Highlights!

Jonathan Lethem has a very funny short story in which he personifies a blog, playing on the drama of starting, maintaining, and falling out of blogging. Let me add to the proverbial pile from which he culled: I’ve disappeared for a little bit. Mainly because I’m lazy, but also because I’ve been swamped with work. That said, highlights!

1) Berlin By Myself
I decided to take a little trip on my own. But alas (thankfully?) the world is too small and not only did I run into two girls from my very own NYU program, I also met up with a friend of a friend, ran into friends of other friends, and met a woman who lived, for 11 years, on the same street as my apartment in New York. Whew. Berlin, with its wonderful edgy everything and Christmas charm, brought me back to New York.

2) That Time I Met French Hackers
For a research project in my global media studies class, I chose to look at the e-zines of early French hackers. On the journey towards a very long paper and a very fun presentation, I interviewed some modern-day French hackers! They meet in a squat, an old parking garage covered with rugs and old sofas (not a joke). They were very kind. In their broken English and in my broken French, we talked about…top secret things.

3) Jane Alison at the American Library
I was the only person under 40 there to hear Jane Alison read from her new book, The Sisters Antipodes, but this was some mistake on the part of Paris’s students, not mine. It was a lovely reading and fascinating hearing about Mrs. Alison’s incredible story (and the difference between memoir and fiction writing). It’s always inspiring to hear from professional authors. They make it look (sound) so easy. It’s like see a musical on Broadway. I can totally do that. Except not at all.

4) A Retrospective: The Crush
As I gear up for my last week in Paris (I leave here on the 19th), I think I’m setting myself up to have a pretty rough breakup. I will crush maybe twice as hard once I realize I hadn’t squeezed Paris hard enough, from the normal, familiar place back in New York. I’m excited to get home, but I’m scared it will be no different from how I remembered it. I’ll miss flirting with France. Today I went to a mosque. I had tea at a mosque, with birds eating off my fingertip and outdoor heaters everywhere. I walked around the Jardin des Plantes and had some great conversation. These are the things I’ll miss about crushing on Paris. And so as the end nears, I’m thinking my crush might bubble just underneath the surface until I’m back one day.

Mon Beau Déserteur

J’avais 17 ans et j’habitais la banlieue de Bruxelles. Un soir, tard, j’ai raté le dernier tramway qui devait me ramener chez moi. En face de l’arrêt d’autobus se trouvait un bar de nuit. J’y suis entré pour me réchauffer. L’endroit était sinistre, peu de monde, quelques ivrognes. Je me suis installé au bar, à côté d’un jeune homme aux cheveux blonds coupés à ras, avec les yeux bleus étonnés et étonnants. Un Brad Pitt avant l’heure. Je lui ai proposé une bière. Il était américain et s’appellait Bill. Quelques bières plus tard, il s’est mis à pleurer. Il avait déserté de son camp d’occupation en Allemagne, parce qu’il ne voulait pas partir se battre en Corée. Il allait tenter de passer clandestinement en Espagne. Je ne pouvais rien pour lui, sauf le consoler.
Nous avons loué une chambre minable dans un hôtel près de la gare. Au petit jour, il s’est levé a déchiré son livret militaire, après en avoir décollé la photo qu’il m’a donné, et a quitté la chambre.
Je n’ai jamais eu de ses nouvelles. A-t-il été arrêté? A-t-il pu franchir la frontière?
Bien plus tard, je suis parti vivre en Californie. J’y ai croisé des dizaines de Bill aux cheveux paille, aux yeux bleu azur. Ils ne m’ont pourtant pas fait oublier mon petit déserteur.
D’ailleurs, j’ai toujours la photo!
-Jacques Collard, Paris

I was 17 and living in a suburb of Brussels. One night, late, I missed the last train that was supposed to take me home. Across from the bus stop, there was a bar. I went in to heat up. The place was bleak, few people there, a few drunks. I sat down at the bar next to a young man with trimmed blond hair and astonishing blue eyes. A Brad Pitt before his day. I offered him a beer. He was American and his name was Bill. A few beers later, he was crying. He had deserted his military post in Germany because he didn’t want to leave to fight in Corée. He was going to try to pass secretly into Spain. There was nothing I could do for him, except console him.
We rented a crummy room in a hotel close to the train station. One day, he woke up and ripped up his military papers, after having peeled off a photo that he handed me, and left the room.
I haven’t heard anything of him since. Was he arrested? Did he cross the border?
Much later, I left to live in California. I swore I saw dozens of Bills there, with straw yellow hair and azure eyes. They won’t let me forget my little deserter.
But I will always have the photo.
-Jacques Collard, Paris

This is a story printed in the Parisian gay mag, Têtu. I thought it was particularly touching and sad. Crappy translation thanks to yours truly.

