Paris je t'aime

17th November

Sitting at the desk with Notre Dame across the street lit up like a thousand fireflies with that colour, that perpetual orange hue that all of Paris has at night, I push the typewriter away and use the computer instead. I just learned to use the damn thing but now the keys have gone and got all jammed on me and to make matters worse the ink reel is running dry, so I must acquiesce to modern technology. After a while my heart rate settles from the coffee high and now I'm hungry so I get some Camembert and a crusty baguette from under the bench which serves as a makeshift fridge and wash it down with some cheap wine from the corner store. What makes Paris so beautiful, you ask? On every street corner, intersection and backstreet there's either a cafe or brasserie or restaurant or patisserie-boulangerie or fromagerie or boucherie or wine store. A month I've been living on nothing but bread, cheese, wine, pastries, crepes and coffee, and then more bread, pastry and coffee. There's so many fine, fine Italian joints everywhere  I've fallen into an addiction- tagliatelle, linguini, ravioloi, bruschetta. I've become a pasta junkie. Every day, a croissant aux amandes, almond croissant, at a different patisserie. If you keep reading I'll tell you where to get the best one in all of Paris.

And then when you're nice and full and coffeed up that's when you learn, when you hit the countless museums, galleries and exhibitions sprawled across the city and you can wander for hours and try to take it all in, Cezanne, Manet, Monet, Delacroix, Pisarro, Matisse, Rodin, Picasso. There's Musee D'Orsay with her Impressionists. Musee Picasso with all the periods he ever worked in, as well as less-known sculptures. The Centre-Pompidou with Pop art and contemporary works. And yes yes yes there is Le Louvre, not only La Jaconde but underground caverns full of Ancient Egyptian artefacts, halls of Renaissance sculpture and painting, and too much, too much for one visit, so you have to buy a yearly pass and go four times. After you come out your back will hurt and you need a caffeine hit. But no time to stop! Because at Cernuschi museum only seven Metro stops and two changes away there is an exhibition of Persian art and artefacts from the Sassanian period.

Only the other day I walked into a small gallery with a Dali collection and the crazy old curator sat me down and gave me an education on his life and works. I bought him an espresso to thank him. The same day I went to the national library which had an exhibition on the French humanist photographers of the 40's, 50's and 60's and it was marvelous, there was Brassai, Edouard Boubat, Willy Ronis, Henri Cartier-Bresson and also Robert Doisneau, not only the famous picture you'll know of the couple kissing in front of the Hotel D'Ville but a whole lot more. What pictures! Perfect little slices of humanity with amazing subjects and wonderful everyday situations.

You meet a varied bunch in this city. There's Michael Saviour from Newfoundland, Canada, who teaches French. He's trying to get a place here like so many others but no luck, so it's back to his Atlantic coast village he goes. Peter John Paul, Australian, wandering Christian, he tells me on his travels he's looking for the "connection thread that runs through all of us". We talk for hours on all things religion, god and the universe. Sometimes he will get angry and wildy flail his arms about. Other times he will speak so softly I can barely hear him although I'm right next to him. During the conversation I run to the local cafe, get two coffees, then cross the street to the patisserie for baguette and pastries. Isac from Brazil, architect, here to dig the countless amazing buildings. He runs around them snapping away on his camera, muttering to himself, "nice, nice, yes". Dulce, Carolina and Alexis I meet in front of Lisa in the Louvre. We wander the streets taking night photos. Sylvian from Britanny, another teacher but of Latin and Spanish. He knows the place well, and recommends me some jazz clubs.

Ah the jazz clubs! Now the jazz clubs here are never ground level but always require traipsing down a set of dank, narrow strairs into a underground lair of sorts. There you will find all sorts and kinds and kind of sorts, suited old smoking men, young fashionable smoking madamemoiselles, newcomer smoking tourists. Everybody fills the place with smoke. And the band will blow and bash and strum until the early hours of the morning. When you strumble out into the still coldness hopefully there will be a cafe open for a quick hit to keep you up.

Now, Shakespeare and Co, I came to by accident. I'd heard about it here and there but it wasn't really on my mind to visit it until I found an old magazine on the Metro that had an article on it, describing its history and its magic. So when I went in and discovered just how lovely it was, I hung around all day to talk to Sylvia, the daughter of owner Mr George Whitman, and I asked her if I could stay and she agreed, provided that I work a spell in the store everyday and write my biography for George. Downstairs there is the bookstore with the best selection of English books in all of Paris, but if you climb the dangerously narrow stairs you find the library section which has the beds where the guests stay.

Now the original Shakespeare and Co was run by a Mrs Sylvia Beach and it was a couple hundred metres from where this one now stands. It ran from 1921 until 1941 and gained notoriety when her company was the only one to publish Ulysses although she later went bankrupt because of it. Then in 1951 or thereabouts George Whitman, who was a close friend of Beach's, set up his own bookstore and when she died later renamed it Shakespeare and Co in her honour. So fast forward 55 years and it's still standing here, still taking in travellers and youngsters and writers and anyone who asks with open arms.

These days George is 93 and has rather cloistered himself in his apartment a few levels above the store and rarely comes down. I met him the morning after my first night there which was a Sunday, Sunday being the day where he cooks pancakes for all the guests. Unfortunately they taste awful, and a few of the smarter guys try to feed theirs to the cat but after it figures out how bad they are it doesn't want them, and me, I have to eat the damn thing because he's watching and what can I say, "George, they taste terrible?". So I pour about a gallon of syrup on just to make it palatable and wolf it down.

