Because I am what my family calls the Queen of Guidebooks, I couldn't resist this "Paris Survival Kit" I bought in a Paris museum recently, while on the prowl for something completely different. Isn't it it cute? Look how there's even a little fake hole at the top for the display rack.
I bought it because of the genuine information I found in it, such as a few places to eat, work, or send visitors; also because it's fun to see how real Parisians look at themselves– this book is aimed at them. The only foreigners to get their own chapter in the book are Americans. But don't be flattered! Despite the scholarly-looking preface from the (bogus) Harvard professor John P. Kirkpatrick, Ph.D (the real author got it right in having him dateline it Cape Cod, July 2015), the book's Americans are there strictly to be avoided.
How do you learn to identify (and avoid) Americans in Paris?
1) The American in Paris smiles.
This physiognomic particularity should warn you, since in Paris no one ever smiles. (see Gueule [attitude], p. 64)
2) The American in Paris is loud
You won't even have to bother looking around the restaurant to identify the Americans who have infiltrated the clientele. The background noise will tell you quite enough. Moreover, the American in Paris is the only person to call the waiter "Garçon," even when it's a waitress.
3) The American in Paris lives in an amusement park.
For the expat American, "Paris is a moveable feast," as Hemingway wrote, which shows you how completely he got things wrong. When you explain that your Paris life is nothing but an exhausting series of underground journeys, interminable office hours, and dreary evenings, the American in Paris laughs! Because as for him, he is having a great time going out, eating and drinking!
4. The American in Paris lives on the Île Saint-Louis.
It's not even an exaggeration to say that NO ONE but Americans is on the Île Saint-Louis. Our American– an upper manager in a multinational company, a gallery owner endemic to the rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré, or perhaps a journalist for CNN–can therefore well afford to hire you as a private tutor of the French language.
The seventh arrondissement, especially buildings with a view of the Eiffel Tower, are also prized by members of the American upper class [in English in the original], who choose to live there in the hopes of making their friends back home jealous with their Facebook photos.
The Fantasy of the "True Paris"
A serious mental disorder affects the American in Paris: the Fantasy of the "True Paris," which is a sort of Stendhal Syndrome in reverse. The American Bohemian in Paris–possibly a jazz musician, a painter at Place du Tertre, a Yin Yoga teacher, a waiter at Breakfast in America, or another kind of artiste–has abandoned a job in a huge agrofood business to live simply, devoted to the discovery of the "True Paris."
What is the True Paris? It's a complex mixture of clichés that groups together the films of Jean-Luc Godard, perfume ads, Bateaux-Mouches tourist brochures, and of course scenes from the movie Amélie. The American in Paris, therefore, must struggle every day to be convinced that Paris resembles this fantasy.
Note: The American in Paris (fifty- to sixty-year-olds version) is the only person who still believes in existentialism and that Rive Gauche cellars are still wild places.
09 December 2015 in Books, literature, Daily life in Paris, On Being an Expatriate, U.S.A. | Permalink | Comments (3)
America: Instructions
What they think of us
09 January 2013 in Books, literature, France | Permalink | Comments (1)
Zola's Nana
As Manet imagined Nana, the "plump blonde" demi-mondaine who enthralls le Tout-Paris
I read a lot, but until recently I hadn't actually read many French novels, even the "great" ones, in French. I did get all the way through Remembrance of Things Past in English, the Scott Moncrieff version; but Nancy Mitford, who learned French as a child and lived most of her life in France, believed out that Moncrieff took all the humor out of Proust. And Proust's transformation of the obviously-- to me-- male love interest "Albertine" into a woman and his pretense that the narrator wasn't gay, while gossiping a great deal about others who are, were like fingers scraping on the blackboard.
I tried to read Le Rouge et le Noir in college. It starts with a shy little boy crying and he goes on crying. He turns out to be the hero. I disliked him at first sight. I had also read Madame Bovary as a child (my father was a professor) and that probably warped my ideas, as the main character that interested me was Emma's little daughter, and the first chapter I read was the end of the book. I detested Emma for what she did to her girl! Even reading it as an adult, I kept wanting to just shake Emma for being so selfish. Then I read a few Balzac novels last year. He's a great writer, all right, but it is so hard to find anyone you like in his novels, or at least it has been for me. Reading his biography by Stefan Zweig, I understood that a bit better. Balzac spent his whole life social climbing (adding a de to his name along the way) and writing frantically to pay his bills. He never had a real family life and you can tell.
