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geoffsebestaPlus how to ride trains for free in Europe and a review of Kazantzakis's The Last Temptation of Christ
It is a hedgehog! Auf Deutch, un Igel -- pronounced exactly the same as "eagle." :)
Just one amazing fact about these tiny little creatures that look like living hairbrushes.
Hedgehogs are obligate carnivores. They live on insects and catfood.
I'm back in fabulous Münster, readying for the last leg of my European journey. On Saturday I head to Copenhagen, spend Sunday at the Glyptotek, and Monday afternoon I'm America's problem again.
That said, let's sum up the last week. It is not going to be a short entry.
Paris
My triumphant return to Paris was undone by an eye infection, which I thought was an allergic reaction to pollen, so I fled the city. I found out quickly that the problem was me and not the trees, but I didn't know that at the time, so I left in a big rush. Too bad. I had been really looking forward to staying at Shakespeare and Company. I to know some of the people who worked there and the owner, and I really liked them. Probably easier if I tell the story in order, but there's an important detail I left out of earlier posts -- the last time I was in Paris I went to Shakespeare & Co. to see a bunch of kids put on a production of Endgame, which was terrible (I think I mentioned that) but as I was there a fella had a stroke or an epileptic fit and I helped keep him calm and cool until the ambulance there. Which was fast, the hospital was literally across the street. But I fell to talking to Sylvie, the owner, and she is an extraordinarily likeable person and doing an extremely important job for world literature.
So I came back, planning to sleep there as part of their visiting author (or "tumbleweed") program but it was undone by the eye infection. I spent two days in Paris (a friend from 24hrCD gave me a ride), each one more painful than the last. :/
But I did see some dude snorkelling in the Seine:
And I took this picture, one of my favorites so far:
I'MA THOUSAND YEARS LATE BUT I'MA GONNA VIKINGGGG
But things were bad. At one point my eyes were tearing so much that I was literally blind, could not open my eyes at all, and had to navigate the Metro back to S & Co. without being able to see. I don't remember much of that journey except rocking back and forth in pain. I'm not really sure how I back there, they were very nice, gave me a pair of sunglasses (for my comfort and the comfort of those who had to look at me), offered to take me to the hospital. But I was convinced that the eye problem was allergenic so I jumped on a train and went as far and fast as I could. I made it to Saint Quentin.
Saint Quentin
At this point I had my contact lenses out. I went to the hospital, because it kept hurting worse and worse, and had a wonderful experience. They treated me for free! God bless socialized medicine. But I couldn't wear my contacts for days, so I found a hotel and holed up for a couple days, then went for a second appointment at the hospital, they said things were much better (the doctor was Romanian; always always always be nice to Romanians, folks! There are few people I've ever met where you get more mileage from a little politeness than Romanians, who are currently being shit on by the whole of Europe in spite of the fact that they manifestly do not deserve it. If you ever want to read a story of hard luck (and learn a little bit about how believing in America can be fatal to your way of life) study some Romanian history. No wonder they drink) but I still couldn't wear contacts. So I stuck around for another day, went to the library blind (and it has my vote for the best library I've found in France yet, though in truth there are two things France does not do nearly as well as America and that's libraries and coffee shops), walked around. Since I couldn't see and I couldn't buy glasses (it was Friday when they gave me the emergency glasses scrip and the optometrist wasn't open until Tuesday) the only way I could navigate was to take a picture with my digital camera and zoom in on details. So I have lots of pictures of Saint-Quentin, but they ain't normal tourist pictures. And I lived in town for three days, but I can literally say I've never seen the place.
Little totem pole, I have no idea what you're doing in France. I took a picture of it because I wanted to confirm to myself that yes, it was indeed a totem pole. I guess it's no stranger than Medieval Times.
Some of my navigation photographs turned out to be accidentally quite interesting.
Frex this one. This photo saved me hours. At the time I took this I had been walking around for two hours trying to find the hospital, which was less than half a kilometer from where I started.
Wha....what's that over there?
I took this picture because I wanted to know what this thing looked like. Seeing it now, I'm wondering why the heck the flag was at half-mast. I shoulda watched TV at the hotel but I couldn't see it so I just left it off.
The cathedral at Saint Quentin, and of course Saint Nougat Albert.
I am under the impression this cathedral was particularly beautiful but I can't be sure.
It was very big and empty inside, I'm sure of that. It also had an actual labyrinth, which I walked, though...how does one take a picture of a giant pattern on the floor of a cathedral? Cathedrals are incredibly difficult to photograph -- for these three pictures I took something like eighty. But hey, had nothing better to do.
Outside the library. I love the absurdity of streets in hilly towns.
"Le Splendid!" One of the better "where the hell am I" photos.
Public sculpture is just out of place in this debased age of ours. Don't get me wrong, I don't want typhoid fever and sexual persecution and religious wars back. But I do think there's a place for beauty in this world and that it has been lost. Modern buildings...they're cheap. That's the only nice thing I can say about them. They're cheap and maybe some of them are reasonably well insulated.
