I'm back.
In two senses of the phrase. First, after a fortnight's absence, Ink Quest is back online. My wounded iMac is still in intensive care, and I dread the arrival of the bill, but I have managed to borrow a laptop from work so that I can access the internet at home while the surgeons are at work. Second, the Penquod arrived back at Ink Towers last night following a short work-related trip to Paris. I hereby present you with my inky Parisian diary.
Sunday 17 February
Walking across the tarmac from the plane, I look up and find myself confronted by the brutal, beautiful concrete beast that is Terminal 1 of Charles de Gaulle airport. I have always suspected that J.G. Ballard had a hand in the design of this unsettling building. As usual, I get lost trying to make my way from Terminal 1 to the RER station. It's no accident that Marc Augé began his book on 'non-places' with a reference to Roissy's spatial and social laboratory. Don't misunderstand me: I'm fully in favour of dehumanized and deracinated environments, but the pleasures of misanthropic isolation are ruined if you then have to make contact with another human being to ask for directions, aren't they?
I eventually find the RER station and make the journey into the centre of Paris. At my hotel on the Boulevard Saint-Michel, I perform the customary ritual that transforms the 'non-place' of my room into my temporary royaume of ink (a 'kinkdom', if you will; echoes of the Marquis de Sade are entirely coinkidental). As usual, I have separated ink from pen for the flight: my trusty travelling pen, a Visconti Van Gogh, has been carried in the comfort of my hand luggage, while a small and chic tin of Herbin Lie de Thé cartridges -- parfait for Paris -- has been secreted in the hold. As I have noted on previous occasions, I hate the travelling that unfortunately comes with my job, so I attempt to make trips bearable by structuring everything around ink and pens. Before I unpack a single item of clothing, then, and before I go exploring the city, I slide a cartridge of Lie de Thé into the Visconti and scribble a few sample lines in my notepad. At last: tout va bien.
At around 8pm I decide to wander the streets of Paris. To be more precise, I have just one destination in mind: Mora Stylos on Rue de Tournon. Longtime readers of Ink Quest may remember the entries from January 2007 in which I reported on the voyage of the Penquod to several Parisian pen shops. For reasons best filed under 'The (pregnant) Inkette had had enough', I didn't make it to Mora Stylos on that occasion, so a visit is absolutely essential on this occasion. The only problem is that I have an extremely busy two days in the city, so it looks as if a brief dash first thing on Monday morning is the only option.
I decide to test and time the route from my hotel to the shop, carefully studying the map beforehand for possible short cuts. It takes about ten minutes to get to Rue de Tournon. Because it's Sunday evening, the shop, of course, is closed. A heavy metal shutter prevents me from peering with beating heart through the window.
I take a short detour on the way back to the hotel, strolling in awe down the beautiful Rue Servandoni, where Roland Barthes lived for much of his life. (I look for a commemorative plaque of some kind, but nothing appears to exist. I make a mental note to write a furious letter to Monsieur Sarkozy.) I wonder if petit Roland, my great hero and self-confessed lover of pens (one of his interviews is entitled 'An Almost Obsessive Relation to Writing Instruments'), used to make the short journey from Rue Servandoni to Rue de Tournon on his own ink quest.
Back at the hotel, I sit at my desk and write the words that you have just read. The Lie de Thé -- one of my favourite browns -- looks more elegant than usual. Perhaps, like Guinness, it's best enjoyed in its country of origin. I fall asleep and dream that Roland Barthes accompanies me to Mora Stylos to try out some inks. He chooses a bottle of Royal Blue. I, of course, do the same. Back at his flat on Rue Servandoni, we unpack our purchases and fill our pens. He passes me an index card upon which to write. We compare notes. Even though we've used exactly the same ink, his card looks infinitely more elegant than mine. When I point this out to him, he replies, cryptically, that the explanation for this discrepancy lies in Chateaubriand's Mémoires d'outre-tombe, which, outside the world of the dream, I was reading on the plane from Cardiff to Paris. 'It's all in the melancholy', he adds.
Monday 18 February
The clock is ticking. Mora Stylos opens at 9am, but I have a pre-meeting meeting at 8.30am with the person who has invited me to Paris as an expert étranger to take part in the assessment of research at several Parisian universities. I can handle the étranger part, but the other word in my title is giving me some cause for concern, as it's my ambition never to be an expert of anything in higher education. It occurs to me, though, that expert étranger has probably been chosen to convey just how much of an expert I am at being foreign or, better still, strange.
The rendezvous is over by a little after 9am, and I'm told to be at the office of the governmental agency responsible for the assessment exercise at 11am. I race over to Mora Stylos, where the shutters are now open, as the photograph displayed above shows. Inside I find a stunning array of writing instruments -- Omas, Taccia, Pilot, vintage Parker and Conklin -- but this is a trip with a limited budget, and the Inkette has already placed an order for some Chanel No. 5 and 'something cute and French' for Baby Ink, so I keep my credit card in my wallet and hand over twelve euros for a bottle of Private Reserve Burgundy Mist. As I'm running on cartridges during my stay in Paris, the lid will have to remain closed for now.
