I received an incredible scholarship to study in Paris for two weeks from the University of Kent, with food, board, and inner-city travel included. I'd been waiting for these two weeks for months, eagerly stalking the hostel website and incessantly checking my emails for information on the programme. It's documented here - I only wish I'd taken more pictures of the food...
Summer school unofficially starts on Sunday night, with a cheese, tomato, and spinach crêpe followed by a classic nutella crêpe dessert - it's so hot that the restaurant sprays jets of cold water at its windows. We're served bottles of cider and a little ceramic bowl each, but everyone's too nervous to pour at first, in case we get the etiquette all wrong at our first meal. After a while, though, someone breaks the ice. By the end of the week we'll be disappointed, even outraged, if cider is served in glasses...
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After dinner on Sunday, I get to know my room, and then a bunch of us head up to the Foyer rooftop for the view I've read about online. It's better in real life, gorgeous, the Eiffel tower defying the low horizon, with La Défense and Montmartre emerging triumphantly above the townhouses and monuments, if you know where to look. The former is a business and finance hub, the latter home of Picasso's studio, the artist's square, and Sacre Coeur. Vibrantly different, and testament to Paris' logical structure that winds you along as though through chronological chapters: here the Eiffel tower, there the Louvre and the Pyramids... The skyline's as neat as the regimented Luxembourg gardens we stroll through the next morning on our way to class.
On Monday night we go down to some bars near the Seine for a drink, and on the way back I notice the pages of a book of sonnets scattered in the streets. Someone's ripped up a poetry book, scattered it, perhaps in anguish or from a broken heart. I pick up one of the dozens of leaves and take it home, read it later. It's in French, with an English translation on the back. I wonder what must have happened for someone to scatter sonnets on the boulevard Saint Michel like this. I'm really starting to feel like I'm in Paris.
Every morning we breakfast at the foyer - it's always baguette and jams, although legend says if you're up early enough on a Thursday, you can bag some pastries. I squirrel away some baguette for snacks and to toast later for dinner (note - how to do Paris on a budget!). There's delicious coffee too, and I see a student fill a huge flask with it and take eight or so pieces of bread, so it's the done thing. I even get up early enough to do some reading on a couple of mornings, and George Orwell is the easiest 8am read I have. He tells me to write for myself, never for anyone else. I think this is a kind of personal creative revolution.
By Thursday I'm giddy with all this talk of revolution - Kant and the French Revolution, Picasso's cubist 'revolution', and the revolution of Parisian architecture, be it Haussman or Le Corbusier. We make our way down some of the ancient surviving sidestreets and later we stop in at the Pompidou center to look for women artists, or to look at the blank spaces where they should be. We debate on whether or not women-only galleries would be a positive thing. I argue that it would - begging curators to give more space to women just won't happen, and visibility is key. In a world where women's art is suppressed by their circumstance and situation, those who have the power to give the right circumstance and the right situation back to those female artists have the duty to do so, no matter how embarrassed it may make them feel for the oppression of their sex. We're asked what we would call such a gallery in France, and I say, La Citoyenne.
The next day - Friday - we talk about scientific revolutions. As we're mostly humanities students everyone expects this class to be a drag, but it blows our minds. Paradigm shifts and a potted history of science through revolution have us asking dozens of questions. We lunch at the Grand Mosque opposite the Jardin des Plantes and see the National Museum of Natural History. It's aimed at kids, but it's incredible, with a vast high ceiling that changes colours to mimic the cycles of night and day, beautiful old architecture, and fascinating information on how human activity might be revolutionising nature today. The Jardin des Plantes, though, is as regimented as the Luxembourg Gardens, despite the few beds of slightly wild-looking flowers here and there, giving it a little chaotic English edge.
That weekend we visit Montmartre, Pere Lachaise, and Shakespeare and Co in the afternoons, sacrificing our mornings for a much-needed lie in. I still get up for breakfast and spend an hour on Saturday morning, however, in the library, trying to squeeze in some calmness before the storm of the metro, the lunches, the drinks. I go back to sleep afterwards, before we head out to see Picasso's studio at Le Bateau Lavoir, and to indulge my most expensive meal - soup d'oignon, salmon pasta, mousse au chocolat, and vin blanc - in the Place du Tertre, for seventeen euros. We wander down to the Moulin Rouge, take it in before taking the metro back. We even get to experience a double decker train. The next day, we pay tribute to Jim Morrison and Oscar Wilde's graves; I sit in Shakespeare and Co and write. The cat comes and sits on my lap and I feel like part of the furniture.
By Monday, we feel like we own the place.
We discuss Vichy France and visit the Memorial de la Shoah. It's a grounding, sobering day that reminds us of the dark struggles that Paris has been through before it became the city it is today, and we need the reminder to remember those who have died just for standing in the same city we're stood in. We have lunch at L'As du Falafel, the city's best falafel shop, which we eat in a rainy Place des Vosges.
Then it's Tuesday, by far my favourite day: we study irrational approaches to writing with Yelena Moskovich, and visit Montparnasse Cemetery, where we're supposed to sit and write about anything from a colour and name we see around us - but it can't involve death or cemeteries. It's an amazing thing, to take the environment you're in and watch it bleed into your writing without ever mentioning the location directly. It's thought-provoking, even revolutionary, in its own tiny little way. Even better - the cemetery has names like De Beauvoir, Sartre, Man Ray - so we spend a while there afterwards, paying tribute to the different artists and thinkers that have shaped our realities. That night we go to a burlesque show off the Champs-Élysées, the world famous Crazy Horse Paris. I feel quintessentially Parisian.
Wednesday and Thursday blow my mind too - we learn about May 68 and the student and worker uprisings, and then the Situationalists. They seemed to work together in the sense of psychogeography - it definitely seems to me that the streets of Paris are paved with revolution: "under the cobblestones, the beach" never seemed more pertinent. We learn the art of the dérive, the structure of structurelessness, the city walk without a purpose that allows us to encounter the city as it is, without the pulls or drives of capitalism tugging at our sleeves. Most of us struggle with it, however, and I decide it takes commitment to feeling a little bit foolish to achieve. We try to master the denouement - deliberate use of objects in a different way to their original 'purpose' in order to again defy the meanings assigned to our surroundings - by running down an up-escalator. We embrace looking foolish, but I'm not quite sure we pulled off anything Debord would be proud of. I stop taking pictures for a while, put off by our discussions of the society of the spectacle and the domination of the image.
On Friday we pack in a lot - student presentations, champagne and a three-course meal, and finally the Eiffel tower. It's a bittersweet sight over the city on our last night, a city that has taught me a lot and that I know I'll be coming back to. I stand outside the foyer for a photo on Saturday morning before I catch the metro back to Gare du Nord. I like to try and find ways to say goodbye, but it was hard this time, to tear my eyes from the rooftop view and the beautiful library and the breakfast trays and corridors lined with books. I'll miss the hand-picked restaurants at lunch and the re-purposed baguette I had for dinner, and the three-euro wine, and gorgeous vending machine coffees. I'll miss having class in Reid Hall every day, watching the sunlight fall onto the courtyard, learning about revolution.
