Strangers in Paris

am so pleased to be part of a new Paris anthology, edited by Megan Fernandes & the illustrious, frequently top-hatted David Barnes.

Strangers in Paris is a museum of experience and objects that is anything but iconic; the collection establishes a new hunt for language worthy of a changing city. It is possible to find Paris in these pages, but it is just as possible to find everything else.

Launches have been happening in Canada & Paris & New York, and i've somehow managed to be in the wrong city at the wrong time to miss each & every one of them so far...but hey, it's amazing technology, this book thing, possible to experience even if one misses the launch.

in the official blurb about the anthology, Tightrope says: The stunning variety of writing in this volume addresses the city of Paris in all its complexity, while challenging the mythology of expatriate Parisian literature. The anthology contains entries as diverse and disparate as an excerpt from John Berger’s novel, Here is Where We Meet; Suzanne Allen’s ekphrastic poetry, a tongue-in-cheek take on the nineteenth-century novel by Helen Cusack O’Keeffe; Canadian writer Lisa Pasold’s story of a forced extended stay in Paris; and an interview with the celebrated American poet Alice Notley.

i'm so pleased to be part of the book...and i'm particularly sorry i missed the KGB event, as it was one of my favourite literary booze locations when i lived in New York back in the dark ages (ie. the Giuliani years). i wonder if KGB (above) still has the series of Stalin's official photographs--where Stalin's colleagues were mysteriously air-brushed out over the years, very creepily.

order info for the book here...or find it at Shakespeare & Co in Paris.

Montreal street corner

standing at the corner of Saint-Laurent & Laurier, i notice this plaque by Gilbert Boyer. i've only walked past this corner a thousand or so times since this was installed in 1988, to notice it for the first time on this appropriately hot lazy Montreal day. perhaps i've just never before waited for the light to change...

this corner is part of a larger project--the whole layout of the art piece is here, but i'm going to keep Boyer's words in reserve, to stumble across serendipitously when the weather's just right.

eating & reading Savannah

The sidewalk in Savannah, Georgia, shines with mother-of-pearl from the old oyster shells buried in the concrete. Forget streets paved with gold...i'll take oyster shells any day. Mostly to eat (because there is no better town for food in the whole USofA). But the streets are also wonderful for book-browsing, as i discovered when i stumbled upon the marvellous indie bookshop E. Shaver Booksellers, which nestles beneath the Spanish moss of a live oak.

I expected a shop dedicated to tourist books & innumerable editions of Midnight in the Garden of Good & Evil (which kicked off the historical district's relentless walking tours). But Esther Shaver's bookshop is much much more, a real resource for readers and writers. See what i mean by checking out their current recommended reading list--the kind of bookshop where you can throw a dart & know you'll hit something interesting. (no, don't actually DO this or you'll stab the bookseller.)

After Shaver's, i walked around wondering what Midnight author John Berendt is working on these days. His follow-up to Midnight was a book about Venice, which didn't suit him so well as the lazy hot streets of Savannah. I tried to be positive when i reviewed his City of Falling Angels for The Globe & Mail in 2005: 'Berendt's charm as a raconteur suits the narrow Venetian streets, but some of his stories lead straight into a dead-end calle.'

Later, i read an even more cutting review by Jan Morris, travel writer & Venice expert extraordinaire. Reviews are hard...should you always be honest? Well, yes... But i still love Midnight in the Garden. And wandering around Savannah as a tourist, it's hard to imagine the city without Berendt's book.

ps. here's a full list of bookshops in Savannah, including Shaver's address

inspired Orlando

a big thank you to everyone who made the 'Don't Just Sit There' workshop happen in Orlando! i had a wonderful time talking writing with people today. such a gorgeous day, too...i felt honoured that people spent their beautiful Saturday cloistered in a room with me, discussing the writing life. it was especially interesting talking about WHERE we write best...and it's not always the most beautiful and comfortable chair in the house...

taking a bite out of malaria

today is the 4th annual World Malaria Day. for the first time in 50 years, we might actually be able to defeat malaria--which killed 781 000 people in 2009. take a second to digest that number. it's a crazy number, especially when a simple mosquito net can vastly cut the infection rate.

what's inspiring about this? we're actually making progress--a rare & wonderful reason to celebrate this day.

hot chocolate, writing, and Belarus

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.

zeppelin over Paris

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.]

if i ever get an iPad or kindle, i’m making it a cover that says DON’T PANIC. there's even a site with instructions for various designs.

“...he also had a device which looked rather like a largish electronic calculator. This had about a hundred tiny flat press buttons and a screen about four inches square on which any one of a million ‘pages’ could be summoned at a moment’s notice. It looked insanely complicated, and this was one of the reasons why the snug plastic cover it fitted into had the words DON’T PANIC printed on it in large friendly letters.
[…]
Arthur turned it over nervously in his hands. ‘I like the cover,’ he said. ‘Don’t Panic. It’s the first helpful or intelligible thing anybody’s said to me all day.’”

– Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979)