Home

No trouble traveling.

Au revoir, Paris

It's been a good trip. Soon I'll be leaving on a jet plane, heading home to Donna.

If I can get my luggage into the tiny hotel lift, that is. You know how small and cramped airplane lavatories are? Even smaller. The sign in the lift claims 3 people can get in, but unless they're hobbits, I don't see how. Don't believe me? Here's a picture, with my shoe to give the scale:



See you soon.

Last day

The weather was better today--the sun came out several times, despite the attempts of the clouds to obscure it. But the sun kept moving--or rather, the earth kept rotating--foiling their scheme.

There was also a bit of snow.

I started the day at the Musee D'Orsay, one of my favorite museums. I'm not alone in this; many people told me that it's their favorite museum as well. A former train station, it houses a vast collection of Impressionist paintings.

As I wrote on my post on the Louvre, I like periods of transition, where there is usually an explosion of invention and variation. Periods of refinement, while producing many great works, do not have as deep an attraction for me.

Like the Renaissance Italian painters, the Impressionists were trying out new ways of seeing the world. Here "seeing" takes on two meanings. The first is more obvious and superficial: how do we process light and images, and how can the eye be fooled? One of the greatest of the many great Impressionists is Monet, and of his paintings D'Orsay houses several of his famed Cathedral Rouen series, where the artist painted the same view of the cathedral, over and over, under different lighting conditions.




Impressionism was one of the first salvos in Modernism and Post-modernism. When you start to learn how the eye can be fooled, you realize, it's really how the brain is fooled. And the brain can be fooled by images, how else is it fooled?

Artists have traditionally been skeptical and questioning. But with Modernism, this trend became full blown.

To help us understand this transition, a starting point is a definition of post-Modernism: incredulity towards all "master narratives" (except, of course, towards the master narrative of post-Modernism itself). Modernism was a precursor in that it was skeptical of many traditional narratives.



A great example of this is to compare Ingres' "Odalisque," a classic example of the "male gaze," wherein the woman seems to accept and even shyly smile at the viewer. Not so in Manet's "Olympia," which is a direct response to all the odalisques that preceded it:



Here the woman is not pleased with being viewed; her emotion is not shame at being naked, but challenging the viewer's voyerism.



Even more challenging is Courbet's "Origin of the World" (google it yourself, this is a family blog), which goes even further in questioning the motives and hidden agendas of artists and art-lovers alike.

By the way, the Musee D'Orsay was also undergoing renovation, and so many of its prize pieces had been moved to the first floor. If any important ones were missing, I didn't notice.

After lunch at the museum (another excellent meal, a tasty risotto aux champignons--pricey but no more so than outside restaurants) I walked to the Musee Rodin. You can see the snow on the ground here:



My favorite Rodin pieces are those where the figures are emerging out of stone. (He didn't originate this--it goes back at least to Michelangelo--but he utilized it heavily.) They don't photograph well, however, so I'll restrict myself to more traditional, and famous sculptures, such as "Le Baiser," which in English means "The Snog" and in American "The Kiss."



Of course the most famous Rodin sculpture is "The Thinker."

Donna says an awful lot of pictures of me seem to have objects coming out of my head and so, now, we try deliberately for pictures of objects coming out of my head. It took a few tries to do this self-portrait:




After Musee Rodin I walked near the Eiffel Tower, then caught the metro to the Musee Marmatten Monet, which unsurprisingly houses more Monets. They discourage photographs, which I respected. Then I walked to the Eiffel Tower, and managed to get yet another in the series "Things Coming Out of Calvin's Head."



In case you prefer your tour eiffel sans
hominid, here you go:



I also caught this picture of the Seine as dusk approached.





I finished the day with a plate of fruit de mer. It's amazing how many things that look like, well, snot, can taste so good, and so different.

Tomorrow I head home. Will probably post a farewell to Paris.

Rainy Friday

Workshop broke up around noon. I struck out for Marais. Along the way I whirled through Notre Dame, the famous rose windows, and my favorite stop, St. Thomas, the patron saint of scientists (or if he isn't, he ought to be, the little doubter).


In the Marais, I managed to stumble upon a little Corsican restaurant, Salvi, which Donna and I had enjoyed a few years ago, and ate there for lunch, happy to have made its reacquaintance.





Alas, my luck for the day ended there.

From there I went to the Musee Picasso, only to discover it is closed for renovations. For two years. And three years ago, when we were in Paris, it had been mostly closed also for renovations. I know Picasso was famed for reinventing his styles, but this is ridiculous.

