Photo Gallery

No bare naked ladies, I promise, unless I sneak in a shot of the Venus de Milo. Just a few favorites that we haven't previously posted.

Aging Cafe Chicks (photo by John Unsworth):


In the Jardins de Luxembourg (photo by ML):


Lily Pond at Giverny (photo by ML):


In Monet's Garden at Giverny (photo by John Unsworth):


Eiffel Tower at Night (photo by John Unsworth):


St. Germain Metro sign (photo by ML):

Where Were We?

Here's how we spent our weekend in Paris before flying out late Monday afternoon.

On SATURDAY:

• We made the pilgrimage up to Montmartre to visit the Sacre Coeur and take in the amazing views of Paris from the top of the hill. We spent some time exploring the neighborhood but cut that short because we were on a tight schedule and were determined to make it out to the cemetery at Pere Lachaise, which is a long Metro ride away from Montmartre. The train ride took us through some fairly grim-looking neighborhoods on the east side of the city and provided a glimpse of some of the social and economic conditions that have fueled recent tensions in Paris. (A few miles further to the east, the neglected, poverty-stricken suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois was the starting point for the nights of civil unrest that spread throughout France this past fall.) In any case, the cemetery, which in some ways seemed as neglected as the area surrounding it, was a beautiful old ruin, filled with the spirits and remnants of departed geniuses and who knows what else. We paid our respects to Stein and Toklas, to Oscar Wilde, and to Jim Morrison as well as Edith Piaf and a few other French luminaries. It was touching to see that Toklas is in fact acknowledged on Stein's (surprisingly modest) headstone. Like all wives, Toklas is memorialized on the back of the stone, but at least she is there. And it was sad to see the vacant-eyed young pilgrims who make their way to Jim Morrison's grave and sit there, before a shrine piled high with candles and cigarette butts and photographs, wrapped up in the impenetrable silence of their communion with the dead. What mixture of identification and desire fuels that communion, we wondered as we walked away? They were all too young to have known Morrison when he was alive. (He died in 1971.) What moves them to reach out to this icon of crash-and-burn rock excess? Perhaps the question answers itself.

• After the somewhat somber tourism of the afternoon, we had a more festive time in the evening, when we headed out with the group from the conference for a banquet and Seine cruise on the famous Bateaux-Mouches. Martha insists that I point out that the Bateaux-Mouches is not famous for its cuisine but for the uniquely lovely views it offers of the city as one cruises serenely down the river at sunset. Indeed, after seeing the dry piece of fish and crack-your-teeth overcooked rice we were served for our main course, my pert partner declared she had finally discovered that it was possible to eat a bad meal in France. It was, nonetheless, a splendid evening of good company and eye-popping views. My cameras batteries had expired at Pere Lachaise in the afternoon, but fortunately friends have shared their postcard-quality photos of the Eiffel Tower dressed in its summer best.

On SUNDAY:

• We spent most of the day on a conference excursion to Monet's incredible home and gardens at Giverny. Pictures will convey more eloquently than words the beautiful place Monet designed to inspire his painting, so I'll post a few in another entry of visual highlights of the trip. Suffice it to say we were thrilled to visit the place after having communed so happily with his water lilies in the Orangerie earlier in the week. After we got back from Giverny, we did some serious cafe-sitting in a joint called l'Ecritoire in the Place de la Sorbonne. It was fun to hang out, snap silly photos with friends from the conference, drink many beers, and feel the excitement building as the time for the World Cup final approached. We had dinner at a place nearby, la Cremerie Polidor, which has been a favorite of Latin Quarter habitues since the 1840s (including Hemingway, Joyce, and Kerouac). We loved the feel of the place (family-style seating, totally un-stuffy atmosphere, waitresses who kept racing out to the bar next door to check on the progress of the game), but the food was a little disappointing. Martha had a spinach & ham salad that was practically tasteless, and I had tripe sausage with French fries that was good but not wonderful.

• However, it's possible that our disappointment with dinner stemmed from other causes. By that point, Martha was experiencing pretty severe pain in her upper left leg that had us both feeling anxious. Indeed, by the time we finished dinner, she could barely walk, so we hailed a cab home to avoid Metro and to make sure we were off the streets by the time the game ended. I was also contending with a heavy period, which is always fun on vacation in countries that still have pit toilets in a few places (such as la Cremerie Polidor). We were tired, distracted, starting to think of the trip home, and silently remembering that Martha's nightmare of hip pain began in the course of a beautiful walk on the streets of another of the world's great cities, New York. Sometimes, perhaps always, life rudely intrudes on the pleasures of our holidays.

