The (New) Red Wheelbarrow Bookshop, Paris

11 rue Medicis, opposite the Luxembourg Garden, east (Pantheon) side, going up from the Odeon towards the Bd St Michel.

I learned from a writer friend just last week that The Red Wheelbarrow Bookshop had re-opened, now in the 6th arrondissement (rather than the Marais), still in the competent and enthusiastic and welcoming hands of Penelope Fletcher, a fellow Canadian. I popped in yesterday afternoon and met Penelope’s two assistants, Rafael and Renate, busy unpacking books for the poetry shelf, but Penelope herself was off with her books and information about Paris at the American Church’s afternoon for new arrivals in the city.

‘Come back, tomorrow,’ they said, and I will, even if it is raining, unlike yesterday, which was sunny.

So the 6th has a new English Bookshop—welcome, Penelope!

Esthetics

Honestly, the French will never be good capitalists. For one thing, the customer is always wrong.

I was happy to notice yesterday that the shopkeeper on a nearby side street who utterly failed to be impressed by my potentiality as a customer, ushering me out the door when I asked the same question about having some cushions made of the lovely fabrics she was selling, has gone out of business. I knew she wouldn’t last. France is not a nation of shop-keepers, as they like to sneer at the English, but never mind…they may be the most inefficient people in the western world, but they know what is important: esthetics, esthetics, esthetics!

The Noise

A noise, not a sound. A large egg-yolk-yellow bus almost without windows parked under my window. Last night when I went to bed, the parking spaces on the street had been roped off. Some kind of event in the church? A concert? Tonight? The bus’s motor is on and has been on for a couple of hours. There are people grouped around the door of the bus. Is the star inside? I don’t care. I don’t like the noise. I don’t think a bus should be able to idle its bus motor for hours under peoples’ windows.

There is a building in California on the Stanford campus which, at the level of the street-level, ground-floor office windows has a big sign: Drivers! Please turn off your motors! People are trying to work in here!

The thing about noise is that it only bothers me when I feel persecuted by it. If it is unavoidable city noise, I can enjoy it. I do have sound-proof windows, but the rooms behind them feel tight, claustrophobic, airless. I like the breeze on my skin, even the polluted city breeze with its many stinks.

Amsterdam Reading

A great reading with a wonderful audience on Tuesday evening. It went on until 10 pm, and then Marilyn and I went back to our hotel, had a bite and headed off to our rooms on the 12th floor of The Student Hotel, two metro stops from downtown. The next morning we went to the Rembrandt Haus museum and lucked into a talk about engravings in Rembrandt’s studio. The curator was fascinating and explained very clearly the whole process (etching, dry point…) including how Rembrandt, unlike most of his more academic predecessors, mixed his methods and was able to print far more subtley in terms of clarity of line or deliberate blurriness, darker or lighter; and how different supports (rag paper, velum, various Japanese papers) affected the result. Everything was demonstrated on Rembrandt’s bench, then printed on a press that was not original but just like the original. We visited the rest of the house, then went across the street for lunch at the Dance School, visited the Beguinage, before I headed to the station to get my train back to Paris and Marilyn returned to the hotel for another night.

Here is a link to some photos from Tuesday’s reading.

Today is another beautiful October day and I have worked, grocery shopped, taking pleasure in small stores—the Tunisian fruit and vegetable specialist, the Asian counter in the Marché St Germain for pot stickers, because the nearest supermarket is shutting down for remodeling. And so to bed, soon.

Sunday morning, Paris

Every time I come to Paris, I notice all the differences again, for a while, and then it all seems ‘normal,’ just a familiar part of my life. Yesterday I wrote in the morning, had lunch, went to the supermarket a couple of blocks away to buy—what? toilet paper, garbage bags—then took my grocery bag and a book to the Luxembourg Garden, found a sunny chair up by the orchard, and read (kafka, ‘The Burrow’; a new book by Cixous that I found here when I arrived). My usual spot under the two sequoias. A group of high school kids were talking beside me—one boy very loud, drowning out the girls, later one of the girls, very loud. Eventually someone higher up towards the southern rim of the Garden left, and I moved to their chair (musical chairs), later I moved again in search of sun. And still later, when the sun went down behind the buildings, I went to the indoor market to buy a head of lettuce and some vegetables to stock, because Sunday afternoon and Monday most food stores are closed. Parsnips (panais) and turnips, must be winter!

