Le Prof & La Potiche

The Real, Real Reason We're In Paris

2012-02-20T18:57:00.040+01:00

(left: France (?), c. 1460, Man with a glass of wine, detail. Louvre)

Some of you have asked if we have a schedule. Yes, we do! First, La Potiche gets sick. She's on her second cold here. Le Prof writes in the mornings while La Potiche snoozes and sneezes. Once Le Prof routs her out of bed, we go shopping for the day's groceries, which can take anywhere from ten minutes (if we visit the Bio a few doors down), or four hours, if we walk to a new street market. These walks often detour toward churches, parks, and unanticipated confiseurs. Then, somehow, lunch always happens right after the market walk, regardless of whether it was a 10-minute or 4-hour walk: Le Prof eats a hunk of bread and cheese and wine, just like in this painting, and La Potiche eats a quarter of a cauliflower and a jam-jar of yogurt, which is probably in a Flemish still life in the salle of the Louvre that was locked the other day. Then we sit down to write some more (or, for La Potiche, there is a commencement), though, ten minutes later, La Potiche declares, "It's sweetie time!" and routs out whatever candy or pastry we bought earlier that day. Then we really do write. Then we make supper, and afterwards, sometimes we study a little French (Le Prof is trying to master conversational French. La Potiche is trying to master Proust, and elle se fiche de conversational French, because she's going deaf and can't understand anything said to her in English, anyway, and really, what's wrong with spending all your time in Paris alone, wheezing in a cork-lined room? More on that, later). Sometimes, we go out to see parades (two!), and movies (The Artist--more on that, too, later), and friends in cafés.

But the rest of the time, we are busy being Amis du Louvre (Friends of the Louvre)! We paid a membership fee that lets us make as many visits as we want for the duration of our stay in Paris. In the one month and three days we've been in Paris, we've paid five visits to the Louvre, at an average of three hours per visit. Which is to say, we have seen nearly all of the salles on one floor in one wing (Richelieu 2ème), which leaves us two more wings of four floors each. (Correction: and all the rest of Richelieu, of course!) To put this in perspective, we have also visited the following museums/things-like-museums:

La Maison de Victor Hugo, for a show on the Communard Louise Michel and to see his fancy dishes
Le Musée du Quai Branly, for the "The Invention of the Savage," an expo on the history of human expos and only a peek at the Mesoamerican collection
Le Musée national du Moyen Âge ("Moyen Âge" = "Middle Ages"), for 3/4 of the permanent collection and the show "Gaston Fébus, Prince Soleil"
Le Musée d'Art et d'Histoire du Judaisme, for the expo on the Walter Benjamin Archives
Le Tour Jean Sans Peur, for "L'animal au Moyen Âge" and a dizzying climb to the top
Le Grand Palais, for an expo on giant relief maps from Louis XIV to Napoléon
La basilique-cathédrale de Saint-Denis, which you heard about on Valentine's Day

--And, most recently, today: the Galérie Saint-German and Réfectoire des Cordeliers, for a gallery show of the work of Lydie Arickx. The Réfectoire is a gorgeous gallery space.

This brings me to a personal revelation, which is what blogging is for. Several years ago, a stranger trying to make smalltalk with me asked, "Do you like art?" And I almost choked on a burst of self-righteous indignation and condescension. What kind of a goon would ask a no-brainer like that? And how on earth could I lump the billions of cultural productions out there under the rubric of art, to be liked or disliked? I have no doubt that I replied in a pretentious, malicious way, then abandoned him to go in search of a cocktail shrimp to commune with on a higher plane.

(right: either a Mayan warrior sculpture, c. 800-1000, or La Potiche's attitude problem. Musée du Quai Branly)

Now, however, I know that there were much better ways for me to respond. Not only friendly ways, but also ways that might have pointed out to me some deficits in my aesthetic sensibilities, and enabled some great changes in my enjoyment of life. Because at that time, the truth was that I didn't like art. I had ideas about art, or rather, prejudices I'd picked up. They had nothing to do with an expansive knowledge of art, and a great deal to do with showing I was the right kind of person, with the right kind of biases, which I wore like the right kind of accessories.

As a result, I didn't like anything that was too "popular" (the Impressionists, or the more floral Van Gogh productions, or anything else that might be represented on a mouse pad). Things made before, roughly, 1880 (like ancient Greek sculpture, or Leonardo's paintings), were to be admired for good form, but otherwise disregarded as irrelevant. (To what? I didn't ask.) Hieronymus Bosch was an exception to that rule, because he was Dark. Good art exposed the Dark Side of the Force, which meant that Goya, Schiele, Van Gogh in a bad mood, Bacon, and anything Japanese was okay; also, agony was good, because it was political, or something. Works made after, roughly, 1930, were also irrelevant, unless they were goth, steampunk, or graphic novels. Colors were to be regarded with suspicion. And having these views didn't mean you actually had to go look at art, because you could just sit in a coffeeshop listening to some cute guy with lots of opinions, and you'd learn all you had to know about Which Artists Mattered. Oh, and Barbara Kruger counted too, because these guys were always Feminists.

(left: The consul Areobindus presides over the games, 506, Constantinople. Cluny Museum)
Then Le Prof, who wasn't yet Le Prof, just this skinny guy (he really was skinny; he weighed 156 pounds with his shoes on) who lived in a walk-in closet in Williamsburg and had somehow read Everything and really enjoyed it all, came into my life. That was when I began to realize that there was something lacking in the way I'd buzz through a museum in search of the Darkest painting in the collection, check it off my list of things to Darkly regard, then head out for coffee. "Oh my god!" Le Prof-Pas-Encore would cry. "LOOK AT THIS!!!!!!" And he'd point at a millimeter-sized detail in some ivory thing from the eleventh century--in a casement, or even a whole room that I hadn't even noticed--and I'd look, and realize that a whole world was contained in the ivory thing, from which Le Prof would spin out anecdotes from books he'd read and other ivory things he'd looked at and books he intended to read but hadn't gotten to yet. And then, after two hours of ivory thingies, Le Prof would want to move on to the Egyptian wing. Or Oceania. Or German Nostalgic Pastoral Works Between the World Wars. Or all the galleries on the Lower East Side. Or all of these and more. It was like Journey; it went on and on and on and o-o-on.... But it was fun. He made it fun to slow down and look.