• And then, of course, our adopted team, les bleus, managed to blow their World Cup chances with an inexplicable head-butt by superstar Zinedine Zidane. We missed the head-butt and were frankly a little relieved not to have to contend with a night of victory celebrations, but we were disappointed for the French fans. When the game ended, it briefly seemed that we lived in an Italian neighborhood, as there was a good bit of cheering going on, but things quieted down fairly quickly and we went off to bed, knowing that the next morning would be a busy one of packing, postcard-writing, and the other rituals of departure.

And so our Paris interlude wound toward its close.

Safe Home

We're back! We touched down last night a little after 7:30 and reached home about 9:30. Sweet Geoffrey picked us up from the airport, and Mlle Roxie greeted us with a thousand soggy kisses. We are happy and a little jet-lagged. Awakened around 4 by a smoke detector that seems to have been set off by a spider, we all found it hard to go back to sleep and finally got up at 6:30.

Re-entry is a slow but satisfying process. We'll keep updating the blog with reports on our last couple of days in Paris as we settle back in. Meantime, thanks to John Unsworth for the above photo of MN, who found her true home in Paris in a well-named spot right across the street from the Luxembourg gardens. Our next major technological challenge will be to try to upload the wonderful Quick Time Movie John took of the Eiffel Tower at night to the blog. Stay tuned, mes amis!

Indiana Frusk in the Temple of Fashion

Today was a long, busy day. We went to the Centre Pompidou in the early afternoon. The permanent collections were closed, but we enjoyed the panoramic views from the escalators running up the outside of the building. Also saw a fun exhibit on the moving image, which explored connections between the technology of motion pictures and other art forms. It was fun and smart and deep in a particularly French sort of way.

Martha went and gave her paper late in the afternoon. I went down the rue Sevres to the Bon Marche and la Grand Epicerie de Paris—basically an upscale department store and a grocery store that was Whole Foods on steroids. For me, strolling through the aisles of the Bon Marche felt like being Indiana Frusk in the Temple of Fashion. I just couldn't believe the hordes of women grabbing up clothes that seemed to me wholly impractical and obscenely overpriced, not to mention, um, small. I realized, of course, that I had to be missing something, that there was something perverse in my DNA or my upbringing that made me unable to appreciate the delights of designer fashion. There were dogs in that store who seemed more in their element than I did, surrounded by rack after rack of eye-popping clothes while walking around in my Target travel pants and my old running shoes with the hole in the toe. The devil may wear Prada, but sensible middle-aged dykes on vacation wear strictly Saucony, with a little Mephisto thrown in when they want better service in restaurants.

Met up with MN at the Sorbonne a little before 6. We walked to the Louvre for what had been billed as “a private tour.” Turned out to be a short lady in a green raincoat who had nothing to say and didn’t seem prepared to “guide” us at all. We hadn’t even bothered to pick up maps at the entrance because we assumed we wouldn’t need them, so we hung out with folks who had maps long enough to stop and pay our respects to the Venus de Milo and the Mona Lisa, then bailed out because we were exhausted.

