laura-les-crayons

je ne manque pas de bonnes raisons pour t'aimer

2008-08-31T12:56:00.000-07:00

It's high time I finished what I started almost two months ago and worked out how to tie up this blog and my last couple of days in Paris. This morning I found my red Dorothy shoes under my bed and felt hugely guilty for abandoning this blog at the final frontier: home. Which reminds me, before anything more is said, this whole thing had a happy ending because on my last night with my U-dub friends, after Rock en Seine, we went back to the bar in Montparnasse, which we still can't remember the name of, and I found my black ballet pumps. I screamed about this for about two hours and immediately replaced my horrible trainers with them. Then I spent an hour talking to a fireman about car fires in the banlieue. Funnnnn.

The next day I visited Joel and the room was half-emptied, as Cameron had moved out the night before. It was so weird without half the stuff there, the collection of empties finally binned, the basketball laboriously deflated. We went to the brasserie with Sean, where we had hung out on the first day, and drank ice tea and they talked about technology, because let's not get soppy now. Joel had to catch his bus, so he could be super early for his flight to Sweden and Sean and I took a very long, slightly risky bus journey to the Louvre, where we explored the medieval foundations, and where I took the picture of these dice, which were used a rubble for the next palace and only collected in the Mitterand excavation and renovation project of the eighties.

After this I realised I had a lot to cram in before I left. I have recently become obsessed with the soundtrack of Les Chansons d'amour, a film starring none other than...Louis Garrel. You can listen to most of the songs online, although the CD itself is almost impossible to track down, and I couldn't find it in Gibert Jeune. If by some unlikely turn of events you have to queue at a listening post in FNAC on your lunch hour to hear it, you really should. My favourite song from the film is definitely "Je n'aime que toi," sung by all three of the main characters, who are in a strange, three-way relationship that at least one of them isn't happy about. The particularly clever part is sung by the second girl in the relationship, expressing her role in quintessentially Parisian terms, with all the perversity you can expect of a Garrel film:

Je suis le pont sur la rivière

Qui va de toi a toi

Traversez-moi, la belle affaire!

Embrassez-vous sur moi hmmm hmm

Je n'aime que toi hmm

Je n'aime que toi

and then later, she becomes even more obstinately architectural to the romance:

Je suis le pont sur la rivière

Vos guerres me laissent de bois

Piétinez-moi, que puis-je y faire

Je ne bouge pas de là, la la, la la

Je n'aime que toi, la la la la la

Je n'aime que toi

I was excited about seeing the film as I loved the songs so much and just couldn't imagine Garrel doing a musical. In fact the clips of the film I had seen were more like music videos, not excerpts from a musical and the whole thing it seemed aspired to operate on assumptions very different from the usual all-singing all-dancing production (actually you don't get much dancing in Chansons, just some terrific smoke rings and inspired choreographed-yoga). Also exciting was that I'd heard reviews as damning as:

You need a sweet tooth for this kind of thing and Garrel really is turning into the most irritating actor in the world, hyperactively clowning around and generally behaving like the Big Brother contestant from hell.

from Peter Bradshaw at the Guardian.

I decided this was an occasion on which to dress up for the cinema - they all are, but especially so when you've been looking forward to it this much and you're going alone - so I put on my new breton top, blue jeans and an enormous cream cardigan, and set out for Le Brady L'Albatros. This had acheived almost pilgrimage-like destination status in my mind by the end of the week as I realised that the film actually centres around this very cinema, and you can see it in the opening shot, left. Not only this but I had the delicious joy of mentally caterwauling the lyrics of the film's final song, "J'ai Cru Entendre," the whole tube ride there, as I too made my way "de Montparnaaaaasse...à...Chateau d'eaaaauuu."

As usual there were three other people in the room, possibly the smallest movie theatre I have ever seen, with maybe twelve seats, and the lights were on right up until the feature started rolling, recalling the unnatural starkness of a night club just before closing. The first few scenes, however were glorious, although the imitation of Umbrellas of Cherbourg with the chapter divisions required the taking of a deep breath. After a while it seemed to stray a bit, as though someone had found twelve or so excellent music videos and tried to think up some dialogue and weird sexual situations to place them context and link them all up. I can't disagree with Peter Bradshaw on Garrel's mime scenes either - they went on forever and were distinctly irrelevant, although he personally couldn't help that. What I did like about the film was the ending, where the two male leads end up on the roof, at the end of the song and the exhaustion of what had seemed a self-indulgent and cruel hit-parade of emotional experimentation is revealed in a classic last line -

Aime-moi moins, mais aime-moi longtemps

Whoever said films are written with words like "wooosh!" and "zoom!" was wrong. Meanwhile it was coming up to my last day, which I spent entirely at the Cinemathèque Française finally. You can spend forever in there going from floor to floor. I spent most of my time in their history of film exhibition, where you can see everything contributing to the birth of cinema, like magic lanterns, and all sorts of phantasmagoria, as well as the earliest faking of colour film, Lois Fuller dancing, the head from Psycho and props from Metropolis and Un Chien Andalou. There's also a really nice park with a strange flying saucer like sports centre dedicated to some prime minister or other opposite. I was a bit disappointed to find that the collection has been moved since the sixties, although maybe not so worried that the line that's been in my heads for several years no longer applied - "only the French would house a cinema inside a palace." It's better as poetic licence.

The Civilised Consumer

2008-08-26T15:04:00.000-07:00

Over the last few days, I have been forced out into the shopping districts and street markets of Paris by cruel necessity. Having checked out the Promod on Boulevard St Michel fairly early on during my stay here, I had resolved to devote my time and money to higher cultural pursuits, such as reading in the Jardin du Luxembourg, going to the cinema, and constructing a mental league table of the local patisseries. As time went by, the thought of buying any kind of clothing in France began to horrify me, and I squandered my funds on drinking Ice Tea and noisette in nice cafés instead.

Victim of circumstances that I am, i.e. having discovered that flip flops really don't go with everything, as one might assume, I ventured as far as Chatelet to find some suitable footwear. This was a false start, as apparently nothing's open on Sunday afternoons. In the meantime, I did some research and found out that the largest flea market in the world, les puces, takes place every weekend at Porte de Clignancourt - and they stay open until monday, so I hadn't missed it! This made me very happy, as I imagined all the vintage Balenciaga that I would be able to pick up for twenty centimes a piece and some kind of tinderbox with magical powers that would find its way to me. Resolutions were made, to get up early, eat a good breakfast and beat the crowds. In reality, I slept till gone midday, when the inconsiderate cleaning lady told me she had to change the bedsheets right now. Not now or never. Just right get-out-of-bed-this-instant-you-lazy-slob now. Which was actually fine by me as I needed to get to the market before classes at three.

