Maitresse

Ellis Avery, The Footsore Flâneuse

Ellis Avery, author of The Last Nude, out this week from Riverhead and set in Paris in the 1920s, went to Paris earlier this year on a sabbatical with her partner (Sharon Marcus, who has also written brilliantly on Paris) to do some research. Unfortunately, a foot injury prevented Ellis from flâner-ing around the city the way she'd hoped. Then she found she could get around just fine on a bus and a bicycle! Here, her tale of flânerie aboard public transport.

 

 

 The Footsore Flâneuse: Claiming One’s Own Paris on Public Transportation
 
The glamorous Art Deco painter Tamara de Lempicka had the good fortune to live in Paris in the 1920s.  While writing about her, I had the good fortune to live in Paris in 2008.  My partner and I had the further good fortune, that sabbatical season, to be working on projects we loved.  Sharon was researching Sarah Bernhardt; I was finishing the first draft of my Tamara de Lempicka novel, THE LAST NUDE.  I was unlucky in only one area: my right foot.  I would later discover my Parisian foot trouble was just one manifestation of a literally bone-breaking but ultimately treatable form of arthritis, but at the time, I thought I had an injury that simply refused to heal.  In any case, they were scotched, my plans for long walks in my favorite walking city.

The foot injury made it easy for me to stay home and write my thousand words a day, five days a week.  Sure, but what’s Owen Wilson doing in that Midnight in Paris poster?  He’s walking through Paris.  Ever since the first gimlet-eyed flâneur strolled out of the pages of Baudelaire, cane in hand, this is what writers have done.  Bad enough, as scholars who work on the female city-stroller, the flâneuse, have pointed out, that a woman idly walking the streets is apt to be taken for a streetwalker.  (I have, even dyked out in my old-man shoes).   Far worse for my flâneurial ambitions, however, was the fact that I could not stroll.  I could gimp along, sure, the way a moth can, but every step cost me.   I could not cross the Palais Royal, change trains at the Place d’Italie métro stop, or even stand long enough to chop, sweat, and sautée an eggplant at home without needing an Advil.

But I was optimistic.  At home, in New York, where I make a discipline of distilling my urban observations into a haiku a day, the raw material is often just out the window.  (Night.  The drag queen at/the corner pauses, wonders:/ Walk home, or cab it?)  Surely this would be the case in Paris, too?

Our SabbaticalHomes.com sublet, the least expensive of a few palatable options, and, revealingly, the only one for which the owners had posted no pictures, did not offer much to see out the window.  Oh-so-Parisian windowbox geraniums, yes, but the rooftops of the postwar Thirteenth arrondissement are not known for their charm, and the drizzling sky remained the color of vichyssoise for days.  The interior of the apartment was even less inspiring: in addition to the living-room/dining-room, dominated by a couch we dubbed The Silent Killer for reasons that would become clear to each guest who attempted to find comfort in its maw, the apartment featured two tiny windowless closets—one for the shower, one for the WC—and an extremely dark bedroom, home to an aging bed whose sagging mattress was propped up, in places, with sofa cushions.  A narrow L-shaped hallway lined in cabinets and rustic-tiled counters promised to open up onto the kitchen, until we realized it was the kitchen: when we cooked, we swiftly learned, food crusted between those rustic tiles.  The day I noticed, from my spot on the floor by the Silent Killer, that the wallpaper print in the hallway matched the woven-straw wallpaper, no doubt tasteful and expensive in the Seventies, that adorned the living-room/dining-room, was the day I knew I had been staring at those wallpapers for too long.

I owe the pleasure I was able to take in Paris, despite these unpromising circumstances, to three things:

One: the elevator.  The hollow spines around which the central staircase of many an old Parisian apartment building once spiraled have since been filled with tiny, tiny elevator shafts, such as the one that housed the lift to our sublet.  One person with one large suitcase filled it completely.  “Its merit,” as a neighbor would wryly tell us in elegant French, “is in existing.”  Vive l’existence!
 
Two: Vélib.  Although the ball of my right foot hurt after just a few steps, my heels worked fine, and so did my legs.  Research revealed that my American Express card just happened to contain the chip that permitted me to use my Parisian all-you-can-ride transit pass, Navigo Découverte, to unlock Vélib, the city-wide free-bike system: I couldn't contain my glee.  “You are Vélibérée!” Sharon cried.  I could borrow a bike from the rack by the bus stop, pedal it uphill to the métro stop, and leave it behind while I took the subway, and then I could pick up another bike when I got out of my train.   Or I could just ride a bike the whole way: there’s no cure like exercise for injury-related depression.

The chunky public bicycles took me to Shakespeare and Company bookstore in the Fifth arrondissement, where I joined David Barnes’s writing group, and up to Culture Rapide in the Twentieth, where I could hear my fellow English-speaking poets read alongside French and Francophone freestylers.  Culture Rapide sat beside the truly gritty Place Fréhel, a vacant lot littered with beer bottles named for a chanteuse who died in 1951.

I was glad the bicycle system could connect me with my fellow living writers, but even more grateful that Vélib could take me into the heart of my novel.  I visited Lynn Jeffress, a novelist from my writing group, at 27, rue de Fleurus, who took my picture in front of the courtyard pavilion Gertrude Stein had used as her dining room.  I found Le Sentier, the seedy garment district where a key scene in my novel is set, and slid down an alley as narrow as a drain, quixotically named Street of the Moon.  Men passed me in either direction, wheeling garment racks.  I whirred past the sullen little fortress of a columned church—Our Lady of Good News—and found myself face-to-face with a massive arch featuring mythological naked men beneath suits of empty armor: how weirdly fitting, for the garment district.  My ride through Le Sentier allowed me to describe the neighborhood without gilding it with sentimentality or tarring it with melodrama.

