Have I mentioned how much I hate moving? 

Only on paper

Trolling through web sites I bookmarked long ago but haven't visited recently, I chanced across an article by Malcolm Gladwell, he of The Tipping Point. "The Social Life of Paper," published in The New Yorker in March 2002, is an extraordinary examination of the role of paper in modern society. It begins with an examination of why air traffic controllers are wedded to little slips of paper to help them track the planes they are responsible for, and why the process of developing a computer-based system to replace those scraps has already taken decades, and billions of dollars.

Gladwell finds convincing evidence that while the computer is great for storing data, when it comes to using and manipulating data, it often loses out to piles of paper pushed around on a messy desk. He cites The Myth of the Paperless Office, by Abigail Sellen and Richard Harper. Gladwell writes:

"Paper is tangible: we can pick up a document, flip through it, read little bits here and there, and quickly get a sense of it. (In another study on reading habits, Sellen and Harper observed that in the workplace, people almost never read a document sequentially, from beginning to end, the way they would read a novel.) Paper is spatially flexible, meaning that we can spread it out and arrange it in the way that suits us best. And it's tailorable: we can easily annotate it, and scribble on it as we read, without altering the original text."

Since I moved to Paris, leaving behind nearly all my files and books, and trading a really sweet home office for work on a dining room table, I've been trying to put more, and do more, on my computer. I keep previous drafts of stories on my hard drive but don't print them out. I try to download and store reference material rather than clip or copy it. Part of the motivation for that -- aside from the lack of a nice, big flat surface to work on -- was an environmentalist impulse. I like to print out a fresh copy of every page I revise, and subsequent pages if the revision changes the line count. I'll change a single word, print out the page, look at it, then decide whether to keep it. I could easily burn through a carton of paper to produce a single short story. Why kill a tree if I could accomplish the same result by moving around some electrons?

Turns out I can't accomplish the same result, and now I know why.

An Occurrence at Barter Books

So we're knocking around England's Lake District last week and it is, of course, raining, it being England. In Kendal, where there is not much to do, particularly when it's raining, we shelter in an Ottakar bookstore (but the sovereign in the Tintin adventure is King Ottokar, go figure), and I pick up Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce, not because I don't already have several hundred books and magazines to read, including a half-dozen I've brought along on the trip, but because buying books makes me feel good, at least until I remember I have several hundred books and magazines I haven't yet read. It's the new edition from Bloomsbury, with drawings by Ralph Steadman.

I'm not sure I've read Bierce before, but I'd certainly heard the name. He disappeared without a trace in 1913 on his way to cover the Mexican Revolution and was never heard from again. Bierce, Judge Crater and Amelia Earheart figured in a lot of tales about alien abductions. The introduction to Devil's Dictionary, by Angus Calder, piqued my interest in Bierce and his fiction (which owes something to Poe, but Bierce's language remains clever and sharp where Poe's, these days, can seem musty).

So, days later, we're in Anwick, in Barter Books, reportedly one of, if not the, best used bookstore in Britain. (Housed in a former railroad station, it certainly must be one of the best looking.) I walk inside, and am struck by a display of wee books, orange bindings facing out. Turns out they're Penguin 60-shilling editions. Released to coincide with the publisher's 60th anniversary, they're about half the area of a trade paperback and run less than a hundred pages.

I reach onto the shelf of about 40 of the things and pull out ... An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce.

Devil's Dictionary doesn't have an entry for coincidence but I like the one for accident: "An inevitable occurrence due to the action of immutable natural laws."

Et la vache dit << Meuh! >>

There are posters up for a Disney movie called "La Ferme se Rebelle," which is the French title of "Home on the Range."  I don't know if the movie is funny, but the posters provided an amusing lesson in barnyard French.  There are three different posters, each quoting one or more farm animals.  "Meuh!" is obviously French for "Moo!" but the others were tougher. 

"Groin! Groin!" is the local version of "Oink! Oink!" and please get your mind out of the gutter.  "Cot!" is the sound a hen makes, and arguably closer to the mark than "Cluck!"  (Who would bother to make such an argument is another matter.)  "Cui! Cui!" was a gimme, since it appeared on a poster with a Tweetybirdesque creature.

Then there's "Bëëe!"  Don't feel sheepish if you can't figure that one out immediately.

I get a kick out of this, but then, I still think any word is funnier if you put "la" in front of it.

