December Holidays Part 3: belated belated belated

At 10:15am on Wednesday December 21^st my brother and I were climbing the 400-some steps that spiral to the top of the southern tower of Notre Dame de Paris. Having made our way through the rainy winter morning to the center of the city, we led ourselves up through the narrow and damp staircase, keeping an eye out for especially ancient graffiti. There, the old stone steps are the color of aged paperback volumes and, like stacks of forgotten phonebooks warped by the weight of time, gravity and moisture, they are each sagging or wilting or drooping at the center, gone limp from the weight and the wear of 800 years of tourism and devotion and shoes.

Tardy in our attempt to break convention and beat the (other) tourists to visit the inside of the cathedral, we made it just in time to get a good spot in line to climb the tower (once before when I lived and studied briefly in Paris, I was one of the few students in my program to actually follow the instructions of our professor on a certain day when we were to be at Notre Dame by eight in the morning. Among the hush and the dust of the pews I sat and wrote an assignment in French about sanctuary and thick stone walls and time-outside-of-time; the cathedral smelled vacant and idle). Through the fog of the morning we took in our first view of Paris as a whole entity, the Eiffel Tower’s upper third hidden in a low mist. By the time we made it to tour the Cathedral’s interior, it was busy sight to behold and the nativity set up had a strangely cheap feeling.

That day, we had lunch in the Latin district at a Sicilian restaurant with very good pizza (maybe the 2^nd best pizza I’ve had in France) and with a very unfortunate name (Pizza Roma—come on, bra. Way too easy.) From there we went the Pantheon, where France’s national heroes are buried, one of my favorite sites to visit in Paris. As I tried to explain it to Jay, if Notre Dame is the cathedral of catholic France, the Pantheon is the church of the French Republic. Although we have the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington monument to represent our nation’s mythic past, the reason why I love the Pantheon is because it is a monument to the idea of the Republic. France has any number of more illustrious or ancient monuments to represent its thousands of years of Gallic history, but it is this building—once a neoclassical church dedicated to Paris’ patron saint St. Geneviève—that houses the country’s memory of the idea that people could rule themselves.

Standing before La convention nationale, I once wrote:

In 2000 years human beings or aliens will find the autel républican in the ruins of the Panthéon in an abandoned Paris, and they will have forgotten the French language. A woman will uncover the Rosetta stone of what will become a resurgence in interest for old European languages and these beings of the future will read the block letters engraved on the autel, VIVRE LIBRE OU MOURIR. They will look into the decomposed and cracked and blank eyes of Marianne and they will see the unyielding gaze of a goddess holding a broadsword—a powerfully serious visage in the midst of ruins—and they will ask themselves in reverence who the people were who worshiped at this alter of stone, and freedom.

We spent that evening exploring the Christmas markets on Monmartre. Along with lonely tourists and the standard groups of loud drunk men wearing tracksuits, we drank whiskey and coke on the steps of Sacre Coeur, taking in the twinkling lights and the Eiffel Tower’s upper third obscured in a low mist. The next morning we would arrive in Rennes by carpool, and after two days exploration of one of my favorite small cities, take an hour flight back in time to England, United Kingdom.

p.s. fucking formatting.

December Holidays Part 2: A Short and Probably Heartwarming Reunion, a City at Night and Metro Mice

In trying to write this belated and multi-part Christmas epic, I’ve learned something about myself: for some unholy reason I do not have the brain capacity or energy to write during the workweek. Hello, weekend. Kind of.

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While I was working on sentence equivalence and high school-level geometry questions in a cubicle on the second floor of a Rue St. Honoré office building, mere blocks away from the Louvre and the river, in Paris’ 1^st arrondissement, my older brother Jay was arriving at Charles de Gaulle airport, and into a land of foreign words and names. Armed with but an iPhone and heroically intermediate German skills, he managed to successfully navigate the RER from the airport to the city proper and then the metro to our Paris hostel. What’s more, while waiting for me to finish my test, the little bugger got sick of watching American basketball in the hostel lobby (weirdest/classiest hostel I’ve ever stayed at) and decided to venture out and find the Eiffel Tower, red Canton Basketball duffel in tow. Despite it’s intrepid hide-and-seek skills, he managed to find the large metal tower (relic of the 1889 World’s Fair as much as the modern need for radio and television transmission), snap some photos and witness a French-Algerian military ceremony at les Invalides, quite possibly featuring Zinedine Zidane.