On my way from Mora Stylos to the rendezvous in the 2nd arrondissement, I zoom into FNAC to pick up a copy of the French release of Hitchcock's Jamaica Inn. I'm not really interested in the film itself (which is one of Hitchcock's weakest efforts, and which I already own), but I am interested in one of the extras included only on the French DVD: Mary, the extremely rare German remake of Murder!. While I'm there, I have quick look in the children's section for books by Éric Sanvoisin, author of the magnificent The Ink Drinker mentioned in earlier Ink Quest posts. The ink-well, alas, is dry, but, as I make my way to the tills to pay for the Hitchcock DVD, my eye is caught by the five-volume Oeuvres Complètes of Roland Barthes. Could I fit them all in my case? Hmmm... I lift the entire set off the shelf to test the weight. I nearly collapse from the effort. Fairly certain that my travel insurance doesn't mention cover for 'injuries caused by attempting to carry multi-volume reference works by major French thinkers', I make my way to the tills with just the Hitchcock DVD in my strained hand.
I find myself thinking fondly of my new ink on numerous occasions throughout the day, which was filled with long, technical meetings and, of course, an endless line of awkward social situations. I am entirely to blame for the latter; I must stress that I was treated like royalty by the staff in the three universities visited and by the other members of the committee. The problem was that I, as expert étranger, was the only non-native speaker of French at any given moment throughout the entire event. Everyone was perfectly understanding and spoke slowly and clearly in French, but I find polite conversation wholly unnecessary and puzzling in English, my native tongue, so having to do it in another language is pure torture. (Again, people were perfectly understanding and often switched to English, but that somehow merely reinforced my inadequacy and general hopelessness.) In my head I formulated coherent French sentences filled with dazzling wit and complex puns, but my mouth refused to play along. In the course of two agonizing days, I found myself constantly becoming Joey Tribbiani, who, in an old episode of Friends somehow convinced himself that he could speak perfect French. Ink fact, I don't know why I've even bothered describing my trauma; I could simply have posted this clip of Joey in action instead. The only mistake I didn't make, I think, was using 'tu' instead of 'vous'. After an unfortunate incident at a conference several years ago when I nearly started another war between France and Britain by tutoyer-ing someone, I stick to 'vous' whenever speaking French. Even my good friends in Paris are, on the very rare occasions when I speak to them in their language, 'vous'. (Jacques Derrida noted in his elegy for Jean-François Lyotard that, although the two men knew each other well for many years, they never progressed to 'tu'. If it's good enough for them, it's good enough for moi.) Everyone is 'vous' to me, and I long for the day when the English language rediscovers a formal equivalent. We misanthropes need a 'you' that keeps people at a distance, I feel. Only Larry David, who regularly addressed the audience as 'you people' during his stand-up years, has come close in this respect.
My sense of general inadequacy during the visit to Paris was exacerbated by the effortless style of the inhabitants of the city and, more specifically, the staff at the universities. Having worked within British higher education for nearly a decade, I can assure you that an assembled mass of humanities scholars would be, in sartorial terms, something of a ragged, crumpled, ill-fitting, and egg-stained wasteland. With just a few notable exceptions, we're a scruffy, styleless mob. (I stress the notable exceptions because a few of my colleagues occasionally read Ink Quest. I am not, of course, referring to you here. You all have impeccabble style -- which is why you're readers of my blog, of course.) Someone once claimed, ink fact, that British philosophers were only opposed to the work of Jacques Derrida because he wore trousers that actually fitted. Everything is different in Paris, however. When the conversation became too technical and rapid for me to follow during part of the visit to the Sorbonne, my eyes wandered around the room. One man was wearing a yellow silk scarf over his shoulders with impossible grace. Its colour complemented his shirt and crisply knotted tie in a manner that no British man could ever manage. Another was dressed in a dark grey suit which must have been bespoke, as must his white silk shirt. The female members of staff, meanwhile, appeared to have been styled and dressed by Chanel, and I lost count of the number of Hermès scarves on show.
Most important of all, however, were the fine writing instruments on display around the room. It's true that there were a couple of rogue ballpoints, but these were negated by a wave of Mont Blanc fountain pens and propelling pencils, a Conway Stewart 58, a Waterman and a Cartier of some kind, and several other stylos plumes whose precise identity I couldn't determine from a distance. Meanwhile, one man had signed the dossier prepared by the department for the meeting with a nib so flexible and a flourish so flamboyant that his handwriting looked as if had stepped out of the eighteenth century.
In the end, that is to say, my ink and my fountain pen saved me from total inadequacy; here, if nowhere else, I held my own. I failed and blundered in everything except the only things that really count. As long as I have my stylo, I have at least an inkling of style haut.
Ink in use today: Private Reserve Burgundy Mist (a vivid, rich, expressive colour).
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