In Paris with Ellie and her friend Seth, and having an awesome time. Speaking snippets of phrase-book French (I got stamps today ... in FRENCH!), eating lots of bread and fruit, seeing beautiful buildings, passing gorgeous women whom I mostly wish were Robin instead of whoever they are because I miss her, drinking exotic coctails, having a great time.

And listen to this:

I am getting to stay at Shakespeare & Company, an English-language bookstore that was started by American expatriots, ALL WEEK ... FOR FREE. Apparently, traveling writers and artists and people can stay there for periods of time at no cost, as long as you do two hours of work for the store during the day. The only other criterion you have to fulfill in order to stay there is that George, the owner, like you. I went upstairs about an hour and a half ago and found George in his study-bedroom. George is fully 90 years old, tall with a withered face and hair in big cottony wisps around the sides of his head, like clouds that hang around mountainsides, and his eyes have that wide wide old-people eyes look that I always find bewildering at first. But he is full of life. As soon as he saw me, he smiled and shook his head and said "Ohhh, we're gonna have trouble with you." I laughed, and then he asked how long I was going to stay for. I told him sunday or monday was what I'm looking at, and he said that that was fine, as long as I would be there for the Pancake breakfast on sunday morning.

I love this. This is adventure.

8:05 PM

Here is my biography and picture:

Josh Bisker
For George

I’m in Paris. I don’t know what this city tastes like yet, I am not used to it. I just got here from London a few days ago; they are very different, it feels like. It’s strange – when I got to London in January, New York was the city in my head, my point of reference for appraising other places’ values and colors. Not that I know New York that well. We moved out of the City when I was only 5 or so, up to a horrible suburb called New Rochelle. It’s the kind of place that I guiltily excuse my connection to – “it’s not my fault,” I’ll say, half jokingly, when someone asks where I live. Obsessively materialistic, subtley anti-intellectual, big cars and middle-school cheerleaders dating high school security guards; an icky place. It’s not too far from the City though; only forty minutes on the train, a half hour or so since I’ve been driving (though yes, parking’s a bitch). So I’m in the City for things, still not often, but enough so I can say I know how its currents of money, traffic and art all flow, and know how to swim in them. But I don’t really. I’ve never really lived there, drank there, been on my own there – it’s all been a kind of limbo between being a local and being a tourist. Then London.

I got to London a week after the New Year began, nervous and excited and young. It was a semester abroad from school back home, the second half of my junior year at Oberlin. Oberlin is a small liberal arts school to the south-west of Cleveland, OH; in ways a fantastic place, but it drives you crazy to be there too long at a stretch (you know, like two, three weeks…). Part of it is the violently counter-culture attitude that pervades the campus; protest has become the new institution, and it can drive a man nuts. I’m studying English there, I think in a much more old-school institutional way than most of the other English Majors – can you believe that someone could matriculate from Oberlin with a degree in English and have never read Shakespeare in a class? Sure, just sticking to the old academic rubric would be both dull and reductive, but there are some strengths in the old way. If you’re going to be a writer – or a reader for that matter – you’ve got to read and try to see the forces at work in our literary tradition; Keats knew his Chaucer, Dylan knew his delta blues, Stan Lee knew his Shakespeare. So I took a break from Oberlin to try to fill in my foundations, hoping to flesh out my sympathy for writing, and that brought me to England. But laced through with that lust for a different readerly mindset was a thirst for London; a City, a new city, a city to be my own; to learn and taste on my own without parents or sister or other models of experience or advice; to see through fresh eyes without already being thickly invested in someone else’s feeling of what the city ‘really’ feels like. New York is a place with such a grim and grinding mythos about it, the City that never sleeps or lets you do so either – but London, London was new, and just for me. I could discover all its history and magic and myth and truth on my own. It was wonderful. It became mine.

I was not there for the longest time ever. Five months, almost six? I left three days ago, but already it feels like ages. It is strange to have left after such a short while; for a bit it felt like home, and homes can be hard to come by. Maybe I’ll end up there again? I don’t know if I’ll call it home again. It has been difficult being away from family; the older generation is getting older and its numbers thin, and that is very hard to be away for. I missed my Great Uncle Herbie’s funeral, and am not sure how to begin mourning for him. It’s also bizarre being Jewish in Europe, confusing on how to keep it as part of my identity (good jokes?). So I’m un-uniquely uncertain about the future. I got one more year left of school, and then I guess I have a lot of doors open. Back to England? NY? I have family and a girlfriend down in DC, but a year is a long time for thinking about either. Japan is another door, to continue and intensify my study of Aikido, a Japanese martial art. My goal is to open a door into the American comic book industry, as an editor and eventually a writer. I care a great deal about comic books; they tell great stories, important stories, and as much as any other literature they help make the world a bit more sane and lively for their influence. I understand them, why they work and why they often don’t, and they excite me – it’s what I want to do. Lots of doors. I feel like I’m in a good place though right now; I’m opening more of them, and when I have to choose one it will almost definitely lead me somewhere great. For now I don’t have to worry about it. I’m at the beginning of six weeks travel, arrived in a new city from a new home, bound for glory. Right now, I’m in Paris.

Holy shit, I'm off.