In one of my guidebooks it mentioned a nice little shop for gifts. I wandered around, got a bit lost, then found the address.

Closed and moving to a new address.

From there I went to the Pompidou center. It has a great collection of modern art, but after all this walking I wasn't really in the mood. So I headed out again.



Just then it began to rain.

I hung out for a while in an antiquities mall across from the Louvre. The rain did stop by then, so I walked through the Tulleries--although no rain, the wind was bitterly cold. At Place de la Concorde I crossed the Seine and headed back to my hotel, exhausted.

Not a bad day, but not what I was planning.

More tomorrow.

No news

Just busy at the workshop. It finishes tomorrow (Friday) morning and I'll spend Friday afternoon and Saturday at museums. Posts and pictures then.

Louvre

Today was spent at the Louvre.

Both my brain and my feet hurt.

It's off-season, and a weekday, so the larger crowds were actually schoolkids. I got there early so I could get an early, unobstructed view of the Mona Lisa.



Because so many lunatics and fame-seekers have attacked the Mona Lisa, you can no longer get close. Instead it is behind glass, and a barrier keeps you a good 3 meters away:




Going early turned out to be a good idea, because later in the day the room got quite crowded.



I found myself drawn to the paintings in the gallery next to the Mona Lisa, Italian
paintings predominantly from the 16th century. I decided I am attracted to art in transitional eras. My very favorite era are the impressionists, whereartists really began to play with light and perception and representation, and I'll go to Musee D'Orsay on Saturday. But the Renaissance is another time when artists really began to use perspective and light and there was an explosion of inventiveness. I'm also attracted to the slightly whimsical and allegorical character to many of the paintings of that time, with themes such as the Tower of Babel





and the "Cortege of Thetis."



Here's a woman who appears (to me, anyway) to be selling "John the Baptist" t-shirts at the cruxifiction.




18th and early 19th century paintings are less intriguing to me. Oh, there is beautiful work, too many to mention, but it is more refinement of technique rather than the invention of technique. Here is Gericault's masterful "The Raft of the Medusa."






The Louvre is so huge and luxurious it's intimidating. Just the sheer volume of art is overwhelming. And many of the halls in which the art is hung are themselves works of art.






The Louvre not only has European art, but also a tremendous collection of artifacts from Rome, Greece, and the near East, including Egypt and Babylonia. (In essence, French looters, er, art collectors took from cultures they saw as flowing into modern European culture--so European philosophy grew out of Greece and Rome, which in turn were influenced by Egypt, Babylonia, and so on. Only in 2000 did they start displaying artifacts from sub-Saharan Africa, the Americas, and the south Pacific, and they don't seem to have anything from Asia at all.)

The Venus di Milo is one of the most famous pieces. As I'm currently writing a story called "Aphrodite Shrugged," it seemed an apt sculpture.



It is a very moving sculpture, although at times I wonder: who gets to decide what art is iconic and what is not? Is there a committee? The Mona Lisa is a fabulous painting, but at times it feels like a celebrity--most famous for being famous.


Another famous sculpture is Michelangelo's Slaves. I'm always astounded by Michelangelo's ability to imbue stone with the illusion of motion.







One of my favorite pieces is the famous Code of Hammurabi, the world first known usage of Fortran. (Or at least that is how students imagine Fortran, when they first come to me after being brainwashed by the computer science department.)




Towards the end of my visit, I wandered into the sumptuous apartments of Napoleon III.




I was reminded of Hyacinth Bucket (prononced "boo-kay") of the BBC comedy series Keeping Up Appearances, and played by Patricia Routledge. It is Hyacinth's long ambition to set a dining table so glamorous it causes a guest to stagger back in admiration.

Hyacinth never succeeded, but Napolean III certainly did:

A New Trip

I'm in Paris this week, sans Donna, for a workshop on RPA (which stands for "random phase approximation," one of the least helpful descriptions in all of physics). I will bookend it with visits to museums, although most of the week will be working, i.e., listening to talks or giving one.

It was foggy at Charles de Gaulle airport, and it is cold and drizzly. Fortunately the cold isn't as bitter as I feared, so it isn't too bad walking around.



I'm at a small hotel near the Luxembourg gardens, just a few minutes walk from the Latin Quarter and the famed Cathedral Notre Dame.



I walked around a bit, and had a crepe with ham and cheese. The airplane trip was mostly uneventful.

More later this week.