Vélib also brought me to the Place de la Contrescarpe, steps from Hemingway’s first Paris apartment and home to a Hemingwayesque character in my novel.  In one of the bakeries that fronted the place, I bought a flaky Breton kouign aman, asked for them to heat it up on the spot, and ate it at one of the cafés on the place while the waiter’s back was turned.  As I ate and drank, the brazier beside me rendered the evening chill decorative rather than sinister; the cup of coffee warmed my hands.  The trees and fountain at the center of the place—in the Middle Ages, a village square—lent a gracious look to the student quarter, but Hemingway’s rummies and poivrottes still collapsed here and there amid the clusters of kids in the cafés.  A yellow dog with a torn ear trotted over to beg the flaky crumbs off my fingers.  It was the best pastry I ever ate in Paris.
 
Three: the bus.  Sometimes it hurt too much even to ride a bicycle.  As the autumn deepened, it began to grow too cold and wet to ride.  My nearest métro stop, Place d’Italie, was unwalkably far, but it wasn’t long before I could spot the insignia of the boxy mint-green bus that stopped near our apartment building from several blocks away: a black 67 emblazoned on a pink square.  In order to announce their alternate, nighttime schedule, many Parisian buses bore spooky, Halloweeny lettering, proclaiming, Le soir, cet autobus devient noctilien!  In the evening, this bus becomes nocturnal!  I savored the reptilian word noctilien, so much more sinister than its English counterpart, as I watched the wrong 67, not mine, approach from the wrong direction, stop, disgorge passengers, and swish away in a wash of pneumatic hiss and prerecorded chime.

The “wrong direction,” for me, was out toward the stadia that lay between the city and its beltway, the Périphérique: the 67 terminated at the Stade Charléty.  The “right direction” brought me closer to the city center, first uphill to the charming Butte aux Cailles, where thickly-planted chestnut trees lobbed their buckeyes at passers-by.  I could follow the example of the old ladies in the neighborhood and fill a plastic bottle with water from the artesian spring at the heart of Place Paul Verlaine.  Or I could buy a delicate, buttery quiche Lorraine from my favorite bakery, Legendre, and limp it down the street to check out stark, tile-lined Place André Masson, named for a painter who had died in 1987.  “That place was like the drain of an abattoir,” I reported to Sharon that night.

“Once you see his work, you’ll know why,” she deadpanned.  I realized that even if you’re worthy of commemoration by Parisian city planners, the more recently you’ve died, the more remote and crummy your place will be.  Poor Masson.  Poor Fréhel.
 
Farther north, and deeper into the heart of the old city, the bus let me off at the end of the linden-lined Île Saint-Louis.  I could stand at the easternmost tip of the island and look down to where, just feet below, the seventeenth-century breakwater split the river like the prow of a ship.  The bus route turned west from the Pont de Sully, traversed the rue du Rivoli, and brushed past the Louvre, where I could either pick up another bus or limp my way west toward the Palais Royal.  I could rest at Le Nemours and nurse a café crème while surveying the expanse of paving-stone outside the Comédie Française.  This is where I developed my Principle of Perfect Parisian Places: I’m sitting outside with my coffee, and I’m looking out at people, not cars.

Well, that just about covers most of Paris, huh?  Au contraire, this experience is harder to come by than it sounds.  To offer a few clarifying corollaries to this simple expression of pleasure:

1)    Cars aren’t driving past me.
2)    My sightline isn’t blocked by a parked car.
3)    Nor is it blocked by a plastic hedge.  (Why, Les Deux Magots?  Why?)
4)    I’m at a café, not a restaurant: no one is bullying me to order food I don’t want.

Place Saint-André-des-Arts hits all these marks gracefully, as do Place Stravinsky and Place de la Sorbonne.  From my café perch overlooking Place Colette, I could watch well-dressed Parisians cross under the plane trees, pause to listen to an open-air chamber orchestra, gape at the acrobatic skateboarders, or pass through the fanciful spun-glass arch marking the Palais Royal métro entrance.  I grinned.  I was a cane-chair flâneuse.

If I stayed on the 67 bus, it headed north from the center of Paris, out past the old city walls and into the Pigalle, home to the Moulin Rouge and other schlocky monuments to the skin trade.  From there, I could take the squat little Montmartrobus up absurdly charming streets, coiling past an unlikely vineyard and windmill before reaching the foot of the massive Sacré Coeur, that domed white-wedding-cake folly of the Belle Epoque.  From there I could drink in some of the best views of the city before taking a funicular back down the hill to Place Saint-Pierre.  I could curl up with another crème at one of the brazier-heated cafés and listen to an all-girl brass band on Place Suzanne Valadon beat the air into a giddy Cajun froth.  It hurt to dance, but I felt so grateful to Paris, and so blessed: my Navigo pass had brought me this far. --Ellis Avery
 

On George Whitman, 1913-2011

George Whitman, the founder of Shakespeare and Company bookshop (in its current incarnation), has died. He was 98 years old. For those close to the shop, it was no surprise, as George had suffered a stroke two months ago. Even for those not close to the shop, to die at 98 is no surprise. But none of that mitigates how heartbreaking it is to see him go.

I will skip the personal reminiscences because they’re not that interesting, and other people will do that better; I met first met George in 1999 and met him again over the years, but my more profound relationship was with his shop, and with the literary legacy he carried out. I’ve used different words at different stages to describe my interest in Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company: first I was seduced by the myth of the Lost Generation; later, as a scholar of transatlantic modernism, I came to see the shop in sociological terms as an important nexus in the sustaining of an epoch-defining literary hub. The present-day shop borrows from both categories: it gestures at this illustrious history and extends it through the 1950s and the Beat Generation on to the present moment, when it has once again, under the guidance of George’s daughter Sylvia Whitman, assisted by Jemma Birrell, David Delannet, Hilary Drummond, Thomas Collard, Terry Craven, and Linda Fallon (my apologies to the others I’m probably leaving out, not to mention the volunteers, interns, and Tumbleweeds), become a meeting-point for a group of expatriate writers, as well as an impressive array of Anglophone literary luminaries as they pass through town.