I'm not sure how much Le Prof realized what a constraint he put me under, to have to look. But it was thanks to him that I realized that I'd divided not just art, but also books and music and film and spectacles and walks and travel and foods and conversations and friends and work, into a narrowly defined realm of the Interesting, and a much wider, undifferentiated realm of the Boring, without having realized that interest is a state of mind in the beholder. I didn't just lack knowledge and experience; I lacked curiosity, without which I could never even realize the aesthetic, intellectual, and emotional boundaries I'd imposed on myself, much less do anything about widening them. What I had to do was to learn To Be Interested. I think that urging me toward that realization, and giving me a living example of how to Be Interested, not just in art, but in lots of stuff, are, by far, the greatest things that Le Prof has ever done for me.
(right: Not dark, and unbelievably gorgeous: Sarcophagus, Sphinx, İstanbul Arkeoloji Müzeleri. That stone is like velvet.)

(left: hard-to-photograph detail from Nicolas Poussin, Triumph of Flora, c. 1627-28)
This is not to say that my taste in or knowledge of art has deepened or improved in a significant way. Rather, in looking more, and liking more, I've only started to glimpse just how much I won't have time to learn or see before I up and die. We have friends who are artists, who are sometimes kind enough to discuss their and others' work with us, and it blows our minds: they know so many things about how to look, and what to look for; their taste is so exquisite; they tell us, "You must see this Poussin show,"or "This is the wrong place to look at Richard Serra," or, sometimes, "This show represents everything that is worst about the art world," about something we've liked, and they make us think. They have a voracious curiosity to make, see, and learn, that is the opposite of the kind of mastery that would claim to have already seen it all, known it all. Art is exciting to me now, not because I've seen it all and know what I like, but for the chance to look at what I don't think I like, and discover why I should; to be astonished by looking at that which I'd never imagined to exist; and to review that which I thought I knew, only to find that I didn't, at all. I enjoy my feelings of ignorance more than I ever enjoyed my pretensions of knowing, because now I'm able to marvel. At beauty! The more things I can find beautiful, the better. I hadn't realized, before, how savorless life was without it.

(left: François Clouet, Elizabeth of Austria. Louvre)
So, the Real Reason we came to Paris was to go crawling through the Louvre and a hundred other museums, looking, very slowly, very carefully at the works, and trying to see what they are. (So carefully that, in fact, when La Potiche was examining a painting of fruit and flowers the other day, she suddenly screamed and bolted backwards into the midst of a tour group. She had spotted a caterpillar. La Potiche really does not like caterpillars.) And if you need any evidence that this was the Real Reason, you need only look at our Flickr galleries. Maybe there is something gauche about being the tourists with the cameras in the Louvre. But it's important to us to be able to revisit, again and again, the things we liked, and to record details of make and date so we can learn more about what we've seen; we also like to share things we think are marvelous and want everybody to see, especially those friends who want to see for themselves but can't get to Paris any time in the near future.

Our galleries are governed by certain constraints, however. We don't keep the many, many photos that inadequately capture what's awesome in a work; the Louvre, in particular, has terrible lighting, and hangs things in such a way that there's always a glare, even when you're standing right in front of a picture. Surveillance systems could learn a lot from their lighting. And we don't often photograph things you can find thousands of images of online, so you won't find La Joconde in our files, unless, by chance, we see something spectacular happening near her, and she just gets in the way. Since Karl's the one who really enjoys taking photos, many of them are related to his research. And when they're not, they're often motivated by a mixture of whimsy and astonishment. And love of cat pictures.
(right: in the category of the utterly rad, from the Entourage of Toussaint Debreuil, Portrait of King Henri IV as Hercules treading on the Lernean Hydra. Louvre. That smirk! Those shorts!)

And Le Prof has a taste for ceramics. He really, really loves a certain kind of ceramic. If you view our gallery from the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, you'll find ceramic upon ceramic upon ceramic. It was our third trip to the museum together, and this was the first time we actually made it all the way through the ceramics wing, though by the end of it we were crying a little, because we just couldn't look at any more ceramics.

There are also dozens or hundreds of things that just made us stop and say, "Wow," and stare, and appreciate. Having a record of all those moments of Wow, counting them up and realizing how many moments of our lives we're devoting to WOW, is reason enough for the project.

(right: Enguerrand Quarton, Pietà de Villeneuve-lès-Avignon, c. 1455, detail of the Magdalene, Louvre. Wow. Holy freaking wow.)
So this is your introduction to our Flickr collections, which contain many images Le Prof couldn't bother to upload to Facebook. As some of you know, we left the U.S. on January 3 and visited friends (and museums!) in London and Istanbul before coming to Paris. You will see that our photos are sorted, conveniently, into art collections and slice-of-life collections. You'll also see that we haven't even gotten around to rotating and labeling some of them. If you don't want to see 3000 pictures of 18th-century ceramics, you don't have to. But I really do think you will be the better for it, because everybody should cry a little at the beauty of the world.

Links:
Our London Collection
Our Istanbul Collection
Our Paris Collection (ever-growing)

Happy Valentine's Day From the City of Pentanoic Acid

2012-02-14T17:25:00.017+01:00

How to spend Valentine's Day in Paris? The obvious answer was to do what we like best to do with our free time here: to stand by ourselves in out-of-the-way rooms in the Louvre, looking at paintings for hours and not really speaking much. But the Louvre is closed on Tuesdays, so we will have to save our thoughts on art for another post, apart from these two little valentines.

(left: The Triumph of Love, Domenico Zampieri and Daniel Seghers)

(right, below: Funeral of Love, attributed to Henri Lerambert, c. 1589)

Plan B was hatched two weeks ago, when La Potiche arranged her desk with a cup of coffee, the tin of prune-filled prunes, and the Franck Kestener (a 2003 Meilleur Ouvrier de France Chocolatier*) Atlantique Sablé croquant et caramel tendre à la fleur de sel (the chocolate bar she mentioned before, from Ètoile d'Or: the brown sugar cookie covered with fleur de sel-salted caramel and chocolate), which is the second most delicious candy on earth, to do her and Le Prof's taxes. She'd calculated that their federal income tax refund would roll in just in time for Valentine's Day, so that she could spend the whole thing on Ladurée macarons and tell Le Prof that it was a present for him.

(* Who are the Meilleurs Ouvriers de France, or Best Artisans of France? They are artisans recognized as the best from among 162 trades, including pastry chefs, chocolatiers, denture-makers, bra-fashioners, and lab photographers. Check out the reality show documentary The Kings of Pastry, which, as seen in this trailer, starts to get really fun when the disasters start at the 1:00 mark.)

But, even though the refund has come, we have decided, for reasons we won't go into, because the last thing we need is more vitriol-spewing hate mail inundating our mailbox, that we feel blasé about Ladurée macarons. We would rather spend our €uros on more Franck Kestener chocolate bars, or the box of Breton salted caramels we picked up yesterday for sneaking into the opera.