Someone asked what my apartment looks like. Here's the salon -- that's the living room, to you Americans -- awaiting furniture. On the mantlepiece is my collection of flags of countries I've visited, the Concorde model S. got me for Christmas, my Tintin rocket, a leather mask I got at a Florida crafts fair about 15 years ago, and a lovely photograph by Aurelia Bismuth. I bought the photograph at a photo show in Paris in November 2002. It was Bismuth's first show, and her first sale. "Well, you'll never forget me, will you?" I said. 

Rotterdammed

It is theoretically possible that someone, somewhere, has had a pleasant experience with a moving company, but I've never heard of it.
 
I handed off my stuff -- furniture, 60 or so cartons of books, 30 years worth of writing files, 7,000 comic books, a lifetime of photographs, paintings and other memorabilia -- to the movers on May 15, a rendezvous they had postponed, at the last minute, from two days before.  The two-man crew didn't know about the arrangement I'd made for their employers to bill my employer, so I had to come up with cash and a cashier's check on a Saturday.  Par for the course.
 
The estimate then was six to eight weeks to get my stuff to Paris.  That would make the happy reunion anywhere from June 26 through July 10.  As the time approached and I heard nothing, I sent an e-mail to the company and was told that my stuff would arrive in port on July 5, and would clear customs and be delivered in seven to ten business days.  Which would bring us up to July 15-20, which is to say today.
 
Today I hear from the U.S. moving company's European partner, based outside Rotterdam, the Netherlands.  They do not know how this July 5 date was arrived at, because the ship carrying my stuff has not yet steamed into port.  They don't know when it's going to get in.  But they do e-mail me several forms to fill out, plus requests for much documentation.  Hopefully, none of it is in my files on board the ship that is steaming, with agonizing slowness, across the North Atlantic toward Rotterdam. 
 
Among the documents requested is a suggested route from the nearest highway to my front door.  Which, I would wager, most clients are not able to provide because they are not familiar with the area because, hello, they are moving there.  Which segues neatly into my plea that moving companies spend a couple bucks on GPS, or at least on Internet-capable computers so they can order up some directions from Mapquest or the charmingly named European equivalent, Mappy.  When I moved from Manhattan to Washington, the Virginia-based crew that came to collect my stuff arrived frazzled because, seeing my address was in the 1000 block of Second Avenue, assumed the cross street was 10th Street, because (a) that would make sense and (b) that's how they did it in DC.  My apartment was 70 blocks further north.
 

I see dead people.

One of the big attractions here is Pere Lachaise cemetery. For Americans, it's because Jim Morrison is buried here. But there are other residents who are, in some circles, even more highly regarded: Honore de Balzac, Marcel Proust, Oscar Wilde and Moliere; Maria Callas and Simone Signoret; Gustave Dore; Frederic Chopin.

For a cemetery covering 105 acres, it's not a dismal place. But you also won't find the occasional levity to be had in the Key West Cemetery, where the epitaph on one headstone reads "I told you I was sick," and toy airplanes adorn another marker. The atmosphere at Pere Lachaise is quiet, respectful, but not morbid or creepy. Nice place for a picnic. Almost.

Avenue des Peupliers, Le Pere Lachaise. 

Grief distilled in bronze. 

Balzac's last book, in bronze. 

If you stop at Pere Lachaise, you just gotta see the grave of the Lizard King. 

The working writer makes it a priority to set up a functional work space. (Or: I never thought it was possible to miss a desk so deeply.) 

Consider yourself warchalked, mon ami

As occasionally happens, I tried to get on the Internet just now with my ADSL connection from Club-Internet. The remote computer, being all remote -- even moody -- did not respond. Just for the heck of it, I fired up the WiFi on my T41 ThinkPad and, voila, there were two networks floating around in my neighborhood. So, M. Netgear, thanks for the ride.

I'm not much interested in tennis, unless you count my tendency to pause while channel-surfing when I hit a broadcast of lithe young women in short skirts leaping to and fro, swinging rackets and grunting. Still, my attention was snagged by the BBC's interview with Andy Roddick after his defeat by Roger Federer at Wimbledon this week. In describing the game, Roddick said, "I threw everything at him including the kitchen sink, and he went and got his tub." And then, after the interviewer asked about the great rivalry with Federer, "I'll have to start winning some of these if they're going to call it a rivalry."

Elsewhen, Maria Sharapova apologized profusely to Serena Williams for beating her to win Wimbledon. Williams's smile didn't even look strained.