Though-- let’s be honest-- none of us who hang around it can claim to be a Stein or a Hemingway, our Shakespeare and Company does play a similar role in the Anglophone community. No, they don’t lend out their books, you must buy them, but they will buy your old ones, or let you trade them in for something of equal value. You can attend readings, and have a glass of wine on the house; and you can sit in the upstairs library (The Sylvia Beach Memorial Library) and treat it as your own reading room. On a recent visit to the shop for a reading, I sat, antisocially, in the upstairs room, where the speakers’ voices are piped in via the sound system. My mind wandering from the reading, I made a catalog of the books on the wall next to me. Here they are:

The Pig in the Barber Shop
The Bishop’s Jaegers
I Capture the Castle
Herrold’s Leap
Topper Takes a Trip
Rain in the Doorway
Shelter Bay
The Stray Lamb
Peregrine Pickle (volume 1)
Humphrey Clinker
The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves
The Conscience of the Rich
The Mandelbaum Gate
These Lovers Fled Away
Wolf Solnet

This list, for me, testifies to George Whitman’s most salient qualities: he was a generous and eccentric hoarder. Judging from the contents of the library, no books are turned away (expect, perhaps, for books about the shop, of which I can think of at least one that was banned when it first came out). George’s Shakespeare and Company goes beyond the standards of a “good bookshop,” the defining aspects of which, for me, include being well-curated, able to surprise me with the right book at the right moment; reliable, with a solid backlist; and not outrageously expensive. George’s vision for Shakespeare and Company was to make all of this readily available in his "rag and bone shop of the heart." But because of his particular genius, he created a space that was so much more than just a shop: it was an experience. Many people today are quoting the lines that are prominently displayed in the shop: “Be not inhospitable to strangers, for they may be angels in disguise.” A self-proclaimed “tramp,” George Whitman welcomed all those who tramped through his doorway. He presided over a community, and we are sad to see him go.

And what has gone with him is another connection to our literary heritage.  It is not through nostalgia or sentimentality that I say that I sometimes have a difficult time moving forward, leaving people trapped in the fabric of the past. This is as much an intellectual difficulty as a personal one.  George is said to have met Sylvia Beach after the war, to procure her blessing on borrowing the name of her shop, and is even said to have taken some of her stock with him to the new shop. (I have never really tried to verify this. NB: I have been told in the comments that apparently George was too shy to actually ask for permission to use the name, in case Sylvia Beach said no. And then Jeanette Winterson claims that Sylvia Beach came to the shop with Lawrence Durrell in 1958 and formally bequeathed George the name. Who knows what's true? George would often embellish for effect.) By virtue of having met Beach, and Anais Nin, and Henry Miller, and many others, he symbolized a link with this storied past, when even if the plumbing was sketchy, the exchange rate was favorable, you couldn’t cross the Boulevard Montparnasse without tripping over a Russian painter, and the Left Bank was cheap enough for artists. It was meaningful to have, upstairs at Shakespeare and Company, the living link to that period. The literary modernist era is said to have ended in 1941, with the deaths of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. But in fact, it ends today, with the passing of George Whitman. I'm sure I speak for all of us when I wish Sylvia and David and everyone at the shop my deepest sympathies.

Her Royal Majesty, issue 11

... publishes today! And I'm proud to have a short story in this issue, called "A Naturalist in the Family," which is about technology and humanity, success and failure, and ends with a duel in Les Halles. Ordering information here.  

The rocking cover (all queens!) was drawn by Badaude.

The issue also features art and reflections on art by James Franco. (Because he's everywhere else-- why shouldn't he be in Her Royal Majesty?) 

For those of you here in Paris, you're warmly invited to the launch party tonight at Le Carmen. No word on whether James will show up.

May 6 1968

The great photographer of May 1968, Goksin Sipahioglu, has died. Here, one of his most memorable shots, from May 6th 1968. A policeman throws a pavé at a storm of students surging over the Boulevard St Germain on the first big day of fighting. More at Lettre de la Photographie.

Anne Marsella at Her Royal Majesty

Her Royal Majesty has just published a wonderful interview with the Paris-based writer Anne Marsella, author of Remedy and The Baby of Belleville.  An excerpt:

Both of your novels are set in Paris. What about Paris interests you as a writer? Is your Paris different from the “written Paris” you have inherited?
Remedy, Patsy Boone and The Baby of Belleville comprise my Parisian trilogy with Remedy and Patsy Boone working as mirror narratives, the first written in English, the latter in French. All three novels depict Paris as a city of overlapping, multiple worlds where Muslim matriarchs, French aristocrats, immigrant plumbers, Catholic nuns, American expats and a host of others entwine destinies in unexpected ways, and this fictive world, as strange and “whimsical” as it may seem to some, does in fact reflect the “real” Paris where I’ve resided for many years.  In Remedy I play with stereotypes of the American in Paris and displace them, so that they are no longer quite recognizable. The romanticized Paris played up in books like Adam Gopnik’s beautifully penned Paris to the Moon, simply does not seem real to me. I often think the myth of Paris is held too dear and to the detriment of seeing what is really going on here. I wonder how one can write a book about Paris and France in general without exploring its colonial past or lending an ear to its immigrant populations which have largely brought the country to its current prosperity. My imagination has been naturally drawn to these immigrant communities in the north-east of Paris, perhaps because I am an immigrant as well, and the question of exile and how it places one at the crux of myriad contradictions interest me: how can one make a home where one is not at home (and constantly harassed as with the sans papiers)?; what does it mean to be oneself, when one is perceived as other, particularly as an unwanted Other?; but also because in a city so groomed and polished, it is through the cracks and fissures of these more neglected neighbourhoods that my imagination has been able to make its entry. Right now France struggles to uphold its ideals of Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité against the winds of a growing xenophobia. My novels are not political in any obvious way, but they touch upon these current realities of French life.

