Tuesdays II

back to Au Chien Qui Fume this week...

... expecting to be disappointed, especially because I wasn't really all that hungry for fish soup. Of course they have lots of other yummies on the menu, but they do soupe de poisson so well... so I went and I ordered it, all in the name of routine.


The waiter who served me last week didn't take my order, but he did end up bringing my bowl from the kitchen and greeted me with a friendly reconnaissance that surprised us both. I mentioned that the joint was jumpin' and he said the evenings especially have been very busy lately. I suspect the change of pace that I noticed was due mostly to the fact that I had arrived earlier than last week. I had to sit at a floating table for two in the middle of the restaurant. The bar man was lining up saucers with doilies and meringues for after lunch coffees and the fish monger was serving himself a pastis. I couldn't make out any of the conversations around me as they bounced around the room in buoyant warble.

But there was one table that caught my attention... two older gentlemen shared a rather large fish and a half bottle of wine before ordering desert. The one with the short, clean cut hair had a fruit bowl and the other, who was facing me, ordered a slab of cream and custard... maybe lemon. The latter must have mentioned me to the former because he turned to look at me. He tried to see what I was reading--California Quarterly's latest volume--before turning back to his brother, twin brother--I knew it as soon as he turned around. Then he got up and took his coat and hat from the maitre'd and waited by the door. Meanwhile, the less pressed and polished brother caught my eye and took it as an invitation to start up a conversation with me.

The first question is always "What country are you from?" and usually, anyone friendly enough to ask it is happy to meet an American. He seemed a little tipsy, said that "love is life," and then he invited me to dinner. By now it was maybe 3:30 and his brother was standing by the door, all but tapping his foot, but the friendly one kept chatting me up. He would be back with an artist friend for dinner--someone well known, he said--and if I was there, he would be happy to invite me to join them. The idea was enchanting and, truth be told, it hung in the back of my mind as I passed the rest of the day at that small table in the middle of the room drinking Grand Marnier, reading poetry, and writing...

"These crumpled wads of wasted words won't stick. They drip between the walls and the Maitre'd with the thick moustache, and the more I waste, the smaller the words, the vaster the small, blank page... Drinking in the afternoon--la classe Americaine, he says as he works to pay my way. I want to come back again and again. Have dinner with the drunken twin and his artist friend. But can I ask that freedom of my Love, my jealous, zealous Love?"

Ok, not always something worth reading! But there it is anyway. After that, I spent almost an hour on the phone with family and friends back home. Honestly, I don't see how this can last for too many Tuesdays, but yesterday was no disappointment. Thinking I might go to the movies after lunch, I didn't take the Filou; and though I never made it to the movies, it's a good thing I left him home. He would have been clawing at the window after the first hour and a half. Maybe next week, Filou!

Tuesdays

Au Chien Qui Fume

On Tuesdays Agnes, our housekeeper, comes at one and spends three hours doing what has sometimes taken me days to do myself… if I even do it at all… because I hate it! Dusting, mirror and toilet cleaning, kitchen scouring and heavy duty vacuuming, the occasional ironing. Whew! What a load off. She doesn’t have a key so I usually stay home when she comes. We move around each other in the small apartment, maybe I help her stretch the sheets across the bed or gather up the dirty laundry scattered about, but the late lunch hour is perfect for café sitting, and it's got me thinking...

Every writer needs a café, right? Someplace she can go, away from the laundry and email, and the same old walls. But it has to be someplace particular. Someplace she only recognizes after a few visits but which suddenly becomes familiar… a place where she can sit and forget certain things, remember others. And because I want this to be a routine, I am writing my intentions here so as to be accountable for sticking to it.

So this past Tuesday, I let Agnes in and Filou and I went to a restaurant that I know is very dog friendly... Le Chien Qui Fume—The Smoking Dog is a chain, but the only one to which I’ve ever been is here in Châtelet. In warmer weather the patio is divine, looking out on Les Halles and its sage green trellises, and inside the ambiance is classy without being pretentious. There are pictures of celebrities hung just below the ceilings and little dog statues perched above the bench seats that line the well-partitioned spaces. All this is only part of the reason why I’ve settled on this place.