Here’s an amazing story, though. At some point when we were looking out the windows to try to figure out which of the four wings of the Louvre we were in and how we might go about getting out, we realized it was suddenly pouring down rain. Well, we thought, might as well not hurry to leave, because I had left the umbrella back in the apartment to try to lighten my load. As we re-traced our steps, we passed back through the room that houses the Mona Lisa and several dozen other masterpieces of Italian Renaissance painting. (It’s enough to make a girl feel sorry for Titian and Veronese, I swear—These guys have these incredible 30-foot wide Technicolor canvases with dogs and Christ and angels and food, and all anybody comes to see in that room is one little painting of an overweight Italian nobody!) Anyway: As we walked back through Mona’s room, we suddenly found ourselves caught up in a bit of museum hysteria. The guards were telling everybody, “You can’t go this way, you have to go that way,” which Martha processed as “blah blah blah, blah blah blah,” and which I processed as, “What the hell is up with these uppity Frenchmen, always telling us, no, no, no, you can’t do this now, you should have done this five minutes ago, but now it’s absolutely impossible?” So, they’re trying desperately to herd us one way rather than another, when suddenly I look up at and notice that there is WATER pouring down one of the walls behind a group of PAINTINGS not fifty feet from where her majesty, the Mona Lisa, the queen of western civilization, is hanging. And I do mean POURING. We stood there transfixed by the horror of it—Renaissance masterpieces, greatest museum in universe, and WATER, WATER pouring down!--and spent the rest of the evening re-assessing our whole sense of the French and their cultural superiority. I mean, really, I may be Indiana Frusk in the Temple of Fashion, but a couple of weeks ago when we had ourselves a nasty series of summer storms in the Washington area (with something like 15 inches of rain over a three-day period), I managed to keep my artwork dry! Folks, this is water management 101: don’t get water on the great masterpieces of Western Art! Fine, if you’re too snooty to install air conditioners that actually COOL or internet connections that consistently function, please do the world a favor and at least try to assure that the Mona Lisa doesn’t go to mold.

After the trauma of flooding in the Louvre, we needed serious sustenance. Fortunately, we had a late reservation at l’Epi Dupin, a restaurant not far from our apartment that had been highly recommended to us by a couple of people. It was just the two of us, and we had an extraordinary meal, possibly our best yet, or maybe we were just so tired and hungry that it made a huge impression. We both had a festive drink to begin, a kir royale for me and a glass of champagne for Martha, to chase the Motrins we had taken before dinner for the aches and pains we felt from all the walking of the last few days. I had a lovely shrimp salad for an appetizer, just three shrimp on a bed of greens with a light vinaigrette and a light piece of parmesan toast. Martha had a cold soup of little peas with a piece of herbed chevre—also very light and delicate. For entrees, I had a steak with mustard on a bed of spinach, and Martha had duck breast with polenta. We even had a cheese course tonight, because we had a smashing bottle of Chateauneuf du Pape (La Bastide Saint Dominique 2002) to finish off. Then, for dessert, I had a roasted peach with pistachio ice cream, while Martha continued her chocolate tour of Paris with another little soufflé.

We finished with espresso and an armagnac and then went home to blog, to bed, to dream perchance of floods and fires and all the terrible threats to Westuhn Culcha for which neither the French nor “Homeland Security” is prepared.

Matthew and the Chapeau

Today we finally feel that we're on Paris time. We both woke up this morning around 8 and felt well-rested, though we had slept a little less than we had most nights since we've been here. The weather remains cool and pleasant--partly cloudy with some threat of showers, but nothing that gets in the way of our plans. We had an abbreviated tourist schedule today because Martha wanted to attend some of the conference, but we did go to the Musee Maillol on the rue Grenelle to see an eclectic collection of Maillot's sculptures and other works and an amazing selection of photographs of Marilyn Monroe taken shortly before her death in 1962. The photos were taken by celebrity photographer Bert Stern and are shockingly intimate, not just because Monroe is nude in many of them but because she seems so close, so available to the camera, and so profoundly vulnerable. I suppose that's probably a case of hindsight being 20/20 vision, but in several of the photos you'd think you were seeing staged tableau-morts. They're very stylized and incredibly creepy. The body is splayed out across the bed. Booze bottles and glasses scattered here and there. The neck is displayed as if inviting the viewer to slash it. The eyes are closed. Even smiling, she looks already dead. And achingly beautiful, of course.

Martha went to a session in the afternoon, so I took off on my own in the Latin Quarter. I grabbed a ham and cheese crepe from the crepe stand associated with le Comptoir because I was determined to eat there one way or the other this trip. Then I headed up to the Place de la Sorbonne for an hour and a half of reading and people-watching and searching for glimpses of myself at 17 haunting the same spot. I'm reading Sarah Waters' Tipping the Velvet, which is a perfect summer vacation read--fun but not trivial, potentially teachable at some future point, and full of the kind of youthful libido that was starting to drive me nuts thirty years ago this summer when a French teacher named Gisele made my heart skip a beat before I even had words for the feelings I had. Long story. . . .Never mind.

After her session, we spent an hour or so relaxing in the jardins de Luxembourg and walked home by way of 27 rue de Fleurus so we could get digital versions of the photos we took six years ago.