This, to me, is the kind of writing about Paris that I can get behind. Read the full interview here. And you can read my 2008 interview with Anne here.

Wake in Progress

At the reading last week to celebrate Shakespeare & Company's inaugural Paris Literary Prize I found my attention wandering repeatedly to a pair of prints hanging over the till. Riverrun, I read, past Eve and Adam's, why does this sound so famil--

Although any self-respecting modernist would have made the connection as soon as they read the word "Riverrun," I blame my delayed reaction on the fact that I was simultaneously listening to one of the three short-listed authors reading from their work.  I was, of course, looking at the first sentence of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, which is also a continuation of the last sentence of Finnegans Wake ("A way a lone a last a loved a long the").  

As it turns out, the prints I was looking at were part of Stephen Crowe's project "Wake in Progress," in which the artist is illustrating every page of Joyce's late masterpiece. In honor of Bloomsday, they were on display the previous night at the party where the winners were announced, but I had apparently had too much champagne to notice what was on the walls of the Société des gens de lettres.

According to Crowe, "Joyce’s final work is a giddy, disorienting dream that dramatises the internal conflicts of a sleeper's unconscious through a wild, satirical mash-up of history, myth and tall tale-telling." Crowe honors "the book's playful miscellany by plundering the history of the visual arts, from Medieval illuminations to cartoon strips."

The prints will be up at Shakespeare and Co until June 30th. For more information on the project, visit Crowe's website. And don't miss this short reflection on "Why Finnegans Wake is Better than Ulysses."

 

Q&A

Talking about the weird search terms that lead people to your blog is a tradition in the blogosphere, but before today I haven't indulged. (You don't really want to hear the kinds of Google searches that include the word "Maîtresse.") However, after I posted Keri Walsh's guest review of Woody Allen's "Midnight in Paris," I feel inspired to answer a few of the questions that people type into Google that lead them to my blog, where prior to now, they won't have found the answers.

Question: To the person in Cedar Falls, Iowa, who wondered "In Woody Allen's 'Midnight in Paris,' who is the author Gil Pender talks to who wrote about guests who can't exit and are turned into animals?"

Answer: That would be Luis Buñuel, the Spanish director. The film Gil is pitching him is Buñuel's "The Exterminating Angel" (1962).

Question: To the reader in Winstead, Connecticut, who queried "Did Modigliani have a mistress named Adriana?"

Answer: Maybe. I don't know. But the Adriana in the film is fictional.

Question: To the person from San Bruno, California, who asked "Who painted the fictional mistress of Adriana in 'Midnight in Paris'?"

Answer: It's supposed to be by Picasso, and they're at the Orangerie when they see it, but I have no idea if it's a real Picasso. I hope you had more luck researching this on the internet than I did.

 

And the winner is

Shakespeare & Company announced the winners of their first ever Paris Literary Prize last Thursday.

Awarded for a novella (the perfect form, some say-- more room to develop than a short story but leaner and trimmer than a novel*), the judges included Erica Wagner, Breyten Breytenbach, Darrin Strauss, and Denis Loy Johnson of Melville House, who will be publishing the winner.

Rosa Rankin-Gee (she of Le Carmen Book Swap and A Tale of Three Cities) took top honors for "The Last Kings of Sark," while Adam Biles and Agustin Maes were the runners-up. (Bios here)

Shakespeare & Company held a reading the next day where we got to hear the three of them read a sample of their work. Here's Adam Biles reading from his novella, "Grey Cats."**

 

 

*Novella fever is everywhere-- my second novel is actually two long novellas which take place in the same apartment 30 years apart.

**The cafe Biles mentions is Le Select, where I'm often to be found, and yes, the cat is still there.

 

 

Guest Post: Keri Walsh on "Midnight in Paris"

When last we heard from Keri it was during a three-way Bloomsday chat with Keri, Sylvia Whitman, and yours truly. Now Keri's back to give us some thoughts on Woody Allen’s new film, "Midnight in Paris." Take it away, Keri!

Woody Allen’s "Midnight in Paris" asks a simple question: was Paris in the Twenties really so much more glittering than the present?  The answer, inevitably, is no: Allen knows that nostalgia has a vanishing horizon, with every generation yearning for the golden age before it.  But then again, within the lustrous charm of his Jazz Age scenes in "Midnight in Paris," the answer seems to be yes: once upon a time, there was a charmed decade in which Americans lost their inhibitions and found their prose styles.

The film’s protagonist Gil Pender (played by Owen Wilson) is a jaded American screenwriter who gets a magical opportunity to test the charms of expatriate Paris first-hand.  While on a Paris vacation, he finds himself mysteriously transported. When the clock strikes midnight, he is picked up by a jazz age automobile filled with a tuxedoed, champagne-swilling menagerie.  "Midnight in Paris" is a variation on the Cinderella fable, but in this case the enchantment begins at the stroke of midnight.  And the modernist car, rather than turning back into a pumpkin, takes him on a journey to a land of artistic mentorship and sexual fantasy.

In the film’s first Jazz Age sequence, Gil finds himself raising a glass with the Fitzgeralds while being entertained by Cole Porter on the piano.   He sits across a café table taking advice about “Courage” from a vainglorious and punchdrunk Ernest Hemingway (wonderfully played by Corey Stoll).  The rest of the American crowd of the Twenties is there too.  Alison Pill feels just right as Zelda Fitzgerald, a party girl always on the brink of tragedy.  The film’s spoof of F. Scott, on the other hand, doesn’t quite come off.  He calls Gil “old sport,” but other than that, he doesn’t have much to say for himself.  Kathy Bates plays Gertrude Stein with firmness but kindness.  If she turns Stein into a bit more of a den mother than would really have been her style, at least Bates avoids the worst possible caricature of Stein as wannabe, fawner, and bitter, manipulative bitch. 