When we arrived, lunch hour was nearly over. An older woman seated near our table with a matching older man gave us the usual disapproving glances, top to bottom. He didn’t of course. The men rarely do. Plus, he was seated with his back to us. But they were already having desert and Filou settled in at my feet right away, so quiet, so well behaved that it didn’t take long for her to forget me. No sooner had my wine arrived than I found myself privy to the most beautiful conversation I have ever overheard in this beautiful city.

Maybe it was the chocolate, but her face had turned to mush and her eyes were sparkling from wells of almost tears. She was actually smiling… the sweetest smile, truly, and she reached across the table to hold what I can only hope was her husband’s hand. (She spoke with such sincerity and compassion that I thought it might have been her lover.) “When I do things for you, when I show you how much I care, I do it because I want to, not because I have to. Sure, affection is a basic human need, but it’s not about that.” I couldn’t hear his responses, but I could see that he was looking into her eyes, and even from the side of his face, I could tell that he, too, had been moved close to tears.

This is what I wrote in my little notebook: “I don’t think I’ve ever felt this manic happy. I’ve just overheard the most amazing conversation—am still hearing it, in fact. The previously snooty couple across the aisle has been having one of those tell-all talks about their love and life. I could cry… fighting back the tears. I’ll blame the Sancerre.”

So we're all nearly crying, and they were speaking French, of course, so I began writing in French but have translated it here: “Among the most beautiful moments of my whole life. At first, I didn’t want to strain to listen, but I couldn’t help myself... ‘You’ve brought me so much… I think we've succeeded at making a nice life for ourselves, and that’s no small thing.’” She went on to say that yes, they had had their difficulties, but that they had surmounted all of it to arrive at this place today.

And that’s how I chose Le Chien Qui Fume. Their soup de poisson—fish soup with croutons, aioli, and shredded cheese is the best I’ve tasted, but if you’re not careful, they’ll sell you the most expensive wine to go with it. I’ll blame the Sancerre again for what happened next. I gushed to my server about the afternoon I had passed and how I wanted to come back again and again. Then I asked him where I might find my favorite dog statue—they move them around—gauche-ly calling it “le chien qui pisse.”

I love the statue because when he sits on the deck behind the bench seat, it looks like he’s piddling on the head of whoever is sitting there, their back to him, probably completely unaware. Apparently, there is only one pissing dog in the place because the server knew exactly what I was asking for. He laughed while clearing the couple’s table and said he thought it was upstairs, even insisted on bringing it down for me in lieu of my searching.



I took my picture (for you!) and headed for the door with my Filou, and the server said “à la prochaine, alors—see you next time then!” Maybe one day when I’m famous and dead—because I would have to be both!—this place will become lovingly known as Le Chien Qui Pisse. I think it has a certain ring!

When Horses Fly

Oh my gosh. Outside, the sun is shining in a rare and absolutely cloudless way. It's falling through the windows and warming the new quilt I bought at the local shabby chic shop on Tuesday. I want to go out and just be in it, but I need to tell you some things! Yesterday, I saw a flying horse.

I often see them three at a time, not flying of course, but with Gendarmes all saddled up on top, clattering down Avenue Victoria. In fact, I just filmed a group the other day patrolling the Boulevarde du Palais. I didn't have my camera in hand for the rapturous moment, but it probably wouldn't have made much difference if I had. She was flying pretty fast.

It struck me funny that a lone officer was standing at the corner of the quai and the Pont au Change like that, looking up the Seine more than at the people bustling in all directions or the cars. It was about a quarter to noon and his whistle hung on his lips. I passed him, maybe twenty paces, before I heard the noise that signals a flying horse--The approaching sirens were nothing out of the ordinary, but the whistle, and some shouting followed by a strange absence of movement and chatter on the wide sidewalk, the interrupted flow of traffic.

