Marais - superr cooool.

 

Marais is trendy, upended high end, gentrified bohemian, chic paradise, resplendent with tweed and mesh.

All the locals are looking good. Monasteries and gallery spaces are basically the same thing. Minimalist.

I had been walking in the rain and now in the sun the pavement shone. There is a clarity to the air in February. These rues are narrow. This sidewalk is more so. Wherever there is sunlight there is enchantment. Its angles are acute. There is charm in this.

I like the Marais plenty. It is material and mercurial and everywhere there are beautiful people. Frenchmen graffiti like artistes. Too funny! Frescos and analytic cubism and shit. Angulated cream roses. Nudes! Even the tags on the bridges are tasteful. Mauve and beige and violet jargon for Christ's sake. Not much overlap. Quite gentlemanly bonhomme.

In Europe graffiti has a title like de Balzac. Its title is le Street Art, superr urbain. Chez Dalí, the wallpaper, c'est l'art urbain. Le jour de la Saint-Valentin IS romance alors. But on 15 Feb no love for Faunus. What a has been -->

Paris has unity. It has a standard that facilitates perfecting. Paris is a process of perfection. A confectionary of standards. Stone and cobblestone and catacombs.

After the deluge Paris will be just fine. The Romans christened Paris, Lutetia, built on marshland. Bye bye, Shanghai. See ya later Miami. Arrivederci, Venezia.

Valentine could be any one of three saints. All of whom suffered martyrdom to sell stickers to preschoolers. According to la Dame à la licorne birds couple on the 14 Feb. 

Sextus Propertius loiters by Q.H. Flaccus' book-stall catcalling. Just being an all around nuisance. Wearing snakeskin pants. Frank gets a little Verlaine. There are a parti-color lights somewhere. And Hemingway browses through the Russians on a blustery day. Bookseller is to modernist what  folksinger is to manager. Rock and roll!

I have been an organic farmer and an assistant kindergarten teacher but I have been employed longest as a bookseller. I have been employed by almost sixty-six percent of the bookstores on the Upper West Side. I sell ornamental holiday pickles such as this beautiful specimen to your right and of course Elf on the Shelfs not to mention the infectious biography romance John Quincy Adams, American Visionary as seen on your left.

Sylvia Beach and James Joyce made modernism. This is hilarious and the absolute truth. Jim with his ash-plant walking stick and gentle Sylvia.

Certain critics are career gossips. Having deified certain writers in their youth they now must rectify this travesty by convincing themselves, mind you themselves in the guise of an riveted public, that the lives of these men and women of genius were quite trivial indeed. They sniff and snivel and genuinely drivel laundry lists of minor incidents that would not go over well over drinks let alone over several volumes. It is like a not too topical People Magazine, like a melange of the Théâtre de la Cruauté and friends reruns. Should the genius in question be a publicity somnambulist i.e. d'Annunzio or (better yet!) Mayakovsky then the tactic has a shot. James Joyce embraced life too fervently for laundry lists. Jim lists! Seraphim and moocows.

Ernest composes his Sylvia so gracefully, with such resolute tenderness, one thinks of the portraits Cézanne did of his son Paul. Humanity and craft and heart, whatever that is. Cézanne so moved by his public, now paints with more care.  Made and made of mes petites sensations.

There is the passage in A Moveable Feast where Hem has not eaten and his "perceptions are heightened."I adore this - "All the photographs looked different and you saw you saw books you had never seen before." Anyone who loves reading understand this. I can see the yellow and cream bookends of the turn of the century revealing themselves to young Ernest. Here are the Prose Poems of Turgenev. The Mysterious Stranger. I imagine Hemingway intrigued by a few truly composed sentences. There is the marvelous injunction of Sylvia not to read too fast. Such a kind and unusual farewell.  I wonder if Beach said this to all of her regulars.

