Is it really so bad? The view outside my window. (Louvre at back, with trees of the Jardin du Palais Royal.)

Paris is for lovers, right?  Mais non.

I actually enjoy wandering the narrow streets of the first arrondissement alone, exploring the byways that open unexpectedly to a spectacular scene like the autumn trees of the Jardin du Palais Royal, or ducking out to the fromagerie for some Roquefort from the Pyrenées, or discovering a 200-year-old bakery around the corner, Au Grand Richelieu, which provides homemade marrons glacés – or simply sitting alone, in my tiny studio apartment overlooking the Louvre.  There is no one to mediate or mitigate my interaction with the city – it’s a direct hit, every step I take.

Susan Sontag, who adored Paris, nevertheless found being alone a drag – even for a quick croissant and coffee in the morning with Le Monde.  She told memoirist  Sigrid Nunez that when she was alone, her “mind went blank” like “static on the screen when a channel stops broadcasting.” Yet she also claimed, “One can never be alone enough to write.”  Well, that’s the point, isn’t it?

Emily Cooke discusses the writer’s solitude over at The New Inquiry:  “Being alone lets you develop, become strange, be mad. If to be with people is to be socialized, to submit your rough edges to the whetstone of others’ desires, to be asocial is to be ragged and, thus, original.”

Sontag falls under her lorgnette, but so does Vivian Gornick and Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik.

Read the whole thing here.

Postscript on 11/25:  My friend Pierre de Taille over at La Plume Périodique  tells me what I already knew: “Roquefort cheese is not from the Pyrenées but from the region of the village of Roquefort, south of Le Massif Central (http://www.roquefort.fr/decouvrir/le-village/).  There are similar kinds of cheeses in the Pyrénées, one of the best being from the town of Salies-du-Salat, a little hard to find but delicious.”  What can I say?  They told me it was Roquefort from the Pyrenées, but maybe they didn’t want to explain to all their customers why a very similar cheese is from the Pyrenées.  It just confuses us.  The price would certainly suggest it was hard-to-find. Thanks, Pierre!

As soon as I read this passage in Marcel Proust‘s Swann’s Way, I knew I must have one:

Being the only rather vulgar person in our family, she took care to point out to strangers, when they were talking about Swann, that, had he wanted to, he could have lived on the boulevard Haussmann or the avenue de l’Opéra, that he was the son of M. Swann, who must have left four or five million, but that this was his whim.  One that she felt moreover must be so amusing to others that in Paris, when M. Swann came on New Year’s Day to bring her her bag of marrons glacés, she never failed, if there was company, to say to him: “Well, Monsieur Swann! Do you still live next door to the wine warehouse, so as to be sure of not missing the train when you go to Lyon?”  And she would look out of the corner of her eye, over her lorgnon, at the other visitors.

These candied chestnuts migrated to northern Italy and southern France after the Crusades.  Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about them:

“The earliest known record of a recipe for marrons glacés was written by the French at the end of 17th century in Louis XIV‘s Versailles court.  In 1667, François Pierre La Varenne, ten years’ chef de cuisine to Nicolas Chalon du Blé, Marquis of Uxelles (near Lyon and a chestnut-producing area), and foremost figure of the nouvelle cuisine movement of the time, published his best-selling book Le parfaict confiturier. In it he describes ‘la façon de faire marron pour tirer au sec’ (‘the way to make (a) chestnut (so as) to “pull it dry”‘); this may well be the first record of the recipe for marrons glacés. ‘Tirer au sec’ means, in a confectionery context, ‘to remove (what’s being candied) from the syrup’. La Varenne’s book was edited 30 times in 75 years.”

Good enough for him.

So that’s how I celebrated my Thanksgiving.  Returning home from the Sorbonne, I stopped in a boulangerie on the Rue de Richelieu for a baguette, and saw a enormous pile of marrons glacés.  I had my doubts.  The little suckers were going for 1.80 euros apiece.  I’ve never been able to quite make friends with the humble chestnut – you know, the “chestnuts roasting on an open fire,” and so on every Christmas – and that, despite making a reasonably good chestnut soufflé in the wintertime.  But the marron glacé?  Un vrai délice!

Have a happy Thanksgiving.  And don’t pass them up, if you get the chance.

(Or try the recipe here.)