For dinner tonight we hooked up with Maryland pal and colleague Matt Kirschenbaum, intending to hit a place fairly close to the apartment that has been recommended to us by several folks. It was full for the evening, but a sweet waiter directed us to another spot in the quartier St. Germain, la Cigale Recamier. We couldn't get in there until 9:30, and Martha and Matt were both starving, but it turned out to be more than worth the wait. We had fabulous food and a feast for the eyes as well. The crowd was a great mix of up-scale tourists and pretty snazzy looking Parisians, including an amazing older woman seated right next to Matt who had on the most extraordinary hat any of us had ever seen. It was enormous and perched at an angle on the left side of her head, totally obscuring the side of her face that was next to Matt. Martha and I were across the table from Matt and so saw mostly the hat but also got a few tantalizing glimpses of the face as well. When we sat down, she and her companion were just finishing their dinners, but they lingered until just before we left some time later.

It is impossible to describe this hat, which was an electric blue and had what seemed to be a sheaf of wheat that had to be three feet wide attached to the top. One could not help but stare and stare and wonder what kind of fabulous creature would adorn herself in such a hat. She was of course impossibly thin and did not avail herself of any of the many souffles on the menu (unlike the three of us, of course--Martha manged to have a souffle for both appetizer and dessert, while Matt and I both opted for an amazing caramel souffle for dessert). She had a sensible grilled fish and split a bottle of water with her younger female friend, who protested when she moved to pick up the check but let her pay it anyway. When she finally got up and sashayed out of the place, someone stopped her to chat, and we immediately assumed she was famous as someone, at least in the quartier. (I had read an article just this morning that informed me that Catherine Deneuve lives in St. Germaine, so I was primed for a major celebrity spotting, though I did not for one second suppose that Miss Deneuve would hide her fabulousness beneath such an ungainly chapeau. Please.) Because our waiter was funny and playful and inclined to chat, I asked him about her after they were gone. "La femme au chapeau," I managed to say, "was she someone famous?" He laughed hysterically. "Ah, no," he said, "I have never seen her before in my life!" I felt immense relief in that laughter, even if it was at a skinny old woman's expense, because it made me feel less crude, less hideously vulgar, un peu less Indiana Frusk (to cite the crudest of Edith Wharton's barbarous American women characters) to think that a woman in such an astonishing hat was no less astonishing in St. Germain than she would be in Washington--or Apex or Kokomo or any other "hideous" American place.

I suspect it will be a long while before I forget the sight of our smart, polite friend Matt carefully cutting his steak while keeping his left shoulder down to avoid an untimely collision with one of the largest hats the quartier had ever seen.

Dancing in the Streets

[Our internet woes continue, so this, too, was written yesterday and posted today, the 6th.]

There is so much to be happy about tonight that a girl hardly knows where to begin. First of all, the heat wave broke early this morning in an excellent little thunderstorm that found me standing at the wide open window with a grin on my face as the first touch of a cool breeze rolled into the city at around 4 a.m. Today’s weather was so delightful that I barely noticed that the Cluny museum, though richly endowed with ancient tapestries and fine Roman masonry, is a little spotty in the air-conditioning department. If you’re looking for a cool retreat in the Cluny, I’d recommend the aptly named Frigidarium, site of a Roman cold bath, or the room dedicated to the six tapestries of the Lady with the Unicorn. The tapestries are spectacular, of course, but, being extremely fragile, they are housed in a climate-controlled room that is chilly enough to satisfy even the most AC-dependent American.

About those tapestries, though: Apparently there is some debate among medievalists as to whether the meaning of the tapestries is religious or secular, possibly even sexual. Martha and I are in agreement that anything involving a lady and a unicorn is most definitely sexual. I mean, please, folks—a hybrid creature with a horn in the middle of his head. How could that be anything but sexual? In one tapestry, the lady is showing the unicorn his reflection in a mirror, as if to say, “See, honey, I told you we were different. This will never work.” In the last of the six tapestries, she is taking off her necklace and putting it in a box. The unicorn is still there, and the words above her head are “A mon seul desir” (“For my sole desire”). Down with the jewels, on to the dude with the horn on his head. Love conquers all. End of tapestry sequence. We are professional literary critics, after all, and Martha once impersonated a medievalist at a cocktail party early in her career, so I believe we have some right to weigh in on this crucial question.

