Paris, je t'aime

My internet access this past week of traveling has been, as I expected, rather sporadic, so I've been writing in the journal I've brought with me. This blogpost will be pretty much transcribed from my journal entries, so apologies in advance if the writing is a bit prosaic--my time online is ticking away at two euro for thirty minutes. So here goes.

March 18, 2009

Today I have...picnicked in front of the Eifel tower. Walked from the Arch de Triumph to Notre Dame. Seen the Mona Lisa. Taken a nap in the gardens of the Louvre. Drank wine in the Latin Quarter. Walked along the Seine as the sun set. Got hit on in a charming fashion by old French men. Added a note of my own to those left in the nooks of Shakespeare & Company (and it really was the bookstore of my dreams), paraphrased from a story I skimmed in the Paris Review in Blackwells before I left Oxford: "a journey doesn't always begin the moment you step foot out the door. Sometimes it begins far away from home.' I will come back." Nothing very profound--I couldn't think of anything truly profound to add--not like the letter written to Anne Frank about how she lived on in the dreams of man, how her words, unlike so many that came before her, will never be forgotten. Not like the owner of Shakespeare & Company, who wrote that Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky were more real to him than his neighbors; that he was still searching for his own Natasha; about peace; about tragedy, about every day failures and triumphs.

I could have added "I am happy." That would have been true.

You know, Barbara was right--I didn't really appreciate Spain at the time--or I did intellectually, in the sense that I knew my mother was spending time and money to be with me, but sentimentally, not as much as later. I wish I would have enjoyed it more--that I wasn't so irritable and jetlagged, that I appreciated exactly where I was, which, only months later, seems like the remnants of a dream--the streets of of Madrid, flamenco shows and tapas bars, the squares at night, the parks, the techos, Grenada, the Alhambra--one of the wonders of the world. Avila and Segovia and Toledo. But at least later I will be able to say "my mother and I spent a week in a four star mansion in Sevilla; we watched flamenco and saw the Alhambra, and she moved me into Oxford." I really miss her. Jens' house is gorgeous--I would love to have a house like that some day-with balconies and terrace doors and a window seat; white and wood and brightly colored plates, fresh bread every morning, flowers on all the tables. But I really miss my mother. Even not talking to her for two days is hard. I am so closely tied to her.

Paris is beautiful. A city you should explore in depth. I wish I spoke French. How will I ever do justice writing about it now that I've seen it it? It both is and isn't what I imagined--maybe it isn't because what I imagine is a city that simply doesn't exist anymore. The one that does is more earthy, more vibrant.

I am sunburnt, my feet ache, and I overpacked. But I am in Europe, living my life. I am here. I am so thankful for that.

I want to see Paris when I'm in love, and I want to see it when I'm settled. I want to know this city in all its forms. I want to come back.


March 20, 2009

Today was Versailles, which was closed (disappointing! 2 days out of the year they probably close and today would have to be one of them!) so we walked around the gardens instead, which although lovely, didn't quite ease the disappointment. Nothing was in bloom--the wrong season--and all the statues were covered. Still, the oppulence of the palace itself was evident from the facade alone. What must it have been like to live there...

The Paris metro was on strike, so we walked for about twenty minutes in search of another station which dropped us off at Montparnasse--haunt of a good many of the writers I love. We saw the local cemetery, where I payed homage to Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvouir (leaving my metro stub, like so many people before me), saw the Catacombs, though I had a total panic attack once I emerged, and the Closeries de Lilas, the favorite cafe of Hemingway (he wrote most of the Sun Also Rises there), Fitzgerald, and Trotsky. It was beautiful--a garden terrace, lilacs everywhere, the interior wood paneled, masculine. We drank champagne and ate chocolate in the gardens of Luxembourg, had dinner overlooking the Seine at twilight--wine, baguettes, brie--and I got a text from Ben saying he would love to get together for more than an hour next time, once I return to Oxford.

Trying to find a train running back to Jens', we walked down the Champs-Elysee at night, and saw the Eifel tower all lit up. I can see why they say Paris is the city of light. I think its hte most beautiful place I've ever been.

March 22, 2009

Nice was...the French Riviera; strawberry tarts and gelato, wood oven pizza and three spoon ice cream sundaes. The bluest water, winding alleyways, sundresses and winter coats. The Matisse museum--his former villa, high above the city, all terracotta and white walls, a local park on a Sunday afternoon, with a carousel playing Disney songs in French. Naps on the sun-warmed rocks of the beach, a clean and sparse hostel, croissants and honey, pulsing marketplaces--a pale pink pashmina and a bright pink tote. Echoes of Athens and Sevilla, of the Mediterreanean. Of women in black slips, high heels, wide sunhats. Watching the planes land over the beach--a strange feeling of euphoria and sadness. I can't believe a week has gone by already. I'm so in love with France. Maybe that's what I'll do this summer, when I'm busy not finding a job. Intern a day at week at Sterling Lord in the city, cozy up to my GRE prep book, learn French, write regularly, read.

