The Vertical Plane:

Whether height, or virility, or simply a defiance of gravity (one might call it phallic), so many cities seem to have a building serving little purpose beyond size. A sort of benchmark's what it means to be a city, or a beacon unto country:

Here, where dreams are realized, thrown together, we'll defy those natural laws - imposed, as from above…

Come join us as we Babel…

Or lean, Pisa, lean.

Often, in the afternoons, I go to the Jardin du Luxembourg to play basketball. The court is small with one hoop, thick-rimmed, and no three point line. There’s a crowd of regulars who I recognize by sight, but not by name. Children gather on the other end of the pavement kicking footballs, rolling scooters, and intermittenly wandering into our games, interrupting them. The structure of the court seems to dictate the style of play and the particular skills which thrive there. Slashers are often the most successful, as the scoring is generally done from what would be considered the paint, though there are no markings or colors to be found. Everyone plays pretty good defense, not excessively physical, but not lackadaisacal either. Yet for whatever reason there seems to be an inordinate number of foul (fout) and travel (marche) calls, and other such trivial interruptions of the game's momentum. Though I can understand how calling these violations when they do occur can help to dissuade smaller tensions from building into a generally more angry and violent all-around style of play, I must say, as an American, I find the French to be quite petty as far as these things go.

5.08 - Paris

Shakespeare and Company: The second floor, like the first, is humid, and packed with books. These books though, somewhat disconnected from the store downstairs, are part of a private collection, a collection which long ago ceded any hold on more conventional understandings of that word: privacy. I'm reading Italo Calvino's American Diary, the fourth section chronologically (the manner of this particular collection's organization) in an English-language translation of his autobiographical writings, titled fittingly Hermit in Paris.



Though not quite a hermit, I am in Paris, sitting by an opened window's letting in the breeze, the smell of the rain-laced spring leaves, and the Seine - rolling slightly faster with the recent rain, ensnaring monuments and tourists alike within its pale-green passage. Cars pass on the roads, over the bridge, and under the gothic towering of Notre Dame. Two Italians, a boy and girl, sit beside me, smiling at one another, conversing in a language I do not comprehend, while Italo writes in English, through the medium of Martin McLaughlin.

Were this a different place, I might have had to smuggle the book upstairs. But as it isn't, I walked quietly, book in plain site, up the rickety red-wood passage, the stairs peeling paint, partially hidden, in the back right corner of the shop. They tempt you with the way they wear their footsteps, the many years of traffic, the ascending weight of sightseers and poets, and all the ones who fall - into books of every kind, into enexplicable love with stores that feel, stores of memories on old wood shelves, into the picture-filled lives of Joyce or Hemingway, or two-year-old copies of the New Yorker lying unassumingly beside them on a well-placed desk.

This place... it's a hospice of sorts, a den of invitation, which wears it's motto in a marking, like a mantra: 'Be not inhospitable to strangers, lest they be angels in disguise'.


And, though the initial luster always fades, though the magic of any perfect communion must open itself to economic and practical realities, though you discover, in time, that it is technically 'against the rules' to bring new books upstairs, and though each person that works in such a place is never entirely (or even often) hospitable, the extent of your foreigness fades, and you gather yourself into its rhythms, dirty rhythms which afford you little privacy, but rhythms nonetheless.

And it starts to feel like home...

paris photos:

paris photos:

5.04 - Paris

The Primacy of Perception:

To take a picture, or document a line of influence, in an overcrowded cemetery, with maps for sale marking the locations of the numerous famous inhabitants, I didn't buy a map, but glanced briefly at someone else's for a less likely visited, if personally significant name.

And while somewhere, I am told, in the 52nd section of the Père Lachaise cemetery (Paris, France), the rotting remains of Maurice Merleau-Ponty stand as testament to his life (to his truly being dead), I don't know where, per se. To find a single body buried in the ground can prove quite hard.

Having searched throughout this section, not to note his stele-carved name upon a single of its stones; perhaps he is not dead…

The mind and the body indeed.

5.02 - Paris

Running east between Place de Clichy and Stalingrad the #2-line rises out of the ground just past Anvers. Between Barbès Rochefort and La Chapelle, just out the northwest corner of the Gare du Nord (one of Paris' main stations), beneath the morning rumblings of the metro, pedestrians crowd into a dense sensory marketplace.

As voices of the merchants – Arabs, Frenchmen, Spaniards – rising over one another, gather in the passers-bye, potential buyers, not quite noticing they're singing…

Prices, and the names of produce rolling rhythmically off their tongues, collectively – with the fragrant smells of olives, oranges, and the overpowering fish (their eyes gazed upwards, blankly, at the overpass) – trapped in the light, like's gathered at reflected angles under tarps drawn taut, and awnings of every color, circulating smells (and sounds) that those at either end be drawn on towards the other, bumping into the watch-man, with his fake designer merchandise, his eyes a bit crooked like he wants you to know it's a seedy business, but him: he doesn't mind it, cause you: you'll be getting a good deal…

And the prices are cheap, whether or not you need a watch, or a mango. And, for me, perhaps for the first time, Paris seems truly alive; not just an overcrowded tourist-trap after all...

4.31 - Paris

There's something to be said for tourism. Whether or not it conveys any real valuable understanding of another culture, it means something to us, we continue being tourists. T

here's certain places we flock to, historic or beautiful places, places we take pictures of. We tell our families we went there. We tell our friends we went there (we went there and took pictures). We tell ourselves we went there.

Do people who've seen the world and taken pictures of it still kill people? Still do horrible things in the name of justice, or righteousness, or no name at all? Do they live fulfilling lives as valuable members of families, and communities?

I don't know if a place can become the accumulation of all the pictures taken, all the stories told, our collective image of it? I think I've read these ideas somewhere, or heard them.



What is tourism? People visit places for different reasons. Some need a break from, a step outside, their lives. They work hard, and find in such communal gathering – around the same monuments, the same churches, mosques, synagogues, and temples, the same ruins – something reassuring, some collective memory reconstructed (perhaps a bit commercialized), some shared past that makes them feel less isolated in their particular troubles, in their particular jobs, or cultures.

I suppose, in traveling, we all find something different: some people say you can even find yourself. As though you might be out there somewhere. The real you. And all you have to do (the current you, not really you) is look in the right place, experience the right experience. I don't know who they are, these people who say this. And I imagine I don't really know who I am either. But there sure are a damn lot of cameras in Paris.