Seriously. Couldn't see.
Quite an adventure.
Railway stations loan themselves to moody photography, especially at sunset. This I believe was Alnoye? Dunno. It was around here that I just said to hell with it and put my contact lenses back in. It had nothing to do with sick or well, I was bored. And since then my eyes have been fine.
I'm still using the antibiotic eyedrops at night, because in this world of ours if you do not finish a course of antibiotics you are an irresponsible asshole who is saying to the world "Yes I want drug-resistant superbugs and I want them to start right here, in my body." But in the day it's contact lenses all the way.
Maubeuge
I spent three days in one of the coolest towns in the history of Things. Maubeuge, France, is not a place that you have heard of. I never would have heard of it if I hadn't gotten off the train there. Oh, important digression here:
How to Ride the Trains in Europe For Free or Close To It
First, always remember that foreign languages are a gift, and may be turned off whenever is convenient for you. Playing the tourist is astoundingly effective for getting yourself out of trouble. Basically, you are not worth the trouble to prosecute, they know it, you know they know it. Use it.
NEVER BUY A TICKET. You are a tourist, you are a foreigner, you do not have to buy a ticket. Buying tickets is for suckers, wimps, and people who don't read my blog.
Just get on the train. Odds are good that the conductor will never even be by to check your ticket. In that case, you ride for free.
Try to sit in the farthest coach back. If the train is really empty, hide your baggage and put yourself where you can't easily be seen. Odds are good the conductor won't walk back there.
Oh, no, there's the conductor! Okay, there are a couple things you can do.
One is to wait until they're close-but-not-too-close and then go to the bathroom. For a long time. As long as it takes. This mostly only works on short hops, and it lacks style, but it does work. The conductors are on to this and will give you a dirty look but it'll be okay.
Here's another way, my favorite. Try to communicate with them in writing in whatever language they speak. Don't worry if your French/German/Italian/Belgian/wevz is dreadful, that's part of your plan. They will be charmed by this fumbling attempt to speak like a real human being, and they will talk to you in English. They already know you're American, by the way. Everybody knows you're American. It's quite a compliment to be mistaken for a German or Spaniard or whatever.
Tell them that you have a trip ticket but it is somewhere in your baggage and you don't know where. Also tell them that you got on at the last stop -- this is a failsafe in case they make you pay anyway, it cuts your losses somewhat. It adds veracity if you memorize the name of the last stop.
They will usually offer to come back in ten minutes, by which they mean half an hour. At this point, if you are poor, you can just jump off at the next stop and take the next train. This is cheesy but it would probably work -- I haven't tried it. By the time I'm in conversation with the conductor I'm usually feeling enough guilt that I'm willing to shell out some loot. The question of whether-or-not this is theft does not interest me -- I don't think it is, and I'm not one to have moral discussions about pure abstraction. This train was going to that place at this particular time and your presence neither adds nor subtracts from that. I am poor because life is not fair to artists and we do what we must to survive. If there was no harm I think my overwhelming obligation to have the best life possible in a world that insists on not funding essential social classes (not to say I'm essential, but artists are absolutely essential, and if America paid us fairly I'd be thrilled to share that with Europe). But I am all about being polite to service employees, and I don't want to make these guys feel like dupes or burn things down for myself. So by the time I'm in conversation with the conductor I'm resigned to givin' 'em somethin'.
Okay, you have half an hour. Make it look good -- take this time to repack your backpack. You needed to do it anyway, a well-packed backpack weighs a fraction of an unbalanced and messy pack.
When they come back, you still couldn't find it. You need to get off at the next stop, poor poor you, you can't afford to travel any further.
Either they will take pity on you and let you ride for free or they will sell you a cheap ticket. Then you get off at the next stop, take the next train, and do it again.
And this is how I travelled from Paris to Koln for eleven euros.
Maubeuge
And that is why I left the train in Maubeuge. It's a tiny town on the Belgian border. It is also one of the weirdest, coolest places I've ever been. I stayed for three days.
Okay, before WWII is WWI, right? Well, before that was the Franco-Prussian war, in 1870 -- mentioned it briefly in the posts on Dijon. This was another place where that war was a big freakin' deal. After the French were thoroughly demolished in this war, they put some money into some serious fortifications. Thus were born some of the biggest craziest earthworks I ever did see. I don't just mean la Redoute in Dijon, although that place is dang amazing. I mean Maubeuge.
They built a wall around the whole dang town. And they had bulldozers then, it was a serious, serious, series of walls.
Unfortunately, artillery. The Germans just shelled the hell out of it in 1914 and it fell tout-suite.
This is how big the ramparts were -- I have no idea where this happened. I went to every single little bit of the ramparts (except the zoo, somehow I never got around to that) and whereever this big giant caved-in mess used to be I could not say. There are lots of places I suspect. 120 people were inside this barracks when it was destroyed. The French rightly concluded that walls are no good against bombs that fall from the sky and they abandoned ship.
