L'après-midi and everything after

Much later. My body seems to have adopted, maybe in self-defense against abuse, some bizarre rhythm in which it wakes me far too early after far too late nights for several days running, then wants me to recover all the lost sleep at once. Like today, Tuesday, October 18, when to my own astonishment I slept very late by my standards, woke to full knowledge that there was really nothing but fruit, cheese, and yogurt (well; and oatmeal, but I just couldn’t) in the place for food, gauged that I could just make it to lunch if I hurried, and did that. Wine for breakfast these days, followed eventually by a jolt of strong coffee (much too early in the day for my caffeine sensitivity, even on a full stomach), is not really the best of ideas, either, though it trumps not eating to the point of low blood sugar, I suppose (a repeat visit to a little salon du thé just a couple of blocks away, one I hadn’t tried last year. The placemats are a 1940 photo of the same place, looking virtually identical to itself in 2011, with one exception being, of course, the formule lunch’s being listed on the chalkboard in the photo as starting at 10 francs, rather than 12 Euro). Then to a bakery for tomorrow’s breakfast as it began to rain (what are the people upstairs doing? violently rearranging the furniture, it would seem) and home. Where I promptly feel desperately drowsy again, full night’s sleep and coffee be damned.

But the train and bus schedules are perused, a hotel reservation in Alençon is made, and I leave tomorrow morning for my long-postponed whirlwind trip into Basse Normandie. So I should try to recall and piece together as much as I can of the past week, whether anyone else ever reads of it or not, for my own memories.

Tuesday (October 11). In the afternoon I finally went to take part in a “Parler Paris” après-midi, which happens once a month upstairs at La Pierre du Marais, a restaurant in, obviously, Le Marais. It was cool and overcast; I took the Métro to the Temple (all these references to “Temple” in the Marais refer to the “Temple” of the Knights Templar, remnants of which still turn up from time to time when buildings are renovated or any excavation is done—as our speaker for the afternoon reminded us) exit, and without too much trouble found the place. Making me twenty minutes early, a rare occurrence; first on the scene, remarkably, so early the proprietor inquired as to why I was heading up the stairs. There were only, at that point, a couple of businessmen’s meetings still in progress up there, so I sat quietly and started in on coffee while waiting.

Eventually the businessmen departed and the overly-warm room filled with “Parler Paris” faithful (the tastefully finished and painted walls studded all over with rough stones, per the restaurant’s name; inquiring minds want to know whether they were already there or added for effect). I was a little disappointed that in my corner everything proceeded in English only for the duration, but not at all in my conversational partners, a young couple, he a physical therapist from New York here for a year with his wife, who’s from Taiwan (!), here on a fellowship to do research on 19^th-century tapestries. No; I wasn’t really familiar at all with the concept, or had never given any thought, certainly, to the existence of 19^th-century tapestries, so we had an interesting conversation. Whether helpful or not, I passed on the (apparently; to me at least) connected thought of the tapestry-like painted frieze by Jan de Beers I had just seen the preceding week at the Petit Palais.

Home to regroup, because that evening was the poetry reading. It was only in Les Halles, only slightly past the language school where the conversational group usually meets, so I walked (even in pumps). In spite of myself I found the little side street, but by the time the street numbers had reached 28 on the right, while I was still looking for 17 on the left, I stopped to ask directions. A couple of young men assured me to just keep going, and sure enough, there it finally was. “It” being a—well, disco club, pretty much, that can be rented out for private parties. A bar, with various small dark rooms. Dark rooms. Dark. The woman in charge of the combined event, in fact, advised us just to sit down and wait “upstairs,” when we were on the ground floor, meaning we would eventually descend somewhere else, because they hadn’t yet managed to turn off the disco music in the reading room. Wherever there were steps, and that was often and everywhere, their blackness was outlined in red strip lights, which for me at least served only to take away all depth perception.

But the gradually gathering people were, as always in my experience in Paris, friendly and welcoming. The woman with whom I’d found Spoken Word that first night in Belleville was there (networking, as she has some workshops coming up herself for which she’d of course like participants), and then an American couple came and sat by me and we chatted.

Finally we were invited to come down to the readied room. After a full descent to another, deeper level, there was another bar room, and then the reading room itself, with stools and chairs set up in addition to the bench around the wall. The gloom was alleviated a bit by a few uplights, and what an intriguing room it was. Cellar, it was. Surely it was always some sort of storage space, for the whole vault over our heads, though whitewashed now, was of rough, jagged stone. In one far corner there was a low, narrow arch, through which you could see the beginning of a twisting flight of steps.

The reading itself was—to summarize—intriguing, very interesting. Some of the poetry was a bit too cutting-edge and experimental to move me, but how often do I get the chance to hear it? and because of that it pinged places in my head to jar assumptions loose, shake things up a bit. “Like fernseed after fire,” to quote Jane Lewty, who I don’t always understand but will certainly be looking for from now on.

(For the record the reading was sponsored jointly by Ivy Writers and Poets Live, and those reading, in addition to Jane Lewty, were Anna Arov, Megan Garr, Kate Foley, and Sarah Ream, all currently Amsterdam-based though they’re from the U.K. and the U.S.; and Lars Palm from Sweden. Megan also established (she’s thirty-two!) wordsinhere, a literary community organization, in Amsterdam, and Versal, a literary journal now celebrating its tenth year of existence, “named one of seventeen ‘Indie Innovator’ presses by Poets & Writers Magazine” in 2010 (quoting from the reading’s publicity).)

And so I staggered home, this day having been the cautionary tale of not eating enough, of hardly eating at all, and then on an empty stomach deciding to have a Nutella crêpe in addition to coffee while at the “après-midi” gathering, throwing my blood sugar completely out of whack for all the remainder of the day and evening. Dizzy? Mais oui, mes chéris. Absolutely no alcohol necessary, though there’d also been that glass of wine at the disco club for good (or not) measure.