Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [120]
A: I also love all of Janet Flanner’s writing about Paris and The Flâneur by Edmund White.
Q: You have such a busy schedule, yet you seem to balance everything really well. Have you picked up any tips about organizing from the time you spend in Paris?
A: I haven’t picked up any tips in France, but I’m very disciplined about how I spend my time. It’s very easy to get carried away with all the things people want you to do. We plan our trips a year in advance, and France is like the circuit breaker. It’s inviolate, to the point where, for example, a friend of ours had a bar mitzvah and we flew home for it and we flew right back. Paris equals time off for me. It’s a really important part of my really busy life.
Fear of food, indulgences, and small helpings. Because of media hype and woefully inadequate information, too many people nowadays are deathly afraid of their food, and what does fear of food do to the digestive system? I am sure that an unhappy or suspicious stomach, constricted and uneasy with worry, cannot digest properly. And if digestion is poor, the whole body politic suffers.… The pleasures of the table—that lovely old-fashioned phrase—depict food as an art form, as a delightful part of civilized life. In spite of food fads, fitness programs, and health concerns, we must never lose sight of a beautifully conceived meal.
—Julia Child, The Way to Cook
Photo Credit 24.2
À TABLE!
I can hear the glass door of the café grate on the sand as I open it. I can recall the smell of every hour. In the morning that of eggs frizzling in butter, the pungent cigarette, coffee and bad cognac; at five o’clock the fragrant odor of absinthe; and soon after the steaming soup ascends from the kitchen; and as the evening advances, the mingled smells of cigarettes, coffee, and weak beer.
—GEORGE MOORE,
Confessions of a Young Man
There’s no city in the world where you eat better. Period.
—ALEXANDER LOBRANO,
Hungry for Paris
Photo Credit p5.1
A Clean, Well-Lighted Café in Montparnasse
ADAIR LARA
I HAVE BEEN a fan of this essay since its original appearance in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1991, and it continues to bring a big smile to my face.
ADAIR LARA wrote a popular (and often very funny) twice-weekly column for the Chronicle for twelve years, and her award-winning columns have been published in several collections: Welcome to Earth, Mom: Tales of a Single Mother (Chronicle, 1992), At Adair’s House: More Columns by America’s Formerly Single Mom (Chronicle, 1995), and Slowing Down in a Speeded-Up World (Conari, 1994). Lara is also the author of Naked, Drunk, and Writing (Ten Speed, 2010), You Know You’re a Writer When … (Chronicle, 2007), Hold Me Close, Let Me Go (Broadway, 2001), The Granny Diaries (Chronicle, 2007), and Normal Is Just a Setting on the Dryer and Other Lessons from the Real, Real World (Chronicle, 2003), among others. She has contributed to numerous magazines, including Cosmopolitan, Departures, Glamour, Redbook, Ladies’ Home Journal, and Good Housekeeping. San Francisco mayor Willie Brown declared May 17, 2002, Adair Lara Day.
PARIS—IT was a pleasant café in Montparnasse, the famous artists’ quarter of Paris. An American sat at a small table, took out a yellow pad, and began to write. A cup of coffee steamed at her elbow. It was good to sit in a café and watch the people go in and out.
Before coming to Paris, she had read A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway, who lived here in the 1920s and wrote in the cafés. Her friend Bill had hated the book, in which Hemingway wrote terrible things about people who were nice to him in Paris but had