Sometimes It Works

Tonight I started making dinner the same old way: rice in the boiling water, chicken breast in the olive oil (with some ground pepper massaged in). But I got upset because this is what I do every night. So I freaked out a little bit. I grabbed some red wine, a 2005 Bordeaux sitting on my coffee table and I threw some in with the chicken. Then I sliced up an apple and threw that in there too. Some butter later, I had it plated on top of the rice. I had no idea what to expect but in fact, sometimes things work. The chicken is perfectly tender (not the benefit of a good cut of meat, thank you Franprix) and the apples are both savory and sweet at once. I am not a cook, but I’ve always been in awe of the spontaneity of my two brilliant and beautiful New York roommates, Anna & Jess, who have an instinct I usually lack of creating interesting combinations of tastes and flavors. Maybe tonight I channeled them extra-well.

My motto is usually “Nothing works in France.” All the little things (read: efficiency) we take for granted in New York are somehow absent here. The receipt machine at the cashier will be broken, the escalator you desperately need is temporarily out of service, or the WiFi you need to check for that important email just cops out. But tonight, a little something worked in France.

Parisian Stories

There was a rose on my desk when I first arrived in my apartment. As I set my bags down on the floor, I remember thinking that I hoped it was fake so I didn’t have to watch it die. It was real. It sat in a tall, thin vase right next to my computer. Slowly, it did die. I let it stay here for as long as I cold stand it. My sister used to dry flowers when we were younger and so I tried to bring myself to see the beauty in its shrivels and grays. But after 3 weeks, I threw out the flower. I don’t even remember where I put the vase.

During an intimate lunch during my second or third week in Paris, I shared a revelation with a friend, one borne slowly but urgently over gazpacho and café crèmes: the city is devoid of kitsch or camp. Torn jeans here are not trendy, they are damaged. Asymmetry, emotion, pastiche all fail on the street. We exaggerated, of course. But at the same time, we discovered something really important. The tight, tailored jeans leading to pointy loafers or well-fitting pea-coats and a purse strung over the right shoulder are indicative of the Parisian performance. There are no pajamas or athletic shorts thrown on to run to the grocery store. Entering the street is a ceremony in Paris, whereas in New York is might be a rare opportunity to swap insecurities if you’re lucky enough to catch someone’s eye.

Leaving a friend’s apartment from a dinner party a while ago, I looked up to see the Eiffel Tower. it was early enough in the semester and I stared. I never thought it had the orangey-yellow tint that it does at night. I tried to figure out, briefly, if it was the lights that were this color, or the tough metal of the tower itself. Friends up ahead waited for me to catch up. I didn’t know my away around Paris yet, but I didn’t need to look at my map this time. I knew which way to turn, taking my bearings from the glowing tower above. “No, see, the Seine is up there, so the Métro is that way.” A couple giggly cheek-kisses later, I was on the train, in for my 30-ish minute ride home. I had forgotten all about the Eiffel Tower. I was trying then to pick up pieces of other people’s conversations, elated when I could understand even the tiniest bit. I got off the Métro and happily walked the next 15 minutes home. I was digging in my pockets to get my keys out and slowed my pace to look down. I was a block away from my apartment, where L’Hôpital Saint Louis starts on my left and a row of apartments starts on my right. The hospital is uneven in its architecture and when I walk past it from that particular direction, it always gives a great view through to the heart of Paris as the buildings split. When I looked up, I saw a bright light coming from the Eiffel Tower. At night, it has two giant rotating lights, perhaps to alert planes (although I’m sure there are other lights for that, though I haven’t looked for them), or perhaps to help guide the oft-lost city walker like myself. I was struck my the light this time. Even though I couldn’t see the top of the tower, it was still the same one I had just gawked at before hopping on the métro. 45 minutes later, I did not expect to see it again from a completely different part of the city. And there it was nonetheless. It was comforting, but creepy at once. The Tour Eiffel, the big brother always watching over its city dwellers. We trot around in the shadows of its light and even as we lay our heads down on our pillows, we are resting under its skyscraping eye. Built so low to the ground, Paris is maybe a child underneath a weeping willow.