It is too late to make your own nominations this year, but London’s Literary Review is about to announce this year’s winners for one of the world’s most dreaded competitions:  the 20th annual award for the most embarrassing passage of sexual description in a novel, to take place  on December 4, 2012.

According to Jonathan Beckman, a senior editor, wrote in the Financial Times last year: “Auberon Waugh, Literary Review’s former editor, founded the prize with crusading purpose. He was genuinely convinced that publishers were encouraging novelists to include sex scenes solely in order to increase sales. The award’s remit was ‘to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it’. But it is rather hard to convey the redundancy of a passage to an audience that has not read the entire novel, and so the prize has evolved to acknowledge the absurd, the implausible, the overwritten and the unwittingly comical.”

This year’s finalists are:

• The Yips by Nicola Barker
• The Adventuress by Nicholas Coleridge
• Infrared by Nancy Huston
• Rare Earth by Paul Mason
• Noughties by Ben Masters
• The Quiddity of Will Self by Sam Mills
• The Divine Comedy by Craig Raine
• Back to Blood by Tom Wolfe  (he was a 2004 winner, too!)

I think they’ll have difficulty topping previous winners.  Rowan Somerville was awarded for this passage in The Shape of Her: “Like a lepidopterist mounting a tough-skinned insect with a too blunt pin he screwed himself into her.”  Tom Wolfe winning 2004 entry in I Am Charlotte Simmons: “Moan moan moan moan moan went Hoyt as he slithered slithered slithered slithered and caress caress caress caress went the fingers.”

Go over to the #LRBadSex2012 twitter hashtag to check out some of this year’s more promising contenders. How about this one? “She smells of almonds, like a plump Bakewell pudding; and he is the spoon, the whipped cream, the helpless dollop of custard.”

Beckman wrote: “It did not occur to me on joining the magazine that my job would include, every autumn, the corralling of a selection of egregious descriptions of sexual activity.”

It’s a tough job, but somebody’s got to do it.  The difficult work is described in the video below.

My neighbors at the Palais-Royal.

Diderot lived and died here.

So, while waiting for my luggage, and deepening my relationships with the baggage resolution personnel at United Airlines, I finally did spend a few minutes this afternoon wandering around my neighborhood, with my cellphone handy in case I had to rush back home for a joyful reunion with my suitcase.  Alas, the phone call never came… (we’re getting close to three days now).  Clearly, this arrondissement is big on the 17th century – so am I, so it’s a nice match.

Colette lived and died here.

Daniel Medin was right in telling me that this is a literary neighborhood – but really, aren’t all Paris neighborhoods literary ones?  Certainly my previous digs near the Eiffel Tower had its share of literary associations. Since I could not meet Daniel at the Louvre today as we had hoped, this increasingly grubby woman could explore the sites that Colette, Diderot, Molière, Corneille, and even Peruvian writer César Vallejo (1892-1938) called home – or at least a place to die.

A few blocks away, French tragedian Pierre Corneille (1606-1684) is entombed at the magnificent Eglise St. Roch.  Nearby, the Comédie-Française, which reaches back to the days of Molière (1622-1673). Good company for an afternoon walk.

The brouhaha with the airlines reminds me of the famous saying of Colette (1873-1954), “Plus je connais les hommes, plus j’aime mes chats.”  Mes chats are far away, but I’ll settle for the company of a few ghosts, these eminent and familiar spirits.

This one, however, disquiets me.  A marker for Ludovic J. Jacquinot, one of the “group of angels” who “fell gloriously” on the 26th of August, 1944.  The name, which has slightly Slavic resonances for me, reminds me of the ones I saw in Poland, trying in my off-hours to find out what I could about these wartime victims and heroes.  Unlike his Polish counterparts, however, there were no flowers at Ludovic’s marker.

There’s not much about him online. The FFI, or “Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur,” were the French Resistance fighters at the tail-end of the war. He may have been an architect, and may have lived on this or that street.  He was forty years old, and of course did not fall but was “tué,” under what circumstances it isn’t clear, except that it occurred here, at 2 rue des Pyramides.  Who remembers him?  I will, I guess.

Postscript:  Voilà!  My luggage has arrived while I have been writing this.  What a glorious thing it is to be clean again.

Je retourne.

