on the case

I have started making follow-up phone calls about the job applications I sent to various schools in Northern Italy. Before I began, I prepared a speech with care. Okay, I wrote it myself, and okay, I only looked in the dictionary twice, but those three or four sentences pretty much used up my entire stock of Italian, so I was stuffed when I was called upon to have an actual conversation (something I ought, arguably, to have anticipated). Think of it like this: it’s one thing to read a passage of Chaucer aloud, but it would be another thing entirely to have a good old chat with the Wife of Bath. So after a flood of incomprehensibility that began with Ah, si, si, certo… I had to stutter that I um didn’t um understand, and the confused secretary switched obligingly into English. Given that I may have to leave for Italy within the week to begin interviews, it seems I am a little under-prepared. Let’s see: if I cover a chapter of my Italian in Three Months book every day, I will be up to “object pronouns”, “likes and dislikes” and “ordering a drink” by the time I arrive. So at least I’ll be able to greet cutey Italians with: I like you. Let’s get a beer.

I’m enjoying my last few weeks in Paris. I keep finding new cafés to love, like the L’Industrie where you can nurse a black coffee for as many chapters of your novel as you like, and they don’t serve breakfast but they let you bring in a croissant from the patisserie across the street. I spent a fun night playing anagrams with Gideon, David and Macgregor. Any word nerd would love this game so it’s worth me telling you the rules, but it’s hard to explain so I’ll put it in a separate post that you can click on at leisure. I also went shopping with Macgregor in the Marais, as a celebration of his completing his film school application and my having applied for many jobs. We bought beautiful things packaged in fancy bags. It’s a funny thing—the cost of that carry bag must be added to the cost of your purchase. If somebody came up to you in the street and said, “Would you like a cardboard bag with rope handles for two euros?” you would say something impolite. But if you’ve shelled out for the self-striped classic white shirt with lacing detail on the cuffs, you’re going to feel let down if you don’t get the fancy bag.

Yesterday I went with Macgregor to the park, because the weather was proper August weather again and we wanted to be out in the sun. We chose Parc des Buttes-Chaumont in Belleville, as I hadn’t seen it before. It is on one of the two hills of Paris. If I hadn’t been able to see Sacre-Coeur on the hill across the way, I would have thought I was in an entirely different city. Clusters of huge trees and green hillsides full of picnickers, and because of the slope, kids are always doing acrobatics and stacking it spectacularly on the steeper bits. French kids don’t seem to cry when they fall over, they just right themselves noncholantly and saunter off, as if it was part of the trick. This park was one of those places that seem to have a distilled aura of happiness around it. I’ve never loved Parisians so much, each on their patch of sunny lawn. The park itself was very beautiful and dramatic, but I think it was the modernist tower blocks all around that gave the place its particular loveliness. One does tire of the same-same Haussman-style buildings all over Paris, and it was perfect, in all that sun, to see the clean lines and jaunty red sun-shades of the ocean-liner-style apartment blocks. Like being in a Jacques Tati film, but less cloyingly quaint. It was all real, and all joyous. A man near us on the hillside was meditating, and I didn’t understand how he could keep his eyes closed on such a day, in such a place. I listened to contrived, educational conversations in Italian on my iPod, Macgregor read a David Sedaris book I bought him.

The birthday presents keep on coming. Matt sent me a great stash of music, including Nick Cave’s recent double album, which makes all the hairs of my scalp stand on end in tingly revelry, and a lush, moody album from The Woods Themselves, a Sydney band he has just joined (why did you have to have your rock n roll renaissance after I left, M? I always wanted to be a groupie). And I have a wonderful new pile of books beside my bed, distracting me from my Italian study. It comes courtesy of Tania, who had to listen to me whining loudly about the cost of books while she was over here for a Women in Engineering conference. Hurrah for Tania! Permit me a couple of quotes:

Here is Primo Levi in The Periodic Table, writing about his first exercises in chemical analysis at university (I have chosen a quote about chemistry, rather than about his incarceration in Auschwitz, though he writes with equal lucidity and care about both. After all, he chose his vocation, and his love for it survived his ordeal along with him):

One way or another, here the relationship with Matter became dialectical: it was fencing, a face-to-face match. Two unequal opponents: on one side, putting the questions, the unfledged, unarmed chemist, at his elbow the textbook by Autenrieth as his sole ally… : on the other side, responding with enigmas, stood Matter, with her sly passivity, ancient as the All and portentously rich in deceptions, as solemn and subtle as the Sphinx.

