5.08 - 5.24 Paris

Shakespeare and Company:

I am staying on the second floor of this two-story bookstore, spending most of my nights on a short makeshift mattress which serves as a sofa throughout the day, and the usual napping space for a black-haired cat, named simply Kitty.

(Aside: why is it socially acceptable to name cats ‘Kitty’, while dogs always receive more respectable, god-fearing names? Is this a sign of feline inferiority? One supposes it more complicated.)

Of the regularly employed or paid workers, there are two Irishmen: Asheen and Jonathan, an Australian: Jemma, a New Zealander: Rowan, as well as another Gemma (dating Jonathan) and Sylvia – daughter of the owner (George Whitman) and veritable manager of the shop – both Brits.

Of us migrant borders, the numbers, and the people-fleshes filling them, are constantly in flux - having gone as high as six, and as low as three during my stay.

Those of the longest tenure, and with whom I've become closest, are (in order of appearance):


Omar: A mustache-wearing, suspendered San Diegan of Mexican heritage. A would-be will-be playwrite and reader of Wind in the Willows who dreams of one day opening his own bookstore, titled explicitly.

Gabriel: A side-burned Vancouverite living in Montreal who makes bagels, surfs on couches, likes Murakami and lived alone in the woods with a typewriter at a fragile age.

John: A Rhode Island native who's wandering the world. A web-site designing, real-estate selling magician who doesn’t drink. But plays guitar. And likes the ladies.


Carl: The son of a Texas bible-thumping evangelical preacher. A whacky liberal artist angered by authoritarianism. And newly home-ful in a Parisian apartment, as I understand it, and congratulate.

and Sara(h-less): An American Pole (or Polish American, not being sure which label best conveys such multi-nationality) in her gap year, which doesn’t translate so cleanly into French, on her way to Brown University with tips on teachers, exceptionally well-read, and tongued (English, Polish, French and Swahili commandeered ably at her behest).

All of the boarders must help to open up the shop at noon, and close at midnight, working two additional hours at some point during the day (which are scheduled at closing the night before). Working in the store is not incredibly difficult, as with checkout duties being left to the regulars, the main responsibility is simply to stock and organize the shelves. Yet, discounting its relative ease and the ample opportunities which it provides for flirtation with the clientele, if one should ever find oneself looking to re-inforce the fact that mastery is an infinitely unattainable ideal in this universe, then this would certainly be at least one job to look into.


We hide food beneath the benches of the library upstairs, inside drawers and small cubby holes, snacking occassionally outside the shop during the days, though while the shop is open we generally must find food elsewhere. There’s a pretty good sandwich place run by a middle-aged Asian man and woman just around the corner on Saint Jacques where you can get a sandwich for 2E, and I often have one with tuna, hard-boiled egg, lettuce and tomato, as it seems to offer the most for the price. At nights, after closing, we pull a cofee-maker(to boil water), a hotplate and pan, out from under the upstairs sink and make pasta. We mix in some beans, and whatever cheese, tomatoes or other vegetables we may have, and along with a bottle or two of 1.90E to 2.90E wine, we have a generally nice little feast.

Especially compared to Berlin, eating out in Paris, even at the cheaper establishments can quickly become expensive. So, if you're trying to maintain any sort of a budget, you need to find some sort of balance between making your own food, and simply eating sparsely. Yet, even so-balanced, one yearns for some variety: a few times splurging for Indian food, or a couple non-happy hour beers, and a few times going for the better part of a day on just a baguette and some jam.

paris photos:

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.

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...