And then in WWII, as you know if you've been reading along, there was nobody left to kill.
No idea where this plaque is.
So they built these endless fortifications that were obsolete before they were finished, and then they did with them exactly what you should do with all castles -- they gave them to little kids to play with.
Having seen a few castles now, I have to say that it is cruel to raise a child in a town without a castle. No more natural playground has ever been invented. The fortifications were SWARMING with children. You can't tell from the pictures because they're so big that the kids just get lost.
I took infinite numbers of pictures of this series of edifices. I plan to use it for mad reference. I also plan to tell anyboy I ever meet, ever, for the rest of my life, if you're looking to make a sword-and-sorcery epic I know just the place for you. I can't show you all these pictures but here are a few:
You get a...sense for towns. Or at least I do. I mean, I've seriously seen well more than a thousand small towns in my life. I can show you the numbers if you want, but if you know me you know that's no exaggeration. A few stick out -- Junction Texas, Boise City Oklahoma, Likely California, Athertonville Kentucky, South Daytona Beach Florida, et cetera. A few tiny towns in France made an impression with their personality, like Dormans in Champagne.
Maubeuge has a personality. I'm torn about its personality. It's easily one of the most conservative, redneck places I've ever seen. I'm not positive I would enjoy living there, though I really liked the people I met on this trip.
How is this personality expressed?
Everywhere. But Maubeuge was kind enough to have some public sculpture that I could take pictures of to sum things up. Here they are:
This is in the yard of the public school. It's difficult to see here. It's not just a man holding a shield. It's a man who literally turns into a shield. Notice he has no head.
This is near the public library. From this angle it's some hot naked woman who's jugglin' some fruit or somethin'.
But she ain't have no brain.
Note this is obviously not the sculptor's intention.
This is in the main square at the edge of the ramparts. That is actually part of his coat but it...man, they really should have caught that in the planning phase.
I love how thrilled Napoleon is about it. He's all like, Yeah! Dick!
These three sculptures tell a story about Maubeuge. Perhaps they may explain to you why I would not like to live here, but I would like to make a movie about men whacking each other with swords here. It seems appropriate.
I spent three days camping out, drawing Cloudhopper pages (finished two!), and taking more pictures of the ramparts:
There are people in this picture if you know where to look.
I took many, many, many more pictures than this -- I plan to use this as ref for Cloudhopper and many other things. I'm mostly just posting the pictures with people in them, for some sense of the scale of these endless, pointless walls.
There were quite a few places where you could get inside.
Me, leaning as far out over a wall as I could to take pictures of what it would look like if you were trying to climb up it. You will see these pictures, but they will be called "Cloudhopper" when you do.
By the way I totally speak French. Some kids asked me;
"Pourquoi prendez-vous photos des ramparts?"
I responded, "Je suis espion pour les Etats-Unis. Nous allons attaquer ici."
"Qu...quoi?"
"Nous avons beaucoup des chevaliers, beaucoup des trebuchets."
"Ah...um. Ah...bon journee, monsier."
Translated:
"Why are you taking pictures of the ramparts?"
"I am a spy for the United States. We are going to invade here. We have many knights, many catapults."
This was easily my best conversation in French yet.
But it is time to come home, so I left.
Belgium
Maubeuge is 9km from Belgium. I just walked it. By the way, I weighed my backpack and gean in Saint-Lo and it was 25 kg, or a third of my body weight. I did all my Xmas shopping in Maubeuge and now it weighs more. But I walked to Belgium, and then got a ride to the train station in Mons.
They were rough about checking tickets in Belgium so I kept jumping off the train. I think this was Charleroi. I went and wandered the town.
I think that says they are selling prosthetic breasts. The eight-year-old in me giggles at this picture. I'm not sure what the name of the store is but I think it means "Quite a story."
Anyway, I went shopping again in Charleroi and bought even MORE books. Then back to the train. The train was so crowded that the conductor couldn't check tickets at first, but after a while he found me so I said I was going to the next town, which happened to be....Hoy. I coulda waited for the next train but I didn't feel like it. The idea was to walk to the autoroute and hitch for a while.
I don't usually carry a map. Of anything. This is not a problem in America because I've memorized the place. This is a big problem in Europe and messed with me a lot on the way to Saint-Lo. It was also a problem here, because I couldn't find a map in Hoy. So I didn't know that the autoroute which looked so close when I checked in Charleroi was eight kilometers away, on the other side of a mountain. Walking, as it turned out, was dumb.
But I saw a beautiful view.
This two-hour hike was pretty much all I know of Belgium. I can tell you this:
The most Belgian-looking person I know is Tyler Stafford. Congratulations, Tyler! You win the "skinny tall pale white guy with red hair award!" Seriously how the hell do you stay so not-tan you live in LA.
