The cinnamon buns are back!

I found them at 40 Alfred Place, the pop-up café that enticed me in on Friday mornings with coffee-and-cinnamon-scented wafts. Once I was thoroughly addicted to its lattes and buns, it decamped without warning - such is the cruel nature of pop-ups.

However, all is not lost - the glorious cinnamon buns of Hart's Bakery ride again! Or at least they better, or I will be round there to express my disapproval as best I can with my mouth full of bread. You can apparently find Laura Hart working yeasty magic down by the station at Arch 35, Bristol Temple Meads - I'll be visiting next time I catch the First Great Western, which suddenly seems so much more attractive...

Library Corner: I'm reading Kingsley Amis' 'Take a Girl Like You' partly for the sixties clothes but mostly because I'm certain to get a letter or a blog post or even just a postcard out of it somehow. I think  I dined out on 'Lucky Jim' for about a month.

Bristol, Sheep, Books, etc, as you do.

So, after a Big [undocumented] Trip to America, I'm back in lovely Bristol and turning tradition on its head by beginning with my...

Reading List

David Wong - John Dies At The End

The internet in book form. If this doesn't give you nightmares, well, you're obviously not a very creative person. 2 stars

Philip Roth - American Pastoral

The swan song of my American literature phase. I bought my copy on a gasping, blistering hot day in Philadelphia in a dozy little bookshop near the public library. I rearranged their Shakespeare section for them. (The shop, not the library, obviously.) Reading this on the bus to New York, I came across a note in the back, reading something like: 'Vienna tomorrow. I am so sick. Prague was nice.' Some idealistic young earnest had taken this to Europe on his Big Trip, and now I was reading it in America, on mine. Poignant. I give it 3.

Rose Tremain - Restoration

One of the best 'voices' I have ever heard come off a page, this diary of a 17th century surgeon turned professional cuckold turned surgeon again seemed oddly familiar as I read it. Then I realised I had seen the film aeons ago. IMDB tells me it stars Robert Downey Jr, or, 'Robair Doonee Joonoo' as my French landlady calls him (he is her favourite actor). A very rare narrator, in that your annoyance and frustration with Merivel increase in direct proportion to your liking for him. And as if one spot-on character wasn't enough, Charles II could be twirling his moustaches enigmatically in your very own living room and he wouldn't be more real than Tremain makes him. 5 stars

- All George MacDonald Fraser's sublime 'Flashman' novels bar 'Flash for Freedom!' and 'Flashman at the Charge.' My fave so far: 'Flashman and the Redskins' but possibly just because it's the last thing I read and therefore the only thing I can remember in any vivid detail. Five of the best. Five Victoria Crosses. Five runs, five smokes, five gulps of whisky, five fast ponies, five smouldering houris, five enormous sacks of cash and five inches from certain death...

A terrible hit-and-miss literary buffet. Someone told me recently, "you're a pick-and-mix dilettante and before you know it you'll be thirty and managing a barnes & noble." They said it was a Simpsons quote but I can't confirm that.

This is the way I cycle to work in the morning (on the days I cycle - it is getting a bit dark for all that now). Here's the Avon Gorge, looking west from the Suspension Bridge:

This is looking east, towards the city:

Certainly wakes you up.

On Saturday we went to St Werburgh's City Farm, in (I think) the nicest part of Bristol and a lovely allotmenty community-minded kind of place. Here are the sheep. I laughed so much, they just sounded like a man doing an impression of a sheep, not like a real sheep should sound at all. Just like someone pretending to be a sheep very badly.

Lyon

I have finally been somewhere in France other than Paris, look:

For some reason a DELF B2 exam costs around €100 more in Paris, even when you take into account the train fare to elsewhere, so I made it into a day trip to Lyon. It went fine apart from the listening part, imagine a stuffy, uncomfortably-warm classroom, clock ticking slowly towards 5pm, tape broken, tape machine broken, the waiting, the agitation, "ok, we'll start again," which fatally wounded my ability to concentrate. Lyon's team were playing Bayern Munich so the town was full of jubilant German parties singing, "Baaayern München, tra la la la la!" I have never before seen football spectators so unthreatening. Everyone, in general, was lovely. The lady at the postcard shop, the waitress where I had lunch, my examiners, people I asked directions, two guys I bought a salad off before I left – everybody was charming and respectful and smiley.

And then I got back to Paris. Since I last updated I've had a gun pointed at me at the fairground, been to the lovely Musée Marmottan and the pretentious 'resto tendance' La Gare,
wandered through centquatre (of which more soon), and popped into the delightful sweat shop, which I'm sure you've read about in the Guardian, darling, squeezed in between those articles about how great Nick Clegg is and how he reads Beckett and speaks five languages. (I don't know why people are calling him a '2nd Tony Blair,' he appears to have stolen that dubious crown from Cameron lately, but come on, my french accent is better than Tony Blair's. )

Oh, I can't remember if I talked about Le Bistrot du Peintre or Chartier, or a million other places Paris has revealed to me recently, like Baron Samedi's. That place is covered with vintage jazz swing soul posters, and a flicking projection of retro advertisements (mosty for cars and cigarettes) adorns the back wall. A wire sculpture of the man himself sits on a high shelf, throwing an eerie shadow of his top hat and, underneath, his grin, onto the wall behind him. A bar with a late feel, they do a v respectable €2.50 half, but though happy hour's only until 20h00, you'll pay €3.50 for pints and €4.50 for cocktails. They swing open the windows so inside and outside can mingle. Oh and they do €9-platters, the kind where they plonk a sausage, a hunk of cheese and a bowl of cherry jam on a wooden board, and accompany it with a whole Poilâne thin-sliced loaf in a basket. Enough; it's cool, essentially.

I am starting to get melancholy and even slightly panicky about leaving. If I can once more draw the analogy between Paris and a difficult relationship, it's been good to me, it's been bad to me, it frustrates me more than I can express, but now I'm finally leaving it, all I can think of are the good times. After my first go at packing, I'm heading out for an aimless wander through the centre, just to soak up some atmosphere, and maybe buy myself a leaving present. A nice slicing knife, perhaps, or a kooky household gadget from pylones, or some shoes, or sunglasses. It's been fun, Paris, now loosen your grip and let me go. No clinging to my knees. No. I have a train to catch. Get up. Honestly...

Climb and Bunishment

I've been so preoccupied with books lately I've been neglecting the 'Paris activities' narration. The last Sunday in March is, apparently, International Tree Climbing Day, so I went to the Parc Buttes Chaumont and shimmied up one. (More like five.) Unfortunately I don't have a 'view from the top' photograph but it was a little like this:


Then last Wednesday I mooched round the exhibition on 'Crime et Châtiment' at the Musée D'Orsay, after hearing a segment on France Inter, the French old people radio I listen to, broadcast live from its opening. We began at the beginning, with Paradise Lost and the slaying of Abel by his brother Cain, and continued via various mugshots of moustachioed criminals. The line between art and historical documentation was satisfyingly vague, with newspaper accounts of gruesome fin-de-siècle murders shoulder-to-shoulder with Goya and Magritte depicting crime, transgression and bloodshed in their own fantastical ways.

The French Revolution subject of the 1793 murder of Jean-Paul Marat by Charlotte Corday was, er, done to death, both immediately afterwards and posthumously, around the sort of time the Pre-Raphaelites were doing their Ophelias and such. Great lesson in 'who's the good guy' and how it changes over time. Needless to say, my favourite part was the AMAZING gooey blueberry muffin in the café, though I did have some reservations about my plastic cup of tepid water which I received after ordering tea:

Me: 'Excuse-moi m'sieur, mais c'est quoi ça, s'il vous plaît?
Waiter: 'Ah! Désolé, j'ai oublié le thé.'

Hands me a Lipton's teabag. (Obligatory 'I hate this country' moment.)

Here's a fantastic little video (courtesy of le Figaro, in French) which takes you round some of the ace paintings.