Just as I turned, there she flew, limbs stretching beyond her barely touching the ground... The moment was suspended. Everything stood still as her police escorts cleared her path, and there she went up the quai towards the Hotel de Ville. I can't say where to after that. Her yellow rain coat flapped only a bit, so graceful were her strides. It must have seemed, to her, that the whole world had stopped. She had gotten loose of her Gendarme and was running. I wonder if she knew where to.

A Religious Experience

or, Flashmob in Paris the 18th of February.

At my high school reunion a couple months back, an old "friend," after learning that my boyfriend is Muslim, asked me in the most judgmental way, "So what religion are YOU?" It took me a few seconds to respond, for a few reasons... And when I came up with "Literature is my religion," apparently my time to respond had run out and I was thought a heathen. Now I know it's true... at least the religion part! And I don't think S/He will hold it against me ;) This is why.

You see, I went to this Flashmob thing. I had nothing better to do, not until three anyway. So I took my favorite book off the shelf--Jeanette Winterson's Art Objects and chose which passage I wanted to read--pretty much the whole book is worthy and I could never have anticipated how very perfect her voice would be for the occasion. I had no idea what I was in store for.

When I arrived, the Place St Michel was more crowded than usual... more like a Saturday night than a Wednesday at noon. Riot police had lined up their paddy wagons, clearly preparing for the worst. Who knows what can happen when you get a bunch of readers together, right?! I had a few minutes to wait for the whistle and was hoping to run into someone I knew, but alas, I stood alone and smoked a festive clove cigarette while the people came. I wished I had invited that group of students that I passed in front of Sainte Chappelle. I wished I had brought Filou. I wished I had enough courage to walk up to the Addonizio'esque French mom and her daughter with the oh-so-French embroidered beret and to tell them, "Comme vous êtes belles !" Each with her book in hand.

And then the whistle blew. At first it got quiet and I felt self-conscious. This is what I read:

“To begin with the reader. The ordinary reader is not primarily concerned with questions of structure and style. He or she decides on a book, enjoys it or doesn’t, finishes it or doesn’t, and is, perhaps affected by it.”

Second by second the din of dissonant voices rose and within just a few lines I was crying, yes crying... happy to have worn my dark sunglasses despite the ever-present rain clouds.

“When the fiction or the poem has a powerful effect likely to be lasting, the reader feels personally attached to both the work and the writer. Everyone has their favourite books to be read and re-read. Such things become talismans and love-tokens, even personality indicators, the truly bookish will mate on the strength of a spine… The world of the book is a total world and in a total world we fall in love.”

By this time, I was no longer sure if it was the mob or the book that was making me so emotional. I assure you, I could barely hear my own voice and my mouth was trembling and falling all over the words…

“Falling for a book is not the nymph Echo falling for the sound of her own voice nor is it the boy Narcissus falling for his own reflection. Those Greek myths warn us of the dangers of recognizing no reality but our own. Art is a way into other realities, other personalities. When I let myself be affected by a book, I let into myself new customs and new desires. The book does not reproduce me, it re-defines me, pushes at my boundaries, shatters the palings that guard my heart. Strong texts work along the borders of our minds and alter what already exists. They could not do this if they merely reflected what already exists. Of course, strong texts tend to become so familiar, even to people who have never read them, that they become part of what exists, at least a distort of them does. It is very strange to read something supposedly familiar, The Gospels, Great Expectations, Jane Eyre, and to find that it is quite unlike our mental version of it. Without exception, the original will be as unsettling, as edgy as it ever was, we have learned a little and sentimentalised the rest….”

I read on through tears… and simultaneous laughter! Giddy does not begin to describe it. I felt much like I did almost twenty years ago coming out from under the anesthesia used by my oral surgeon when he pulled all four of my wisdom teeth! I looked around me and others were giddy, too. Probably not crying, but I didn’t want to stop reading long enough to look so closely. Instead, I pushed through the rush.