"No strike planned for arts festival this year"

That's a headline in the International Herald Tribune today. Need I add that the dateline is France? The article is about the forthcoming festival of performing arts in Avignon. Last year's was canceled at the last minute after French mimes, clowns and other artistes went on strike over a plan to cut their unemployment benefits. The 100,000 unionized artists used to be able to get a year's worth of unemployment benefits if they worked for three months.

The electrical workers' union went on strike for a couple days recently. Demonstrators ripped the meter off the prime minister's house. Between 40,000 (if you believe the cops) and 80,000 (if you believe the union) of them marched in the Bastille. The government wants to sell some shares in the electric and gas utility, which is now wholly state-owned, and the union fears this is the first step to privatization and, eventually, layoffs.

I figure that if 40,000 or 80,000 electric workers take the day off and the lights stay on, there may be some fat to be trimmed.

I read recently in the World's Best News Magazine that a greater portion of the work force is unionized in the U.S. than France. You'd never know it. The unions have a lot of clout here, in large part because they have public support, albeit sometimes only tacit. Fraternite may be part of the motto of the Republic, but there are many deep division in society. One of the deepest may be the one between workers and "the bosses," to use a quaint socialist term that's still au courant here.

A walk to the comic book store

Wherever I am, particularly if I'm flying solo, I seldom make it a priority to check out the museums, the top restaurants, the interesting stores. Mostly, I just walk ... and Paris provides the most interesting walks of any city I've visited. This is a typical walk for me on a day off. In fact, I'd been on all these streets before, seen all these sights, although I hadn't photographed them. Without any planning, the route from my apartment near the Folies Bergeres to the comic book store Album near the Sorbonne covered the spectrum of what's out there, everywhere: an odd little store, something new and striking, a moment of "what the--?", a historic building, a historic sculpture. On a good day, sights like these make me glad I'm in Paris. Even on a bad day, they provide a welcome break from the routine, like a couple hours in the exercise yard.

One of a pair of dragons, Saint Michel.  

The Institut de France, across the Seine from the Louvre, at the foot of the Pont des Arts. The most famous of the five institutes is the Academie Francaise, the "immortals" who decide what is and is not proper French. (When the word "spam" entered the language, the immortals decided whether it was masculine or feminine.) The building was constructed in the 1600s and is far from the oldest in the city. 

There were a couple dozen of them, on their way from here to there. Something you don't see in New York or Washington. 

Rue de Rivoli. I don't know who they were, but I'll find out.  

Scaffolding detail. 

Art deco scaffolding, Place du Lieutenant Henri Karcher. 

Elvis My Happiness, Paris's pre-eminent magasin for all things Presley. Rue Notre Dame des Victories. 

Current events

I have this transformer that will knock France's 220-volt current down to 110. I don't use it much, since my ThinkPad and peripherals can munch on either voltage (except for the Tungsten, which would fry on French current), and the small appliances I've bought in France -- an electric toothbrush, a hand blender -- are, of course, happy with the local cuisine. But I do have the Tungsten, and the motor on the air mattress needs 110.

Since the air mattress is the only piece of furniture in the new apartment, I figured I'd blow it up to make my wait for Darty less excruciating. But ... nothing. I tried several outlets. Then noticed the lights didn't work. Nor the refrigerator, when it arrived. I found what looked to be a tripped circuit-breaker, but it wouldn't untrip. Just flopped back and forth.

I made another trip to the new apartment just now, unplugged the transformer, then tried flipping the circuit-breaker. Worked fine, lights came on, refrigerator hummed. Plugged in the transformer -- blooie.

Why this should be so bears further investigation. If I can't use the transformer, my plans for cultural domination (plugging my U.S.-spec television, VCR, DVD player and stereo, when they get here, into the transformer and creating my own little American Media Zone) are undone.

As well as being Continental in appearance and generally pleasing to the eye, the courtyard provides an alternative light source when the electricity is out in the apartment. (View from the salon. That's "living room," to you.) 

Qu'est-ce que c'est?

I'm on the third day of a two-week vacation. Originally, S. and I were going to spend this week moving her belongings into our new apartment, and then next week vacationing somewhere not-too-expensive to recover from this week. But in May I awoke in a classic alternate universe scenario. You know the drill: change one pivotal event (the South wins the Civil War, Oswald misses, the Supreme Court hands the 2000 presidential election to George Bush) and explore the ramifications. So, I'll be moving into the new apartment by myself.