Ok, and then today, a surprise Venetian Carnival on the banks of the canal at Bastille, where head-to-toe Dukes and Duchesses behind creepy fixed masks were wandering around mingling with the commoners. They disguised (badly) the bridge as, like, Venetian, and stalked gracefully across it fanning themselves and inclining their heads to the crowd. We think they're the French aristocracy who have to pretend they like living in a republic the rest of the time. It's probably the one day of the year they get to come out and be cheered and receive the adoration they feel is their due. I did feel a bit like a mob, but no irrational desire to guillotine, luckily, though there is one in the Musée D'Orsay until the 27th of June...


Reading List

Man in the Dark, by Paul Auster

I think I chose this book because of the Chatroulette Piano Guy and his 'Man in the Dark' improv section. (Tell me you've seen it. No? Really? Sigh.) Merton, the Piano Guy, is better. This is yet another book in which the perfect couple are happily married for many years, until he makes the dire mistake of leaving her for a sexy younger woman, the wife is devastated but recovers, and he regrets his error for the rest of his life. Like 'Everyman,' like Lonoff in 'The Human Stain,' like, well, nearly every one of these recent American novels of mine has an incidence of infidelity. I think it's the mark of the noughties, the presence of this problem that, while men and women hold an increasingly equal footing (financial, emotional, professional) in their relationships with one another – or maybe because of that fact – it's still gut-wrenchingly shocking when you find out he's got a floozy. And I don't know what it is with Paul Auster, he's good, but he makes me feel bad. (Lit Crit at its finest, wouldn't you say?)

I haven't really digested this book yet so I can't give stars.

Rats, smiles, Jasmine and rosemary.

When I sceptically googled, “Where can I find fresh rosemary in Paris on Easter Saturday morning?” I didn’t expect much of a response. Maybe an American gift brand of ‘Paris Soap’ scented with herbs, shipping direct to your home. But I’m cooking roast lamb for Easter Sunday lunch tomorrow, and fresh rosemary is a must, so I set myself the mission of locating some.

Half an hour later, having deliberately dressed down in jeans and a hoodie, I arrived at Barbès-Rouchechouart Market. Held Wednesdays and Saturdays under a railway bridge a couple of streets behind the Gare du Nord, in a quartier often delicately described as ‘cosmopolitan,’ this enormous improvisation of stalls feels like a different country. Bright fabrics give way to mint and merguez, stallholders address their customers in French, Spanish, and Arabic, and each other in ten more languages. I feel a bit (ok, I lie, exactly) like Jasmine in Aladdin when she escapes from the Palace and is startled by the fishmonger shoving a trout in her face. I had barely been there ten minutes before I got fed up with “Anglaise! Elle est anglaise! Serve la dame anglaise!” I was stopped and fed bits of orange and sausage, propositioned very politely at least four times, often accompanied by compliments on my smile (I was very overexcited) and having left the house for rosemary, I came home with:

- Three little cantaloupes, one of which I am eating now for lunch and which is so sublime my eyes keep rolling back in my head and I keep losing focus on the screen (€1)
- Five parsnips (€1) The French don’t really know parsnips that well, the small boy running the stall told me he couldn’t give me any fewer than 5 for €1 and as he piled them into a bag curious French ladies looked over and asked me what they were. “Mais, des panés, Madame! Très bien roti avec un peu de miel,” was my too-enthusiastic response. That’s how people know I’m English.
- A kilo of Moroccan haricots verts (€1) These are €3.99 per half-kilo in Franprix. From Kenya.
- A handful of spicy olives (€0.80) for tomorrow’s pre-lunch picking, and five ripe tomatoes (€1 something, we had a bit of a mix-up) for the same.
- A big bunch of mint, to make mint sauce for the lamb (will have to call my Granny and find out how, though) (€0.30)
- A bunch of rosemary (€0.50) Actually, I’m not sure about this, I was too excited at having found what I came for to pay attention to how much it cost. Cheap, anyway.

I'm now back in my apartment counting my purchases and listening to some very Parisian accordion waltzes drifting through my ceiling. On my way home, a girl on the metro had two delightful rats in a cage.

Yesterday my bank account was blocked and my card swallowed, so I couldn’t buy my monthly Navigo pass for the metro. Could it be the one day there’s a contrôle at my stop? (Do bears shit in the woods?) Of course it could. Luckily I brandished an old ticket and hurried through it unscathed. In the evening, I had dinner with the French-Italian couple (I go for the company, I stay for the parmesan) and related my woes. He said, “But that’s the difference between France and Berlin. In Berlin, you’d be stopped and told ‘ah, I know you are only a tourist, but you have bought the wrong zone ticket, you should have used the machine to select the right tarif and the right zone, it is a crime to break the laws of the transport system, I am fining you €50’ but in Paris– ah, in Paris, we only pretend to care.”

Paris, for once, is in my good books.
Speaking of good books…

Reading List

Exit Ghost, by Philip Roth

I have lots more to say on Roth and American Lit which I shall do very soon. I have been to the library and got two more Austers and an Updike so had better shift PR out of the way before I get too into those. The above is apparently Nathan Zuckerman’s final appearance. I found the writing weakened in this book and linked it mentally with the protagonist’s age and decline. So I should either take away or add a star for that, depending on whether Roth intended it or not, but since I will never know that (or know whether, in the end, it matters) I won’t.

Score: Four successive kings [of] Denmark. (If Roth can quote Hamlet, so can I.)

Belle de Jour, by Joseph Kessel

This I read in French. And, my God, what French. I marked a passage mentally for quotation as I read it, and just now opened this short but intense novel at precisely the right page:

L’endroit ou Hippolyte se rendit était un petit bar ouvert toute la nuit en face de la Halle aux légumes. Là, on commençait à sentir le bouge. Les tables souilleés, les détritus sur le carreau glissant, le vide de la salle et une bizarre lumière, à la fois fatigante et confuse, serraient le coeur. Dehors passaient de lentes voitures chargées d’un butin imprécis, avec des chevaux luisants et des homes à moitié endormis, chaussés de grosses bottes et munis de fouets énormes. Une sorte de barbarie régnait sur le lieu.

My translation (sorry, I couldn’t find one, it’s not perfect):

“The place at which Hippolyte rolled up was a modest all-night bar opposite the Halles vegetable market. There, one began to sense the shady atmosphere. The grimy tables, the detritus on the slippery tiled floor, the emptiness of the room and a strange light, at once tiring and vague, all clutched at the heart. Outside, slow vehicles passed, laden under unspecified loot, with glistening horses, and men half-asleep, shod in fat boots and bearing enormous whips. A kind of barbarity reigned over the scene.”

Very good practise, incidentally, for my past tense revision, lots of it being literarily written in the passé simple. The heroine is one of the most selfish, boring, annoying characters you’ll ever have the misfortune to meet in fiction, but the writing more than makes up for her, and I can’t pretend the plot isn’t edge-of-seat stuff. We all know the story: repressed bourgeoise ‘ousewife by day, masochistic prostitute…also by day, actually, she does it with a procession of lower-class men in the afternoons. Ends badly. Buñuel made a film of it starring Catherine Deneuve, who is on the front of my book, looking startled and rabbity and very blonde.

Four stars: Plat du jour

What I Loved, by Siri Hustvedt

Guess what, it's about intellectuals in New York being friends with each other and going to gallery openings! Nah, it's better than that. A good, in parts very good, novel, but the second half could be more tightly-plotted, especially as I got the feeling that was the important part. It reminded me of a badly-focused photograph in which the face of the subject is blurry and indistinct and yet the fern, the table, the lamp in the background are sharp, precise, exact.

Score: Three New York intellectuals (This is how I will grade her books from now on.)

Los Desaparecidos

Today I went to a free event at my local library on 'Los Demonios'. It's both a novel and a play, written simultaneously by a French author called Valérie Boronad, currently showing at the Vingtième Théâtre. VB gave a lecture on her work and read extracts from it, before a group discussion.

