A Sundry Assortment of Thoughts

One of the pleasures of just walking about Paris is musing on the names of the streets. Paris has the very oddest names for its boulevards and streets. Often they are history lessons. Generals, Presidents, dignitaries, scientists, writers, and thinkers of all nations are here – there is Avenue de President Wilson, much bigger and grander than the Boulevard Auguste Blanqui, who was President of the Third Republic. There is my street – Rue Abel Hovelacque, named after an anthropologist. There is the Avenue José Maria de Heredia, an obscure poet. Someday, if not already, Serge Gainsbourg will have his own street. I am sure of it. And then there are dates – the insidious Juin 1940, when Paris fell to the Germans. Aout 1944, when it was liberated. And there are the much more mysterious references – Rue de la Reine Blanche. Avenue des Gobelins. Who or what was the White Queen? What are Gobelins? The answer is obscured, and we stroll on ignorant of their significance, but intrigued nonetheless. Then there are the humorously mundane: Rue de la Boulangerie. Bakery Street. Rue des Moulins de Pres: Street of the Windmills in the Fields? There are no numbered avenues here – the implicit order of the grid required for such nomenclature is lost in the chaos of medieval cow paths and who knows what else the crucible of history has produced to create Paris.

No, I think we Anglo-Saxons could care less about what our streets are named. Fifth Avenue – how bland in sound, yet how grand in actuality! The French knew that a street was going to be grand, so they called it Les Champs Elysées: The Elysian Fields, the closest the ancient Greeks ever got to Heaven. We Anglo-Saxons usually get lazy, and leave the names from whatever the Native Americans had called the area – this does lead to some fantastically strange highways in the South in particular (drive through Alabama, Louisiana and Western Tennessee if you simply must see for yourself), but they mean nothing to us besides an occasional stumble in pronunciation. We do have streets named after famous people, but they are usually generals and conquerors with a nice tint of American nostalgia: Washington Avenue, Columbus Avenue, Lafayette Street. But! God forbid we honor those pesky intellectuals and artists, save the ones that are really, really famous. Walt Whitman has no street in Washington DC, nor does Henry Thoreau, nor does Ambrose Bierce. It’s not wrong or bad that things are this way, just different. We esteem our thinkers in different ways: impoverishing them, not teaching our children about them, putting their works on the discount rack in Barnes and Noble.

If I ever have any sort of power of suggestion in Washington (which means never), I’m giving Kurt Vonnegut, Henry Rollins, and Nathanael Parker Willis their own grand streets right away. And while I’m at it, I’ll throw in an April 1865 and a White Queen, just for fun.

Last night I watched Jean Luc Godard's film "Breathless" (A Bout de Souffle) at a little independent cinema in the Latin Quarter. The film was part of a repertory series called "Smoke Screens" (Les Ecrans de Fumee) - a focus on the role of smoking in cinema and in watching cinema. Imagine how well this series would go in America! The link between classic film and smoking is undeniable, but in the States we just seem to say "Oh, they didn't know back then..." Apparently they still don't know in France, though the cigarette packages all have SMOKING KILLS written on them in huge letters. As for Breathless, I don't think I've ever seen two people smoke more in a movie.

Before seeing the movie, I visited the Ile St. Louis. Notre Dame de Paris is on the Ile de la Cité, and the Ile St. Louis is the slightly less visited island right to it on the Seine. There were still a lot of tourists, but it was somehow quieter, calmer. The five or six streets on the island are all not much wider than alleyways, and ice cream shops, cafés, and art galleries - each of a distinct look - line the ground level from one end of the island to the other. The quays of the island are much less crowded than those along the Right or Left banks, though equally tranquil. And now, the highlight of my story: I bought my first piece of art there! Actually, I bought two pieces of art. Passing by a gallery, I saw the name "Tim Sale" written on the poster on the window. Tim Sale is a comic book artist, known for working on Batman: The Long Halloween, Spiderman Blue, Daredevil: Yellow, and doing the artwork for the show Heroes. Intrigued, I went inside and was privileged to see original panels from the above comics. Then I chanced across a series of 90 prints that Sale had done and signed himself. Each was numbered and everything. Knowing my good friend John is a much bigger fan of the artist than I was, I decided to buy one for him. And then I thought more, and decided it would be neat to have one for myself as well. I think it was meant to be: there were only 2 left. "Vous avez de la chance." the girl working the exhibition told me. Indeed.

I felt like I had really accomplished something as I left the gallery and carried my precious cargo home. I am the owner of a piece of art! By a semi-famous artist! Somehow I feel more complete, more like I have tasted a sublime aspect of life heretofore unattained, all the more because I bought it in Paris.

A quick note about AUP students: I expected, on coming to France, that I would meet a lot of open-minded Americans who wouldn't have the sense of entitlement that I have seen in an upsetting number of NU students. Well, I was wrong. Not 100% wrong, as I have met a few interesting and open-minded individuals, but nonetheless, I have been let down on several occasions. I don't know what causes this - AUP is pretty expensive, so maybe the students who come here are generally born with several spoons in their mouths? Or they like to pretend that they were? Then again, many AUP students are visiting, like myself, and come from less pretentious schools (with the exception of the bundle of NYU students here). And they too can give off this grating sense of entitlement. Since when did professors have to bend to your whims or give you good grades because you are paying money to go here? College is sink or swim, folks, or so I'd always believed.

A few days ago, I was by the Seine and a man rode by me on his bicycle with his child in one of those backpack carriers. As he passed, the child looked at me and said "Connard!" (Asshole!), very sweetly. The man pedalled away and didn't say a word. I stood, awestruck. French people, even children, can be very randomly mean.

Last night I was eating dinner next to an American couple who were arguing, in English of course, over what to name their child. They were drawing names from all over the place, including Shakespeare and classic Hollywood and Greek myth. I'm pretty sure no one else in the restaurant knew what they were talking about. I felt as if I should have reached out to them - "Claire is a pretty name. Or how about Desdemona?" But that would have been ridiculous. And I am relatively sure that, eventually, they knew I was at least English speaking, because I was sitting there reading Henry James' The American. And yet, for a solid hour we went on unacknowledging, both speaking to the waitress in French. It was a singularly bizarre experience; I felt as if I should talk to these people because I could, and yet, I should not have because they were just trying to have a nice dinner together - in a foreign country. I'm not even sure if I can describe how strange that was for me. If the same couple were having a conversation like that in Boston, I would not have thought twice.