If Belgium is indeed the promised land for comic books I saw little evidence. There was a poster on a wall in Charleroi advertising a comic book, that was new, but that's about it. I also saw no evidence of waffles. I saw a place in the train station that sold all sorts of chocolate, but they had no customers at all and the woman that worked there looked worried.
I did notice this -- Belgium is Africa-crazy. I saw African restaurants, advertisements for African vacations, stone buildings with thatched roofs like African huts. If you know your history you'll find this interesting, and this certainly makes me speculate about the connection between the Belgian Congo and WWI/WWII. Belgium, of course, is the preferred route for Germans invading France, and did not have an easy time of it. No, they did not. I did not take pictures of the "Mort a la Grande Guerre" memorials but they were common, and the lists of names were long.
The place is very hilly, stone buildings everywhere, quarries everywhere. I think a lot of Europe's buildings are made of little bits of Belgium. Everyone speaks French, no German, barely any Dutch. The people are pale and unassuming, jolly but resentful of the oncoming winter -- if you had to connect it to anywhere in America, I would say "Minneapolis people in a northern Appalachian setting." And it is very far north here indeed -- they're on the 54th parallel.
After a long, long, painful while I found the road again and hitched out with a very nice woman named Nadine (both my rides in Belgium were with middle-aged women, which now that I think of it is also unusual), and she dropped me of in Liege, which is another town that nobody ever heard of but they had a magnificent train station.
Look at it it is the future.
Or an egg slicer.
This is not a building, per se. It has no walls. It's just a giant hat they put over some trains.
Walkin' to the future.
I rode the train from here to Münster, arrived at 1am, no bus running, so I walked to Astrid's house, it was cold, I got lost, it took two hours.
So that's six hours of hiking with a backpack that weighs almost half as much as I do. GODdamn. What a long day. I think I went 30km in the day. This was easily the roughest day of hiking yet, beat hell out of the Marne.
And now I'm in Münster and everything's jake. We're going to see a castle on Friday, marking the second tourist-thing I've done in two months (this and the Louvre). Today we went to the art supplies store and I bought me a reasonably-priced German lead holder, which is only the fourth or fifth thing I've bought in France, and we went climbing at a little local climbing wall.
Astrid warming her hands before trying that wall again. Winter came to Deutschland the day before yesterday.
Then we played with the hedgehog for a bit and everybody went to work or sleep, except for me. I've been writing this for three hours.
The Last Temptation of Christ
I read The Last Temptation of Christ, which is sort of an interesting story in itself. Here's what happened:
I left America in a bit of a rush and forgot a couple important things, specifically books and t-shirts. I've been wearing the same three t-shirts, over and over, in different combinations for the last two months. And I haven't had much to read. I've been living off books that I found in my grandmother's attic. After I finished a YA book about the French Revolution back in August, I had three books in English:
The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco
In the Labyrinth, by Alain Robbe-Grillet
The Last Temptation of Christ, by Nikos Kazantzakis.
I read these in order of most enticing to least. When you consider that In the Labyrinth is a story about PTSD after WWII in a nameless French soldier who spends at least thirty pages describing wallpaper, you can get a sense of how much I was looking forward to The Last Temptation of Christ. And I almost put it down after opening it, despite the desperate situation, because this book was Not For Me. You know how some art is for some people and not for others? You know how you love Frank Sinatra even though he makes me want to kill my eardrums forever with flaming q-tips? It's not because Frank Sinatra is bad -- it's because he is Not For Me. I am not buying what he's selling.
If you read Roger Ebert's review of the Human Centipede you'll get an idea about how I feel about books like The Last Temptation of Christ. I'm an atheist. Although I believe Jesus was a real human being who really existed once, and the fact that we date our freakin' calendar from somewhere around his birthday seems to me to answer the question of his historical relevance or significance, I don't particularly care about the guy. I sure don't think he was magic. I think he was a cool dude who said some cool stuff and caught some shit for it, because that's the way the world is. I don't read the Bible or any other Jesus fanfic.
But a couple people who I really respect chimed in and said they loved the book, and besides, what were my options? So I read it. I'm glad I did. I'm not sure if I would call it a good book or not -- as I mentioned above, I'm pretty sure my opinion of this book is irrelevant because the overlap between me and the target audience is minimal -- but I learned a thing or two.
This book illustrates the opinion that Jesus had a really shitty life. Everything sucked. All his friends were assholes. Nobody liked him. He was a bullshit dude in a bullshit town and nothing was ever gonna change.
God comes into the book just as a jerk who tells Jesus what to do, and he's not nice about it. Jesus wants to marry Magdalene but God gave him epileptic spasms and he couldn't do it. So instead he builds crucifixes all day and listens to his mom complaining, when are you going to get married? And he stalks Mary Magdalene.
But then at some point he gets his act together and starts preaching. It doesn't go well at first, then it goes even worse but he attracts some disciples.