Getting there was a brilliant, long journey on the RER changing at Gare du Nord, during which time I got to read my Patrick Hamilton book, a novel truly suited to the atmosphere of a dirty, suffocating, underground train. Coming out of the station was like arriving in a different country. Only three stops away from Montmartre and all I could see were beaten-down supermarkets, hot tarpaulins and stark, white tower blocks. This would have all added to an atmosphere, even lent a sense of vibrancy, if the marché aux puces had genuinely had something out-of-the-way and interesting to offer, but what was sad was the ubiquity of the lamentably usual stuff: legally-dubious phone unlocking services; cheap market clothes, the designs of which seem never to alter from year to year and from country to country; the odd chancer clearing out a selection of his manky old crockery from the backs of kitchen cupboards. Of course, there is no reason why the stall-holders at les puces shouldn't make a living like this, anymore than the millions of traders doing exactly the same thing the world over. But this is my point - the largest flea market in the world, offering nothing that anyone in their right mind would ever need, or even particularly desire, to own.

Only two stalls in the market really caught my eye. The first of these was a lovely bric-a-brac stall with useless but beautiful items on sale. In fact, the items themselves weren't particularly beautiful, but the way in which they had been presented were - like the box of rusty keys, or the collection of pipes on a foil platter - their multitude created a redundancy, tending towards the bizarre. They seemed to offer a new way of looking at the market, their time-shifted elegance almost suggesting that one day even the box of old Happy Meal toys might come into their own antiquated romance.

Old keys rusted tan

Tangle of pipes

Tempting, battered suitcases

In the second case, my attention was grabbed in an utterly different way. As I was making my way along the main artery of the market, I was taking a lot of photos, the day being dusty and set against a hot, blue sky. I especially like taking pictures of the streets off the side of the second market, of the corrugated iron warehouses-cum-restaurants with their concrete patios and of the parked cars. The one picture I would have loved to have taken here was of a shop called "Saisi en Douane," which had an exciting almost Wild West feel to it. The front was a great corrugated iron arch shape, only just beginning to rust, which curved in attractively and, through a small, half-opened doorway, opened into a cave of glass display cases, that, even from a distance, looked cloudy, with age and proud but inept polishing. There were no windows and the entire front was painted step-away-from-the-scene-of-the-crime yellow, onto which the shop name and various "official" slogans abusing the police had been lovingly stencilled, untouched by the normal graffiti. Wow, I thought. This would make a great holiday snap. What a way to capture the real Paris. I then had a very serious moment in which I realised the display cases were full of guns and ammunition. And not just guns and ammunition, but guns and ammunition "dedouanés" i.e. stuff that it would be highly illegal to bring into the country. I respected the bravado of the shopkeeper for maintaining this rather professional outpost of banditry. On the other hand, as I have mentioned, I'm from the English countryside and, faced with the hooded men who sloped around the display cases in the dark, I couldn't suppress the petty belief that I could be shot down any minute, or that someone would at least roughly grab my wrist and tell me to scarper. I didn't get more than six feet near the door.

After this, I decided I had experienced about as much variety and local colour as I fancied for that day and headed to the Rue de Rivoli for some risk-free consumer indulgence. I replied the lost shoes with two pairs of ballet pumps from Etam (surprisingly good over here; now gets a second chance at home), one in olive and the other in black. They both have a delightful floral lining and came in matching drawstring bags. Irrestistable! (says the girl who g.t.f.o'd from the scary gun market). I also found two amazing vintage shops, which as far as I know, are fairly well kept secrets.

FREE P STAR

The more predictably located of the two, at 8 rue Sainte Croix de la Bretonnerie in the Marais, it also has the most striking interior, with a make shift first floor housing bags and boots at the back half of the shop, accessible only by ladder, and a tiny spiral staircase down to a Narnia-esque bargain basement with fur-coats galore.
GÉNÉRIQUE

Smaller but with a lovingly cultivated stock of interesting designs and good names at decent prices. 68 rue Cardinal Lemoine, a few minutes walk from the Panthéon.

Enjoy!

«Sur Place», part 2

2008-08-23T05:48:00.000-07:00

I like this photo of my stairs at Cité-U because they look like a snail shell, spiralling out like the arrondissements of Paris. Yesterday all morning a thick, fine rain came down over the whole city, so that, from my window, the tall, turreted Belgian foundation and the grattes-ciels behind them looked like two worlds slipping over one another and the smell of sunbaked dust rose up to the third floor with the clarity of remembering a bonfire.

I have always loved being indoors during a cold, heavy shower of rain. It can improve any experience: lying in bed, reading a novel and listening to it on the roof; or cooking pasta with the back door open whilst the windows steam up; having a bath; or getting dressed in the morning when your clothes have been on the radiator. It's the most wonderful thing in the world when you realise that you don't want to go outside, because everything you need to be happy is dry and warm and around you. At those times, if you poke your head out, or decide to go through a walk through it, it's a mysterious sort of glass-beaded curtain, of the kind that hangs in the doorways of bric-a-brac shops and student houses and the houses of friends whose parents went to university in the seventies and still occasionally smoke pot in the shed. On the other hand, there can be times when you absolutely need to get out and the lashing rain is keeping you in like an electric fence. On those days, even if you made an effort, you know you'd only fare the same as all those stop-start Wimbledon matches, guardedly anticipated picnics and outdoors parties spent squashed with one hundred other people for the duration in a tiny marquee.

Yesterday's rain was like neither of these old friends or enemies. It should have been the latter, prolonging the feeling of waking dissolute, rendering starker the realisation that I had left my shoes and cardigan in a bar the night before and that they were now, almost certainly, irredeemably lost, along with some shreds of my dignity. Instead, it was just a reason to stay inside for a bit longer, despite conversation running dry, playing the guitar with a friend and adjusting to the morning, and the end of the week, and being sober, and the fact that in less than ten days, I'll be at home, caring too much about essays on books I don't want to read, and not taking the RER every day, and not sitting in cafés or lying about my age to get into museums.

In the mid-afternoon, we went out onto the drizzly pavements of Montparnasse, like escargots craving newly-moistened air, and in search of lost vêtements. When we got there, the bar wasn’t open and my american friends decided that we’d go to MacDonald’s to pass the time. I’m usually not a fan of this establishment at all, not least abroad, but recently I’ve come to appreciate the subtly chic aspect of the Parisian “MacDo.” This might be something to do with Louis Garrel and Leila Bekhti ordering “un Big Mac” in Choisir d’aimer, or the red white and yellow paper bags strewn along the Boulevard St Michel, or the pleasant, dependable reek of Kronenberg mingled with French fries in each of their shops. Anyway I didn’t have much of a choice and, when we got there, I realised there’s something I quite miss about drinking coke from a paper cup and mindlessly demolishing packets of straws, especially whilst looking out on a still-overcast, puddly street as greyish light spills onto a grimy window-side booth. (Although this is as far as I allowed my MacDo experience to go.)

