Toulouse

With all the bombings going on, and the terrorism, I don't like it at all. It frightens me. I like being in the South of France. It is very beautiful, and we work very hard to keep it that way. We have a huge garden bearing fruit for the winter: peaches, grapes, strawberries, and raspberries. - Nina Simone

This hole in my heart is in the shape of you. No one else can fit it. Why would I want them to? - Jeanette Winterson

Book collecting is an obsession, an occupation, a disease, an addiction, a fascination, an absurdity, a fate. It is not a hobby. Those who do it must do it. Those who do not do it, think of it as a cousin of stamp collecting, a sister of the trophy cabinet, bastard of a sound bank account and a weak mind.



We are friends and I do like to pass the day with you in serious and inconsequential chatter. I wouldn't mind washing up beside you, dusting beside you, reading the back half of the paper while you read the front. We are friends and I would miss you, do miss you and think of you very often.

When I say "I will be true to you" I must mean it in spite of the formalities, instead of the formalities. If I commit adultery in my heart then I have lost you a little. The bright vision of your face will blur. I may not notice this once or twice, I may pride myself on having enjoyed those fleshy excursions in the most cerebral way. Yet I wil have blunted that sharp flint that sparks between us, our desire for another above all else.

I miss God. I miss the company of someone utterly loyal. I still don't think of God as my betrayer. The servants of God, yes, but servants by their very nature betray. I miss God who was my friend. I don't even know if God exists, but I do know that if God is your emotional role model, very few human relationships will match up to it. I have an idea that one day it might be possible, I thought once it had become possible, and that glimpse has set me wandering, trying to find the balance between earth and sky. If the servants hadn't rushed in and parted us, I might have been disappointed, might have snatched off the white samite to find a bowl of soup. As it is, I can't settle, I want someone who is fierce and will love me until death and knows that love is as strong as death, and be on my side for ever and ever. I want someone who will destroy me and be destroyed by me.


Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights: the accumulations of a lifetime gather there. In places the palimpsest is so heavily worked that the letters feel like braille.


However it is debased or misinterpreted, love is a redemptive feature. To focus on one individual so that their desires become superior to yours is a very cleansing experience.

You never give away your heart; you lend it from time to time. If it were not so, how could we take it back without asking?

There are many forms of love and affection, some people can spend their whole lives together without knowing each other's names. Naming is a difficult and time-consuming process; it concerns essences, and it means power. But on the wild nights who can call you home? Only the one who knows your name.

from Ghost Dance (Carole Maso)

She is standing under the great clock in Grand Central Station and she is waiting for me. She does not shift her weight from one foot to the other, checking her watch every few moments, worrying about where I might be. She is not anxious at all, in fact, but calm, peaceful, at ease. She is so beautiful standing there. People whirl around her, talking, laughing, running, but they pause for a second when they see her, turning back to look as they hurry. She focuses in the distance, oblivious, it seems, to the life of the station, and looks straight ahead at a point still some way away, where the poem she has been struggling to finish for days will fall into place. She smiles as she feels herself come a little closer and then rests; there is no forcing it, she knows. She shifts her great attention to me. Guiding me through the treacherous streets to her. Slowly she clears a wide path for me through the snow and, as I step safely, in her mind, from the taxi onto the street, quite suddenly the poem is complete. As she places my foot onto the pavement, puts the fare in the driver's hand, and has me enter the station, she is overwhelmed by an immense, inexplicable joy. Nothing can equal this happiness, she thinks. She looks up at the snow that hugs the high, cathedral-like windows. She is dangerously happy. The day is beautiful. There has never been a better time or place to be alive, she thinks. There is no life more perfect than her own. And she is right.

Nobody deserves your tears, but whoever deserves them will not make you cry. - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Serendipity me manques.

I miss running into people I know on the street.

I miss places where you can sit and nurse a cup of coffee and a book for hours, even though I don't really do that in the States.

I miss American cups of coffee, in the paper cup with the little cardboard sleeve that you can grip while walking down the street. Espresso gets cold really, really fast.

I miss normal pillows. Wide squashy fluffy ones, that you can wrap your arm around or throw your leg over. Here you choose between two kinds of pillows - those roll things or the little square ones like toss pillows for dorm rooms. Mine is red.

I miss microwbrewed beer. French wine is great, but French beer ... well, French beer is Belgian beer, and I haven't found any yet that I can't get back home. I want a nice dry hoppy Glacial Pale Ale from Boscos on Madison at Cooper. Or Anchor Porter at the Liberty Cafe on Cortland. Or Pearl Street's Colorado Kind.

I miss cooking with my girlfriend. I miss the sound of her laugh. I miss her holding me while we laugh at the dubbed version of Iron Chef and wonder what the fuck they're going to do to make those weird sea urchins taste appetizing.

I don't think I have any idea what I want, these days.

I want to be a doctor. I want to fix people.

I want to never cry again.

I want to admit that I don't think mankind is really naturally good at heart.

I want to have a baby not because the world needs another person but because I deserve the right to be a mother.

I want to never be afraid again that I have said the wrong thing, and that my words are irreparable.

