Scribblings › Notes from Afar, September 1, 2001

Four months have passed since I moved to Paris with Jeff. Four months that, reflected upon, sometimes seem like a fleeting week, and, at other times, feel like an eternity. Every day is full of new experiences. Ironically, much of this novelty is thoroughly enmeshed with places that are hundreds or thousands of years old; what's "new" after all, has much more to do with who's doing the perception than on what's being perceived.

Mental States

My May and June were largely characterized by the shock of structureless days; as Jeff went off to work each morning, I sat up in our splendid, light-filled apartment and wondered what the day might bring. This, I have since realized, is not a wise strategy. Bear this in mind, friends: In general, you should bring something to the day rather than waiting for the day to deliver.

Not yet having learned the above, life took on a certain amorphous liquidity for these months, accompanied by a sense of isolation. I worked on a new book for between two and four hours most mornings and then took largely solitary journeys around the city.

Paris is famous for cultivating isolation. Parisians (and they will tell you this themselves) are rather reserved and not particularly good at making friends, or even friendly accquaintances. By the time mid-August rolled around, I had grabbed this taureau par les cornes ("bull by the horns" which is an oft-used colloquialism in French, just as in English), and had figured out how to begin applying my eccentrically effective social skills and began to build up a significant circle of friends (French and expat both). Jeff and I both have such singular personalities and perspectives that I think we are seen less as "Americans" by our French friends, than as visitors from our respective mysterious planets.

Still, the first two months were difficult for me, particularly since I knew I was headed to Prague (more on that later) for the entire month of July; it was psychologically difficult for me to settle in to a new home knowing that I would be leaving for a long stretch so soon. (I also was in Chicago for a week in late May/early June, which only added to my sense of chopped up time and disorientation). When I left for the Czech Republic, and during my time there, I promised myself that I would approach Paris with an altogether different strategy when I returned: aggressively scheduling activities, planning my time, making efforts to meet people. I'm happy to report that this has been almost entirely successful. While continuing to allow for some free-form serendipity and exploration, I've managed to turn things around so that my days feel much more full, and are often quite fulfilling.

Much of the way I feel about these two modes of Parisian life (May-June vs. August), relates to some evolving thoughts I have about fiction writing:

On the days I feel the best, I make things happen; I plan events that will take place and, by bedtime, I can recount my day in the form of a sequence, a loosely structured story. Days that are too free-form and allow my mind to drift into abstraction and philosophical musing, tend to make me feel aimless, even lost (particularly when I have more than one day of this sort in a row).

Narrative is engaging.

Favorite Places

Still, sometimes, as in this newsletter, narrative can get unwieldy. So I'm going to get all impressionistic on you now, zipping you through some Parisian high points:

La Parc de la Villette

My favorite non-touristed spot in the city. Perfectly manicured grass dotted with abstract red metal sculptures and strange gardens, including a below-ground-level bamboo garden traversed by extremely narrow alley-like paths at the bottom and equally narrow metal-grid walkways above. In America you'd be afraid to walk down blind alleys like this; here, it's a safe and magical experience. Follow the gurgle of running water and you'll end up standing in the middle of a cleverly austere fountain, in which the water is there more for its sonic that visual effect. Another fountain of note in the park is an ingenious moebius strip of metal tubing and air-pumped water; it's located outside the spectacular Cité de La Science et Industrie museum, a modern building that rivals the Pompidou and is loaded with exhibits that put most American science museums to shame (I haven't actually toured them, but have heard much praise and will visit on a rainy weekend soon). Because they are behind clear glass walls, I did get to see the amazing children's exhibits here -- there are separate (each very large) activity areas for kids in three different age brackets; it's all exceptionally done. The day I was there I really wished my five-year-old nephew Mitchell was with me, he would have had a ball.

[Side note: Parisian children are remarkably well-behaved and responsive. Toddlers and young kids in the parks rarely fuss, scream, or resist their parents' guidance. It's astoundingly different from what I see in the States. I wonder what's behind it. This morning, in our building's courtyard, I met, and proceeded to have a little chat with Artur, a 3-year-old, who turns out to be the son of Olivier, who works in the electrical shop next door. Artur approached me when I pulled in on my bicycle to introduce himself and explain that he would be spending the afternoon playing on his father's computer. I'm proud to say that my French is at least as good as Artur's.]

Also in La Villette: a music museum and conservatory, a playground with a fantastic dragon-shaped sliding board, hippie kids drumming and dancing all the time, theatres, a cabaret, and, in July and August, a huge outdoor movie screen which has free films every Tuesday through Sunday night at 10 pm. We went twice this year, with huge picnic dinners in tow. We also went to an elegant little two-acrobat three-musician circus in the park one night.