My shoes, unfortunately, and the cardigan, so it transpires, are lost forever. We scrabbled around in the bar for a while, and I asked the barman, but they're definitely gone. At least three different people have informed me that this is a Good Thing, because now I get to go shoe shopping and apparently, being female, I love that. I don't really object to the hideous gender stereotyping, because I joy in the unnecessary acquisition of material goods as much as the next. It's just annoying as I now have to content myself with one pair of flimsy sandals, even in the rain, and a trench coat, even when it's not quite cold enough.

In this unsatisfying, meteorologically indecisive outfit, we returned to Cité-U, where I went to the brasserie to read Slaves of Solitude and check out the Versailles review in Cahiers du Cinema. Two lovely faith-in-humanity-restoring things happened as a result of this decision. First of all, I went to buy a cup of tea, to soothe the pain of shoe loss with the most comforting English thing I could think of, and so that I had a legitimate reason to hang around in the brasserie and the waiter who I had befriended earlier in the day slipped me four different herbal teas and a muffin, as though he had felt my pain without my saying anything. Then, as I was reading, a man, whose name I later discovered was Maol, struck up conversation about French literature with me. He's studying philosophy at the Sorbonne and we talked for a while about Alain Geismar, who is a professor there, and May 68 and, predictably, "Biquette" and Proust.

His cousin then arrived and they invited me over for dinner at the Maison des Arts et Métiers. I wasn't really sure whether or not to accept, but they seemed really nice, and it's hard to believe there could be anything sinister about anyone who knows that much about Proust. We went to the supermarket, which was semi-awkward if I'm honest, the coffee cups and table having disappeared and the chat being significantly reduced by necessity of discussing various onions and camemberts. Then we went to the M.A.M., a part of Cité-U that I've never visited before, and into a cavernous, wonderful kitchen.

The M.A.M. is a great example of some mid-twentieth century brutalist architecture, inside and out. To get to the kitchen, we had to take a lift no larger than an ordinary wardrobe, with two sets of heavy iron doors that you had to open - outwards like normal doors - manually to get out. I would have expected to see a crank in the corner, if the lift had been big enough. We descended into the basement, and walked along a wide, shabby corridor. The room itself had a high ceiling, and felt like a gaping, windowless hole in a building that felt like it should have been full of yellowing packing peanuts. Inside two walls were lined with fridges and freezers of different sizes, some stacked on top of each other in a higgledy-piggledy way, and all wrapped in thick, padlocked chains. Along another wall were a collection of microwaves in various states of disrepair, a sink and a few portable gas rings, and in the middle of the room were two large rustic tables with torn and tattered lino tablecloths.

They made a salad with hard-boiled eggs, potatoes, lettuce and tomatoes and we all ate bread and cheese, whilst one of their friends learnt lines for a film that she's going to be in. She kept repeating "je me donne toute entière" and laughing dispairingly. She made us all coffee and moaned that someone on the metro had given up his seat for her thinking that she was pregnant. Maol told me about the character of the different arrondissements, how they are arranged like a snail, and he and his cousin argued about Kant and Dostoyevsky for nearly an hour (from this I picked up "laisse-moi parler!" - great in an argument). I looked at my watch and realised I had been there for hours, that it was gone 2 o' clock. They walked me back to my building, but I avoided exchanging numbers, as I'm going home soon and everyone was so drunk by this stage, but maybe I'll see them around again.

Baisers de Secours

2008-08-21T10:06:00.000-07:00

A few days ago I realised that I had been in Paris for quite a while and I hadn't got around to doing quite a lot of things I had planned to when I came here. One of these was to visit the Cinémathèque Française, which I haven't been able to do because it's shut until next week. Pleasant surprise then when one of my friends rang me and told me he had a free ticket to see a film called Versailles because some people in his classed had dropped out. It was showing at a gargantuan, labyrinthine cinema, called Gaumont, in Montparnasse. In the UK I find multiplexes like that quite tacky and very tiring to walk through, but this place was exciting and warren-like. Usually it's hard to ignore the cheap, garish carpets, the same in every single cinema, and the tangerine strip lighting, but Gaumont felt clean and held an innocent sort of glamour, like going to a film with your friends for the first time, when it's the latest you've ever been out alone.

As for the film, I was expecting a kind of Kirsten Dunst resplendently shot yet indifferent biopic, having got the whole thing confused with Marie Antoinette. It couldn't have been further from this. It was a film about a homeless mother, Nina, and her very young son who move from place to place in Paris and end up meeting Guillaume Depardieu's character, Damien, at his shack in the middle of the woods near Versailles. For much of the film, you are consumed by the fantasy that they might all live in the clearing of the woods together and escape their position in society, especially during the campfire scene, where Nina and Damien seem almost happy with one another, and then you realise that that is just about as naive as hoping that someone might let them stay in one of the spare rooms at Versailles until they get straight. My friend, who complained that he spent most of the film observing technical aspects, told me that he was bothered by the number of fade-to-blacks in the film. Thinking about it, I realised that those moments were some of the bits that impressed me most, as they would be followed by incredibly stark, bright daylight scenes that didn't allow you to be pensive or sentimental, just vaguely shocked. It's exactly the kind of film you need to see by accident, in a foreign country, on a rainy evening when you're not convinced of how much fun you're going to be having.

The next morning I got up really early, convinced that the person showering in the room above me had installed a swimming pool on the third floor, to go the Pantheon and see the Zola exhibition that had been staring me in the face on the way to lectures. I decided to conserve funds by pretending I'm sixteen at museums, which, so far, is working a treat. After convincing the cashier that "my aunt" couldn't accompany me because she has to work all day, I had a good look around, saw some amazing statues, the Foucault pendulum, which I remembered from last time. Then I was about to trek across to the Musée d'Orsay, when I noticed a tiny cinema called Les Trois Luxembourg.