So I started Nana by Zola with low expectations. But it's so good! I am reading it in the métro and can't put it down. The differences between French literature and English literature are somewhat staggering for the naive, like me. I see why it was considered shocking for young girls to read "French novels." In the first chapter, the theater owner Bordenave calls his theater "my brothel" and we see a crowd of respectable and not so respectable Parisians at opening night of a musical that sounds fun to watch, about the gods of Olympus. Lucie Stewart, a demi-mondaine, "an ugly little woman in her forties... but so lively and graceful that she had a great charm," says to her friend the journalist, about Nana, "On m'a juré que tu avais couché avec." [They swore to me you slept with her.] In the last scene, the beautiful Nana appears in see-through gauze as Venus, nude "with a tranquil audacity," so that you can see the "golden hairs in her armpits" (!). Even though she can't act and can't sing, the audience succumbs to her charisma and sex appeal.
In the evenings this week, I've been watching the BBC production of Bleak House. It's funny and also significant to notice the difference between the respectability and even puritanism of British and American novels of this period-- Trollope and Thackeray, Dickens and Hardy, not to speak of Austen, Brontë and Gaskell-- and the French novels. I think it says something profound about the two societies as well. But I don't know which is more realistic, in the end. To paraphrase something I read once, fiction is more about sex, less about children. Real life is the reverse.
19 October 2012 in Books, literature, France, Life | Permalink | Comments (5)
Café with lunch? Ha ha ha
A woman I met works as a translator and was telling us how difficult it can be to translate cookbooks and travel books from English (or "American") into French.
"First they use completely different measures, of course," she said. "Cups, teaspoons, quarts... then, they have ingredients that are hard to find in France, like baking powder or baking soda [I buy mine at "foreign" stores in Paris] or brown sugar. Or they go into a lengthy explanation of something that any Frenchwoman would know. For example, where we would just say 'cut the vegetables en julienne', they will say, 'first turn the vegetables lengthwise and cut them into tiny lengthwise strips about two inches long.'
"Travel books are even funnier," she went on. "Sometimes you just have to leave things out. One Australian book told the readers that in Italy, you shouldn't order coffee during the meal, but wait until it was time for dessert!"
Everyone burst out laughing. Imagine ordering coffee with a meal!
I learned this the hard way, like all the other Americans, I suppose. Basically, they just won't bring you the coffee till after the meal. It doesn't register in the waiter's mind that you ordered it until then. Didn't you know that ça ne se fait pas?
15 March 2012 in Books, literature, Food and Drink, France | Permalink | Comments (0)
Long live the American Library of Paris!
One of my favorite places in Paris! And I'm not the only one. It's the biggest English-language library in continental Europe. Edith Wharton, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein loved it. There are lots of free evening lectures and events for children. Here is the calendar page. Wish I could go there more often....
27 February 2012 in Books, literature, France, U.S.A. | Permalink | Comments (0)
Quai d'Orsay, the cartoon
I have just been reading the bande dessinée, or rather graphic novel, Quai d'Orsay* (volume II), and laughing all the way through. It's a fabulous roman à clé depiction of an all-too-real French foreign ministry in the run-up to the Iraq war, with a bull-headed George W. Bush determined to invade with or without United Nations support. It's clear that "Abel Lanzac," the pseudymous co-author, had privileged access to the top levels of the Quai d'Orsay and that is what makes it so fascinating. In an interview with L'Express, he said that he had worked there and is close friends with Bruno LeMaire, the "superpen" of the ministry in those days, "whose presence permeates the book."
The larger-than-life character of Dominique de Villepin ("Alexandre Taillard de Vorms"**), then French Foreign Minister, dominates the book. It leaves you with a grudging respect for him, in spite of his habit of lecturing to crowds on his Club Med vacations. George W., Colin Powell, Berlusconi, and the Russian foreign minister also make appearances.
What strikes an American is, among other things, how important America is in the story. And how anguished the other countries were about the Iraq war. Along with a recent British black comedy, In the Loop, the focus is completely on what the Americans are doing. The other countries think what the U.S. is demanding is stupid, crazy, ignorant; but they are like little kids being dragged by a brutish big brother to somewhere they don't want to go.
Captions:
1. Alexandre Taillard de Vorms, French Foreign Minister
2. "I was hoping that the people at Club Med would take fright and put a stop to it. The problem is, they were actually really happy. They started noticing that their customers ate it up, to the point that they would try to guess which Club Med the minister would choose for his next holiday so that they could book there."