Walking down the waterfront, I realized how perfectly content I was. So far this spring break has consisted of wandering through gorgeous cities, eating, and napping in picturesque locations. Couldn't ask for anything more.

"The day's last one way ticket train pulls in"

Another term has ended--wonderful & bittersweet. My last fiction tutorial was a bit odd--she was distracted by personal issues, which I understood, but it was a bit disconcerting in any event. She told me she had no doubt my talent "would always be guided--and not necessarily by a person either" Alright, I said. What else do you say to that? She also advised me to be wary of working in the publishing industry for a career--that it might exhaust me; sap me dry. Editors don't write books, she said. Maybe there is some truth in that. But if I didn't do that to earn money, I don't know what I would do. "I love photography," I told her. Then work in an art gallery was her response. But I hardly have the qualifications for that. It's a long way off, still.

Friday was...crepes at the French market at Gloucester Green, running into Amy & Sara (who is here visiting, before heading to Paris with me and Amy) & Fayyaz outside the Vaults & Gardens, Spice Lounge for dinner, basking in the sunshine. The Oxford Union for cocktails & the Wadham bop. Getting all the cash out of my wallet stolen; meeting Jeff's golf boys, wondering how on earth will I go back to the States/Sarah Lawrence after this year? There is nothing quite like Oxford..I don't know where else in the world you get this particular conflation of academia & exuberant debauchery; the work hard-play hard dynamic but with this total passion underneath.

Yesterday was London--walking the South Bank, which was beautiful, taking Sara to Westminster, and St. James Park, hot chocolate and belgian waffles in a cafe; a coffee date with a cute Brit who had told Jeff I had "interesting eyes." It would be nice if it came to something next term, but if not, at least it was another experience.

Today was laundry all day, 60 degree weather, packing for my month long travels. Tomorrow will be spent running last minute errands and simply enjoying Oxford. I leave Tuesday morning for Paris, and won't be back to the UK until April 14th. I'm sure I will have so much to write about when I do.

I despise people who feel the need to drink and drive. They always would make us watch those videos and sit through those lectures in middle school health classes, all school assemblies, and drivers ed. They'd bring in women from MADD, or guys in their late twenties horribly deformed by major car accidents, and maybe they'd scare the shit out of you for the hour, or even the afternoon. Maybe it would seem totally hokey, maybe you just wouldn't even think about it. I probably leaned towards the first and then fell into the last.

Talking to my mother on the phone just now, she told me about this email she got from Connecticut College, where my twin brother goes to school, though he's in Beijing currently, studying there for the semester. A girl he knew, a girl he was friends with through the humanitarian work they both did for Africa--him for Darfur, her for Uganda--was killed this morning, on her way to Uganda with six other kids from my brother's grade at Connecticut College. A 23 year old guy coming the wrong way down the highway slammed into the van that was taking all the kids to the airport for their aid mission. He was totally fine.

I don't know anything else about the girl. But it infuriates me nonetheless. I started crying when I got off the phone, and I couldn't even tell you why, except it would probably be why I cry over any of these things, from Eve Carson to any of the school shootings. It is always needless and tragic and horrible no matter what the age of the people involved. But someone your own age, someone you could have conceivably hung out with, had classes with, even just vaguely knew. Someone who was just beginning to go places, who was doing such good. And to be killed like that, over someone else's stupidity? What do you even say? That's why they have those assemblies, that's why they try to scare the shit out of you. I've sat in the passenger seat of cars of friends who had a few drinks hours before we leave the bar, taking backroads to avoid cops and random breathalyzers, bemoaning the Fairfield police. But that's why.

Everyone's got a story like this, though. Hopefully you aren't just working against the tide.

"What I want is to be told that this is solid and that it means something"

It's starting to feel like spring. Sunny & warm(er) than its been for months. I'm getting restless. Craving things I'm not actually sure I want, just sure that I want something. Amy & I leave for Europe in two and a half weeks. Time goes by. There's still so much to be done--essays to write, preparations to be made. All I want (well, not all) is seventy degrees & sun dresses; long, long hair again. A stack of books I keep meaning to read. Vodka & lemonade. Simple stuff.

This week I saw both Jane Goodall & Ruth Padel, the great-great-granddaughter of Charles Darwin speak. Both were amazing--these phenomenal, captivating, spirited older women who have done such interesting, important things. Goodall was quieter, passionate but even-tempered. Wiser, somehow. Padel--witty, acerbic, her poetry brilliant. I never really think of science as being beautiful--I never really think of science at all--but it's true; her friend was right. The attention to detail; the precision required, it's all the same. It is vital you teach that in schools, vital you engage children with it, vital for lots of reasons. She's up for Professor of Poetry, Padel, and I signed up to volunteer the day of the elections. It could be quite interesting--the people you'd see.

