There are things I noticed when I was in Paris that I didn’t get to write about elsewhere that I want to write about here. I hope you don’t mind. I’m not trying to unload a box of asterisks on you, dumping them out the way someone might dump out a box of let’s-rummage-through-these tchotchkes from the attic that may or may not have that one crucial thing in it. Each story has its own geometry, its own musicality, and its own structure, and unless you’re in the mood to create something deliberately ugly, it’s important to pay attention to that.
For instance: Marine Le Pen’s ‘National Front’ did okay in European Elections the day I left Paris, and that took me somewhat by surprise, not only because I’d been generally untethered from the news, but because every poster I saw of her in Paris without exception bestowed upon her a Hitler moustache and a Hitler hair-do. (Quite a few also placed a phallus near her mouth, but that’s true for any poster regarding any subject in any city anywhere, isn’t it? Even a poster urging you to eat lettuce would be at risk for that sort of defacement.) In the court of graffiti opinion, I’d reckoned — even though when I spent some time in Milan with a friend, I’d been warned about her slickness — who also, according to my friend, if you took away her slickness, sounded exactly like a Liga Norte politician — Le Pen had already lost. How could Greece’s Golden Dawn and Hungary’s Jobbik be as transparently abhorrent as they’ve been and not have a ripple effect on other ‘far-right’ parties across Europe in terms of voting? The idea that it was somehow the UMP’s fault for not moving sufficiently to the right or that it was Hollande’s fault for being something of a lackluster campaigner seemed (and seems) silly.
Another thing that took my by surprise was the sheer smell of the Seine – holy suddenly-singing-Mount-Rushmore, Batman – and the fact that you could smell it from a few blocks away. I’ve never really experienced that with the Charles River in Massachusetts, the Hudson (in either Manhattan or Upstate New York), the Potomac in D.C., any of the rivers in New Hampshire or Maine, or while walking along Milan’s Navigli, but you could smell the Seine a few blocks away, and it wasn’t terrible. It was kind of nice. It helped you along to the fact that you were walking along in Paris in spring, an usher of a smell guiding you to your seat, possibly uttering something like, “Right this way, Monsieur, if you please,” though I can’t be entirely sure. I can’t say for certain. (Though you know I’m soft-pedaling this ‘like whoa.’)
I was also impressed by how busy and packed both sides of the Seine were – whether it was in watching people ironically dance to terrible techno outside a boat that had been rented out and converted into a makeshift club (I watched a real estate agent give a tour of the boat to prospect clients the next morning and smilingly cringed at the thought of them passing through locales where something unpleasant might have happened the night before), watching friends and tourists practice a kind of tetherball with each other, wander by giant shipping containers that had been transformed into temporary work and rest spaces, or in listening to someone bounce his trumpet off of passing boats the way a bored Steve McQueen perpetually bounced a baseball off the walls in The Great Escape.
And then there was the joy in buying newspapers and highlighting the words one didn’t know, like broncordiers (“stretchers”), jette l’eponge (“throw in the towel”), crapaleux (“villainous”), l’aumônier (“the chaplain”), sans essorage (“no spin”), marche-arret (“start/stop”), le gisement (“deposit”), socle (“pedestal”), and more, because travel is made up as much by language as it is by anything else. Don’t rely on English alone. Thrive amongst the other languages, too. Because there really is no other way to do it – language-wise – than to go and be there and let the language be itself. I can’t stress that enough.