Yes! Not Götterdämmerung Live in HD, awesome as it was, but something Live in Live! L'Opéra Bastille! How could we spend a winter in Paris and not go to the real live Opera? Well, we did, and we chose Manon, because it was French, and we're in France. What we didn't know about Manon was that there would be a totally appropriate duet that went just like the time that Le Prof said, "What should we do with my leave time?"

And La Potiche replied, "Go backpacking across China for six months! I wanna see Qinghai Lake and the Terracotta Army in Shaanxi and the panda reserve and the Harbin Ice Festival and the Guilin Mountains and the Yunnan rice terraces and hear a Flying Song in Guizhou!" Then she put on her shiny tinfoil hat and started singing a Flying Song, just like this:

La Potiche's favorite song in the world, except for the Rainbow Bread song. She takes every opportunity to link to it.

Anyway, Le Prof said, "You're not planning to do any work, are you?"
La Potiche said, "No way! No siree, Bob!"
Le Prof said, "Uh, I gotta write a thing on The Abyss and a response paper on Skin and a couple talks."
La Potiche said, "Uh. How about Paris, then? You know what they say about Paris: you can write lots of response papers there."

And as it turned out, that's just how this song goes in Manon!

À Paris! à Paris, tous les deux! / Nous vivrons à Paris!
(In Paris! In Paris, the two of us! We'll live in Paris!")

And there's another song, wherein it is revealed that Manon and her boyfriend's apartment has only a tiny little table, and only a single drinking glass for tous les deux! It's just like ours! So anyway, the REAL reason we came to Paris is that, according to some people, you can't write things on The Abyss while you're fighting pandas. Although some other people ask, what is more abyssal, really, than looking into the eyes of a fighting panda? But it's what stranded us here on Valentine's Day, with nothing to do, because Manon happened last night.

After the Ladurée plan hit an epic Fail, La Potiche's Plan C involved buying raw milk crème fraîche and fromage blanc, cooking up sweet onions and chives, and making what would be The World's Awesomest Onion Dip, to go with Lays potato chips. But La Potiche realized that she'd rather save it for a time when she could enjoy her orgy of complete self-indulgence without having to share. When Le Prof heads off to State College, PA this spring to give one of his talks, and La Potiche will be all by herself for three days in Paris...Lucullus will dine with Lucullus.

That left her still pondering what to do for Valentine's Day. What two sexy words come to mind when YOU hear "Valentine's Day?" La Potiche finally came up with...

NECROPOLIS

and

BANLIEUE!

So off we went to la basilique-cathédrale de Saint-Denis. And La Potiche has to say, there was something so romantic in Le Prof's eyes, as he gazed upon the statue of Jeanne de Bourbon (1338-1378) clutching her entrails to her chest, that all her hard work was rewarded.

What's in the Ladurée box?
Why, it's the mummified heart of the Dauphin who would have been Louis XVII! Thanks, honey!

Un Autre fourre-tout

2012-02-07T10:46:00.005+01:00

Another Grab Bag

Concerning cramped Parisian apartments, Merritt Symes, Dominic Pettman's wife, remarked that she feels gigantic. Here, the sinks, the lights and all the other household amenities are too close to one another. I feel like she does in this Hobbit-Town. We have outsized hands and bodies. We move, we destroy. The Potiche, though, pretends that she has a perfect lightness, but no one, not even the Potiche, has such little hands.

Not long ago, la Potiche and le Prof visited the Museum of the Quai Branly and saw the show "The Invention of the Savage." La Potiche said to me that she had never seen such a beautiful collection of horrible objects. She has other ideas, below, in the comments. For my part, I wish that the show had as much on interior colonialism as it did on foreign imperialism. The invention of the savage and the invention of France fed each other. Moreover, for Paris, even France was a foreign country.

Here you go, a poster that satisfies me:

It seems to me that Paris also wondered at wooden shoes and Breton head-dresses.

There are more fundamental problems for museums as a whole. It seemed to us that the show condemned colonial ideas and, at the same time, reveled in them. This is a touchy problem for museums: we visit them like tourists; we amuse ourselves; and no matter what horror we see there, we have the pleasure of leisure in them. To see correctly, to make museums more serious, we need more pleasure in our own lives.

A rather silly remark: at the Cluny museum, we saw the show "Gaston Febus (1331-1391) - Sun Prince." I really liked it, but where was his spirit adviser, Orton? Cluny told us stories of hunting and filicide--thanks!--but if a very powerful man has a spectral friend...

One more thing: I am slowly reading The Roads of Paris (1844): the roads before Haussmann! I'm losing myself in it/them. This book is a true treasure. You, reader of Foucault, you know the story of the unspeakable end of Robert-François Damiens. Here are the words of Eugène Briffault on this subject:

Regardless of these grand traditions, the deeds that we just recounted will be a kind of monument to abominable cruelty: they occurred in the era where the French nation prided itself on being the most polished of all. The Era of Louis XIV followed the birth of the philosophy that began to enlighten the world, and it was in this light, before such a people, that we displayed this splendid [or tawdry] ferocity!

Au sujet de l'exiguïté des appartements parisiens, Merritt Symes, la femme de Dominic Pettman, a fait remarquer qu'elle se sent gigantesque. Ici, les éviers, les lumières et toutes les autres installations sont trop près l'un de l'autre. Je me sens comme elle dans cette ville hobbitesque. Nous avons les mains et les corps démesurés. On déplace, on détruit. La Potiche, elle prétend qu'elle ait une légèreté parfaite, mais personne, même pas la Potiche, n’a de si petites mains.

Il n'y a pas longtemps la Potiche et le Prof ont visité le musée du Quai Branly et ont vu l'exposition « L’invention du sauvage. » La Potiche m'a dit qu'il eût la plus belle collection des objets horribles qu'elle n'ait jamais vus. Elle a des autres idées, en bas, dans les commentaires. Moi, je souhaitais que l'exposition exposait le colonialisme intérieur autant qu'il exposait l’impérialisme étranger. L'invention du sauvage et l'invention de la France se nourrissaient l'un et l'autre. De plus, à Paris, même la France était un pays étranger. Voilà, un poster que me satisfait ; il me semble que la Paris s'émerveillait aussi des sabots et des coiffes bretonnes.

