Monthly Archives: August 2007

An unfamiliar face

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Look who I spied trying to peep his head out right before I left Paris: the Tour St Jacques!
Tower_s_j

That’s right– the 16th century structure who has been getting a facelift since, well, anyone can remember, is coming out from under the scaffolding to see what the 21st century looks like! (Wikipedia tells me it’s only been under construction since 2006, but I seem to recall it being under continuous cover since at least 1999, unless I am conflating it with St Sulpice, which has also been under construction for a curious period of time, having in fact never been finished to begin with).

The  tower, which was built between 1508 and 1523, is the only remaining element of a church destroyed during the French Revolution, and features some really frisky looking gargoyles– nothing like the sage of Notre Dame (note the Tour St Jacques in the background):

Gargoyle

In fact, I’m fairly certain there is a passage about the Tour St Jacques in Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris (1831) but memory fails and so does an internet search– though this site, from whence I stole this lovely gargoyle, seems to agree.  Anyone remember?

around the internet on a Tuesday

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Vogueparis0907
As I get adjusted to my new schedule, a few links for you all to chew on.

Artemislives was so kind as to scan the September US Vogue Paris je t’aime Steven Meisel spread, and I am so kind as to share it with you. (Special Prix Maîtresse to anyone who can name the location(s) where these were shot)

Lynn Yaeger reviews a new biography of Paul Poiret for the Atlantic Monthly, and discusses her own personal (read: flamboyant) style, which has always mystified me.  She is the fashion writer for the Village Voice and the New Yorker but her sartorial choices are so over the top the only word to describe them is fabulous, in the truest sense of the word.  Fabulous, yes, but tasteful? Mmmmm… I’m not sure.  But that’s just me, and Yaeger’s article historicized and contextualized my own definition of taste (which I understand to be Chanel over Galliano, any day).  I think the article could open up an interesting discussion of what is good taste, what role does it, or should it, play in fashion, and if its role is diminished, what other standards do we possess by which to measure what we see coming down the runways every season?

Is vending books as bad as or worse than vending cigarettes? Shirley Dent at the Guardian Blogs thinks so. She objects to the National Poetry Vending Machine project, which will put a Poetry Vending Machine in a pub in Suffolk this Friday, on the grounds that it is "gate-crashing the fag end of the perceived cool of smoking culture." I guess the comparative harm of poems or cigarettes depends on what kind of poetry is being dispensed, now, doesn’t it? Some of the stuff read at St Mark’s Poetry Project is so bad it makes me want to kill myself, and by those standards I guess cigarettes are less harmful.

Gridskipper tells you where to eat in the Butte-aux-Cailles.  Yes, ok, I wrote this one.   I wrote about Literary Paris too.  And look for an upcoming post on shopping the rue des Martyrs…

And finally, and sadly, Grace Paley has passed away at the age of 84.  "All my habits are bad," she once told Salon. [via Maud]

Histoire d’une dernière semaine à Paris

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Jailbird[NDLR: Dedicated to Alice, the best reader a writer could wish for, on her birthday]

Ok, it’s not that as dramatic as all that. So I leave for New York on Friday.  Big deal. I’ll be back for 10 days or so in October and back for good on December 28th. Still, for the past few years I’ve been saying I would spend Fall 2007 in NY, and now here it is, and it feels strange for time to have caught up with my PhD schedule.  Next thing you know I’ll be defending my dissertation (roughly scheduled for Fall 2011)!

Crazy how time flies when you’re expatriating. Back in November 2004, when Dubya was elected to a second term, not long after I had arrived in Paris to stay for a nine-month research project, I sat in a café and told my friend Kaitlin that I was thinking of staying in Paris for the remainder of his second term.  "I could do my PhD in cotutelle," I told her in a voice my own and not my own, "and just live here for awhile." She shrugged her shoulders and said she thought I was being over-dramatic, but it’s my life, etc.

Three years later, I’ve just about done it: I’ve been here long enough to hear talk begin about the ’08 elections.  But in the intervening time I’ve managed to construct enough of a life here that I can legitimately say that Paris is my home, and not a place I’m killing time in til I go back to the States.  There are some plans in the works that may take N and I to California at some point, but for the moment, Paris is it.