But Gil’s most transformative encounter with the past comes in the form of a woman named Adriana (played by Marion Cotillard).  Her role in the film is to be an allegory, both of Paris and of the past.  Allen has romantically blended women and cities before (in "Vicky Christina Barcelona," for instance).  In Midnight in Paris, Adriana has no direct historical referent, but she is a variation on the women of modernist Paris who became synonymous with the city—from Breton’s Nadja to Man Ray’s Kiki de Montparnasse, from Gala Dali to Lee Miller to Nora Joyce.  Such women, whose real-life roles varied from wife to housekeeper to model to protégée, provided the sexual inspiration that drove the modernist avant-garde.  Midnight in Paris’s Adriana is an artist’s model and mistress who, having changed hands from Modigliani to Braque to Picasso, now finds herself falling for the charms of this slightly hapless American from the future. 

Midnight in Paris proposes several different possible relations between male artists and their muses.  First there is Gil Pender’s fiancé, a thankless part for Rachel McAdams: her job is to hate Paris, have an affair with a blowhard, and keep Gil from his writing.  Gil also finds female guidance in a tour guide at the Rodin Museum (played by Carla Bruni).  She knows all about Rodin’s relationship with Camille Claudel, and she translates for him when only a knowledge of French can give him the key to the past.  The Twenties men have a spectrum of relationships to women too.  Picasso is a ruthless womanizer.  Hemingway sees women only as versions of himself, proclaiming that they can be “equal in courage” to men (though he only appears in the erotic companionship of the dashing matador Juan Belonte).  F. Scott seems willing to follow Zelda to the ends of the earth, but then is nowhere to be found when she is trying to throw herself into the Seine.  Three Surrealists— Salvador Dali, Man Ray and Luis Buñuel—turn up to reassure Gil that his love for Adriana, a woman from a different century, makes perfect sense.  The Surrealists offer a revamped version of courtly love that elevates women to positions of transcendence, theoretically places no limitations on the erotic imagination, and doesn’t bat an eye at Gil’s unconventional romance. 

The Adriana character is Allen’s variation on (and near anagram of) Gradiva, the classical girl carved into a Roman wall.  In the 1903 novel Gradiva by Wilhelm Jensen (best-known from Freud’s commentary), a young man falls in love with the figure in the bas-relief, but becomes persuaded that ancient though she is, she herself is out-of-place in the Roman city in which she was carved: she belongs in Pompeii.  In dreams, he follows her to the volcanic city, but when he calls out to her in Latin, she insists that he address her in German.   For the Surrealists, Gradiva, “the woman who walks through walls” of time and space, became a figure for the simultaneous existence of the marvelous and mundane (it was the name Dali gave to his wife Gala in several paintings).  In Allen’s film, Gradiva becomes Adriana, a Kiki de Montparnasse who longs to be a Jane Avril.  The Golden Age for Adriana is the Belle Epoque, time of can-can dancers, courtesans, absinthe, and bohemian tuberculosis. She longs to return to that stretch between the late-nineteenth century and World War I when—so she imagines—the champagne was flowing, the avant-garde was thriving in painting, suffering was romantic, and artists lived for their muses.  With Gil, she steps back in time to the Moulin Rouge.  She approaches Toulouse-Lautrec, who is sketching at a nearby table, and is offered a job as a costumier.  Gil tries to persuade Adriana of the folly of her historical sense—this is a time without antibiotics!—but she decides to stay and live out her fantasies: “it’s Paris, and the Belle Epoque is just beginning...” she tells him with stars in her eyes. 

Cotillard is magnetic.  We meet her in Gertrude Stein’s drawing room, and from there, she draws Gil into her web by moving her into a nearby room in solitude.  She is filmed in a long close-up, wearing vampish flapper black, looking lovely in a Twenties headdress, sequins and lace.  When she has captured Gil’s attention, she confesses her sad story: drawn to the capital to study design with Coco Chanel, she has instead ended up on the path of the courtesan.  For reasons that are not entirely clear, she falls instantly in love with the bumbling Gil Pender.  Cotillard’s costumes throughout the film highlight her changing personae.  She moves from the role of the decadent vamp (the black dress of the first scene) to a sailor get-up more reminiscent of Colette or of the Surrealists’ “femme-enfant.”  Finally, as she enters the Belle Epoque, she appears in a shimmering silver and gold flapper’s sheath, which gives off shades of Busby Berkeley, shades of gold-digging.  Its glow suggests Adriana’s transition from her own silver age to the one she imagines is golden.

What makes Adriana a Belle Epoque model rather than a modernist one is that she is never itemized in this way of the Surrealist muses, never shown just with her eyes brinking with tears, never shown just as a torso, like Lee Miller’s breats illuminated by Man Ray’s process of solarization.  Rather, Adriana is a muse in the style of an earlier age, and Allen’s film suggests that she is a siren singer luring Gil back to a time in which his art will fall prey to saccharine nostalgia and irrelevance.  He is taking a stab at writing the Great American Novel.  The film takes an anti-Hollywood stance, with Malibu (where Gil and his fiancé will live) presented as the anti-Paris: the land of material comfort and spiritual deadness, in contrast to Paris’s bohemian attics and suffering for art. The main character of Gil’s novel works in a nostalgia shop, and the film is a cautionary tale about the perils of fully indulging the temptations of the past.  But still, and this is one of its chief pleasures, Midnight in Paris is shamelessly indulgent of audiences’ endless appetite for the Paris of the 1920s.  If there is an artistic lesson here for Gil, it is one Allen himself has rarely needed to learn.  At his best, he has often achieved a seemingly effortless reconciliation of nostalgia and relevance, of vintage charm and satisfying satires of the present.  "Midnight in Paris" is like a trip to Madame Tussaud’s or a carnival ride: it is a tour through a wax fantasy version of the past, a film that is itself a nostalgia shop.  And as usual, Allen engages his fantasy past— its music and pop culture, its creative and sexual ideals—with a textured, humorous and self-aware romanticism.  