I was standing outside the gates of the Pantheon one afternoon, shivering alongside a couple classmates and our professor while we waited for class to begin. I turned away from the group and saw a man sitting on a curb. I first noticed him because he didn’t seem to be cold at all. Probably on his lunch break, he was wearing a business suit and was holding his tupperware dish in between his legs, elbows on knees. He didn’t seem lonely, either. He began impassively feeding the pigeons with his leftovers. But soon, he was very interested in pigeon equality, nudging the pushier pigeons out of the way and throwing pieces to the feebler ones in the back. He wanted to make sure everyone got a bite. Bread, however, is harmful for pigeons’ digestive tracks and so I thought this was particularly ironic. When there was no more food left, the man turned the plastic container over next to curb, letting a reddish-orange sauce spill out. Win-win. As he stood up to get himself together, he looked down at the pigeons and smiled just a little bit to himself. He looked quite proud of himself. He had done his community service for the day, acting as momma pigeon setting rules and making sure everyone followed them. He slung his bag over his shoulder and walked away completely apathetically.

In the Louvre one Sunday afternoon, a friend and I succumbed to the overwhelming burden of wandering around the lesser-known exhibits. Unlike the other people walking around, smiling, and blinking blankly, we didn’t even pretend to know why each work was of the utmost importance of which the whole museum drips. We sat down, back-to-back on chairs in the middle of a room of Dutch painters from the 18th century, I think. And we decided to write three things in five minutes, then switch sides. It had to be, as I called it, “three poignant observations.” On the first side, mine were: no blood or bodily liquids even though there were some paintings of butcher shops, all the paintings depicted humans interacting with animals and thereby commented on how close we can get to nature (or are we part of it already?), and the smallest canvasses have the most distracting, thick frames. Switch. On the other side: There are no major differences between the fashion of people in the paintings and that of the modern museum-goers today, the brightest colors in the paintings depicted fabric, not skin or setting, and the majority of all the people depicted in the paintings have something covering their heads. I think I’ll remember this room better than any other in the museum now.

The Imagination and Poetry of Speaking French

A couple of weeks ago, I sat in a friend’s apartment reading a writing sample she had submitted for an internship. Katie makes me slap my knee on a daily basis. And her writing sample was funny. But she hit on something particularly sophisticated in the pursuit of a cutesy (yet well-crafted) one-pager. She started with the way French people describe the inside of a chocolate as the coeur, the heart. She ended with the poetry of the French language playing out Greek tragedies in the lives of candy bars.

A professor told me last week that the English language recently reached its millionth word. The French language, she said, has only reached a fraction of those many words. Instead, the beauty of the French language is in the manipulation of sentence structure. Instead of searching (and only sometimes finding) that perfect word, in French we search for that perfect word order. If English is Mouse Trap, French is Scrabble.

Last weekend I visited two French towns, Metz and Nancy (NYU generosity, again). At the end of my trip, I found myself listening to an enthusiastic French tour guide talk about the history of Nancy in French. We ended our walking tour in a brasseries with some much-needed chocolat chauds and some native Nancy desserts. One dessert had a historical relevance and was named after King Stanislas. The guide described the original recipe as very dry and tough to chew. As the king aged, he needed something easier to eat (what with his teeth falling out) and they added rum to the cake, making it melt-in-your-mouth good. But the guide had a little trouble describing the “tough to chew” part of the original dessert. He used only two words, repeatedly. “C’était sec. C’était, c’était…c’était très dur.” Dur is a french word that is very useful. You can use it to talk about hard exams, sturdy walls, and yes, cake, apparently. I only thought of the English translation, “tough to chew,” after I heard the guide struggle with a good French description. But when he used dur I had a great mental image. I saw King Stanislas biting into his favorite dessert and a tooth or two popping out. Some royal chaos, perhaps.

There is something about the minimalism of the French vocabulary. It is nothing short of poetry. And it is nothing but commonplace.

Art Review: La Subversion des Images, Centre Pompidou

Originally published in KiptonArt Magazine.

It was Walter Benjamin, in his 1935 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” who argued that photography shatters the aura of art. It’s funny, then, that the curators of Centre Pompidou’s surrealism exhibition, “La Subversion des Images,” chose to quote him in explaining a collection of images that explores the relationship between photography and Surrealism. It would seem Walter Benjamin might have shaken his finger at the kind of work the exhibit celebrates. But I have to disagree with Mr. Benjamin and use the Parisian exhibit itself as my cardinal case in point. I’m with Dali: “Nothing has done more than photography to prove Surrealism right.”

