cinque terre

I know Jenny Fitz went there, I don't know if any of the rest of you did. If you want to be my travel guides, send me a comment.

duende

This entry is now a few days old! I told myself I'd give it a proper edit and never did. Here it is, rough as guts and twice as shiny.

Matt Douglas is here. I took him back to that vegetarian organic restaurant, and he too swooned at the muchos vegetal goodness. And this time there was chocolate mousse. Matt speaks and reads a little Spanish, quite enough to get by. It makes such a difference. I am by turns excited and annoyed by the fact that here I'm surrounded by not one but two languages I don't understand. I am probably mixing up Catalan and Castillian every time I try to produce a sentence. I haven't said anything yet that doesn't end in por favor, being still firmly in phrase book territory.

Yesterday when I was looking for La Pedrera, a Gaudi apartment block, I took a wrong turn on one of those endless avenues. At the corner I turned at, there was a confectioners that sold sugar figurines for the tops of cakes. Girls in pinafores, boys in football outfits, couples holding flowers. There was also a phone booth, and a woman crouched at its foot. She looked at me with stricken eyes and wailed and wailed a constant, musical lament. I don't know what language she was speaking, but it was perhaps hardly speaking and hardly language. Or a language pared back to the most basic sounds of grief. I gave her a euro, more out of shock than anything else, which she clamped in her fist without pausing for breath.

A few doors down I realised I'd made a wrong turn and had to backtrack. I crossed the street so I wouldn't have to pass the wailing woman, and headed back the other way. On the next corner, though, I found the strangest thing. The same confectioner's shop, with the same figurines, the same phone booth, and again the wailing woman. I looked back at the opposite corner in confusion. There was the first shop, the first phone booth. I looked closer at the woman now in front of me. Her wail sounded the same but her face was different. Weird. Looking-glass land weird. Maybe a city in this curvaceous, organic country has to buck against these long, straight avenues. You can rake out a straight line, but you can't stop the spirals and folds, the repetitions like a tile border on a facade.

I've enjoyed the Gaudi buildings I've seen. Having seen photos and taken a quick look around his Park Güell, I guess I thought of him as a decorative artist who embellished 'normal' buildings with whimsical mosaics. After visiting La Pedrera and the museum inside it, I see that his vision is not confined to the surface, but goes right through to the bones of the building. He made ingenious light wells to channel the sun into every corner of a place. He needed an excellent understanding of structural forces, to allow him to remove as many walls as possible and open up a space. Every stone in the unfinished Sagrada Familia church, has to be cut by hand, because most of them are not cubic in form, but shapes complicated enough to hold up the weight of a cathedral while perfectly resembling a graceful tree.

La Sagrada Familia is the most joyful church I've ever been into--and being a backpacker in Europe, I find I've been into a lot (from Barthes' Mythologies: "Christianity is the chief purveyor of tourism, and one travels only to visit churches"). Other great churches seem sublime insofar as they represent the human mind's attempt to convey the greatness of God. But La Sagrada Familia glorifies God's creation, and expresses the worshipper's joy that God created all this in the first place. It's a reaching upward of gratitude, rather than a bending down of God's abstract greatness. If that makes sense. Knowing next to nothing about either architecture or Christianity, let alone Christian architecture, I'll just chuck my two cents in.

Postscript: Matt left before me, so I spent my last night in Barcelona with two American girls who had smoked a lot of hash so their sentences took a while to come out but they were very friendly. We went to a club in the Barri Gotic looking for acid jazz, but for some reason it was one of those traditional Spanish bands instead, with the blarey trumpet and the flamenco guitar and all that. Lovely! Then the guy on trumpet said "Blah blah blah blah Yugoslavia blah" and the band launched into the music from Kusturica's Underground. Why not? I'm on the Cote d'Azur now, but I'll tell you about that later, I'm starving.

roses and rabbit eyes

I went looking for a vegetarian restaurant today, and found a street market where every stall sold red roses. They were jammed by their dozens into plastic buckets and trampled in the gutters, petals everywhere. Next to the square was a church and a queue of people--hundreds of people--waiting to go in. Most of them had bunches of roses in their hands. A man in the queue told me that it was a special church holiday today, and people were waiting to leave offerings of roses and red candles and to pray for impossible things.
'Milagros?'
'That's it.'
I wished him good luck.