This is why the film’s ending seems unnecessarily self-denying.  Gil Pender pulls himself away from his dream world and returns to the imperfect present to begin a new life in Paris.  Like the modernist artists of the twenties, he has learned that he must find his art in the jumbled, chaotic materials of the present.  His new muse will be a woman he has met on his rambles through the city.  Her job echoes that of his novel’s nostalgia-purveying protagonist.  She sells old Cole Porter albums out of crates along the street.  She is lovely, but with the awkward loveliness of real life, not the transcendent loveliness of his dream woman.   But what we really yearn for at the end of this film is for Gil to encounter his Gradiva on the streets of modern Paris, for Marion Cotillard as Adriana to emerge from the Belle Epoque in modern clothes, having sought him across the centuries.  Allen refuses this opportunity for romantic satisfaction.  His modern artist will be deprived of the consolations of the wise,  sad, and transcendently beautiful muse-mistress.  Woody Allen’s characters rarely get the girl, at least not the one who matters most.  But in the infinite substitutions of the muse, there’s always another one just around the corner…

Keri Walsh is the editor of The Letters of Sylvia Beach.  She is an assistant professor of English at Fordham University in New York.

On being friends with girls

Recently I reviewed Sheila Heti's latest book, How Should a Person Be?, for The Quarterly Conversation.

One of the most important aspects of that book is the life-altering friendship between the narrator (also named Sheila), a writer, and Margaux, a painter (also the name of Heti's real-life friend).  Here's an excerpt from the review:

The plot, if there can be said to be one, hinges on Sheila’s inability to write a play for a feminist theatre company. It doesn’t have to be a feminist play, they tell her, but it has to be about women. “I didn’t know anything about women! And yet I hoped I could do it, being a woman myself.” At the same time, Sheila is living in the aftermath of a failed marriage, trying to figure out how to befriend an artist called Margaux, and experiencing all-consuming lust for a painter named Israel. But the play just won’t come together, and, wanting desperately to be a genius, Sheila is terrified of failure.

In order, then, to write the play, Sheila begins her recordings, hoping to learn from her friends a bit more about how a person, and more specifically an artist, should be. Along the way she inadvertently ends up alienating Margaux, the one person who is as “serious” as Sheila. After the two girls travel to Miami together to attend Art Basel, Sheila writes an article about their trip. Margaux reads it and is so hurt she can no longer paint, Sheila feels responsible, and—well, I won’t tell you how it ends. Suffice it to say, the path to enlightenment is more of a Dantean journey. Do people change? Can we learn things? Through her friendship with Margaux, Sheila goes from “stupidly living” to living with consciousness, intention, awareness. This trajectory would seem to be at odds with the self-awareness and anti-conventional aspect of the rest of the text. (full review here)

I'm thinking quite a bit about artistic friendships between women these days, for a project I'm putting together, and probably that is in no little part due to the fact that over the past year or so, my friends have become incredibly important to me. They always were, but I think I took that for granted until fairly recently. I've leaned on them to get me through all the crap this last year has involved, the big disappointments and small triumphs (and small disapointments and big triumphs), but most importantly, they talk to me about my work and are helpful and brilliant and generous. (I hope I am as good a friend to them in return.)

So having just returned home from a lovely evening out with one of my excellent friends, I was so glad to read this interview with her. Harriet is (as I just observed to her tonight) the kind of person who has an idea and the next day it's a thing you can touch and leaf through and love. She founded a pretty awesome literary magazine called Her Royal Majesty. Read the interview and you'll see why I'm so glad she's my friend, and you'll want her to be your friend too, and I'm sure she'd be happy to be. 

Also, check out the new website and blog for HRM, crafted with care by my new Scottish friend Grant, who generously put me up in Edinburgh earlier this week.

How to be a tourist

Some shots from Badaude's talk last night at Shakespeare & Company, about embracing the role of the tourist, to celebrate the launch of her new book, London Walks!

The evening included a race between a turtle and a lobster, a theatrical adaptation of "A Room With a View" (starring Badaude as Miss Lavish and yours truly as Mr Eager) and a description of Notre Dame from the Wallpaper Guide to Warsaw:

Paris's new favorite literary soirée: The Book Club at Le Carmen

 This Wednesday, come on along to Le Carmen for the 4th installation of the by-now legendary Book Club party, sponsored by the literary magazine A Tale of Three Cities.

What is A Tale of Three Cities? I'm so glad you asked. It's a new arts journal, launching this summer, and devoted to showcasing the writing, artwork, and genius miscellany of Europe's "golden triangle," London, Paris, and Berlin. ("If we were ever to make the triangle a square, I think NY would be the choice," says their editor Rosa Rankin-Gee.) They're open to submissions-- find their submission guidelines here.

But more about the party. Having been to Chapter 3 last month, I can tell you that Le Carmen is one of those amazing spaces that you might imagine only exists in Paris if you've seen "Moulin Rouge!" too many times and have a thing for 19th century French prostitutes and absinthe. (We wouldn't blame you if you did.) Housed in the former home of Georges Bizet, author of the eponymous opera, Le Carmen features a human-sized birdcage, room after lushly lit room of gilded mirrors and intricate mouldings, and most importantly, a top-notch cocktail bar. The jaunty threesome behind the event (Rankin-Gee, Jethro Turner and Hanna Beširević) patrol the party to make sure everyone is having a delightfully literary time.