There's a bikepath along the Canal Saint Martin, which we can get on just blocks from home, that goes up through La Villette and then continues on for a lovely ride of about an hour, ending near a woodland area.

Le Parc Buttes-Chaumont Man-made rock mountains and waterways smack in the middle of a busy urban environment. Utterly surprising. A marionette show every Wednesday afternoon at 4 and hillside tanning daily, including women's bare breasts, also utterly surprising. (But perhaps not as surprising as the inner-city nudist park in Munich.so far I've only heard about that one.)

Chez Berthillon Yes, this ice creamery is in all the tourist books. For good reason. The scoops are tiny (compared to the full-udder-content portions doled out by Ben, Jerry, and their American kin) but the flavor impact is massive. The cacao amer (bitter chocolate) delivers one of the most intense chocolate tastes I've ever experienced (and not just from ice cream, I'm including candy, cake, etc. when I say this.). The cherry tastes as if the essence of a full pound of fruit has been reduced into the two-tablespoon serving. The pistachio, frankly, teaches you what a pistachio really tastes like; since the texture of the nut is absent, this is a more purely flavor-oriented experience. There are also choices as wide ranging as fig, rhubarb, ginger-caramel, armagnac with plums, cinammon and a bizarrely cold and creamy licorice.

Institut du Monde Arabe I love taking the free glass elevators to the roof terrace for what, thus far, is my favorite view of Paris; a well-proportioned panorama that really helps you get a sense of the layout of the Right Bank and the Ile de la Cite and the Ile St. Louis. The Arab Institute also features light activated mechanical windows called moucharrabes (sp?) that, while of recent vintage, recall the elaborate mechanical contraptions one thinks of as belonging to Victorian times (If you've seen that horrible movie, Wild Wild West, you'll know exactly what I mean. If not, my descriptive powers are failing, so I can only urge you to come visit, and I'll show you).

Our Neighborhood We live in the 10ème Arrondisement, between two major train stations, Gare de L'Est and Gare du Nord. If you visit, you can take a train directly from within the airport to Gare du Nord, which is just a four block walk from our place. At one end of our block is Place Franz Liszt, where there is an impressive church with terraced gardens, where people hang out at all hours of the day and night. Just behind the church are two fantastic restaurants owned by the same family. One, Chez Michel, is more upscale (along with bread, they give you a little bowl of tiny Breton snails with metal toothpicks to remove the meat from the shells); the other, Chez Casimir, has bare wooden tabletops, but similarly delicious (if less elaborate) food. Both restaurants have phenomenal cheese courses - at Michel, the cheeses arrive on a huge wooden cutting board, accompanied by cider jelly; at Casimir, they come in a two-tiered wooden birdcage. At both, you can eat as much as you want (most Paris restaurants give you pre-portioned cheese courses, so this is quite special—if there's something you really like, you can have more of it, ignoring whatever doesn't suit you).

At the other end of our block is the Marche San Quentin, one of about 15 major covered farmers markets in the city. The produce is impeccably fresh and wonderfully varied, the rabbits still have fur on their feet, there are several dozen options when you feel like having some pate, and (Theme emerging!) the smiling woman cheesemonger is extraordinarily helpful when you describe what sort of flavor or texture you're looking for.

There is a café/bar in the market, where the chubby proprietor keeps pet goldfish. He also has a modest shrine to the legendary French pop star Johnny Halliday decoupaged to his walls. Some mornings that's where I go to write.

Also on our block is a restaurant originally owned by Jean Marais, the movie star and romantic partner of Jean Cocteau. Cocteau prints and movie stills from La Belle et La Bete line the walls.

I can still get lost walking the streets of our neighborhood, which is fine, because there are endless charming shops and sights. Walking our dog, Misha, through the hood is particularly rewarding, because, however aloof they may sometimes be in regard to human strangers, the French can't resist approaching a friendly canine; this has led to many a conversation, which makes me feel more at home. Our next door neighbors have a dog too, a lab puppy named Lucie, who has become fast friends with Mish.

Weekend Adventures

We've gone on lots of short 1-4 day trips. Everyone should do this more often. One tends to get so caught up in the details of life in the U.S. that one doesn't go to the interesting places in easy distance of home. I can think of at least half-a-dozen places within a few hours of Philadelphia that I've wanted to visit for years and never gotten around to. Hopefully, I'll learn a lesson from Paris.