I want to hear Gena's voice on the phone.

I want to read a book because I can't stop.

I want to find the sentence that will make my father pack up the dogs and leave Memphis, because there will never be the time or the place or the people who will appreciate him there. I want the sentence that will tell my father that he is the wisest, kindest, and most brilliant man I've ever known, and that if I ever move a mountain, it will be because he taught me how to lift a shovel.

I want the sentence that will tell my mother that I know how scared she is of being misunderstood, because I share that same fear, passed down from her to me through Irish chromosomes. My mother and I, you see, share the the same tenacity, the same perspicacity, the same balls-to-the-wall, fuck-you-because-you'll-fuck-me-if-I-don't-outsmart-you terror. The same resistance for taking anything from anyone, even if we've earned it. The same relentless willfull energy. Because no matter how far we go or how much we do, neither of us believe that it's been enough.

I want my brother Daniel to call me, just to say hello.

I want to be old enough.

I want to tell Amanda that I'm selfish, and I'm sorry.

I want to tell all the people who think they want to change the world that all they really want is a way to rest easy in their own skins.

I miss the idea of being happy because of finding blackberries on a bush beside the road in France.

I miss having nothing at all to prove.

In order to be an immaculate member of a flock of sheep, one must above all be a sheep oneself. - Albert Einstein

Alors, je pense que this trip will go down in the annals of my (one-day-to-be) illustrious history as All Those Days I Looked At Sheep. (NB: Alternate titles include Un Petit Histoire de la Paysanne, The Autumn of the Cold and Damp, and French People Don't Eat Vegetables.)

So. Les Brebis. Just to explain, brebis are ewes. Lady sheep. There are, I discover, a great many of them en France. Their milk is responsible both for the only genuine Roquefort cheese (which was originally crafted by convicts and orphans) and for the most absurdly delightful confiture ever to grace my tongue. Having it in your mouth is exactly what it would taste like to kiss Mary Magdalene.

There are a a number of things that I do in France that I NEVER do in the United States. Wake up at 5.30 in the morning five days a week to run. Drink diet coke at room temperature. Write compositions in French. Lust after sheep's milk confiture. Read comic books. (Also in French. Calvin and Hobbes, for the most part. Lately I've begun to tackle Agatha Christie, although ca ne marche pas aujourd'hui.) My favorite, by far, though, involves a sinful little street vendor called Cornet d'Amour. I don't care much for cheese or chocolate or the ubiquitous baguettes, but if they have to roll me onto the airplane back to Colorado in January, it will be because of fucking Cornet d'Amour. I don't care for ice cream. I haven't been much for it since the days when I still thought cartoons were funny, and my grandfather bought me those upside-down clown cones at Baskin Robbins, the ones with the faces made out of frosting. At the time, my favorite flavor was mint chocolate chip. But in France, they aren't ice creams. They're glaces. And they aren't flavors. They're parfums. And I could eat the glaces at Cornet-sodding-d'Amour every sodding day. What parfum do I prefer? Let's see ... is it the gingembre, with the cold chunks of crystallized ginger? The citron basilique? The noix de coco avec curry? The chocolat noir noisette? The violette, with real sugared violets? The Italianate straciatella? The the vert menthe? (Uhm, yes. I have tried all of these. Along with the guava, mango, and passion fruit sorbets.) It's a real problem.

I'm already thinking about the French habits I'll have to consciously endeavor NOT to bring back to the United States so that my friends will continue to talk to me. These include peppering my conversation with French phrases, insisting on finishing each meal with a cheese course and an espresso, calling it confiture instead of jam, talking about politics to an exhausting degree. But even my favorite gelato spots in San Francisco can't hold a blowtorch, a flamethrower, let alone a candle, to Cornet d'Amour.

One thing in which the residue of my cohort indulges that I DON'T have to consider is le chocolat chaud. Hot chocolate. Even in France, I just don't care for it. If you know me well enough reading this, you know that I have a perhaps unreasonable contempt for things that I associate with childish tendencies. Maybe it's because I'm five-foot-three in my Danskos. I don't like cartoons; I didn't wear my hair in pigtails even when I had enough hair to do that. I don't eat macaroni and cheese. I loathe lunchboxes and Hello Kitty wallets and temporary tattoos. I don't try to justify these feelings. I accept them, just as I accept the fact that Georgie will be our president until January of 2009, even though I can't wrap my mind around the logic.

Granted, hot chocolate is different in France. It doesn't come powdered and presugared out of a pacet from Nestle. There's no lapin cartoon with long ears and a terrifyingly bucktoothed grin. This is France, kids - they grate fresh chocolate shavings into your cup (over a saucer, toujours) and pour fresh whole milk over them, and if you want it sweetened you have to add your own sugar in, which comes in a cunning little tube or in a cube in a silver dish on the side.

But for whatever obscurely stubborn steak of my own, rooted in some childhood malaise that wants a Berkeley therapist in broomstick skirt and scarves and Ethiopian beads to decouver, I can't enjoy the French hot chocolate. Why, and wherefore, this contrary streak? It's important enough and continuous enough an issue in my daily life to have warranted a place in my stock vocabulary alongside Est-ce que vous comprenez l'anglais? Je ne parle pas francais. Ou est le toilette? Je n'aime pas le chocolat chaud.