Its neon sign was pale in the daylight and its idea of advertising was A4 sheets with the name of a film in comic sans, the time and a low-res black and white picture. All of white I found instantly wonderful, so I thought I would go in and pick up a copy of Telerama at least, and see if anything good was on, though I was still set on Musée d'Orsay. Then I saw an A4 sheet with the words Louis Garrel written on it at least twice. Yep, a Louis Garrel double feature, which I hadn't even known was showing anywhere - in fact I found out later that this happened to be the only cinema that the two films Mes Copains and Choisir d'aimer are showing at at all. I couldn't resist the idea of going to a double feature over lunch, in a cinema with as many reels of old film lying around in the foyer as seats in the theatre and only three other customers, and generally couldn't resist Louis Garrel, so I went to buy a ticket. What happened next increased my admiration for Les Trois Luxembourgs ten fold. The owner (I assume the owner otherwise she'd surely have been sacked) basically expelled everyone from the foyer and refused to sell anyone a ticket until five minutes before the film. So we all had to sit on the pavement until 13h25, after which she begrudgingly admitted us to the theatre, as though we were unfavoured old friends who had turned up in her living room halfway through her favourite soap opera.

Today I read about Mes Copains in Cahiers du Cinema, where they say that it's a film which sets out to show that the world is full of friends not of enemies. Given that it's a film in which the main character's girlfriend systematically sleeps with every single one of his friends and then they all have awkward conversations skirting the matter, I'm not sure what I think about that. I think you're most convinced of it after the film, when you've emerged into the bolder daylight, after the baiser de secours that is a concentrated hour in a darkened room.

This morning I continued a great tradition of getting up early and had breakfast on the terrace with a copy of Patrick Hamilton's The Slaves of Solitude, which I'm about halfway through now and absolutely in love with. I went to some frivolous exhibitions at the Musée des Arts Decoratifs, then bought my Rock en Seine ticket at les Halles, before going to class. On the way there I saw the sign on the left, and felt happy to be in Paris.

Barbarity vs Civilisation

2008-08-17T17:42:00.000-07:00

Today on the metro, I was listening to Kocani Orkestar and, as the track finished, I heard a new tune drift in on the accordion. I thought it was some kind of cool, hidden track that my mp3 player had never revealed before, when in fact it was this incredible busker, who came on at Cambronne and played all the way till the end of the line at Charles de Gaule Etoile. I liked him more than a bit, even though everyone else on the train was spectacularly unimpressed, including the grey haired woman in the bottom right of the photo, who, bizarrely, was carrying a bouquet of red and white roses.

I also shamelessly snapped this organ-grinder when I came out by the Arc de Triomphe. I dislike organ-grinders more than a bit, especially the ones outside the Jardin de Luxembourg, mainly because they play really annoying music, or what might be pleasant music but with a lack of anything that could honestly be described as rhythm. I do, however, like the word and concept a lot. Intend to use more in future. I also liked the sign -

HANDICAPÉ VISUEL
mon grand plaisir!
jouer pour vous dans
L'ORGUE DE BARBARIE

pour de multiples raisons. Line by line I'd say the idea of the blind organ-grinder is wonderfully romantic in and of itself, whilst the idea that the man operating this machine has any need of all the five senses (in fact being deaf'd make things more bearable, or at least wearing ear plugs) is ludicrous. Second line, even more bizarre (perhaps something lost in translation here). It seems to me that it could either refer to the pleasure of the music (surely not?!) or the pleasure of being visually handicapped. Probably down to personal preference. Then the fourth line is the absolute jewel in the crown. Apparently "orgue de barbarie" is just the name for this type of organ in French, in the same way that a French horn isn't really french and never has been. The name is supposed to have originated from its 18th-century manufacturer Giovanni Barbieri of Modena, but I think an unspoken national recognition of the instrument's barbarousness must be the reason that the name has stuck.

Thus, in a good English translation I believe this sign to read something like:

BARBAROUS MUSIC BOX
played for you by
ORGAN GRINDER
blind for your pleasure!

Gruesome. Then proceeded along the Champs-Elysées, to Sephora, where I learnt the word for split ends ("fourches") and gained Marc Jacobs perfume samples. I think civilisation just about won out.

Concrete, poetry

2008-08-16T08:54:00.000-07:00

This is an Apollinaire poem that I translated:

The original text read "Mon Coeur pareil à une flamme renversé." I tried to get as close to the original typography as I could, and started out with a more perfect heart shape, but distorted it to look more like the one in the book, which is more flame-like.

I wish there were novels and epic poems in concrete form as well. Life would be simpler. And less time consuming.

Souris de Laboratoire

2008-08-15T14:31:00.001-07:00

A couple of things that happened yesterday made me really glad I decided to come here, and get more civilised, and that. For the last three weeks, I've been missing my guitar hugely, so I got up earlyish and went looking for a ukulele in Pigalle, where I had heard that there were lots of guitar shops. This pleased me first of all because when I was asking the man at reception how to get there, I got to use one of my favourite french phrases, "j'ai entendu dire que..." Then when I found a shop I was even happier, since the man who sold me the ukulele both taught me how to say 'ukulele' in a French accent and sang me the tuning when I asked him about it. Et en même temps he looked uncannily like Dave Grohl.

Then I caught the train back down to Luxembourg for the two lectures I had most been looking forward to in the whole program, on Proust's life and works. I was excited but I'd come not to expect much, as, up to now, a lot of the lectures have been a bit dull, despite still being really useful for improving listening skills. For instance, monday's lecture "sur les pas des écrivains en Ile de France" should have been riveting, whereas, in fact, the highlights were the ten minutes of Edith Piaf that the lecturer would play at the beginning of each half before a big band number came on and he couldn't hear himself talk (this happened both times) and trying to guess who among the dwindling number of students in the auditorium would be the next to scramble politely out onto the street.

These two lectures, on the other hand, by M. Y. M. Ergal were literally the best two hours I've ever spent watching anything - lecture, film or play. He made breath-taking points not just on Proust but on the whole of literature seen through the prism of Proust's mind. It made me think of the German phrase es raubt den Atem. For instance, this was a massive gasp:

"Balzac a inventé l'argent. Tous ces personnages ont une énergie internale qui vient de l'argent. Tous les romans de Balzac reposent sur l'argent comme tous les romans de Marcel Proust reposent sur la vie secrète, les attirances sexuelles secrètes. Le narrateur se fait plonger dans les cerveaux de ces personnages."

I think I especially liked this because I've often thought it about Austen, then the Victorian novelists, such as Charlotte Bronte, even to some extent Henry James, especially in Portrait of a Lady. I had always recognised that money can be the machinery of plot, but it's striking to think that, more than simply serving as a motivation for them, money can constitute the energy of characters; that anything so conceptual yet so brutally real should be necessary for the novelist to bring a character of group of characters to life; that to be able to invent something like this in literature is somehow to shake loose the bonds of influence however important and to hit upon a majestic autonomy.