The book tends to dodge all the miracles, casting them as dreams or crazy stories that people made up. At the end he actually does do a couple miracles but they're done in such a way that you can did-he-didn't-he. Ya know, like your average episode of X-Files. Kazantzakis also takes the interesting tack that Judas and Magdalene were the only disciples who were worth a wet fart. Magdalene is easily the most interesting and sympathetic character, and the story of why she became a prostitute is either incredibly insightful or just more bullshit about Jesus, I'm not sure. Actually, that could describe the whole book.
Anyway, yadda yadda yadda, Jesus does all this stuff that you already know, at the end he dies, there's a big twist but I won't waste your time, just watch the movie.
BUT.
Here's what I actually found interesting about the book.
First, it's an insight into my friends and the way they see the world. The Jesus portrayed here is full-on Suffering Jesus. It starts bad and gets worse for the poor guy. This book is actually an interesting paired opposite to The Name of the Rose, a book whose thesis is "God laughs (although we don't always get the joke)." In The Last Temptation of Christ God Does Not Laugh. At All, Ever. No jokes in this book. This is not the way my friends see the world -- if they did, I doubt they would be my friends, I'm fairly dedicated to the Trickster God. My supreme being does not exist, Bugs Bunny is their prophet, and their temple is the Louvre. I don't get along well with people who don't have a sense of humor about these things. But it's interesting, because these friends who like the book are people who have had a rough time and are up-front and honest about it. They are people who never really felt at place in the world. It's easy to see why they vibe with these particular chords.
Second, this book is sixty years old. I thought The Last Temptation of Christ was a recent book and Kazantzakis was still alive, because the movie faked me out I guess. It ain't. He ain't. It was written in the early 50s and he died in 57. K. lived through both World Wars -- as a matter of fact,
and here is an interesting fact that should be in all caps with big flashing lights around it
Kazantzakis lived in Berlin between 1922 and 1934.
Okay, chew on that for a second. Let's talk about Judas.
Judas is a good guy here. I guess this is sorta spoilers (and let it be noted here that I appreciate the majesty of a book that is a straight-out-retelling of the first four books of the Bible and still manages to be spoilerable), but Jesus straight-up tells Judas you have to betray me. It has to be you because all the other disciples are wimpy little dorks. Here is who I want you to betray me to. Why are you still standing here? Get betraying!
Judas says, I don't want to, this sucks.
Oh hell yes it sucks, says Jesus. I don't think I could do it myself. That's why you have to do it. You have the shitty job. All I have to do is get crucified.
Now if I can connect this back to real life for a second, one thing that my sojourn through Europe has shown me is that the Germans suffered more under the Nazis than ANYBODY else. The first and last victim of Nazi aggression was the Germans*, who no more wanted to invade Poland than you do. They were just people. And not only did they have the pleasure of seeing their homes torn apart by bombs and their neighbors carried off to death camps, but then they found themselves the permanent villians of the world's imagination. And then they got invaded. Fun fact -- they estimate something like ten million German women were raped in the postwar years.
Imagine if you got raped for something the Tea Party did. How fair would that be? Imagine people treated it as a moral failing that you personally did not assassinate George Bush. Multiply that unfairness by two decades and unimaginable numbers. That's what it must have been like to have the terrible misfortune to be born in Germany a hundred years ago.
Kazantzakis, as a denizen of the dream-turned-nightmare of 1930s Berlin, knew this better than I ever will.
There should be a lot of sympathy for the devil. Judas had the shit job.
This book has lead to some interesting speculations as to What Really Happened back in Anno Domini 0, but I'll save them for later. I'll mention these two because they seem important:
1) Making Matthew a disciple was the smartest thing Jesus ever did. Because if he didn't, who was gonna write the book of Matthew?
2) If you were at work one day...let's say you...you're a waiter. Or waitress. I should pick something with a gender-neutral title, make things easier. Cashier.
Let's say you work at Wal-Mart and you're in the break room with a bunch of other people and some freakin' hippie who doesn't even work there comes in with all his dirty hippie friends and says "What do y'all do?" And you say "We're cashiers." And he says, quit your job and let's go.
"What?"
Yeah, quit your job. We're gonna go wander around at random and tell other people how to live their lives.
What?
No, seriously. I'm magic. Today you are cashiers, but I shall make you cashiers of men.
Uh...ooo-kay. Freakin' hippie dude would have to be pretty dang convincing to sell me that one. I mean, I'm a freakin' hippie myself and I don't see anybody talking me into this. The apostles were either the sort of people who usually join cults (by which I mean morons and desperate folk), or Jesus had mind-control powers, or things were unimaginably bad in the fishing business, or it didn't really happen like that. Or some combination of the above. Whatever actually went down, something was lost in the translation.
*Please somebody be dumb enough to say "What about the jews and the gypsies" so I can point out the completely obvious fact that they were German too.
