textual excursions

today i saw Visconti's adaptation of l'étranger. it was quite lovely. i didn't cry but was swept by several waves of emotion. nicely depicted. i need more Visconti now. lucky for saturday night. Anna Karina's performance was quite disappointing (though i guess it's not the best character ever), but Marcello Mastrionni was great (despite being more butch than the Meursault I imagine). and it was kind of odd that everyone spoke italian in french-algeria.


then i walked to Place Saint Sulpice, where Georges Perec wrote Tentative d'épuisement d'un lieu parisien. I sat on a chair and didn't feel anything. i faced an Yves Saint Laurent shop, and to my right was Lacroix. yes, i think this place has changed in the last 36 years. it smelt of money, it was very clean, there was little trace of what Perec found here. though i did see a number 70 bus go past.

love runs smooth. i received three emails from him today. i sent him two. saturday night is confirmed.

fiercely independent

me: so you describe yourself as 'fiercely independent'?
he: yes.
i nod.

he: would you describe yourself as fiercely independent?
me: yes.
he nods.

i think it's love. impossible love.

we're going to see a visconti film on saturday night. a restored print of Le Guépard.

impossible, romantic, love.

potentially torturous, but i think i have a strategy.

splashing around

i have a date in just over two hours. he has a beautiful name and a beautiful face. he reads beautiful books. i'm nervous, but i'm not. i'm concerned, but not. i'm feeling ugly, but not. i think i need a haircut and some different clothes (so bored with these ones). but nothing matters that much. i'm just creating drama because it's easier to think about these things than what's happening in Tunisia, or Queensland, or my academic career (if there ever was one).

it's grey outside. drizzle all day. pleuve is like pleure. rain is like tears. and in learning french i surprise myself by finding such similarities between new words, new and old words, or between the sound (the word spoken) and the thing it represents. but i guess language has only ever been an ocean of metaphor.

night life

i know i should go and see chicks on speed tonight. and i really want to. but after a very long walk, a meal, and two glasses of wine, i feel somewhat sunken into this bed and this warm room, and i feel ready to forfeit. it's probably raining... it's far away... there's no guarantee of tickets on the door... etc.

so now i'm playing fast busy music, drinking coffee, waking myself out of this pikedom. my time here has been quiet, introverted, full of respite, and so an adventure wouldn't go astray. yet i find it difficult to really care about my quiet life. because i like it. one day, recently, i didn't leave the apartment or have any spoken communication. it was a good day. hermits get such a bad rap. and really, i've seen chicks twice already. will they be any different?

i have a new friend and we email each other about books. it's nice. maybe i can stay in and read books. i seem to be acquiring many. tonight i found alain robbe-grillet's pour un nouveau roman for 2 euro. i read the first couple of pages on the metro while small children kicked, watched and poked me, vying for my attention. they were very cute (except the one having a tantrum).

"who wants something real when you can have nothing"

soundtrack for today:



it plays as i get out of the shower, where i'd been deep in thought, and composing something to write here. the shower is quite a handy thinking space. is it the water? the shedding of clothes and dirt? or being away from a computer, pen, and spaces where words are read, written, and spoken? (ie. everywhere, like today's clouds).

24 hours alone in which to think about myself. and i'm processing conversations that took place in this room, on the internet, and in the past. conversations whose edges blur so that they leak into each other and i can't remember where they happened or the actual words said. so i create a new conversation with myself. it's about how the subject in process (let's say me) depends upon an ongoing separation with others (let's say you). and in doing so, we critique each other constantly. within this critique is a delineation of self, an affirmation of one's self - "i would not do that (or say that / be that / etc.) because i am me. and i like to think that i'm better / wiser / nicer than that. but really, i'm not. because in performing this, and to approve of myself, i need to disapprove of you. and perhaps here i am cruel, judgmental, or uncaring. in such moments i'm performing for an audience of myself (asserting my self). and i'm forgetting that you and other others have a much better vantage point of this performance.

