Gare du Nord

"A testament to the proficiency of France’s railway workers, we arrived roughly on time in Gare du Nord, Paris. A station where [James] Joyce penned a letter to his brother, observing: 'I hate the bustle but the station has its own strange poetry, the sound of footsteps, the distant whistle of the steam engines, and the sudden clanging of the signal bell.'"

beckoning with a blade

“Beyond the subways, there were the trains. I was leaving Paris at midnight from Gare de l’Est. So long ago I can’t remember, but I believe I had my eye on Basel in Switzerland; I would have been interested in where Nietzsche died. I was tired, not feeling well, but I was intent on getting the most of an unlimited pass good for two months on continental trains. I could save money on lodging by selecting night trains with sleeping compartments. Aboard my car, I was patiently navigating down its narrow corridor. Directed at the man pushing ahead in front me, I heard in French, ‘All I need is the ticket.’ A gentleman facing us beckoned with a blade.”

~~ from “Chinese Sun” by Alex Kudera

I post a photograph in case we need a reminder that memoir & autofiction trend toward fiction.

I felt tugging

“Head down, I did my best to avoid Xi’an, China’s searing sun and the men selling socks on blankets over pavement. They were partly protected by the thin branches of small trees but still exposed to the heat. As I strode ahead, my mind bounced backwards two or three decades. I was wandering in a busy shopping area off the beaten tourist track in France. I remember it as near Les Halles, but not Les Halles; at the time, I didn’t know precisely where I was. An Algerian busser, one of my coworkers, had sent me to buy my uniform—a white shirt with black plants and bowtie. This was in Paris—or I should say on the outskirts of Paris. Les Banlieues, or not les banlieues? The shopping square was wide and packed tight with brown and pale Arabs. There were Tunisians, Moroccans, Algerians, and others. They were thin and poor, yes, but doing better than they would be back home. It was crowded—we were moving within inches of each other, even rubbing shoulders, as we walked up the wide boulevard. No cars but too many pedestrians. 

“I felt something behind me. I felt tugging . . .”

~~ from “Chinese Sun” by Alex Kudera

"Chinese Sun"

My most recent publication, "Chinese Sun," begins on page 139 of Meniscus, Volume 12, Issue 2; the journal is the creation of the Australasian Association of Writing Programs (AAWP). I'm quite proud of this piece, so I hope you give it a go.

we didn't have much

"Vincent Jeanbrun, the mayor of the Paris suburb of L'Hay-les-Roses, whose home was attacked while his wife and children were asleep inside on Saturday, on Monday described the situation as 'a real nightmare.'

"'I myself grew up in L'Hay-les-Roses in these large housing blocks,' Jeanbrun, a member of the centre-right Les Republicains party, told BFM TV. 'Our life was modest, we didn't have much, but we wanted to overcome it, we had hope that we would make it with hard work.'"

get to the point

"On a high shelf beneath a low ceiling, I’d discovered a single copy of Harry Mathews’s The Sinking of Odradek Stadium. It was a novel recommended to me in a professor’s rushed, indecipherable scrawl on the first story I ever submitted to a college class—a literature course, not one of those dreary, impossible fiction-writing workshops. The professor added that I had the talent to be a writer, but that I had to quit rambling and get to the point. Twenty-five years later on the other side of the world, the book was waiting. His point had found me."

No one was in my life

"Adjunct survival led me to a bird that flew into my apartment only this past year while teaching abroad in Suzhou, China. Not dead yet and employed overseas again, I’d chased contract work to “the Venice of the Far East”—a mainland city of man-made lakes and narrow canals—but I was alone. I had no friends. Gardens bloomed throughout the city, but there was no housing bulletin board at an American church. I had people in the program—teachers, students, staff—that I would exchange pleasantries with or occasional chitchat, but there was no one I was close to. I wasn’t going to stay up all night discussing politics, literature, or anything else. No one was in my life, and talking all about it no longer appealed to me."

a primitive way

"My strength was nearly depleted when Avi stopped pressing hard against me; at last, I could see he was no threat to attack. I didn’t see anything we could win by furthering this contest, and I recognized that Avi’s theft was the initiation of the physical encounter, if not the first act of aggression. In hindsight, it’s hard to remember another time when anything I was involved with was settled in such a primitive way."

no conversion required

"Whereas Avi wanted me to know who I could become, the boy already knew who I was. An identification, no conversion required.

"He appointed me as his countryman, but he didn’t stop and give me time to pledge allegiance."

personally against him

"A bottle of Rioja, pilfered from work, dangled from a plastic bag at Bergmann's wrist; he held an umbrella with his other hand. The wind seemed to be personally against him as he slogged up Camden Road, the bottle banging against his thigh. He had heard it starting when he was getting out of the shower, rain clattering like someone throwing pebbles by the handful at the bathroom window."

~~ from False Economies by Gordon Haber

Letter from Les Banlieues

"The approach has left residents vulnerable to both the police and the virus. Paris had 732 virus deaths compared with 402 in Seine-Saint-Denis as of April 8, but the city has half again the population of the suburb, where many of the metropolis’s cashiers, deliverymen, transit workers, nurses and couriers live.

"'This is getting really tough,' said Larry Karache, an out-of-work shopkeeper, standing outside Chêne Pointu, the housing project where France’s 2005 urban riots were born, and which was depicted in last year’s hit film Les Miserables. 'We’re actually in prison here.'"

our terror of going hungry

“We had only one thing in common in our family in the Passage, and that was our terror of going hungry. We all had plenty of that. It was with me from my first breath. . . They passed it on to me. . . We were all obsessed with it. . . As far as we were concerned, the soul was fear. In every room the walls sweated fear of going without. . . It made us swallow the wrong way, it made us bolt our meals and run around town like mad. . . we zigzagged like fleas all over Paris, from the Place Maubert to the Etoile, for fear of being auctioned off, for fear of the rent, of the gas man, the tax collector. . . We were always in such a hurry I never had time to wipe myself properly.”

~~ from Death on the Installment Plan by Louis-Ferdinand Celine

from A Moveable Feast

“The only thing that could spoil a day was people and if you could keep from making engagements, each day had no limits. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.”

“The one who is doing his work and getting satisfaction from it is not the one the poverty is hard on.”

― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast 

(Both quotations are from Chapter 5, "A False Spring"; I'm rereading the book as included in The Restored Edition, which is, according to this edition, the one Hemingway had completed when he passed.)

contrast

Late last night I watched (and read the subtitles) for this 130-minute film aptly titled Paris, and then in the morning, courtesy of China File on twitter, I saw this 4-minute preview for a new documentary on over 460 landfills for trash in Beijing, China.

books and paris

Here's a brief post for anyone who had one of those Monday mornings where you'd rather be reading in bed or you wished work would go away or you could leave work for Paris, France.

It looks like Shakespeare & Company has some competition in the city of lights. It's nice to read about any independent opening up a store (as opposed to closing one down).