I found the restaurant and had a four course organic bonanza. Having moved from a country where butter is considered a sandwich ingredient in its own right to a place where breakfast is traditionally deep-fried, I could have wept with gratitude. This afternoon I went to perhaps the most beautiful park I've ever seen--Parc Montjuïc. It´s a series of wild, woody gardens, cut across by elegant paths and terraces. It´s full of beautiful museums and cascading fountains that drop hundreds of feet down the hillside, and you can see across Barcelona to the sea. I first saw Barcelona from Gaudi's Parc Gruell yesterday. It was startling to see it from above after walking in the streets. It´s like two different cities. At street level if feels--I want to say it feels human. Human-scale, and dedicated to pleasure. I had imagined that Gaudi was an anomoly--a random stroke of genius that had been visited on the city, and tolerated or adored depending on taste. But the fleshy curves and coloured ornament on his buildings feel like a natural extension of the endemic style of the place. London's gilded spires ring like a cash register. Barcelona's buildings, with their continental garlands and iron work and their mystical islamic geometry, hum mysteriously. But from above, the city is sprawling and tatty. Like somebody raked a big, neat grid through a rubbish heap. Sagrada Familia and other grand buildings standing up out of it like thrown-away toys. It's quite bizarre.

I spent my first two nights in a pensión on a gorgeous palm-treed square, which rather made me feel like everyone was having more fun than me. No hostels I called had rooms, and a pensión, especially one with no common area, is no place to meet people. Last night I was feeling a bit lonely in my room, and I could hear the party in the street. Tonight I've moved to a nice little hostel. It's right near the cathedral, and on Saturday I saw a crowd of people gather there to do traditional Catalunyan circle dancing--lovely! Being in a hostel is a more sociable arrangement. And, to my surprise, I found that Matt Douglas has booked the same place for tonight. Yay Matt! We are going to have some serious fun. I think I'll settle down somewhere and take a job soon. I don't know about this solo travelling business. I see amazing things, but I'm always aware of how much more fun it would be if I were here with people I cared about. Or at least if it were a well-earned break at the end of a working week. What do you know? Pursuing no goal but your own pleasure day in and day out starts to get strangely unsatisfying. Don't let me sound complainy, though. I'm doing fine, it's just that I've been doing this for a while now and I suppose I'm taking stock of things, wondering if I'm doing what I want to be doing with this time, which is full of the lushness and the responsibility of being free. I had two nice phone calls today, with Matthew and Luke (the fabulous and entirely handsome fashion designer who has now been officially mentioned in this blog, hi Luke).

Oh, there's a wonderful covered market just off La Rambla where I'm staying. Olive oil shops, stall after stall of perfect fruit, acres of cheeses, whole rabbit carcasses, flayed and trussed, but with their eyes still in. I've never seen such a temple to gustation. This hostel has a kitchen. I'm going to town.

bring it on

Oh, the summer, the summer! Finally, at the tail-end of May, some Contiki weather: 18° to 30° and frisky as hell. All my little nerve endings are waking up again, carrying my self back out to the skin, where I can connect with the world properly. I took a rent-a-Peugeot out to the medieval fortified town at Carcasonne today. All around, mediterranean hills like--ok, not like white elephants--but like something alive and sleeping, wrinkled and muscled and mangey. And beyond that, the iceberg Pyrenees, half-unreal. The medieval town was so sun-struck and lazy that I could almost have wished that I lived in the moyen age--until I visited the museum of torture. An unforgettable experience. Believe me, I've been trying all afternoon. But, wow, today felt like a total holiday. I thought about all the kids in school who would rather have been strolling around a castle seeing where they used to shoot the arrows from and where they poured the oil. When I was eight I thought that adulthood would mean being able to go where I pleased on sunny days, hire cars and eat ice-cream. I felt my eight-year-old self looking out of my eyes and going, whaddaya know, it's true! (I'd of course like to shelter my little self from details like the way a career doesn't automatically materialise at the age of 22, and boring things like telephone bills and rent--but if she did find out, she'd probably say, so what? At least you're not sitting around in a damn quadrangle every day eating vegemite sandwiches and wondering what a stimulating conversation feels like).

