Birthday & Thoughts on Ecriture (ironically typed)

(our road trip map, see Compiègne up top and Reims to the right? and Paris of course, that was our triangle of travel)


(view from someplace we stopped along the way to change drivers)


(cathedrale de Braine)


(hôtel de ville city hall of Compiègne, Joan of Arc came here to rally troops)

Lundi 5/4/10 (transferred from my normal paper journal)
I just went on a beautiful road trip yesterday. I had an amazing birthday in general. The notes on the other page are our directions outa Paris, written haphazardly in a librairie (book store) at Charles De Gaul (the airport where we rented a car from), so we'd only have to buy one map - a bigger one with less banlieu (suburban) details. The flower on the next page was in my hair all day through Compiègne, Reims, and Champagne country, and the song of the trip fits perfectly with it. The radio station we could get the best was like straight up club music all day, which was kinda funny considering we were driving through rainy countryside and medieval towns, but it made it like a party everywhere we went haha. Anywho, somebody decided to put that 60s song with the line "if you're going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair" to club music! It was the most ridiculous song, with the crazy deep bassline behind such a chill set of lyrics. We thought it was hilarious so it became the trip song. The trip was frickin beautiful though, we got to see a bunch of towns Joan of Arc saw on her travels, and the cathedral in Reims where the kings were always crowned, and then drove up into this field and had sandwiches on a hill of grapevines and saw the sunset over an unbelievable view! My camera died halfway so I'll have to snag some pics from Martha n Alex.

(view from the hill where we had our sandwiches)
I wish I could write about everything! Gah, there's just never enough time and I have so much shit I wanna record, well here's somethin I've been thinkin about


Thoughts on Ecriture
I bought this pen (a sweet fountain pen) not long ago, mostly because you can erase it (German technology I in fact make sparse use of), but I've since fallen in love. I feel like I'll hang on to this pen cuz it's so cool, and you can refill the ink, and it'll have some longevity in my life unlike most small quotidien (daily or common) items. The angle of the tip gives it some personality and for the first time I feel right writing in cursive - a long lost art thanks to computers, poor elementary education, and character-less, mass-produced pens.
Laura and I somehow got into discussing Parisian revolutionary history the other day and when she opened her notebook to validate her claim of Louis-Philippe's maintenance of the pre-1830 monarchical methods. I noticed her handwriting had changed like mine into cursive at the point of purchasing a fountain pen. Cursive can be frickin beautiful.
Just one more thing to love about europe. In the states it's almost impossible to find these pens, whereas here they're everywhere you'd find pens - monoprix, librairies, and there's a whole frickin floor devoted to pens in Gilbert Joseph on St. Michel! In the states we have no erasable pen worth mentioning and we've lost the feel for cursive. No one can even read it anymore. Thanks to computers no one can read most handwriting anymore and it's truly a shame. So much personality and life can go into the written word. It was central to academic/intellectual life in a way we can't understand post-computer-ubiquity.

Reading literature lately has been fulfilling my spiritual lackings a great deal. My good friend Vicky Hugs has a lovely section of Notre Dame de Paris about the transition into life with a printing press. He's a genius of course and had a perspective I'd never really considered before. Architecture was the greatest means of mass communication and self-expression pre-printing-press. P. 161 "chaque face, chaque pierre du vénérable monument est une page non seulement de l'histoire du pays, mais encore de l'histoire de la science et de l'art." (each face, each stone of the venerable monument is a page not only of the history of our country, but also of the history of science and art.)

(Inside Notre Dame de Paris)
Of course he emphasizes his subject and the medieval time period he so Romantically respects. It's cool to look at the building like that though, of course there's loads more explanations, but I won't bore you. You should just go read it again, unabridged, in french...

ok one more cool quote - parisian houses like water. P. 166 "Les maisons se pressent, s'accumulent et haussent leur niveau dans le bassin comme l'eau dans un reservoir. Elles commencent à devinir profondes, elles mettent étages sur étages... les maisons enfin sautent par-dessus le Mur de Philippe-Auguste, et s'éparpillent joyeusement dans la plaine sans ordre et tout de travers, comme des échappées." (The houses press against one another, accumulate and raise their level in the basin like water in a reservoir. They start to become deep, the put floor upon floor... the houses finally jump over the wall of Philippe-Auguste (built in the 11oos), and scatter themselves joyously in the plain without order and by all means, like freedmen.)


(cathedrale de reims)