very flattered to be included in Janet Skeslien Charles' interview series with writers in Paris. with the gorgeous weather, we sat outside at Place Colette & talked writing... check out Janet's blog here
weirdly, we realized that we've both been escorted from a train in Belarus at gun-point. Janet managed to get a temporary visa, whereas i got sent back to Warsaw--perhaps the regime had simply gotten harsher over time. my original goal was Moscow, where i was hoping to arrive at this lovely train station. i did eventually get to Moscow, and ate a memorable breakfast across from the train station. but i wonder if either of us will ever really visit Belarus? the new national library is vast and sparkling. very Orwellian--a huge symbol of freedom of expression in a country known for censorship.
now i know i wasn't hallucinating when i saw a huge football-shaped airship hovering over Gare du Nord. there really was a 75-metre long zeppelin floating around Paris last week.
normally, massive zeppelins do not crisscross the sky above the Paris train stations--though they have been seen, historically (the Prussians used one to bomb the city in 1916 & killed 17 people).
last week, there were sightings all across Paris as the airship cruised around measuring the radiation in our skies. this wasn't because of the tragedy in Japan, but simply a routine annual operation, to keep tabs on normal air quality and radioactivity in the French capital--or at least that's the government line, and they're sticking to it. the zeppelin hovered at around 100 metres up--roughly the 2nd floor of the Eiffel Tower, so really not very high. other cities have apartments with balconies higher than this zeppelin.
the zeppelin over Paris was very plain & utilitarian-looking. [take a look, here] but since spotting it, i've been thinking of Thomas Pynchon's novel, Against the Day. i really admire Pynchon--I especially loved Mason & Dixon, and i wanted to love this hodgepodge airship crew, but by the end i just felt annoyed, as if five different novels had jumped into my head at once, with all the characters running around waving their arms in the air yelling 'look at me! look at me!'
and yet it starts so promisingly... (excerpts from the first pages of the 1120-page novel):
“Hurrah! Up we go!”
It was amid such lively exclamation that the hydrogen skyship Inconvenience, its gondola draped with patriotic bunting, carrying a five-lad crew belonging to that celebrated aeronautics club known as the Chums of Chance, ascended briskly into the morning, and soon caught the southerly wind. […]
At one end of the gondola, largely oblivious to the coming and going on deck, with his tail thumping expressively now and then against the planking, and his nose among the pages of a volume by Mr. Henry James, lay a dog of no particular breed, to all appearances absorbed by the text before him.”
[intrigued by Against the Day? visit its wiki. And don't say I didn't warn you.]
went out last night into rainy Paris to see Robert Lepage's Eonnagata...the show was very flawed, but it was a wonderful excuse to visit the Theatre des Champs-Elysees, built by one of my favourite French architects, the often-radical August Perret.
in 1913, his newly-opened theatre was the site of one of the more interesting riots in Parisian history...because this is where Stravinsky's Rites of Spring was first performed.
Stravinsky's music was booed, and Nijinsky's choreography infuriated the crowd--one elderly Duchess apparently thought the whole thing was some kind of hoax. (here's a great description) But the producer, Diaghilev, was serene... Stravinsky later wrote:
"After the 'performance' we were excited, angry, disgusted, and . . . happy. I went with Diaghilev and Nijinsky to a restaurant... Diaghilev's only comment was 'Exactly what I wanted.' He certainly looked contented. No one could have been quicker to understand the publicity value, and he immediately understood the good thing that had happened in that respect. Quite probably he had already thought about the possibility of such a scandal when I first played him the score, months before, in the east corner ground room of the Grand Hotel in Venice.”
for a great recreation of this moment, there's the film 'Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky' --check out the first 27 seconds of this promo video, below (and then go see the movie! it's gorgeous.)
last night, it was a thrill to look down from my seat in the gods, to see the old fauteuils--because this theatre has small armchairs on its main floor, not fixed theatre seats. And whenever my interest in Lepage's performance waned, i thought about Josephine Baker, who made her premiere here with the Revue Negre in 1925. Baker took Paris by storm, from this very stage. showered with jewelry & marriage proposals after every performance. she wryly said, "Beautiful? It's all a question of luck. I was born with good legs. As for the rest...beautiful, no. Amusing, yes." interesting quote--because watching the few remaining early clips of her Revue dances, what's really surprising is her great comedic timing. she's a real live wire on stage--making crazy faces, laughing at herself, goofing around--and yes, dancing & singing. no wonder Paris was amazed.