MONTPARNASSE

On my way to Montparnasse I made a pilgrimage to the homes of some I admired. There are things that are bound to disappoint one and I have found that former residencies generally do whereas natural landscapes and languages (that includes local architecture and folk music—Thelonious Monk says we all play folk music) are always invigorating.  I think that actually the customary commemorative placard makes matters worse.  Actually when I went to Miles Davis’ house on the upper west side and there was no plac but only somebody taking out the garbage I smiled. Of course 77th street between West End and Riverside is in his name.  Anyway I payed homage in this order to the former residencies of Tristan Tzara, Iannis Xenakis and Gertrude Stein. Tristan Tzara lived near me in Montmartre and his house is an architectural and historical landmark designed by Adolf Loos. As architecture I appreciated it from a distance but I found it underwhelming from the entry or at an angle.  Its features are clustered in the center of the five story residence and the majority of the windows and doors are under setback balconies and terraces in rectangular enclaves. It has a brick lower level and stone upper level. It was kind of tame for Tristan Tzara but if one is to believe Gertrude Stein as Alice B. Toklas’ assessment of Tzara then the house would suit him fine. “Tzara came to the house, I imagine Picabia brought him but I am not quite certain. I have always found it very difficult to understand the stories of his violence and his wickedness, at least I found it difficult then because Tzara when he came to the house sat beside me at the tea table and talked to me like a pleasant and not very exciting cousin.”

 

It is funny to think of the sensitivity of the European temperament to any sort of fluctuation (something like how a Southern Californian deals with the weather anywhere else) and how these if it were not for the tradition (or conservatism as Stein would say) of much of the population then the change that became modernism would have been less persuasive if perhaps more dramatic. From another perspective perhaps artistic revolutions functions like a pressurized system where tradition mounts until boom. Anyways I have a ton of admiration for Tzara. Dada is hilarious. And Tristan after all had a fantastic ear.  Walking through Montmartre in the morning was bracing especially with the climbs and February sun and the cobblestones. I stumbled upon some small parks and courtyards. In the spring I knew I would sunbathe there and read. Iannis Xenakis apartment was in a classy residential building on a side street off Pigalle. It is fun to think of Xenakis surrounded by electric guitars and massage parlors. Arborescent Xenakis, Iannis at sea, evryali, surrounded by souvenirs and knick knacks. The placard reads Iannis Xenakis 1922-2001 NE GREC,  RESISTANT, REFUGIE POLITIQUE, COMPOSITEUR. Incidentally there is no reference to his architecture work with Le Corbusier or his admirable research as a scientific musicologist of sorts. Then there was the long walk down through the 1st arrondissement by the Louvre and to the Seine lined with gnarled, gorgeous trees. I walked over to the Luxembourg Gardens and the small children playing soccer with more facility than most teenagers in the United States. Gertrude Stein lives on the Rue Fleures about ten minutes from the Luxembourg Gardens. It is a scenic walk that many marvelous men and women have taken. The building itself is usual for the neighborhood. The placard reads GERTRUDE STEIN 1874-1946 Ecrivain American.  Gertie would like this.

Walking towards and around Montparnasse the landmark was the Tour Montparnasse. This building is visible throughout the quarter and on a clear day from across the Seine. I photographed how the skyscraper contrasts with the Luxembourg Gardens.

Also I found an instrument store that had an affordable pocket trumpet and a guitalele.

Now I live in an apartment on rue Francœur in a neighborhood where Lamarck and Darwin also have avenues in their honor. I find that particularly appealing because I am fascinated by the rivalry if only conceptual between Darwin and Lamarck (as much as I am interested in their intellectual collaboration that established a paradigm) and because I came to France with the intention of delving into the works of the biologist and physicist directly responsible for our current paradigm. I think the concept of the Will (individual and collective) as a driving or selecting, if you will, force behind adaptation appealing even if it does have little relation to actual biological and ecological development. In part the interest rests in the simple fact that even if the evolution of a fungus cannot be attributed to its cosmic or personal will or pouvoir de la vie, human activity certainly can and ultimately post-industrial, or even post-agricultural developments (biological or technological) have been determined on an individual, inventive basis. Now these adaptations have no primary relation to the immediate inheritance of a given genome but will undoubtable influence the movement of the human genome on a secondary level. Possibly this influence will be greater than any other environmental condition. In a sense biologist driven to theorize and solidify a paradigm that explicates or at the least classifies the development of all life have neglected to forge paradigm able to encompass the emergence of the organism at the center of the Anthopocene. This has been entrusted to historians, philosophers, sociologists and theologists. Actually the economy seems to me in a means of establishing human interactions within a Darwinian framework. I should say that I have read little Darwin and almost no Lamarck as of now and most of my albeit limited conceptual understanding has been derived from summations and commentaries. I have always found Darwin a romantic figure and have wanted to read him long before I began studying ecology especially The Voyage on the Beagle otherwise known as Journal and Remarks. Likewise I have wanted to read in part Flore françoise and the journals of Agassiz. I had not heard of Francœur before taking residence here but his Flore parisienne ou Description des caractères de toutes les plantes qui croissent naturellement aux environs de Paris, distribuées suivant la méthode du jardin des plantes sounds like an early example of urban ecology. Also there is the the fantastic figure of Évariste Galois! Galois was to equations what Rimbaud was quatrains. He transcended his medium.






