Noble Art and Cheap Beer with Ernest Hemingway

It's funny how teaching at one school I work at makes me totally drained and stressed out, and the other has just the opposite effect. I work at one school Thursday and Friday afternoons, and it's only been a week but I love it. Today I taught colors in one class and had my second class choose their "prenoms americains." We talked about English names they already knew last week, and as a result we now have a Brittany (because they all know who Britney Spears is), a Hannah (Hannah Montana), a Leia (like the princess), and I even agreed to let one of my students call herself Megan on the condition that if it gets too confusing she'll change it to something else. In the colors class, we discussed the difference between "blue" in French and English, and decided that in English it's just a longer "o" sound -- BLOOOOOO. They practiced saying this over and over again, as well as the "r" in orange. I was kind of stressed this morning, because I interviewed for a babysitting job and while I'm pretty sure I didn't get it, I had to to the Metro out to the wealthiest district in Paris at 8 a.m. - kind of a trek for me, as I live in Chinatown and everything - and suffice it to say that the person who interviewed me had a suit and an attitude to match the 16th. At 8 a.m. We have already established that I am not a morning person.

So the moment I stepped into the classroom and started going through "what's your name?" and playing games with the colors in English, it was an instantaneous mood upgrade/change of pace. Teaching can be really hard and hectic, but when it goes well, it's almost an antidote to those things. It's impossible to not be totally engaged.

I read Ernest Hemingway on the train to work and felt both precious and blatantly American. I like his take on Paris, in some respects, although most of the book can be summarized by the following:

"I met up with F. Scott Fitzgerald and we got totally wasted all day long. Writing is a noble art. Oysters. Whiskey. Wine. Cafe cremes. Zelda is such a bitch. Also. I hate punctuation. Shakespeare and Co. shout-out!"

Okay so that's not actually what it sounds like. But I'm definitely not grabbing a double whiskey every morning or deciding on the cheaper oysters at cafes. It's more like a quick coffee in my apartment before I go to work, and deciding on the cheapest everything everywhere. Our Parises are very different places.

I really loved some of his thoughts about Paris, though. Here are a few:

"He [FSF] was always trying to work. Each day he would try and fail. He laid the failure to Paris, the town best organized for a writer to write in that there is."

And in the restored edition's additional Paris sketches:

"The blue-backed notebooks, the two pencils and the pencil sharpener (a pocket knife was too wasteful), the marble-topped tables, the smell of cafe cremes, the smell of early morning sweeping out and mopping and luck were all you needed."

EH is totally right about Paris. It is the best place I have ever been for writing. I don't think I've ever been anywhere else where it's completely acceptable to sit and write in a cafe all day if you buy one cafe creme. And the city is basically structured for wandering and concurrent pondering and existential musings. That may sound trite, but it's really true. Even in my quartier, there's a small park, and every time I go past it, there's always someone reading on a bench. The bigger parks are full of destination readers, who sit on benches and just read. And the Metro is always full of open books.

And I love that so much. It makes me feel infinitely more Parisian to have a book on the Metro, and it's one of my favorite things about Paris. People read here. Its history of writers is just kind of a nice addition to the foundation that makes the city itself so hospitable to people who want to make their mark on the world by making up stories and poems. It makes me think that maybe EH's and my Parises aren't as different as they could be.

So. That being said, I haven't really written much at all since I've gotten here. I should get on that.

I've been distracted by the fact that I live in Paris. And learning how to budget and cook for myself and clean my apartment all the time (it turns out that when you have a tiny space, it gets messy fast) and read on the Metro without missing my stop. Last night I had a cheap beer at a hipster bar in the 11th with a friend of a friend whose band opened for Yo La Tengo a while ago. He and his friend told me to be aware of the changes in Paris, that I am living in "a dying city" that will one day just be a museum full of bourgeois people who can afford to live in the center of Paris, and that the Montparnasse Cemetary is okay, but Pere Lachaise is where it's at. Jim Morrison is buried there, as is Picasso, and it's also where you go to smoke pot if you're a Parisian high school student.

They were impressed with the fact that I have a driver's license at home, because though they are both in their twenties, growing up in Paris meant that getting a license was too hard and unnecessary. When one of their cell phones died, and I said, "Oh, that's too bad," they both looked at me like I was crazy and said, "No! It is such a relief to not be able to be contacted."

Then I realized that I was having a beer with two French guys I had just met, one of whom is in a band that opened for Yo La Tengo, in a hipster bar in the 11th in Paris and it was more than a little surreal. Okay, so I really hope Paris doesn't become a museum, and I sometimes get a little panicky when my cell phone dies, and I'm following up that night out with a night in cleaning my apartment and mastering vegetarian cooking and going to work again tomorrow, but really? On the way home, I watched the right bank turn into the left, and it struck me that Paris is a city big enough to house Ernest Hemingway's whiskey-infused meanderings and a hipster bar in the 11th that serves cheap beer to a clientele of musicians and girls with long bangs and the most awkward French hipsters you will ever see. But I said it before and I'll say it again. I don't think they're really that different after all.

Also, I may not live in the trendy part of Paris, but Ernest Hemingway lived on the left bank too.

It's out of focus. But it just seemed appropriate. I spotted it near the Corvisart Metro on my way to get apartment insurance yesterday. "Poetry is an extreme sport."