Travel Log VII

01Mar2011 [personal]

• My time in Paris is coming to a close, and I'm once again finding myself ticking off a list of lasts. I just (at the time of writing, Sunday afternoon) went for my last run along the banks of the Seine; last night was my last mass at the local parish, preceded by my last café and blanche and wifi at Le Molière (in time to take the Foursquare mayorship); the day before was my last grocery run at the local Monoprix; before that my last time wandering the delightfully expensive shopping districts of the 8e and 9e and back into the 1e; tomorrow will be my last day of writing at the rickety little writing desk that's become familiar, and, coincidentally, the last of my rum; all leaving Tuesday for a final laundry run and a last meal out.
• I've mostly been eating and living simply, but I've made sure to try a few different places to eat, so as to experience some French gastronomy; had some great meals in Reims but the richness of the northern food turned out too much of a shock for my stomach when consumed suddenly and in great quantities; I had a very nice Asian-fusion-inspired meal at Kong, though the decor (see recent photos) is weirdly Orientalist in a way only the French can take seriously; went last week to Le Dauphin on Ave Parmentier in the 11e and had a delicious meal; their menu changes day to day, with only two choices for each course depending on what food's been sourced, and I ended up with a couple of fish dishes and a cheese that were all amazing, and all at a cheap set price; went there on the recommendation of Monocle too, officially my favourite magazine now, who are interestingly doing a 'City Survey' on Sydney in their next issue, so I'll be curious to see what they come up with.
• This whole experience has been incredible; very odd (I keep suddenly realising where I am and what I'm doing, a realisation that comes like waking up, or maybe like in a dream where I feel I need to pinch myself, and I'm astounded at just how unusual the scenario seems) but at the same time totally right. It's not something I'm gonna start doing every year, because treating this as a sabbatical, rather than just a holiday, is part of what works so well. But it's something I'll want to repeat in some form — not necessarily to write fiction, though I like that idea, but to capture a different sort of creativity and have the brain take in some completely different stimuli for a while.
• The writing itself has gone as well as the very best of my expectations, the ones I was wary even to admit to, with it looking like I'll be coming home with 50-60k words and the remainder of the stories all plotted out, making the remainder of the writing relatively simple to accomplish, assuming I can find appropriate blocks of time.
• The writing has also prompted a whole lot more thinking about storytelling and genre and the process of writing, from questions of identity, and ethnicity and gender and sexuality, to questions of subjectivity, and conventions of genre; there are a few threads in there I want to explore in future writing.
• Writing Raphaël's story is hard work, but is also really exciting; I've previously written of the weird creative buzz, the feeling of exploration, and it's still hitting me; it was especially fulfilling to break through the two big conflicts I'd set up; when I first envisioned the story, there were two events that were most clear to me, having written them in a loose form previously — one near the opening of the 21stC story, the second a big breaking point in the same; when I outlined it though, I put the breaking point at the end of Act I, imagining three similarly-sized Acts; as I wrote, it instead became a core conflict to the whole story, and the 19thC story thankfully fell into a very similar pace, its own conflicts occuring at similar beats; pushing through the two big parallel conflicts was really difficult — I even put it off a couple of days to travel to Reims and it then took another couple of days to dare to face them — but once I got through, everything else just fell into place, the puzzle coming together in big pieces (which is distracting when I'm working on another piece!) and even threads I hadn't realised were being set up much earlier in the story are building to interesting conclusions.
• Reims made for an interesting trip; it was great to get back there after just over five years away, nice and nostalgic to wander around taking photos (which are coming!) of old familiar sights, even if many of them have changed to varying degrees; but at the same time, I felt what I described on Twitter as "something like revulsion", which I'm still grappling with; going back there I knew I wasn't going to recapture the feeling of living there, and for that matter, wasn't even sure I wanted to, but in my sense of self, the year away is something I associate so closely with my own identity, that it came as a shock to not recognise myself at all in the place where I spent that year; Reims is pretty, and it has history, but it's too much like a provincial small town clinging to the importance of its faded past and its proximity to Paris (the trip near-halved to 45 minutes now) — this was reinforced in all the city's marketing materials, and in its relatively recent refurbishments that create an artificial historicity — it's the 800th anniversary of the cathedral there, and its forecourt and whole streets for a couple of blocks around are being reinvented while being presented as always planned that way.
• Related, I figure it's no accident that though I associate the year away so closely with the construction of my identity, I've always felt the attraction for Paris, even though I only spent a few days here over the course of the year; in that sense, this whole trip has reinforced that attraction; I don't think I could live and work here like a Parisian, but I've no doubt I'll always feel like there's a piece of my heart here.
• Curiously, a couple of weeks in London reinforced that I do think I could live and work there like a Londoner; only a few days left there now though; Wednesday, I'm back to London, with a London Symphony Orchestra session at the Barbican (playing Mahler's 9th, which I'm also seeing Sydney Symphony perform in May), then on Thursday I'm to Edinburgh for a few days, then a couple final days in London before home to Sydney; at that point I've a week to acclimatise before heading back to work, which I'll likely need; my head's been full of ideas and plans for the coming year, many of which are contradictory, so I'll need some time to make sense of it all.