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.