From Henry James’ The Europeans, this single exquisite sentence:

If we are good when we are contented, Eugenia’s virtues should now certainly have been uppermost; for she found a charm in the rapid movement through the wild country, and in a companion who from time to time made the vehicle dip, with a motion like a swallow’s flight, over roads of primitive construction, and who, as she felt, would do a great many things that she might ask him.

And finally some Flaubert, writing letters home from his travels in Egypt in 1850, years before he produced Madame Bovary:

When I think of my future (that happens rarely, for I generally think of nothing at all despite the elevated thoughts one should have in the presence of ruins!), when I ask myself: ‘What shall I do when I return? What path shall I follow?’ and the like, I am full of doubts and indecision. At every stage in my life I have shirked facing my problems in just the same way; and I shall die at eighty before having formed any opinion concerning myself or, perhaps, without writing anything that would have shown me what I could do.

So much for that. Reading Flaubert makes me wish even more keenly that we could travel in time as well as space. That’s my second reference to time travel and now you all think I’m a geek who has watched Back to the Future dozens of times. But the Egypt he saw and luxuriated in and wrote so delicately about is gone gone gone. How sad. Thank god he at least paid attention and took notes.

how to play anagrams

You turn all the tiles from a Scrabble bag upside down on the table, minus the blanks. You turn up one tile each in rapid succession, and everyone scans all the upright tiles for words of four letters or more. If you find one, you call it out and take the letters, and form the word flat on the table in front of you. Everyone keeps turning up new letters and snatching words.

Here’s the tricky bit: if you can make an anagram of a word somebody else has snatched, you can steal it from them. You can also steal a word if you can make an anagram of a pre-existing word by adding new upturned tiles. You can’t steal a word by adding an ‘s’, and you can’t form an original word that is a plural, but you can steal a word with an ‘s’ in it by forming an anagram that is a plural. You can also take new upturned letters to make anagrams of your own words—because if you don’t, somebody else will.

So this is how it works out: when somebody finds a word, they immediately yell out every anagram of it they can think of, often including several words that do not exist. e.g. “Atom! Moat! Um… Amot! Toma!” to prevent it from being stolen. And people start to sweat: if you have a word like “axle” or “gate” or “meet” you get very, very nervous about an ‘r’ turning up, knowing some bastard’s going to nick your word if they see the ‘r’ before you do. Play it once, and you will see how this game can easily steal hours of your life. Much like blogging, except you have to actually interact with other humans.

up and up in paris and london

Having spent a week in London, making a dick of myself by tacking an automatic s’il vous plait on the end of every drink order, I’m back in Paris, dealing with the reality that it takes me five minutes to read a slogan on a poster. I’ve seen both cities at their best recently—in Paris I’ve had visitors to make it all shiny, and in London I got to spend time with people I’ve been missing and find that everyone’s doing well, which is always nice.

In fact, I had an unexpected reunion with some girls I haven’t seen since we used to share a house in second-year uni. It was odd to be reminded of that time. I was in an imploding relationship, eating a no fat, no sugar, no carbohydrate diet, watching my hip bones protrude and collecting amethyst crystals. Amy and Eef were trying to plan a trans-continental move, experimenting with compost and meeting strange people in bars, who would subsequently ring our doorbell whenever they found themselves in the neighbourhood. At three a.m. And we were all being fleeced by a beautiful, intelligent heroin addict who was crashing on our floor (we all wondered why she was always falling asleep with lit cigarettes in her hand, why her parents would buy her groceries but refused to loan her twenty bucks, and, in the end, where our rent money was disappearing to). Now these two are happily established in the Netherlands—Amy is doing a physics degree, and researching nuclear fusion at Oxford on her summer break, and Eef is channeling her formidable joie de vivre into the final year of a photography course. And I still don’t really have a clue what I’m doing, but I hope soon to be clueless—and gainfully employed—in Italy. It all seems sufficient. Fortunate, even.

summer in paris with jenn and pete
The bars of the eleventh are in top form, and groups of happy, beer-drinking young couples have booted the old men off the petanque courts. It’s a fun time to be in Paris, and Pete and Jenn had the energy of people on a short vacation, so we did lots. I don’t normally hold with paying to climb tall things—I find most cities look sort of forlorn and pointless when seen from high up. But from the towers of Notre Dame we could spy into all the little apartment courtyards and narrow streets, and for a moment I felt the hard shell of the city crack open, and reveal a wink of its vivid, dense, chattering past. Gotcha, I thought. Afterwards we went for drinks at a barge café that was moored nearby. From there, we could people-watch at leisure. As each cruise boat passed Notre Dame, all the people on board would hold their cameras aloft to it, silently, simultaneously, as in prayer.

