{"id":208,"date":"2007-10-08T22:15:29","date_gmt":"2007-10-09T06:15:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/2007\/10\/writing-in-paris-doesnt-always-mean-writing-about-paris\/"},"modified":"2007-10-09T22:47:22","modified_gmt":"2007-10-10T06:47:22","slug":"writing-in-paris-doesnt-always-mean-writing-about-paris","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/2007\/10\/writing-in-paris-doesnt-always-mean-writing-about-paris\/","title":{"rendered":"Writing in<\/em> Paris doesn’t always mean writing about<\/em> Paris"},"content":{"rendered":"

Maybe away from Paris I could write about Paris as in Paris I could write about Michigan<\/em>. — Ernest Hemingway in The Moveable Feast<\/em><\/p>\n

Sometimes when you’re in Paris you want an away-from-Paris experience. You’d like to curl up and dig into something in your familiar language. Take a break from the walking, the map reading, the sounding like an idiot in French. I also bought Simone de Beauvoir’s She Came to Stay<\/em> and Tete-a-Tete: The Lives and Loves of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre<\/em> by Hazel Rowley. In my luggage, I had packed Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and<\/em> Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge<\/em>. If I could have managed to bring less clothes, I would have brought more reading material. When I close my apartment door, I just love the simple act of sitting down and opening a book. Away from the Big Experience.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Right now I’m rereading Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast<\/em>. I bought its slim paperback version at Shakespeare & Company, a small and cramped, wonderful bookstore near Notre Dame that’s crammed with English-language delicacies. I’m trying to resist the tractor beam of my own book obsession and not purchase anything more until I’ve read the others.<\/p>\n

I know I’m not going to write in cafes. I don’t seem to operate well in that noisy, public, unpredictable environment. I like a very private, quiet place. And maybe, because Hemingway had a wife and baby in his apartment in Paris, a cafe WAS just the right, private, quiet place for him.<\/p>\n

It was a pleasant cafe, warm and clean and friendly, and I hung up my old waterproof on the coat rack to dry and put my worn and weathered felt hat on the rack above the bench and ordered a<\/em> cafe au lait. –EH, A Moveable Feast<\/em><\/p>\n

So, for now, until I learn how to write in a cafe or find my apartment getting too noisy, public, and unpredictable, I’ll read and write in my apartment. And, in addition to writing my daily journal entries, I’ll begin some different writing formats. Maybe I’ll find my own Michigan–my hometown, Pittsburgh, Albuquerque, Brooklyn–to write about in Paris. Because it’s the feelings, the weather, the conditions, the ennui of a place that can be inspiring. The very fact that you’re in Another Town can inspire memories and introspection and storytelling about The Town. And in Another Town you can be Another Person, the Writer.<\/p>\n

The waiter brought<\/em> [the<\/em> cafe au lait] and I took out a notebook from the pocket of the coat and a pencil and started to write. I was writing about up in<\/em> Michigan and since it was a wild, cold, blowing day it was that sort of day in the story<\/em>. –EH<\/p>\n

I love this pair of sentences. As Hemingway gets his coffee and pulls out his notebook, he knows he is there to work. The caffeinated muse will help. Plus there’s the small ritual of a person bringing a hot drink in a lovely little clinking cup with froth around the edges and lumps of sugar wrapped in paper on the saucer. And the waiter (always men) goes away, perhaps watching you from a distance, perhaps having some opinions about the soft life of writing things on paper. Writing things on paper about places other than Paris.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Maybe away from Paris I could write about Paris as in Paris I could write about Michigan. — Ernest Hemingway in The Moveable Feast Sometimes when you’re in Paris you want an away-from-Paris experience. You’d like to curl up and dig into something in your familiar language. Take a break from the walking, the map […]<\/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-208","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208","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=208"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=208"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=208"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=208"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}