3. "The United States of America aspires only to world peace." [In English in the original]
4. "French, too." "Oh good. You reassure me. I recognize French women."
5. "Okay, I see you're getting me now. This is a negotiation with the U.S. over peace versus war.... not an anchovy crisis in the Bay of Biscay.... Sorry, Sylvain."
*Christophe Blain et Abel Lanzac
**To me this sounds like tailleur de worms, but apparently it's borrowed from Luc Tayart de Borms, a Belgian aristocrat.
27 January 2012 in Books, literature, Current Affairs, France, Politics, U.S.A. | Permalink | Comments (0)
Madeline's city
I was shocked when I got here to discover that the French had never heard of Madeline. The little red-headed Parisian in a cape, who says "Pooh, pooh!" to tigers at the zoo, is known to almost all American children of the reading classes, but is nobody to children in her native city (who would no doubt call her Madeleine. By the way, the hyper-fashionable name is not currently fashionable in France).
It's still fun to recognize scenes from the books now that I know Paris. The tiger in the zoo is on the quais near the Botanical Gardens. The zoo is still there; sometimes when you are stuck in a traffic jam or on a bus, you can look over and see an ostrich looking back at you.
Of course the twelve little girls in two straight lines are obsolete now, as is Miss Clavel with her veil-- she is not a nun but a governess, by the way; and yes, governesses did used to dress like that. But not that long ago there was an all-girls school in Paris not far from my house where the little girls had to wear hats and walk in lines two-by-two as they went out, just like the girls in the book. "I get so many parents with those hats," the headmistress once said to me.
One of the loveliest things about Paris is that if you go away and come back, Paris will still look much the same; the central city is preserved as if in amber, and only the storefronts change with the times. So even though Madeline was written in 1939, it gives Americans who read it as children a shock of recognition when they finally see the Eiffel Tower, the Invalides, the Opéra, and the quais of the Seine, where Madeline fell in and was dramatically rescued by that noble mutt, Genevieve.
08 January 2012 in Art, Books, literature, France, U.S.A. | Permalink | Comments (0)
Sous les pavés, le vide*
Underneath Paris is a network of Roman-era quarries and medieval mines that is much more extensive than most people realize-- 40 % of the city stands over holes. There are 300+ kilometers of stabilized tunnels under Paris. I recently read Graham Robb's book Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris. Among many other interesting and little-known stories, the book discusses the efforts of Charles-Axel Guillaumot, the 18th-century engineer who stabilized the mines and saved large sections of the city from falling through the roofs of the quarries. I also knew that before you buy any property in Paris, you get a report on whether or not there are quarries underneath the building. This is usually lost in the storm of paperwork and few people check it carefully. But the reason it's important is that the owners of a building are responsible for all costs of shoring up the building if the ground starts to give way-- in some places that can cost hundreds of thousands of euros. In parts of the city, notably the picturesque Mouzaïa district northeast of the Buttes-Chaumont, the buildings are made of wood and not allowed to be more than a certain height because of the danger of collapse.
This report by some interns at Rue89 (a great website run by off-duty journalists) woke me up. The map of Paris at the top of one article clearly shows that my apartment building sits right over a huge underground quarry.
Don't think you will get anything from your insurance company if sinkhole happens. Quarries and mines are not considered "accidents" or natural disasters." But don't worry. In Paris there are only ten or so incidents a year, and only one complete collapse.
*"Under the cobblestones, the abyss." The photo of a sinkhole in Guatemala is by John McNab, Flickr.
09 June 2011 in Books, literature, France | Permalink | Comments (4)
The poetry market
A and I went to the Marché de la Poésie. It's a book fair at Saint-Sulpice (in front of Saint-Sulpice, the church in this photo-- it's currently most famous for its role in The Da Vinci Code) and was mostly books in French. I was just after poetry, poetry in a book; but most of the books for sale were exquisitely produced works of art, with prices to match. So we left without buying anything. We did talk to a number of depressed-looking poets and publishers sitting at lonely tables piled high, who all tried to get us to leave our names and address. It was enough to make you vow not to be a poet. Maybe the happier ones were at the very lively wine bar. We did get a few bookmarks and a postcard.
Poetry on the bus
Towards evening
abandon yourself
to your double destiny:
live in the heart of the landscape
and wave
to the shooting stars.
--François Cheng (程抱一), "Un jour les pierres," poem in Double chant (1998)
22 March 2011 in Books, literature, Cars, trains and planes | Permalink | Comments (0)