We went to the catacombs too. In the late 18th century, when several of Paris’ over-crowded cemeteries became a public health risk, the bones were disinterred and moved to abandoned quarries under the 16th Arrondissement. In the 1850s, all the skulls and femurs were arranged into pretty patterns along the tunnel walls (there’s five or six million skeletons down there, so that’s a lot of material to work with—Matthew Barney would surely have sold his firstborn son to be in charge of that project) and the catacombs were opened as a tourist attraction. We enjoyed seeing the bones in their heart and crucifix formations, all interspersed with improving quotes about mortality, but I was most impressed by the hoard of confiscated bones at the exit. I asked the attendant had they really been stolen. He tapped his fingers over a skull and two femurs. “This morning, yesterday and… last Tuesday, I think. Bizarre, uh?” But he didn’t really seem that surprised.

We made three attempts to crack the August queues at the Eiffel Tower. After the final unsuccessful effort, we cheered ourselves up with some second-hand English book shopping. From a listing in Pete’s guide book we found a place called Tea and Tattered Pages, which sounded like it would fit the bill. The American woman who was staffing it talked ceaselessly at us while she made us some cream cheese bagels. She told us she’d been in Paris since ’67, so I asked her about the ’68 riots. Unfortunately she was on a short holiday in Norway when they happened—the thought of the fun she’d missed still made her grimace and pull her hair, 35 years later. She also explained to us that Parisians used to be smaller than they are now, because oppressive parenting techniques stunted their growth. She demonstrated these techniques with verve, swatting the air and barking instructions at imaginary down-trodden little Parisians of yesteryear. When I told her her theory seemed a little bit far-fetched, she conceded they probably didn’t drink enough milk in those days either. Then she made Peter change his tea order from English Breakfast to Lapsang Souchong (“otherwise I could die of boredom just watching you drink it”) and then asked him to help her pump up a flat bicycle tyre, and he obliged.

in london
on the other hand, there was the Fox Reformed, a wine bar in Stoke Newington. I asked the proprietor, who was squeaky-voiced and tufty-haired and wore big moony spectacles, for a glass of beaujolais. He asked me if I wanted it chilled or at room temperature. I was a bit disconcerted, so I asked him what his preference would be. “I should think it has bugger all to do with me, and everything to do with you,” he squeaked. His girlfriend leaned across the bar to me. She seemed to be one of those perfectly normal women who marry intense, under-socialised nerds out of affection and a vague wish to protect. She whispered tactfully, “The beaujolais can be a touch soupy on very hot days, but I don’t think you need have it chilled just now.” So I didn’t.

London is sprawling and magnificently ugly compared with Paris, but I like it very much. I like its tough, aggro energy and its tar-black sense of humour, and its free museums and its red buses and its public notices. In fact, I sometimes think it wouldn’t matter if every place I went to was like that big, white, featureless room in THX-1138, as long as there were signs around to keep me amused. A breath-takingly irresponsible ad for an online casino urged me ‘never to let a defeat have the last word.’ A notice on the bus said it was licensed for 17 ‘standees’, which annoyed me at first for its grammatical inaccuracy, but then I got thinking about what a ‘standee’ might be. I imagined an important-looking man lying prone, grimacing, while a woman teetered on his chest in stiletto heels, and that enlivened my journey no end.

Then there is Lil’s street sign. Her new house is on a pretty street called the West Bank, in the Orthodox Jewish part of town. Go figure. It’s a great area. Lots of trees and nice cafés, and cute kids running around in yamulkahs, their forelocks still too short to curl. And Lil has a beautiful, big room with space to paint and play guitar, and a pear tree out the back that’s taller than the house. She also has a lovely new girlfriend. Lily and Den are now officially, delightfully, an item. Den has a new house too, and she has got rid of a lot of the spirits who were bugging her, both of which things she’s very pleased about. I said it was a pity I hadn’t thought to ask them who killed JFK. “They still drop in every now and then, I’ll ask them.”

