Photo Belleville, Late Afternoon

Modern apartment blocks with a view of Notre-Dame-de-la-Croix to the right.

Procrastination

Well, so far today I've learned to work Mathilde's little Krups espresso machine, read all about the Academy Awards, clipped my fingernails and fed the fish which seems determined to bury its head in the roots of some greenish black plant and pretend not to exist.

Of course I'm writing this. And could, next, if I weren't so disciplined, head over to the supermarket and buy milk and couscous and maybe a plane ticket out of here. But no. Eight hundred words coming up. Eventually.

Eating Royal

I went to a dinner party last night where we ate Vietnamese noodles and ginger beef as a starter, then picked apart Ségolène Royal for dessert.

The funny thing was that almost everyone there was going to vote for her, so what was the point really of the slaughter?

Beyond the usual suspicions I have that even among women, her female face amplifies mistakes that male politicians get away with, I think there's another problem with the French Left, or a segment of it anyway.

They seem to be comparing her to an übercandidate on the imaginary horizon that is not only word perfect in his promises on social policy, but has some kind of political superpower that allows him to swim among sharks yet keep his own teeth perfectly clean.

Waiting for him, they tuck away their votes in cedar chests, douse them with bleach once a year, and hope and pray.

Another Big Loss for Constitution

The New York Times reports that "a divided federal appeals court on Tuesday upheld a new law stripping federal judges of authority to review foreign prisoners’ challenges to their detention at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba."

Another stupefying grenade tossed at the Humpty-Dumpty of American principles that used to include equality, recourse to the law, and limits on government power. Even a Democrat in '08 won't get the old egg back on his feet any decade soon.

Orientation

Well, I'm in my third apartment in three weeks and if you spun me around and asked where home was I might float directly up the sky and find it there.

Though if I walked along the Seine, the way Marina and I used to go, looking for a kind of epicenter of where her feet traveled most, maybe I'd point that way, like the compass of a needle finding a chunk of magnetized ore, a chunk of space debris in a farmer's field. True North is New York as long as she's there.

Another Beau Jour in Paris

The sky lightened early, around seven, maybe, and the sun kept on streaking the clouds with orange until it was well over the chimney pots.

I had lunch with Valerie and her sisters in a café called l'Estaminet, maybe because a cowshed was where the servers learned to wait tables.

When I asked for a glass of wine, and peered at the chalkboard, the woman looked at me in disgust, announced the menu there was all out of date and she'd bring me whatever there was. Hard to turn down an invite like that, though the wine wasn't bad.

Afterwards, Valerie and I walked towards the Hôtel de Ville and got caught up in a parade of Chinese groups coming to the plaza for the New Year's Celebration, and we stayed watching the dragons for a while.

Everybody's costumes, mostly red and orange, glowed in the sun, especially bright against the white of the igloos left over from the ice skating rink that was still up, full of kids mostly, a couple of Muslim girls in headscarves chasing each other, a little earnest panting boy going as fast as he could around and around the edge.

Men Falling, Women Rising

It's hard not to think of Icarus when the name Bush comes up. One by one his high-flying cronies come tumbling down in a shower of feathers and wax. At any rate, there's a perpetual smell of burning hubris.

The latest smoke comes from the criminal suit in Italy against a bunch of CIA agents charged with kidnapping radical cleric Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr near his mosque in Milan, after which he was ostensibly taken to an Egyptian jail, tortured, and held for a couple of years.

The agents will probably never be extradited, but more European suits may appear after a new European Union report exposed “at least” 1,245 secret C.I.A. flights in Europe, some of them involving kidnappings.

Hear the bodies dropping?

One of the few going up is champion German paraglider, Ewa Wisnierska, who went up rather more than she expected after a sudden storm in Australia yanked her higher than Mount Everest, somewhere around 29,000 feet.

The freezing temperatures, rain, hail, and lack of oxygen killed another paraglider, He Zhongpin, and knocked out Wisnierska for more than half an hour, but she revived when she came down to about 1600 feet and was able to land. A miracle, if you believe in them.

Kelly Flaneur

If you don't like to walk, there's no reason to be in Paris, the flaneur capital of the world. You go where the city takes you, begin one place, end up somewhere unexpected in time and space.

Yesterday, I aimed myself towards the Seine, trying to get some exercise by tempting myself with a pastry shop I used to like on rue St. Antoine. When I got there, finally, I found they'd gone more upscale, and refined all the character out of my favorite mille feuilles, no more chunks of pralined hazelnuts, just the faint flavor. That's progress.

Down the rue de Rivoli, at least, there were still ice skaters in front of the Hôtel de Ville, the City Hall. While the rink lasts, anybody can rent skates for a few euros and twirl around in front of two cheesy igloos and the ever present carousel. There was the usual mix of first time bumblers, a couple of speed demons, and a guy who thought he was Dorothy Hamill, spinning away in the center, everybody happy as robins atwitter in spring.

When I went a little further towards the Hôtel's main entrance I saw an enormous photo of Ingrid Betancourt. If you know who she is, a French-Colombian politician kidnapped in Colombia in 2002 and still held by FARC, it hits you in the guts. There her photo is, front and center on City Hall, bearing witness to her absence, when in the U.S. we're tucking away our Iraq War dead, doing our own repulsive share of kidnapping. How many people have disappeared into our prisons since 9/11?