What else? Well I walked around Narbonne a little more, enjoying all the details in the buildings here, where France starts phasing into Iberia. Lacework balconies jutting from walls painted pink and yellow and white, and everywhere those charming hacienda half-pipe tiles. Right, I just used the word charming: I have officially lost the plot, and need to go and have a cup of tea and a lie down and wait for these fits of bourgeois travel-lit rapture to die down. Barcelona tomorrow. Wish me luck.

so,qnystuff

I spent my last night in Paris at an exquisite open mic night in a hole in the ground. The place oughtn’t to have held fifty people but somehow it did. There was a compact, intense woman from New York playing flamenco ukulele, and a band that was sort-of Velvet Underground does Queen (and who wouldn’t pay to see that?). They even had their own Nico, with big flat vowels and one of those bowlcut-mullet hybrid dos that all the cool kids are wearing these days. There was also a French guy who couldn’t speak a sentence of English but who managed a creditable cover of Hotel Yorba.

Paris was crabby and out of sorts the day I left. The story, as best I can make it out, is: Parisians all leave Paris for the month of August. While they were away last summer, a massive heatwave killed a lot of neglected old people, and they weren’t discovered for weeks because everyone except the neglected old people was in St Tropez. So the government decided they needed lots of funds to help lonely old people, and planned to generate these funds by asking people to give up one of their scheduled public holidays. That is, everyone would work that day; and donate their pay to the aged. Some French people are behind the plan, but many of them are unimpressed—in a display of spectacular bad taste, one group of concerned citizens wrote to the UN claiming it was forced labour and a breach of the Humqn Rights convention. Anyway, Monday was the day in question, and nobody knew if they were on holiday or not, and shops were unexpectedly open or shut, or half-open and half-shut—at the post office a woman stood behind the couter all day telling people she couldn’t serve them. Bon. I bought a Bulgakov novella from Shakespeare’s, met Mac for a coffee and got the hell out of town.

The train journey crossed most of France and was luscious of course. The best bit was a strange, spindly mountain range about half way down, which I can’t identify on my map. An old student of mine met me at the train station in Narbonne. I used to tutor her in Business English, if you can imagine. In two years of high school commerce I never once balanced a budget, and I passed torts at uni with 51%, so we did a lot of designing interiors for department stores and ‘networking’ conversation skills. I’ve seen a little of Narbonne these last two days. There’s a gargoyle-riddled gothic cathedral and a pretty canal with L’Atalante barges. There’s also more bad architecture than I saw in the big cities, but it’s festively bad, in the way of small towns in warm places. It looks like a composite of a chi-chi watercolour of Languedoc and a Greetings from Sunny Kyama postcard. In short: adorable.

In other news, I got a hep shot for free. The doctor turned the syringe over in his hands as if he’d never seen one before, read the instruction leaflet at pensive length, and then drove the needle home. When I went to pay, he found my galaxy of credit and debit cards unacceptable and refused to let me go and withdraw cash. ‘C’est un cadeau,’ he said, and settled for a handshake.