It is a hedgehog! Auf Deutch, un Igel -- pronounced exactly the same as "eagle." :)
Just one amazing fact about these tiny little creatures that look like living hairbrushes.
Hedgehogs are obligate carnivores. They live on insects and catfood.
I'm back in fabulous Münster, readying for the last leg of my European journey. On Saturday I head to Copenhagen, spend Sunday at the Glyptotek, and Monday afternoon I'm America's problem again.
That said, let's sum up the last week. It is not going to be a short entry.
Paris
My triumphant return to Paris was undone by an eye infection, which I thought was an allergic reaction to pollen, so I fled the city. I found out quickly that the problem was me and not the trees, but I didn't know that at the time, so I left in a big rush. Too bad. I had been really looking forward to staying at Shakespeare and Company. I to know some of the people who worked there and the owner, and I really liked them. Probably easier if I tell the story in order, but there's an important detail I left out of earlier posts -- the last time I was in Paris I went to Shakespeare & Co. to see a bunch of kids put on a production of Endgame, which was terrible (I think I mentioned that) but as I was there a fella had a stroke or an epileptic fit and I helped keep him calm and cool until the ambulance there. Which was fast, the hospital was literally across the street. But I fell to talking to Sylvie, the owner, and she is an extraordinarily likeable person and doing an extremely important job for world literature.
So I came back, planning to sleep there as part of their visiting author (or "tumbleweed") program but it was undone by the eye infection. I spent two days in Paris (a friend from 24hrCD gave me a ride), each one more painful than the last. :/
But I did see some dude snorkelling in the Seine:
And I took this picture, one of my favorites so far:
I'MA THOUSAND YEARS LATE BUT I'MA GONNA VIKINGGGG
But things were bad. At one point my eyes were tearing so much that I was literally blind, could not open my eyes at all, and had to navigate the Metro back to S & Co. without being able to see. I don't remember much of that journey except rocking back and forth in pain. I'm not really sure how I back there, they were very nice, gave me a pair of sunglasses (for my comfort and the comfort of those who had to look at me), offered to take me to the hospital. But I was convinced that the eye problem was allergenic so I jumped on a train and went as far and fast as I could. I made it to Saint Quentin.
Saint Quentin
At this point I had my contact lenses out. I went to the hospital, because it kept hurting worse and worse, and had a wonderful experience. They treated me for free! God bless socialized medicine. But I couldn't wear my contacts for days, so I found a hotel and holed up for a couple days, then went for a second appointment at the hospital, they said things were much better (the doctor was Romanian; always always always be nice to Romanians, folks! There are few people I've ever met where you get more mileage from a little politeness than Romanians, who are currently being shit on by the whole of Europe in spite of the fact that they manifestly do not deserve it. If you ever want to read a story of hard luck (and learn a little bit about how believing in America can be fatal to your way of life) study some Romanian history. No wonder they drink) but I still couldn't wear contacts. So I stuck around for another day, went to the library blind (and it has my vote for the best library I've found in France yet, though in truth there are two things France does not do nearly as well as America and that's libraries and coffee shops), walked around. Since I couldn't see and I couldn't buy glasses (it was Friday when they gave me the emergency glasses scrip and the optometrist wasn't open until Tuesday) the only way I could navigate was to take a picture with my digital camera and zoom in on details. So I have lots of pictures of Saint-Quentin, but they ain't normal tourist pictures. And I lived in town for three days, but I can literally say I've never seen the place.
Little totem pole, I have no idea what you're doing in France. I took a picture of it because I wanted to confirm to myself that yes, it was indeed a totem pole. I guess it's no stranger than Medieval Times.
Some of my navigation photographs turned out to be accidentally quite interesting.
Frex this one. This photo saved me hours. At the time I took this I had been walking around for two hours trying to find the hospital, which was less than half a kilometer from where I started.
Wha....what's that over there?
I took this picture because I wanted to know what this thing looked like. Seeing it now, I'm wondering why the heck the flag was at half-mast. I shoulda watched TV at the hotel but I couldn't see it so I just left it off.
The cathedral at Saint Quentin, and of course Saint Nougat Albert.
I am under the impression this cathedral was particularly beautiful but I can't be sure.
It was very big and empty inside, I'm sure of that. It also had an actual labyrinth, which I walked, though...how does one take a picture of a giant pattern on the floor of a cathedral? Cathedrals are incredibly difficult to photograph -- for these three pictures I took something like eighty. But hey, had nothing better to do.
Outside the library. I love the absurdity of streets in hilly towns.
"Le Splendid!" One of the better "where the hell am I" photos.
Public sculpture is just out of place in this debased age of ours. Don't get me wrong, I don't want typhoid fever and sexual persecution and religious wars back. But I do think there's a place for beauty in this world and that it has been lost. Modern buildings...they're cheap. That's the only nice thing I can say about them. They're cheap and maybe some of them are reasonably well insulated.
Seriously. Couldn't see.
Quite an adventure.