The superiority of chocolate, both for health and nourishment, will soon give it the same preference over tea and coffee in America which it has in Spain. - Thomas Jefferson

Le temps et le monde et la personne ne se rencontrent qu'une seule fois.

Time and the world and the person only meet a single time. - Helene Cixous

Just for the record, I had a moment in grammar class a few weeks ago when the sun shone through the window and illuminated with Wordsworthian clarity for me the necessity of Helene Cixous’s idea of l’ecriture feminine. Yes, French is an inherently ‘sexist’ language, if you will, in a far more essential way than English. For example, given the concept of gendered modes of expression, one notes that if even ONE male is present in a group of people, that group is automatically and linguistically masculinized in French. That’s just how it works. It’s interesting, on the other hand, to note that I’m calling that a privilege. Were I to say that one drop of blood, a la Showboat, made someone black, that would be marginalizing. Whew. The politics of identity. C’est tres complique pour moi! And that’s exactly why I want to be a doctor. For my own work, I need the facility and visibility of immediate succor. I discover that I prefer to conserve meditation on ontological and epistemological quandaries as a comfortably facultative avocation.

How goes the French Language? Ai, ai, ai. For the good bits, I certainly get a great deal more than I presumed I would, and oceans more than when I first arrived. Actually speaking a language, one finds, is quite different than reading it, or even understanding it. One is often frustrated by the need or the desire to communicate outside the limits of one’s paltry and malnourished vocabulary, one’s Lincoln Log sentence constructions. It’s Fun With Dick and Jane, en francais. ‘I study French.’ ‘Do you study French?’ ‘The cheese is very good’. ‘I don’t like hot chocolate.’ ‘I see you at the cinema.’ ‘I’d like to buy some stamps.’ After one manages the hurdle of the first few phrases, all generally goes well until the person with whom one is conversing (to use a far-too-lofty term) assumes more credit than one deserves and deviates from the script. And finally one gives up in despair. ‘Do you understand English?’

I feel perched on the crest of a genuine understanding of this language, I really do. I’m certainly not there yet, and if there’s one thing that has most assuredly changed in me it’s that I’ll always wonder what someone means when they tell me that they’re fluent in another language. I speak English well. More fluently than many, I would say. (Small digression: on a recent excursion, while walking through pastures gazing at clumps of beige animals I thought at first were goats and then cows, until we got close enough for me to see that they were sheep – yes, I’ve been wearing my glasses a lot more since then – several of us realized that we didn’t actually know the names for groups of animals, in English. A herd of cows, fine. A herd, also, of goats. Or a flock? A … flock of sheep? A flock of birds, but a murder of crows. Antelopes? A pod of dolphins. Rabbits? And then what’s the difference between a tribe and a clan? See, it becomes Ecco-esqe.) But, I can’t imagine grasping the nuances of any other language with anything approaching the intricacy that I do English. It must be possible. I’m looking into the trough of a thousand conjugations that are just beyond the tip of my tongue. While the other students hunch their shoulders and screw up their mouths and protest against its idiosyncrasies (‘But, in English, it’s like … ), I am beginning to see the patterns. I’m four turns of the kaleidoscope away from something magical, I think.

Make no mistake – there are many things that frustrate. It’s the language of a country that produces 400 kinds of cheese. What do you do with that? For every grammatical rule there are fourteen or so exceptions. Just take the numbers, for example. Saying any number between 70 and 100 involves math. Sixty is ‘soixante,’ but seventy is ‘soixante-dix,’ sixty-ten. It gets worse. Seventy-one is the equivalent of sixty-eleven, 72 of sixty-twelve, and so on. Eighty is ‘quatre-vingts’; quite literally four-twenties. And ninety is the most absurd of all, at ‘quatre-vingt-dix.’ No joke, four-twenty-ten. Yeah, okay, it’s logical, in its way. One supposes. One could spend a Proustian eternity pondering the frustrating irregularities of ballet vs. billet, ville vs. fille. But in English we have enough and through and thorough. As with anything else, there are some questions one simply cannot ask. Like where love goes. Or if there's anyone who just naturally peels an orange all in one strand. Or why one feels compelled to set one’s watch at precisely eight minutes ahead.

But, all that being said, the frustration is often, of course, a motivating factor. You learn because you’re angry, because you can’t stand feeling foolish, because you have things you want to say. Even if all you want to say is ‘No, I don’t care for any ketchup, thank you.’

Yes, just as we wish that French people all walked around in black turtlenecks smoking and being cynical (and sometimes they do) or wore striped boatnecks and carried baguettes in the crook of their arms (sometimes they do that, too), the French do think that Americans eat everything with ketchup and growth hormones. I talked to someone the other day who, during a discussion (which, in France, is interchangeable with ‘conversation’ – debate is a national pastime, and that’s a joke they make themselves) about religious differences between France and the United States, mentioned that while Scientology was merely a sect in France, in the US it was a respected and widely-held belief system. Ah, non, I hastened to assure him. He stared goggle-eyed and disbelieving at me as I tried to explain that even Americans have difficulty with a religion that propounds that we were all left here by aliens in spaceships, let alone disavowing medication. I could see the wheels turning as he knitted his eyebrows and contemplated the ends of his scarf. Finally, he raised his eyes to me with an expression of feeble incomprehension and choked out ‘Buht … buht … Tohm Kroowise … ?’