On other happy notes, we are also entering into the spirit of World Cup mania that has gripped France as the nation prepares to face Italy in the final on Sunday. Tonight, as we walked home from dinner, the streets were full of shouts and cheers and horns and singing—and the game wasn’t even over yet. It’s after midnight as I write this, and the party seems to just be getting started. Martha is standing at the window in her underwear watching the whole crazy scene. I swear, the fever is so infectious that I am considering googling the word “soccer” tomorrow to try to get some sense of what the damn game is all about. Or maybe not. I could just buy a tee-shirt.

We wound up back at the Bastide Odeon for dinner this evening with a group of folks from the conference. We couldn’t get into le Comptoir and wanted something reasonably close to where we were (la Sorbonne), so it was a good and convenient choice. The kitchen seemed a bit distracted by soccer mania, but the meal was still excellent, and Martha and I were delighted that the adorable young waiter we had last night came by to say hello and talk about soccer. We had assured him we were fierce partisans for the French, of course. I had the eggplant appetizer again and a terrific squid dish that was full of surprising juxtapositions of flavor and texture—cabbage, beets, basil, bacon. I also had a wonderful dessert of a peach in pesto “soup,” with a dollop of vanilla ice cream. Martha had a baby ravioli with cheese and chives in a light, slightly lemony sauce for her starter and a pork dish she describes as a big piece of thick and delicious bacon with gnocchi and garlic in wine reduction sauce. She had the chocolate cream puff again for dessert. Close readers will have detected an interesting pattern. I got the same appetizer that I ordered last night, while Martha went back for more of the same dessert. On neither occasion did I have a chocolate dessert, and she stayed away from appetizers that were mostly vegetables. There is a world of nutritional/relational insight in that simple pattern, and you don’t have to be a professional literary critic to see it.

Half past midnight and the flag-flying cars are still racing through the streets of Paris which are, if our particular corner is typical, significantly more urine-soaked than they were earlier today. Allons, enfants—to bed!

Please note that I did not say that one more reason to be happy today is that former Enron CEO Kenneth Lay dropped dead of what is being called a massive heart attack at his vacation home in Colorado. I wonder how many of Lay’s former employees, who lost their jobs, their pensions, and their faith in American business, had managed to hold onto their vacation homes. I take no pleasure in Mr. Lay’s passing, but I take no pain in it either—though it is disappointing that he won’t have to serve a single day of the prison sentence he so richly deserved.

Enough with the schadenfreude—BONNE NUIT!

Too Darn Hot--But We're Coping

[Written yesterday, the 4th, posted today when we could poach a signal.]

After several transatlantic phone calls last night, we had formulated a brilliant plan for surviving the heat wave, at least for today: We would go to a museum and spend the whole day pretending to soak up the Best That Has Been Thought and Said (or Painted and Sculpted) in Western Civilization--because we probably couldn’t get away with spending the entire day in the frozen food section of our neighborhood super-marche.

It was a good plan. I took half a xanax last night to assure a good night’s sleep, regardless of the weather, and we headed out to the Musee d’Orsay around noon. Our brilliant plan was almost derailed when we got to the d’Orsay and realized that every other tourist within ten thousand miles had formulated exactly the same plan. We found ourselves melting in the noon-day sun in the longest line I’ve seen since tickets for Cher’s farewell tour went on sale in Dupont Circle. In desperation, we hit on another brilliant plan: Martha sent me out to find a way to get into the museum without going through that line. It’s funny. Only in France, where I have a dim grasp of the language and a high-school girl’s sense of geography, am I the one in this relationship who is supposed to Go Out and Do Things to End Our Suffering in Some Ridiculous Situation.

In this case, that proved to be a smart move. I went out, as hunters have gone out from time immemorial, determined to end the suffering in my clan. First, I went to a tabac by the museum, and said, “Do you sell passes to the museums?” (I was referring to the magical ticket that secures admission to all Paris museums for a set period of time and gets one around all the horrible lines of sheep who stand melting in the mid-day sun in front of every museum in Paris.) “No,” he replied (en francais), “you have to buy it at the museum.” Merde, I muttered to myself, now what? Next, determined not to go back to my girl empty-handed, I went up to a fellow guarding the magic door where all the smart people with advance tickets and museum passes happily entered. “Where do I get the museum passes?” I demanded. He said. . .a lot of words that I couldn’t make much sense of. He probably told me to go around to the door on the other side of the museum where such passes were for sale, but he might have told me that the ice cream on the Champs-Elysees is truly excellent, and it would have been the same to me. In any case, I headed back to Martha in frustration. By that point, she had of course formed intimate relationships with half of the ten thousand people melting in the line under the mid-day sun. She quickly pointed me in the direction of the magical window right behind the rhinoceros and within minutes I had in fact procured four-day passes that will admit us to any museum in Paris without standing in the damn lines with all the sheep whose internet connections weren’t working or whose husbands told them it would be a waste of money to buy passes when they could just get tickets when they got to the museums.