Pour les musées, il y a des problèmes plus fondamentaux. Il nous semblait que l'exhibition condamnait les idées colonialistes et conjointement se délectait d'elles. C'est un problème délicat pour les musées : on les visite comme touristes ; on s'amuse ; n'importe quelle horreur on y voit, on y a le plaisir de loisir. De voir correctement, de rendre les musées plus serieux, nous avons besoin de plus de plaisir dans nos propres vies.

Une remarque assez frivole : au Muśee Cluny, nous avons vu l'exposition "Gaston Fébus (1331-1391) - Prince Soleil.” Moi, je l'ai adoré, mais où était son fantôme conseiller, Orton? Cluny nous a raconté les histoires de la chasse et filicide—merci!—mais si un homme très fort avait un ami spectral...

Une chose plus : je lentement lis Les Rues de Paris (1844) : les rues avant Haussmann! Je m'y perds. Ce livre est un vrai trésor. Vous, une lectrice de Foucault, vous savez l'histoire de la fin épouvantable de Robert-François Damiens. Voilà les mots de Eugène Briffault au ce sujet:

Malgré ces formidables traditions, les actes que nous venons de rappeler resteront comme un monument d'abominable cruauté; ils se passaient à l'époque où la nation française se vantait d'être la plus polie de l'univers. Au siècle de Louis XIV succédait l'avènement de cette philosophie qui entreprit d'éclairer le monde, et c'était à ces clartés, a la face de tout un peuple, qu'on déployait ce faste de férocité!

COLD! And, The Pursuit of Excellence

2012-02-05T09:32:00.026+01:00

It's been cold in Paris; at night, it's dropping into the teens, and today it snowed. The streets are glazed with ice; the wind whips down the Haussmannian avenues; and all the piles of dog poop have frozen semi-solid on the sidewalks, which is about as good as you get. Our little space heater runs night and day, and we have taken to wearing long underwear all the time, and for a few days La Potiche had nothing to write for you, because she was busy rereading Dune to keep warm. Even les Français are looking cold: they're wearing two scarves at the same time over their noses, and occasionally covering their glossy hair with HATS. The little dogs are wearing coats but still playing the flâneur, wandering unleashed up and down the sidewalks, browsing shop windows, and completely disregarding their so-called owners who stand shivering thirty meters away, shouting, "Vigo! VIGO!"

On the first day of the cold snap, when the mid-afternoon high was predicted to reach 21, we decided to go for a nearly six-mile walk, the first half all uphill, to a bakery in Montmartre.

Why? Because Pascal Barillon, of the bakery Au Levain d'Antan (which means, roughly, the Sourdough of Yesteryear, which may or may not be a pun on Yesterday's Bread?), won the Grand prix 2011 de la meilleure baguette parisienne (2011 Grand Prize for the Best Parisian Baguette). Jeffrey Steingarten wrote a thrilling account of the first such baguette competition in the '90s, an effort to revive and popularize the traditional baguette, which was being edged out by non-sourdough, machine-made loaves. Last spring, 136 baguettes were entered in the competition, after 38 were eliminated on technical grounds, and Barillon won and will hold the title till next spring.

The best baguette in Paris! Wow! And now you're wondering, how does it compare to lesser baguettes in Paris, such as the worst baguette?

We have seen the worst baguette. It is lurking in the ready-bake stay-puft ziploc bag at the local crap supermarket that smells of rot. As for lesser baguettes, on our first afternoon in Paris, we visited the nearest bakery, one block away, which won the competition the first year and just happened to come in seventh in last year's competition. We took la baguette traditionnelle home and tore it open and put cheese and tomatoes on it (le Prof), and butter and plum jam on it (la Potiche), and devoured it, moaning all the while. It tore apart as easily as Wonder Bread, but was crunchy and flaky and gapped with giant bubbly holes; despite the crunch of the crust, it was feathery inside, but not mushy, not spongy, not insubstantial. And it was TASTY. It was good enough to eat by itself but even better with other delicious things all over it. We ate the whole baguette for lunch, even though La Potiche's throat was raw and the crust made her throat rawer going down, because it was so delicious, so much better than anything we'd called a baguette in the U.S., and it completely validated our sometimes exasperating and exhausting decision to move here.

We've bought many more baguettes from that bakery. They are still good the next day. La Potiche think that they're even better toasted. (Maybe toasting a baguette is a travesty, but if you can make a delicious thing more delicious with a little heat and browning so that it feels like it just popped out of the oven (though sometimes when we get them, they are still warm from the oven!) and it hasn't yet been banned by l'Académie Française.... Now that I've said that, maybe I've branded myself as one of Those People, the ones who prefer red sauce, the ones who like sugar in their coffee.... And now that I've said that, maybe I'd better stop giving up all my claims to having a palate....) We visited another bakery, the 1996 winner and who-knows-what placer in 2011, and agreed that their baguette, while delicious, was not quite as perfect. And we bought some country bread at Poilâne, famous for their country bread, and some more baguettes, and blah blah blah.... Not a day has gone by without its chunks of bread.

Then, last week, when we were foiled in our attempt to visit a street market and were forced to shop for lunch at the gourmet stores along Rue Montorgeuil instead, we dropped into the Maison Kayser, ten minutes away from our apartment, to buy the Baguette Malesherbes.

Ohhhhh la la. We knew it was special even before we'd tasted it, because its crust crackled in a way that was positively electric. As we carried it home, we were afraid of handling it too much and impairing its FORCE FIELD. And then we were home, tearing into it. The Baguette Malesherbes' crust shattered crisply, delicately, into flakes that were almost as light as those old-fashioned Czech glass Christmas ornaments that crumple if you look at them funny.
Its crumb, or mie, had the tenderness of SKIN, as though it were a living animal. It seemed to want to be rubbed against our cheeks (one of us did, and got covered with flour). Its bubbles, stretched thinner than Czech glass, were IRIDESCENT. It seemed to be made of a magic ingredient apart from microbes, flour, and salt. It tasted the way flour is supposed to taste when you're having one of those Amber waves of grain moments, imagining the sunshine and rainwater being absorbed by the wheat and rye stalks. It tasted winily of exhalations of gas and alcohol from the hungry little yeasts, and explosions of sea salt, and the caramel of the sugars in the flour. There are no photos of real baguettes here, because what makes a baguette good cannot be photographed.

(Full disclosure: La Potiche samples a fresh bite of every Kayser baguette, but then she toasts her own portion. The Kayser baguette, toasted, is like falling in love. Kayser baguettes may very well be why the French invented toaster ovens. For that matter, lots of other things we've found here in Paris are totally awesome. Like Le Dustbuster? What a FANtastic idea! La Potiche is going to make her fortune selling the invention to Americans!)