I suppose "the move" has been in progress for close to two years and won't be completed until my belongings, which I put into storage when I moved to Paris in October 2002, complete their leisurely trans-Atlantic crossing. In the meantime, I've lugged over the astounding number of books I've bought since I blew into town, which has made my current abode, a furnished studio apartment, a bit more roomy. S. was kind enough to set up accounts for me at Electricite de France and France Telecom. I bought a microwave oven and brought it over on my little luggage cart, and today two young mecs from Darty brought over my new refrigerator. Because an unfurnished French apartment is really unfurnished.

Unfortunately, the new refrigerator is not humming away because the electricity is out.

I can puzzle my way through written French, which is how I was able to check out the refrigerators at Darty, order one off their Internet site, and figure out that they were going to deliver it today between noon and 8 p.m. And I can grasp enough spoken French so that when Darty called shortly before noon today, I could grasp that they expected to be by in about 20 minutes (although, by the time nearly an hour had passed, I wondered if they had said they'd be by at 20 hours, which is 8 p.m.). I probably even have enough French to call EDF and ask what's up with the lights. I'd sound like an idiot, but I think the sympathy that tends to engender among the natives is my greatest asset. But I certainly don't understand French well enough to puzzle out an EDF representative's reply to my pidgin inquiry.

Which is how life is here. I can bump along for days without incident, kind of skimming along the surface of the culture. I can order at a restaurant, buy movie tickets, navigate the bus and Metro. In a store, I can ask where the shoelaces are (if I first look up the word for "shoelaces"). But if I have to go one level deeper, I start floundering.

There's ways around it. If I walk to the EDF office, bill in hand, I will certainly find someone there who knows at least enough English to understand me. Odds are, in fact, it'll be someone (either customer or employee) who speaks perfect English. I can ask someone at work to make a call for me. I could even ask the gardien at Rue Bleue for a hand. She doesn't understand English, but I can flick the light switch, point to the circuit-breaker box, wave my paid-in-full EDF bill and look defeated.

My plan now, though, is to read a couple more chapters of Jane Kramer's fine collection of New Yorker columns, The Europeans, and hope the problem kind of goes away by itself.

That's one off the list

I have a little list. Several. Many. And a Tungsten T3 to contain them. One of the lists is "France," reminders of things to do while I'm here. I add to the list occasionally, strike items from it very occasionally. Most days, I get up, I go to work, I take the Metro home, I watch the BBC or CNN or surf the French-language channels. I write a few paragraphs. I read. Eventually, I get tired and go to sleep. I don't take any items off the list. Or, if I do, it's off the list called "Shopping," or the one called "Books" or "Music." (It's easy to knock something off those lists, and you do get a fleeting sense of accomplishment, although all it takes is spending money.)

But yesterday I knocked an item off the "France" list, by taking a L'OpenTour bus tour. A lot of big cities have at least one such service; Paris has two, the other being Les Cars Rouges. Both services run double-decker buses through the more interesting neighborhoods and past the big landmarks, with pre-recorded commentaries delivered in several languages. Les Cars Rouges has one route; L'OpenTour has four, one of which, of the Montmartre and Grands Boulevards neighborhoods, has a stop a couple blocks from my apartment.

I'd recommend it for the rubes -- sorry, "the visitors" -- but for me it was kind of a bust. I've been here for 20 months. Apparently I've seen all the sights, at least from the outside. Oh, look, there's the Opera. There's the Gare du Nord; been there a half-dozen times, to catch the Eurostar to London or the Thalys to Brussels or Amsterdam. There's Gare de l'Est, went through there maybe every other weekend, on average, when I visited S., who lived out in Champagne country. Oh, look, there's Printemps and Galleries Lafayettes, where I've dropped a bunch of euros. And there's my neighborhood again, time to get off.

I'll have to review that list.

I did see one sight that was new to me, a Conran's Habitat store that appeared to specialize in office gear. I made a note of the address (on the Tungsten T3) and will be going back soon. I'm not sure it was worth 22 euros to discover it, though.

Last night I saw "Le Jour D'Apres" -- that's "The Day After Tomorrow," to you -- in English, with French subtitles. It was not as bad as many of the reviews I've read had suggested it would be. It was even engaging at times, though annoying at times as well. There are a couple "wall of water chasing us" scenes that are twins of the "wall of fire chasing us" scenes in "Independence Day," also directed by Roland Emmerich. And there are a couple "Run! Run! The cold will catch us!" scenes that are just silly. Even granting that the air temperature could drop 5 degrees per second, running into an enclosed space and slamming the door won't save you.