And toute suite, there we were, in the AIR-CONDITIONED COMFORT of the Musee d’Orsay. We stayed all afternoon, because we are suckers for Impressionism and because they have an extraordinary collection of Art Nouveau—and because the Musee d’Orsay may well have the finest air-conditioning system in all of Paris. We went to the d’Orsay back in 2000, and I don’t recall being so impressed with the air-conditioning, but this time, ooh la la, it was in fine form, and so I was able to dry out and focus on such minor details as the fact that Van Gogh’s painting of his bedroom at Arles always takes my breath away. A painting like that is so familiar and so covered over with clichés that one can hardly see it, and yet when I do. . .I am always taken aback, by the madness and the design of it, the skewed proportions, that sense of the walls pressing in, and yet the extraordinary colors and the way that it all fits together, even in its skewedness. It moves me as few paintings do, because I still think of myself as visually illiterate, despite all the miles logged in museums over the years. (Thank you, William and Debra!)

After the museum, we came home and changed for dinner, met up with the Unsworths ( and Maggie’s charming father, Jim ) for dinner at the Bastide Odeon, near the Luxembourg gardens, where we ate back in 2000. It was a splendid evening. The Bastide is still a fine restaurant, despite having made certain concessions to the Euro-sensitive tourist trade. We all had delicious three-course meals, a couple of bottles of a spectacular burgundy, and after-dinner drinks for John and Martha. I had a warm eggplant with a touch of goat cheese and other yummy things for my appetizer and an adventurous lamb’s feet in a kind of cassoulet for my entrée, plus some nice poached apricots with almonds and ice cream for dessert. Martha had salmon on scalloped potatoes in a light cream sauce (mayo & chives, lemon) for her appetizer and cannelloni of lamb with fava beans, bits of spinach, plus zucchini for her entrée, then a light chocolate “cream puff” (chocolate outside, pastry, chocolate sauce inside) for dessert.

Great way to kick off Martha’s professional excuse for being in Paris, the Association for Literary and Linguistics Computing and Association for Computing in the Humanities conference, though it does mean that Martha will have to do some work over the next few days. I, however, am not burdened by any such responsibility and will continue to comb the city for evidence of advanced civilization and air-conditioning. The good news is that temperatures are supposed to moderate over the next few days. I think we’ve made it through the worst and that perhaps I’ll be able to fulfill those fantasies of combing the markets for treats and bargains while Martha is off at the conference.

Or, I’ll just get a whole lot more mileage off my museum pass in search of cool rooms and great art. Whatever, I’m in the world’s greatest city, and I love it.

Paris. . .When It Sizzles

[Again, this would have been posted last night, but we continue to have very iffy internet connections. We now think maybe we're just poaching off a neighbor rather than truly connected to the system in our apartment, so it's catch as catch can.]

With all due respect to Cole Porter, whose skills with rhyme and rhythm far surpass mine, I have to confess to harboring some ambivalence toward Paris in the summer, when it sizzles, which it is doing right now. The past two days have been beastly hot but not horribly humid. We can feel the humidity rising tonight, though, and the forecast high for tomorrow is 96. Today we spent hours in the Musee Picasso in the Marais district in part, of course, because Picasso is one of the great masters of modern art, but also in no small measure because the Musee Picasso is one of the few buildings in Paris that is comfortably, wonderfully air-conditioned. I think we saw some glorious art that re-shaped the course of modern vision and representation, but what I may always treasure about the place is that while we were there my clothes and skin and brain dried out for the first time all day. Otherwise, I was a soggy, thirsty, puffy, semi-miserable mess.