After I finished my test, I arrived at the hostel before Jay had made it back. I didn’t have to wait long, though, before he and his large red appendage walked through the door, and after a short and probably heartwarming reunion scene, the dogs of war were officially let slip upon Paris. But not before a well-earned nap.

After we both had some time to rest up, we made a plan for an informal jaunt around town and struck out into the night. Snaking our way underground, we emerged from the metro at Rue de Rivoli and made our way through the eastern entrance of the Louvre.

Having successfully admired the Pyramids and l’arc de triomphe de Carrousel and just how huge le palais du Louvre really is, we continued on along the river, hunger growing ever slightly as we swallowed up the city lights. We were aiming for my old district, nestled between the hip and gay and the Jewish districts, and for the apartment I briefly rented on Rue de Guillemites. Smaller than most modest living rooms, and bereft of hot water for half of our stay, for me and three classmates that apartment served as our point of access into the city’s Dark Romantic corners, when we lived and breathed and studied in Paris for an intensive month in the spring of 2010. On our way, Jay and I ran into a pleasant surprise at my old metro stop, where the city had installed an ice rink in front of sparkling white lights hanging from the Hôtel de Ville. Convinced I was just winging it, I was surprised at how easily I found my way through the narrow, cobbled streets which I hadn’t visited in nearly a year and a half. Soon enough, I was able to point through scaffolding to the windowsill—on which we spent many a spring afternoon perched—that I briefly called my own.

At this point I think I can very reasonably say that—after hours of walking and sightseeing, combined with the weight of jetlag pushing down on Jay’s shoulders and the fatigue of a four and a half hour standardized test weighing down mine—the City of Lights had burned such a wandering hunger through our eyes, down into our stomachs, and up and to the left to place a flaming hot grip so strong upon our collective Fleischmann soul that only the falafel most beloved by both Lenny Kravitz AND Celine Dion could quell the demon-child grumbling within our visceral parts. Dramatic much? I think not. After that completely sensible and not ridiculous sentence, let me just say that it’s not every day that you get to eat the most glorious falafel in the history of the world. Just sayin’.

After satisfying the basic human necessity to eat, we got a quick café at a nearby bar and walked ten minutes to l’île de la Cité and Notre Dame.

Trying to let sink in the idea that it’s almost Christmas regardless of the lack of cold and snow and family, we sat and admired the giant stone building, with it’s 20 meter Christmas tree and lit up façade, and decided to grab some drinks on the other side of the river. A few hours later, without an exact idea of when the metro stops in Paris on a Wednesday night, we tried to head back to the hostel and spent the next half hour waiting, and then running up and down the metro stairs in search of phantom trains--feinted by ventilation fans--our only companions the five mice who called that station their home, and an electronic sign telling us a train was coming, eventually. That night, we took a taxi home.

Tomorrow, we would be among the first to climb to the top of Notre Dame de Paris, we would visit of the graves of France’s most honored dead at the Panthéon and we’d watch the glimmering lights of the city through a gray and misty winter haze from the steps of the basilica of Sacre Coeur.

December Holidays Part 1: Today, Early Vacation, Fumes

These next couple posts have been a long time coming. It’s been difficult turning them out.

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As I sit in a very newly renovated apartment, with double paned windows and white washed walls that reiterate your every sung conviction back at you, distracted by the TV my roommate is laughing at and by music on YouTube, I’m noticing how much has happened in my life since the 14^th of December, one month ago today.

My last couple days have been unique in their tumultuous own way: hectic and dull, still and dynamic, stressful and then relieving. With unrestricted internet access for the first time in almost four months, with no GRE to study for and with the feeling of Winter finally settling in around me, my weekend, to start, has been overloaded with information, and uninspired. Finally settled into the new apartment, I woke up this morning with the idea to photograph horses, and the muscles on their necks, firmly planted in my head. I feel as if I’ve emerged from the sort of seclusion of a wooden cabin in the forest, which was coldly disguising itself in the dull masquerade of a fourth floor apartment atop a solid concrete design, white and dusty and white, to find myself in a setting of very similar aesthetics, but now with neighbors and a television connection, a shower with a door and a meter missing on one side. We'll get to how I got here later.