I’ll have more photos up soon, and hopefully I’ll find a normal keyboard. Sorry if this entry doesn’t scan for shit; I know I shouldn’t let my writing implements get the better of me, but I’d rather go ten rounds with a mugwamp than deql zith this biwqrre qnd unfqtho,qble keyboqrd; see zhqt I hqve to put up zith?

new york herald tribune

Today was my last day in Paris. I bought a Herald Tribune, lit a candle at the grave of Jean Seberg, crossed the Champs-Elysées and went to the Musée Rodin. Just as Bath makes you wonder how anybody could draw attention to a spinster aunt's straitened circumstances at the tea table, Rodin makes you wonder how anybody restrains themselves from ripping their duds off and pashing the nearest gorgeous creature. All of Rodin's characters writhe in the extremes of human emotion--the last moments before their execution, the first act of an epic erotic union, the anticipation of eternal punishment. It's a stirring vision of humanity, but it already feels out of reach. The nouvelle vague, with its miscommunications, broken attempts at intimacy and sense of helplessness in the face of fate--c'est dégueulasse, maybe, but it feels more like home. That's why I went to visit Jean, I suppose. I didn't have time for Sartre and de Beauvoir, but I did eat at their old hang-out, Le Deux Magots, the other day. The wait staff weren't exuding any unctuous bad faith while I was there--they were expressing their conard natures as sincerely as one could wish. Much nicer are the proprietors of my local laverie and internet café. They act tough, but they're big softies really.

Tonight I'm going to a creperie with Macgregor, and an open mic night of some sort with his housemate. Coming back to the Marais in the afternoons is starting to feel like a home-coming. A nice thing to experience before you leave a place. Tomorrow I'll be in Narbonne, in the south. I'll keep you posted.

fluctuat nec mergitur

Je suis content maintenant, donc je peux faire mon blog. Everyone is forever getting it on in this city. It really is all passionate embraces on bridges and street corners and in crowded restaurants and in the queue at the ticket office for long-distance trains. The museums offer no escape--even the statues are in eternal pash-offs. It's not a good place to be love-lorn. Nevertheless, I have enjoyed myself, especially the last couple of days.

These are some of the things I've seen: the coffin of Paris' patron, Sainte Genevieve, in a glass case into which someone had insinuated a little hand-written note (all I could decipher of it was donner-moi, which is the way of it for dead saints, I guess) and a seperate little casket for her finger--under what circumstances it was detached, I don't know. Another lobster, at the Musée Picasso, in the hand of a little boy in a painting. Many streets of gorgeous shops. All the waifs of Shakespeare's Books returning like a flock of sparrows to the shop at a quarter to midnight in a flurry of flirtation, socialist blague and tweed coats. One million ads for creme minceur--apparently a normal woman rubs this gunk into her thighs and becomes sixteen, stick-thin and decidedly photoshopped. Beaucoup de places that Hemingway lived, wrote, drank and inspected F. Scott Fitzgerald's penis. The apartment where Joyce edited Ulysses (this required some satisfying naughtiness, ducking into a key-operated gate just behind a resident, only to spend some anxious minutes working out how to get out again). Chateau de Fontainbleau, where Napoleon abdicated and where I was extravagantly sad in the garden watching all the promenading couples--it was all very Last Year at Marienbad. Many nice bars. A fantastic bookfair of small publishers, with gems like famous letters of history printed looseleaf and sold seperately in envelopes and little books of quirky cartoons--I was admiring one book, an illustration of Sinbad's adventures without any text, and the girl behind the counter told me the artist was the guy sitting at the bar. And, randomly enough, many people who look like Nick Tapper or Tegan Bennett. Are you two following me around?

I've met lots of nice people at the Mije hostel. My favourite is the hilarious Brazilian girl I walked around with this morning. She spoke no English, only Portuguese and French, and given that I can still enquire after a hairdryer by saying "Is there a hot wind for the horse inside this eggplant?" you can imagine the time we had. Still, we compared the women of Switzerland, France, Australia and Brazil, decided that the French need less creme minceur and more raw food in their diet, bought umbrellas, fruit and phone cards while she complained about her lazy friends in Paris who wouldn't collect her in their cars, and I bragged about mon chou, le plus résolu et intelligent metteur en scene. Not a bad effort.