Go to France. Learn that, for Europeans, Washington D.C. may be the alleged capital of the United States (though many aren’t aware of the difference between that city and the state of Washington), and Manhattan may be the center of the universe for we huddled masses yearning to buy low, but the real encapsulation of all that is the Land of the Free beacons, brighter than the torch of Lady Liberty, from the other side of the continent. Screw Plymouth Rock. America is Hollywood.

France, you will be happy once you are finally cured of individuals.

One evening in Belleville, a seedy-yet-gentrifying neighborhood (a la Cooper-Young, Memphis folks, but inhabited by a much more disparate melange of French, Arab, Vietnamese, Chinese, African) in the Northeast part of Paris, I wandered into a tight and smoky neighborhood bar, following the sound of sitar music. I sat down to listen to the handful of men, six or so, crowded around a table in a corner of the bar and strumming instruments of various descriptions, exchanging them among each other with ease. I was immediately befriended by a tiny Persian woman who kept fanning herself with the hem of her heavy sweater, apologizing in a husky sigh – Fatih. And her friend, Lise, a Parisian lawyer with hair pulled straight back from her face, all in black and emanating the impression that she'd dallied in nonsense perhaps once in her life and never intended to repeat the experience. Both of them - and indeed everyone - chainsmoked with an enthusiasm rivaling that of the girls on the patio at the One More a Memphis, and for no reason that I could pinpoint, they kept buying me Kir mure, a cocktail of white wine and blackberry liquer that nobody drinks in America. Fatih told me all about how she loved America (one of the lies Parisians continually repeat: the other two most prominent are "You are so beautiful," and "No, no - you speak very well French!"), and how she wanted to travel more but couldn't because her adult daughter, who also lives in Paris, was ... and here she would break off, purse her lips, and scramble her delicate fingers beside her temple. Fatih decided that I needed to learn to dance to Arab music, so she pulled me out of my chair tout de suite and made me wiggle my hips and shrug my shoulders ("Laike zhees ... sensual ... oui, oui ... NON. Noht laike zhat." And then she'd grab me and move me like a clunky American doll until I copied her to her satisfaction). Things ended up with fringed scarves being magically produced from behind the bar, a woman appearing like a snag-toothed and aged Salome all in flowing black and taut headscarf who turned out to be a professional dancer, the evidently pregnant barmaid essaying from behind the bar, and Fatih and I dancing with all of them in a circle, palms slapping against each other to the ever-faster whirl of the sitars, guitars, and who knew what else.

On the train to Toulouse from Paris the next day, I succumbed to cabin fever and wandered through the train into the observation car. (NB: difficult to observe much on these high-speed trains. All the herds of cows and sheep and quaint little stone farms huddled against petit French gardens, and picturesque villages tucked into the Bordeaux countryside are things you know are there but can't really see much of besides a green, yellow, and grey blur.) I spent the next few hours locked in conversation with my umpteenth Jaded Parisian, Patric, a man with cropped grey hair, jeans, a black wool sweater, a Robert Redford five-o'clock shadow, and a penchant for referring to America as "your beautiful country," in just the tone you're imagining. He also dubbed George Bush "your esteemed president." He shared with me the growing concern in France about genetically modified food, and how the French fear that American companies are slipping horemone-treated meat; in particular, into the French markets underhandedly. The French take food quite seriously; a tone that becomes understandable in a country that gets two hours for lunch each day, and where dinner often encompasses three.

Kharim, the bike-happy world traveller I mentioned in another post and who reminds me faintly of my friend Kirill, has moved on to ... somewhere else (one is never sure, especially when one is me), but he bequeathed to the little American girl beaucoup de Portuguese music and French slang. (It's true: I speak French like a grammar professor. It's ridiculously unhip. But not uncharacteristic, at least for me.) I'd come home from school to find him slouching in the garden, his lean and rangy legs stretched out and bare toes buried in the grass, cradling his little Brazilian backpacker's guitar like a peculiarly tiny infant, like those sandstone paintings of Kokopelli the flute player. Strumming away and crooning to himself. He'd look up and hail me, Ah, Avie; Salut! fingers still poised over the strings. And he'd pull a chair up next to him and tell me stories about himself, about everything he's certain of, which is everything he thinks. He believes it's wrong to travel to poorer countries unless you're going there deliberately for humanitarian purposes, and even then he thinks you have to consciously try not to be exploitative. He also has a personal rule not to travel anywhere that he can't reach on his bicycle. So he's never seen America; he loves everything Brazilian but won't go there. He made an exception to travel to Vietnam, but he says he never will again, because it didn't feel right.

Trouver d'abord, chercher apres. Find first, search after. - Jean Cocteau

He loved to talk to me about Bob Dylan but admitted that he had no idea what any of the lyrics meant. That's as astonishing as anything I've encountered here, eh?

