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Full disclosure: I did not read every page or piece in this anthology. Please see below!
1/16/23-2/5/23
Read up to page 106
Intro, Benjamin Franklin (1767) - Harriet Beecher Stowe (1854)
This is a meaty anthology, spanning 3 centuries, clocking in at 608 pages, and weighing 2 full pounds. It indisputably fits my definition of bench presses for the brain, and is dedicated to one of my favorite topics: Paris.
"An American in Paris is, as they say, a story in itself: one need merely posit it to have the idea of a narrative spring up, even if there is no narrative to tell." p. xiii
Written by a wide swath of Americans who have spent significant time in Paris, this collection provides a vivid glimpse into history. Their distinct voices cover a huge range of topics: manners and social life, politics and Royal activities, art and culture (including fashion), and Parisian habits like spending time in the city's beautiful parks with their small dogs.
While I do find all of this information very important to my personal knowledge base of Paris, quite a bit of the old timey writing style isn't particularly engaging. I'd read 3 pages, have to go back and re-read it, and then fall asleep. That doesn't make me love it less, but it's challenging to tackle a big chunk of this book in one reading session. For this reason, I plan to pick it up and read a few chapters between books / when I'm waiting for something to arrive from my library hold queue.
Abigail Adams, Letters from Auteuil, To Mrs. Warren, 5 September 1784: "I believe this nation is the only one in the world which could make pleasure the business of life and yet retain such a relish for it as never to complain of its being tasteless or insipid; the Parisians seem to have exhausted nature and art in this science, and to be 'triste' is a complaint of a most serious nature." p. 10
From the headnotes on Thomas Jefferson: "Where Franklin was the model American backwoods philosopher and (mostly theoretical) libertine, Jefferson was the model student, the first on a Junior Year Abroad. He bought the wine, admired the architecture (which he later copied), and befriended the intellectuals, including La Fayette and La Rochefoucauld." p. 14
James Gallatin, from The Diary of James Gallatin, 11 August 1816: "I have but little work to do here. I foresee I will soon be in mischief. Paris is indeed the paradise of young men." p. 34
From the headnotes on James Fenimore Cooper: "Fiercely judgmental and perhaps a tad too easily shocked, he nonetheless had a sharp eye for French manners - and emerges as one of the first Americans to look genuinely hard at Paris while remaining resolutely unimpressed by it." p. 69
James Fenimore Cooper, from Gleanings in Europe, 1837: "The approach to a Paris lodging is usually either very good, or very bad. In the new buildings may be found some of the mediocrity of the new order of things; but in all those which were erected previously to the revolution, there is nothing but extremes in this, as in most other things. Great luxury and elegance, or great meanness and discomfort." p. 71
Harriet Beecher Stowe, from Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands, 1854, on her visit to the Louvre: "I should compare Rubens to Shakspeare [sic], for the wonderful variety and vital force of his artistic power. I know no other mind he so nearly resembles. Like Shakspeare, he forces you to accept and to forgive a thousand excesses, and uses his own faults as musicians use discords, only to enhance the perfection of harmony. There certainly is some use even in defects. A faultless style sends you to sleep. Defects rouse and excite the sensibility to seek and appreciate excellence. Some of Shakspeare's finest passages explode all grammar and rhetoric like skyrockets - the thought blows the language to shivers." p. 100
4/10/23-4/11/23
Read pages 107-120
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1858) - Mark Twain (1869)
I only read 2 pieces as a palate cleanser between fiction books. In the intro to Mark Twain's piece, The Innocents Abroad, Gopnik describes Twain using a euphemism: "the American as disappointed libertine and failed student," then further asserting that, "[Twain] invents the tradition of American disappointment." I thought Twain sounded downright rude and haughty, and it turned me off so much I ran into the arms of another piece of fiction that I'm confident I'll actually like. Will return to this tome later as another non-fiction palate cleanser.
4/2/25-4/4/25
Cherry picked / read the following pieces:
F. Scott Fitzgerald - Babylon Revisited
James Baldwin - Equal in Paris
Jack Kerouac - from Satori in Paris
M.F.K. Fisher - Gare de Lyon
Diana Vreeland - from D.V.
My to-read stack is brimming with exciting new fiction, and once again I used this as a non-fiction palate cleanser. Looking back on my thoughts from the previous pieces I read (and keeping in mind that it took me almost exactly 2 years to pick this book back up), I cherry picked and read only the pieces that interested me. My primary takeaway this time was that I simply must get on the Baldwin train asap. His account of being arrested in Paris for a stolen bedsheet (seriously), the ensuing ordeal, and the authority figures encountered along the way was vividly harrowing and surely a similar scenario is happening somewhere in the world on this very day.
