Badaude

Hemingway & Company (Plus Big Badaude Giveaway!)

Crazy week at Shakespeare & co.So what was it like? Well, most days went a little like this:

Morning, walk to work past Notre Dame, gleaming. Arrive - tumbleweeds everywhere: unswept, unslept. Giro Playboy in the bathroom ('Would you like a coffee? A glass of wine?' 'A coffee.')

Corinne sawing shelves, tatooed, silent mostly. ('My right arm is dedicated to Alice in Wonderland, my left...')

Intruder:'Cela n'est pas un metier des femmes.'

Sylvia (in yellow boots) 'Mais ca change, ca change.' 

Maitresse in refuge from a bad smell, working in the corner. Me, working up a ladder, pen in mouth, a Groucho Marx cigar. Booktourists arrive, documentarymaker arrives: my ass photographed from 100 angles.

Michael: 'A glass of wine? Anytime. A coffee? A coffee. Got to keep the balance.'

I draw through lunch.

Balanced on the benches, one foot in the door to George Whitman's apartment, I catch a whiff of WIFI from the office.

Syliva's amythyst necklace: Maitresse's amythyst necklace.

After hours: still working. Lauren shelves books, Gemma and Gemma shelve books. Sylvia shelves books.

Magazine editors arrive, photograph the walls. I notice - books in George Whitman's library: 'Naked They Prayed' (snortle); another. What was that title? Can't remember - but worse! (giggle). Third, a book by Arnold Bennet labelled in equal capitals BURIED ALIVE BY ARNOLD BENNET (barely-repressed hysteria). 

Half an hour on the phone. Coquette, Maitresse, Badaude (salonistes? superheroes?) wait to leave. Am I finished? Coquette tells a sale story: where should we meet, eat? Ici ou ailleurs? Ici ou ailleurs?

'A glass of wine? A coffee? Just ask me. Any time.'

(It was always wine, never coffee).

I've finished drawing. I write on the wall of Shakespeare & Company:'My Latin quarter hat. God, we simply must dress the character. I want puce gloves. You were a student, weren't you? Of what in the other devil's name? Paysayenn. P. C. N., you know: physiques, chimiques et naturelles. Aha. Eating your groatsworth of mou en civet, fleshpots of Egypt, elbowed by belching cabmen. Just say in the most natural tone: when I was in Paris, boul' Mich', I used to. Yes, used to carry punched tickets to prove an alibi if they arrested you for murder somewhere. Justice. On the night of the seventeenth of February 1904 the prisoner was seen by two witnesses. Other fellow did it: other me. Hat, tie, overcoat, nose. Lui, c'est moi. You seem to have enjoyed yourself.'

(BIG BADAUDE GIVEAWAY! The first person to identify this quote in my comments box, leaving an email contact, will WIN AN ORIGINAL BADAUDE DRAWING!)

Getting there...

 

Beautiful Strangers*

Wednesday last week (28th). Things are shaping up at Shakespeare & Co...

 

...and at the Centre Nationale du Livre where I, along with Maitresse and Meg Zimbeck, I attended a bilingual q&a session organised by the French-American foundation, featuring Todd Zuniga of Opium, Paul Morris of Bomb, Chad Post of Open Letter, Eli Horowitz of McSweeney's as well as high-powereds from the world of traditional publishing. After hours, Ms Zimbeck led all of the above over the river to a little place she just happened to know which was still open and conjured wine, bread, terrines, saucisson and cheese for something approaching 20 and let us stay 'til some sort of late hour...

But it's back to work again in the morning...

(*the title is because I got confused by picking up a leaflet about les belles etrangeres in the lobby of the Maison des Livres. Nevertheless, all the stranger I saw tonight couldn't have been more beautiful)

First Pencils...

Tabula rasa...

 
 
 

It's a privilege to draw on these old walls and, oddly, rather hard on the pencil. More tomorrow...

photos (c) Lauren Goldenberg at Shakespeare & Company - thanks, Lauren!

Crazy Week in Paris

So, Sylvia of Shakespeare and Company asked me to draw on the immortal bookshop's historic walls... This happened to conicide with a conference on the electronic book (edition numericale) involving all sorts of visiting American luminaries, talking and partying.

Which made for a somewhat crazy week. 

Here are the designs I sent to Sylvia:

This is for the main staircase of the shop. The theme: English-language writers in Paris (Proust didn't make the cut, obviously, but Proust is always good to draw...).

Kind of a trompe d'oeil gallery of author portraits, inspired by Shakespeare & Co's original staircase decor which looked like this:

Incorporating a poem was Sylvia's idea. I searched but, although Anglo prose writers made Paris their home, I was hard-pressed to find poets who wanted to write about the city. Here I made do with Rilke's Im Jardin des Plantes...

...and this is for the children's section: what happens on your bookshelf at night.

But will they work in practice? Watch this space...

Chic, la Rentrée!

(I feel it really should have a capital letter).

