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My Quest Trip to Paris
the Parisian summer is just ending,
exhausted trees hanging onto their remaining foliage with difficulty.
Outside the Place St-Michel Metro stop,
the oaks have pretty much given up the fight.
The Seine too looks ready for a quiet spell,
thick with the churn of summer's hordes.
As I wander away from the river,
I spy my goal, Rue de la Huchette,
one of the Left Bank's most famous streets.
It reminds me of my quest -
nothing less than to find the literary
heart of the world's most literary city.
It's a daunting task.
Almost every great writer in history
waxed lyrical about Paris and many lived in its complex layers.
But I've started well.
The scruffy mid-20th century bohemians of the Left Bank
were immortalized not far away in Elliot Paul's
The Last Time I Saw Paris.
It was around here too that the -
Beat Generation hung out,
most notably Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg.
I try to find Kerouac's Cafe Gentilhomme,
so beautifully evoked in his book Sa tori in Paris.
I have no luck, running into the infamous Parisian 'non' at every turn.
Undeterred, I make for the grittier end of the suburb and suddenly,
unintentionally, hit the jackpot
when I accidentally land up outside Ginsberg's favorite hotel,
the Hotel du VieuxParis, at 9 rue Glt-Ie-Coeur.
It still looks just as I had imagined it to be,
a glorified pension heaped atop a filthy pavement
with only history to hold it up. Pure Ginsberg.
Inside things are a little less authentic.
Ginsberg's presence is not so much felt as read,
on a much too neat notice board about his time at the hotel.
I tick one off my list for the day.
Next is Rue Monsieur-Ie-Prince,
called Yankee alleyway
because American literary refugees
seem to have congregated around here through history.
I pass the now recorded homes of Whistler,
Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Kerouac and Hemingway.
Hemingway's favored restaurant,
the Cremerie Restaurant Polidor,
at 41 rue Monsieur Ie Prince, 6 E.,
is still making excellent stroganoff.
After a bowl of the piquant dish,
I head for the Crillon Hotel with its remarkable history.
The bar is popular among movie stars and other famous figures -
and Hemingway set a, dramatic scene in the The Sun Also Rises here.
The hotel is very glitzy-
the Crillion obviously knows it's famous.
Instead of feeling like F. Scott Fitzgerald ,
who also dined there, I sense that I am out-of-place,
little plastic and slightly embarrassed.
So I take my leave and head over to the literary equivalent of Piccadilly Circus, a bookshop back on the Left Bank within spitting distance of Notre Dame called, oddly enough, Shakespeare and Company.
Its owner George Whitman,
who has nothing to do with Walt,
has made it his mission to stock his shop with writers
who've lived in or been synonymous with Paris.
It's scruffy and wonderful inside and authentic.
It smells like the starving poets who are allowed
to spend the night in the shop if they've nowhere else to go.
They're in good company.
Orwell starved in Paris once, as did Hemingway.
My resolve fortified and poetry on my mind,
I head for the Luxembourg Gardens.
If elegance were a flower,
it'd grow in the Luxembourg Gardens.
Umpteen writers and poets have immortalized it.
Victor Hugo used it in Les Miserables and Hemingway in A Moveable Feast.
Up the road I find a plaque on a tatty building
on Rue de Fleurus in homage to Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas.
It was here that Stein held her famous afternoon workshops
while Alice poured the tea.
Having seen the plaque,
I go in search of the spirit of the past as reinterpreted
by the new generation and head back to
the cafes of the Left Bank.
Two of them have succeeded in re-establishing themselves
as modern-day hotbeds -of literary cacophony.
The Cafe de Flore and the Cafe Aux Deux Magots are loud, polluted and awash with literary life.
I ascend to the second floor of the Deux Magots, away from the tourists, and join the writers and editors, publishers and failures drinking thick coffee and discussing the Next Big thing.
There's a display case against the wall which startles me when I look at it.
It appears I'm sitting in Jean Paul Sartre's seat!
I have a minor existential moment looking at the faded picture
of the odd little man perched on my chair.
The caption says that the cafe became his study and living room.
I try to think how anyone could have come up with anything
as explosive as existentialism in such a raucous environment.
Perhaps you have to be French.
When I put down my coffee cup,
I notice a scrawl on the table.
Someone has penciled Jean Cocteau's quote to Picasso
about poetry on the tabletop.
'Poets don't draw.
They untie handwriting and then retie it in another way.'
After my Sartrean moment, I'm feeling very in sync with alternative Paris
and decide to finish my day's literary
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NaBeeel
HELLO
I love people with respect to Live and I have a reference for the God. I like positive people with ideas to help and empower others
write political editorials on topics ranging from the years presidential election, the emerging nuclear crisis in North Korea, to cultural and social issues and problems affecting the United States and the world peace.
I'm eager to hear what other people have to say about issues, whether I agree with them or not. In my opinion, that is how one gains knowledge, by taking an issue and studying it and applying different perspectives, and taking those perspectives and using them to make change in the world around you.
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Being nice and honest is my best policy for my life pursuit, but not at the expense of other people’s happiness. Being wise enough to reach for your hand and touch your heart and sole , therefore not taking chances or wasting time in trying to live your life while it lasts, trying to please others, when the truth is you can’t please everyone at the same time .
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