Saturday, March 24, 2007
Just to keep those itchy feet in check, A and I are going on a trip in a couple of weeks to Paris, France and Prague, Czech Republic. We are doing each city for one week. I'm thrilled to discover Prague since it's been on my list of places to go for several years now. Don't ask me why, I tend to set my sights on a place which are usually more difficult ones to get to. I have to admit, I like going places that most people I know have not yet been. It's not motivated by a competitive spirit, rather a desire to experience something unknown to me. I'll just blame it on itchy feet because there is no real explanation for it.
Contrast to my desire to visit unexposed areas of the world, Paris is the number one tourist spot on the globe. Over 36 million tourists travel Paris each year. No wonder Parisians get so hauty towards tourists who can't speak French, like me. I'm hoping the pregnant state I'm in will provide me with reasons for Parisians to be gracious.
For some reason, I've often imagined living in Paris, even though I've never been to it. If I think back far enough, that was more than likely established when I read Hemingway's A Moveable Feast. I adored the lifestyle depicted by Hem and his entourage, which included Ezra Pound, Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein. In a 1964 NYTimes article, writer Charles Poore wrote the following observations about A Moveable Feast:
"The importance of beating Ernest, someone once said, gave a hopeless target to industrious lit'ry careerists. How cheerfully Hemingway was aware of that--and how early--appears quite clearly in this memoir of what I can only call his brilliantly obscure emergence as a man of letters. Here is Hemingway at his best. No one has ever written about Paris in the nineteen twenties as well as Hemingway. Thousands, of course, have given their own bright versions of that unaccountably perpetual springtime, but too many lost parts of their own identities in taking on some of Hemingway's. And they could not precisely share his astounding fugue of interests, which wove Tolstoy out of Sylvia Beach's bookship with days at the great race tracks, skiing expeditions to the Alps and the study of CÈzanne, noticing that F. Scott Fitzgerald was wearing a British Guardsman's tie and boxing with Ezra Pound, forays to Pamplona and living above a sawmill at 113 Rue Notre Dame des Champs.
It made a very movable feast. The feasting was sometimes pretty Spartan. Yet Hemingway and his first wife, Hadley Richardson, and their infant son, lived high on low amounts of money. Wages were precarious for a writer trying to get on paper, in his phrase, "the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion," trying to create rather than describe."
I've got to read that book before I go, or while I'm there. Between laughing at references that remind me of Bumby and drooling over what to order from each patisserie, I think I'll be just fine.
Contrast to my desire to visit unexposed areas of the world, Paris is the number one tourist spot on the globe. Over 36 million tourists travel Paris each year. No wonder Parisians get so hauty towards tourists who can't speak French, like me. I'm hoping the pregnant state I'm in will provide me with reasons for Parisians to be gracious.
For some reason, I've often imagined living in Paris, even though I've never been to it. If I think back far enough, that was more than likely established when I read Hemingway's A Moveable Feast. I adored the lifestyle depicted by Hem and his entourage, which included Ezra Pound, Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein. In a 1964 NYTimes article, writer Charles Poore wrote the following observations about A Moveable Feast:
"The importance of beating Ernest, someone once said, gave a hopeless target to industrious lit'ry careerists. How cheerfully Hemingway was aware of that--and how early--appears quite clearly in this memoir of what I can only call his brilliantly obscure emergence as a man of letters. Here is Hemingway at his best. No one has ever written about Paris in the nineteen twenties as well as Hemingway. Thousands, of course, have given their own bright versions of that unaccountably perpetual springtime, but too many lost parts of their own identities in taking on some of Hemingway's. And they could not precisely share his astounding fugue of interests, which wove Tolstoy out of Sylvia Beach's bookship with days at the great race tracks, skiing expeditions to the Alps and the study of CÈzanne, noticing that F. Scott Fitzgerald was wearing a British Guardsman's tie and boxing with Ezra Pound, forays to Pamplona and living above a sawmill at 113 Rue Notre Dame des Champs.
It made a very movable feast. The feasting was sometimes pretty Spartan. Yet Hemingway and his first wife, Hadley Richardson, and their infant son, lived high on low amounts of money. Wages were precarious for a writer trying to get on paper, in his phrase, "the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion," trying to create rather than describe."
I've got to read that book before I go, or while I'm there. Between laughing at references that remind me of Bumby and drooling over what to order from each patisserie, I think I'll be just fine.
# posted by tfoxfan @ 8:33 AM 