Some of what we've seen:

Chateau Vaux de Vicomte

This is the palace that made Louis XIV so envious that he jailed the owner and ordered the architect to build him his own version (10-or-so times larger...Versailles). Having visited Versailles one Sunday and Vaux the next, I can assure you that bigger is definitely not better. Versailles and its gardens are so overblown that you can't even imagine living there, whereas Vaux encourages covetous fantasies. One of the best things at Vaux (soon to be discontinued, because of structural stress) is the opportunity to climb up to the clocktower, a walk which allows you to see the impressive carpentry work that went into building castles like this one. It's quite rare to see the structure of a chateau, you usually just get to see the living spaces. At Vaux, the living spaces are still magnificently decked out in furniture and accessories, unlike Versailles which is cavernously empty. We were lucky enough to visit Vaux on one of the summer days when, from 8 p.m. to midnight, the chateau and gardens are illuminated by candle light. Touring the castle in this lighting gives a great sense of what it must have felt like to live lavishly in pre-electrical times.

There are lots of buses from Paris to Vaux, but instead, Jeff and I, along with our French friends Laurent, Stephane and Antoine, took our bikes on a 40 minute train ride and then biked another half hour from the train station to the castle. Approaching the chateau by bicycle along a quarter mile stretch of manicured tree-lined road was one of the day's highlights. I felt like Michele Pfeiffer in Dangerous Liaisons, but on a Schwinn.

Conche, Normandy

Jeff, Misha and I spent a country weekend at the rustic, rickety 18th century farmhouse of Phillipe and Françoise, the Parisians who were Jeff's host "parents" when he lived in Paris for a semester back in college. It was wonderfully lazy and relaxing. Françoise cooked huge mid-day lunches, which we ate outdoors, on a table that we set beneath a shady tree. It was a scorching hot weekend, so meals were accompanied by plenty of cool Maresques—pastis, water, and a splash of orgeat (almond syrup) over ice.

We went TTVing over muddy backwoods trails (that's mountain biking: Tout Terrain Velo) and Misha gave himself numerous refreshing mudbaths (for the next week, our apartment smelled really rank, despite a fun evening taking a bath in the tub with Mish).

Our Normandy weekend was a great opportunity for me to be in an only-French-spoken environment for a few days, because our hosts spoke very little English. It was fun. I didn't have any trouble communicating, and I got a lot of good corrective tips. I was also reading an old Simenon mystery novel in French that weekend. Phillipe and Françoise have two boys, Adrienne, 11 and Antoine, 13, who couldn't make it that weekend, but I'm getting together with them to help them practice their English later this week before they start school for the year. Presently, I'm best known to the boys as the American who served them Monstrous Roasted Eye of Cyclops when they came over for dinner a couple months back, a story which I'll save for later use (Alas, its true, many of my best anecdotes are being held in reserve for the alchemy of future fiction. I don't mind telling any stories orally, but there's something about writing down a tale that makes it feel 'spent' to me. So come visit if you want to hear all of the good stuff as it actually happened. Or read what I write in the future, to hear about all of the good stuff reconfigured and given new meaning.)

Roscoff and Isle de Batz, Bretagne

On the rocky coastline of Brittany, Roscoff is a small town that draws a considerable number of Brits and Irish because it is just a short ferry ride from the U.K. to this northernmost corner of France. The landscape has a wonderful gray-green scruffiness and the tides move in and out quite dramatically. There are quarter mile stretches you can walk in mid-day that are deep underwater by sunset. The nature of the sea here has led to the world's largest harvestable kelp bed, and both enterprising locals with wheelbarrows and major industrial operations harvest the seaweed for use in the manufacture of various food and cosmetic products. The other notable regional plant life are ecchia, 7-8 foot towering purple plants that look like something out of Dr. Suess.

We attended a choral concert commemorating the 800th anniversary of the Roscoff town church. It was free. And it was worth the price. Roscoff's best vocal talent has apparently sought greener musical pastures elsewhere.

The next night, we ran into an old woman who was one of the 100-odd singers in the concert. I said hello and politely complimented her on the performance as we passed on a footpath; she spent a puzzled few moments trying to figure out who I was and how I knew her. Jeff was perplexed too ("How could you possibly recognize her?"). But we had a charming little chat. I don't know how I spotted her, but I was happy about it. She probably felt like a star for a few minutes.

We spent the following day and evening wandering the wild hills of the Isle de Batz, just 15 minutes by ferry from Roscoff. Clydesdale-type horses roamed the pastures, while just below, the sea lapped up against rocky beach. The Batz-sters were having their annual dance party that night: about 20 people in the rec room of the town library, standing along the walls as a cheap strobe flickered and a dj played the French version of Frankie Valli's "Oh What A Night".

Barcelona, Spain

There once was an arc'tect named Gaudi,
Whose buildings defy all things dowdy,
Candy-colored cartoons,
With oddly shaped rooms.
Oft-judged doody, but boy they say "Howdy!"

This was originally intended to be the beginning an ongoing newsletter, with frequent postings on the internet. I wrote this first set of pages on September 1, 2001; ten days later, major distraction set in. I never returned to this project.