“La Subversion des Images” compliments itself on bringing together “more than 350 works, some hundred documents and a dozen films,” but it should; the collection is extensive. Curators Quentin Bajac, Clément Chéroux, Guillaume Le Gall, Michel Poivert, and Philippe-Alain Michaud cut a particular cross-section of Surrealist art, but one that nonetheless opens many an exciting new door. Film and photography were not just tools for the Surrealists, as the exhibit discovers. They were essential to sculpting and advancing it. Showcasing examples of Surrealist film and photography rather than particular artists, the exhibit still manages to squeeze in the likes of Man Ray, Hans Bellmer, and Claude Cahun alongside virtually unknown bodies of work.

After ascending the iconic escalators that traverse the façade of the Centre, it is a series of big and unabashed clown mirrors that you see when first entering the exhibit. Some children linger while the adults walk by. At first glance, this is a tragic ploy: letting image-distorting reflective surfaces greet an audience coming to see art that has, the world over, become known for its senselessness. But in fact the gesture makes sense. “La Subversion des Images” shows us a new way of seeing ourselves.

The exhibit has 9 rooms, each devoted to tackling a different facet of Surrealist art. The concepts are not wholly about Surrealism nor wholly about the role of photography, illustrating an elegant interdependence between the two. In the first room, we’re taught the importance of “collective action,” the strong preference to create in groups. Room 4 sensitively introduces the “art of juxtaposition,” that very devil that has given Surrealism its absurdist stereotype. The seventh room takes on “automatism,” the question of spontaneity in the images that appear through the lens. But the take-away here is not in the point of view that Surrealism takes on each question raised. Even before seeing any of the works we are reminded by the exhibition’s brochure that the Surrealists sought to redefine our ways of seeing rather than align themselves with any particular body of thought. It was revolution they were after.

Take the photograph by Brassaï, “La Tour Saint-Jacques.” It is in the room titled, “Le Réel, le Fortuit, le Merveilleux” demonstrating the Surrealist fascination with the city as their primary text. It is a picture of the tower at night with scaffolding surrounding it, as seen from the street level. Of course, this was not the first time in the history of art that someone has turned to the everyday images to explore a deeper idea. But the photograph does much more: it searches for the modern sublime of the city at night, devoid of human presence and almost devoid of adequate lighting. A room over, there are scrapbooks full of rags, streets, slums, and window-displays. The Surrealists found a new urban life all around them, aided in no small part to the camera that, yes, as Benjamin would say, strips what is being photographed of its authentic place in time and space. And this is the point.

“La Subversion des Images” shows Depression art at its best. Almost all of the works come from the late 1920s and all through the ’30s, when the world felt economic panic. It is no wonder, then, that modern audiences like this exhibit so much. The act of seeing these images is intriguing. Unlike what is to be found in the hall of sculptures in the Louvre, people are not feverishly trying to learn the artist’s history, his inspirations, or even his influences. There is raw humanity abound. Even I was transported out of France, not knowing which language to speak when I accidentally bumped into someone on my way out.

In the midst of another global financial crisis that coincidentally mirrors the one that affected the Surrealists, I find the exhibit to be both well-curated and timely. There is solace is trying to understand the revolution in values the Surrealists were after as we go through our own kind of search for the same. The title is dead-on: the exhibit shows us subversion, but a comfortable one that might even help us in redefining our own images.

The exhibit does well in taking a particular flavor of art and unpacking its meaning and significance. While an exploration into the role of film in Surrealist art at first seems narrow, it actually digs into questions of inherent meaning, incongruity in urban images, collective artistic movement, and on. If its goal is to help us break out, it succeeds. Even as I casually glanced at a museum sign posted on the wall mid-way through the exhibit I saw new ideas. It had a drawing of a camera with a red line through it, a proclamation from the Centre Pompidou that in this exhibit “Photography is Strictly Prohibited.” It was funny and surreal.

Images (from top, left to right): Man Ray, “Lee Miller,” 1929; Maurice Tabard, “Essai pour un film Culte Vaudou, 1937; Brassaï, “La Tour Saint-Jacques,” 1933.
Images courtesy of le Centre Pompidou.

A Word or Two About Amazing Professors

They make all the difference.

