Note: We don’t know how when George Fasel began writing. He always said that he was aware of things around him, in an objective sense, from an early age. As a young teen, he covered LA baseball and wrote freelance for whoever would publish. By age 16 he won a journalism contest in competition with students from 30 high schools in southern California. College and a double PhD (humanities and history, Stanford) trained him to think and write in the pure academic way. Later, he would bring his own style and flair to marketing and financial PR, speech writing for Fortune 500 CEO’s, annual reports and the like. As he eased out of the corporate life, he began to read and study what writers themselves wrote about writing. He added memoirs to his reading lists. One of his goals in writing this blog was to express a thoroughly rigorous analysis of film in a style freed of the academic.

In the fall of 2004, just one year ago, George returned to his beloved Paris for several months and began to consider the city as a focus for his own memoir. His notes, below, are themselves a contribution - a writer writing about writing. Like all his essays for this blog, they reveal his considerable breadth of intellect and, mais oui, his view of (French) cinema as a window on a larger world. Ruth

PARIS

Definitions & Goals

Sept. 15, 2004

It seems important to get this project much more strictly defined, while leaving room for development as I go along. I don’t think the notes on the first trip are anything like the way I want the finished piece to read, and that’s because I just relied on memory, and not imaginative connections, frameworks, and so forth.

There are two subjects, Paris and me. Paris is going to be the more interesting to most readers, although it’s equally true that my role in it—the personality I build, my relationship to Paris, my definitions of Paris, how it looks through my eyes—is the only thing that’s going to keep readers from saying, “Oh, it’s another Paris memoir,” and let it go at that. So I need to work out questions such as:

· Who am I that I should see Paris in this way?

· What did I bring to Paris that made it what it was for me?

· The other way round: what was there about Paris that shaped me, changed me, that might not or probably would not have happened without Paris?

· As I sort through these questions,what sorts of answers are so commonly given that I need to avoid them or soft-pedal them?

· How did the answers to these questions change over time? In other words, how do I see Paris now that I did not in the ‘60s? How different am I now than in the ‘60s and what, of that, has to do with Paris?

· Where do I find the line between a special personal point of view and something that’s too personal, because surely the line is there.

· Is Paris simply a place to which I come from time to time and stay for varying stretches, or is it something I take with me wherever I go? Has it really changed me to that degree?

Here’s a place to start that bears some reflection. Certainly, Paris did not “make” me; Richard Cobb insists it didn’t make him, and if it’s not true for him, of all foreigners, it’s not true for me. I was made in Illinois, and by the time my family moved to California when I was six, during the war, I was pretty much what I am with respect to all the fundamentals. There have been changes, of course, some of them extremely important, but they are rearrangements of those basic patterns. The slate has not been and cannot be wiped clean, something entirely different written upon it.

My hunch is that Paris was, at the beginning, one of those rearrangements. It provided an alternate vision of how life may be lived, alternate priorities and possibilities. I began tinkering, adjusting, going forward and back (or sideways). Part of it was a response to fashion, part of it was sixties’ rejection of stodgy fifties’ ways. Part of it was to give myself a more interesting identity, even if to some degree it was fictitious. Part of it was to make me feel better, to help me forget who I was while I took refuge in that new identity, or partial identity. And that identity which I began to adopt in 1962—slowly, experimentally, piece by piece—certainly underwent evolution in more than one direction over the next ten years or so. I think I was always tinkering during that time, trying to get something that fit and also made sense—I wasn’t going to be in Paris, so how could I make use of Paris profitably where I was?

Because I was away for so long, from 1969 to 1985, the old Parisian identity would need some readjustment. The city Americanized, and while there were always pockets of resistance, those changes went forward all the same. I found a far more modern, high-tech, English-speaking, prosperous, confident society in Paris than I had known. In many respects, it was not so very different from where I had lived for the last six years (even though the differences could not be ignored). So all this must be figured in and studied closely, even if all the close study—beyond its results—doesn’t make it to the page.

How do I tell the story? There’s something to be said for the chronological: I came, I felt this and that, I learned this and that, my vision changed from A to B to G and H, etc. There’s something to be said for the topical: there are these dimensions of Paris to be considered—language, how life is lived, food, culture, habits and customs, politics, preferences, films, etc. I think chronological cannot be avoided, but perhaps I can emphasize topics as I go along—especially language, food, culture, film, politics, history, Americans.

I don’t want to dismiss this issue, because it’s going to determine how I start to organize the actual writing, how I think about putting this thing together in a very practical way. Perhaps the introduction needs to give a bird’s eye view of the total experience, saying something like:

I have been coming to Paris for more than forty years now, staying on my shortest visit barely twenty-four hours, and my longest a year (with other long stays of nine months, three months, and two months). I have come as a graduate student, a college professor on a research project (twice), a vacationing tourist, and a businessman. I have stayed in apartments, and in hotels from rather toney to exceedingly modest. I have travelled elsewhere in France, if not comprehensively, at least frequently and have some basis for seeing the degree to which Paris is merely French and to what degree it is France. Over that time, France, and especially Paris, which is my real focus, have changed dramatically while, of course, also staying the same. I believe I have done the same. In this memoir, which is also an essay in observation, the subject is both the changes and the continuity, how a city (in particular) may go through sweeping evolution without changing, but in some cases in fact changing, its basic personality, and how the same is true of a man. I’m also interested in how the two experiences interacted: while I certainly in no way changed Paris, I believe I was changed by it within the basic framework established for me many years ago. Writing this book is my way of trying to find out.