And here we are.  The apartment is sublet, the ticket is bought, and all that remains is to tie up some loose ends, pack my things, and get on a plane.  I’ve watched Coquette go back and forth to Chicago a few times now, which helps me feel less like I’m giving something up that I’ve fought very hard to earn, and more that I’m fulfilling a professional obligation and it isn’t really a big deal and the time will fly by.  Plus, it’s New York I’m going home to– it could be worse.

So how does the condemned spend her last week in Paris?

  • I velibbed! N and I took the bikes to a quiet area in the 5th and he helped me get my bearings.  Soon I felt confident enough to set out toward Odéon, which necessitated taking Blvd St Michel, Blvd St Germain, and even, at one point, biking around the traffic circle at Luxembourg!  I biked on big roads with cars and buses and scooters and other bikes and pedestrians! It was very gratifying and I feel like much less of a gimp now.  We spent part of the afternoon in the Apple Store, two geeks loving it up among the iMacs.
  • Went to the Musée d’Orsay to see the Vollard exhibit (which was excellent).
  • Watched "Hors de Prix" and "Shortbus" with N and loved both.
  • Have had lunch, dinner, coffee, or drinks with just about every friend I’ve made here in the last 3 years.
  • I made Green Curry Chicken using the fancy spices I bought at the Galeries Lafayette Gourmet shop, but it didn’t taste quite right. Needed more cumin or something.
  • And then we went somewhere that put my cooking to shame: yes, after hearing half the blogosphere going on about it (Matthew Rose, Clothilde, Meg)  N and I scored a reservation at Hidden Kitchen (thanks to Meg, who proves herself once again to be the superconnector of the blogosphere).  I don’t need to add my voice to the gushing choir but I can confirm that all the great things you’ve heard are true.  Each course was more creative and delicious than the next, culminating in espresso-encrusted porkloin served with roast peach and homemade habanera jam.  Incredible.  And I’m now looking forward to checking out the underground restaurant scene in NYC, which the HK people assure me is thriving!

Between now and Friday I’m packing my bags, getting the apartment ready for its new inhabitant, taking some old clothes to Emmaus, hugging N a lot, and basically just wandering around town trying to register it all on my mental hard drive.   [NB: There was a certain synchronicity electrifying the Paris air before I left: while dining at La Coupole on my last night, purely by chance we ran into Julie and a certain suitor of hers about whom I've been hearing for months and have been dying to meet...] There are a few places in Paris that really just get me every time I see them (many of these are in the Marais), and while I’m away I’ll think about them from time to time to feel less homesick: rue des Barres; the rue Vielle-du-Temple as it snakes northward, viewed from the rue de Rivoli; the houses on the rue St Antoine viewed as you walk down rue de Turenne; and my own neighborhood, looking up the rue Mouffetard as it slopes gently uphill, the tops of the houses rising up one after the other til the road curves away; the light filtered through the trees in the Luxembourg; the Haussmannian buildings lining the rue Gay Lussac, whose features and curlicues I’ve memorized from so many trips up and down that street on the 21 or the 27 bus.

So the next time I blog I’ll be Stateside. And off we go…

family tree

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I met Carolyn Goodman for the first time at a family get-together in Manhattan, when I was 19 and studying at Barnard, and I remember being impressed that someone so sophisticated, well-spoken, and politically engaged should be lurking in this family I barely knew I had.  When I was growing up we didn’t speak with that side of the family (my great-grandmother having sown the
seeds of conflict between the different branches of the family tree).
But it worked out alright, because when I met Carolyn I was old enough
to appreciate her. 

The Goodmans are quite an interesting lot (one of them, Marian, a cousin by marriage I believe, has a gallery here in Paris, though I’ve never met her), full of eccentrics and geniuses (and often both in the same body). Back in the 90s, Carolyn’s son David undertook an immense genealogical study that traced our family back to a pair of shtetls in Latvia and Lithuania.  On the basis of what he uncovered, he invited us all to this family reunion in which a genealogical diagram stretched across several walls of the room.  I was simultaneously discovering my affinities for Judaism, and getting back in touch with the Jewish side of my family helped solidify my wavering sense of identity.  There on the walls was the proof.  That I had been raised Catholic was an accident of fate; my father not feeling much affinity himself for a religion to which his Italian mother had converted to marry his soon-to-be absent father.  Some religion was better than no religion, my parents thought, or better than one to which my father’s claim was tenuous at best, and so although they were married by cantor in a Jewish ceremony, they baptized my sister and I.  I was frustrated for a long time that Judaism travels through the mother and not either the mother or the father. I looked into converting but every rabbi I met wanted me to take a year’s worth of conversion classes, which would have been redundant given that I read Hebrew and had observed the Jewish calendar for years at that point.  But living in France has brought me to an equilibrium when it comes to religious identity, and I can now tolerate the ambiguity of being neither wholly one thing nor the other. 