After pancakes I briefly sit with him and get as close to a conversation as I have with him during my time here. That day he was really rather sweet, asking all about me, telling me how much he liked Sydney when he visited, and insisting that I work with him for an hour a day instead of two downstairs, which I duly take up. We talked briefly about the famous writers that had passed through the store, among them Henry Miller, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Lawrence Durell (all of whom he apparently knew quite well), Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Corso of the "beat generation" and others like Pablo Neruda. He claims he is descended from American poet Walt Whitman but I've read it's all made up, which wouldn't surprise me. He lets me borrow his collection of Whitman poetry which I read a lot of everyday. I find this poem and read it:                                                 Shut not your doors to me proud libraries,                              For that which was lacking on all your well-fill'd shelves, yet needed most, I bring,                                                     Forth from the war emerging, a book I have made                    The words of my book nothing, the drift of it every thing,              A book separate, not link'd with the rest nor felt by the intellect,          But you ye untold latencies will thrill to every page.

After this he returns to reading his paper and lets me take some pictures of him. He has the look of a rather mad person, wild white hair flaying about, his clothes unkempt and his fingernails as long as claws. He says he doesn't believe in soap and I'm told he shortens his hair by burning it with a candle flame. I've also learned just what a difficult character he has. He can be very abrupt, has a terribly short temper, and most of the time is unapproachable. The first few days I worked for him he would ask me to do the strangest jobs which created more mess than they cleaned up. Now I have gotten on the wrong side of him. I wrote my draft biography for him on Wednesday, he read it and said he rather liked it which surprised me. So he let me stay in the Writer's Studio, which is a separate room across the hall from the library. It's equipped with a bed propped on two giant metal trunks, a tiny kitchen, and an amazing selection of books some which are signed personally from the authors. There is an original painting by Henry Miller which hangs on the wall. It's a wonderful place. After my draft he asked me to type it up and get a bigger picture of myself as the one I got at the Metro photo booth was "not stylish, we're tryin to do something with style here, what's the matter with you?". The next day I went out with the other guys here and when he found out I hadn't done it, he howled at me and called me a bad guest. Today he came down and banged on the Studio door. I told him that I'd typed it but hadn't printed it yet, and he just shook his head and walked out. He's convinced I'm going to run off on tomorrow without giving it him. So tonight I finally got it printed off and went up to give to him but he didn't answer his door. Scott, another guest, says I should be flattered by his attention as he rarely asks for anyone's biography personally anymore, but I think he's just plain crazy and probably always was.

I've come to love the place dearly. It's such a genuine and warm place in a world when most bookstores are chain run monstrosities with computerised catalogues, all neat and orderly. Up here in the library everything is ramshackle chaotic, the overstuffed shelves warped with time and in dire need of dusting. Whilst browsing you may find classics like Dickens and Kipling in beautiful old hardback editions among delapidated old boxes. I pull up one of the beds and find a first edition copy of Lord of the Flies. It is a dusty, dirty, cobwebbed, crowded little piece of literary heaven. There's a tiny sort of room under heavy shelves of hardbacks which houses a typewriter where you can sit and type, and next to it are personal messages to George from Jacques Chirac and Jacqueline Kennedy. Up above the archway there is a sign put up years ago - Be not inhospitable to strangers lest they be angels in disguise. Meanwhile upstairs in George's personal library, amongst piles of trash and old junk I find letters from all over the world expressing gratitude to him for letting them stay. Some are in French and Spanish, even one in Japanese. Some are from a few years back and some from the 1960's and 70's. You can't help but feel the transience of the place, to feel the history and to imagine the thousands of people who have slept here and the millions who have browsed through the store.

I have found two beautiful beautiful old pieces. Obras completas, the complete works of Spanish poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca, and a leatherbound, pocketsize, tattered old copy of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, that oh-so marvelous work by the 13th Century Persian poet. I am worried about damaging  them in my bag so I have them wrapped in a scarf, two t-shirts and leather jacket.

When the store closes down at midnight the group will usually open a bottle or two and the talking and milling around begins. To name them, they are Scott, Canadian; Kate and Samantha, Americans; Anna, Scottish and Lauren, Australian. A few of the nights we head to a club down the street. Back in the heyday Mr Miles Davis played there. One night there is a lady who has a voice so heavenly it drowns all sorrows and melts all hearts in the room. When she comes off stage I tell her in bad, drunken French, "vous etes comme Madame Piaf". She kisses me on the cheek.

So it's with a sad heart that I will leave this place tomorrow and head onwards to Dublin. I'd only planned to stay here three weeks but it's stretched to almost a month. This city, I tell you she casts a spell on you. She puts one of her stockinged legs up on the table and opens them up. "I believe you're trying to seduce me", you say, but you're powerless to stop her. She will pull and pull you in, drown you with her overpowering tides. And you will wander the Seine in the cold windy Parisian night, bottle of Bordeaux in hand, and sigh because you must leave her, even though you've barely stayed but the briefest of times.

If you ever do come, forget that steel tower. Make sure you firstly get a croissant aux amandes at the patisserie at the start of Rue Veille du Temple in the Marais. They will delight and astound you like no other piece of pastry ever did or will. Stop for an espresso at any old corner brasserie. Buy a cheap bottle of wine, a warm baguette and a piece of Brie, or whatever cheese takes your fancy. Then come to Shakespeare and Co. and stay for hours, browsing and wandering and marvelling. Pick a title, any title. Take a friend and head down to the Seine. Voila, bon appetit. Because in the words of Omar Khayyam:

I need a jug of wine and a book of song,                               Half a loaf for a bite to eat,                                           Then you and I, seated in this deserted spot,                           Will have more wealth than a sultan's realm!