I believe this was only the second time in my life I've gone to a movie theater by myself. The first time was to see "A Boy and His Dog," released in 1975. Back then, for a high school nerd, it turned out to be an acutely lonely experience. This time it was okay. I'm made of sterner stuff now, and starved for English-language entertainment.

"You bid me rouse myself...."

"Blocked," an article in The New Yorker by Joan Acocella. Published in the summer fiction issue, which must be some sort of meta-irony. Informative and entertaining. Entertaining, that is, in the same sense as a really bad car wreck you've just avoided. Take Joseph Mitchell, who joined The New Yorker in 1938, wrote a series of brilliant pieces, culminating with what was thought to be his greatest (about a blocked writer) in 1964. After that, he continued to come to work as usual, day in and day out, for the next 32 years, but never submitted another word. Two thoughts immediately come to mind:

"Wow, at least I'm not that bad."

And:

"Wow, what a great job that was."

Acocella cites Ian Hacking, a philosopher, who has written about "dynamic nominalism." That's when you invent a category, and people "sort themselves into it, behave according to the new description, and thus contrive new ways of being. Possibly, some writers become blocked simply because the concept exists, and invoking it is easier for them than writing."

I haven't read Hacking, but it wouldn't surprise me if he notes the influence of society in this phenomenon: you not only sort yourself into the new category, but you're accepted by society as a member of the new category. When people discover I've published, and then how long it's been since I have published, the usual response is "Oh, writer's block?" No one's ever said, "Oh, lazy fucker?"

Lever, coucher

Okay, so the photo uploadification process works, courtesy of Hello. This is software from the folks who brought you Picasa, a photo-handling package I started using a year ago. It's wonderful, except it can't do captions. For that, I have ACDSee. And for quick editing, I use Microsoft Digital Image Suite. (I bet there's a photo program that can do everything. And I bet it's exclusively for Macs.)

So, yes, the photo, although you have to click on it to make it big enough to read the sign in the window. But you can click on it, which is cool.

And yes, it's a little after 6 in the morning. Until I moved to Paris and got a day job, I had no idea I could wake up and actually function at such an hour. Most newspapers publish in the mornings, which means they're put together in the evenings, so that's when the production editors work. I worked from around 4 p.m. to midnight most of my life, would get to bed around 2 or 3 a.m., wake up at 11. The IHT has a shift like that, too, for the European edition, but I usually work on the Asia edition, so I'm on a Hong Kong schedule.

The day shift is not the problem. The problem is axial tilt. Sunrise was at 5:47 today. Sunset will be at 9:53. It's still twilight when I go to sleep. Or try to. Still, I'd rather deal with too much sunlight than the Stalingradesque winters, with their short days, perpetual overcast and frequent rain. (For those of you humming "April in Paris," try November here.) Most people don't realize how far north Paris is -- farther north than Halifax. Although not as far north as Saint Petersburg, Russia, which I have ruled out as a retirement destination. I'll head for someplace closer to the equator.

"Here We Talk English." Rue La Fayette, Paris, May 31. 

Without haste, without rest

Especially the "without haste" part. My last short story, "The Mercy Gate," was published in the March 1998 issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction. After six years, you'd be forgiven for thinking it really was my last publication and not the most recent. When I came to Paris, in October 2002, I figured it would be a good opportunity to hunker down. This was the city of Hemingway and Fitzgerald and all that crew, after all. I'd shake off the dust, clear away the cobwebs, pick up some new material and maybe some fresh perspectives. And, despite it being Paris, there'd be few distractions. I didn't know anyone. I didn't speak the language (and still don't speak it very well). Most of the television was broadcast in French, oddly enough, and CNN and the BBC compromised most of the English-language programming. What was there to do but write?

But, you know, when you're having trouble writing, there's always something to do besides writing, even if it's just sitting around, staring at the walls, and thinking about why you're not writing. I did a bit of that. Also, watched CNN and the BBC for hours on end. Read a lot of books and bought a bunch more I haven't gotten around to yet. Did some traveling. Had a volcanic, inspiring and distracting love affair. Negotiated the French bureaucracy on various matters, such as the all-import visa and titre de sejour, which is a part-time job in itself. Oh, and worked full-time at the International Herald Tribune.

But I've been writing lately. No reason for it, just as there was no reason, really, not to do it. I'm not going to write about the stories, just as I don't talk about them, because if you talk it out you don't have to write it out. But they're there, reeling out word by word, and now so is this.