But did I mention that the art was lovely? And the building, some 16th-century something or other, was also pretty snazzy? As well as cool? I was almost as happy at the Musee Picasso as I was standing in the frozen food section at our local supermarket this morning. The visuals weren’t as compelling, but the air was equally delicious.

Martha and I think maybe the French might consider modernizing just un peu, if for no other reason than we doubt they’ll be able to survive global warming without something more substantial in the way of climate control than long lunches and excellent ice cream.

Okay, enough grousing about the weather. Today was in all other respects another lovely day. We slept late, having stayed up late last night blogging and drinking wine, and then dawdled around the neighborhood getting a few supplies for the apartment. We bought Metro tickets because we realized we couldn’t be walking everywhere in the infernal heat (oops, did I grouse about the weather again?), which was a sensible thing to do in any case. We spent the whole afternoon and evening in the Marais. After the Picasso, we strolled around, found the chic gay part of the district, then wandered around killing time until it was time for dinner at the Brasserie Bofinger, one of the oldest and best brasseries in town. We probably had our best meal since we got here and for a very reasonable price. We had three courses with a very nice burgundy and one Grand Marnier for 130 euros, which felt like a bargain for such good food and ambience. Martha had fois gras, a wonderful lamb, and some chocolate almond thing for dessert. ML had the freshest oysters she’d ever eaten, a delicious cod and veggies in a yummy lemony sauce, and ice cream in a meringue “sandwich” for dessert. Oh, and best of all, the dining room was AIR-CONDITIONED or “climatise,” as we say en francais.


MN here. I’ve been having a fabulous time – this vacation in Paris is everything I’d hoped for and more. The apartment is one of the most perfectly apportioned spaces I’ve ever seen – every square foot used beautifully and for full comfort. Little aesthetic treats abound in this 3rd floor walk-up, and we’re in the heart of the 6th.

We have forgotten to mention two things: first, the fact that on our first walk out from our residence (on our way to the Musee Quai Branly) we were almost immediately greeted with a spritely wire hair fox terrier. I thought that must have been Roxie’s blessing on our vacation; second, we should have mentioned the obvious, the wonderful bread shops, which of course everyone knows about, yeah yeah, and everyone knows where the best bread in town is. However, on the Cherche-Midi there is the lovely Poilane, and upon our arrival Saturday we were greeted with the wonderful spectacle of three perfectly ROUND loaves of bread, each in the shape and with the design of a soccer ball – the French have of course gone mad because they are in the semi-finals of the World Cup, having defeated Brazil to get there and facing Portugal Wednesday night (July 5).

Marchons!

Martha with Monet's water lillies at the Orangerie:

The brand new Musee du Quai Branly:

Highlights of our first full day in Gay Paris:

1. Sleeping like goddesses til 9:30 and then having a lovely breakfast in our apartment of brioches, cheese, cherries, OJ, & coffee. We are pleased that the French have discovered Tropicana Orange Juice. We don't think this represents any serious undermining of the national commitment to haute cuisine, and it perhaps makes up for the fact that the French never got hold of Florida despite centuries of imperialst activity. Bottom line is it's vastly better than the boxed kool-aid they used to try to pass off as orange juice, and it makes American tourists happy.

2. Heading out into a WARM day at around 11:30 and managing to visit the brand new and extraordinary Musee du Quai Branly (primitive stuff from Africa, Asia, and the Americas) and then hopping over to the other side of the Seine to visit the beautifully renovated Petit Palais and the sublime Orangerie, with two huge rooms devoted to Monet's enormous water lillies. The Quai Branly is amazing both architecturally and aesthetically/philosophically. The exterior is an exquisite blend of primitive and postmodern; the inside is pleasing to be in, but the viewer is constantly reminded through all kinds of multi-media commentary of the politics of self and other involved in any journey into the primitive. You know you're not in an American museum the moment you look up and see comments from Trinh Min-Ha on the walls. It's beautifully conceived and executed. Don't know if the photo I've put in here adequately captures it, but it is an impressive space/experience.