Je suis tombe du mon velo.

An intellectual is a man who doesn't know how to park a bike. - Spiro Agnew

Being fair, I have my own and quiet struggles. I spent two weeks in Paris azure at the edges, and there were times when I was downright blue. (Who knew that Paris is such a lonely town ... ?) There was a lot going on inside my head and my heart, and ... well, I perceive the romance of a woebegone American slouching pensive through Paris. Coughing, and in the rain, no less. I think that isolation had been exigent for quite some time. In some small fashion I suppose you might say I went to Paris to be unhappy. And to smile at the mundane inevitability of it all.

It took me weeks to figure out the money, how to use the phone, what to say at the post office. Even the little text boxes that pop up on the computer are in French. Doesn't sound daunting, but it can be. I've gotten cell phone service, bought groceries, ordered many meals, navigated the Paris Metro (that last is actually quite logical - props to the French), had my hair cut twice, bought books and maps, mailed packages, and talked more politics than at any time previous, and all in a debauched version of a language I don't really speak. Don't come to Europe thinking that everyone speaks English. Not at all. (If anything, everyone speaks Italian. I'm convinced they'll conquer the universe and we'll all be wearing Dolce and Gabana and being fastidious about espresso.)

To round out the list, I've also received medical treatment. From a school nurse, who was convinced until persuaded otherwise that I was an exchange student at the high school. Ehhhhhhh. So, on my way to school last Friday morning, as I tried to navigate a particularly ferocius rush of agressive Toulousain traffic without crashing into any of the chic teenagers thronging the pavement outside their school, I hit the curb at the wrong angle and tumbled off my bike. I was rescued immediately by five or six passers-by, who swooped down immediately like angels of mercy with hopelessly French brows furrowed under fabulous haircuts, waving graceful anxious fingers in my face and muttering at me in worried French. Despite my thick-tongued protests, they tucked away my bike whisked me off to the school infirmary, where the baffled nurse in white frock, cap, and kicky red sandals tut-tutted as she salved my wounds and bandaged my torn knee, while I tried to explain that I was a university student and that I didn't have any parents she could call. (Once I finally showed her on my ID card how old I was, she was so charmingly apologetic I couldn't believe - "Desolee! Desolee!" over and over, with her hand over her heart like she'd mistaken me for a Belgian.)

Most importantly, the bike is fine, which is the first thing anyone asks. And I'm alright, as well; on the mend. I sort of tore my face up - left chunks of nose, lip, and chin on the sidewalk, and now that my hair's short I've nothing to hide behind, but a week later I'm looking much less like the Phantom of the Opera. I got the obligatory cyclist scrapes on my left hand, where you reflexively try to catch yourself. I somehow managed to bruise one arm and both knees, though only one was scraped up. But everyone says I look tough. I scratched the lenses of my favorite (and only) sunglasses, and ripped the knee of my favorite jeans, and I'm still wearing both, so coupled with the war wounds, I certainly feel like a badass. :)

Kharim, this half-Algerian, half-French guy (they always tell you that: "Buht mai muhzair, mai muhzair eehz French) who has been staying at our house and who travels the world on his bike, just waved a casual hand when he saw me and said, "Eh. Velo. Eeht 'appens."

Falling, though. It's a funny thing. You know it's coming, always. Like love. You realize its ineludibility at the precise moment that you're utterly powerless to do anything to prevent it.

We're falling all the time, you know? Fall off a bike; fall in love; fall ill; fall from grace. In French, you even "fall pregnant", as though the lady in question strolled out the door to the market one morning, stumbled on a roller skate, and found herself with child.

Really, we're falling every moment. With each step we fall, and catch ourselves with the next. And - usually - we don't even miss a beat.

With an apple I will astonish Paris. - Paul Cezanne

She was a spendthrift of the spirit, an American in Paris when, as Evelyn Waugh said, the going was good. - Anatole Boyard

And I haven’t even reached Paris yet, have I?? Alack. Wurra wurra.

Well, Reijo and Tuula, my Finnish friends, drove me to Southampton, from whence I caught a train to London Waterloo. I spent a restless night inside the wonder of the International Terminal’s everlasting charms (haunted by geography, of course … ), learning another important traveller’s lesson: one can indeed sleep on the terrazzo floor of a giant train station, empty except for you and the few other hardy souls with heads pillowed on bulging backpacks and nowhere else to go.

If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a movable feast. - of course, Ernest Hemingway

Paris. I stumbled bleary-eyed out of the train, blinking into the fluorescent lights of the Gare du Nord. Fumbling with the straps of my pack and trying to pretend there was a way that I could situate it on my hips that wouldn’t be uncomfortable, I emerged from the station into a grey afternoon. So this was Paris. The air was thick like wet cotton batting around the monochrome buildings, imposing facades, wrought iron and too many windows, and the door to the railway station was flanked by two guards with boots laced up their calves, in actual berets that probably didn’t look sissy because they were paired with matching automatic rifles (or whatever that kind of gun is called; I don’t pretend to be up on these things). As I trudged up the wide Boulevard de la Bleh Bluh, the drizzle became actual rain.