From the headnotes on Baldwin: "In Paris, Baldwin discovered that the American racism he fled was simply a subset of a larger and inevitable human indifference to suffering." p. 467
Baldwin: "The moment I began living in French hotels I understood the necessity of French cafés. This made it rather difficult to look me up, for as soon as I was out of bed I hopefully took notebook and fountain pen off to the upstairs room of the Flore, where I consumed rather a lot of coffee and, as evening approached, rather a lot of alcohol, but did not get much writing done." p. 468
"None poured as much emotional energy into the fact of their arrest as I did; they took it, as I would have liked to take it, as simply another unlucky happening in a very dirty world. For, though I had grown accustomed to thinking of myself as looking upon the world with a hard, penetrating eye, the truth was that they were far more realistic about the world than I, and more nearly right about it." p. 476
"Any society inevitably produces its criminals, but a society at once rigid and unstable can do nothing whatever to alleviate the poverty of its lowest members, cannot present to the hypothetical young man at the crucial moment that so-well-advertised right path. And the fact, perhaps, that the French are the earth's least sentimental people and must also be numbered among the most proud aggravates the plight of their lowest, youngest, and unluckiest members, for it means that the idea of rehabilitation is scarcely real to them. I confess that this attitude on their part raises in me sentiments of exasperation, admiration, and despair, revealing as it does, in both the best and the worst sense, their renowned and spectacular hard-headedness." p. 479
"I was dulled by their merriment, even though it was meant to warm me. It could only remind me of the laughter I had often heard at home, laughter which I had sometimes deliberately elicited. This laughter is the laughter of those who consider themselves to be at a safe remove from all the wretched, for whom the pain of living is not real. I had heard it so often in my native land that I had resolved to find a place where I would never hear it any more. In some deep, black, stony, and liberating way, my life, in my own eyes, began during that first year in Paris, when it was borne in on me that this laughter is universal and can never be stilled." p. 481
In the headnotes on Kerouac: "...reminding us that one of the things that Americans have in common with the French, and share not at all with the suspicious English, is a readiness to like things." p. 577
Vreeland: "A woman dressed by Chanel back in the twenties and thirties - like a woman dressed by Balenciaga in the fifties and sixties - walked into a room and had a dignity, an authority, a thing beyond a question of taste." p. 598
1/16/23-2/5/23
Read up to page 106
Intro, Benjamin Franklin (1767) - Harriet Beecher Stowe (1854)
This is a meaty anthology, spanning 3 centuries, clocking in at 608 pages, and weighing 2 full pounds. It indisputably fits my definition of bench presses for the brain, and is dedicated to one of my favorite topics: Paris.
"An American in Paris is, as they say, a story in itself: one need merely posit it to have the idea of a narrative spring up, even if there is no narrative to tell." p. xiii
Written by a wide swath of Americans who have spent significant time in Paris, this collection provides a vivid glimpse into history. Their distinct voices cover a huge range of topics: manners and social life, politics and Royal activities, art and culture (including fashion), and Parisian habits like spending time in the city's beautiful parks with their small dogs.
While I do find all of this information very important to my personal knowledge base of Paris, quite a bit of the old timey writing style isn't particularly engaging. I'd read 3 pages, have to go back and re-read it, and then fall asleep. That doesn't make me love it less, but it's challenging to tackle a big chunk of this book in one reading session. For this reason, I plan to pick it up and read a few chapters between books / when I'm waiting for something to arrive from my library hold queue.