Okay, so it's 1 in the morning and i just went outside to post the postcards i wrote today, and feeling the calming ease of the cool night air I decided to linger a bit on my stoop, soaking in the sounds of this my fleeting city. Sitting on the ledge of my building's doorway, I see a white, unmarked van making very mysterious movements around the neighborhood. The driver is pulling up at random points along the streets and hopping out to do something, but I can't tell what. It looks like he's making deliveries of some kind, but I can't see what he's dropping off, and he doesn't seem to be going to the doors of buildings; and who ever heard deliveries at 1 AM? So I go to get a closer look when he pulls over to the mailbox on the corner, where i had just dropped my cards off. I see him pull over and jump out, leaving the engine running. He races to the side door, slides it open and comes out with a big brush on a stick, and a sheet of paper. Now I get it, and I watch with some delight as he paints the glue onto the mailbox and sticks the poster on, jumps back in the car, pulls out and cuts a turn to race down the next block. I know that there's not much over where he's headed, so I gamble that he's going to lap around and come out a block south. I start to run down, holding on to my flip-flops with my toes and trying to button my shirt. I know that there's a few circuit boxes that always have posters on them, and if I'm right about his destination, then I can beat him there. He pulls in just like I'd thought, and I'm only a few steps behind - but he jinks back out again and keeps going down the block. Right by the circuit boxes are three orange-vested civil servants! Are they waiting for him? Will they bust him? Oh no!

But he just parks on the corner and goes with his brush and papers to the wall by the phonebooths where the drunk people pee on their way to the tube. I catch up with him just as he gets back to the van.

"Hey, can I gank one of your posters," I ask him.

He answers with a big smile, and says "sure mate, which one do you want?"
He slides back the van door to reveal a whole matrix of cardboard boxes, each with a different kind of poster. I ask if he had put up the Morrissey one I had seen around the corner, and he gave me one of my very own. And here it is!


So awesome, right!? I love this city sometimes.

From the book I'm being more and more wrapped up in, "Invisible Cities" by Italo Calvino:

Marco Polo describes a bridge, stone by stone.
"But which is the stone that supports the bridge?" Kublai Khan asks.
"The bridge is not supported by one stone or another," Marco answers, "but by the line of the arch that they form."
Kublai Khan remains silent, reflecting. Then he adds: "Why do you speak to me of the stones? It is only the arch that matters to me."
Polo answers: "Without the stones there is no arch."

A book? I'm reading a book? YES! That's right - I have time to read now, because I'M DONE!!!!!!!! DONE DONE DONE! No more schoolin' for four months! Holy hell, it feels wonderful. Wrote some good papers, wrote some crap papers, it's all in and I'm all done. Got Calvino's "Invisible Cities" and Kundera's "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" to entertain my brain, and Blur's "Parklife" and a Blondie collection to entertain my ears (I thought it was an album when I bought it). Some anonymous stranger has been telling me to get "Parklife" for weeks, and now I've done my mystery friend honor by following his fairy-godmother advice, and I love the album. Any other suggestions, mystery friend? Also listening to the Smiths and the Cure courtesy of my darling Robin and the fine chaps at the Royal Mail, and Dylan '64 and St. Louis Jimmy Oden from Mom&Dad. I'm planning on enjoying them and freedom and London to the fullest in the next week and a half - because that's all I've got. Hooooooooooly crap. I only realized it on Thursday while I was changing for aikido (and I'm going to aikido again - yay free time!!!!!!!), that I only have two weeks left here. It is exciting to think that I'm going to be traveling and everything, but it's sad also; I've been having a really amazing time here, I have a great best friend who I've bonded with to the degree of being almost symbiotic, I have a dojo that I'm making more friends in and learning a lot, and I have THIS CITY that I'm living in and not a tourist in and love and enjoy, and it's crazy man. That said, I'm still enormously excited. Gotta get off my keister and make some solid travel plans this week though, and that will probably be both terrifying and exciting.

I saw "All's Well That Ends Well" on stage this Thursday with John; it was fan-goddamn-tastic. Dame Judi Dench was the Countess, and she was magnificent - everything was! I forget how watchable Shakespeare is. You know? It's so brilliant and complex and emotional and intellectual and layered, and sometimes I forget how it's also captivating and fun to watch. But it was, and was wonderful. This week will hopefully see me continuing my cultural education at many a museum; the Imperial War museum and Wallace collection are high on my list. And can one ever spend enough time in the British Museum? No. One simply cannot.

So all my coursework is due on Tuesday, and I've been frantically busy and mad stressin. Every day since early april has seen me in a library (except for the two i spent hungover and horrible from a night of accepting too many free drinks at the blues bar ... eeeugh), and I've been pretty consistently productive, if not speedy. But now it's crunch time and i've still got a whole heap of work to pump out - but there's good news!
The good news IS that I just got back two of my papers, with an A and a B++ in red ink on the tops of them! This is not only good news because good grades = good news, but more to the point, BECAUSE since I only have to pass my classes here (the grades don't transfer), having those good grades in the bank takes the pressure off what i'm producing for my current work. I just have to produce, I don't have to burst the seams of academia with my insights. Oh thank God, this may be a less horrible weekend than I'd thought.
The two papers, incidentally, were the Dylan and the Chaucer respectively, which I'd proper slaved over, so I'm happy to have done well.