She seemed to find it difficult to get away from the topic of how someone who has no connection whatsoever with the events she describes has the right to enter into their world, almost as if she feels guilty for doing so. The group vacillated between the admission that all horror is shared human pain, whether it be the war in Algeria, Nazi atrocities, Bosnia, Spain under Franco, or Argentina's Dirty War, and the criticisms of two Argentinian woman who had fled to France during the period and who had plenty to say, largely along the lines of, "I know this is fiction, bien sûr, and not la vérité, but honestly if your protagonist had done that he would have not been allowed to live, he would have been shot instantly." Boronad patiently (yet slightly defensively) tried to explain that in her novel, Luis is more useful to the junta alive than dead, and he will die soon in fulfilling his mission, but they laughed together and speculated that, in fact, he was more useful to the author alive than dead. They may have had a point.

We had assembled in the amphithéâtre underneath the Bibliothèque Place des Fêtes, a warm, carpeted space with wicker chairs and lamps, perfect for intimate readings and discussions. It became full of ghosts, from Tango's dead father, Luis, to the invisible audience of one to whom all art is, perhaps, directed. One Argentine lady with a deep, husky voice was a singer: "When I sing," she said, "I don't sing for the audience, or even for myself. I sing to some intangible being who becomes the focus of my expression." Boronad agreed. She quoted Russell Banks, the American writer, who she implied wrote to 'The Angel On The Roof,' and who defines the relationship between the reader and the writer thus: ‘A story is ultimately, of course, about the teller, but the ambition is to try to make it seem like it's about the listener or the reader.’ You write for your imaginary audience, though you don't yet know who they are. The connection, the moment of identification, of reaching out and hooking in whoever happens to be standing by is what counts. Strangely, she tried to convince us that she wasn't one of those authors who writes only about themselves, but one to whom a story arrives, fully-formed, as if she is merely the conduit. A mysterious example of this, she explained, was the occasion on which she invited members of the Argentinian association for los desaparecidos to watch her play. Beforehand, they were reticent, skeptical that some foreigner could claim to grasp what they had been through. After the performance, they were profoundly moved. She had created something genuinely Argentinian, (she said) they said.

I was tempted to go to the play, which is apparently a mixture of theatre and film, an experience rather than an entertainment. It even incorporates smells, for example, the perfumed, maternal smell of the mother who leaves her husband and her country clutching her infant to her breast. Wacky and cool. As the boat pulls away, the baby tastes salt. The salty sea, which has a great presence in the novel, blends with the tears of Anna, and to her child's senses they become one.

At the end of the reading, we're discussing the evocative nature of the sea-scenes. Boronad says she was born by the sea in the south of France and grew up by the coast. It is always there, she says, always present in her mind. You can't not write about yourself, I think, even if you don't realise it at the time. I am with Russell Banks on this one, and so have shifted him to the top of my reading list. Man sounds great. Can't wait to dive in.

Cycling, cinema, lots of books.

I cycled home from school yesterday because I sensed that Spring had arrived. It was still pretty cold on the knuckles, but I wasn’t far off. Beautiful day. And I went to a film called ‘An Education,’ about an intelligent and precocious schoolgirl who has an affair with an older man. I agreed with my landlady’s verdict: “Elle a perdu un homme, c’est pas le fin du monde, quoi.”

Reading List

The Human Stain, by Philip Roth

Continuing my foray into American Lit, everything I read by Roth makes me like him more. This one has some interesting takes on perspective: he gets behind everyone’s face, under everyone’s skin. I should take a star away for his persistent writing-about-and-perhaps-exclusively-for-academics but I can’t. I also can’t reveal the plot because there are excellent twists.

Score: Five Stains

The Children’s Book, by A.S. Byatt

Possession is to A.S. Byatt what Midnight’s Children is to Rushdie, the big prize-winner that lends a flavour to all subsequent work but can never be topped. I’m not sure this one was worth all the hours the author clearly spent at the V&A researching it. Fewer glazed pot and fabric and Morris wallpaper descriptions and a tighter plot might have helped. Also, at the end of any novel containing the words, ‘1890,’ ‘Edwardian,’ ‘Golden summers,’ ‘cricket on the lawn’ in the blurb, you just know every young male character bought it in the trenches before you open the cover...

Score: 3 stars

The Crying of Lot 49, by Thomas Pynchon

This one’s a cracker, Italo Calvino’s ‘If on a winter’s night a traveller,’ as written by Hunter S. Thompson. Mysterious, deep yet light, and terribly accomplished. I will remember and recommend and re-read.

Score: 49 stars, look out for the best renaissance tragedy plot ever



Entre Les Murs, by François Bégaudeau

Great French semi-autobiography which became a film, English title: ‘The Class,’ about teaching French in a collège in the 19e. I loved this because of the snippets I recognised from my own staff room:

‘Personne sait faire le recto-verso sur la photocopieuse?’
‘Non, mais ‘y a des gateaux secs si t’en veux.’

Inspiring, authentic, a colloquial classic.

Score: cinq étoiles, moi j'sais pas

The photocopier was broken yesterday, stretching our creativity to the limit and singling out the lazy worksheet-centred teachers from the improv. masters. A little spot of pendule filled the gap nicely.

The above are overdue at the library so I'm heading up there this afternoon. I have done many more interesting things but will have to leave them for another time.

Verlaine (1844-1896)

Reading in French is so incredibly good for my language skills. I shouldn’t be surprised, I suppose; the reason my English is so good is because I’ve spent so much time with my nose in a book. I remember being at primary school (another of those resurfacing memories caused by teaching in one) where occasionally someone would ask me how to spell something or what the right usage of a word was, and I would tell them without thinking about it. Seeing long words and uncommon grammatical structures in front of your eyes helps you recognise what’s right and what’s wrong instinctively. I like reading biographies in French because they’re interesting yet factual, apart from the occasional 'Paul Verlaine fled to London again like a bat out of hell' they’re blessedly free of complicated metaphors or double meaning or philosophical debate and so very easy to understand even if the vocabulary and the grammar are more advanced than I’m used to (i.e. more so than ‘Direct Soir’).

Anyway, Paul Verlaine is a nasty piece of work. The spoilt only child of an indulgent mother who kept her miscarried foetuses in jars, PV is classic self-obsessed wild artist type, keeps losing decent jobs obtained through connections, drinks, whores, eventually marries nice little French girl and before she even gives birth to their son is running around Europe with young poet Rimbaud (who, this biography says, is an intolerable peasant type who insults everybody and abuses PV dreadfully.) After he shoots Rimbaud in the arm (!) he goes to prison, during which he, remarkably, embraces Catholicism. Renouncing all vices, he writes religious poetry. When he gets out he runs to Stuttgart to find and convert Rimbaud, who is having none of it (PV spoils his case slightly by going for a romantic walk with R and frantically trying to embrace him.) After this fiasco he lives in England by himself teaching French for a while. (At some point the poor wife finally dumps him.) Comes back to France, indulges pastoral fantasies, develops various ill-considered attachments to young men who remind him vaguely of Rimbaud. (Still drinking and whoring throughout.) Works as English teacher by virtue of his time spent there, invents technique of talking French with an English accent (no, seriously, his pupils must all say Bon-jewer Mon-sewer Verlayne when he comes in). When his poetry takes off, he surrounds himself with young protégés who remind him vaguely of Rimbaud. (All these are mentioned in the biography as ‘young men who remind him of his own dear son, forbidden to him since the separation’ (balls).

Aged about 50 but looking about 80, he catches on to the wheeze of foreign lecture tours fairly late in life, and, dressed like a tramp, staggers around Europe mumbling incoherently before room after room of aghast foreign academic and literary circles, gleefully spending his fees on, yup, drink and whores.

Dies in excruciating (and not entirely undeserved, in the opinion of this biography reader) pain.

