly enough to get caught out in a similar situation — just ask the rap music CDs I bought under duress in New York’s Times Square — but that kind of reaction feels like bringing a Stephen King book to the My Little Pony chat.

There is only one response to either of those hypotheticals. If I can’t write fiction, fine, I don’t. But one must try. And if I don’t like Paris, I can always come home.

And if I don’t get the visa and I come home in three months anyway, none of this ever happened and we shall not speak of it again.

Observations

Stinging Nettle

On Wednesday night while I was at trivia one of my snouts drew my attention to the notices on AusTender (be still, my beating heart) where the National Anti-Corruption Commission had posted the eight-month contract for former High Court of Australia Justice Geoffrey Nettle to handle the independent of the independent of the independent* investigation into the Robodebt Six referrals made by the Royal Commissioner Catherine Holmes, a former chief justice of the Supreme Court of Queensland. The cost of this single contract is $648,0005 and a separate contract for Nettle’s previous counsel-assisting in the Lawyer X inquiry to work with him again on this is for $360,0006 which makes this a $1 million fuck-up from the NACC under Commissioner Paul Brereton.

The true cost of its original a.) failure to investigate the referrals at all and b.) infection of the initial assessment with an embarrassing and prolonged conflict of interest is in the multi-millions of dollars given the Matryoshka doll effect of reviews and umpire decisions that have all declared, to use shorthand non-legal language, that the NACC no longer had custody of its senses.

All of this makes the section of the Commonwealth Procurement Rules used to offer the limited tender for Nettle’s (very eminent) legal services darkly amusing. Nettle’s sharp mind is intended, they tell us, as ‘replacement parts’ for the NACC.

Quite.

Local Man Discovers Simile

I was working away last week (on this newsletter, very slowly, as you must by now have appreciated) when one of those blokes walked up to the women who run this cafe to have a yarn. You know the bloke. Likes a chat, has an uncommon (except to them) interest in the machinery of World War Two, regardless of intentions comes across as vaguely threatening. Anyway, I heard the conversation and he opened it so:

‘Should have seen the grass this morning girls, it was glistening like diamonds,’ he said.

The cafe owner responded appropriately and there was a long pause before the man continued.

‘Of course I wish it was diamonds, but it was only water droplets.’

It took all of my self-control to refrain from laughing openly. It’s not clear if he thought the simile was too provocative and didn’t want to trick the poor cafe owners into believing he stumbled on to a field of diamonds or whether he frequently fails to stick to the mechanics of literary comparison due to a lack of confidence.

You know what they say: if music be the food of love, play on. But don’t eat music. You can’t eat music. It has no caloric content. If that is all you tried to eat, you’d die.

Substacked

I think the time has come for me to get off Substack.

Since at least last year the platform has troubled me in its hamfisted approach to dealing with publications by extreme rightwingers and Nazis and the empty cooing over censorship and cancellation in response to the very reasonable pleas of normal people to maybe not re-energise the rise of fascism? Please?

The issue seemed, from my distracted vantage point at least, to resolve. Not perfectly, but so little of modern life is perfect. The evolution of Substack, however, has been more profound and the problem has clarified itself not so much as what the platform owners allow to be published but, fundamentally, who they are. And who they are is not ideal.

Like most of us, I became aware of most of this via the work of investigative reporter Dave Troy who really didn’t have to do much beyond pay attention to what was going on (the most important trait of any investigative-minded person, in my honest opinion) for the rest of us. One of the biggest investors in Substack is Marc Andreessen, of the venture capital firm Andreessen-Horowitz, who has been actively recruiting for Elon Musk’s government slash-and-burn project DOGE7 and is variously on record about his pro-Trump, MAGA-aligned worldview. As Troy writes8:

The company is also a major tentpole in a parallel establishment envisioned by Andressen [sic] and other promoters of the Network State movement, which specifically aims to dismantle the United States and replace it with a federation of smaller, competing fiefdoms.

Now, there are a million arguments in any direction about the value in staying and pushing back against the toxification of Substack or leaving with one’s purity intact, and in the end I will ask and answer none of them except the one that matters to me.

Can I deal with it, in my own mind? I’ve been thinking about this a lot for a month or so now and have started the process of trying to migrate this whole newsletter, readers and subscribers alike, to an open source platform called Ghost9 which is not a venture-capital plaything for the rightwing freaks. At least, not yet.

Something at the back of my mind — did I mention my enduring hatred of administration? — was bumped to the front when, unprompted, I was contacted recently by two different journalists both working on something about Substack and its growth and they wanted to chat10. In both cases, I had to respond with something like yes, yes, happy to chat although my soul is riven and I am paralysed with indecision about what the future looks like on there for me if that is at all helpful.

And so, stirred to active consideration, I finally went in search of verifying those claims I had seen floating around and, well, here we are. Whatever this is, it does not amount to a criticism of anybody else who uses Substack to get their writing into the world. It’s just, for me, I think my stomach has turned for the final time, aided by the desolation of what is happening in the United States with near impunity and prosecuted by the very same people who want Substack to win.

Once I have finished setting up Ghost and learning how to migrate everything (I am hoping their concierge service will take pity on me and help) I will let you all know the logistics of what is to come. In the meantime, situation normal, I suppose?