Here's how it works: you bring a book you don't mind giving away, and you trade it for a book some other person didn't mind giving away, and you hope for the best. Last time I brought James Salter's A Sport and a Pastime with me, but I had a devil of a time fobbing it off on someone. For some inscrutable reason my pitch ("Sex in France? Great writing?") was unsuccessful. Finally some lovely Swedish girl traded it for a French translation of a Doris Lessing novel. This time I will probably bring Chloe Aridjis's egregious Book of Clouds, because I just don't care to have it taking up space in my apartment. But I'm thinking that although the writing is pretty weak, since it's set in Berlin, it'll be an easy sell. (Which is probably what her agent and editor said, too.)

Details: Wednesday 25th May, from 8:30 pm, at Le Carmen, 22, rue de Douai 75009. Facebook invite here.

Long Live Her Royal Majesty!

The Paris-based literary magazine Her Royal Majesty is one of the most beautiful arts & literary quarterlies on the market-- editor Harriet Alida Lye and her band of merry helpers go to the trouble not only to produce a magazine, but to make it an objet d'art. The kind of thing you want to be seen reading on the metro, so Parisians will covertly note your impeccable literary and aesthetic taste.

Printing costs, etc., do mount up, and so in order to off-set charges, HRM has started a pledge drive. As little as a dollar will help-- donate and watch a fun and informative video here, starring Ms Lye herself, part of Anne Marsella's face, Adam Biles of Gulper Eel, and the illustrious Shakespeare & Co.

Save the Village Voice

An email has just gone round a French academic listserv I subscribe to letting us know that the Village Voice Bookshop is in serious financial trouble, and very close to bankruptcy.  This is according to the writer Hazel Rowley, who is a good friend of Odile Hellier, the owner of the Village Voice.

The tone of the email is somewhat condescending (calling the VV the "last serious English-language bookshop in Paris") and urging us to buy our books there as opposed to on Amazon.

The intentions of the email, however, are good. So I'm passing the message along, with the caveat to whomever might be reading that as a consumer of "serious English-language books" I very often order mine via The Book Depository, because as someone who reads "seriously" for a living, my income is not what I would like it to be, and The Book Depository offers lower prices and free shipping. And it's still an "independent bookstore"-- it just happens to be virtual.

So perhaps the Village Voice might find a way to offer reductions for students and teachers, and/or some kind of loyalty card, such as you often find at French bookshops (including my neighborhood bookshop, L'Arbre à Lettres). Some sort of gesture like that would indicate an appreciation for the financial situation of its patrons, to lure those of us on a tight budget back in. The Village Voice does have a wonderful selection of books on history, literary criticism, psychoanalysis, philosophy, etc., and I would be delighted to be able to run over to the 6th arrondissement to pick one up rather than waiting for it to come in the mail from the Book Depository.

And while we're on the subject of virtual bookstores, let's talk about Dialogue Books in Berlin, which recently closed down its "bricks and mortar" bookshop and moved the whole business online. They continue to sponsor events and other reading-related services, and I have no doubt the encyclopedic ambitions of its owner, Sharmaine Lovegrove, will take them in directions heretofore unexplored by traditional bookshops.

Of course I prize an actual bookshop you can actually walk into. I've been frequenting the Village Voice (and buying books there, when I can) for over a decade. Browsing in a bookshop is just about my favorite thing to do. But I don't think the VV has done all it can to induce a less well-off readership to buy its books there. And should worse come to worst, there are other models bookshops can, and should, explore.

But all of these other concerns are secondary.  My main point is, help save the Village Voice. They have some great events coming up there-- go to one, and buy a book while you're at it. It's bad for everyone to see a bookshop go under.

Ivy Writers Paris video

What a treat! Erin Stranyak of the American University of Paris put together this mini-documentary on a wonderful bilingual poetry reading series in Paris, Ivy Writers Paris, which was founded by the American poets Jennifer K. Dick and Michelle Noteboom.

Sit in on a reading by watching the video below, and join us on January 18th for the next reading, featuring Guy Bennett & Philippe Beck.

 

poetry + the visual arts

[cross-posting from the NYU blog. this stuff is just so awesome I had to share it here, too.]

In one of the classes I'm teaching this semester, we're reading the Scottish writer Hope Mirrlees's poem "Paris" (1919), a little-known masterpiece of Modernist poetry that was first published in a small print run by Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press, and which Mirrlees later tried to prevent being reprinted because she had by then converted to Catholicism and found her earlier work blasphemous. No doubt Mirrlees's poem had a big impact on TS Eliot's 1922 work "The Wasteland" (although Mirrlees does seem to have been inspired by Eliot's 1917 "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock").

Part of what I'll concentrate on with my students is the influence of French Symbolist and Cubist art and poetry on Mirrlees's poem, most particularly the way Mirrlees draws on the way Mallarmé and Apollinaire use the space on the page to produce meaning in their poems as well as language itself. In the visual arts, Severini and Delaunay achieve a similarly dynamic effect of images on their canvases.

The idea for these writers and artists was to "transcend the limitations, the stasis of plastic form or writen language, by reaching out to embrace the whole of experience, sights and sounds, thought and language, song and dance" (Briggs, 263). Mirrlees absorbs all of this and integrates it into her work, which you can download a "dodgy scan" of here.

Gino Severini, Le Nord-Sud (1912)

Robert Delaunay, 1911 (backdated by the artist to 1910)

Guillaume Apollinaire « Salut monde dont je suis la langue éloquente que sa bouche Ô Paris tire et tirera toujours aux allemands » (Calligrammes, 1918)

Mallarmé, "Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard," (1897)

A pair of contests

I've been meaning to mention that there are a couple of Paris writing contests afoot at the moment, whose deadlines draw near.