The lecturer also spent a lot of time talking about how Proust wrote the last sentence of his book as he was dying, "comme s'il a prévu sa mort," and how his novel writing could be compared to autobiography in light of his final act. He said that, in writing his final word at the moment of his death, Proust had assured his oeuvre at the same time as assuring his life. Whilst that seems to me a slightly romanticised or maybe over-philosophical view of Proust's life, and something that says more about him as a character than about the theory of his work, Ergal's statement that Proust's work was neither biography nor fiction but something entirely new in literature, "une écriture mise en scène dans sa vie" is an incredible idea, that conjured up so many different associations.

The lecture ran on longer than it should have done and people arriving for the Loire lecture kept stumbling in and back out of the hushed theatre, with a physical comicness that reflected the stupified, stunned way I was feeling. As this was happening, Ergal read from Albertine disparue -

"...au milieu du noir que je croyais total , la partie vitrée était translucide et bleue, d'un bleu de fleur, d'un bleu d'aile d'insecte, d'un bleu qui m'eût semblé beau si je n'avais senti qu'il était un dernier reflet, coupant comme un acier, un coup suprême que dans sa cruauté infatigable me portait encore le jour."

There was a certain sense of triumph in coming to the end of this amazing sentence; it could never be read in the hysterically laconic way that the lecturer from earlier in the week, who had also provided amusement by saying "biquette" instead of Beckett, had read Perec and Duras. I finished scribbling some notes and packed up my things. Then, just as everyone was standing up, Ergal produced a A3 sheet and declared "a facsimile of the madeleine scene!" with a huge grin, like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat, but doing it for real and conjuring something much more interesting than a rabbit. I went out into daylight and straight into a shop called "Le Temps Retrouvé" looking for some Proust. They didn't have any, just a lot of really pretty second-hand art books and compilations of French music, with nice covers and titles like "Chansons Coquines et Sensuelles." I stayed for a while, listening to the swing music that they were playing and then went to Gibert Joseph and bought an ex-display copy of "Un amour de Swann." I ended up on a side street called "Rue Jean de Beauvais," where I saw this startling mosaic above a church doorway and had to take a photograph:

When I got back, I went to see my friends in the Canadian building. We drank lotssss of Corona and then I went to St Michel with Eloise, where we sat in a bar that included an outrageously pervy old man and a fascinating mouse (non Algernon-esque, my fate will not be linked to that out of the mouse, who should probably leave the bar, in any way, or for any purposes).

Lost in the supermarket

2008-08-12T14:16:00.000-07:00

I had been planning to do justice to my healthy obsession with French supermarkets in words that evoke its full range and complexity for a long time until today. I was going to rhapsodise about the way all the cheese smells but how there's also room for "vache qui rit", about the vacuum-packed escargots and the abundance of Nutella, about their perfection of the ultimate utilitarian yet comforting public space. I was going to recount the time last summer that we drove fifty kilometers from the Atlantic Ocean inland just for the sake of visiting E Leclerc, even though we passed a dozen Co-ops and Spars on the way. Or I could have just reeled off the names of my favourite chains, starting with the hypermarchés - Carrefour, Auchan, Géant - moving onto the innercity supermarkets - 8 à huit, Champion, Franprix. The list, the poem; the poem, the list. Ah.

But then I went to MONOPRIX. And everything changed.

This is a supermarket where unknowable atrocities are committed i.e. the concept of packaging loaves of bread like iPods and then selling them for three euros. Ditto with fruit. Photographic evidence.

I'm thoroughly appalled.

Fingers crossed in the Promised Land

2008-08-09T06:39:00.000-07:00

The image you thought you'd never see? A few thoughts on the career of Conor Oberst, as told through music videos.

A couple of days ago, I stumbled upon one of the most shocking things to hit YouTube this year. If you're a Bright Eyes fan, that is. It's the video for Conor Oberst's new single from his first solo album since Kill the Monster Before It Eats Baby and he's actually in it. This will still amaze plenty of Bright Eyes fans who remember scratching their heads watching the Bowl of Oranges video and trying to work out which one was supposed to be Conor. When I started thinking about it, I realised that Conor has actually been the focal point in at least his last four videos. What's more significant then is that it's the first video in which you see him actually "acting" along to one of his songs, in the way that Britney Spears does in the Oops!… I Did It Again video or Destiny's Child do in Independent Woman.

Now I'm a massive fan of this video. I like it much more than the song in fact, as it shows a lot of traits of Conor's work which haven't come through on the recent albums and quite frankly, I find the new songwriting boring (more on that later). What I'm not sure about is how far you can match up the musical artistic development of C.O. and Bright Eyes in terms of the way they portray themselves in media other than music. More specifically, how far is a fun video a play for the mainstream and does it reflect an attitude that has affected the music?

The early videos

Among the early videos I can only include Lover I Don't Have to Love and Bowl of Oranges. more than just revealing the huge lack of money at Saddle Creek at the time, these videos both reflect Bright Eyes' early stand-offish stance towards the media in their different ways. After the initial disappointment about lack of almost anything actually happening, the minimal Lover I Don't Have to Love video was great for a sing-a-long once or twice, a talking point among fans and not much else. It was a video so unfriendly that it pushed you back to the record and rightly so. Lifted was about enormous sounds, enormous unwieldy emotions and expressing some kind of philosophy arrived at specifically from a young person's point of view and experience. You had to actually listen to it. No proper video could have done the song justice and, as it was, the song became a karaoke sort of hymn, anthemic but with one self-critical eyebrow raised.

Bowl of Oranges also refused to play up to a market of teenage girls and again did not feature Conor. It won huge respect among fans by its strikingly originality. To start with, anyone would agree that three and a half minutes of beautifully worked, distinctively sewn textile-based stop motion animation is no mean feat, not to mention that Kat Solen made up her own story for the video, to compliment the lyrics, rather than falling into the trap of mirroring them. It's a video you can watch over and over again, not just out of the fascination inspired by the video itself, but because it reflects the tapestry-like richness of Conor Oberst's lyrics and because the layering of narratives and the theatrical framing enhance the complex story-telling of his songs.

The Golden Age

Despite my enthusiasm for the two earlier videos, neither of them are quite Golden Age quality, in that LIDHTL was a one-trick pony and BOO similarly had a home-made feel to it that wouldn't come off for more than one music video, although it clearly influenced the album art for I'm Wide Awake it's Morning and was improved upon by Solen herself in the later At the Bottom of Everything video. The Golden Age videos are all very different from one another but characterised by a certain professional yet understated quality, interesting storylines and an unwillingness to use the charisma of the artist as a selling point. The best example of this is ATBOE. The video extends the idea of the plane crash from the spoken word introduction and draws on the style of the music, imagining a party-like atmosphere on the plane before it goes down. It was interesting to look at, drew out an aspect of the song that I hadn't thought much about before and gave a new perspective on human solidarity and joy amid suffering, in an unfamiliar and obviously unrealistic context.