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The December holidays started two days early at Lycée-College Brocéliande when a fuel line broke somewhere within the heating system of our building, Building C where the male boarding students also live. Our apartment was flooded with gasoline fumes, and my brain was flooded with a chemically induced daze. Suddenly caught up in a very real and stressful fog, worsened by the fear of potential consequences for the then-fast-approaching GRE, I avoided my apartment for days and stayed at colleagues’ homes the following weekend, trying to get in last minute studying before my GRE on the following Tuesday. After a reassuring and comfortable couple of nights at the home of an amazingly accommodating friend and colleague named Joanne (the antics of 10-year old son and 5-year old daughter included in the experience for free), I set off for Paris on 19 December, a Monday.

My means of transportation from Guer to the big city was arranged through my favorite pragmatic website, covoiturage.fr: a carpool with Gilles F, a recently divorced, middle-aged man of somewhat conservative political beliefs, fitted with a graying buzz cut and glasses that frame fairly gentle eyes, who, by either profession or pastime (throughout the whole five hour car ride I was never quite certain which), is an avid historian and family history enthusiast. He was an extremely chatty man, who let me have my say but seemed perfectly content to share his own stories and, in the intervening silences, to pose me questions with an air of polite interest.

Arriving in Paris by mid-afternoon, Gilles dropped me off at l’Etoile, that crazy, crazy thing that encircles the Arc de triomphe and which some people might be inclined to call a roundabout but rather reminds me of pictures I’ve seen of city streets in southeast Asia, swarming with mopeds and motorcycles and humanity, and I sent a text message to my roommate that read something like, “j’suis à Paris. putain, les touristes.”

I stayed at a hostel in the 9th with a summer of love, rock and roll, Beatles kind of theme and, accompanied by a short novel named after the city of Rome, ate a dinner of gnocchi served by a quietly flirty waitress at a pizzeria down the street. The next morning I took the dreaded 4-hour exam that has occupied a medium-sized space in the back of my head since no later than September, and as I pushed open the glass doors of the testing center, said a big fucking "hello" to vacation.

Thanks for supporting the US Postal Service; ou L’insupportable bureaucratie française; or Interwebz 2.0

[Find yourself!]

A handful of cards and pictures are arranged my wall in an almost random, overlapping pattern so as to use the least amount tacks as possible (I only have one hundred, you know). Forming an ever-growing mass of vertical and horizontal rectangles, it is slightly oval, overall. Under all this, on my desk, there sits a tiny golden box of matches, a drinking glass clinging to a decaying harvest of mid-Fall's last wildflowers, pages of notes on geometric area formulas or strategies for essay responses and an owl made of wax, whose fate as of right now is not yet determined--he may yet suffer a beautifully slow death which, with the help of combustion, emanates from the nature his very being, something that flows straight through his core! (Get it? Candle-related humor: a genre of slow burners whose hilarity only waxes with time!) Needless to say, I love all the mail. The cards, letters and postcards have been a saving grace for me in terms of feeling connected with faraway friends and family.

Someday in the distant future, though, I may have to take down the beautiful collage that is the proof of my friends' and family's support of the failing US Postal Service and reassemble it on the wall of my new room, in my newly renovated apartment in Building E of la Cité Scolaire Brocéliande, where I can enjoy the pleasures of unbridled internet access. However this day, my friends, is far from being near as there are still holes in the ceiling of this elusive Building E apartment, since renovation work at the school is everything but fast (e.g. loud, long-lasting, a large physical presence, very glassy, not-too-impressive, etc.), and because this collage is just too damn fabulous to see the destruction of its present form.

Translation: I won't be getting internet of my own any time soon here in Guer—clearly not until after the New Year, if that's even a reasonable estimate after the latest discussion with a supportive, but not really catalytic M. le Proviseur (headmaster). All is lost, Skype users.

And so, we need a change in perspective (lest I go crazy). Let us rather believe, friends and family, that one day in the middle of this ever-approaching foggy and rainy Breton winter, the clouds will weaken their miserly hold on the sky’s coveted daytime hours, and the sun, in his not-quite-pale-enough-yellow-to-be-considered-eggshell yellow track suit, will peak out his head and reveal to us Language Assistants the splendor of a standard of living in which one can find outlandish and often humorous stories of fictional encounters with Bill Murray at the tip of one’s fingers. That day will be a glorious day, friends. And full of pictures of kittens.

So keep up the postcards, the letters and stamps, and I will keep up with the replies. I have regular email access five days a week, so feel free to use that if you feel disconnected from good ol’ me in the meantime.