but anyway, i guess it's necessary to critique the other in order to be. though i tell myself (and others) that it's wrong to do this. i don't want to bitch / judge / hate. but i continue, and i go on living, and trying to make sense of my subjective boundaries. but alas, i'm too close to see a clear line of where you and i differ. maybe we don't

oh dear, another post-structural rant. i guess paris might be the place to have them after all.

let go of the wheel, turn your ass over... (girls)

i'm the real tourist

The tourist, it seems, is the lowest of the low. No other group has such a uniformly bad press. Tourists are continually subject to sneers and have no antidefamation league. Animal imagery seems their inevitable lot: they are said to move in droves, herds, swarms, or flocks; they are as mindless and docile as sheep but as annoying as a plague of insects when they descend upon a spot they have ‘discovered’.
(Culler 1990)

thanks jessie for sending me this article. it arrived at a nice time, when i'm processing my own 'away' existence that lies somewhere between tourist/resident, and in which i'm guilty of seeking a more authentic experience of awayness.

lenny and i chatted today about our different styles of photographing paris. he says he gets my everyday thing, but asks how the tour eiffel is not also part of the everyday. he argues that for many parisians it is. a few days ago (at the pompidou) he asked me to photograph him with the tour eiffel in the distant background. i didn't want to but eventually did. i felt conflicted. he says he can't understand my hatred of this monument. i explain that my hatred is not of the monument (i've never 'really' seen it), but of its symbolism. i hate that for many, it is paris. and i guess i hate that it interferes with my paris.

neither of us would photograph sydney opera house. i suggest that it's pointless because, like the tour eiffel, you can just google it and there it is, shot from every possible angle. so why bother? i don't need to see the tour eiffel to know its shape. i can't not know it. i can't not imagine it. and i guess my refusal to visit it (let alone photograph it) could be about my struggle for authenticity, as Culler suggests. for in doing so, i raise myself above the 'herd'.

and yes, i love it when i get mistaken for a local, when french people ask for directions. it means i'm passing, that i'm falling into step with the locals. when i walk the streets with a bag of groceries, bread, food to prepare at home, i'm a resident. i have a kitchen, a bed, a door code, a place to not simply stay, but to live (whatever that means). and these walls belong to a subleasing resident; this is not a hotel. i fend for myself, and this makes it more real to me. yet i also understand that it's not real. this experience is very much mediated by my being away from home. tourist or not, i do not belong here. and whilst i might pretend, i know that this is pretense.

this neighbourhood houses no monuments and there's little english spoken here. there are piles of broken furniture on the streets, discarded xmas trees, posses of french-african teens on corners. this is a paris i feel more comfortable with because it's uncomfortable. it's different to my usual existence and i'm forced to contemplate this broken furniture (evictions?), my concerns about 'gangs', my understandings of poverty, violence, immigration, noise, mess, etc. the domestic argument that echoed through the stairwell a few days ago was difficult to stomach. but it's there (with or without me) and i guess i'd rather 'experience' it if this can help to broaden/complicate my understanding of how people live.

i can accept that this neighbourhood might even be hostile to me and my bourgeois pursuit of the everyday. it probably should be. and i should be made to question that. and this tension of wanting to belong but knowing that i cannot is one i quite enjoy. it generates material to contemplate, write, and grapple with.

so yes, partly this is about a pursuit of authenticity, but i think it's something else too. i don't think i fit into either of the camps that Culler discusses - the tourist or the traveler. for there's no touring and very little traveling. i'm just staying, and most of my time is spent in my neighbourhood or in my apartment. so my distaste for tourism is not simply to conjure my authenticity, though obviously it's useful in elevating myself higher towards a more original experience of paris (therefore, it conjures my paris).