“… I do not mean to say that any of this is conscious; mostly it is not, and therein lies a difficulty. Art is conscious and its effect on the audience is to stimulate consciousness. This is sexy…” [and at this moment, I KNOW the older gentleman next to me was listening! I began to calm down.] “… this is exciting, it is also tiring, and even those who welcome art-excitement have an ordinary human longing for sleep. Nothing wrong with that but we cannot use the book as a pillow. The comfort and the rest to be got out of art is not of the passive forgetting kind, it is inner quiet of a high order, and it follows the intensity, the excitement we feel when exposed to something new. Or does it? Only if we are prepared to stay the course, not give up and doze off, not leap from rock to rock after new thrills. Books need to be deeply read which is one reason why it is wise never to trust a paid hack.”

In the unyielding din, I found myself wondering what others were reading, if they had chosen their books as appropriately as I. In the moment, I had given up understanding exactly what I was reading. Everything related to that moment. Every word was about that moment. We were making art… many without even knowing it.

“Our unconscious attitude to art is complex. We want it and we don’t want it, often simultaneously, and at the same time as a book is working intravenously we are working to immunise ourselves against it. Our best antidote to art as a powerful force independently affecting us is to say that it is only the image of ourselves that is affecting us. The doctrine of Realism saves us from a bad attack of Otherness and it is a doctrine that has been bolstered by the late-twentieth-century vogue for literary biography; tying the writer’s life with the writer’s work so that the work becomes a diary; small, private, explainable and explained away, much as Freud tried to explain art away.”

Just as I reached the white space, the second whistle blew and the crowd gave up the joyful noise of a Flashmob well executed, myself included, hooting, hollering and clapping—the muffled clapping of hundreds of hands on the books they were holding, and then the crowd began to disperse.

I’ll post a link to the video once I find it. Or if you find it first, please send it along. I’m just left of the fountain in a red coat and camel colored hat… with dark glasses, of course. Not hard to find in a crowd of black-clad Parisians! In the meantime, here is a quickie video of a Flash-freeze mob at Trocadero.

Short story long, if you have a chance to be a part of a flashmob, do it. Just do it!

Work

... an uninspiring topic for Spoken Word?

I have exactly one poem about work, but instead of also reading one or two off-topic pieces--I like the big picture a theme can bring to the evening--I decided to search my bookshelf for someone else's words on the subject.

It's no secret that I haven't done a whole lotta "work" since finishing my MFA last spring, but I try to make up for it at home: laundry, dishes, all the daily straightening I can stomach, the mundane and unpaid rituals performed by most women. I don't know if Naomi Wolf occurred to me before or after I thought of that, but one thing's for sure: I hate to miss a chance to share The Beauty Myth. This passage comes from the first chapter aptly titled "Work:"



"'While women represent 50 percent of the world population, they perform nearly two-thirds of all working hours, receive only one-tenth of the world income and own less than 1 percent of world property.' The 'Report of the World Conference for the United Nations Decade for Women' agrees: When housework is accounted for, 'women around the world end up working twice as many hours as men.'

Women work harder than men whether they are Eastern or Western, housewives or jobholders. A Pakistani woman spends sixty-three hours a week on domestic work alone, while a Western housewife, despite her modern appliances, works just six hours less. 'Housework's modern status,' writes Ann Oakley, 'is non-work.' A recent study shows that if housework done by married women were paid, family income would rise by 60 percent. Housework totals forty billion hours of France's labor power. Women's volunteer work in the United States amounts to $18 billion a year. The economics of industrialized countries would collapse if women didn't do the work they do for free: According to economist Marilyn Waring, throughout the West it generates between 25 and 40 percent of the gross national product.