Until then, with love and international postage,

Adam

A not so American Thanksgiving: Lyon

I spent this past Thanksgiving weekend in the wonderful city of Lyon, France’s third largest city, but second largest cultural center. Known for its gastronomic prowess, for its racial diversity and racial tension and its two parallel rivers, whose confluence sits on the city’s southwest corner, Lyon is also the current home of two of my best friends from college, Robert and Alexis. I arrived in Lyon on Friday at noon and spent the long weekend there, leaving by 5pm on Monday and returning to Guer in time for work on Tuesday morning. Another friend, Meghan, from the 2009-10 Evergreen program “Dark Romantics” (through which I traveled to France that Spring, with Robert and Alexis), came down from Paris to join us for the festivities.

The not-so-American Thanksgiving feast occurred on Friday evening, and consisted of a roasted chicken for the others, mashed potatoes, a lentils-greens-tortellini-etc. thing I made, a jar of wonderful Ocean’s Spray Cranberry Smooth Sauce which Robbie found at an English grocery, pumpkin pie and many bottles of wine to go around. Two friends of Robbie and Alexis from the Alliance française, a Columbian gal and an Argentinean guy, (both amazingly nice and interesting people) joined us for the meal, making for a cozily crowded evening in the cute little apartment on the first floor of a building whose goddamn front door opens with a 5-inch long skeleton key, notshittingyouitisthatcute. With a proper giving-thanks ritual performed by each person before the meal, with much wine consumed, and with a heated debate about OccupyWallSt. in English (whoops!) somewhere in between, all can fairly say it was a successful evening.

On Saturday, us four Americans slept off our food comas (sleeping off a coma, say whaaaaaat?) and then spent the entire afternoon (I’m talking four or five hours) at La Sucrière, a converted former sugar factory located at the confluence of Lyon’s two rivers, and now home to one of four sites making up the city’s Biennale d’Art Contemporain, a (you guessed it) biennial festival of contemporary art. In short, it was incredible. Containing paintings, three-dimensional pieces of many media, short films and performance pieces, the factory’s three stories made for a perfect venue. As evidence of the building’s former life, even the spiral metal supply chutes, cutting vertically through all three floors in tight, aging corkscrews, seemed an appropriate part of atmosphere. There, among many, many other pieces, we saw a staging of possibly the shortest play ever written (I’m talking ten seconds), Samuel Beckett’s Breath, as well as an amazing modern choreography/theater piece, set to occasional classical music performed by a live string quartet, in a cave-like artificial pond-fountain installation.

Later that evening, after aperitifs with a neighbor, we went out on the town. Drinking in the delights of early winter until the early morning hours, we walked the wintry streets back to the apartment, arms linked six across. The next day and a half was spent less busily, over many small cups of coffee: Robbie cut my hair, he and I arranged a guitar and two-voice version of the opening track off our album EVES (it’s a capella on the record), we said goodbye to Meghan on Sunday afternoon, we made vin chaud (a mulled wine concoction sold by bars and street venders throughout France during the winter months), and I somehow acquired 18 hours of brand new, never-before-heard music. After making plans to celebrate New Years Eve together, I said goodbye to my two fellow Americans and found myself back in Guer, back to work in the high school. And somehow, it’s already been a week since I was in Lyon. Funny how that works.

Speaking of holiday plans, I’m definitely looking forward to my brother coming to visit for ten days over the holidays—it’s his first time in France, wooooooo! He arrives the same day that I take the GRE in Paris (bon courage); we will spend Christmas in England with a friend from camp, Cheryl, and then travel throughout Europe or France, before he leaves just short of the New Year. In addition, for one week at the end January, my two roommates and I will be chaperones for a 6^th grade snow trip to the French Alps, and plans for serious travel are a-brewing for this coming spring with both Robbie and another best friend Everett, who will be studying abroad in southern Germany.

And now, some self-directed words of encouragement:

Dear Adam, study harder for the GRE, you asshole. It’s in three weeks!

Fancy hats and well-worn shoes,

Adam

P.S.

Petites aventures, romanticism, more updates to come

Hello. Sorry for the lack of updates, I’m not as good at this as I had hoped.