Another reason I like reading biographies is the occasionally breathtaking gulf between how a person appears to the world – in where they live, who they know, how they dress – and the work produced by that inner hidden self that can so outshine the former. Why were all those Belgian and English literary circles so surprised at the disparity between the poetry that had inspired them to meet the author, and the reality of the man himself? In my edition of French Grazia a couple of weeks ago there was a short interview with some yummy intellectual, now aspiring film director, who gave Rimbaud as his main influence. Une Saison en Enfer is cited with reverence as a pivotal literary work. Rimbaud gave up writing when he was 21 and his life was a mess through his leg amputation to his early death. I don't know what to take from this.

Is the gap between the mundane and the visionary at its greatest for the artist? If so, are these great works produced because their real lives are so crummy? Or are their real lives so crummy because they can’t handle the magnitude of the creative force inside them?

Or is this gulf present for everyone? In which case, every single person is a mass of emotions and desires and beautiful, poignant thoughts and impulses hidden behind an ordinary face and body, nondescript clothes, an undistinguished existence. The artists don’t have more feeling than everyone else, they are just the lucky ones who manage to squeeze some of it out. And when they do, we turn to them in awe and admiration, exclaiming, ‘that’s just what I wanted to say!’ projecting our own mute experience of feeling into their words, their pictures, their music.

I'd like to talk to a French person about Verlaine and Rimbaud, and see if they think the end product was worth it. I can't get very far at all without hitting words I don't understand, and being put off by too many exclamation marks and dot dot dots. (Or maybe they are just rubbish.)

Cinéphiles look away now

I knew never going to see new films at the cinema would pay off eventually.

UGC is showing the 25 best films of 2009 at €3 each this week. Last night I went to 'Le Concert' at Bercy.
It's one of those films that would fit into the New Yorker Cartoon Lounge's bit on 'Confusion at the Cinema':

Homme A: "Tu vas voir le concert ce soir?"
Homme B: "Mais quel concert?"
Homme A: "Non, je veux dire 'Le Concert,' tu y vas?"
Homme B: "Je sais pas, un concert de quoi?"
Homme C: "Et où sont 'Max et les maximonstres'?"

Ok, the last bit doesn't translate at all.

See it. I loved it. During the opening credits, I realised with an inward groan that this film was going to make me miss playing in an orchestra. It also made me want to speak Russian, and go to the Théâtre du Châtelet, and drink an entire bottle of vodka when I realised none of the above were going to happen.

The plot revolves around classical music, but it's not un film intello, it's something anybody can watch and love and feel that they want to participate in. Without wanting to give spoilers, I drew an analogy between the orchestra and the soloist in the beginning of the final scene, and the audience and the film itself. (See, another point in favour of 'Le Concert': it brings out beautifully everyone's inner ridiculous pretentiousness, but that's okay, once in a while.)

When You Say The Year, Now You Start With 'Twenty'

I'm back in Paris for deux mille dix. (I said I would incorporate French eventually.)

Almost everyone here is mad for the soldes, every shop is offering 10%, 20%, 40% off, and I am assured they will get even more extreme before it's all over. In my experience January sales involve crushing around in busy hot shops taking your coat on and off to try on optimistically a) the top with the great floral pattern that turns out to be four sizes too big and b) the perfect versatile pencil skirt that ends up being four sizes too small. Still, sales are all about optimism, so I went to Printemps, the huge department store, on Thursday to check them out. I was just like Dougal in the lingerie department. Burberry swimsuits swam in front of my eyes and blaring music assaulted me from every direction. Heavily-made up fifty-year-old ladies in killer heels verbally abused the concession staff in Spanish, Russian and Japanese, and the staff then took their frustrations out on the queue for the changing rooms by verbally abusing them in French.

I eventually found the loos and had to hand over €1 to an air hostess holding a spray can, who escorted me to my cubicle. The waiting males outside were slapping each others' shoulders and squeezing out tears of mirth at the six different colours of toilet paper on display, and the various potions and lotions available in this highly superior urination station. I have never seen men outside a toilet less bored. I left.

Reading List:

Favourite Christmas book goes to 'Faces of Humph: Cariacatures and Memories' by Humphrey Lyttelton, which got me through that interminable stretch of Christmas Day between the Queen's Speech and the trifle and salmon sandwiches.

Score: Take Five stars (it's a jazz book. Sorry.)

'The Cleft' by Doris Lessing

This great woman (born 1919) is still alive and writing, despite having written a perfect novel ('The Golden Notebook') in 1962. I can say that of no other author. She won a Nobel in 2007 for 'The Cleft,' clearly because it was too late to give her one in 1962. Anyway, it's a fable about the origin of the sexes, in which a tribe of women who live by an enormous vagina-shaped rock slowly discover and are discovered by a new male gender. I know what you're thinking, so I'd like to quote her on feminism:

"What the feminists want of me is something they haven't examined because it comes from religion. They want me to bear witness. What they would really like me to say is, 'Ha, sisters, I stand with you side by side in your struggle toward the golden dawn where all those beastly men are no more.' Do they really want people to make oversimplified statements about men and women? In fact, they do. I've come with great regret to this conclusion."

– Doris Lessing, The New York Times, 25 July 1982

She's one of the good guys.
Score: Three Nobel Prizes (probably more if by anyone else, but I'm comparing it to a perfect novel)

'Runaway' by Alice Munro

A lot of people make a big fat fuss about Alice Munro. This collection of short stories could be titled by short story cliché: "Is She Or Isn't She Adopted," "Is She Or Isn't She Psychic," "She Married The Wrong Brother," "He Had A Twin All Along," "She Went Funny-Religious," "Who Knew He Was Going To Jump In Front Of That Ole Train," etc. I did enjoy reading this. There was some great writing in it. But I couldn't escape the nagging feeling that all the characters were either Alice Munro or unfair caricatures of people who didn't like Alice Munro. Also, I'm sick of reading about generic wild environments e.g. coastline, islands, forests, etc.

Score: Three stars

'Oracle Night' by Paul Auster

Paul Auster is the one married to Siri Hustvedt, you know, the one I said wrote about "intellectuals in New York coping with the past, having dinner parties with each other" well, guess what, this is about a novelist in New York, I'm sure there is a dinner party involved, or at least some picking up of supper from a specialist deli. It's one of those books where the title of the book is also the title of the protagonist's book, which we are allowed to glimpse extracts of. (Like 'The Golden Notebook,' in fact.) Actually, beh, er, in this case it's the title of a book within the protagonist's work-in-progress. It's three-deep, clever, but Paul knows it, and Siri does too, and I bet they're in their New York loft right now eating very expensive delicatessen supper and talking about how clever they are.

Score: Four stars, it was damn good really, despite my resentment.

'Everyman' by Philip Roth

I can't believe I've never read any Auster or Roth. One would be understandable, neither is inexcusable. I loved this. This is about 'The Life and Death of a Male Body,' as the protagonist would call it, as he says from inside the book, if he'd ever been a writer. The most similar thing I've read recently was DeLillo's 'The Body Artist,' because they don't just address Death in an expansive, philosophical sense: I felt they both really try hard to understand the physical nature of a human body, its potential, its limitations, and how these fit with who we are inside it. I finished this feeling like I'd made friends with an author. You know. Next time you see them on a shelf you'll give an affectionate smile, they'll take precedence over other shiny books you haven't read. You give them a room and a key, then they start to put out tendrils in your mind and link with other experiences you've had, people you've known, books or films or pictures you're drawn to.

Score: Five stars, I'm feeling generous.

I'm having a New World literature phase, because at first, after reading so much classic old English waffle, Margaret Atwood sounds like Don DeLillo sounds like Alice Munro, but the more I read, the more these voices disassociate from each other and speak out separately. It's like when you read 'Trainspotting' and at first you think, 'oh, balls, it's all in Scottish,' then by the end you know the accents so well they have personalities of their own; characters, almost.