What about the New Woman, with her responsible full-time job? Economist Nancy Barrett says that 'there is no evidence of sweeping changes in the division of labor within households coincident with women's increasing labor force participation.' Or: though a woman does full-time paid work, she still does all or nearly all the unpaid work that she used to. In the United States, partners of employed women give them less help than do partners of housewives: Husbands of full-time homemakers help out for an hour and fifteen minutes a day, while husbands of women with full-time jobs help less than half as long--thirty-six minutes. Ninety percent of wives and 85 percent of husbands in the United States say the woman does 'all or most' of the household chores. Professional women in the United States fare little better. Sociologist Arlie Hochschild found that the women in two-career couples came home to do 75 percent of household work. Married American men do only 10 percent more domestic work than they did twenty years ago. The work week of American women is twenty-one hours longer than that of men; economist Heidi Hartmann demonstrates that 'men actually demand eight hours more service per week than they contribute.' In Italy, 85 percent of mothers with children and full-time paid jobs are married to men who share no work in the home at all. The average European woman with a paid job has 33 percent less leisure than her husband. In Kenya, given unequal agricultural resources, women's harvests equaled men's; given equal resources, they produced bigger harvests more efficiently.

Chase Manhattan Bank estimated that American women worked each week for 99.6 hours. In the West, where paid labor centers on a forty-hour week, the unavoidable fact to confront the power structure is that women newcomers came from a group used to working more than twice as hard and long as men. And not only for less pay; for none."



I did get my usual jitters, the shaky voice and fumbling hands. It may even have been worse than usual because I was reading such a notoriously feminist text with an academic tone at an event meant to delight and dazzle. The last thing I wanted to be was a downer or heavy handed. But I pushed through it, replacing the citations with "blabiddy blabiddy blah," some nervous smiling and giggling. I even let my hair down to appear more feminine. Choosing to read such a passage at Spoken Word was a risk, but I also think I underestimated my audience. A few people thanked me for the enlightening reminders. One woman, French I think, even came over to my table before she left and asked for the name and author, wrote down Shakespeare when I told her I bought the book at the famous English bookstore, at which point I couldn't help but think, "My work here is done!"

It was only slightly easier to read my own words. I wonder what Naomi Wolf would have to say about my one poem about work. In any case, it's a published prize winner--California Quarterly's annual contest last year--so I can share it here... with you. If you'd like a copy of the magazine in which it appeared, (vol 33.4) click here and contact Julian Palley via email for ordering info. Be sure and tell them I sent you! (Note to self: Send more poems to CQ!)


Keep Them All


When you wait tables or teach, you don’t quit
one job for another. You keep them both,
keep them all because you need the money.

You skip a lot of meals because you're broke
or busy. You eat a lot of fast food and feel guilty
when you wait tables or teach. You don't quit

believing it will get better. You don't quit
drinking either. You drink and save up bottles,
keep them all because you need the money.

And you say you do it for the environment—
all that saving, reusing—you do it with people too.
When you wait tables or teach, you don’t quit

stockpiling lovers who ask nothing of you,
lovers you never leave and you never ask to stay.
Keep them all because you need the money.

Let them buy you dinner. Meet them for lunch.
Have sex. Keep living. Keep believing that
when you wait tables or teach, you don’t quit.
Keep them all because you need the money.

Boo Hoo...

The other shoe...

Amidst all the hope and celebration that last week's election inspired, and apart from the fact that the Electoral College seems once again unable to accurately represent the popular vote, there is one significant disappointment:

“…Bush’s one secure legacy will be [his] demagogic exploitation of homophobia. The success of the four state initiatives banning either same-sex marriage or same-sex adoptions was the sole retro trend on Tuesday. And Obama, who largely soft-pedaled the issue this year, was little help. In California, where other races split more or less evenly on a same-sex marriage ban, some 70 percent of black voters contributed to its narrow victory.” Frank Rich, New York Times

Now if that's not irony...

Why would a group of marginalized individuals vote to further marginalize another group of individuals? And maybe now I understand why Barack went soft on gay rights... to keep the black vote?

Granted, it took a lot more than just the black vote to approve the ban on gay marriage. It wouldn't have made the difference if other groups were less divided on the issue. I can only hope that "President Elect Barack Obama" will finally step up to the plate and remind his supporters that no group of individuals, no individual can be denied their constitutional rights. All (wo)men are created equal... blah, blah, blah.

