French films

I love my job this semester. That’s usually true. Teaching for a living brings a lot of rewards. It doesn’t pay brilliantly, but you get the room to think and share your thoughts to your students and colleagues. That adds up to a lot. Call it “pay,” compensation, whatever you want. I dislike “reward,” because that takes the work out of the equation, and as much as I love my students, this isn’t a primarily emotional relationship. I work at my job.

Every spring I teach a class miles, and fields, and territories away from my main area: French cinema. Cinéma, more particularly. I try to pronounce it right. I fail, but that’s another blog post.

I always love teaching Wordsworth, Wollstonecraft, Keats, Radcliffe, and the other Romantics. I have a great time with the 18th-century novelists. Right now we’re spending good time with Defoe, Fielding, and are about to get to Frances Burney.

But they’re nothing compared to Jean Renoir (who you see to the right), Jean Gabin, Jean-Luc Godard, Louis Malle, Jean Vigo, et &c. Comme j’adore les films français. I might love them best because I get to teach them least, but whatever, it isn’t important. I love this class.

Novel breakthrough

I’ve been stuck, but now found a way through. The novel got to 60,000 words with lots of complications since it’s a thriller, after all. But a few issues were getting in the way.

First of all, it was hard to see why the protagonist was chasing the leads he was chasing. He didn’t seem to care enough.

Second, there was mystification where there could have just been plain lying. It’s nice to give your characters permission to lie.

Third and finally, too many people were randomly connected. They’d just bumped into each other in Paris. Having spent more than a year in Paris, I know that can happen in real life. I enjoyed that random bumping into people a lot. But in a book, you get plot holes when you do that. Especially when you’re trying to tie Paris, New York, Libya, and Rome together. So I simplified. It’s fine if some people went to high school or university together.

All of which is to say that the book was stuck, and now it’s unstuck. I owe it all to Dostoevsky. I’m teaching Crime and Punishment to a class of non-literature majors, and we’re having a lot of fun with it. Characters get emotional. Irrational things happen. My book’s very plot-driven, but now I see ways in which my plot-serving characters need to be people, or at least characters, rather than devices. I didn’t turn my thriller hero into Raskolnikov. But I made him get pissed off and drunk, for very good reasons.

Inspiration takes a hand

Today was an inspiration day, or rather tonight, this morning, I woke up with an idea I’ve been needing. I firmly believe that the ratio of inspiration to perspiration in creative work is small, very small. But little moments come when problems we’ve been wrestling with become clear, and ideas start to flow. And now and then inspiration, like destiny in the film Casablanca, takes a hand.

With me, it all starts with the Paris Métro between Porte de Bagnolet and Gambetta. Line No. 3.

It’s a five-, maybe five and a half-block ride. No one would take it. You get on at Porte de Bagnolet and go at least to Père Lachaise, down the hill of Menilmontant, if not further. You get on at Gambetta and go to the end of the line, Gallieni, or you just walk.

But in my book I had a guy going that one stop and couldn’t quite explain it to myself. Tonight, I figured it out, while sleeping, so I’m up writing it down and writing this post. I’m not going to explain it here, for obvious reasons, but I know.

The breakthrough might have come because I started pinning things to the wall. Pictures, maps, cards with plans, more cards with questions. I pinned these two guys up there. They’re both real people. The one to the right is someone on Twitter, Farid ARAB, a Parisian with Algerian roots, maybe Algerian born, mostly into tech things, as far as I can tell from his feed. The one below is an Egyptian film director, Ibrahim El Batout. I chose them for their faces. I need to visualize what one of my characters might look like, and one is pretty similar to one of these guys, or an amalgam of both. He’s involved in the Métros and the one-stop ride. There’s some running in the streets. These two actual people have nothing to do with the book. They’re just visual inspiration. I’m trying to imagine a character, the one who runs the several blocks because of something to do with his best friend, and get to how he thinks and feels by looking into his face, that’s all. But it’s a lot. And these guys have pretty interesting faces, you have to give them that.

This is all stuff that has to be worked out. It’s just nice to have it come alive in my head so now I can work it into the pages. It’ll come into the book in several places, and only become clear near the end.

And now the morning doves are cooing, so I have to get back to sleep. Paris was a few weeks ago. It’s good to remember the Gambetta Métro station has at least five entrances/exits, and that the Porte de Bagnolet one has only three. And that CCTV didn’t exist in the Paris Métro in 2011.

I’ll write this out in the morning. I’ve got a page full of notes written in purple marker (the only thing at hand), and a subway map. I’m looking forward to tomorrow’s writing.

Bonne fête nationale à tous/Happy Bastille Day

A younger Siobhán shows the way to Le Place de la Concorde

I took a walking tour of Paris a couple of years ago, and when we got to the Place de la Concorde the guide made a big point of telling us we shouldn’t call July 14 “Bastille Day.” He said the holiday came about on July 14, 1790, was originally called the Fête de la Fédération, and focused on the new nation and reconciliation, not the storming of the Bastille on the same date in 1789.

From that, we get Le Place de la Concorde. The picture at the right with a little Siobhán will show you the way there.

I was there this past week but I didn’t take any photos. I was scoping out the U.S. Embassy, Thomas Jefferson’s former house, for some scenes in my novel in progress, and didn’t think I should take pictures while looking suspiciously at the place. The gendarmes were everywhere, as were cameras. I noticed that you can’t walk by the embassy because of security, but you can drive past it. Interesting.

But back to France and “Bastille Day.”

I was in France for American Independence Day, and now I’m in the U.S. for Bastille Day. Don’t know what to make of that, but it’s made me think of my relationship to two of the three countries I visit most: France and England (the third is Ireland, my own true love). I teach British literature, but I’m no Anglophile. I like and dislike British things just about as rationally as I like and dislike American things. I’m the same way with France. I love speaking French. I love walking around Paris. But I can’t go crazy over French food, which I find bland, and have just as complex a set of relationships with French people as I do with Americans. I like some, dislike some, and don’t find generalizations easy.

The Flynn Connection to The French Connection

One of Hemingway’s six-toed cats, daring you to type.

I’m well into the first draft of a book that’s going to kill me, unless I kill it first. Masculine approach to writing, I know. I don’t go at it like that every day. Yesterday evening I worked on putting up corkboard for index cards, arranging colored markers, printing out pictures of places … Very analog, let’s get along, playful, not the angry Hemingway pounding the typewriter approach to writing.

Although – to be briefly tangential – I have a typewriter in my analog section of the writing room. But that’s another post. Back to the topic.

Quimper to Paris

I left Brittany much the way I got there. Lugging, schlepping, cars and trains and steps, a taxi, the Métro …  It was a trip full of connections and changes.

I left Penmarc’h, and all the beautiful lighthouses, rocky beaches and ardoise-roofed stone houses behind, and drove my Europcar rental to the Quimper train station, or “gare.” I like the car. I purposely got a Fiat 500, just like I drive at home, to make it less disorienting. The sunroof didn’t open, but never mind that. It handled the Brittany roads with their narrow lanes and ubiquitous rond points (roundabouts) very easily.

Two good days in Brittany

I had two excellent days in Brittany, checking out the lighthouses and the coast. I watched fishing boats crawl into port after a day of work, and had an excellent dinner at a “gite,” or B&B, where our hosts, Hélène and Daniel, along with a bunch of Italians, sat down to eat with us for hours. Langostinas, which are like little crawfish, white wine, red wine, cheese, crêpes, Scotch. My room was very close to where we ate, fortunately. 

Back to the mother country in a few weeks

I’ve been trying to pivot from family matters to preparation for my upcoming trip to London and France. I’m finally starting to focus a little better on what’s coming up.

First, a few days in Stoke Newington, where I’ll be filming sites that were important in Daniel Defoe’s life for a documentary film I’m working on. I’ll also do some filming at places where he stood in the pillory, and at the Museum of London (where Newgate Prison is somewhat represented).

New essay – “Super Bowl Sunday on the Seine”

I went to Paris, ate a few falafels, and decided to write about it. The essay showed up in The Montréal Review today. For a look, click here.