Railway stations loan themselves to moody photography, especially at sunset. This I believe was Alnoye? Dunno. It was around here that I just said to hell with it and put my contact lenses back in. It had nothing to do with sick or well, I was bored. And since then my eyes have been fine.
I'm still using the antibiotic eyedrops at night, because in this world of ours if you do not finish a course of antibiotics you are an irresponsible asshole who is saying to the world "Yes I want drug-resistant superbugs and I want them to start right here, in my body." But in the day it's contact lenses all the way.
Maubeuge
I spent three days in one of the coolest towns in the history of Things. Maubeuge, France, is not a place that you have heard of. I never would have heard of it if I hadn't gotten off the train there. Oh, important digression here:
How to Ride the Trains in Europe For Free or Close To It
First, always remember that foreign languages are a gift, and may be turned off whenever is convenient for you. Playing the tourist is astoundingly effective for getting yourself out of trouble. Basically, you are not worth the trouble to prosecute, they know it, you know they know it. Use it.
NEVER BUY A TICKET. You are a tourist, you are a foreigner, you do not have to buy a ticket. Buying tickets is for suckers, wimps, and people who don't read my blog.
Just get on the train. Odds are good that the conductor will never even be by to check your ticket. In that case, you ride for free.
Try to sit in the farthest coach back. If the train is really empty, hide your baggage and put yourself where you can't easily be seen. Odds are good the conductor won't walk back there.
Oh, no, there's the conductor! Okay, there are a couple things you can do.
One is to wait until they're close-but-not-too-close and then go to the bathroom. For a long time. As long as it takes. This mostly only works on short hops, and it lacks style, but it does work. The conductors are on to this and will give you a dirty look but it'll be okay.
Here's another way, my favorite. Try to communicate with them in writing in whatever language they speak. Don't worry if your French/German/Italian/Belgian/wevz is dreadful, that's part of your plan. They will be charmed by this fumbling attempt to speak like a real human being, and they will talk to you in English. They already know you're American, by the way. Everybody knows you're American. It's quite a compliment to be mistaken for a German or Spaniard or whatever.
Tell them that you have a trip ticket but it is somewhere in your baggage and you don't know where. Also tell them that you got on at the last stop -- this is a failsafe in case they make you pay anyway, it cuts your losses somewhat. It adds veracity if you memorize the name of the last stop.
They will usually offer to come back in ten minutes, by which they mean half an hour. At this point, if you are poor, you can just jump off at the next stop and take the next train. This is cheesy but it would probably work -- I haven't tried it. By the time I'm in conversation with the conductor I'm usually feeling enough guilt that I'm willing to shell out some loot. The question of whether-or-not this is theft does not interest me -- I don't think it is, and I'm not one to have moral discussions about pure abstraction. This train was going to that place at this particular time and your presence neither adds nor subtracts from that. I am poor because life is not fair to artists and we do what we must to survive. If there was no harm I think my overwhelming obligation to have the best life possible in a world that insists on not funding essential social classes (not to say I'm essential, but artists are absolutely essential, and if America paid us fairly I'd be thrilled to share that with Europe). But I am all about being polite to service employees, and I don't want to make these guys feel like dupes or burn things down for myself. So by the time I'm in conversation with the conductor I'm resigned to givin' 'em somethin'.
Okay, you have half an hour. Make it look good -- take this time to repack your backpack. You needed to do it anyway, a well-packed backpack weighs a fraction of an unbalanced and messy pack.
When they come back, you still couldn't find it. You need to get off at the next stop, poor poor you, you can't afford to travel any further.
Either they will take pity on you and let you ride for free or they will sell you a cheap ticket. Then you get off at the next stop, take the next train, and do it again.
And this is how I travelled from Paris to Koln for eleven euros.
Maubeuge
And that is why I left the train in Maubeuge. It's a tiny town on the Belgian border. It is also one of the weirdest, coolest places I've ever been. I stayed for three days.
Okay, before WWII is WWI, right? Well, before that was the Franco-Prussian war, in 1870 -- mentioned it briefly in the posts on Dijon. This was another place where that war was a big freakin' deal. After the French were thoroughly demolished in this war, they put some money into some serious fortifications. Thus were born some of the biggest craziest earthworks I ever did see. I don't just mean la Redoute in Dijon, although that place is dang amazing. I mean Maubeuge.
They built a wall around the whole dang town. And they had bulldozers then, it was a serious, serious, series of walls.
Unfortunately, artillery. The Germans just shelled the hell out of it in 1914 and it fell tout-suite.
This is how big the ramparts were -- I have no idea where this happened. I went to every single little bit of the ramparts (except the zoo, somehow I never got around to that) and whereever this big giant caved-in mess used to be I could not say. There are lots of places I suspect. 120 people were inside this barracks when it was destroyed. The French rightly concluded that walls are no good against bombs that fall from the sky and they abandoned ship.
And then in WWII, as you know if you've been reading along, there was nobody left to kill.