Paris is filled with Maghrebin, North African immigrants, and West Africans, Afrique noir, whose presence in Paris – and indeed throughout France, but particularly in Paris – parallels the Mexican dilemma in the US. Enough said. But you find the latter variety of them, in particular, close to any tourist spot. They crowd outside the larger Metro stations piping “Mahl-bro? Mahl-bro?” and I’m still not sure if they’re buying or selling. They want you to pay them: for directions to Sacre Cour, for little braided bracelets that come with a line of patter about how much they love America and how beautiful you are. For letting go of your arm if you pause long enough to let them grab it.

My first week in Paris, I shared a room at a hostel in Montmartre with five other travelers, all students, all English-speaking, a motley assortment of Americans, Australians, Canadians, Brits, and one Vietnamese kid who’d spent the last year in Germany and didn’t understand how the beer in Paris could be so lousy. Of course, I loved Montmartre – how could you not? The view of the city from Sacre Cour is unbelievable, as is the church itself. I went there the morning of my second day, and walked inside with a glut of other tourists as a service was in progress. A wimpled nun who didn’t look all that much older than me, half-hidden by the carved marble pulpit, was singing the Kyrie Eleison in a voice as high and plaintive-sweet as an Irish choirboy. Centuries of incense and devotion hung between the muttered prayers of the devout, and I walked out the door into my first view of la Tour Eiffel. It was quite a moment.

What did I do in Paris? I walked around alone a lot. I think I traversed the entire city with two weeks, a Streetwise map, my favorite Chacos, and a camera. If I can ever get the internet here to run at less than a crawl, I’ll get them onto flickr. Yes, Paris is an unbelievable city. I don’t think you get it, the first time you go. It takes some time, and some sinking in, I think, before all the sounds and strange words and signs and impressions slow down, before you can start seeing the droplets of personality and individual character among the tsunami that is … well, that is one’s first time anywhere. Paris. What a loaded word, right?

I saw the Eiffel Tower from every angle and vantage point, except from above. I visited the Louvre, the Musee Delacroix, the Musee Victor Hugo, the Musee Picasso. I stood at Napoleon’s Tomb, at the graves of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. Jim Morrison’s graffitied edifice. In the Place de la Concorde, where blithe little Marie Antoinette was beheaded. I walked up the Champs Elysees watching the Arc du Triomphe grow from the size of a quarter until it towered over my head. I saw Les Halles and the Pompidou Centre, the Sorbonne, Les Deux Magots. I found the Rue du Bac and walked along it towards the Seine, thinking of Enjolras and the students at the barricades, of Javert. I found the Rue Foucault. I took hazy pictures of the stained-glass windows of Ste. Chapelle, and I was quietly stunned by my own and genuine awe each time I saw Notre Dame.

So many gardens. The French like their flowers, like their language, in a riot of color that is combed and tamed in neat beds and ordered paths. Baroque splendor, rigorously controlled. The Jardin des Plantes, the Jardin du Luxembourg, the bourgeois but lovely Parc Monceau. I strolled through the Tuillieries licking a glace de noisette and pretending I was going to meet my lover.

If England is grey then Paris is beige. It’s loaded with history and culture and civility and politesse, with students and tourists and jaded Parisians, who really do wear black and smoke all the time. It can be quite cold in Paris, in August. I immediately got a wretched chest cold that I hung onto until about three days ago. I’d wake up hacking in Montmartre and kept finding myself wishing I was in Spain.

In Paris, one is always reminded of being a foreigner. If you park your car wrong, it is not the fact that it's on the sidewalk that matters, but the fact that you speak with an accent. - Roman Polanski

In French, when someone says, “Merci,” the general answer is “De rien.” Nothing at all. In Toulouse, in the South of France, you’ll hear, far more often, “Avec plaisir.” With pleasure. In Paris, they say, “Je vous en prie.” It’s a city of reflexive hubris. A place where people wear sunglasses all the time, and ignore the rain.

A star looks down at me, / And says: `Here I and you / Stand, each in our degree: / What do you mean to do?

There are accents in the eye which are not on the tongue, and more tales come from pale lips than can enter an ear. It is both the grandeur and the pain of the remoter moods that they avoid the pathway of sound. - Thomas Hardy


Let us now retrieve the fallen thread of our yarn. Since last we spoke, it has rolled through the English countryside and come to rest beneath a squashy armchair upholstered (within an inch of its life) in threadbare fabric blooming with overlarge-but-otherwise-nondescript flowers. The armchair sits in the parlour of what I have learned is a very typical English house, bulging with mismatched furniture in likewise-nondescript and likewise-mismatched woodgrains. Tatted doilies and absurdly small cushions abound, as do assorted knickknacks that we would call tchotchkies but that the British call, loftily, “objets d’art.” Prints on the wallpaper (wallpaper! Blue, printed with cornflowers) range from hunting scenes, to pastoral images of ducks and shepherdesses, to a dolphin that looks like something you (well, alright, not any of you, but someone) would pick up on a spring-break trip to Destin, along with pukka-shell-tipped cornrows. This is the B&B in the little town of Wimborne, Dorset, into which my hosts have kindly inserted me, so that I’ll have my own space.