Like everything in Paris, this post is costing me a big shiny stack of euros, so I'll go soon. Keep posting comments, you guys are great. I had a funny experience while I was backpack-pruning this morning. You know that scene at the end of Labyrinth where all the puppets turn up in Sarah's bedroom mirror and then they all have a little reunion? I hope you do. Anyway, it was like all of your faces flashed through my mind's eye in a slideshow of appreciation. I wasn't even homesick or anything. I leave for the south of France on Monday, where an ex-student of mine is full-on organising a week of amusement for me. I hope to meet up with Matt Douglas (of MHS fame) in Spain after that. I have a mobile number for France now: 0675 313 012.

Cést tout pour ce moment. Get back to work.

non, je ne comprendre rien--and I can't spell either

Oh, man, I live for my blog comments! Poets all, my lovely buddies. Some announcements:
1) Love youse all
2) My new email is (removed for privacy reasons, sorry. -ed.) but I'll keep checking the old 'un for a while yet
3) My UK mobile doesn't work here; I am sans mobile for now (that was French, right there)

And now I'm in Paris. I am staying at a lovely hostel called Mije in the Marais district. I emerged from the metro onto an oversized traffic island supporting a carousel, some trees with twittering birds and a magazine stand. I bought gum and asked the shop guy Est-ce que je peux prendre un taxi ici? and was very proud of myself. He replied, blah blah blagh emphatic gestures something something beaucoup, which neatly demonstrated the limitations of my French, and then I turned around and saw the taxi stand.

The cab driver was very angry because he didn’t know the street I wanted to go to, and then he yelled a lot through his window at another cab driver, including many improper suggestions and cuss words I was pleased to recognize, while I found the street in his street directory (presumably he keeps one around for ornamental value, or good luck). Then he was very angry again because the street was ten or fifteen metres away, but subsided into crabby magnanimity after a few repetitions of je suis desolee, vraiment, which probably isn’t even a sentence. It was a tremendously enlivening introduction to Paris. Then Macgregor, my Sydney expat mate, cooked me a yummy omelette and took me to see on a surprise mission—the best possible thing for one’s first night in a city—to see the Eiffel Tower at night. It really was romantic and gorgeous and, you know, big. It was decorated with huge candles, for the feast of the ascension, or the assumption, or whatever it was yesterday. I thought it looked like a glamorous oil rig—or, as Mac put it, “Oilrig: the musical”.

Yesterday I walked around with a girl from Boston called Lisa, who is also twenty-five and traveling alone. We went to Shakespeare’s books but got there too early, so instead ogled the façade of Notre Dame and wondered about the lobster that was among the religious symbols carved into the left hand door frame. Theologians? What’s with that? First credible answer wins an all I got was this lousy t-shirt t-shirt. Then we walked to Montmartre and ate quiche and patted people’s dogs and asked directions a lot. Then we found Sacre Coeur, as one does if one walks around in Montmartre, and it was beautiful. The mosaics inside are like none I’ve ever seen, in books or anywhere. I don’t know anything about Sacre Coeur, but I gather it was built quite recently, or at least the mosaics were done recently—late nineteenth, I think. They were so luscious and expressive. My favourite was the dome above the altar. It has a big Jesus, blessing with arms outstretched a crowd of saints and other figures. He curves to fit the inside of the dome, and with his calm, blissed-out face and his forward tilt, he looks ready to launch into some crowd-surfing among the congregation—and he resembles you a bit too, Nick.

I’m not sure what I’m going to see in Paris. I don’t feel very attracted to the art museums right now. I like Kerry’s suggestion of going to see where Colette lived—and, why not, Hemingway and Miller and Nin and Pound and Eliot and so on. And I might go and see the street where Modigliani used to live, which is also the street where Godard shot the last scene of A bout de soufflé.