Abigail Adams, Letters from Auteuil, To Mrs. Warren, 5 September 1784: "I believe this nation is the only one in the world which could make pleasure the business of life and yet retain such a relish for it as never to complain of its being tasteless or insipid; the Parisians seem to have exhausted nature and art in this science, and to be 'triste' is a complaint of a most serious nature." p. 10
From the headnotes on Thomas Jefferson: "Where Franklin was the model American backwoods philosopher and (mostly theoretical) libertine, Jefferson was the model student, the first on a Junior Year Abroad. He bought the wine, admired the architecture (which he later copied), and befriended the intellectuals, including La Fayette and La Rochefoucauld." p. 14
James Gallatin, from The Diary of James Gallatin, 11 August 1816: "I have but little work to do here. I foresee I will soon be in mischief. Paris is indeed the paradise of young men." p. 34
From the headnotes on James Fenimore Cooper: "Fiercely judgmental and perhaps a tad too easily shocked, he nonetheless had a sharp eye for French manners - and emerges as one of the first Americans to look genuinely hard at Paris while remaining resolutely unimpressed by it." p. 69
James Fenimore Cooper, from Gleanings in Europe, 1837: "The approach to a Paris lodging is usually either very good, or very bad. In the new buildings may be found some of the mediocrity of the new order of things; but in all those which were erected previously to the revolution, there is nothing but extremes in this, as in most other things. Great luxury and elegance, or great meanness and discomfort." p. 71
Harriet Beecher Stowe, from Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands, 1854, on her visit to the Louvre: "I should compare Rubens to Shakspeare [sic], for the wonderful variety and vital force of his artistic power. I know no other mind he so nearly resembles. Like Shakspeare, he forces you to accept and to forgive a thousand excesses, and uses his own faults as musicians use discords, only to enhance the perfection of harmony. There certainly is some use even in defects. A faultless style sends you to sleep. Defects rouse and excite the sensibility to seek and appreciate excellence. Some of Shakspeare's finest passages explode all grammar and rhetoric like skyrockets - the thought blows the language to shivers." p. 100
4/10/23-4/11/23
Read pages 107-120
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1858) - Mark Twain (1869)
I only read 2 pieces as a palate cleanser between fiction books. In the intro to Mark Twain's piece, The Innocents Abroad, Gopnik describes Twain using a euphemism: "the American as disappointed libertine and failed student," then further asserting that, "[Twain] invents the tradition of American disappointment." I thought Twain sounded downright rude and haughty, and it turned me off so much I ran into the arms of another piece of fiction that I'm confident I'll actually like. Will return to this tome later as another non-fiction palate cleanser.
4/2/25-4/4/25
Cherry picked / read the following pieces:
F. Scott Fitzgerald - Babylon Revisited
James Baldwin - Equal in Paris
Jack Kerouac - from Satori in Paris
M.F.K. Fisher - Gare de Lyon
Diana Vreeland - from D.V.
My to-read stack is brimming with exciting new fiction, and once again I used this as a non-fiction palate cleanser. Looking back on my thoughts from the previous pieces I read (and keeping in mind that it took me almost exactly 2 years to pick this book back up), I cherry picked and read only the pieces that interested me. My primary takeaway this time was that I simply must get on the Baldwin train asap. His account of being arrested in Paris for a stolen bedsheet (seriously), the ensuing ordeal, and the authority figures encountered along the way was vividly harrowing and surely a similar scenario is happening somewhere in the world on this very day.
From the headnotes on Baldwin: "In Paris, Baldwin discovered that the American racism he fled was simply a subset of a larger and inevitable human indifference to suffering." p. 467
Baldwin: "The moment I began living in French hotels I understood the necessity of French cafés. This made it rather difficult to look me up, for as soon as I was out of bed I hopefully took notebook and fountain pen off to the upstairs room of the Flore, where I consumed rather a lot of coffee and, as evening approached, rather a lot of alcohol, but did not get much writing done." p. 468
"None poured as much emotional energy into the fact of their arrest as I did; they took it, as I would have liked to take it, as simply another unlucky happening in a very dirty world. For, though I had grown accustomed to thinking of myself as looking upon the world with a hard, penetrating eye, the truth was that they were far more realistic about the world than I, and more nearly right about it." p. 476
"Any society inevitably produces its criminals, but a society at once rigid and unstable can do nothing whatever to alleviate the poverty of its lowest members, cannot present to the hypothetical young man at the crucial moment that so-well-advertised right path. And the fact, perhaps, that the French are the earth's least sentimental people and must also be numbered among the most proud aggravates the plight of their lowest, youngest, and unluckiest members, for it means that the idea of rehabilitation is scarcely real to them. I confess that this attitude on their part raises in me sentiments of exasperation, admiration, and despair, revealing as it does, in both the best and the worst sense, their renowned and spectacular hard-headedness." p. 479
"I was dulled by their merriment, even though it was meant to warm me. It could only remind me of the laughter I had often heard at home, laughter which I had sometimes deliberately elicited. This laughter is the laughter of those who consider themselves to be at a safe remove from all the wretched, for whom the pain of living is not real. I had heard it so often in my native land that I had resolved to find a place where I would never hear it any more. In some deep, black, stony, and liberating way, my life, in my own eyes, began during that first year in Paris, when it was borne in on me that this laughter is universal and can never be stilled." p. 481
In the headnotes on Kerouac: "...reminding us that one of the things that Americans have in common with the French, and share not at all with the suspicious English, is a readiness to like things." p. 577
Vreeland: "A woman dressed by Chanel back in the twenties and thirties - like a woman dressed by Balenciaga in the fifties and sixties - walked into a room and had a dignity, an authority, a thing beyond a question of taste." p. 598
