Paris bulletin 5 2014

Long hot days in Paris. The Ramadan moon is a sliver in the night sky. Every day brings an end-of year party, concert, spectacle, boum, marking summer endings before autumnal new beginnings.

23^rd June, Shakespeare & Co bookshop hosts the jury of the Man Booker International Prize 2015. The event takes place on the pavement outside the shop. While we find seats on stools, chairs and along the low wall the other side of the pavement, various men fuss about with recording equipment and mikes. The BBC will broadcast the discussion at some future date. A passing busker entertains the crowd but doesn’t get much for his efforts.

The judging line-up is impressive: Nadeem Aslan, novelist,  Elleke Boehmer, Oxford professor and author, Edwin Frank, New York-based publisher and poet, Wen-Chin Ouyang, SOAS professor, and, chairing this event and the judging itself, academic and author, Marina Warner. The theme is ‘Writing Home Elsewhere’. The discussion is thoughtful and wide-ranging.

Afterwards we get the usual thimble of red wine and then Anna and I take ourselves off to café Panis, where we’ve spent many a happy, noisy evening. Anna Pook has run the writing workshops at Shakespeare & Co for the past five years but she will be leaving Paris later this summer, to begin an MA in Creative Writing at UEA. Another ending, another beginning. Bon courage, Anna! Write that novel!

Later still we walk across to Notre Dame, me to go back up to la Chapelle, Anna to go in the opposite direction. There are one or two tourists about but really we have the parvis and the floodlit facade to ourselves. So we stop, we tip our heads back and we look – properly for once – at those three extraordinary portals – the Last Judgement in the centre, flanked on the right by the portal of Saint Anne and on the left by the Portal of the Virgin, the whole Christian story chiselled out in stone, much of it unchanged since the 13^th century.  Street art in the medieval era.

Modern street art is everywhere in Paris. Very little of it is done in stone so it won't last fifty years, let alone seven centuries. In my part of Paris it appears in the most unlikely places – on vans and hoardings as well as on bare walls. The fact that it’s ephemeral - likely to be washed off or painted over - is of no consequence for the artists. They’ll be back to do it again there, or somewhere else. Their cartoons and scribblings capture the fluidity of the city, its lawless energy, its tribal boundaries.

 

Where tagging’s concerned it’s the ‘I’ that matters, not the ‘You’. The young men who do it – it’s mostly young men – mark their territory like young tomcats:  ‘I was here. I did this. I changed this space.’

You may think that tagging is another kind of urban blight- to quote from one anti-tagging website: “Street art says, ‘Have you thought about this?’; Tagging says, ‘I tag therefore I exist”. Or you may feel that it’s a relatively harmless form of self-expression for those who have no other way of making their mark on the city. Or some variant of  that. Whatever your opinion, you can’t deny tagging takes nerve and hard work. It must be bad enough crawling about in the half-dark of the metro tunnels with a can of spray paint, but what about the elaborate 3-D designs, the personal logos on the side of buildings, in places that look inaccessible to anything without wings? There’s a trail of giant lettering along the top of a sheer wall fifty feet above the train lines out of the Gare de l’Est. I can’t imagine when or how they were done but whoever it was must have used ropes, maybe a platform too. You take the risk and if you get down safe, think how you feel, seeing your tag up there out of reach, like a defiant shout across the rooftops!