The Kayser baguette was so good that it relegated our neighborhood bakery's heretofore Perfect But Only #7 baguette to "Tasty and completely acceptable when we can't get a Kayser baguette." (Why can't we get a Kayser baguette every day, when Maison Kayser is only ten minutes' walk away? Because sometimes, often, we are coming back from a five-mile march in the opposite direction and are so tired from looking at Art that we cannot force ourselves to take the extra ten blocks out of our way, even for the Kayser baguette.) It was so good that, the other day, La Potiche ordered two baguettes for lunch, and succeeded in eating slightly more than a whole one all by herself. And this got us (her) thinking that we didn't know how Kayser placed in the competition. He may not have entered it; he may have gotten disqualified because his baguettes don't conform to weight and size standards. We knew his baguette was better than #7. We knew it might even be better than the competition winner. But there remained the disquieting possibility that six other baguettes, most especially #1, were better, and we wouldn't know till we'd tasted them.

Hence, the trek to Montmartre, in weather well below freezing, dodging some very slow-moving, gelid crowds, because the Real Reason we came to Paris was the pursuit of excellence. We found the bakery, bought two baguettes, stuffed them awkwardly into La Potiche's bag, because it was so cold that we'd forgotten to bring the roomy shopping bag, climbed a couple hundred stairs to swing by Sacré-Coeur and feel ambivalent about it, and then started heading home, because La Potiche couldn't feel her toes anymore and was afraid of falling down the stairs. Here she is, with a red, windburned face. She is not the Kwisatz Haderach.

But before we'd gone too far, we dropped into a chocolate shop, L'Étoile d'Or (Gold Star), where our friends Rebecca and Rudy once bought us some beautiful chocolate bars stuffed with pistachio paste, because we were still In Pursuit of Excellence.
It was cold in the shop, as in all the other stores we've visited. By the time we'd looked at all the lovely things, and selected a bunch of handmade chocolates, and a tin of prune-stuffed prunes (I do not want to hear your negative opinions about prunes, which add nothing to the conversation), and a chocolate bar made of a brown-sugar cookie covered in layers of salted caramel and chocolate, La Potiche's hands were so stiff that she couldn't handle her money. Luckily, Le Prof still had the use of his hands. Then we marched three miles home, but it was downhill this time.

When we got home, we sat down to eat our lunch of Grand Prix Baguette. It was very good. It was as good as the Kayser. It was exactly as good as the Kayser, apart from being ice cold. And beyond that, we cannot rank it. Because, despite our Pursuit of Excellence, it is simply too early in the game for us. We can tell the difference between a #7 and a #1 baguette, but not between two Top Sixes, or, perhaps, two equally good #1s, as a true connaisseur would. But this impasse is not a dreadful one. We simply have not eaten enough Really Good Baguettes, and we have five more months to educate ourselves. Even if we never actually learn to make those fine, fine distinctions, because our palates will simply not become refined enough--we won't know what to look for, fragrances and flavors will escape us, and our teeth won't sense the tiny differences in crunch and give--it is not a bad thing for excellence, or in this case ignorance, to abound. We can have SEVEN number one boulangeries and live happily, never the wiser.

Here is a picture of one of the candies we bought at L'Étoile d'Or: it is a mandarin pâte de fruit, or fruit jelly, filled with orange liqueur. Reflected in the mirror, La Potiche is having a fit. It came about because Le Prof told her to back away from the candy. His intention was to include her in the photograph. But La Potiche misinterpreted his request as an attempt to keep her from sniffing the candy as closely she would have liked to do at that moment, so she did back off, but then immediately flung herself into a Dance of Rage, which Le Prof captured on his camera. This, friends, is what it's really like here. The Pursuit of Excellence does not extend to Excellence of Character.

And here is my favorite song ever. Like this blog post, it is about excellence and bread. La Potiche likes to dance around the apartment, singing, "Bread! You know that it's...BREAD!" and Le Prof says, "That's not how the words go." But for La Potiche, rearranging song lyrics to suit herself is like toasting: why NOT gild the lily?

And finally, did any of you notice the candy labeled "Pruneski"? It is a dab of sweet prune paste, stuffed inside a date that is dipped into a caramel bath and hardened into golden, sparkling rock sugar crystals...and then dipped in dark chocolate. It is possibly the most delicious candy that has ever been made. If I were a St. Petersburg matron in an unhappy marriage, I would totally fall for a dashing bald officer named Pruneski. But what is a Pruneski? The innerwebs are strangely silent on the subject. We will have to return to the store to find out where these glorious things come from, and how we can get them in New York.

Quelques choses que j’ai appris depuis mon arrivée

2012-01-30T11:31:00.004+01:00

(for why my prose style is so weird, my topics so constrained, and why, for this particular reason, I'm a lot less interesting than La Potiche...and why I've included what looks like a bad French translation, see my first post here)

Several things that I've learned since my arrival:

my words stagger along; my broken-down French stumbles. But I knew this already and you are learning it from this blog. I wanted only to use a handful of the new words that I've just learned;

not too far away, close by the church of St. Germain l'Auxerrois, the Vikings set up camp during one of their ninth-century sieges of Paris;

the same church rang its bell to announce the beginning of the St. Bartholomew Day's massacre...or, I read this but I believe it announced the second day of the massacre. The difference matters only to scholars and to the victims themselves. And in any case, the cruel church was mixed up in the massacre;

in another wonderful book by Graham Robb, Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris (if you haven't read The Discovery of France, add it to your list), I learned that during the 1870 Siege of Paris, the farmers around Paris burned their fields to prevent the Prussians from supplying themselves with provisions. But the fire destroyed only those things on the surface; many things yet survived in the soil. Therefore, the new Republic had the potatoes and other root vegetables that had escaped the fire harvested; to do the job, it invited other farmers, the starving ones, living outside the fertile regions. With full stomachs, these farmers, this plague of locusts, soon returned to their homes. And I imagine that Paris starved more than the Prussians did.

I have a lot of other things about the subject of new ideas and words, but that's enough for now. Soon I'll talk about this show.