Forgot to mention that I sat for a bit on the edge of the lawn that contains the bust of Verlaine, scowling atop his column, with a pigeon sitting on his head.

And now, 7 pm, home from a walk on the Right Bank Quai of the Seine, which was packed with people, of all ages, walking, cycling, skateboarding, roller skating, scootering (electric and other0 hoverboarding, and all other means of transportation you can think of, except cars. I went not quite as far as the Arsenal, sat for a while, finished reading Kafka’s “The Burrow,’ lay down for a while on a bench and looked at the coach doors on the buildings on the Ile St Louis, and walked back to the foot bridge between the Louvre and the Institut, returned to the Left Bank, and home.

Blasey-Ford and Kavanaugh

I watched Blasey-Ford on tv at my downstairs neighbours on Thursday—was it (still a little blurry from jet lag)?—then came upstairs, made myself some dinner and watched Kavanaugh’s opening statement, which was enough to give me nightmares, apparently, since I woke myself up in the small hours, struggling to cry ‘Help, help!’ but not making much noise—not enough to bring the neighbours running. Was I reliving Blasey-Ford’s experience? Maybe.

Yesterday I ran errands again, to the SNCF to print out my Amsterdam tickets for Tuesday’s trip, a newstand to buy a magazine, then, though it was cold, through the Luxembourg Garden where I found a comfy chair near the duck pond and read for a while before returning home for supper and early bed. In fact, I fell asleep over a detective novel I downloaded to my ipad for the plane trip, but, to my annoyance, find I’ve already read. It shouldn’t matter, should it, since the plots of this series are all pretty much the same? That reminded me of the time I wanted to buy a copy of the previous day’s Le Monde; the newsie allowed as he had a copy, but ‘it’s been read.’ I bought it anyway…

It looks like a sunny day outside: sharply angular shadows on the buildings across the street. But the air is cold.

Paris noises

I arrived here yesterday late afternoon, and did the usual things that need to be done: getting some food in the house. Stayed up until 11, took my melatonin and went to bed. Listened to the street noises, which are very different from what I’d hear in Palo Alto—no commuter train whistle, but church bells, cars, people walking and talking under the window or on a nearby street. A concert of some kind down the street, impromptu, I think. Right now young voices laughing together, maybe coming out of the dental school a few doors away. When I woke up at 3:30 am, there was a couple talking and walking, her in high heels. Earlier I noticed, as I have before, that everything grows very quiet from 1 to 3 in the afternoon, when people are eating lunch; the same thing happens from 8-10 in the evening. That is very different—just the fact that lunch and dinner are quiet periods of the day in the centre of the city, and that they last more than half an hour.

Monday September 24

I have just printed my boarding pass to Paris tomorrow evening. Was hoping to possibly change my seat, but all seat changes (for my class of passenger?) at the airport check-in, so that means I have to go by airport check-in. Perhaps I would have anyway—I don’t know yet whether I will need more than a carry-on.

Meanwhile, the sun is out and I am going to take my last bike ride, up Sandhill, on up Alpine to Portola Valley and, if I can, the ‘green gate.’ If I can, because the last bit is quite steep. Still, it would be good to do it once more before I leave. Lots of walking in Paris, but the only biking—without getting out of the city—is flat on city bikes and I’m not sure I’m ready for the dangers of Paris traffic. Years ago, when I learned to drive a car in the city, I ended up quite comfortable circling the Etoile (Arc de Triomphe) and the Porte Maillot, remembering not to make eye contact with any other drivers, unless I wanted to be edged out of my place in the race. If they think you aren’t paying attention to them, they give you a pass. Of course, out of the corner of your eye, you have an eye on everything going on around you—the insults, the fingers, the rudeness, which, frankly, I have never learned to enjoy; ie, not to take personally. Once, I recall, I told my dentist that taxi driver had shouted obscenities at me in a traffic jam, and he thought that was funny. Not me, as witness, I’m still traumatised. ‘What did you want me to do?’ I asked him, ‘Tell him to fuck off.’ Well, that shocked him. That was the good part.