so, yes, Eonnagata was disappointing (Lepage was interesting on stage, as were the two dancers, but the overall concept just didn't work. everyone seemed under-utilized, the movements were predictable, and even the late Alexander McQueen's costumes were dull), BUT i still had a great evening thinking about performance & art. maybe part of the point of performance is to risk failure--or at least, to risk being ridiculous, at least some of the time.
reading Robert Kroetsch's A Likely Story, i'm thinking that blogs are much more like scrapbooks, open to the public, rather than private journals, secret diaries. we collate present-day links with ideas, magpie shiny images, and somehow this
"implies a larger whole, an organized universe, an explanatory mythology, from which the scrap was taken... A scrapbook is made up of stories--and of gaps and silences. A scrapbook is a kind of code; the code allows us to bring into play whole areas of memory." - Kroetsch
two shiny scraps that caught my eye this past week: first, my friend Sue Chenette writing about Paris, specifically the city's relationship to language
and, thinking about books, a rather brilliant tank re-purposing:
this is a great ferris wheel--old & slow, it is set up every summer in the Tuileries Gardens. this is the first time i've actually taken the trip.
i especially like the pigeon sitting on the head of the statue, which is apparently "Monsieur Fery"--no relation, as far as i know, to the Ferris Wheel. and the "non non non" from a nearby passenger, whose chair was being set spinning. but most of all i like the view in all directions...
turns out bees are thriving in cities...and Paris has some great examples. despite the die-offs in working pollination bees (used for large-scale commercial farming), bees in urban environments are doing just fine. maybe that's not so surprising: cities have a great selection of flowers for the bees' delectation (whereas so many acres & acres of our farmland is now mono-cropped & covered in pesticides, which is hard on the bees.) in Paris, i like to visit the beehives at the Luxembourg Gardens (taking care not to walk on the grass, of course!) but the most bizarre beehive location is on top of the Grand Palais, the immense glass-domed exhibition space. the bee-keeper has quite the view! and i'd love to tell the tourists, touring the Opera Garnier, about the bees...i like the idea of the Opera being haunted by bees rather than Andrew Lloyd Weber.
French writer Daniel Pennac is currently reading Herman Melville's Bartleby, nightly, on a little side-street not far from the Paris Opera. it's billed as a theatre piece, and it sort of is--the audience sits in the theatre, Pennac is on stage, he is beautifully lit, there is a backdrop of sorts (an elegantly evocative sail-cloth, hung from the wings). but really, Pennac simply reads the story to us.
story-telling isn't exactly trendy, but when it's well-done, a sold-out theatre of people hang on every word. i think Melville would be contented by Pennac's rendition of his story, assuming he could understand the French. the translation is elegant and sparse and forced me to focus on the story, the choice of words.
these photos are from last week's flash mob. it's rare in Paris to have a gathering that isn't patrolled by the rather frightening security police, but this event, organized largely through blogs & cellphones, swam under the police radar.
at noon exactly on February 18th, people gathered to read aloud for 5 minutes at Place St-Michel--a traditional mob gathering place, not far from the medieval origins of the Sorbonne. the flash-mob was organzied as a protest against cuts to funding for arts education. we need a similar protest in Canada...
first, imagine a great crowd of people, each of them holding a book. a whistle blows, and for five minutes, each of these people becomes deeply immersed in that book, reading aloud. imagine the muttering, declaiming, murmuring sound...
the snow is already melting from one of my favourite Paris streets. the domes of Sacre Coeur looked particularly eerie through this morning's snow.
same street, looking the other way across Place Dalida...i keep coming back to this corner & thinking about different ways to work it into a novel. obviously needs some more time to percolate...
good excuse to visit Le Refuge, a few blocks away, with its Art Deco interior & great people-watching perch. the walls are decorated with paintings & photos taken by patrons through all kinds of weather, including a great one of the cafe in an evening snowstorm.
i did eventually get to Moscow, and ate a memorable breakfast across from the train station. but i wonder if either of us will ever really visit Belarus? the new national library is vast and sparkling. very Orwellian--a huge symbol of freedom of expression in a country known for censorship.