But back then I has not yet been to France, and had no idea where I was going, having given up theatre, and was hesitating between majoring in art history and English, trying to decide if I would rather spend the next few years writing about paintings or novels.  Carolyn took me seriously, which I appreciated very much at that age, talked with me about my classes and future plans, and left me in a state of awe at everything she’d been through and everything she was. I watched her intently, a if I could discern in her movements or in her speech the trace of her tragic, heroic son, my father’s second cousin, Andrew. Of course I could not.  She was wholly herself and lived on in spite of what she had lost, and worked tirelessly for civil rights before and after Andy’s death.  She was a most impressive individual, and I am honored to have known her.

around the internet on a Tuesday

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Christopher Hitchens reviews Harry Potter (didn’t Kakutani already do this for the NYT?)  just so he can use the term apotropaic.

A review of a new book on Woolf at the London Review of Books. The topic? Her uncomfortable relationship with her servants. I know this might sound boring to some but in fact Woolf’s cook played a pretty formidable role in her daily life and had more than a marginal influence on her psyche. I’m looking forward to reading it when I have some time (The Mrs Woolf and the Servants: The Hidden Heart of Domestic Service  by Alison Light · Fig Tree, 376 pp, £20.00).

Jeanette Winterson has a specially commissioned short story in The Guardian (via Bibliobibuli)

I take a furtive step into Du côté de chez Swann and take two steps backward by reading blogs about Du côté de chez Swann.

I’m almost finished with my paper on Claude Cahun and modernist intertextuality and this site has been very helpful with the section on Swinburne.

A question of organization

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Fellow writers and academics, this question is directed at you.

Four years of undergraduate study plus one masters year plus four PhD years means I have now amassed nine years’ worth of research.  Nine years’ worth of class notes, photocopies of articles, syllabi, projects, presentations, and final papers.  I’ve saved everything from my English major and from my (undeclared) French minor and even some stuff from a sociology class on Gender, Race, and Class taken at Barnard with Lynn Chancer in the spring of 1998.  I stand before you a paper woman, personally responsible for the death of a small forest somewhere, and likely as many copyright infringements.  And now I have but one question to ask:

How on earth does everyone else stay on top of their paper mess? More particularly, I’m interested in controlling the photocopied articles which lurk in a variety of filing boxes shoved haphazardly onto shelves and into closets.  I want to know, for instance, how to find an article on a given topic when I want it.  I have articles I don’t even know I have, and I want to have a way of knowing that I have them.  The folders aren’t working because there are so many papers crammed together that I can’t read the labels.

What do you suggest? Binders? My own personal card catalog, a little box full of index cards with directions as to where the article is filed, cross-referenced to subject, author, and title? Is there a way to do this on the computer? An excel spreadsheet perhaps?

Thank you very much.

growing up means riding a bicycle

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Velib
When I was ten, I was a bicycle fiend.

Go ahead, ask my mom.  I had a cool purple bike and I rode that thing all around our neighborhood, down to Smithtown High School, around toward the end of Plymouth Road, up Wichard Blvd. (which featured a hill that I defy Lance Armstrong himself to tackle), around and down Harris Court, and back through Washington Blvd.   I was fast and I was good. I could handle bumps in the sidewalk, hairpin turns, and human obstacles, and I never fell off. 

Then the inevitable happened: I entered some kind of adolescent zone where I no longer played outside after school.  God knows what I was doing instead, because I didn’t watch much television and I sure as heck wasn’t doing my homework (you can ask my mom about that one, too).  I guess I was reading, or playing the piano, or at rehearsal for whatever play I was in at the moment. I got too big for my cool purple bike, and never thought to ask for a grown-up one.  How was I to know that one day I would be mocked by all and sundry for my inability to ride a grown-up bicycle? I, who rode like the wind, the two-wheeled purple streak of my neighborhood?

