Paris Was Ours

mandy — Sat, 16 Apr 2011 20:00:00 +0000

“Paris lives in its details,” observes one contributor to this collection of essays. But equally true is the idea of Paris that thrives through clichés. You’ll find spare references to the Eiffel Tower, berets, cheese, and wine in Paris Was Ours, although the apparently ineluctable forms of French snobbery are discussed. What this anthology delivers instead are a wide breadth of creative and nuanced meditations on the culture, history, and inhabitants of the City of Light, confirming that all our romantic associations with Paris, despite the city’s faults, are quite justified.

Paris Was Ours offers a diversity of voices and topics, and in this regard, it is a superior resource among the proliferating anthologies on the city. (Adam Gopnik’s Paris to the Moon and Sarah Turnbull’s Almost French come to mind.) The contributors range from well-known writer David Sedaris and poet C.K. Williams, to a homeless woman, a chef, an Iranian revolution escapee, and various scholars. There are translations in the book from Arabic, Spanish, and French.

Paris Was Ours serves as a useful introduction to French culture, and even the most frequent travelers to France will find it illuminates what can oftentimes be perplexing Parisian mores, such as their disdain for discussing money matters, heavy-handed parenting style, chic fashion sense, tangled bureaucratic systems, insistence on a well-rounded and balanced quality of life, and greater acceptance of human shortcomings in their political leaders. Reading the book had the satisfying effect of gaining a greater appreciation for living in France, and perhaps by some comparison, the United States.

One discovery I made is that, for many of the writers, living in Paris afforded a certain liberation that led to greater self-knowledge and appreciation. “People just find themselves here,” says one Uighur journalist. Valerie Steiker, in “Fledgling Days,” whose sojourn was motivated by her desire to connect with her deceased mother by re-living similar Parisian experiences, learns about humility and self-reliance. In “Understanding Chic,” Natasha Fraser-Cavassoni discovers that “[t]he secret to acquiring chic… is to correct negative thinking.” In “Just Another American,” African American student Janet McDonald describes how Paris freed her from being perceived mainly through the confines of racial assumptions:

The French drew no such [racial] distinctions, which meant I no longer had to worry about making African Americans look good. Or bad. Whatever I did was attributed to Americanness, not blackness. What a switch – a black person with the power to make white people look bad.

No discussion of Paris is complete without mention of seduction and romance, and there is certainly plenty of that in this collection. One standout essay is “Love Without Reason,” where student of post-structural theory Caroline Weber draws comparisons between Lacan’s views on human desire and her foray into becoming “a one-woman band of seduction.” In “Ma Vie Bohème,” Karen Shur sensually describes the days and nights spent with her lover in their scant apartment. Brigid Dorsey, in “Litost,” tells the heartbreaking story of her failed romantic relationship with the father of her child.

Paris Was Ours will conjure nostalgic feelings for those who have lived in Paris, and wanderlust for those who have yet to visit. Many aspects of Parisian life are captured in such original and surprising ways that I found the book tough to put down and almost as good as walking down the Champs-Élysées.

Written by: Abigail Licad, April 16th 2011

Traveling Light

gwen — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 12:00:00 +0000

By Linda Pastan

W.W. Norton & Company

Pastan’s latest collection reaches beyond the usual everyday subjects and themes of a “domestic poet,” a label that has long underrated her abilities. While many of the poems in Traveling Light continue to display her familiar manner of sensing dangers that lurk beneath quotidian objects and rituals, Pastan demonstrates her broader capabilities by grappling with more political matters in the fourth section of the book, “Somewhere in The World.”

In the uncharacteristically political fourth section, Pastan comments upon a number of defining historical moments, including World War II, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and most intensely, the September 11 terrorist attacks. These events are often personalized, brought down from abstraction to the level of an experiencing individual at a specific moment. Consider, for example, the short poem “Anniversary”:

For us it was the anniversary
of love–September 11th,
the day my parents met, a year later
the day they married.
So when I see or hear that date,

my heart by habit lifts
for a moment, just before
it plunges–history’s
dirty thumbprint
staining the calendar.

Present here are Pastan’s classic distinguishing qualities–the discovery of the extraordinary within the ordinary, the concrete image at the center, the simple and elegant language, the ominous tone. But while history often represents cyclical loss and failure in Pastan’s poems, it would be erroneous to classify her as a negative poet. Pastan’s pessimistic expectance of loss may permeate through her poems, but it is overcome by her faith in the individual’s innate moral goodness and power to turn any course of events. In “Weights and Measures,” for example, she argues that one’s ultimate natural allegiance will not be to any political or ideological stance, but rather, to love:

Wouldn’t I break my word,
wrap myself in any flag (stars,
or sickle, or rising sun) just
to be with you? …

In other sections of the book, nowhere are Pastan’s talents more compelling than when she reflects upon her state as an aging woman. Absent are the clichéd complaints one would expect over the loss of physical beauty. In their place are nuanced meditations on the oppositions that animate life–youth and old age, forgetting and remembering, change and permanence, sadness and joy, good and evil, destruction and renewal. In mediating between these oppositions, Pastan asserts her ever forceful mind and impassioned spirit over her failing body as she does in “Any Woman”:

Age has nothing to do with me.
Lust still raises its purple flag
and envy its green one–
don’t I repent the same sins
every year, make the same resolutions?

Particularly evocative and lyrical are Pastan’s Eden poems, which summon the archetypal figure of Eve to explore women’s complexities and concerns. Pastan’s Eve is not Milton’s passive and subservient Eve, but an Eve who took a lover, who questions God’s motives, and who takes credit for the Fall as the unifying narrative of humankind. And just as Pastan is given to weighing oppositions, so does her Eve embody both humankind’s most exalted qualities and most dangerous faults. This Eve is all at once sensual, astute, vain, foolhardy, wise, and vulnerable.

Pastan’s “mind of spring,” the vividness and potency of her thoughts and feelings, shows through her keen powers of observation and illumination. At each turn in Traveling Light, the reader is surprised with a startling image and recalled to a profound truth previously taken for granted or neglected. Pastan attunes us to the possibilities of each given moment, to their dangers and rewards, and in doing so enriches the kinds of realities we can create.

Written by: Abigail Licad, December 23rd 2010