my suitcase has been stowed away, hidden, out of sight. my fridge is stocked like at home, but not, because it has food that i don't eat at home, things that aren't readily available there. but there are similar habits, practices, routines that stay with me wherever i go. and so here in my paris, i'm both here and there, home and away, myself and not myself. i think in english and (attempt to) speak in french. schizophrenic, i lose my way on these streets. lost, i happen upon pastries whose flavours take me elsewhere.

this morning i walked along a canal. i walked over bridges, under bridges, and past bridges. it was new territory but not too far from 'home'. i ate an almond croissant which i believed to be the best almond croissant i'd ever tasted. i made a mental note of the patisserie location, for i hope to return. yet i know that i might not because experience tells me that i forget locations, that i lose my way, that in seeking an old patisserie i'm more likely to discover a new one. and maybe it's not really the best almond croissant anyway because my memory isn't perfect and the amount of pastry i consume is quite high. but i like to think it's the best, particularly there, in the moment when i'm walking the cold morning streets and feeling its warmth and sweetness fall inside me.

perhaps nothing of that moment was new or authentic. yet surely a spasm of pleasure that resembles something new is just as good, if not better, than the real thing. and maybe that's the paris that i can carry with me always, wherever i go, like a tour eiffel pendant.

né pour courir

...means 'born to run'. i found the expression accidentally, in researching a writer i long to read. so i added it to my spreadsheet of new words, as i push myself closer to reading new books, and old books in a new language. or the language they were born into.

christine angot writes autofiction. having explained my style of writing, a french man/lover told me my writing sounds like this. so i'm curious, and want to read.

today i remember bruce springsteen and how i haven't listened to the born to run album in quite some time. i play it now.

yesterday i went to the pompidou. i didn't want to, but was seduced by the mondrian exhibition. i also liked the sound of Gabriel Orozco's work, which is about celebrating the everyday. but i was underwhelmed. then i walked into the Saãdane Afif exhibit, Anthologie de l'humour noir (anthology of black humour, a reference to Breton), and i smiled a lot.


in the centre of the room is a sculpture of the pompidou as coffin. on the walls are song lyrics by 12 friends of sàadane whom were asked to respond to the sculpture. there's a few aluminium cylinders cast from a mould of a pompidou bollard (also commissioned works), but they are barely noticeable, despite intermittent spotlights falling upon them. they are dead matter. unlike the words on the wall, which of course, are all about death - of art, artists, institutions, and more. funny, absurd, satirical, words.

i didn't want to visit galleries. this is a first for me in paris. i wince at being amongst the cattle of cultural tourists, or at the thought of appreciating art as isolated, singular, evenly spaced works propped high on white walls. i know that my attitude is a little ridiculous, and thankfully, i had to eat my bias here, in this room, surrounded by words about the morgue, the cemetery, death and decay. the erosion of art and its institutions. and yes, i found myself nourished. the death of art is alive and well in paris.

how can i not fall in love with the institution that houses a celebration of its own decay? or the artist that makes this (but doesn't, because he commissions much of the work)? he's a collaborationist, which is as beautiful as the black humour, the referencing, the ensemble surrounding me. mostly, for me, it's about the words, but they can't be separated from the artist, the institution, the networks between them, or the responses i have. the songs are in english and french (half of each) and i manage to comprehend most of the latter. they're not sung, but printed on a wall, so they too are dead. but also they're not, because the reader gives them life.

where i don't comprehend words and phrases, i skim, i make meaning. i fall in love via my own skewed interpretation. much like how i fall in love with people. it's about my experience of the assembled words, objects, feelings, and not the thing itself (the art work). in the room i'm connected to artists/people both dead and alive. i'm drawn into a politics of the past (1968, surrealism, anarchy, etc), yet a politics still to come. dismantling and erosion takes place in this room, but it's also the sound of a future death. a rumble, an almost, a could-be. a mire of words and sensations that i can't quite crystallise with my own words, but of course, i want to. and of course, there's the beauty. what is beyond me seduces me. it moves me, or rather it propels me, to run towards something.

j'étais né pour courir.
j'étais né pour mourir.