Quelques choses que j’ai appris depuis mon arrivée :

mes mots vont cahin-caha ; mon français délabré bronche. Mais je le savais déjà et vous l’apprenez par ce blogue. J'ai voulu simplement utiliser une poignée de nouveaux mots que j’ai appris tout à l’heure ;

à quelques encablures, près de l'église Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, les Vikings ont établi un camp pendant un de leurs sièges de Paris au neuvième siècle ;

la même église a sonné sa cloche pour annoncer le commencement du massacre de la Saint-Barthélemy...ou, je l’ai lu, mais je crois qu’elle a annoncé la seconde Saint-Barthélemy. La différence n'importe qu'aux érudites et aux victimes eux-mêmes. En tout cas, l’église sanglante s’est trouvée mêlée au massacre ;

dans un autre livre merveilleux de Graham Robb, Parisians : An Adventure History of Paris (si vous n’avez pas lu The Discovery of France, l'ajoutez à votre liste), j’ai appris que pendant le siège 1870 de Paris, les fermiers autour de Paris ont brûlé leurs champs pour empêcher les Prussiens de se fournir des aliments. Mais les feux n'ont détruit que les choses sur la surface ; encore plus de choses survivaient dans le sol. Donc, la nouvelle république a fait moissonner les pommes de terre et les autres racines comestibles qui ont échappé les feux ; d'accomplir cette tâche, elle a invité les autres fermiers, les affamés, habitaient en dehors des zones fertiles. Leurs ventres rassasiés, les fermiers, cette nuée de sauterelles, ont bientôt retourné à leurs maisons. Et j’imagine que Paris aient affamé plus que les Prussiens.

J’ai beaucoup d’autres choses aux sujets d'idées et de mots nouveaux, mais ça suffit pour le moment. Bientôt je parle à cette exhibition.

A Word of Explanation

2012-01-29T11:24:00.010+01:00

Qu'est-ce que c'est, la potiche?

It all begins with François Ozon. He is the real reason we came to France. We love three of his films, Gouttes d'eau sur pierres brûlantes (Water Drops on Burning Rocks), 8 Femmes (8 Women), and Potiche (hey!). We are kind of "Ehhh" about Swimming Pool but look forward to seeing the other films. Ozon's work has all kinds of queerness and feminism and awesome technicolor set designs and more Douglas Sirk, Jacques Demy, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder references than Rock Hudson could shake his manly fists at, but sometimes there are things, little touches, that we can't resolve as misogyny or fetishism or cattiness or humor or all of those things at once, so that we're kept on our toes. When we have an apartment of our own, we will have a room decorated entirely in İznik tiles and a room that looks like the Nouvelle Vague, the Nouvelle Nouvelle Vague, and the Neuer Deutscher Film all wallpapered together IN VELVET.

Which brings us to Potiche. What exactly is a potiche, you ask? It is, in the first place, the 2010 film starring Catherine Deneuve. In the second place, it means "trophy wife." Deneuve plays the meek wife of an umbrella factory owner who takes charge of the works after her mean, philandering husband's heart attack; the film asks not only what is the role of the trophy wife, but also what she's supposed to do with herself when she no longer plays a decorative role in her husband's affections or status-seeking.

The film does some very charming things with gender and labor and politics. It's also a highlight, and a skew, of Deneuve's transition into playing dignified, sexless, matriarchal supporting roles. I think that there are times when she seems to show traces of discomfort, even bewilderment, that is not entirely confined to the roles themselves, as though she too is wondering, "How did I, Belle de Jour, the Mississippi Mermaid, Peau d'Âne, always the gorgeous lead little more than a decade ago, get typecast this way for the new millennium?" Ten years ago, when hers was the face of Chanel No. 5, she might have thought it would be a fun experiment to allow Lars von Trier to cast her as Kathy, Bjork's sidekick at the stainless steel sink-making factory, and had no idea that she was letting herself in for another decade of sexless supporting roles. Or maybe she was sick of being typecast as beautiful and seductive? Or thought it would be funny? Or thought that it was the only thing for an actress of her age to do, to keep working? Or she wanted to invest those roles with variety and great acting and wanted a new challenge? Or maybe it was a relief?

There is a similar mystery in watching Lauren Bacall play Ma Ginger in Dogville. "Don't give me any of your lip, Thomas Edison Jr.: I'LL HOE AS I DARN WELL PLEASE." Lars wrote that line because he's a sadist. But it's also an incredibly amusing line, and it's more interesting to speculate on what Bacall herself might have been thinking as she hoed her gooseberries. Similarly, we can suppose that Deneuve has all these thoughts, or none of them, or something else entirely. All we can do is sit around obsessively watching the quirks of her expressive mouth and wondering just how much irony she's investing in her performances--or watch films like Potiche, which seem to comment on and critique not just WOMEN and WORK and the PLIGHT OF AGING WOMEN ACTORS, but also Deneuve's career in particular.

So. In case anybody is wondering, the title of our blog is my idea. Karl wouldn't have gone anywhere near it, if I hadn't insisted. I like that it's funny and also very uncomfortable. There is nothing terribly amusing about calling oneself La Romancière (The Novelist), though there is some value in claiming the name itself. La Potiche, on the other hand, carries with it so much ambivalence and provocation; there's no way you can talk about the word without discussing misogyny, money, and power, and no way you can disclaim it, without having to say something positive about women's unpaid domestic labor and so forth. All this stuff is present in my mind every time I sit down to write, but more often when I'm sitting down to not write--but in a funny way! Like Catherine Deneuve, I am profoundly ambivalent about the roles I've chosen. Like Catherine Deneuve, I often think back on that time that I was the allegorical figure representing la République Française, and wonder, WHA HAPPENED?

The idea of La Potiche is my bugbear, my memento mori, and also, not unproblematically, a comfort, because there is nothing technically wrong with being one--that I must admit as both a feminist and a pragmatist. When I reckon the possibility that I will never write a sellable novel, and my dedicated, hardworking agent will never get paid, I comfort myself with the fact that Le Prof wakes up every morning with a big old grin on his face, to realize once more that he has won the competition and I AM THE PRIZE, and even if I did cook a completely inedible egg and rice soup for yesterday's lunch, he was still grinning with joy as he dumped the leftovers in the toilet. Seeing that grin, I sat down to write some more, because I, La Potiche, am une artiste tragi-comédienne, and if there's something rather misogynist or fetishistic or catty about all this, it's keeping me on my toes.

Which brings me back to the Republic of France! We came away to Paris not just for le fromage, but also to get uncomfortable with language and culture and how we fit into the place where we're living, which is to say, who we are. That discomfort is meant to stimulate our work, our imaginations and criticisms and readings, so that we write, not about Paris, but because we've been provoked and shaken up by Paris. Or at least that's what we're telling ourselves this morning, because the dryer takes 6 hours to dry the socks, and the sink pipe dripped all over the floor, and the microwave fell off its stand, and last night's Fête aux Cris lasted till 3 A.M. (they really did scream till 3 A.M. Screamed. Really. Repeated high-pitched whoops and screams, as they danced to le techno). But, undaunted, we are eating oatmeal and drinking our second pot of coffee and coughing, and, around brunchtime, going forth again, Le Prof et La Potiche, to hoe as we darn well please.