I'm being slightly facetious to make up for my shocking ignorance in having done a literature degree yet read virtually no modern American literature.

I am fulfilling my own prophecy in finding it an endless struggle to go to stuff and have time to write about going to stuff. It may be one or the other. A while ago I went to see La Clique at Bobino for €10 (standing, lounging, perching or otherwise squashing up tickets, rather than actual seats, but still.) It made me want to keep a pocketful of silver stars on me at all times and toss a shower of them in the air whenever I do anything remotely impressive. It's in London over Christmas, so if you're looking for presents of the 'doing not having' variety, I can thoroughly recommend it. My favourite act:


Reading List

Midnight Express, by Billy Hayes
The story of a young American hippie's 5-year stay in a Turkish prison for possession of hash, and his subsequent escape. Translated into French so simple even I can understand it. Quite heart-warming in a way, I think there's a movie too.
Score: Two stars

The Body Artist, by Don DeLillo
Stark. A grieving woman tells stories with her body by forcing it under the most perfect control, and an idiot man can only speak in the words of others. Gets under your skin. Full of images that stick, and half-conscious repetition. One to read again when I have more life experience.

Score: Three stars.

The Sorrows of an American, by Siri Hustvedt

Paul Auster's Norwegian wife writes wryly and wittily about intellectuals in New York coping with the past, having dinner parties with each other, etc. It's the kind of book where someone would find a lost childhood toy in an attic and talk about it for an entire chapter, including flashbacks. Protagonist has a respected and lucrative yet, importantly, not soulless profession: in this case psychiatry.

Score: Four and a half stars, lose half a one for being the famous novelist wife of a famous novelist. Pah.

My Balls On Your Pas Encore Payé

The chocolate event at Galeries Lafayette was magic. (That was Thursday 12th.) Their Christmas decorations are up, making the entire outside look like a huge Russian palace of some variety, at least until you get close enough to see the animated teddy bears in the windows. Maison du Chocolat were giving out tiny cups of heavenly melted chocolate – happiness in a vessel – and Dalloyau were making chocolate rings in moulds brushed with edible metallic paint and handing them out as soon as they were dry. Too beautiful to eat. Pierre Hermé (of Maracons fame) was signing his new book. He looks exactly as you would imagine, i.e. like he's fond of chocolate macaroons.

I'm tempted to make a massive generalisation about French people and chocolate, or the French and self-indulgence, or the Parisian obsession with appearance, but it's been done so often, and besides, no-one does Paris-based generalisations better than Olivier Magny, so I'm just going to give up with those and encourage you to read his fabulous (and accurate) blog instead of this one.

On Sunday I went to my second Parisian salon: Papilles en Fête. There I got talking to (and sampled the wares of) a rabbity fellow promoting terrine du lapin, pointy-nosed wine vendors, fat-fingered butchers selling pork cured fifty ways, and the inventor of the Foie Gras Strawberry, a lump of goose liver pâté painted with a jammy red exterior and topped with a real strawberry stalk. (Get them while you can...) And then I did something which means I will never integrate into this society. I came across the snail stall, where a quiet man with slightly bulgy eyes was putting foil trays into a microwave. The smell of garlic butter was fabulous. I glanced over his propaganda, showing the snails in their natural habitat, pictures of him with snails, explanations of potential predators of snails, etc. Then he stuck a shell under my nose, nestled in a paper napkin, with a cocktail stick poking out, the other end attached to the innards of said mollusc. I stared at it. With one swift motion I flicked it into my mouth and chewed. I told myself I'd eaten them before, as a child, on holiday in rural France, and loved them. By this point all the butter had gone and I was left with pure snail. I reminded myself I was daring, cosmopolitan; a try-anything-once, pleasure-seeking citizen of the world. Then I went behind the honey stall and spat it back into the shell. This was a huge mistake, as I could then see what it looked like.



Thursday was Beaujolais Nouveau day. At lunch in the school cantine all the teachers were complaining because normally one gets Beaujolais on the third Thursday of November (it's Beaujolais day, duh) but there wasn't any.

Apparently it's like when a Harry Potter book comes out, people hang around at midnight for the first taste. I thought they were taking the piss, but after school I went to my supermarket and they wheeled a massive trolley of pink and red bottles out: "Ahh, c'est le beaujolais? Oui oui c'est aujourd'hui, ça coute combien par bouteille? Un euro quatre-vingt? Pas possible! Deux quatorze? Ahh, beh, tant mieux quand même, je prends trois." €2.14 each. They're saying it's a good year, the Beaujolais is fine, the crise (credit crunch) is lifting, the cows are getting fatter. (Wine is what single-handedly keeps French farmers busy. Not subsidies.)

After a refreshing verre of Beaujolais Nouveau, I went to a 'concept' soirée called My Balls On Your, the idea being to show contempt for any noun you like in the illustrated format.

I have a bunch of stickers. Look forward to seeing where that is going.

I'm not completely frivolous. I m'inscrired at the library on Friday (free, Paris-wide access to up to 40 materials of my choice for 3 weeks) to give me something to read. If I were in need of a certain text or edition I'd be screwed, but as I'm just browsing for pleasure and random enlightenment it's fine. Also on Friday, I re-discovered Culture Rapide off rue de Belleville (between métros Belleville and Jourdain I think), a very cool café-bar with reasonably-priced coffees, snackage and booze, plus a weekly programme of events from free buffets to poetry slams.

...and we're back to frivolous: today found me in St Germain, then at Bistrot des Artistes on rue des Anglais (excellent) for a rum-and-coco milkshake. A lovely French girl had tickets to Grizzly Bear tonight at La Cigale in Montmartre, but couldn't go and couldn't sell them, and as it started in an hour, she gave them to us with a plea to "just go and enjoy it, I would rather someone used them!" Bought tickets with (now ex-) boyfriend? Unwanted birthday present? Sudden allergy to sweat and or beer? I don't care, they were great, and if I ever see her there again I will thank her more enthusiastically than I did this time (basically just a nod and a smile for the €25 face-value of the ticket).

Oh, and an addition to my post on French marketing: how could I forget sex. Sex sells anything that isn't sold using anything else, i.e. virtually everything.

Reading List
'Gomorrah' by Roberto Saviano: The author is a journalist from the region who risked his life to write this passionate and unflinching exposé of the Naples mafia. Heart-poundingly dangerous.
Score: Five, and no jokes (too serious).

'The Satanic Verses' by Salman Rushdie: a few magical moments, and some great prose infused with Rushdie's idiosyncratic wordplay; the rest of the book is worth it if you're a fan, but if you're not, it can all get a bit Bend It Like Beckham.
Score: three stars, zero fatwas.

Kids, homesickness, dreams about the Daily Mail.

I’m finding teaching tiring, but full of delight.

I had nine classes on Thursday, an entire day’s worth of teaching. If each class has 25 pupils that’s already over 200 little faces. All the Thibalts, Thulis, Blanches, Audes, Octaves and Cesars blend into one another very quickly, with their clean hair and Ralph Lauren polo shirts. (Counting myself lucky compared to others with kids who throw chairs, have mullets, walk out etc.) Mainly I did basic vocabulary, introductions, pronunciation etc, unless I was compelled to fill more time in which case I pulled out my Bonfire Night stuff and pitched it to the class’s level. My CM2’s were very keen on burning effigies, and a division soon emerged between the ones who wanted to burn Sarko and those who were eager to see Chirac go up in flames. Just as I was idly beginning to wonder whether I was getting myself sacked, à la that woman with the teddy bear called Mohammed, the teacher stepped in with a well-timed ‘on s’arrête là!’