C’est parti:

Red wine in a white glass jar and a sandwich of gouda and camembert on a day old baguette: I am enjoying what zhey kowl een fraynch un pique-nique. Pleasantly surprised at having found myself here, I squint at the waning sun's reflection on an all but stagnant stream or pond or creek just outside Guer proper. These days the sun seems to start yawning, yearning for sleep, at about 3pm even if it knows its day is not done for another three hours. Among a scattering of small, lobed oak leaves, brown and dry, I stretch out on the large mossy stepping stones that allow one to cross this still body of water, and I listen as the birds declare their living presence. Every few minutes a slight breeze tricks me into believing that the stream is flowing, though, audibly, the rustle of the leaves above betrays the stillness of the water below. Clad in the Standard Adam Fleischmann Biking Gear® of UnderArmor compression shorts under black cut off jeans and a hat with a flipped up brim, I have somehow found a small stint of real forest, probably no bigger than 3 sq. km. I was led here on this unseasonably warm Saturday by a waking and biking path that continues for about 26km all together, cut in half by the village of Guer. The forest trail that split off from that path and led me here to my stepping stones and my still creek and my lunch, continues up and to the west, spluttering to a sudden halt at the Chappelle St. Etienne, a tenth century church and priory settled in between farms, the smell of cows and the distant sound of a hunter's missed attempt with a shotgun.

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It is little solitary adventures like this which have for now kept me content with living in middle of the countryside and which keep at bay that melancholy, digital yearning for a city, where there's actually shit to do. But perhaps I wouldn't feel any urge to write something like this if I lived in a place with so much external stimulation. Or maybe, instead, my inspiration for writing and my tendency to romanticize would take shape in descriptions of visits to art galleries, small, intimate concerts or late dinners out with new friends. (More of just that in the next post about my visit to Lyon, promise.)

However, I am convinced it is this tendency to romanticize, this romanticization itself, which makes any narrative portrayal of oneself--be it a diary entry, travel writing, memoir or blog thingy--interesting and readable; and this isn't necessarily a bad thing. I've long recognized as an essential ingredient to any first person, semi-nonfiction piece of writing, some small notion of romanticization and, also, something else--what, pride? vanity? arrogance? or just self confidence? Got it: a romantic self-awareness matched with enough of a mastery of the elements of written English (thank you, GRE) to mask that self-consciousness and turn it into something universal, or unique or believable. I guess it’s an essential part of the medium, what makes it more than a list of things accomplished. And, boy-o-gee-golly, how I can’t stand the idea of cataloguing the quotidian.

Further, though, I’ve also noticed that by writing about (romanticizing?) elements of my everyday life here in France, I’m able to cement them in my memory and better appreciate them in hindsight. However, the moments in which I am most fully absorbed make the best content for writing. It’s like some perverted combination of Baudelaire’s desire to step back and view himself from a subjective distance and Zen Buddhism’s objective to literally always live in the moment. Or perhaps, more simply, a content little act of recognition for the awesomeness that is now, when now is happening.

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So, after having admitted to my recognition of the vanity and romanticization (or something) involved in this type of writing (and while we’re at it, the larger tendency of Americans to romanticize Europe in general), I'm going to (try to) continue this blog thingy, free of any onerous morals.

Sorry for the lack of updates, my small readership.
All of the above is probably just some reticent expression of latent guilt involving my hate of tourism. Or something about Freud or something.

À la prochaine (bientôt, je vous avoue),

Adam

Happy Fall from Guer

Fall has settled in here at the edge of the Forêt Brocéliande. And I am definitely feeling it's presence. I came across this stint of yellow trees the other day when I was running. I came back the next day, to photograph it, and it had lost some of its vigor in the previous night's storm. Still pretty awesome though. With my initial reactions, the day before:

**Click the image for the actual photo--formatting is messed up on the blog.

it was as if 12,000 yellow canaries stood in a line and simultaneously exploded to create a singular yellow tunnel on a forest path, slightly downhill. it was as if spring had broke in a forest buried under 10 meters of snow, and as the ice began to melt, the forest filled her lungs with hot yellow air and blew a tunnel through the trees. it was as if she changed her mind, the forest; her favorite color became not green, but yellow. wet yellow. and then it was gone.

Also, I made an Autumn playlist. I really like it.

Going to Rennes tomorrow to see The Cat Empire, getting to Lyon for Thanksgiving-ish and Robbie/Alexis is coming together and I'm kicking ass in MMA class. Life's not so bad, eh?

Love,
Adam