Postscript: Une potiche is also a kind of ceramic vase, like the one adorning the sidebar on our blog. And holy moly, but Le Prof is a big fan of ceramics, certain ceramics. More on that in a later post.

Les roches : ses courtes durées

2012-01-23T15:30:00.005+01:00

(for why my prose style is so weird, and why it's followed with what looks like a bad French translation, see my first post here)

(and of course, read La Potiche's most recent post first, before reading mon flux de conscience)

For two or three years, more or less, my friend Jeffrey Jerome Cohen has been writing a book on the subject of rocks and time. Is it possible for a human being, living for perhaps eighty years, to imagine the time of stones, which endure through ages that seem an eternity to us? However, for the universe, stones endure a few short moments between two abysses, the one black and the other hot, the end and the beginning of all. Too long and too short, rocks escape and hide themselves. So the book will be difficult, slow, and, of course, hard, like others.

Here's a statue, I think, on the Louvre. There are many statutes like this one on the Louvre, all with famous names: Montaigne, Cassini, Rousseau, Rabelais, and also yours, my readers, I swear it. But this statue is the only one wearing a net. For what crime, I ask myself? Is this evidence that punishments continue openly, despite the analyses of Foucault?

This is not such a stupid idea, nevertheless, I have another one, more amusing: thinking that the net is doing its best to stop the outflow of stones. According to Cohen, and according to geology also, even stones flow. The others without their own nets have soft surfaces. All the hazards of a wild life in the open air have made them multicolored. I chose to believe that the net is trying to do the impossible: to capture one statue, only one, to encourage it to remain itself.

Depuis deux ou trois ans, plus ou moins, mon ami Jeffrey Jerome Cohen écrit un livre au sujet de roches et de temps. Est-il possible pour un être humain, vivant pour peut-être quatre-vingts années, d'imaginer le temps des pierres, qui durent à travers le temps qui semble, à nous, une éternité ? Toutefois, à l'univers, les pierres durent quelques instants courts entre deux abîmes, le noir et le chaud, la terminaison et le commencement de toutes choses. Trop longs et trop courts, les roches échappent et se cachent. Donc, le livre sera difficile, lente, et sûrement dur...comme les autres.

Voilà une statue, je crois, sur le Louvre. Il y a beaucoup de statues comme celle-ci sur le Louve, toutes avec les noms célébrés : Montaigne, Cassini, Rousseau, Rabelais, et aussi le vôtre, mes lecteurs, je le jure. Mais cette statue est la seule qui porte un filet. Pour quelle félonie, je me demande ? Est-il l'évidence que les punitions continuent ouvertement, malgré les analyses de Foucault ?

Ce n'est pas une idée trop bête, néanmoins j'ai une autre plus amusante : penser que le filet fait de son mieux d'arrêter l'écoulement des pierres. Après Cohen, et après la géologie aussi, même les pierres coulent. Les autres sans les propres filets ont des surfaces mouillées. Tous les hasards de la vie sauvage en plein air les bariolaient. Je choisis croire que le filet essaie de faire l'impossible : capturer une statue, seulement une, pour l'encourager à rester soi-même.

Plus ça change...

2012-01-22T20:17:00.013+01:00

La Potiche started this blog writing about the Daily Life. Le Prof weighed in, in his inimitably Duboisian way, to preserve the mystery of sacs. "Oh look, we have created enchantment!" And it's true! There is a great deal of mysterious enchantment to be gotten by the performance of everyday tasks and the observation of everyday things in an unexpected place. Imagine this scenario, which we played out our first night in Paris: what would you do if you had a pot of pasta boiling over on the stove?

a. Turn off the heat.
b. Remove the lid.
c. Move the pot to another burner.
d. Panic and wring your hands, because French pots and French penne and French water and French stoves are entirely too mysterious and enchanting to be understood!

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. (The more things change, the more they stay the same.) I hear that that's meant to be an expression of more-or-less bitter resignation. But for Le Prof et La Potiche, it has been a good thing. In our first days of head colds, travel exhaustion, and linguistic idiocy, the presence of familiar things and routines has eased our culture shock, while leaving us relaxed and ready for the appreciation of all that is wondrous and new (to us) here.

Chores here are a mixture of the humdrum and the exciting. Our vacuum is mysteriously efficient. Our toilet cleaner is mysteriously familiar. Our microwave, which is also somehow an oven, mysteriously opens from the top. What's up with that, Professor? Our washing machine is also a dryer, and it takes four hours to efficiently (?) dry two towels. In Brooklyn, we are accustomed to going out in the morning for a walk, during which we run errands and buy our groceries at the co-op. On our street in Paris, there is an organic grocery with familiar bulk foods bins, whole grains, herbal teas, and even my usual brand of tampons. The store also, enchantingly, sells bottles of dirt-cheap delicious wine, jams made of fifty different fruits (mirabelle ET reine claude plums), and raw mare's milk. The eggs are kept at room temperature, in that way of a people (that is to say, the members of the Economy of the European Union) who know where their eggs come from and don't wash off the protective coatings along the way. A nicely kept egg that won't kill you is an enchanting thing.

Le Prof interjects, "'I keeelled a man,' says the little egg." In Paris, all the eggs sound like Rossano Brazzi, who was the real reason we came to Paris. In South Pacific, Rossano Brazzi played Emile de Becque, who, in his native FRANCE, keeelled a bad man, who was a booolly. Every day, and especially on enchanted evenings, we are inspired by Rossano Brazzi.

Speaking of bullies, last night we went to see the Metropolitan Opera's new baroque pastiche, "The Enchanted Island," broadcast live in HD to a cinema in Montparnasse. They took The Tempest and bits from A Midsummer Night's Dream and set them to arias from Handel, Rameau, and Vivaldi. For all of you in New York, or with the chance to see a rebroadcast: go see it. It is robust, glorious fun; one of our fellow audience members commented, approvingly, of one of the leads, "Il est silly!" (he's silly). It was lovely to see our old friends Joyce, Danielle, and Placido in such fine form. Also, there was the most gorgeous use of Zadok the Priest ever. You know, Zadok the Priest.