Lua on the other hand is a side-splitting fuck-you to the idea that a number one single needs a watchable music video: I think I can only bear watching this four-and-a-half-minute clip of Conor Oberst playing an acoustic guitar at a bus stop, whilst almost entirely hiding his face, about once or twice. I'd rather have classed it as an early video and would have done if it hadn't paved the way for Easy/Lucky/Free, the first video in which you see Conor's face and the first step down a slippery slope towards atrocities like the Hot Knives video. We start with the most off-putting performance video ever made. One that says, "leave me alone. I'm probably boring and you don't like me." Phew. I don't want Son of Dork fans thinking we have the same taste in music because they now fancy Conor Oberst. Noooooo. Good job they can't be bothered to listen to a song that doesn't have bright colours in the video and a heart-throb on the packaging. Then we get E/L/F. Nice for Bright Eyes fans but good to see that Oberst is still maintaining a healthy distance and, even rather tackily, contructing a barrier of words between the viewer and himself. He's not degrading himself to tasting the peanut butter and telling us all how good it is. Eugh.

The later work

This is the point in Oberst's career where we start to see the glitzy performance video ie Four Winds, Hot Knives. Just as embarrassing as the music for the latter, Conor is dressed up like Jesus, all in white with long flowing locks. Pass me a bucket to throw up in. Actually pass me my copy of Cassadaga - that'll do just as nicely. I don't have a clue why an artist who has always made incredibly amusing, anti-music industry videos as often as original, intelligent videos would suddenly opt for frontman-focussed performance vids. They say nothing, they do nothing and for the first time in Conor Oberst's career, the song writing isn't particularly good enough to hold his fans' attention for the length of the video.

It's a breath of fresh air, then, to watch a video like Souled Out!!! because it has all the wit of the sound collages from Conor's earlier work and shows more of the intelligent yet upbeat side that you can see on Lifted and Wide Awake. It has all the personality that the song lacks. The way in which it portrays that personality is also interesting. One of the clever things that happens in the video is that a huge giggle interrupts the throwaway but typically Oberstian filler lyric "Now I'm cold..." and Oberst joins in, laughing at himself, as though to acknowledge the end of certain gestures that he feels are approaching cliché. Other moments at which Oberst seems to be shedding his skin are the haircutting scene, presumably a joke about the prententious long hair he had in the Cassadaga period. All of this would make sense if the video were clearing the way for artistic development. This is the view of Eric Danton from courant.com:

"He sounds as if he has shrugged off any pressure to make a Grand Artistic Statement, resulting in songs that play to his considerable strengths as a writer."

I object to this mainly because as an intelligent songwriter he has won most of his fans through making artistic statements ie using well written lyrics, not being afraid to experiment with different sounds and forms. Those were his "strengths as a writer" - I'm not sure what other strengths Danton is talking about, although I suspect he is referring to some kind of ability to write popuar trash. It seems more accurate to me to say that it isn't songwriting strength that is now distinguishing Oberst's work from anyone else's but a cult of personality that is best expressed through visual media. Souled Out!!! is the ultimate, self-contained media trickshot. It's the music video for a song about a sell-out, that is a sell-out itself, whilst being aware of this and mocking itself. Fair enough if that's what the band are into, even if it's a bit of a tired statement to make, but it's not really what I come to Conor Oberst's work for and it doesn't seem to me to be particularly about making interesting music any more. Despite this, I will continue to enjoy scenes like this:

You can watch the video for Souled Out!!! here.

I dreamt that I dwelt in marble halls

2008-08-09T03:15:00.000-07:00

Okay, haven't posted for a while because my wonderful friend Becky has been staying with me and we've been being tourists together, which is a full-time job. I only just managed to borrow a camera cable so whilst I have this picture of the attractive CIUP foyer, I still don't have any nice pictures of the places we went or stuff we did. Since we didn't get too far off the beaten track, and other people have probably taken better pictures of Tuileries or the Eiffel Tower, this isn't a massive shame. Also now there is no documentary evidence of my sunburn. Phew.

On the first day we hung around in the Jardin du Luxembourg eating sandwiches and drinking ice tea. I'm quite worried about my ice-tea intake at the moment, mainly because I grew up in the nineties and remember the urban myth (?) of the Sunny-D kid, who turned orange from drinking too much Florida Style. Though I think if you stick to Ice Tea Pêche the worst that can happen is you get a slightly spooky tan. Mangue is a different kettle of fish. Acid green lid = can't be good. After this we headed to the legendary Shakespeare and Co bookshop and each bought a gritty Patrick Hamilton novel. Basically proving that it was awwwwful to be alive in the nineteen-thirties. (A point that I can't take seriously having seen the TV adaptation of Twenty Thousand Streets under the Sky, ultimate point of reference for fans of cardigans and muted colours).

In the evening we met up with a friend who is spending the summer in Paris and is frighteningly confident on a velib'. We planned to meet her by the fountain at St Michel and cycle along the Seine to the Champ de Mars. I loved the idea of this but I was fairly scared. I don't drive and traffic seems to me a chaotic mass of dangerous machinery driven by anonymous Darth Vader types. Anyway, by the time that she guided me through the confusing process of hiring one of these bikes out and a helpful bystander adjusted the saddle for me, there was no backing out. Plus that would have been an entirely pathetic thing to do. I mean, it's not like we're talking about some extreme sport like bungee jumping. (In which there are actually very few other people around to complicate things and you're attached to the top by a meticulously-checked risk-assessed system of rigging. Cycling is comparatively the Wild West.) After a frightening left-turn across a busy intersection, however, it was actually really good fun and by far the best way to see the city. The river and all the buildings along the Seine were beautifully lit-up. It was also so much nicer to arrive somewhere having cycled through a cool breeze and feeling slightly exhilarated than emerging from hot and grimy metro station.

We got rid of our bikes (plugging them in and waiting for the light to go green was a novelty in itself) and headed towards the Champ de Mars with some wine and Desperados. The Eiffel tower was lit up in a fluroescent mauve, so that it looked like some kind of ultra-violet security marking, affirming that the night-sky was indeed the property of Paris (or that Paris was old enough to get into the night-club? I'm clutching wildly at metaphors here). It was endearingly garish, especially as every so often the gigantic net of fairy lights it was covered in would start flashing to hilarious, syncopated rhythms. It really does amaze me that the most famous landmark in Paris seems to imitate souvenir-stand replicas of itself, rather than the other way round. I much prefer it when they switch the lights off at 1am and you're left staring at a great iron monster silhouetted against the light pollution of the left bank.