And that yarn we mentioned earlier? The end of it is being toyed with and frayed between the paws of the resident cat, a large, vocal and friendly orange tabby named Charlie, who took quite a shine to me and decided that my lap was exactly the place he wanted to be each morning at 8 o’clock, when I “took my breakfast” in “the conservatory.”

My room here, alas, lacks the robe, the slippers, and the view of London, but I do have my own electric kettle, a window that opens onto the charming garden, and another large and comfy bed. There’s also a shower that is actually in the bedroom. Glass walls and all. Just hanging out there in the corner like a particularly damp closet. You have to turn the electricity on every time you wanted to use it, with a little light-switch type thing next to the shower doors. (We won’t even go into the advisability of putting the switch right there by the water – leave it to the British.)

My hosts are a Quaker couple in their fifties whose five children have all grown up and left the house empty. These two, the squat and smiling grey-haired Ruth and her equally amiable husband Richard (who was as keen to chat as an ageing maiden aunt), decided to open the rooms to pensioners such as myself “so that there’d still be some life in the place, yeah?” – which Richard explained to me about four times on my first evening there. They were both lovely, actually, and it was soothing to feel like I was a guest in someone’s home, although I found it difficult to repress the instinct to bring my dishes to the kitchen after breakfast, and I couldn’t stop myself from making my own bed each morning and feeling guilty that they washed my towels every day.

Wimborne itself is a 4000-person village, complete with genuine thatched cottages and gobs of flowers spilling from baskets and window boxes and seeming to seep from the very walls of the numerous public houses. It’s south of London, close to Poole, and to Bournemouth and Southampton, and to the Jurassic Coast, which has signature white cliffs, has just become a World Heritage Site, and where you can forage for those little spirally mollusky fossil things you always see in natural history museums and on the covers of Biology textbooks. Little old English ladies totter about in trenchcoats and sensible shoes toting baskets for their shopping, and little old men shuffle through the cobbled squares in cardigans and those flat, buttoned caps that must be requisition issue on retirement. The spires of the Wimborne Minster, a 1300-year-old church that is still a pilgrim site and is dedicated to St. Somebody-I-Never-Heard-Of, tower over all. You can check out the photos of the church and its crypt, and see the little Nutcracker statuette that stands guard in one of the towers, apropos of nothing in particular.

So, then, the question becomes, what did I do in England? I took a great many walks. Wimborne is surrounded by numerous walking trails – as is much of England – and I discovered a delightful one that wound for miles alongside the Stour River, passing sheep and cows placid in pastures, climbing over stiles (for those of you who’ve read Tom Stoppard, I’ve finally experienced a ha-ha), and foraging for blackberries.

Feh. How to sum it up? I had Guinness at a real English pub(okay, two pubs. Okay okay. Three.) and some insane local brew called MacStinger’s that was made from nettles (local nettles, even). And … I think MacStinger is the name of a landlady from a Dickens novel. From Dombey and Son, to be precise. Correct me if I mistake. I quietly munched muesli and natural yogurt in my little corner of “the conservatory", Charlie on my lap, and surreptitiously spied on a family of tourists with broad Yorkshire accents like they’d walked out of a James Herriot story, eating beans (seriously – baked beans) on fried bread, bacon, sausages, fried eggs and fried tomatoes for breakfast. I saw more placards beaming the legend “Wm. Shakespeare slept here,” or “Charles Dickens dined here,” or “Thomas Hardy drank here” than any of those illustrious men could’ve had time for. I looked at a lot of very old things made of stone. I had Devonshire cream tea at a teashop in a weensy little town teetering over a cliff and shadowed by a 2000-year-old castle ravaged by Parliamentary forces during the English civil war. I drank quite a lot of tea, as it happens. Quarts and quarts. I also learned that the rain doesn’t pique one at all if one simply takes no notice of it. Such is the English way.

I really did love it all.

If London is a watercolor, New York is an oil painting.

This melancholy London- I sometimes imagine that the souls of the lost are compelled to walk through its streets perpetually. One feels them passing like a whiff of air. - William Butler Yeats

Ooolalalala. It has been far, far too long since I have updated this petit cahier, n’est ce pas? Allow me to begin by assuring you that it’s not for lack of wanting to, not at all. That being said, I’ll try to bring you up to date on my adventures. Setting? I’m at my computer, at my rolltop desk in my room in Toulouse. The door to my balcony is open to the balmy evening. I’m drinking coke *light* flavored with orange and listening to James Taylor.

One thing that this traveler, at least, has felt in force is the realization that there’s nothing quite like becoming the stranger in the strange land to make one conscious of being an American. Not in the “ooo, I’m sure all these Europeans hate me; I oughta paste on a quick maple leaf and start saying ‘Eh?’” sort of way. More like, in the midst of other histories, other traditions, other languages, other everyday objects, there surfaces an acute familiarity with the weight of known history, tradition, language, popular culture and so on through which one habitually and oh-so-unconsciously moves. Made poignant by its absence. Make no mistake - I’m not speaking of culture shock or homesickness. What I’m saying is that a person tends to live in a kind of shorthand, wherein the metaphorical “sentences” of life may be left incomplete. Well. I find myself having trouble filling in the gaps, of late. Which is what I mean when I say that I’m conscious of being an American. In a way it’s comforting, liberating, even, to understand how much that’s mine.