OK, it's now some time after the Rentrée officially started, but I've been moving around throughout September and it's still tough coming back to Paris after a summer in the provinces and elsewhere...

click on the image to make it bigger: click again to enlarge further.

SDF

Fivedials magazine asked me to do a kind of 'illustration-essay' (like a photo-essay, but with drawings). I decided to document something I see all-too-often around Paris, and which lookss subtly different from the same problem in the UK. I'll be posting my original sketches during the next week, and you can also see them in a slightly different version at http://fivedials.com.

Fivedials

is a London publication, but for the current issue, it's in Paris. 

The magazine asked me to do a kind of 'illustration-essay' (like a photo-essay, but with drawings). I decided to document something I see all-too-often around Paris, and which lookss subtly different from the same problem in the UK. I'll be posting my original sketches here all this week, and you can also see them in a slightly different version at http://fivedials.com.    

Party Paris!

At the launch party for Hamish Hamilton's FiveDials Paris issue at the mythic Left Bank bookshop Shakespeare & Company (recently given a new lease of life by young owner, Sylvia Beach Whitman), the resident cellist played, we drank some wine and ate some flan and talked 'til it got dark.

Then Steve Toltz, author of A Fraction of the Whole, told us why we all love Paris, and poet Joe Dunthorne gave a hilarious account of how he was refused entry to the Oulipo inner circle for his use of the letter 'y', then read an adrenaline-fuelled rant vowelled only by the letter 'i'.

I've always been intrigued by Oulipo (the lit movement utilising alphabetic games, including the one which restricts the writer to the use of one vowel only) but, never having tried it, had thought it was strictly for crossword-addicts. 'Til I heard Joe, I didn't realise how creatively liberating (and addictive) it is, even in cartoon form.

You should be able to see: Simon Prosser and Anna Kelly of Hamish Hamilton; Craig Tayor of Fivedials; authors Steve Toltz and Joe Dunthorne; Paris bloggers Lauren Elkin (Maitresse), Elizabeth Fourmont (Coquette) and Joanna Walsh (Badaude); Sylvia Beach Whitman, owner of Shakespeare and Company, and her father, George Whitman. What a gathering of lit stars under the star-lit Paris skies.

The issue which features work by Ali Smith, Geoff Dyer and Hugo Vickers as well as archive material by Camus, Sontag and Updike, is readable and downloadable online. Art is free: download it and print it on red paper, on white, on art paper, on toilet paper. Make it your own work of genius.

Reading is Sexier in Paris!

It's always sexier with Maitresse, for whom I've just designed this header, especially when yor company includes Anais Nin, Henry Miller, Kiki de Montparnasse, Jean Rhys and Jean-Paul Sartre:

 

They're sitting in Le Select in Montparnasse, a bar I've always liked for it's old-school brown stuffiness - decor seemingly unchanged since James Baldwin's era. Le Select regular, Maitresse, wrote a hilarious piece about literary tourism in the toilettes.

While I was working on the pic, I discovered Djuna Barnes was not only a writer but a fantastic illustrator which got me thinking: if I had a header like Maitresse's, which Parisian artists would be there with me and, more importantly,  where would we be drinking?

I think I'd start by asking Honore Daumier, the daddy of French cartooning, who was imprisoned for five months for charicaturing Louis Phillipe as a pear. 

Am I allowed tourists and short-term residents? Francophobe, Hogarth, visited Paris, as did Francophile Aubrey Beardsley on his last, tuburcular journey to the South of France. Francophile, Posy Simmonds whose wonderfully funny reworking of Flaubert, Gemma Bovery, clearly knows Paris and Parisians (see Gemma's French lover's super-Parisienne girlfriend and her dreadful mother).

No one drew the Parisians so well as Jean-Jaques Sempe and Ludwig Bemelmans. And, talking of children's book illustrators, I've always loved Roger Duvoisin's sophisticated line.

Sadly I couldn't invite Herge, despite his influence on French culture and last year's exibition at the Pompidou, as he lived in Belgium all his life. Instead, I'll have Henri Cartier-Bresson with his almost inhuman ability to capture other people's intensely emotional public moments.

Contemporary Paris artists? How about Miss Tic and Sophie Calle - both of them share my interest in wandering anonymously around the streets of Paris and elsewhere.

Where to drink? HCB and Djuna would prefer Montparnasse, Sempe, a little bar like le Rubis. Hogarth wouldn't be happy anywhere, Posy, maybe somewhere in 16e, but Daumier would hardly recognise modern Paris outside the Ile Saint Louis. We'll just have to go for my choice: either Cafe de la Mairie or La Palette or L'Abribus in Belleville, or cocktails at the very hip Curio Parlour, or that little bar by the Marche d'Aligre or any one of a hundred other good bars in the city. Decision: given they're artists, let's make it the bar of Marais art bookshop, La Belle Hortense. Drawing is sexier in Paris too.

Chiche! (challenge). Who would you invite? I challenge Belette, Adam, Coquette.

And please add your fantasy Paris dinner party/pub crawl list of invitees below: