Snow Falling on Pain au Chocolat

After almost two weeks of silence, the blog surfaces again. I had to pour my writing energies into a review essay, and was working on some poems - c'est la vie, as very few people here in Paris actually say. The best thing I've recently eaten was a pain au chocolat under very specific meteorological conditions: a suddent snowfall during my commute to the bibliotheque nationale. frankly, croissants are a bit of a crap shoot even in Paris: you have to know a good patisserie, first of all, and second of all you have to get them right after the croissants have come out of the oven - a few hours later, and the peak experience that makes pastry here subtly but completely different from pastry in America, is lost. I got lucky last monday and bought my pain au chocolat from my usual bakery, and bit into it as I walked out towards the underpass and through the snow, feeling little bits of it (the snow, not the pastry) on my face and neck and hands, vision slightly obscured by snowfall, and _felt_ the counterpoint between the cold weather and the hot, buttery pastry and the melted chocolate inside it. It was like being reminded, in an age in which "beautiful" images are on billboards all around us, that beautiful things are from an entirely different order of being. It rocked my world. I worked for six hours straight and then came home and collapsed. It was a good day.

Ben

it's the simplest things

That make life here OK. I treated myself to a omelette jambon sandwich - yup, a ham omlette stuffed in a baguette, sort of like a better version of an egg mcmuffin, something I've only eaten once, in midwinter when I was desperate for something warm. Eggs have the magic power of making grease OK. The secret is to put mustard on the baguette first.

cafe theory

I am sick and tired of cafe theory. How about that for an assertive start? In fact what I get tired of, are the attempts to view the cafe, or usually the coffee-house, as a pivotal social institution in the development of modernity in Europe. I don't mean that it wasn't important - those who read Jurgen Habermas on the cafe, or who read Carl Schorske's work on Viennese coffee-houses, certainly are right that they played a role in creating political and aesthetic meeting-points. I just mean that the cafe risks being turned into an abstraction, in that nice cloud of verbiage. What strikes me about Parisian cafes, is just how diverse they are, and how the behavior people display in them runs over the limits of community center, political center, and so on... they remind me of just how fragile and limited our academic "maps" of these social spaces can be. So far, I've watched people complete Sudoku puzzles, make out, read books, type on laptops, greet friends, give tourists directions, get drunk, get high on caffeine - perhaps the only generalizations possible, is that people tend to know each other in the smaller cafes, not to know each other in the larger ones, and that they tend to use them like living rooms, for everything they don't have the space or inclination to do at home.

Just speculating for a moment: might one of the differences between the American and the French cafe, be that the French version has a more established place in the local culture, and is thus a less anxiety-provoking topic for the French than for the Americans, who worry when Starbucks encroaches on their territory?