Le Prof et La Potiche have been Met subscribers since 2004 (long before Le Prof was un prof or La Potiche was une potiche!!! More on that, in a later post), and during that time, have seen a wide range of bad behaviors both in the opera house and at the movie theater broadcasts. Opera-goers tend to be vigorous, passionate, irritable people between the ages of 36 and 106. We have witnessed bullying, yelling, scolding, grabbing, slapping, and the sneaking in of food. It is all part of the fun, till somebody gets hurt. We have engaged in none of that behavior except for the sneaking of Opera Snackies, usually chocolate, which can be eaten swiftly and silently without crumbs and hidden under one's playbill, and which hurt only us. We were nervous about doing this in Paris, where people might, we thought, enforce anti-outside-food rules with similar vigor, passion, and irritability. But were we ever surprised! No sooner had we sneaked our two little tarts out of their box, than we looked up and saw people all around us pouring champagne into real glasses that they'd sneaked in, opening plastic containers of homemade tabbouleh and green salad, unpacking dessert tarts and quiches and sandwiches. Six or seven women opened up their tiny handbags, pulled out whole baguettes, like rabbits from top hats, and started tearing at them with their perfect teeth (this is where the rabbit simile ends, I suppose). And we felt sad, because the tabbouleh and baguettes were beautiful, while our tarts were not so beautiful. They were, in fact, cheap-ass tarts bought along the way in St. Germain from a boulangerie that was not on La Potiche's list of Boulangeries Approuvés! Le Prof et La Potiche felt so bad that they decided to reserve the right to speak of themselves in both the third and the first person, even in the same sentence, whenever we so desire.

This morning, Le Prof et La Potiche set off on their Daily Errand Walk. This, mes amis, is our Daily Errand Walk:

"Shall we take the shortcut through the Louvre?" we say, every morning. The only answer is, "Duh." We will never get sick of the shortcut through the Louvre.

Then we say, "What is that?"

It is one of the mysteries of Paris, not that there is a large white singe escaping from a window of Louvre, but rather, that only one other person on the internets seems to be remarking upon it.

Back home in Brooklyn, Sunday mornings are for walks to the greenmarket. So, today, we walked to the greenmarket. And we bought juicy pears. And a savoy cabbage. A sac full of mâche, which we may report on later. A pot of forest honey. A sac of spinach. A sac of dried green flageolets, which we may also report on. A ripe raw milk cheese, handmade by a farmer named Agnès, from the milk of a Jersey cow. I can't remember the last time I knew what kind of cow my cheese came from; I am particularly fond of the doe-like aspect of Jersey cows.

A bunch of parsley, which we forgot to take with us. A bag full of clementines, which were not grown in France. Then we walked the two miles home, bought a baguette from the other award-winning boulangerie a block from our apartment, and went home. We will not get to some of that food till tomorrow, but le Prof ate half the cheese for lunch. It had a strong smell and a flavor like fresh white cheese--very interesting and strange to us. Tonight for dinner we ate the spinach cooked with green lentilles de Puy and caramelized onions, topped with fried eggs. We also ate a DELICIOUS slice of tart from the good boulangerie: apricots and pistachio paste, the apricots so juicy they soaked through the wrapping paper--but not through the buttery crust. YUM.

Not all the street markets in Paris are actually farmers' markets, and not all the food is organic. This stuff is, though. And it all clocked in at about $20.

Un énigme dans un sac.

2012-01-20T15:08:00.003+01:00

Hi everyone, it's Le Prof!

Before leaving, I had the idea for this blog, namely, to write in French and then to translate what I wrote into English. The result, I believe, would be a kind of foreign English, where I would become a stranger in my own language and, at the same time, I would learn French a little. Of course, my French will have many mistakes, but after several months, maybe I can write with the lightness, but certainly without the precision, of the masters, like Lacan, for example.

Okay then. Here is a little bag in or near the Tuileries Garden. There are many like this in other trees; I could search for their purpose, but I prefer to imagine that they contain druidical eggs or, perhaps, only the fingers of druids, but with the regenerative power of starfish. For now, I want a Paris full of mysteries.

And for you, now, a druidical song. Make the most of it! Learn something!

Avant de notre départ, j’ai eu une idée pour cette blogue, viz., d'écrire en français et, puis, de traduire mes écrits en anglais. La conséquence, je crois, soit un type d’anglais étranger, dans lequel je deviendrais un étranger dans mon propre langue et, au même temps, je apprendrais le français un peu. Bien sûr, mon français aura beaucoup des fautes, mais après quelques mois, peut-être je peux écrire avec le légèreté, mais certainement sans l’exactitude, des maîtres, comme Lacan, par exemple.

Ah bon. Voici un petit sac dans ou près de jardin de Tuileries. Il y a beaucoup comme ça dans les autres arbres ; je peux chercher pour leur but, mais je préfère d’imaginer qu’ils contiennent les œufs druidiques ou peut-être seulement les doigts des druides, mais avec le pouvoir régénératif des étoiles de mer. Pour ce moment, je veux un Paris plein d’énigmes.

Et pour vous, maintenant, une chanson druidique ! Profitez ! Apprenez quelque chose !

On Not Going Out in Paris

2012-01-19T21:33:00.004+01:00

Scott was sick in Rome, and Byron was sick in London. Karl got sick in London and brought it to Istanbul, where Scott was, and, as it turned out, was still a little bit sick. Karl coughed directly onto Alison's face, twice, at close range, though he had the excuse of being asleep. But it was Amy who got sick next. Back in London, Alison got sick, though it is entirely possible that she caught it from one (or a hundred) of the couple hundred thousand people who also had colds in London, Istanbul, Paris, on the planes, and in the Chunnel. Or from a passing Euro/lira/pound coin she'd licked. There are probabilities, and good ones too, but no certainty on this point, without genetic testing of germs.

What this means for you, O lucky readers, is that Karl and Alison aren't going anywhere in Paris. Not anywhere YOU want to hear about, that is, though they have already gone to the bank, to make a deposit! And to the FNAC in the otherwise earth-swallowingly purposeless mall at Les Halles, to pick up theater tickets bought online! And to the Bio for lettuce and a demi-litre of organic red wine, very fruity but very dry (5 euros, or $6.48), and to the Boulangerie Julien for their award-winning Baguette Tradition (1.15 euros, or $1.49)!

Which is to say, daily life in Paris has commenced. Daily Life in Paris is the reason we came here, and it is the reason we had time today to put together our travel blog and bring Le Prof and La Potiche into existence. There is no time for blogging (though there is, apparently, plenty of time for Facebook), when there are mosques to marvel at and puddings to eat and a bazillion cobbled steps to climb and even more whimsical ceramics to photograph--and friends, because friends are more important than the internet. But now La Potiche is sick, and Le Prof kindly declines to adventure without her, so they have put together this blog.