My arrival in the First Arrondissement of Paris, sans luggage, has had one advantage, besides familiarizing me with the personnel at United Airlines, who, in the last 36 hours, still haven’t returned my toothbrush, my clothes, my medical prescriptions, the books for my research, or anything else I had packed. It has been a monk-like existence in the sixth-floor apartment, the sole excursion being to my beloved Galerie Mazarine at the La Bibliothèque Nationale de France again.  Amid the Parisian students, I figured one more grubby, earnest person would pass largely unnoticed and unremarked.

Here’s what else the seclusion has done:  It has brought me at last to Marcel Proust.  In all the whoop-de-do about Proust’s madeleines, passages like this one, early in Swann’s Way, tend to be overlooked.  It’s the one that sold me as I read on the train, and read in my studio overlooking the Louvre:

Proust as teenager

“But even with respect tot he most insignificant things in life, none of us constitutes a material whole, identical for everyone, which a person has only to go look up as though we were a book of specifications or a last testament; our social personality is a creation of the minds of others.  Even the very simple act that we call ‘seeing a person we know’ is in part an intellectual one. We fill the physical appearance of the individual we see with all the notions we have about him, and of the total picture that we form for ourselves, these notions certainly occupy the greater part. In the end they swell his cheeks so perfectly, follow the line of his nose in an adherence so exact, they do so well at nuancing the sonority of his voice as though the latter were only a transparent envelope that each time we see this face and hear this voice, it is these notions that we encounter again, that we hear.  No doubt, in the Swann they had formed for themselves, my family had failed out of ignorance to include a host of details from his life in the fashionable world that caused other people, when they were in his presence, to see refinements rule his face and stop at his aquiline nose as though at their natural frontier; but they had also been able to garner in this face disaffected of its prestige, vacant and spacious, in the depths of these depreciated eyes, the vague, sweet residue – half memory, half forgetfulness – of the idle hours spent together after our weekly dinners, around the card table or in the garden, during our life of good country neighborliness.

So what?

The corporeal envelope of our friend had been so well stuffed with this, as well as with a few memories relating to his parents, that this particular Swann had become a complete and living being, and I have the impression of leaving one person to go to another distinct from him, when, in my memory, I pass from the Swann I knew later with accuracy to that first Swann – to that first Swann in whom I rediscover the charming mistakes of my youth and who in fact resembles less the other Swann than he resembles other people I knew at that time, as though one’s life were like a museum in which all the portraits from one period have a family look about them, a single tonality – to that first Swann abounding in leisure, fragrant with the smell of the old chestnut tree, the baskets of raspberries, and a sprig of tarragon.

For a different take on Proust, the famous madeleines, and “odor memory,” try here.

Postscript: My thanks to Twitter’s Proustitute, the founder of Sharing Poetry, who may have coined the term “Proustitute.”

Here it is…America’s birth certificate, signed by Martin Waldseemüller

Twelve large sheets, assembled together in a 4′ X 7.5′ spread, form the 1507 map that has been called “America’s birth certificate.”

Like father…

Last night, I listened to Chet Van Duzer discuss his latest book, Seeing the World Anew (Library of Congress/ Levenger Press).  He spoke about both the 1507 and 1516 maps by German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller – but it was the earlier, dreamier map that caught my attention imagination.  Especially since it’s the first map to mention “America” by that name.  Or rather, by the name of the man who was the first explorer to decide that the Americas were not the eastern tip of Asia, but a whole different continent – or, put another way, he saw the Pacific as a separate body of water.

…like son.

America was named for him, but who was he named for?  That story falls outside the world of cartography and takes us back to saints. It seems this Florentine was named for an obscure 11th-century Hungarian, St. Emeric – which is to say, “Henry,” or in Hungarian, “Imre.” He was the crown prince of Hungary; his father was the legendary founding king of Hungary, St. Stephen.  The lad was killed by a boar at age 24, and buried church of Székesfehérvár.  (Is it just me, or does it seem like lots of folks in those days were killed by boars?)

When Waldseemüller made the 1516 map, Vespucci suffered a huge demotion, and had been supplanted by Christopher Columbus. He disappeared from the maps and from popular imagination. Still, it’s nice to know my homeland has been named for a Hungarian.

I didn’t hear the whole talk – I had to tiptoe off to the Humanities Center for Tobias Wolff leading a discussion of William Maxwell‘s So Long, See You Tomorrow, the debut event of “Another Look” book club.