Later that night when we were all going to sleep, Den yelled across the room to me. “It was Archibald, Kate.”
“What?”
“Who killed JFK.”
“You mean Oswald?”
She was quiet for a second, presumably in consultation.
“That’s it, yeah.”
“Oh jeez, Den, that’s what everybody says. Get some sleep.”
There was silence for another long moment.
“And Jack the Ripper was some bloke called John Hewitt. An American, apparently.”
Now that was news to me.

I also went to see Frida Kahlo at the Tate Modern, which had most of her major works so I didn’t mind the ten pounds’ entry. Best of all was her self-portrait against a yellow ground. I’ve seen it lots of times in books, but on the wall there was a direness, a sort of stricken dignity that I’d never seen in it before. I wonder why that is with some artworks—like there’s a spirit in the paint itself that can’t cross over into reproductions. And I passed a happy birthday evening watching a super-8 film festival. My favourite was an amusing one with a dog in. I got a DVD of Don’t Look Now from Pete, a cute notebook and some new drawings from Lily, and a tin whistle from my sister. Excellent.

And I applied for some teaching jobs in Italy. I can’t be doing with this drifting forever, I need to belong to a place again. In the metro I see scowling boys dressed in camouflage carrying big machine guns, and I want to march up and demand, what country are we living in, for god’s sake? Except that I can’t say that properly in French, and I’m not really living here, am I, it’s more like a long pause than real life. Or I see a street name that I should remember from history class, but I don’t bother to look it up and find out why. Or I see a photograph of Beckett sitting in a left bank café, and I wonder what attracted him so much to this place. Unless I learn French, I will probably never really get it. It’s been fun, all this idle speculation from the outside, but I need to be somewhere long enough to get beneath the surface a little.

revisionist history

Lah-di-dah (I saw a Woody Allen film last night; all the French people were laughing before I did because sub-titles are known for their terseness and Woody Allen is not). If you keep a diary, or indeed read the newspapers, you'll know all about revisionist history. I have just deleted a post from this blog, because I didn't like having it here. It was written at an unhappy moment, and it felt like a betrayal of what I've tried to make of this blog. With it went some lovely, friendly comments and some others that would curl your toenails (Nik, please think of the children) so I expect a lively debate about censorship of self and others to follow, unless, in fact, people have more interesting things to do.

charming and cheesy

signs

On a shop front:
Open in August!

In the unisex toilets of a corporation I taught at:
Out of respect for other visitors, please urinate in the bowl, not on the walls.

Poster in the metro:
[IN ENGLISH] Paris offers you a warm welcome!
[IN FRENCH] For the good of your city, encourage tourism.

In an ad for a wonder cream:
Shed kilos and bronze at the same time.

All over the city:
J’aime mon quatier; je ramasse

To ramasse is to pick up, as in your dog’s shit. But a certain intertextuality suggests itself, especially in the accompanying cartoon of the man with the shovel hovering behind his dog. I love the way French public notices are often in the first person: perhaps they want the words to pass directly into your internal monologue, or maybe they are meant to be the words of an encouraging friend, a role-model type. Do you ramasse? I know I do.


commerce on the traffic island in the middle of boulevarde menilmontant

A shed full of arcade games, with Rastafarian plush dolls dangling from the ceiling.

A beige caravan like your nan and pop might have in their back yard, with posters in the windows offering tarot consultations.

A news stand that sells maps of Pére Lachaise cemetery and Jim Morrison t-shirts.

A guy who has made a barbecue out of a shopping trolley, an upturned tin bucket and a primus stove, and is barbecuing corn cobs.

Benches where men sit at night with beers in their hands and blankets of trashy jewellery laid out on the ground in front of them. Once I saw a car drive over a whole blanket load—oh boy, was there some gesticulating.


things on the banks of the seine in summer

A tiny sunken amphitheatre on the very edge of the water where people come to tango in the evenings.

Buskers playing Ticket to ride, Ma vie en rose and, inevitably, No woman no cry.

People pashing.

Cruise barges with banks of floodlights along their sides, so they can light up the banks like a police raid and give their passengers the best possible view of Romantic Paris by Night.

Three kilometres of fake beach with boardwalks, sand, deckchairs, palm trees, and a lending library.


easily amused

In fact, they were digging up all the footpaths around our house last month, creating holes a man could stand shoulder-deep in. Macgregor speculated they were shipping all the sandy dirt over to the Paris Plage. An irresistible thought. Under the cobblestones…