After my Paris Monuments class on Tuesday, a couple other students and I hung around to talk with our professor, Christina von Koehler. We talked about nothing in particular, but it was riveting all the same – we were lost in ideas. Somewhere along the line, we wandered into the street and into Café Favorite (quite the apt name). Over a couple café crèmes and chocolat chauds, we talked about favorite essays, learning to write, intellectual property, the impermanence of memory. It was the kind of rendez-vous that leaves you feeling so happy about everything. We parted with Christina on the métro and sighed. How perfect.

Today after class today she invited a few of us over to watch a movie she had mentioned the other day: How to Steal a Million, a mid-sixties Katherine Hepburn film. She had to shoo us away from all the little gems she harbors in her lovely apartment (hats from the last decade of the 19th century, jackets found at opéra costume sales, and tons of books). It was a great movie, enjoyed petting her cat, Plump, and over a glass of wine.

I’m sure there are many professors who heave this kind of “back in the good old age” talk onto the huge proverbial pile, but let me add a little but of my own, this time about professors rather than about students. It is so rare to have this kind of sweet and exciting relationship with a professor. So many are cut-off, scared to show any kind of affection for fear of stepping out of this strict authority figure we have dreamed up of a professor. I am not spoiled, either. Professor von Koehler has not given me straight As and I hope she doesn’t. She’s an excellent professor who has already had an impact on my thinking and it has nothing to do with this anxiety-ridden idea about professors and grades and power. She’s an excellent professor because she is a caring, enthusiastic person (she brought out chips at one point during the movie and warned me that they might contain traces of gluten when some of family members can’t remember I have an allergy!). She’s the kind of woman who can shout out the name of a book during her lecture that a certain student might find interesting because she remembers (read: she cares enough to remember) the flavor of his/her studies.

Here’s to all the wonderful professors.

L’Arc de Triomphe as the Anti-Glacier Memorial

Taken from a paper for Paris Monuments and Political Power in the 19th and 20th Centuries with Prof. Christina von Koehler.

Although L’Arc de Triomphe is ostensibly dedicated to the great French armies and victories under Napoleon, it is more a memorial about war and sacrifice. There is no denying that visiting the Arc is a sad experience. It’s not like strolling through the Tuileries or the halls of the Louvre while being captivated by the grand history of the place. L’Arc de Triomphe is marked by death all around: names of battles, names of fallen soldiers, and depictions of great sacrifice. It’s touching and heart breaking, but I wonder if it’s effective. How do we memorialize something as terrible as war? If we look to L’Arc de Triomphe, I’m afraid that we might only find the wrong answers.

The reasons to feel sad at the Arc go on and on. Even a gay young American as myself (someone who would never see the inside of the American army) can understand the importance of the war memorial. War has its etiquette: atop one façade is the funeral of General Morceau where even the Austrians, the enemy, have come to pay their respects. The eternal flame of the Unknown Soldier implicates all unknown soldiers across the world. The engraved names underneath the Arc make real the ultimate sacrifice. It’s all incredibly touching.

L’Arc de Triomphe also uses circles to symbolize endless cycles. Not only is it sad, it never ends. There is a story being told as you walk around the monument: soldiers leaving for war, soldiers returning home, soldiers leaving for war, and on. It’s meant to illustrate that not only does war continue on forever, but so does the sorrow. As spectators, we’re supposed to be utmost respectful. We shouldn’t laugh, talk too loudly, or smoke. But is this the best way to memorialize war?

When I visited the Arc, I saw many people just like me, solemn and quiet. But I also saw teenage girls dancing, laughing, and taking pictures of themselves at the base of the monument. I saw a mother and son taking off their shoes to massage their feet, indulging in humanly pleasures underneath the stone depiction of the greatest sacrifice. It makes me wonder if the memorial achieves the effect it should.

In some ways, it’s not the fault of the teenage girls or the mother/son duo. They were destined to forget what was happening above their heads. After being constantly reminded of the endless cycle of war, we have nothing to do but carry on. The Arc sits on an island itself, but one surrounded by the infamous example of chaos: the roundabout. Even though the rest of the city extends in all directions away from the Arc, we can only forget what we saw there because there’s nothing we can do to change the cycle anyway.

But it’s also something about the sorrow. Tim O’Brien, author of the essay “How to Tell a True War Story,” whispers in my ear now. He argues that any semblance of sappiness renders the memorial useless. To him, a true war story “does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things they have always done.” The more emotional the memorial is, the easier it is to simplify it and forget it. And if we forget it, the memorial is useless. A good memorial, according to O’Brien, should have an “absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.” It is only in depicting the senseless chaos of war that we can actually remember it.