Hello to all you beautiful Londoners, including the ones who didn’t make it into the blog. Thanks for being troupers and farewelling me on a school night. I’ll be back to visit. I know I’ll meet lots of nice people in my travels, but they won’t be you.

Had a fantastic last week in England. Pete and Lily played their first “real” gig, if you don’t count the open mic where they were also great. The open mic was held in the upstairs room of a pub, while Chelsea played Liverpool on the big TVs downstairs. Every now and then a sulky poet would be interrupted halfway through some tortured jeremiad with bird-of-prey metaphors, as the crowd below rumbled out that most soccer of sounds—the noises of building anticipation, and then the collective groan as the ball misses the goal. Anyway, the proper gig was in a red room underground in Islington, and they played wonderfully, and I had to drink a lot to calm their nerves. Even after they’d finished. I also went to see The Lion King with my sister Jenn, to celebrate her birthday. It was exotic, dazzling and spectacular, in the fullest Barthesian sense. The puppetty costumey things were cool.

And of course I went to Bath, and claimed I’d write about it later. Well—the symmetry of it defied my sketching hand. I can do jumbles of chimney pots and listing Jacobean hovels with humorous signs out the front, but those perfect, sweeping crescents slid out of my grip. I went to a museum at the end of the Royal Crescent, which was a fully restored Georgian interior. As with the exteriors of such buildings, every line was placed in such a way that I couldn’t imagine it being put anywhere else. Words like “gracious” and “dignified” arise inevitably in the mind. I think I understood Plato’s ideal forms better in Bath than ever before. And as a writer’s pilgrimage it was surprising un-naff. It was illuminating to see the spaces that Jane Austen’s characters poured tea in, and promenaded and danced and embroidered in. It seems utterly scandalous that anyone could be surrounded by such an aesthetic of calm restraint and still behave like a Mr Wickham or a Mrs Elton.

Lasting memories of London: the clocks chiming out their truncated tunes on the quarter hours, like an absent-minded friends who forgets to finish their sentences; public toilets with a few gold sequins on the floor and ashtrays fixed to the cubicle walls; a band with its own dancer, Happy Mondays-style, who wore an outfit made of rubber gloves; the gorgeous, gorgeous Londoners I met through Lily… stay in touch.

the inadvertant burger

I should be telling you about my trip back to Bath, but I want to do it properly and, damn it, I'm temporarily exhausted by the necessity of "searching with unflinching patience for the right word, the only right word which will convey with utmost precision the exact shade and intensity of thought" (thankyou Nabokov).

So I'll tell you about signs here instead. There seems to be this sharp divide between a tone of polite diffidence and one of dire emergency. The buses and trains have little notices saying things like, "please consider other people's musical tastes and keep personal stereos on low volume" or "please avoid eating or drinking". I like the choice of the word "avoid" here--as if it were a matter of ongoing vigilance, and if you dropped your guard for a moment, you might find yourself suddenly consuming a double beef burger and strawberry thickshake that had appeared out of the ether. On the other hand, death by fire or electricity is something of a signage obsession. And there are pictures. Electicity substations have big yellow signs declaring DANGER OF DEATH, with a picture of a man writhing under a bolt of lightning. A banner advertising smoke alarms asks HOW WOULD YOU ALL GET OUT ALIVE? in letters two feet high. A box of matches says DANGER: FIRE KILLS CHILDREN. This is a reasonable statement. The picture of a stick figure child with an open wailing mouth and staring eyes, its right arm consumed entirely in yellow flames, seems a little gratuitous, however. If you ever wondered where Radiohead got ideas for their sleeve art, wonder no more.

I will tell you about Bath, I promise, and I'll post a stack of pictures of Brighton, too. I've become umbilically attached to my camera, after all. They'll make a tourist of me yet. I have to go now and cook up a planetload of fried eggs for my second breakfast (the first was fruit salad and low fat greek yoghurt, so it cancels itself out) in honour of this morning's phone call with Matt, and of a certain film currently in cinemas.