My fiction tutorial takes place in my tutor's study, and this week we were interrupted by a phone call, and a quite intimate one at that. Her mother is in the hospital, suffering from dementia, on her "last lap" as my tutor put it, and sitting there, staring fixedly out the window, wanting to seem invisible as she talked to various doctors, I had to blink back tears, fight away thoughts of my own grandmother and a similiar situation. "I'm so sorry," I said when she got off the phone, but what else do you say? There's no place for commiseration, really. She took a breath, picked up my story, dived back in. Compartmentalize. You compartmentalize. I used to be quite good at that. These days, less and less.

There has been a lot of 'future' talk as of late--planning for senior year, planning for graduate school, planning even for after that. I have to remind myself to stay in the present, to not constantly compare myself to my mother, to what she had accomplished at my age. 21 and about to graduate from Yale, about to marry my father. A year later, juggling Columbia & a waitressing position at a shit Howard Johnson's in the Village. Then five years in Greece under the military junta, not seeing her parents for five years, just phone calls at Christmas. A doctorate after that; lots of things after that. Though maybe no one gets the future they think they'll have. It's never perfect, is it?

Still. There are things I want to do, lots of things. I want to have my own adventures. My own accomplishments. I already do, I know, but there are fears I need to overcome. "Submit," my tutor keeps telling me. "Send things out. You're good. You can be published." And yet I don't--not to anything besides Oxford & Sarah Lawrence literary magazines--because I'm not sure how good I actually am. I stumbled upon my tutor's blog, and she wrote about me--called me a rising star. Of course it doesn't matter what anyone says, if I don't actually do these things. Take risks. I'm learning, really.

I've been eating too much crap lately. Now I'm leaning towards early mornings, fruit & yogurt, meandering walks. I guess that's what happens when you live on pizza & oatmeal, late nights & later mornings. Your body starts to rebel. I bank on the fact that really, I've always been small & thin, but even so, I could do with a change. Even now though, it's hard to fight against that troublesome instinct to cut back entirely when I feel things getting out of hand. "You are not the same girl then as you were now. That's a good thing"--Amy, of course.

Katie & I had a long heart-to-heart a few days ago. I'm really glad I'm living where I'm living; of the people that I get to share this experience with.

"You've got to own your own days & name them, each one of them, every one of them, or else the years go right by & none of them belong to you" --That might be my new goal.

Went on a search for a swingset last Saturday, when, like today, the weather was beautiful. Was unsuccessful on that front, but spent a lovely hour wandering around Jericho, which I had yet to explore. I'm looking forward to roaming Oxford & London in the days before and after my European adventures.

What else has happened? A pancake party for 'pancake day' last Tuesday--English and American style; tea with Roxy; Revolutionary Road with Rand, which I enjoyed, though it doesn't exactly make you long for Connecticut--I kept explaining to people afterwards, that really, it's not like that, I promise. Taboo & wine with the Williams boys; dinner tomorrow with the Williams girls. Drinks last night with the Williams boys. Emma's birthday party today. Balls next term. I need to find an actual gown. My hair is now dark red & I'm in the middle of Christopher Isherwood's Goodbye to Berlin. Bath on Friday. London the week after that.

Drink, work, sleep. Bask in the sun. Flirtatiousness & debauchery. Life is as usual.


My next entry will not be so long--or after so much of an absence. Really. Promise.

"step, step right over the line and onto borrowed time"

Jeff, this entry is for you, since, as you pointed out last night (and with all due sincerity) it has been two weeks since my last blog post, and isn't it about time I write something?

Lets see. There was major emotional turmoil two weeks ago, arising from two different situations, which ultimately gave rise to some interesting conversations, including one which will be the discussion topic at WomCam next week--female solidarity.

I continue to enjoy my fiction tutorial, though I've discovered now, in order to generate ideas I need to get out of the flat, walk, be around people. Otherwise the day just slips by stagnantly and I start to go a little nuts.

I read Virginia Woolf's The Waves last week, and I adored it. It might be the first thing I've read all year that really, truly resonated with me on a deeper level than just surface admiration for the complexity of the prose or the loveliness of a particular sentence (i.e. Tender is the Night or Farewell to Arms). It was also one of those books that you struggle to hold onto after you've finished. It starts to feel like a dream you had months ago, where you thought, for a moment, it all made sense, you had it all figured out, and then the phone rings, the alarm goes off, you wake up and forget what it was exactly you dreamed in the first place. Still. Much of what she ruminated on--at least what I focused on--was art & nature; how you survive; the responsibility one has to one's friends, to one's self; what you lose by distancing yourself from the world--or if that distance is vital. All things I've been thinking about, at one point or another. Bernard, one of the six characters in the novel, and, in some ways, an amalgamation of Woolf herself, is forever the observer, left to record his friend's stories in lieu of his own, because somewhere along the way, he didn't get around to making his own. He was passive, always searching for the "true story," unable to see the beauty in the natural world anymore than he could in a touch between lovers.