I was asked in the staff room if I was training to become a teacher, and when I said no and explained my circumstances, I was told, “Don’t teach. Don’t do it. If you teach, you can’t do anything else, that’s what they think. They look at your CV and if it says you are a teacher they think you aren’t capable of doing anything else.” This is more true in France than England, I think, but still. A warning.
I am over the one-month hump now and beginning to settle in properly at last. There is a point almost exactly a month after you arrive in a different country when it ceases to be the longest holiday you’ve ever had and the cold hard reality starts to sink in. I think everyone’s been struggling a little. Lately, I’ve been missing: fireworks and the fairground on the Downs, jacket potatoes, real mugs of tea, Bristol accents, the arrival of winter Starbucks specials, pumpkin-carving, the Times 2 crossword and a cappuccino, Neighbours, the new term’s library books, Paperchase, lemsip, and whatever my mum does to washing which makes it smell better than I can ever hope to achieve. A pint that doesn’t cost €5 and a soft fresh loaf of bread that doesn’t go stale within eight hours. I’m glad I didn’t go home for Toussaint, though, as if I had, I’d have to acclimatize again when I came back, whereas now I’ve almost let go of my irrational England nostalgia.

Yesterday, I saw two very fashionable young men collide in the street. One was carrying a trombone, and the other was clutching a huge grey furry cat. There was a slight struggle, during which I almost expected them to swap. Classic Paris moments which I wouldn’t give up for anything.

I’ll finish with a dream I had this week, even though, as Adrian Mole’s mother says, “there’s only one thing more boring than listening to other people’s dreams, and that’s listening to other people’s problems.” It is too good not to though.
I was having a casual conversation with someone, it went like this:

Me: “Look, have you seen this article in the Mail today, it says the technology to make human resurrection a reality could be a little as 40 years away. They’ve done it on mice.”
Friend: “Really? No, I haven’t.”
Me: “There’s a poll: which five people would Daily Mail readers most like to bring back from the dead?”
Friend: “Princess Diana?”
Me: “Bingo, top spot. Well done. Any more?”
Friend: “Um, no, Jade Goody?”
Me: “No! Wrong! You seriously can’t get the other four?”

…at which point I became so frustrated I woke myself up, and couldn’t sleep again until I had guessed the others: Elvis, Winston Churchill, Henry VIII, and someone like Scott of the Antarctic. I later did some online research to see if I had correctly guessed the imaginary poll and found I had forgotten Bobby Moore.

What's happening this week:

France joins in the celebrations on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. 7pm Mon 9th Nov, Place de la Concorde Be aware of chaotic traffic circulation and probably delays and manifs galore.

Chocolate event at Galeries Lafayette. Free tasting, demonstrations, decadence etc. 5pm-9pm Thurs 12th Nov, Galeries Lafayette

Know God by all means, but not in my classroom

I cut half of this post out because I didn't agree with it anymore, or find it necessary to make sense of the following anecdote. It's my blog, I can do that.

Meanwhile, in the real world, I observed a class of French 8 and 9-year-olds today while they were learning about the rise of Christianity in France. It was an amazing lesson; history, religious studies, economics, citizenship and maths all in one. I took some badly-written notes, which, translated and edited for clarity and length only, I'm going to post. I was so touched by their enthusiasm and their humanity and, I don't know, it seems relevant. Maybe if all those twittering god-no-godders today had been in this class when they were nine, they wouldn't be making such a big deal out of it now.

Teacher: Ok, look at the map of Europe and the timelines. Look at the numbers. Who can tell me something about the different numbers of Christians in France in 400AD and 500AD?

Kids: [after some amusing comments] There are more! Loads more!

T: Yes, well done! So why do we think this might be?

Kid: Miss, did they see it on TV? *laughing*

T: [laughs] No, they didn't have TV. First, think about how people used to move things around back when there were no TVs or cars or aeroplanes.

Kid: Did they use a postman?

T: No, they didn't have postmen either. But you're right, in a way. It was someone who travelled. Who would have moved around a lot, a long long time ago, before postmen?

Ks: Everybody! Nobles! Train drivers! Important people! [...they continue guessing.]

Ace Kid: Miss I heard that some people from France used to go all the way to China to fetch the rice. They would travel and travel and they would come back from China with rice all the way back to France, and they would carry things and bring messages and things.

T: Yes. Exactly right! Well done. So look on your map and see how people travelled all the way from the East, through the Middle East, and towards Europe. The caravans from Asia brought spices and all sorts of other things, and they helped to spread ideas about Christianity as on the way the travelling people preached. So this was the diffusion of Christianity, facilitated by commerce. Also at this time Rome was taken over by people who 'officialised' Christianity and made it the one proper religion of the Empire, so old Roman culture was outlawed and everybody was told to change, even in France.

Kids: Everyone?! Waoh etc. Why? Why did it take over?

T: There have always been people who believed - sorry, who believe - in things. People like to believe in things, children. Life is sometimes very hard and it's reassuring to believe in something. The people of the caravans were sometimes travelling for weeks and months at a time, it was very uncomfortable and dangerous back then. So you see why it was good to think somebody was looking after them. We are very lucky in France because we have the "liberté de culture," we have the freedom to make a religious choice (because it is a choice), and part of this liberté is that my religious freedom stops where another person's starts. [makes arm gestures] I can believe whatever I want, and so can they, but to each other we have to be - what do we have to be, children?

Kids: Respectful!

T: Yes, we have to respect other people's religious beliefs. Otherwise you get religious wars between two kinds of believers that can cause enormous deaths. What do you think? Would you kill the person sitting next to you because you were a different religion? Would it make you feel better to kill your neighbour?

Kids: [all look round, start laughing] Mais non! Because I like him.

Ace Kid: Good, because otherwise I wouldn't have any friends!

T: Yes, good. Shh. [waits for them to be quiet, then speaks slowly and clearly.] But the problem is that in some countries, though, things aren't like that. People who believe something often don't understand why others don't believe exactly like they do. C'est illogique mais ça existe. It's unbelievable to the people who are fighting these wars that they could be wrong. They're convinced it's right, but is it really?

Kids: Nooooooooon!

T: Non. Non. [She looks very serious.] Il faut lutter contre ça. [We must struggle against that.]


Now, without going into France's shady past in that area, or the race riots of the banlieux, or the fact that I'm in a great school in a chic suburb where the teacher has time and resources and energy to actually teach, unlike many – and above all, without getting onto the no-god-know-god seesaw – I think that's a pretty positive start to a nine-year-old's religious education.

Salon "Bio," a.k.a. let's make lambs into shoes.

Continuing on my current theme of massive unfounded generalisations about France and French people, I missed the moment when Parisians turned, en masse, to the side of organic food and became obsessed with all things "Bio." I think it happened around 2004. Though I wasn't here then, I imagine that if I was, one minute we'd all have been sitting around dipping our steak frites in beurre and watching the red blood run down our faces, then there'd be a barely audible click, and within a few seconds we'd be asking one another where you can buy five-grain rusks and explaining how important it is for one's forme, santé, enfants etc to "manger bio."

This weekend the better-off sort of Parisian woman (pregnant, 30, serene, wearing expensive knitwear) is at the Salon Bio at Parc de la Villette with her serene knitwear-clad mummy, elbowing past the students to get to the free organic pesto dips. I know, because I went yesterday. 'Salons' are another Parisian thing I had no experience of, and my landlady gave me some free tickets, so I went out of curiosity. What goes on at a 'salon'? Traditionally, it was a reception room, and the word in English came to mean a literary, musical, or other intellectual kind of soirée, hosted to promote The Arts by some aspiring lady, accompanied by tea and delicacies and a string quartet. That's the mental image I have, anyway.

In Paris 2009 it seems to mean an exhibition hall, a show, and these exist for everything under the sun, last month: salon du mariage, salon immobilier, salon du chocolat. At the Salon Bio we tasted breads, jams, spreads, cookies, cider, all produced organically and at phenomenal prices. There was also an array of beautiful, gaspingly-expensive baby clothes, bags, hats, hemp stuff, you know. Fabulous deals on apple crisps, €8.50 a bag or €15 for two. Bizarre gadgets to oxygenate the air, de-chlorify water, relieve stress. Criminally costly cookware for steaming your food, vibrating anti-cellulite massage chairs to shake out whatever change was left in your pockets. Point made, I think. It was pricey.