Later, on the rue du Temple, past clothing stores, and shops for fancy handbags, I saw a plaque to Raoul Naudet, resistance member, who lived in the building before he got arrested and exterminated in the camp of Mauthausen in 1942.

It's good to remember.

Le Temps

Paris has generous weather, not stinting at all on rain. Morning and night the skies open up, let loose. Almost always, though, there is a gap in the afternoon when the place dries out a little and I go for a walk.

In the meantime, cloud-watching is a sport I'm proud of.

Wipe Your Feet

So John Edwards hitched his cybercampaign to a couple of unknown mules and found himself yanking on the reins in horror. I'm not surprised. The internet is supposed to be the next big thing in democracy, but when it comes down to it, U.S. candidates really only see it as another fundraising and advertising tool.

Hence the outcry about bloggers Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan. They were hired for their popularity and strong support, then had to issue a bushel of mea culpas for past comments on abortion, queers, and the "Christofascist" Catholic Church.

Don't you know you should wipe your feet, ladies, before you come in the door?

A Change in the Weather

I worked for while this morning, found the nearest library online, picked up my courage and went. It's in the 3rd in the local mayor's office, not very big, but big enough for a crime section. Vive le polar!

The courage came in when I had to check out a book, and renew my library card -- in French -- which I'm still not mistress of. But I went up there like I was entitled to, and got my Simenon fix, no problems.

When I got back home, black clouds rolled in and the sky opened. I peeked out the window after and there was this enormous rainbow.

Squirrelly

If Marina were here, it would be perfect, sun streaming through the windows, my view the rooftops of Paris, work I like ahead of me, too. The scale is better. In New York I'm a small fish in an enormous pond. No. I'm not even a fish, a squirrel maybe, without a taste anymore for the wet.

In the Segosphere

My first few hours in the new apartment and I gave the kitchen a scrub, then went out to post a letter and buy some groceries.

Back at the apparto I made coffee which I haven't drunk in a couple of days in some misguided effort to protect an ungrateful stomach from more stress. No wonder my last column stank.

Last night I entered the Ségosphere for the first time--a big rally at a hall in the 13th. The doors were supposed to open at 7 but there was already a pretty big crowd by 6 so they let people in twenty minutes later.

The place was packed by 6:45, with Young Socialists in their red tee shirts screaming and waving their banners in a reserved section up front, though when Ségolène Royal actually arrived everyone contributed to the din, screaming their heads off, clapping and chanting "Ségolène pour Presidente."

Even the jaded journalists I was sitting with brushed away the crumbs from their sandwiches and perked up.

Of course they had a couple of speakers before her, including the gay mayor of Paris Betrand Delanoë, who can talk like nobody's business, ten minutes or so without notes.

When Ségo came on, she seemed amateurish after him, and I wondered when he was going to run. Probably six years from now. The ways of politics are strange, though a facility with the crowd doesn't necessarily fit you for the presidency. It just makes you more electable.

She drew some lines in the sand for a change, attacking Sarkozy, calling him "the other candidate" playing that game politicians do when they don't mention rivals by name.

She enumerated her points with the mantra, "the left is not the same as the right," in response, I suppose, to far left critics that sound oddly like Naderites, and may have the same effect pulling away just enough votes to screw her.

Some of her biggest points: a defense of the secular nature of the state vs. Sarko's revamping laws to award public funds to mosques; a refusal to use scare tactics to get votes vs. Sarko's warnings about terrorism and crime; and bien sur, the importance of participative government joking about Sarko who even in his role in his UMP party seems to hold all the main positions himself, President of the UMP, the candidate, as well as his Minister of the Interior gig.

Most importantly, she criticized Sarko's affinity for Bush, saying, it would be a disaster for France to follow in his footsteps when even Americans were sick of their own neocons.

Speaking later of Iraq, Ségo linked Sarko to Bush's rhetoric on "the war between good and evil" which she slammed as the new version of the "civilizing mission of the West" which Bush has used to excuse "torture, secret prisons, detainees without rights, humiliation..."

The gloves are off.

Speak with Fork and Tongue

I couldn't sleep last night, French rolling around in my brain like marbles, all the mistakes I made during the day, phrases I should use later repeating themselves with a clacking sound loud enough to wake the neighbors that woke me at 1:30 with a nice loud rap cd.

Today, a visit to the apartment I'll be moving into, then lunch with Mme. Gauvin, who announced I was thin and tried to stuff me. Funny, my French is almost fluent with her, maybe because she likes me. For me, language is an extension of myself, like a tongue literally that I stick out like a snake does to taste the wind.

Kelly Jean nouveau est arrive

I'm back in Paris, staying with the friend of a friend and staring out the window at the gleaming white domes of Sacre Coeur which somehow look better at a distance. It's strange how you can get from one continent to another, cross the ocean, in fact, in a matter of hours. It changes expectations, enforces maybe, ideas of similarity. There's no time to change yourself.