I've been considering applying to Oxford directly after I graduate to do a Master's in Literature (1900-Present), though who knows if I would even get in. If I didn't, I would just work for a year, in some aspect of the publishing industry, and even if I did, I'd still apply afterwards to get my MFA. Stay in school, delay the inevitable, I can't give up writing or literature. So why not continue them both, at least for a while. If I can, if it's possible. Anyway. There's a wonderful quote in The Waves which made me feel, for a moment, that the last thing I should do is spend more time in a classroom--that I should be out living, experiencing, crafting my own story (which, I think, I already am):

"that would be a glorious life, to addict oneself to perfection; to follow the curve of the sentence wherever it might lead, into deserts, under drifts of sand, regardless of lures, of seductions; to be poor always and unkempt; to be ridiculous in Piccadilly"

This one too:

“Should I seek out some tree? Should I desert these form rooms and libraries, and the broad yellow page in which I read Catullus, for woods and fields? Should I walk under beech trees, or saunter along the river bank, where the trees meet united like lovers in the water? But nature is too vegetable, too vapid. She has only sublimities and vastitudes and water and leaves. I begin to wish for firelight, privacy, and the limbs of one person”

Valentine's Day was Saturday, and instead of bemoaning the fact that this year I happen to be unattached, I realized, in a fleeting moment in the midst of a delicious spending spree, that this was the first time since I was sixteen years old that I haven't been in a destructive sexual relationship / pseudo-relationship with anyone. Which, I think, is something to be celebrated. I baked brownies, and ate them for dinner, drank strawberry wine coolers while wearing a polka dotted silk slip and massive Lolilta sunglasses, and spent the night with some of my favorite girls, getting drunk off champagne and raspberries and vodka shirley temples, singing along to Celine Dion. All is well.

Europe planning is more complicated than I had foreseen, but in a month from yesterday, Amy and I will be on our way to Paris, then the Riviera, then Geneva, Lausanne, Lake Como, Venice, Rome, Vienna, Prague, Amsterdam, then back to Paris one month later just as our Eurail passes run out at midnight. How very Cinderella.

I also got in touch with the author of a fantastic manuscript I read this summer, which was then picked up, and is going to be published sometime next year. It's one of those things, where, as the intern, all the difference you make happens behind the scenes--the authors have no idea who's the first to read their manuscript, even though the interns are who make the majority of the intial slush acceptance/rejection decisions, I'd say. It was nice to actually speak up, congratulate her, see how excited she was to hear about me. It felt rather rewarding.

It's hard to believe half the year has gone by. It feels like I'll be here forever (in the best way).

"it looks like rain tonight, and thank god, because a clear sky just wouldn't feel right"

I think you find the little pieces of good in every day & keep going. I think you have to do that. Otherwise, the world is too dark of a place.

I don't understand why these things happen. You can talk them in circles for hours, analyze power dynamics and culture dynamics to death, talk about what it means to be a feminist, what society's definitions of masculinity imply, what responsibilities we owe each other. You can talk about the system and talk about justice, you can talk until there's nothing left to say because you've said it all and you're tired of discussing these things but you still have to because it hasn't gotten any better. Maybe in time. Maybe you keep fighting this fight because someone has to, and someday it will change things, and someday it will get better. You take the small steps and look at the big picture and hope against hope that it will matter.

Maybe you wake up in the morning, after having barely slept, a night not as bad, but close to, the night you had yourself two and a half years ago, and you look outside, at the sun rising, and the patches of snow, burning eyes and head aspin, and you take a breath. Because that's the only thing you can do, that is all you control. You give back what you can, you provide what you can. You look ahead. You slow down, for a moment, for a day, and then you keep going.



I don't know if that's the right thing to do, but it's what you have to do.

My brain is in a fog, I slept three hours later than I had planned, due to being so impossibly hungover I scared the shit out of Amy when she found me unelegantly sprawled on the hallway floor, begging to be put of my misery, and because I started my essay so late, my plans for this afternoon/evening of hanging out with people, and going to Evensong at the University Cathedral in Radcliffe Square are shot as well. And this essay is not going to be good. I enjoyed Tender is the Night, but I can't seem to hold onto a cohesive thread of arguement. I have too much textual evidence to use for an eight page paper, and not enough critical back up. Ugh.

Enough complaining, back to work.