I have always had an affection for Henry James. James like his compatriot Whistler brought sophistication and elan to American culture. Yes, their finesse may at times feel finicky but their wit and felicity always win out. Hemingway mentions James in a moveable feast as who his wife thought of as a good novelist. This is classic Hem. Remarks are not literature but they are.

Gertrude Stein (I am not sure where but I have read it) writes about Henry James (whose brother William James she studied with at Harvard) as being the forerunner to the modern "modernist" tradition. I think Stein wrote about how in James it is happening but not in the writing. James novels feature a simulacra of sorts. Things happen as they are understood and as they are remembered as also somehow as they happen. One focuses on the linguistic intricacies and feigns and devices and beyond the friezes and tapestries a human beings says a thing or does a thing and one is unsure of anything but the unveiling. Finally one looses sight of the veil and the scene seems real.

I love travel but once I have been any place long enough I want to establish a routine. I want to work towards. I want to have a lively devotion. I have gotten to that point with Paris. Actually I was there almost immediately. This is possibly because I knew I would be here awhile. I think it also has to do with how familiar I was with the city coming in. As Ezra says the Chinese say: Emotion is born out of habit. Or as Picabia pointed out: Pour que vous aimiez quelque chose il faut que vous l'ayez vu et entendu depuis longtemps, tas d'idiots. How to do and do honestly.

I have an easel and watercolors and once the springs comes I will open the window and paint with oils. There are plenty of geometric and spacial concepts I want to work out and the ever fulfilling balance of colors. Like Picasso said how Matisse paintings breathe, the colors together breathe. I wish I had a horn with me but hey I got neighbors and wood floors. I thought about buying a pocket trumpet but what I really want a guitar.

WALKING TOUR 1

The Latin Quarter swarms with tourists and anybody wandering through it cannot help but feel ridiculous. It has become a medieval Times Square with enough miniature Eiffel Towers to construct a sizable Eiffel Tower Eiffel Tower replica.  Near the Seine where the cobblestone street prevent car traffic tour groups move in herds. Certain tourists completely embrace the culture and stand resplendent with selfie stick and guidebook. There is no shame in being a tourists. There is shame however in succumbing to a tourist driven daily life. When every other storefront sells souvenirs then maybe the genuine souvenir of the neighborhood has been lost. But hey I’m a tourists too. And there are plenty of scenes in Paris to go around.

Paris: a sleepy upper class suburb of New York

There are an enormous amount of churches and chapels and cathedrals and monasteries in and around the Latin Quarter. It also has an extraordinary amount of overpriced cafes, restaurants and bars. It reminds me of Bourbon Street but with tacky romance replacing tacky sex. I guess the Lower East Side better watch out.

Walking the Latin Quarter early in morning before the deluge you get a sense of what once was and after all could be. Cobblestone alleyways, shafts of light, the weatherworn walls. And there is the Abbey, a wonderful Canadian bookstore run by a gentleman named Brian who will serve you coffee with maple syrup. The Abbey brims with used books and I also found that I could order anything I wanted to the store. I found there much of what I hoped to find and discovered plenty anew and for the first time. In the basement there are rare scientific and philosophical titles. I just finished a book on quantum mechanics and the quest for a cohesive theory regarding superluminal or nonlocal causation I bought there. Fascinating stuff. In the Latin Quarter there is also the Gibert-Joseph bookstore. It is massive and not overpriced.  There is little romance however to a multistory conglomerate and Paris has many bouquinistes along the quais to frequent. And the walk along the Seine in any season is gorgeous.

Eglise Saint Julien Le Pauvre has a quaint garden in front and the bulbous trees are a marvelous counterpoint to Notre Dame. The quart yards behind the Abbey leads to a bending rue that almost transcends the souvenir shop decor. I love round pathways, windows and sentences.

I cannot say that anybody I passed has lasting interest to me although I traded glances with many. Paris has a cosmopolitan taste for anonymity and voyeurism. Parisians can take pride in having written more and more of value on this topic than the rest of Europe combined. New Yorkers will undoubtably surpass Parisians in quantity if not quality of such literature. 