Continuing in this vein: After I left San Francisco, I made a brief pilgrimage to Philadelphia and New York before I decamped. The intensity with which I appreciated both places surprised even me. I’ve been to Independence Hall; seen the oldest Quaker meetinghouse in the US; visited the spot where my hero, Thomas Jefferson, wrote the Declaration of Independence. I spent a quiet moment in the cemetery and threw a penny onto Benjamin Franklin’s grave. I stood in the line for security at the Liberty Bell with a group of ravishing Italian tourists whose trailing scarves, fantastic shoes, and animated hand-waving laugh-punctuated chatter made me wish I spoke Italian and could join in the joke. Lorca also said that "New York is something awful, something monstrous. I like to walk the streets, lost, but I recognize that New York is the world's greatest lie. New York is Senegal with machines." But going to New York was, for me, like coming home. Something in the crush of people, cars, concrete, sound, mess, harmonious cacophony, something hanging in the space between all those things … satisfied my soul like nothing else. I know that some of you, at least, know what I mean.

So, then. London. I got on a plane from the British Airways pod at JFK – arriving absurdly early in anticipation of the crazy long lines. Made it through security in about … eight minutes, and although I had to remove not only my compact but also my pens (evidently Aveda powder and biro ink are potential security threats) to my checked bag, I was in fact issued a BA Ziploc in which to store them. Quite kind, really. And the BA terminal has wireless and good food and decent coffee and a place to buy a pencil, so the three hours I spent there weren’t a total wash. I arrived at Heathrow around 9 local time, heaved my pack onto my plane-crushed vertebrae, got my first Great Britain passport stamp (managing not to look too absurdly pleased in front of the charming guy with the charming accent), and headed through the sign at customs that says Nothing To Declare. Hrm.

The Finnish friends with whom I was visiting whisked me off to the loveliest B&B I’d ever seen, situated with British self-effacement on a quiet street in the trendy London borough of Kensington and Chelsea. I had a bed big enough for an entire Ukranian family, a desk, a tv that folded into its own cunning little closet (the drawback there being that it only got British channels, which involves three versions of BBC news, two sport stations that are almost exclusively dedicated to football, a weird soap opera network, and a lot of channels that were “experiencing difficulties in transmission” for the entire duration of my stay – well, I suppose I can relate to that sentiment), a shower the size of my entire bathroom in Colorado, and my own billowy cotton robe and plushy hotel slippers. Every morning they brought me breakfast on a tray and my own personal pot of tea or coffee and a copy of the Independent; every day at 4 they delivered another pot of tea with jam and scones. Absurd, right? My favorite thing, next to sprawling on the bed and trying to feel the pea, was to sit on the ledge of the window in my foyer (yes, I had a foyer) with my teacup and saucer, looking out over the rooftops of London for Mary Poppins. Everything else was so storybook that it seemed inevitable that she’d come floating out of the clouds with her parrot-handled umbrella and scold me. Spit-spot!

What did I see in London? Whew. Everything imaginable. Just look at the pictures on flickr and you’ll see … well, everything I saw. I haven’t got that totally updated yet, but it’s current through part of London. The internet is so slow here that it takes forever to upload photos. Particularly if you’re trying to upload like, 400 photos at once. (No, I’m not kidding.) So I’m working on it, and will do my level best. One of the highlights was a trip to the Sherlock Holmes museum, nestled (cleverly, surprisingly) at 221-B Baker St. It’s a recreation of the rooms of the famous detective as per the description given either by the patient Robin to his Batman, Dr. Watson, or by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, depending on the level of one’s suspension of disbelief. Again, refer to the photos. But there’s a man who wanders around with a pipe and a cravat and says “Hello. I am Sherlock Holmes, and this is my apartment” in just as wooden a manner as I have described. Evidently they retrieved him from some dank corner of Madame Tussaud’s, and I wondered what he’d do if you put a quarter in. (Also where you’d put the quarter.) There were actual wax figures on one of the floors though, which was tres bizarre. You walk up a narrow flight of stairs and into a low-ceilinged room to see a sort of mini-jail cell and a man inside with sorrowful visage and handlebar mustache, a cabinet with someone’s ears in it under glass, and someone else frozen in the act of hanging himself from the rafters. Rather distressing, and I don’t know how much it added to the experience. But I kept wishing that my dad was there and hearing his voice in my ears, which is why, if you look at flickr, you’ll see about forty pictures of the place. There you go, Dad. Next time I’ll take you in person.

Now I’m listening to a random Portuguese jazzish cabaret lounge-singer type woman. Talk about cultural crisis, eh?

After London we spent a day in Oxford – also refer to flickr, but I can tell you that when I saw the Bodleian Library, I think I had a tiny orgasm.