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.