That’s right, folks.  Think back a second.  Your kiddie bikes, they had brakes on the pedals, right? Well, grown-up bikes do not: they have brakes on the handles. You have to squeeze them to stop.  And while I admit  that for someone who can drive a car and play the piano, handle-brakes ought to be no problem, I can tell you this: they are.  If you’re not used to them, then you have to go through the learning-curve.  And Parisian traffic is no place to do it!

Nevertheless, once this new bike rental scheme debuted in Paris, I was determined that if I could find a quiet spot with a Vélib, I could train myself.  This in spite of an ill-fated (and slightly drunken) attempt to ride Meg’s bike five feet next to the Canal St Martin back in June (something for which she continues to taunt me).   Two weeks ago, N and I rented Vélibs from the station at the bottom of rue Mouffetard for an outing to the Darty at Odéon.  I climbed on, rode it a little ways down rue Edmond Quenu, started to squeeze the handles– so far so good– and put my feet down on the ground to stop myself completely.  Except my Repettos slid along the cobblestones and allowed me no traction whatsoever.   I was riding and slipping and not stopping and heading right into the nearby traffic circle, which had actual cars in it. I gave a very Nathan Lane-in-La-Cage-aux-Folles shriek and somehow managed to avert the bike out of oncoming traffic.  N was already off  biking happily around the circle.  I marched the thing right back to its station and returned it before he could even get back to me.  "You ride to Odéon," I said, my voice shaking with frustration.  "Vélib c’est débile!" I cried. "I’ll take the bus and meet you there."  He did the gentlemanly thing and insisted on taking the bus with me.  Then he did the ungentlemanly thing and mocked me so incessantly for not knowing how to ride a bike that I told him to go buy his own effing vacuum cleaner and I turned around and went home.  He rerented the bike and Vélibbed to Odéon without me.

All this is a preface to a question.  Do they make grown-up-sized bikes with the brakes on the pedals? Or am I out of luck, doomed to be a Vélib reject, a bicycle gimp for the rest of my days? In NY this would hardly brand me a loser, but this is France.  Every physical activity here is highly ritualized and performative.  You don’t just ride a bike– you ride a bike.  You don’t just take a walk after lunch– you go for a walk.

You’ll be happy to know, however, that I now go regularly to the pool with N without crying.

Former crush makes good

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Back when I was pursuing theatre as a career, before I wised up and chose a stable field of work, like,  oh, writing , I spent a summer at the Williamstown Theatre Festival working as an apprentice, alongside people who are now semi-famous.  During my time there, I developed a crush on Nate Corddry, who was then a fellow apprentice, a junior at Colby-Sawyer, and a complete doll, if a little shy, and who is now appearing on a television show whose existence I have just discovered called "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip," which co-stars Matthew Perry, the sarcastic guy from "West Wing," and Amanda Peet.  And, of course, this kid I used to crush on.  He has scenes with Chandler, for crying out loud.  That is quite a meteoric rise, and as I sit here in Paris watching him on iTunes, I think to myself: I have good taste. 

I’ll note here that back in 1998 Rob Corddry was not yet on the Daily Show (although our improv teacher  Lewis Black was), and so I developed my  crush in complete ignorance of any associated family comic genius. 

Check out this interview with Entertainment Weekly where the boys talk about Williamstown. 

a Bendel bonnet, a Shakespeare sonnet

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There really isn’t enough Elizabethan poetry on this blog.

There was a time when I was handing out Shakespeare’s sonnets left and right, but alas, those days are gone. 

So here’s one just to keep everyone’s English up to snuff. Careful, though, read a bunch of these in one sitting and you’ll start to think in iambic pentameter.

XCI.

Some glory in their birth, some in their skill,
Some in their wealth, some in their bodies’ force,
Some in their garments, though new-fangled ill,
Some in their hawks and hounds, some in their horse;
And every humour hath his adjunct pleasure,
Wherein it finds a joy above the rest:
But these particulars are not my measure;
All these I better in one general best.
Thy love is better than high birth to me,
Richer than wealth, prouder than garments’ cost,
Of more delight than hawks or horses be;
And having thee, of all men’s pride I boast:
Wretched in this alone, that thou mayst take
All this away and me most wretched make.

And here’s another (Petrarchan).

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