Another important dimension: in addition to the elements of memoir, I want to bring in books, films, and other cultural artifacts which show, comment upon, give telling examples of what Paris is like. I want to bring in French films, American films about France, books of all sorts (history, memoir, fiction), to interest people in art, and music, and architecture, to bring in important historical individuals, to illustrate how Paris is seen by others compared to my own vision, or to demonstrate how these visions have influenced me, and probably others as well. I want to talk about actors and writers and characters and historical persons that have moved me, and helped me see and understand Paris differently from I would have without them, helped me imagine a Paris I had never actually seen but which I saw, from these people and characters and visions, was real and essential. I want to do this from very early on and make it an integral part of the story. Beginning—first sentence—with some example of this is something to consider. I want to draw on my full historical and cultural knowledge of France to write this story of Paris, and myself, because that knowledge may be as much as anything the basis of my love of this place.

One of the great advantages of this approach is that I could give visions of Paris that are different from and larger than my own, get much more of the city into the book than I could do from my personal experience. Example: I could give the Paris of Richard Cobb, using his books, Barnes’s essay, my own sense of those neighborhoods and how they have changed, and of course my own brief brush with (or near) Cobb in 1969. Example: I could give some of the Paris of Balzac, and show how much has remained the same, walk some of the same areas, etc. Example: I could talk about Paris films (Renoir, Carné, Duvivier, Godard). Example: I could talk about les deux Bibliothèques nationales. Example: I could talk about the Occupation, bring in films during the period, about the period, Paxton and revisionism, the Barbie and Papon trials—lots and lots of material. Example: I could talk about Gabin, the proletarian ideal of the thirties, the Popular Front, the radical right, etc. Example: I could talk about the Algerian War, the OAS, my time here, films, books, etc. Example: DeGaulle. I think I get the idea.

All this possibility and potential takes me right back to the question of organization. Now, it seems to me, I can lean much closer to the topical, although at some point rather early on I have to give a capsule glimpse of my history here so that I can refer to it in the topical treatments in a way I can understand.

September 24, 2004

One way of trying to make this interesting and different is to keep each essay, or story, or chapter/topic, from being predictable. Each should take unexpected flights, make connections that would not immediately occur but make perfectly good sense, show how Paris leaps across time and place, from history to literature to film, if only you use your imagination.

Take my 9/15/2004 sketch on Cobb. It’s OK for a while, introducing the organizing character and a place, but a good place to take a departure is where I turn to how the neighborhood had changed from the 1930s to 1962. It might be a good place to take off on Haussmann’s overhaul of central Paris and the creation of the grand boulevards, how that development had changed the area from the time of the armées révolutionnaires.

Also, I think introducing Hôtel du Nord here is a mistake; probably better to save it for its own essay. What might that include?

· Canal—history, operation

· Movie

· From Arletty’s role to prostitution in Paris, pre- and post-war, and changes in street trade from 1962 to 2004

· The current Hôtel du Nord

There needs to be something more: anything of historical significance that happened here, some interesting period in its development. Perhaps some reading, perhaps something that could emerge from a visit.

The two Bibliothèques:

· The Mazarin palace: history, 17^th century cardinals

· Transformation into library; working there in 1960s

· Neighborhood: the Restaurant Druot; the café; the Palais Royale, its history, and some of its famous residents (Colette; Cocteau?)

· Mitterand: his presidency (and his past), Bastille, new bibliothèque, “modernization” of outer edges of Paris (la Défense, the northern science and industry museum—visit)

The occupation:

· Perhaps begin with the house on rue Lauriston

· History of occupation (include plaques of resistance and liberation); hotels and other buildings, like Opéra Garnier, which were important sites; Pont des Arts

· Paxton and Vichy revisionism

· Drancy, Vél d’Hiv; Chirac’s apology—all of which brings up history of anti-Semitism in France, and French cultural nationalism

· Barbie, Poupon, Bousquet and the others

· Occupation in movies—Le Chagrin et la pitié, Laisser passer, Huppert abortionist, Au revoir les enfants, Le Corbeau, etc.

Food in Paris:

· French attitudes toward food

· Contradictions: persistence of Parisian attitudes with intrusion of supermarchés, fast food, etc.

· Les Halles: a brief history

· A trip to Parisian market streets—rue de Buci, rue Mouffetard (visit marché de Montparnasse)

· Historical attitudes: Brillat-Savarin, Escoffier, nouvelle cuisine

· Bistros in Paris

To the barricades:

· Food riots; the storming of the Bastille and subsequenct Parisian uprisings of the revolutionary years

· 1830, 1848, 1870-71

· Changes between 1870 and 1934: working class migrating to suburbs, change in working class politics to reformist/electoral politics among socialists, decidedly non-revolutionary and non-autonomous PCF.

· 1934, 1936, Algerian war, 1968 (connect to Zéro de conduite, cinemaphilia)

The cult of movies:

· Invention of movies; popularity, now and then; the experience of going to movies in Pais

· American movies in Paris: 1930s, Eddie Constantine, film noir, musicals, westerns, Jerry Lewis, today

· Cinemaphilia: André Bazin and Cahiers du cinéma, Henri Langlois and the Cinémathèque; The Dreamers,

· The city in films: 1930s, 1950s, 1960s

· Jean Renoir, Marcel Carné, Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais

· Jean Gabin, Yves Montand, Jeanne Moreau, Catherine Deneuve

De Gaulle:

· In the land of democracy and equality, a hunger for heroes: Napoleon (and heroic royal figures—Saint-Louis, Henri IV), Napoleon III, General Boulanger, Marshal Pétain

· De Gaulle always surrounded by that dichotomy: needed and distrusted, turned to for leadership and rejected for imperious style

· De Gaulle biography

End Note: George drafted the essay on Cobb, wrote notes for other essays, and began to explore others.

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A Girl and a Gun

September 22, 2005

Definitions & Goals

Sept. 15, 2004

September 24, 2004

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