It’s enough to be in Paris

I went to Paris for my birthday (had to say it at least once). Found a wonderful hotel, with the sort of market just two minutes away you can only find in France. Combination of food on sale and items and atmosphere. Checked the book in Shakespeare and Co. Have a look, too – Uncorrected Proof, under A for Alba.

Walked the streets. Passed through, open-mouthed, the commercial alleys of the left bank. Should manic tourism do this to such a brilliant part of the city? Up and away through Montparnasse, by the Pantheon and back down by Joyce’s home (one of 13 while he was in Paris).* I  just found the address without any idea where it was, wasn’t even thinking of him. Now I’m asking myself what are the chances of chancing on it in a city the size of Paris.

Not one for tourist plaques or gravestones but this is worth lingering by.

Really didn’t do all that much in two days -  didn’t lunch or dinner at expensive restaurants, didn’t even tea or coffee in les deux magots. Just absorbed the sounds and sights from train to train. It’s enough to be in Paris.

* As the New York Times tells us, it was Joyce’s “prettiest place…Valery Larbaud’s apartment in a kind of mews at 73 Rue Cardinal Lemoine, on the Contrescarpe behind the Pantheon and with curving view of Paris.”

Happy Bloomsday

Though they didn’t see eye to eye in everything a certain analogy there somehow was as if both their minds were travelling, so to speak, in one train of thought. p536 ‘ULYSSES’ – THE CORRECTED TEXT

As summer reaches for its solstice, as the stones of Big Ben time tremble from Stonehenge right around the world, as the polititudinous rage bleeds in ancient places and I sharpen these scribal tools to palimpsest my way through another 16th, I salute old JJ, for his ‘galaxy of new devices and stances and verbal antics, extravagant, derisive, savage, rollicking, tender and lyrical… ironic dominion.’ (thankees to Richard Ellman)

Let’s all salute  oldy-poldy JJ his voices talking at us still, twirling in time all this live long day, as we take a moment to let ourselves be literarily astounded  all o’er agin by  his thesis for true intelligence….

We are all equal every wingy, tready, swimmy, barking one of us