Throughout the evening the seine turns tones and in winter the bare branches and indigo river have a lovely quality. Strangely few walk along the seine at night in February. This is a pleasure.

On the Metro there was a bobo (bourgeois-bohème) pouring wine into a disposable café cup and downing shot after shot. He looked something like Lord Byron and was perched in an almost fetal position on a collapsable metro seat. His gaze lent heroism to his posture. Who knows? Maybe there was something there. I was riding the Metro back to the Lamarck stop at around eight so not that late. Nobody seemed to mind. Parisians like New Yorkers have  as the saying goes seen worse. I did not feel that the courtesy of the espresso cup was all that necessary and would have drunk out of the bottle but I guess that was a lack of politesse on my part. I should specify also that our hero was tall and rounded and even with his knees tucked under his chin still had a domineering air.

Journal 1


Gertrude Stein and Hemingway had a peculiar friendship. Much has been written about how Hemingway learned from Stein. Something about repetition and the American idiom. Much has been written about how Hemingway assisted Stein. Much has been written about the ways the pair betrayed each other. Not much has been written about the whimsical and tender friendship of a then unknown matriarch of American letters and a young aspiring poet and journalist.

Gertrude Stein is hilarious. Her facility and wry sensibility paired with her intellect and sharp perceptive prowess become her to such a degree that despite her linguistic overhaul of the language her prose remains sociable and one finds a levity and grace in everything she has written. Cependant controversy has surrounded Gertrude from the onset and she has always embraced this just as she embraced celebrity later in her career. I would not call Gertrude Stein an abstract writer any more than I would call Picasso an abstract painter but both ventured further into ambiguity and reduction than anybody before them. Tender Buttons has its parallel in Cubism wherein forms are not so much abstract as dissociated or wrought and Stanzas in Meditation reminds me in its spontaneity and simplicity of late Picasso. Picasso and Stein also had refined noses for publicity. Stein apparently demanded that any magazine that published parodies of Tender Buttons also include her original because after all nothing could be funnier or more interesting.

I think there is a very interesting distinction between a journal and a diary and another fascination distinction between either journal or diary and a memoir. A diary happens to one whereas one keeps a journal. I see the events of a diary happening in a social sphere and the events of a journal happening in the psyche of the chronicler. A memoir is a kind of memory. Talking and conversing have similar connotative divergences. In no sense is one superior to the other. It is not only in the etymology of the word but in phenomenal divergences. I converse over a set topic and elaborate a theme. In this sense conversing has an element of the fugue whereas talking resembles a fantasia. Obviously any blatant statement such as these only have meaning so far as they spark a referent in the immediate recollection of the reader. I say immediate for a reason. Immediacy transcends vagaries. One would examine the distinction between journal, diary and memoir in the context of vagaries and how they come about. Anything vague in a diary, wherein one assumes the phenomena discuss has just transpired, would be due to linguistic shortcomings or a deliberate lapse. In the case of a diary not meant to be read one can assume anything deliberately vague to just be the result of either a lack of interest or attention or a subconscious repulsion. Most likely it would be the former. In the case of a journal any vagary would be a lapse in pursuit or perception if not as in the case of either other format a lapse in interest. In the case of memoir there is the transformation of memory: everything set to music etc.

Living in a once legendary arrondissement tends to confuse.  Time has an elastic quality there. Almost as though the density of the past had gravitational pull. Elements of the landscape are transfigured and become say the Linden tree that Erik Satie would walk by or an angular view  through rooftops that Picasso must have admired. Anything earthy is also ethereal. There is then the question of sentimentality to which there is no answer but what is the question. Tourists crowd the Place du Tertre and portraitists with charcoal and pad ply their trade. Hack galleries line the rue with so many not so starry nights. Still sunlight is lovely thing falling over Paris, especially in the morning from Montmartre. Crepuscular Montmartre is tender and blue.

Paris is a city where neighbors say hello. It is not really all that big of a city. If I see somebody around the neighborhood then most likely I will see them again. This is not true in New York and although I recognize the occasional by-passer and am friendly with the neighbors on my floor and those whom I work with still I can go to Irving Farm four days out of five for coffee and not recognize anybody but the barista. This is actually an architectural feature of the city. Skyscrapers conglomerate urbanites but also distance us.