{"id":206,"date":"2007-10-04T07:26:46","date_gmt":"2007-10-04T15:26:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/2007\/10\/im-just-not-getting-the-writing-in-the-cafe-thing\/"},"modified":"2007-10-06T05:18:35","modified_gmt":"2007-10-06T13:18:35","slug":"im-just-not-getting-the-writing-in-the-cafe-thing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/2007\/10\/im-just-not-getting-the-writing-in-the-cafe-thing\/","title":{"rendered":"I’m just not getting the writing-in-the-cafe thing"},"content":{"rendered":"

“What never wearies me is to sit on chairs which belong to nobody (or, if you like, to everybody), in front of tables which belong to nobody; that’s why I go and work in cafes–I achieve a kind of solitude and abstraction.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 <\/em>–Jean-Paul Sartre <\/em><\/p>\n

I don’t get it. When I sit in a cafe,\u00c2\u00a0open my notebook, and get out my pen, the waiter comes to ask what I’d like. It’s a cafe creme (milk and coffee) and a croissant most mornings. Sometimes I get the tartine au beurre<\/em> (sliced baguette with butter–more carbs for your euro buck). Then I write for a bit.\u00c2\u00a0The cafe creme and croissant arrive.,\u00c2\u00a0I sip, write, bit, chew, write, sip, stir, bite, write, chew, and sip till the whole breakfast is consumed. The check comes curled up in a shot glass or flat in a basket.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I worry that a tourist bus might come crashing into my cafe table, killing me instantly, exposing to the world my little notes: “Walked to the Pantheon this morning. The steps are lower than I remember. Must get wine and toilet paper on way home,” and my reputation as the greatest\u00c2\u00a0living writer of the modern Parisian novel would expire along with me.<\/p>\n

I sit there with the check, the shot glass, my euro cents, the croissant crumbs, the frothy dregs of the cafe creme. Write a little more. Eye my cash, glass, crumbs, and dregs. The light’s not good. The table’s small and a little sticky. Between the notebook, the dictionary, the saucers, and the shot glass, there’s practically\u00c2\u00a0no room to even set my pen down. Did Hemingway\u00c2\u00a0put up with this bad lighting? Did Fitzgerald ignore the spilled coffee, stickiness, crumbs,\u00c2\u00a0dregs, and chance of a careening tourist bus?<\/p>\n

Hazel Rowley’s 2007 relationship biography, Tete-a-Tete: The Lives and Loves of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre,<\/em> she reveals that Sartre and Beauvoir wrote in a cafe’s second-floor room at a reserved table. NOT right on the street with the buses and backpacks. NOT where the waiters\u00c2\u00a0hustle and\u00c2\u00a0tourists chatter.\u00c2\u00a0Sartre had a very strict routine and wouldn’t even look up from pen and paper if you’d made an appointment with him, not until it was time for the interview.<\/p>\n

Sartre\u00c2\u00a0didn’t like to acquire\u00c2\u00a0possessions and prided himself on owning only\u00c2\u00a0things attached to the writing process. On the other hand, there’s a photo of him in Rowley’s book where he’s at a desk in his office at 42 Rue Bonaparte, an apartment he shared with his mother.\u00c2\u00a0He’s got\u00c2\u00a0lots of books on a shelf and a\u00c2\u00a0window at his left shoulder (great light for a right-handed writer). Who’d want to write in a cafe if you had that<\/em> kind of space?<\/p>\n

Writers like writing in cafes when weather conditions are not too cold and\u00c2\u00a0not too hot, when they’re meeting people, there’s was no wind and no tourists, no telephones ringing . . . at least not ringing for them, the light is not too strong, it’s not dark, other people are buying\u00c2\u00a0them\u00c2\u00a0coffee or\u00c2\u00a0wine,\u00c2\u00a0and–perhaps most importantly–when other people can see\u00c2\u00a0them writing in a cafe.<\/p>\n

If I really want solitude and abstraction, I\u00c2\u00a0enter my apartment, take off my shoes, put the kettle on,\u00c2\u00a0lower a bag of Moroccan tea into a mug, sit down, open my laptop, sip tea, and write.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“What never wearies me is to sit on chairs which belong to nobody (or, if you like, to everybody), in front of tables which belong to nobody; that’s why I go and work in cafes–I achieve a kind of solitude and abstraction.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 –Jean-Paul Sartre I don’t get it. When I sit in a cafe,\u00c2\u00a0open my […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-206","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=206"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=206"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=206"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=206"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}