The interesting, generalization-worthy part was this: the focus was on well-being and personal health, rather than on the planet, as it would have been in England. I didn't go in the Greenpeace tent, but elsewhere there were remarkably few stalls proclaiming their low environmental impact and green credentials. All the adverts were based on the fact that products contained some rare ingredient (loved the horse milk soap), were super-low-allergy, were re-invigorating or some shit. And in the midst of this "bio" produce, supposedly so healthy and hippyish, there was a stall selling sheepskin rugs, leather bags, and these delightful cosy slippers made from lambswool, that looked a bit like sheep. It was the final proof that, as I had suspected, Parisians were just here because it is deeply fashionable. There are certain must-have cereals, darling. Then they are going home in their cars to their fur coats and unethically farmed meat.

We did try an absolutely beautiful spicy fruit bread-cake hybrid, which reminded me that October half-term (23rd) is Christmas pudding week. I have a dreadful feeling that I will masochistically treat this as a challenge and try and make one here. This is only because the horrible memories have faded from Christmas 2007 when I made three in Bristol and gave one to my French exchange student friend as a present which she then ate the same day. One we ate at Fake Christmas Dinner and I can't remember what happened to the other one.

Le Marketing

French marketing has always puzzled me.

When I was studying literature in Paris I quickly learned to deflect the question, 'and what are you doing here?' as it would invariably lead to raised eyebrows, smirks, and, 'but what do you want to do comme travail?' not completely unlike in England, I suppose, where I'm knee-deep in jokes about lazy art students going straight on the dole after graduating. But in France, unlike England, the assumption that you can't get a job with a literature degree is based on a system in which pupils have to specialise early, sticking to arts or sciences even if they're not sure which they like best, and where employers choose a candidate based on how closely their qualifications match up to the job requirements, regardless of their raw aptitude, on-the-job experience, or passion. So someone with an engineering degree can only be an engineer, and someone with a history or philosophy degree from a good university who wants to go into marketing had damn well better make sure they have a marketing qualification on top of that. (See 23 year old Jean Sarkozy's recent appointment as chairman of the body that runs la Défense, and how angry people are that he hasn't even got a fucking degree, for the importance of either relevant qualifications or a Presidential parent when it comes to finding a job.)

Most young French people I've met (admittedly, not a huge number) work in marketing. 'Le marketing' is massive. In England, if you're doing a degree course in marketing, in business and marketing, hospitality and marketing etc, it means you're probably at the University of Coventry, or Plymouth, or Middlesex, and you're heading for a job as the manager of a branch of Thomas Cook's. In France, you do your arts or humanities degree, free (virtually), straight out of school, you go on erasmus, you protest, you stand around looking mind-blowingly sexy and smoking, and then you knuckle down and get a real qualification so you can actually get a job. In marketing.

Why, then, if the cream of French youth is engaged in this industry, is it so, so bad? Take poster campaigns. I saw one on the metro the other day describing some kind of winter-time show, the main text of which read (in English): "Impossible To Describe It: Just Go!!!" Lazy. Just lazy. A clothes shop near rue Rambuteau calls itself 'Fashion,' explaining, if you hadn't grasped the significance of the word, 'make oneself more self-confident!' Those hideous Orangina animals: who on earth thought it was a good idea to put endangered safari wildlife in revealing swimsuits and slap them on the window of every Tabac in Paris? And why do adverts for literally everything else contain young children trying to look at each others' genitals?

Realistically, French promotional material can't be dreamt up by four guys called François-Xavier sharing a large bag of weed. It's got to be meticulously researched and targeted, presumably not at me. So what's difference between me and a French person which makes them respond positively to ad campaigns that leave me cold? My mission for this week is to find out...

In other news, Spotify just gave me this nugget of late-nineties joyful nostalgia.

Paris #1

It's been a while. (Luckily, due to having only 2 followers, my embarrassing hiatus went largely unnoticed.)

I'm currently living in Paris, which seems to be a city of bloggers like no other. (I'll add some here when I have a chance.) On one hand it is completely understandable, as whenever you leave the house you see something curious, delightful, amusing, stimulating – something to write home about. I find myself scribbling down shop names on métro tickets, staring at something with a ridiculous grin, overhearing ludicrous conversations. But then it is so lovely here I don't know how people find the time to go home and type about a fantastic bakery they've found, and post photos of it, when I would probably still be in said bakery, brushing pastry flakes off my face and making a noise like a pig having an orgasm.

Several people have asked me if I have a "Paris blog" and though I am reluctant to create one – you know the type – red, white and blue colour scheme, photo of self by Eiffel Tower, name like C'est la vie! I do think it would be interesting to keep track of all the interesting things I am doing.

(Boring paragraphs over.)

I am starving, absolutely ravenous, literally going hungry in a garret; however, this is not because I am an attractive hollow-eyed street-sparrow but because I went to the Marché des Enfants Rouges for le brunch today ("The pâté is gorgeous, so fatty it melts in your mouth, have some.") We then got invited to a private clothes sale in a nearby apartment (complete with baby being changed, madeleines and grapes and plums on the table, roof-top-view). As always, when I've decided not to buy anything I just went silly and dressed up as a chimney sweep, grabbing some tweedy Vivienne Westwood red label trousers and a soft white shirt. I came home with both. These trousers are, as George would say in Blackadder III, a magnificent pair of trousers. They make my bottom look like une pomme and give me a slightly unladylike edge. Wow, I love these trousers.

Spending money (even €30 - bargain) on designer trousers instead of food and transport is not good for my bank balance, though, so I then walked all the way home to the 19e. It took me about two hours and though I picked up two aging melons (lol) I couldn't bring myself to go to Monoprix, and re-spend the money I should have spent on food but actually spent on trousers.

Other exciting Parisian things I've done this week would fill a much longer post, but I have to include the Fête des Vendanges in Montmartre, a cross between a Harvest Festival and a Christmas Market, only with fewer shit decorations and fudge stalls and more intoxicated singing and foie gras sandwiches. I wandered around in a lovestruck haze sipping a flûte de champagne and swerving occasionally to avoid the predatory Turkish men circling the drunken crowds. The fireworks were some of the most fantastic I've ever seen, or maybe they were just nearer. There didn't seem to be any impractical health and safety legislation in place. Had a few beers and some sushi with the boys and returned chez moi. (God, it feels good to say that. It's so relaxing to have some stability in my life at last, after a summer of not-bad-but-not-good transition.)

We'll see if this works out. Give it a week or two. If it does, we may go so far as to incorporate some French (!!!). À plus.

Jusqu'au bout.

This morning Samuel Beckett arrived in the post. I was still half-asleep when I opened his Letters, but was captivated by this:

“How energetic they always are, these self-avowed cynics and désabusés, bristling with passionate estimates and beating their breasts in a jemenfoutiste & jusquauboutiste frenzy.”

The last two words mean, respectively, ‘fed up-ness, don’t give a damn-ness’ and ‘to the full-ness, no-half-measures-ness,’ which he means derogatively, but which Katie and I appropriated to mean pursuing experience jusqu’au bout, to the end, going right to the edge of your limits. Being a hardliner in the best possible way. Think of it as a way of saying ‘fullness of life,' which, as well as being my Issue of the Day, ties in neatly with the essay I’m writing on James Joyce and Ulysses. Bear with me, I'm aware it may seem like it only ties in because it's my Issue of the Day. But this essay is the most complicated, demanding thing I’ve ever written, and simultaneously the easiest and most glorious.