The next day, Becky directed us towards the most consciously civilised place in Paris. More civilised than the Louvre, probably. We spent about two or three hours there, in the Musée du Moyen Age, which was filled with twelfth centure Islamic pottery, early music manuscripts and the most incredible tapestries I've ever seen. Although I hate to admit it, I often find myself getting really fidgety in art galleries. I don't understand the people who can sit still in one room of the Louvre for an hour, concentrating at just a few paintings. I always want to rush through all the rooms, one painting after another. Not in a "great-seen that now!" or a "hmm boring" kind of way - I just prefer to keep on my feet and see lots of different stuff. I always assume that the sitting down people are either having a rest or in some way "getting their money's worth." Despite this, we spent a long time in the Salle de la Dame à la Licorne. The lights were off apart from a few spotlights on each of the six tapestries and we pored over the laminated visitor information cards.

Gentility and fantastical allegory hung heavy about the place and every stitch seemed to scream "SPEN-SAAAA!! YOU SHOULD REALLY READ THE FAERIE QUEENE!" Then as you turned your back, "AND THE FIRST FOUR CANTOS DOESN'T COUNT AS READING IT BY THE WAAAY!!" I think our overwhelming sense of guilt, mingled with desperate hopes of reading the whole thing feverishly, and possibly drunk, the week before term, actually enhanced the experience. I really think you're supposed to be vaguely humble in the face of an enormous, laboriously worked tapestry, in a way that a great oil painting or sculpture doesn't demand. When you know that someone's fingers were covered in wool dust and thimble sores every day for unimaginable, endless years, smugness at having got the hang of epic Renaissance poetry just doesn't work. You're not "in on" the way the lustre on someone's cheek has been captured or photographic depiction of the folds of a dress. The separateness of the colours and the fuzzy flatness seem to force you into a world of slightly skewed rules, not unlike a surrealist painting, but with an antique authority and sense that what is being done is more than an aesthetic statement or a joke. We found out on the bus the next morning that there are still groups of people making tapestries for French government offices using the same methods in Gobelins. Each weaver produces between 1 and 4 square metres of tapestry per year.

From tapestries and marble halls to sunsets and dooryards and sprinkled streets, we spent a lot of time in the last few days walking along the lower bank of the Seine and picnicking. I've always wanted to do this since I was thirteen taking a tour on the Bateaux Mouches and saw groups of French teenagers getting drunk and sitting on the pavements. I think the closest thing we have to that in Beds in WKD in Budgens car park. We had baguettes, cous cous, goats cheese à tartiner (Primula it ain't), raspberries and peaches, which got slightly pulped in the basket of my velib. The weather hasn't been so great recently - for most of the picnic the sky was fairly grey and it spat with rain, although we hardly noticed until we'd finished eating and Becky pointed out how people's voices always get louder as the weather gets worse at an English picnic. Maybe we overestimated our English stoicism on the other hand, as, during the time we were eating, we bore witness to some great French acts of meteorological defiance. The first of these was a pair of French men who had set themselves up with a crate of beer and who sang Hey Jude seemingly all afternoon, in strong accents on a steel-strung classical guitar. The second was the merely terrifying sight of a man jogging on the very edge of the river path that I had deemed it too risky even to picnic on. Will wonders never cease. I'd like to think he stopped when it really started pouring later.

By that time we had headed to the Marais, where we visited an incredible second hand shop, full of fairly-priced guitars and vintage Balenciaga. (I really wish I could have taken photos of this place.) We ended up taking cover in a patisserie, where I discovered that my favourite drink (after Ice Tea) is espresso à la noisette. I drank a tiny cup of it in the café whilst we waited for the thunderstorm to stop, and Becky had café crème. I think this was the ultimately civilised ending to a very civilised couple of days.

p.s. for anyone who's interested I found this amazing site about music that's used in Joyce, with a clip of I dreamt I dwelt in Marble Halls

Day of Petty Disasters

2008-08-04T12:56:00.001-07:00

Today was one of those setting things up days that make just about everything you do unsatisfying. The odds of getting through the day's tasks swiftly or painlessly were actually stacked against me before I even woke up. I say before I woke up because I have the impression that the fire alarm that roused me at nine this morning had been ringing a long time before my body decided to do anything about it. Even waking up I must have known instinctively that it was one of life's pathetic practical jokes, as I was still half-paralysed from sleep, in a way that you never are if there is a bona fide emergency going on around you. I can't tell how long I was laying in bed deciding what to do, because I'd probably exaggerate the time in proportion to my vague sense of having been wronged. In this time, however long, I convinced myself of the follwing things, in different orders, over and over again:

It's some idiot having a cigarette under the smoke alarm. Nice one. Now I can't catch up on the sleep I missed staying up generally wasting time on YouTube last night and will be in a bad mood/will look rough all day.
Maybe it's not some idiot having a cigarette under the smoke alarm. Maybe it's a real fire under the smoke alarm.
That noise is loud. Good idea for a smoke alarm noise. Better than the average smoke alarm, I'd say.
Maybe I can sleep through that noise?
Maybe it's really a fire.
Maybe I can sleep through the fire and it won't get as far as the part of the building I'm in. Sure the fire brigade can hear alarm from here.
If it is a fire, I'm probably not helping myself much by lying here convincing myself of stuff.

This is a lot to cope with at 9am. I eventually stumbled out of bed and down the stairs with a glass of water. (To drink, not to extinguish the fire with - being woken up early always makes you thirsty. Oh, and angry.) Anyway when I got there, as if to spite me, there were only two other people standing in the lobby, one of whom was wearing a backpack and seemed to be in the process of arriving. No effort! There is something slightly wrong with anyone who tries to arrive in a place during a fire alarm anyway. I mean, why not just come back when the building isn't burning down? I went in and out of the front door a couple of times, whilst the man on reception continued to sit at his desk, smiling and making no show of solidarity.

After this I decided that there was no point in going back to sleep as I was too disgruntled. It was shamefully late in any case so the alarm had probably been a Good Thing. It important to notice here that the bar for Good Things had been set extremely low. I proceeded to break my hairdryer immediately and the one travel plug I had with me. Optimist that I am, I recognised this as a Good Thing too, since it cut about half an hour off my morning routine. Great, now I'll go to the shops with wet hair and buy all the groceries I need. Traipsing around Franprix in yesterday's clothes with a wet back (because I don't want to get a wet back in today's clothes)wasn't exactly my dream when I decided to come here, but it wasn't as depressing an experience as it I thought it would be, despite the inclusion of plastic knives and forks, brutally cheap pasta sauce and pre-toasted "bread biscuits" on my shopping list.

What was not a Good Thing, however, was having my card rejected seven times before I could buy a passe navigo. Also stuff costing a lot of money. A lecture on the infrastructure of France. The lecture was maybe a Good Thing, with hindsight, as I made friends with the two nice girls who sat next me, one from Australia and one from New Zealand, and we went out for Coca afterwards. They're living and working here and it was really nice to talk to some people who know where stuff is and how to get to places.