By these standards, L’Arc de Triomphe is not successful. It was imagined to be the greatest tribute to the soldier and yet the modern visitor is distracted and half-hearted. Kurt Vonnegut explains in the introduction to Slaughterhouse Five that writing an anti-war novel is like writing an anti-glacier novel because both will always exist. But perhaps L’Arc de Triomphe is just fine with being a memorial to something that will always exist. Its sad message is evident, but perhaps it doesn’t beg us to change our ways so much as it begs us to just remember, no matter how quickly that may happen for us.

The Best Day in Paris

There’s a little quote we like to use a lot in my media studies program. We try to “make the familiar strange and the strange familiar.” Long story short: Paris has become too familiar for me. This morning, I set out to make it strange again, to be fascinated by the people and the language and the culture. It worked!

I got up super early, did a bunch of chores (always feels good) and headed off to Centre Pompidou in search of art to review (for my dear friend Aaron Gelbman, to be published in Kipton Art Magazine!). I love using my University of Paris ID card. It gets me in to every museum for free! I headed to the top floor. If you’ve ever been or seen the Centre Pompidou, there is this very modern glass tube that zig-zags up the side of the center, in which the escalators are to take visitors up. So already, I had the feeling that I was slowly reaching the heavens to get to this art. The exhibit I spent most time with was “Subversion des Images,” an exploration into the use of film and photography by the Surrealists. Aside from the fact that I am secretly a surrealist myself, the exhibit was brilliantly curated and planned. The exhibit next door, a tribute to Pierre Soulanges, a very famous contemporary French painter who only paints in black and white. I will certainly be back to Pompidou – every week if I have the time.

Then I was off for another visit to the Red Wheelbarrow bookstore, a lovely English language bookstore near Charles V where I have my UP class. Then I sat in a café on Rue de Rivoli for about an hour and a half, sipped a café crème, did some free-writing, and read. I read Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style, a book I’m now kicking myself for not having read sooner. It’s genius and it makes me want to write everywhere and all the time (notice the 2 blog posts tonight). I’ve been reading a lot about the art of writing itself lately and it makes me see poetry in everything around me. It’s almost like StumbleUpon but for real-life Paris. I see a tile with graffiti on it and it reminds me of authenticity and YouTube and Kurt Vonnegut and on.

Then I was off to the Musée des Arts Décoratifs. I spent much too much time in the rooms filled with historical jewelry. I also had to pry myself away from the fashion and textile collections. I was there mainly to see the advertising exhibition, a tribute to Toulouse-Lautrec, the man who created the famous Moulin Rouge ad. All amazing stuff.

And to finish it all off, I went to the American Library for a panel discussion by three very famous Parisian food writer expats about pastries. I can’t eat the majority of pastries here in France (I can hear your gasp) because of my gluten allergy, but it was a fantastic talk nonetheless. David Lebovitz, the hilarious food blogger, stole the show for me.

After a nice little walk home by la Tour Eiffel, I’m home and I’m happy. A perfect day in Paris.

At the Gates of Versailles

Right before heading to Versailles with my Paris Monuments and Political Power class, I came upon this reference to the place: “The homosexual has marshaled the architecture of the straight world to the very gates of Versailles – that great Vatican of fairyland – beyond which power is converted to leisure.” It comes from my favorite essay of all time, “Late Victorians.” In that part of the essay, Richard Rodriguez uses a “genius” for interior design to try to understand the homosexual stereotype, one of rebellion against the nature that supposedly tells homosexuals they have no proper place. The idea of Versailles as a queer playground was obviously what followed me around during my visit (and it was what I ended up writing a paper about).

I think it’s an apt description. Homosexuality was tolerated within the walls of the palace more than in many other French royal residences, but the architecture also takes something from the queer analogy. Louis XIV created the gardens as a performance in political persuasion. Walking through is a game and a lecture. He went wild exerting control over a place after he had endured panicky Parisian crowds for all his life.

He also attempts to create something natural, just as, Rodriguez would say, the gay man from San Francisco attempted to claim for himself the nature of taste when he was rejected from everything else organic. Louis drew from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, he played games with commissioning statues for the seasons, times of day, and continents (you have to guess which one is which). He and Marie Antoinette have exotic plants, things so natural in their blossom but are not actually native to France.

The idea I have about Versailles as the “Vatican of fairyland” is complicated and perhaps not fully flushed out. But maybe necessarily so. Rodriguez was not the first and not the last to use Versailles as and example of flamboyancy. We might not have it figured out, but it’s just totally gay.