Basically, I’m arguing in favour of the idea that Odysseus is the figure who “chooses custom and habit before all excellency.” He leaves the ravishing nymph Calypso and her promise of immortality shagging together, to struggle back to rocky Ithaca, see his now-grown-up son Telemachus and his loyal, no-longer-young wife Penelope, to get back into their old bed he carved himself out of a tree still growing out of the ground of his homeland. You’d think that excellency meant choosing personal glory, becoming immortal, by which choice he himself would literally, bodily, live forever. But this is an immortality which leaves behind humanity, making it incomplete. We die, which makes us mortal, human; we are mortal because we die. To explain a different kind of immortality, the kind which retains its humanity, apply the analogy of metempsychosis: the transmigration of souls which resurfaces throughout Ulysses like a subtle nudge. The term is taken from Ovid, in his Metamorphoses, who describes it as follows:

"As pliable wax, stamped with new designs, is no longer what it was; does not keep the same form; but is still one and the same; I teach that the soul is always the same, but migrates into different forms." Bk XV:143-175

Look for this even a little in Ulysses and we find Telemachus ‘reincarnated’ as Hamlet, who transmigrates nicely into Stephen Dedalus. These are sons are searching for their fathers. Bloom used to be, and still is, Daedalus the artificer, who has also lost a son; once upon a time he was Odysseus, the all-round androgyne patient striving family man. He is even Shakespeare: the appearance of the ghost of his baby son Rudy, now aged eleven, evokes Shakespeare’s son Hamnet, dead at eleven, the twin of Hamlet the play. Fathers and sons are everywhere because they represent inheritance: genetic, cultural and literary. Literature, or even simply words, is how we pass things on. Ulysses itself, as a book, is passing on these snippets of culture, folklore, forgotten language, new language, to make the whole vast patchwork of humanity complete. All of Bloom's life is in there: in the minutiae of his daily bodily functions as much as in the endless fragments of the past, past literature, real historical figures, of Irish culture, of Jewish legacy, of Christian myth and old Anglo-saxon epics, fairy tales and songs and snatches of every different tongue. In reading Ulysses, and through the character of Bloom, who, we cannot forget, is just one ordinary, insignificant human life, we become attached to this humanity, recognising that immortality isn’t to be gained just by agreeing to an empty eternity as a nymph’s divine sex slave. Immortality and excellency come through choosing custom and habit, by sailing home to your son and passing on your heritage and everything you’ve learned from your own brief journey, putting your energies into building a future for your little kingdom. All these people, all these patterns: we are all Hamlet, we are all Odysseus, we are all (to translate) Jesus Christ. It is ridiculous to imagine one person alone can achieve immortality, because the vital characteristic of this mass of human knowledge, this inheritance, is that it is shared and somehow mutual. One person can neither feel nor induce empathy.

At times, Hamlet and Odysseus both pretend to be mad, Odysseus when the Trojan war threatens to take him away from Ithaca and his young family, and Hamlet to throw his usurping uncle off the scent while he tries to plot justice for his father and a return of order and legitimacy to Denmark. When I was looking up a line reference for the part of the Odyssey where ‘mad’ Odysseus ploughs the sand of the sea-shore, and is subsequently found out in his sanity by refusing to endanger his baby son, I came across this quote by Joyce:

“Ulysses is son to Laertes, but he is father to Telemachus, husband to Penelope, lover of Calypso, companion in arms of the Greek warriors around Troy, and King of Ithaca. He was subject to many trials, but with wisdom and courage came through them all. Don’t forget that he was a war dodger who tried to evade military service by simulating madness. He might never have taken up arms and gone to Troy but the Greek recruiting sergeant was too clever for him, and, while he was ploughing the sands, placed young Telemachus in front of his plough. But once at war the conscientious objector became a jusqu’auboutist.”

It pulled me up short. I’d never heard that word before today, so naturally I felt briefly ignorant, but it arrived at precisely the right time. Reading Beckett on a break from my essay about the shared fragments which link us together, I find a word which Joyce then uses not two hours later (in my chronology) to describe his all-round hero, imperfectly human but a symbol of perfect humanity. Everything fits.

I have more to say about this. At the risk of turning into Katie Brooker, have you noticed how in Disney's Hercules, no matter how many grand heroic feats of strength he performs, he doesn't become a true hero until he becomes emotionally heroic and listens to his heart over his other muscles? He doesn't even choose immortality when he achieves this: he picks custom and habit over all excellency, humanity over immortality, so he can live his life with that apallingly thin woman. Just to show how the trickledown effect works, and how metempsychosis even applies to cartoons. See the infinite in the finite. I dare you.

I, for the sake of other victims like me, have discovered a new ally in the fight against procrastination. His name is “Dr.” Neil Fiore, productivity expert. He claims to be able to solve one's chronic inability to get out of bed through hypnosis. Attempting to cure procrastination by changing your own mental patterns doesn't work: you need someone else to dig deep down and do it for you. His pitch involves the phrase, 'May I make a bold assertion?' The lesson here is to be wary of those who use rhetorical questions when trying to get you to do or buy stuff. ("Have you ever tried to do the washing up without washing up liquid?" It's not pyramid selling, Mark.)

Two particular methods of overcoming a lack of motivation stand out by virtue of being diametrically opposed to each other. In Eat That Frog!, Brian Tracy employs the timeless technique of stringing out a very simple concept into an entire book. To save you having to read it: if you eat a live frog every morning, the rest of your day will be a breeze. (No amphibians are actually harmed.) Your 'frog' is the slimy, unpleasant thing at the top of your list, the one you're least looking forward to doing, but which will give you the greatest relief once it's over. Your aim is not to try to do everything, but do one thing - your frog - first thing in the morning rather than doing lots of little useless things all day and never really doing anything. After eating your frog you won't catch yourself...swallowing multiple tadpoles of self-denial?

Completely conversely, Structured Procrastination is a beautiful concept invented by a man called John Perry. He realises that, while procrastinators find it very difficult to eat their frog, they can often achieve a bundle of other things purely to avoid doing their 'most important' task. The key, he claims, is choosing your 'important task,' one that is unpleasant, requires much of you, but won't incur any severe penalties if you fail to get it done on time. This way, you can meet several smaller goals which are in reality more important than your biggie. Instead of finishing the 1,000 page novel, you'll get in touch with some useful contacts, spring-clean your house and write a blog entry on procrastination. Sooner or later, he ends ominously, an even bigger fish will come along and Ulysses will seem positively appealing compared with your final essay question. Eventually, you'll get everything done, as long as you recognise the way in which you prioritise your activities, and adapt your expectations to it.

I've been thinking about the myriad solutions to this problem and have learnt a lot from the men above. Recently, I started work on my own book about procrastination, largely to avoid doing any real work. And finally, my misdirected efforts have paid off. I generously provide an extract, or 'teaser,' below.

May I introduce Just Fucking Do It, a simple, life-changing way to wave goodbye to poor motivation? (Said introduction will cost you £9.99.) It's punchy, direct, and easy to pick up - even for those of us who aren't born readers.

Chapter 1: Just Fucking Do It

Just fucking do it.

The 'Why blog?' Blog

My halo's got a hole in it so it don't keep me dry, but that's OK because my brain is my heart's umbrella. sings Jeffrey Lewis in a song called, 'You Don't Have to Be a Scientist to Do Experiments on Your Own Heart.' (You can catch a taster here.) I chose it because it's a song about "that conscious attempt at growth" and whether it's "stupid"; the moral vs. amoral, rational vs. sentimental, delving vs. denying. This is a place to slow down the succession of fleeting images and experiences that make up my life and analyse the hell out of them. (Whether this growth has to be arrogantly public is under debate.) My Christian friend Kat(i)e is fond of analogies, mostly to do with being refined (like oil or gold) to a purer substance, so that's where the 'scientist' part comes in. To kick off with an analogy: the aim of this place is to help me determine whether I'm just paddling in circles, or ploughing lanes with custom-made goggles and a shaved back.

Just for the record, I don't need to literally shave my back, which is good, as it sounds difficult.