I left them at the Boulevard Saint Michel as I desperately needed to find a travel plug. but FNAc didn't have one. So I went to Les Halles, a place I already knew I hated from last summer. It's like a massive swarm of swarms. Swarm of shops, swarm of people, swarming smell of urine on the pavement and one the metro, eugh. In the whole of Les Halles, there wasn't a shop selling travel plugs. So I headed for the Gare du Nord, on the basis that they would probably sell travel stuff, and because it wasn't too far away. On the way there I had to board a train that was fairly full but had room for me. The woman standing in front of the door refused to move to let me in, which led to my back getting clamped in the closing doors and my falling onto the pole in the middle of the carriage, upon which she tapped my shoulder and said "un peu moins brusque prochain fois, hein?" Argh, some people are so infuriating. And then, as if to testify to the endless capacity of random members of the public to act inappropiately, the woman behind me told me that my hair was brushing her face and for some reason felt the need to gesticulate wildly about this, as well as the urge to touch my hair saying "tes cheveux, tes cheveux." I was actually happy when I managed to buy the plug at the criminal price of fourteen euros. Or at least I was when I had consoled myself with an overpriced Kinder Bueno and started making my way back home.

Maybe I should go to sleep earlier today
x

Civilisation points: 5/5, in comparison to the brutal misordered world of faulty electrics and overcrowded trains that I found myself in today.

Civilisation «Sur Place»

2008-08-03T14:11:00.000-07:00

ere begins the story of my becoming civilised. As of tomorrow I will be attending a month-long course in French Civilisation as part of the Sorbonne summer programme. You get to study a bit of everything from Proust to the police novel. It's really very worthy. The concept reminds me of some signs my dad saw in Dalian, forcefully asking would-be gum spitters and general litterers to "please remember that you are civilised." I've good cause to believe that the process of my civilisation will be a roaring success. I've been here eight hours already and to the best of my knowledge I haven't dropped a single crisp packet on the floor, although I'm aware that this is just the beginning. Looking through the lecture list, I noticed that there is a class called "Le banal devient original, d'Edouard Manet à Marcel Duchamp." This struck me as particularly relevant and gave me the idea of logging how civilised I become in a series of Flowers for Algernon-style progress reports.

Starting with the best of intentions, I had hoped to fill this blog with some photographic pyrotechnics. I've been snapping all the way from the Channel Tunnel, in the taxi from the Gare du Nord and on my forages for food down the mean, drizzly streets of Montparnasse. Hélas! I brought the wrong USB cable with me, so until, or unless, I can get my mum to post the right one over, this page will be horrible deprived of some truly inept photography (about as experimental as dropping a very small amount of magnesium in water and then writing it up, with very little fizz to make up for it).

The downside to this is that the world will miss out on visual aids to understanding the mind-blowing experience that is a journey on the Eurostar. Yep, that's a train that goes UNDER THE SEA between England and France. You get on in London and it shoots off in one straight line all the way to Paris. Actually going UNDERWATER. Gasp. When I first heard about this circa 1994 from a very small, boxy television set in my bedroom, I was a bit confused and very excited. Trains have always been my favourite mode of transport and were especially dear to my five-year-old self. Reasons three.

no car sickness

a gap between the platform and the train's floor at least half the size of my own body, contributing an element of the sublime

it's exciting to be in a moving vehicle whilst not wearing a seatbelt, and everybody knows it

Add to this the enthusiasm you can expect from any half-decent human being on mentioning the word "aquarium" and you'll begin to understand my open-mouthed admiration and long-standing respect for the Channel Tunnel.

About six or seven years ago, I came agonisingly close to living out my dream. I'm talking about the ultimate Sea Life centre viewing tunnel. Rail-roading 'mong manta rays and portuguese men o' war. Skimming along the sea bed. I had visions of Sebastian the Rastafarian Crab from Disney's the Little Mermaid setting up a bandstand down there, somewhere close to the French terminal, where they could play some kind of celebratory tune on your arrival. Obviously I dismissed the last notion as twee fantasy and, being twelve, I was too cynical to be excited much about the trip. Which was just as well. I was sick at least twice on the hard shoulder of the M1 and was not in the best of spirits by the time we reached Folkestone. There we boarded something known as Le Shuttle and not what I was expecting at all.

Le Shuttle is the Eurostar's insane, inbred cousin. It's like a road, on a train, with no windows, lots of lorries and hideous lets-pretend-we're-dead strip lighting. Completely defeats the object of being in a magical underwater tunnel. This tragedy was lost on me anyway, as I was busy throwing up again, and lost all interest, disappointment or potential anger.

This afternoon's arrival at the Gare du Nord, then, was the end of a journey begun something like fourteen years ago, for all its detours through Normandy in the backs of cars, its straying on P&O cruisers, its snubbing the sea altogether flying into Charles de Gaulle and yet more vomiting that took the whole family one summer on a sea catamaran. Needless to say, I felt a sense of anti-climax. Put this down to my slightly unrealistic of the marine life worn on the unexotic sleeve of the Atlantic ocean known as the English Channel. I don't know, perhaps. Expectations lowered, I contented myself with a couple of shots of seaweed and a shoal of non-descript fish before tiring of staring out my own reflection in the window and getting stuck into someone else's Great Expectations. Will put pics up when cable arrives.

Meanwhile, I've found my way to my room and unpacked, after a stressful episode in which it looked like check-in was closed for the weekend, I forgot how to speak and imagined myself sleeping rough and robbed of all my worldly possessions to the point of hysteria. Above is a picture of where I'm staying, not taken by me but it'll do for the moment. After my trauma, I went out looking for food, but almost everywhere was shut for streets around, except for

a corner shop selling extortionately priced breakfast cereals and instant Lipton's ice tea granules (el dorado, mental note to go back there)

two takeaway stands of "would you like food-poisoning with that" variety

Starbucks, MacDonald's, Subway etc

Being the savvy sub-suburban girl that I am, I plumped for a 15cm vegetarian sub and managed to wangle some free tap water. Yeah. I consumed them "sur place," from where I could just about see a very little of the world go by on the rainy Parisian street. Minus Civilisation Points for resorting to Subway; plus Civilisation Points for momentary Baudelairean city feelings and ordering in French. Even better, the shop-keeper engaged me in an intellectual conversation on the subject of vegetarianism. Great. Now we're really talking. He asks me if I have any good reason for giving up meat. After some vigorous nodding with over-zealous eyebrow gestures, I lie: "Oui, j'aime les animaux."

Yours with a savage laugh
Laura x