Shakespeare and Company is having a novella contest, open to all unpublished writers; the deadline is December 1, 2010:

There are three awards: the award for the best Novella and two runner-up awards.

The 2011 Paris Literary Prize award is 10,000€ and a weekend stay in Paris, France. The winner will also read from his or her work at a special event at Shakespeare and Company Bookshop in Paris.

The Paris Literary Prize Runner-up awards:
There will be two runner-up awards. These awardees will receive a weekend stay in Paris and an opportunity to read from their work at a special event at Shakespeare and Company Bookshop in Paris.

There's kind of a steep submission fee-- 50€-- but I guess you gotta gamble sometimes, right?

Then there's the Paris Short Stories contest, run by Laurel Zuckerman; details here. Deadline November 30th; submission fee 10€. Judges include Nicola Keegan, Penelope Fletcher, owner of the Red Wheelbarrow, Diane Johnson, and Cara Black. (Yours truly was invited, but due to massive dissertation-related time constraints, respectfully declined.)

So if you've got a novella or a "delightful short story about Paris" just sitting on your hard drive doing absolutely nothing for you... send it in, send it in. To not dare is to lose oneself. See, even Kierkegaard wants you to submit.

László Krasznahorkai tonight at AUP

A blog is born

I'm teaching a class called "Paris in French and Expatriate Literature" at NYU this semester, and I've built a blog for it, where students will post their response papers and I can leave them bits of interesting information.

Check it out and let me know what you think; your input, my esteemed readers, would be invaluable! If you have any ideas as to what I ought to include on the site to enhance my students' experience of the course, please do let me know.

The idea is to look at the figure of the flâneur, and more generally at movement and/in the city; we're reading Baudelaire, Simmel, Benjamin, Aragon, Breton, Mirrlees, Hemingway, Rhys, Baldwin, Debord, and Guène. I'll have the syllabus up on the site soon, as soon as it's taken its final form.

Mille mercis!

The canal

A few weeks ago in London, I met up with Mike and Rion near their apartment in Hackney. We walked next to Regent's Canal for awhile, before heading towards Broadway market and London Fields (where we sat and ate bánh mì and cupcakes). The canal, I was surprised to find, is a British twin to the Canal St Martin, the neighborhoods comparably bobo and gentrifying, the down-at-heel and the upwardly mobile jockeying for precedence. I felt a strange sensation of being somewhere familiar but also totally foreign to me. (This often happens to me in England.)

We stopped for awhile to watch a water spaniel swim around chasing ducks; it was a sunny afternoon in the middle of a heat wave and Rion slathered sunblock all over Dante. What struck me most was that unlike the Canal St Martin, the water in this canal was lucid; we could see down to the shallow bottom, where an immense amount of debris had gathered.  It was in such a state of decomposition I could barely distinguish what these items had originally been before they formed this underwater carnage: television sets, old boots, a few tires, bits of plastic and rubber and metal, laying there covered by the seasick green water. 

By some happy accident, that same week I was sent a review copy of Lee Rourke’s new novel, The Canal, set on that same stretch of towpath where we had dodged cyclists only days before. And just as Regent's Canal reminds me of our Parisian canal, so does The Canal remind me of a French novel-- the imagery, the construction, the language is all very tight, very unified; there's something very Camus about it. Rourke picks up certain images-- signage, geese, swans, office workers-- and dwells on them, like staring at the surface of the canal to see what's underneath; the language stalls in loops of reruns, or is blandly clichéd, so that occasoinally bits of it stick out, like debris breaking through the stilled surface.

His hero, or anti-hero, who remains nameless throughout the text, is in a state of complete boredom. Having quit his job, he now comes to the canal every day to sit on a bench and"simply watch it all go by." As Rourke writes in the prologue:

"Some people think that boredom is a bad thing, that it should be avoided, that we should fill our lives with other stuff in order to keep it at bay.  I don't.  I think boredom is a good thing; it shapes us; it moves us. Boredom is powerful. It should never be avoided.  In fact, I think boredom should be embraced. It is the power of everyday boredom that compels people to do things--even if that something is nothing."

It's quite daring to attempt to write about boredom so directly-- it's running the risk, of course, that the reader will decide he is too bored reading about someone else's boredom to continue with the book.  But what Rourke produces is an extremely urban text, through which a 21st century experience of the city, but particularly of London, is refracted.  It is a meditation not only on boredom, but on desire-- both are impulses, Rourke tells us, breaking through our surfaces.  Boredom, in The Canal, can be a state of enlightenment:

"Those who are bored and, more importantly, embrace their boredom, have a far clearer perspective on a) themselves and b) those around them.  Those who are not bored are merely lost in superfluous activity: fashion, lifestyle, TV, drink, drugs, technology, et cetera--the usual things we use to pass the time. The irony being that they are just as bored as I am, only they think they're not because they are continually doing something. And what they are doing is battling boredom, which is a losing battle."

The novel is as much about technology as it is about boredom-- “‘We need something more, we need that added extra in life.  Technology provides all we need...It is an extension.  That’s all.  Part of us’”--  but it’s also about the mirroring, pairing, and intersecting of technology and nature, the human and the animal, the machine and the human. And technology comes to figure as a trope at once for the unique wonder of it-- the narrator is fixated on aircraft making their way towards Heathrow, and also with a video game of his youth-- and for the deadening progress and repetition of it (the "snazzy flat screen monitors" in an office that can be seen from the canal).

Rourke has noticed the debris as well; the narrator spends much of the novel waiting for the dredgers to come and clean it out.  But the canal does not linger on like some Beckettian, unchanging space, suspended in unreality; things shift, change, develop, as they do tend to do in cities. We need spaces where things can happen, Rourke says in the novel, in order to feel real; “I’ve often thought that we seek reality in places and not in ourselves (...) we need things, extra things that help us to make sense of it all.” In its quiet, unannounced way, The Canal does just that.