I once heard the phrase "as goes California, so goes the U.S. and as goes the U.S. so goes the world." But many parts of the world are way ahead of us on this one. In France, there is already such a contract in place... the very one I entered into with my partner last December. It's a sort of civil union called a PACS. There was no white dress, though I guess there could have been... no bridal party, no table piled high with all the gifts we could want from any corporate store, no band, no cake, no crowd of witnesses pretending to believe in the sanctity of one of the modern world's most failing institutions.

I've never been a fan of marriage (click here to see, in action, the battle to define it)... for lots of reasons, and even a civil union seems like a ridiculous formality to me. I even said so much the last time I went to see the authorities about my work permit, which, I'm sure, didn't help my case any. Why do we need a legal contract to love each other? I wish the world would adopt Sweden's ways... no extra benefits for married people. In other words, equal benefits for all, regardless of categorical labels like marital status, sexual orientation, or race.

Marriage might be more successful if people were actually free to do it for other than legal reasons. But probably not. Monogamy itself is little more than social myth, and any governance based on myth is bound to fail... even if we call it love.

I dearly love my gay friends. I have two who are currently in different hemispheres because the U.S. won't acknowledge their relationship... They will probably end up living in the other one, far away from me. And haven't you heard about the gay brain drain calling so many educated, same-sex couples to Canada?
There is the occasional happy ending... my oldest and closest friend and his partner own a successful business and participate actively in their communities, hosting and attending charity fundraisers and offering scholarship programs to University students. They joke that they're so legally (i.e. financially) linked that they could never get divorced. I read a poem for their commitment ceremony several years ago--you see, with enough money and smarts, there are ways around the limitations of the law. At best--and as usual--we're dealing with a class issue.

So now the legal red tape unfurls once again as the fight for gay rights continues, and I have no doubt that one day, gays will be afforded equal rights on all fronts, whether it be legalized marriage or simply some other recognized contract... again, I'm not really sure what they want with our failing hetero institution and all its religious jargon anyway. But whatever they want, I'm on board... boo, hoo!

Woo hoo!

A few initial thoughts on Barack's election.

I've decided, just now as I'm writing this, to call him by his first name. It was so easy with Hillary. And yes, I was rooting for HER, knowing that I would vote for him too. But when Sarkozy and the French media so warmly embraced him, I started to realize what his election could mean on a global level. Could his can-do attitude actually make people like us again?

Being liked is very important to me. I want to say that it "has always been" very important to me, but the present perfect seems to hint at reform, the potential for change, and I highly suspect that wanting to be liked may well be the death of me someday... my Achilles heel and all that. I try to be a good ambassador, but when I'm not busy projecting my neuroses on my pets, I naturally project them on my country: My country needs to be liked. This balancing act is the essence of ex patriotism! (And on some days, narcissism--If people like my country more, they will like me more ;)

Some say that being liked isn't important, that respect is maybe more important. (I'm trying to think of someone I've respected but not liked.) Of course the U.S. hasn't had much respect in a while either. Now I should probably reread Kant before I go throwing the "L" word around "like this" (hehe!) but it's hard not to like Barack. And it's good finally to have a president elected by something other than corporations, fear, or hanging chads.

True, the "throngs" of supporters at the celebration in Grant Park did cast a pseudo rock star effect... The bullet proof panels on his stage--transparent reminders of the cultural divides in the United States. Just never mind how different that scene was from McCain's garden party! Barack clearly speaks to, and now FOR the next generation. This wasn't a black thing, or a class thing, or a gender thing. If any thing, it was an age thing... Babies of baby boomers taking the reigns.

Here's the thing about change: Change is inevitable, like pennies... and fall.

So the pessimist calls it waiting for the other shoe to drop. The romantic calls it hope, faith. Ultimately, the pragmatist in me wins out: It is what it is... Let's just hope those frat boys don't burn the house down between now and January 20th!