3. Making friends with Brian and Jeanie, a sweet ex-hippy type couple from Spokane, in the Orangerie. They got amused when they saw me taking the above photo of Martha standing by the water lillies and we started chatting. We kept running into each other in the museum and wound up talking for ages, eventually exchanging contact info and telling them what restaurants to hit when they're in DC for a convention in September. It was one of those, "Gosh, haven't we met before?" kind of instant intimacies that only happens when one is far away from one's usual element and bumps into someone that feels somehow familiar. Brian wound up telling us that he has a tee-shirt that he loves wearing to places like Utah that says, "Nobody knows I'm a lesbian." Later, when we were telling them that Martha and I have been together for 22 years, I said that my tee-shirt says, "Everybody knows I'm a lesbian," so I came out when I was three and we've been together ever since. I always have mixed feelings about meeting up with other Americans when we're in Europe, but for every Gomer you meet in a Promise Keepers tee-shirt you meet two swell folks like Brian and Jeanie, so we keep striking up casual conversations when we hear American accents. Whaddaya got to lose?

4. Having a lovely risotto for dinner at a brasserie in the Latin Quarter and then stumbling upon the Lycee St. Louis, where I stayed when I was in Paris thirty years ago. We called it the Lycee St. Merde back then, because it really was a dump. The food was inedible, and we all got robbed of whatever jewelry we had brought with us from Indiana, but I still think of it fondly as the place from which my youthful conquest of the city was launched. The brasserie was Brasserie Balzar, and our table was practically out in the middle of the street, but we had a delicious little dinner in the shadow of the Sorbonne. I'm sure Simone and Jean-Paul probably dined there many times. Note to potential visitors to the City of Lights: Your wallet will be extremely light when you leave Paris. They're not kidding when they say the conversion to Euros has led to significant price increases, irrespective of the lousy (for Americans) exchange rate. Our lovely little dinner (no appetizers, no dessert; one bottle of wine, one bottle of water) cost a little over 100 euros, and this was a brasserie, not a top-drawer restaurant.

5. Being happy to get home at the end of long day and find that our internet connection was working better than it was last night. Martha's theory is that the system crashed because the French were so overcome by their triumph in the World Cup that even the computers went nuts. I'm skeptical, but glad to be up and running in the blogosphere.

See you all again soon! Bon soir!

Allez, France!

[This would have been posted last night, but we were having technical difficulties (possibly exacerbated by jet-lag) and therefore, like Rush Limbaugh, couldn't get it up.]

We're here! My rusty French works well enough to tell waiters that we just landed this morning and I'm too tired to speak French. They sweetly lie that I speak beautifully, and my sweet Frenchless girlfriend believes them.

Just a few quick, jet-lagged points:

1. Trip was smooth as silk, but Air France is not what it used to be. We were jammed into our seats like sardines, and the woman in front of me kept rocking back into my lap all night long. Note to self: before next transatlantic trip, cut four inches off of legs. We watched Woody Allen's Match Point late last night because we were too tired to read and too wired to sleep. Good bit of storytelling; nasty little tale, though.

2. Apartment is lovely, all we hoped it would be. We came in and napped for almost four hours, then went out grocery-shoppping for wine and breakfast goods. It's warm here and nothing is air-conditioned, but the people all speak French, so who cares? Young men are exceptionally nice to us, wherever we go. They like to practice their English on us, and they are charmed by our efforts in French.

3. Parisians are extremely happy this evening about France's victory over Brazil in the World Cup. We were happy because the restaurants were empty. Now the streets are full with cars honking their horns, people shouting, motorcycles with French flags flying proudly. We remind ourselves that "football" means "soccer," and in some parts of the world this matters a great deal. We think it's cool that there is one world sport that the U. S. totally sucks at.

Time to crash. Tomorrow we'll hit some museums because they're closed on Monday. Tuesday we may finally visit Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas's graves at Pere Lachaise.

Salut!

Back to the Future

I'm excited, too! I went to Paris for the first time thirty years ago this summer, courtesy of a language-immersion program for high school students sponsored by Indiana University. At seventeen, I was intoxicated by everything about that experience--the challenge of trying to function in another language, the thrill of discovering worlds beyond Indiana and the U. S., the wonder of seeing so much art and beauty in one place. Martha and I went to Paris together for the first time in the summer of 2000 and vowed to go back, rent an apartment, and fulfill the Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas fantasy I've always harbored. Not sure yet who's Gert and who's Alice, but we can argue about that on the plane. Meantime, here's an iconic (cliche?) Paris shot I borrowed off the web to set the mood. Stay tuned for our photos, downloaded live from the Left Bank, assuming the gods of technology are in a cooperative mood. A bientot!