Paris: irritations and pleasures

December 10, 2011

On my first day back in the city after a spell in the US, I needed to take care of some banking business. French banking is bizarrely awkward. The place is over-banked, a bank on every corner it seems, but one cannot go to just any branch of your bank and, with the right account [...]

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American Health Care vs French Healthcare, 3

November 29, 2011

AMERICA HEALTH CARE FOLLIES With my finger tip, I could feel something on my back,  but I couldn’t see it. Since I had been out in the garden, in an area of New England where Lyme Disease is an issue, I thought that might be a tick. I had no friends around, so went to [...]

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Occupy Wall Street post 2

November 24, 2011

I have followed with growing horror (but no surprise,) the violent police attacks, clearly coordinated from the federal level, on the Occupy Wall Street movement. It reached its peak two days ago with the assaults at UC Davis. The video of the policeman  assaulting peaceful students with pepper spray, doing it as casually as he [...]

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France and Food. America Compared

September 3, 2011

Forty years ago, when I still lived in the United States, I had a vegetable garden. I lived in the sun. I dug in the dirt and grew squash, sweet corn, tomatoes, lettuce, and peppers. Both the labor and the product gave me great pleasure. Every morning I went out to see how much damage [...]

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Paris. The Man with the Blue Guitar

August 29, 2011

I am in the process of excavating the social, historical and architectural terrain where I live. I go to a different area of the city once a week, or more often if my other tasks release me.  I use Metro stops as my landmarks, much the way a geologist might use an distinctive outcrop of [...]

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Proust. The Narrator Himself (entry 4)

August 29, 2011

Marcel lui meme   Yes, always Marcel, the central figure. The tyranny of Marcel’s neurosis  – his obsessive need to be accepted, to access worlds he imagines more perfect than his own, his fantasies concerning certain idealized people, as Mme Swann, – dominates this second book. Yet, however “weak” or “sickly” Marcel may appear to [...]

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Proust. Hints of the “accomplishment” (entry 3)

August 29, 2011

(midway through  “Within a Budding Grove”   as before,  overwhelmed by the scope of Proust’s ambition and by how successfully he is accomplishing it.  I use the present participle “accomplishing” because the narrative has not yet arrived at the conclusion, the “accomplishment” that I don’t yet know how to define. But I suspect that it [...]

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Proust. Proustian Time, a first view (entry 2)

August 24, 2011

    There are dizzying time-warps. We begin with the author remembering, in extraordinary detail, the world of his childhood, Combray, the house of his grandmother, a lush orchestration of sights and smells, of people, particular incidents, 200 pages of it, and then, snap, we are fully and deeply into the story of M. Charles [...]

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Paris is the World. The sacred and not so sacred.

August 22, 2011

Paris giveth and Paris taketh away. It dazzles and disillusions, pleases and disgusts. Beauty and filth. Not, of course, a tension unique to Paris, one found in all great cities, but Paris is where the world and I rub shoulders.   I’d arranged to meet my daughter at the Sainte Chapelle, King Louis IX’s private [...]

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Proust, an informal guide. (entry 1)

August 20, 2011

A la recherché du temps perdu rises up before me,  the Himalayas of literature. I have started the climb and am keeping a journal of the adventure. Since Proust allows metaphors to cross and conflict,  I will permit myself the same liberty. Thus: climbing into rarified regions of language and letters, I go for swim and [...]

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