Attractions

Monet's garden (yes, that one) and "The Bronze Age" in the Rodin Museum.

(Literature will be making a comeback soon, I promise.)

Pond Maintenance at Versailles

Because you can't have any pond scum clogging up your Louis XIV fountains. I wonder who has to wheel the palm trees in for the winter.

It's Friday.

The Friday before Memorial Day. It's supposed to be 88 degrees. Quit reading this (expecting Paris pictures? I'll get some more) and go outside.

People Are Dying to Get in Here!

HA! (That was for you, Dad.)


These were all taken in the Pere Lachaise cemetary. The middle photo is of the statue that's on Oscar Wilde's tomb; the top is, well, Rossini's grave (imagine that); and the bottom is photographic evidence of a Focus among all the mossy tombs and marble monuments. Because you have to be able to get around.

Yes, I Was Really There

This is me, and that's the Eiffel Tower. Yes, that Eiffel Tower.

Being Parisian

This is in the Luxembourg Gardens, on the only day the sun shone for more than an hour at a time. We sat in green chairs, just like these Parisians. It was very nice. As I quoted Willa saying two weeks ago, "Paris is a hard place to leave, even when it rains incessantly..."

There Is Never Any End to Paris

Literally.

We walked and walked, stopped for wine and food, walked again, stopped for beauty products, walked some more...I got back on Saturday toned and smelling of French cosmetics.

It was great. (Pictures forthcoming this week, I promise.)

Finally, Literature

Courtesy of our buddy Hemingway, here's another Paris quote. (I know I'm always promising and not delivering, but this comes as part of a longer passage at the end of A Moveable Feast which I will indeed quote here someday. If I come back.)

There is never any end to Paris, and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other


(The image is of the hotel where Papa Hemingway would write, when he lived in Paris. He would walk over from his flat in the mornings. The French sign says something along the lines of, 'Paul Verlaine died in this building January 8, 1896. Born March 30, 1844.' Vive the internet!)

This Is All About Paris

Sadly, it just isn't about literature. (Hey, someone has been deciding what to wear to France. And learning how to work her camera. And trying to say, "No, you can't buy my mother a drink" in French. It's been busy.)

This Isn't About Paris

But it is about birds. (I forgot the book I wanted to use today, so bear with me. They could be Parisian birds.) I just found this. Good old Emily Dickinson.

A Bird came down the Walk—
He did not know I saw—
He bit an angle-worm in halves
And ate the fellow, raw,

And then he drank a Dew
From a convenient Grass,
And then hopped sidewise to the Wall
To let a Beetle pass—

He glanced with rapid eyes
That hurried all abroad—
They looked like frightened Beads, I thought—
He stirred his velvet head

Like one in danger, Cautious,
I offered him a Crumb,
And he unrolled his feathers
And rowed him softer home—

Than Oars divide the Ocean,
Too silver for a seam—
Or Butterflies, off Banks of Noon,
Leap, plashless as they swim.

It's Paris Week!

Actually, it won't be a full week, as I leave Friday to see what everyone's talking about. If the blog doesn't resume the week of the 22nd, we can all safely assume I decided to stay and start my novel. Here's what Willa Cather (of all people!) has to say about it:

"Paris is a hard place to leave, even when it rains incessantly and one coughs continually from the dampness."

Some History

Because it is, of course, el Cinco de Mayo and I have access to the all-encompassing internet, here's some history on today's holiday and on pinatas. (Hey, I didn't know about either of them. It's an educational blog today.)

Another Salinger Cop-Out

Yes, it's been busy today, so we can all be glad I keep a record of these passages as I find them. (And yes, that is a James Thurber drawing of a dog. That's a particularly brilliant detail our old buddy Salinger adds.)

This is from "A Young Girl in 1941 With No Wast At All," Salinger's short story originally published in The New Yorker:

She was a beautifully, a perfectly, gray-haired woman in a long sleeved evening gown with Thurber dogs in the pattern. She was wearing a pear-shaped diamond ring and a diamond bracelet. Just on sight no one very sensible would have laid bets on her background. She might, years ago, have walked very erectly across a Broadway stage, with an ostrich fan, singing A Pretty Girl Is Like A Melody, or something similarly ostrich fan-ish. She might have been an ambassador’s daughter or a fireman’s daughter. She might have been her husband’s secretary for years. As only second-class beauty can be identified, there was no way of telling.

I Heart Literature

(Sorry. I had to make that pun.)

I ran across a quote from the Upanishads yesterday which echoed one I found last Chirstmas from Makarios the Great, who was apparently an Egyptian monk. And the drawing's by Leonardo. Pretty far-ranging blog, I'd say.


The little space within the heart is as great as the vast universe. The heavens and the earth are there, and the sun and the moon and the stars. Fire and lightning and winds are there, and all that now is and all that is not. --The Upanishads


The heart itself is only a small vessel,
yet dragons are there, and lions,
there are poisonous beasts,
and all the treasures of evil,
there are rough and uneven roads,
there are precipices;
but there too is God and the angels,
life is there, and the Kingdom,
there too is light, and there the apostles
and heavenly cities,
and treasures of grace.
All things lie within that little space.
--Makarios the Great

Guess What I've Been Reading?

More Mark Strand, of course. This is from Dark Harbor, and is notable not only for a non-silly use of "alas" in a modern poem, but also the inspired choice of "compassionate" to describe the wind.

"Is it you or the long, compassionate wind
that whispers in my ear, 'Alas, alas'?"

(The whole section is worth posting. Maybe tomorrow.)

Why I Love It Here, Part I

Three words: Rocky Mountain Raceways. They are host to events such as the "Discount Tire Midnight Drag," the "Jet Car Spring Nationals," "Funny Car Fever," and somthing called "Fuel and Fire," which I can only imagine. Buy tickets here. Go, have a drink, watch jet cars, see the light on the mountains, and be happy where you are.

Mark Strand Will Save Us

That feeling of being privy to a new and great truth just because you were lucky enough to pick up a particular book is a source of endless delight and amazement, yes, but in particular times and with certain literature (okay, poetry) it can almost be a source of blessedness, of certainty there is an order for good in the universe. I have to think, "Someone who could put this feeling into words exits in the universe, was lucky enough to have the words ready for the feeling, was lucky enough to be able to share these words, and I was lucky enough to discover them when I didn't know I needed them."

Or something along those lines. This is actually carved above the water feature that's in the south end of the Gallivan Center. I found it in college and, indeed, thought I was lucky.

Visions of the end may secretly seduce
our thoughts like water sinking
into water, air drifting into air;
clouds may form, when least expected,
darkening the glass of self,
canceling resemblances to what we are.
Even here, while summer sunlight
falling through the golden
folds of afternoon
brightens up the air, we mark
our progress by how much
we leave behind. And yet,
this vanishing is burnished
by a slow, melodious light,
as if our passage here
were beautiful because
no turning back is possible.
It is our knowledge of the end
that speaks for us, that has us weave,
as slowly as we can, an elegy
to all our walks. It is our way
of bending to the world's will
and giving thanks.

Cut and Color

So I made a hair appointment Saturday, which reminded me of this (fairly long) passage from The Long Goodbye. "Kingpin racketeers"--long live Raymond Chandler.

There are blondes and blondes and it is almost a joke word nowadays. All blondes have their points, except perhaps the metallic ones who are as blonde as a Zulu under the bleach and as to disposition as soft as a sidewalk. There is the small cute blonde who cheeps and twitters, and the big statuesque blonde who straight-arms you with an ice-blue glare. There is the blonde who gives you the up-from-under look and smells lovely and shimmers and hangs on your arm and is always very very tired when you take her home...

There is the small perky blonde who is a little pal and wants to pay her own way and is full of sunshine and common sense and knows judo from the ground up and can toss a truck driver over her shoulder without missing more than one sentence out of the editorial in the Saturday Review. There is the pale, pale blonde with anemia of some non-fatal but incurable kind. She is very languid and very shadowy and speaks softly out of nowhere and you can't lay a finger on her because in the first place you don't want to and in the second place she is reading The Waste Land or Dante in the original, or Kafka or Kierkegaard or studying Provencal...

And lastly there is the gorgeous showpiece who will outlast three kingpin racketeers and then marry a couple of millionaires at a million a head and end up with a pale rose villa at Cap Antibes, an Alfa-Romeo town car complete with pilot and co-pilot, and a stable of shopworn aristocrats, all of whom she will treat with the affectionate absent-mindedness of an elderly duke saying goodnight to his butler.

Band Stuff

Two more Potential Band Names Found in Everyday Conversation:
1. Crawl On Down The Wall
(From talking about "those gummy spiders you throw at the wall and they stick until they start to crawl on down.")
2. Co-dependent Consumptive
(From when I'd had a sneezing attack and then put on powder prior to going out. I asked my roommate--since the powder was a little pale and my eyes were red and puffy--"Do I look consumptive?" And hilarity ensued, and we ended up deciding I should write a personal ad that starts out "co-dependent consumptive seeks same..." and see how many dates I got then.)

Other Band Stuff:
Neko Case is playing Suede in Park City on June 17th.

Even More Band Stuff:
If you're looking for the archetypal bar experience, you can go to The Republican on Sunday nights and listen to the house band. And drink lots of beer.

There Goes Chris

Another from Chris:
"It wasn’t just Chinatown, it was more like Chinacity, and it was full of Chinese people.”

Our Chris is an invited blogger for the AdTech conference in San Francisco, which means he gets to attend all the parties and write blog entries. (A shame they don't have these conferences for literature, really.)
He'll start posting tomorrow. Click on the blue BLOG navigation at the bottom left of this page:
www.ad-tech.com