No idea where this plaque is.
So they built these endless fortifications that were obsolete before they were finished, and then they did with them exactly what you should do with all castles -- they gave them to little kids to play with.
Having seen a few castles now, I have to say that it is cruel to raise a child in a town without a castle. No more natural playground has ever been invented. The fortifications were SWARMING with children. You can't tell from the pictures because they're so big that the kids just get lost.
I took infinite numbers of pictures of this series of edifices. I plan to use it for mad reference. I also plan to tell anyboy I ever meet, ever, for the rest of my life, if you're looking to make a sword-and-sorcery epic I know just the place for you. I can't show you all these pictures but here are a few:
You get a...sense for towns. Or at least I do. I mean, I've seriously seen well more than a thousand small towns in my life. I can show you the numbers if you want, but if you know me you know that's no exaggeration. A few stick out -- Junction Texas, Boise City Oklahoma, Likely California, Athertonville Kentucky, South Daytona Beach Florida, et cetera. A few tiny towns in France made an impression with their personality, like Dormans in Champagne.
Maubeuge has a personality. I'm torn about its personality. It's easily one of the most conservative, redneck places I've ever seen. I'm not positive I would enjoy living there, though I really liked the people I met on this trip.
How is this personality expressed?
Everywhere. But Maubeuge was kind enough to have some public sculpture that I could take pictures of to sum things up. Here they are:
This is in the yard of the public school. It's difficult to see here. It's not just a man holding a shield. It's a man who literally turns into a shield. Notice he has no head.
This is near the public library. From this angle it's some hot naked woman who's jugglin' some fruit or somethin'.
But she ain't have no brain.
Note this is obviously not the sculptor's intention.
This is in the main square at the edge of the ramparts. That is actually part of his coat but it...man, they really should have caught that in the planning phase.
I love how thrilled Napoleon is about it. He's all like, Yeah! Dick!
These three sculptures tell a story about Maubeuge. Perhaps they may explain to you why I would not like to live here, but I would like to make a movie about men whacking each other with swords here. It seems appropriate.
I spent three days camping out, drawing Cloudhopper pages (finished two!), and taking more pictures of the ramparts:
There are people in this picture if you know where to look.
I took many, many, many more pictures than this -- I plan to use this as ref for Cloudhopper and many other things. I'm mostly just posting the pictures with people in them, for some sense of the scale of these endless, pointless walls.
There were quite a few places where you could get inside.
Me, leaning as far out over a wall as I could to take pictures of what it would look like if you were trying to climb up it. You will see these pictures, but they will be called "Cloudhopper" when you do.
By the way I totally speak French. Some kids asked me;
"Pourquoi prendez-vous photos des ramparts?"
I responded, "Je suis espion pour les Etats-Unis. Nous allons attaquer ici."
"Qu...quoi?"
"Nous avons beaucoup des chevaliers, beaucoup des trebuchets."
"Ah...um. Ah...bon journee, monsier."
Translated:
"Why are you taking pictures of the ramparts?"
"I am a spy for the United States. We are going to invade here. We have many knights, many catapults."
This was easily my best conversation in French yet.
But it is time to come home, so I left.
Belgium
Maubeuge is 9km from Belgium. I just walked it. By the way, I weighed my backpack and gean in Saint-Lo and it was 25 kg, or a third of my body weight. I did all my Xmas shopping in Maubeuge and now it weighs more. But I walked to Belgium, and then got a ride to the train station in Mons.
They were rough about checking tickets in Belgium so I kept jumping off the train. I think this was Charleroi. I went and wandered the town.
I think that says they are selling prosthetic breasts. The eight-year-old in me giggles at this picture. I'm not sure what the name of the store is but I think it means "Quite a story."
Anyway, I went shopping again in Charleroi and bought even MORE books. Then back to the train. The train was so crowded that the conductor couldn't check tickets at first, but after a while he found me so I said I was going to the next town, which happened to be....Hoy. I coulda waited for the next train but I didn't feel like it. The idea was to walk to the autoroute and hitch for a while.
I don't usually carry a map. Of anything. This is not a problem in America because I've memorized the place. This is a big problem in Europe and messed with me a lot on the way to Saint-Lo. It was also a problem here, because I couldn't find a map in Hoy. So I didn't know that the autoroute which looked so close when I checked in Charleroi was eight kilometers away, on the other side of a mountain. Walking, as it turned out, was dumb.
But I saw a beautiful view.
This two-hour hike was pretty much all I know of Belgium. I can tell you this:
The most Belgian-looking person I know is Tyler Stafford. Congratulations, Tyler! You win the "skinny tall pale white guy with red hair award!" Seriously how the hell do you stay so not-tan you live in LA.
If Belgium is indeed the promised land for comic books I saw little evidence. There was a poster on a wall in Charleroi advertising a comic book, that was new, but that's about it. I also saw no evidence of waffles. I saw a place in the train station that sold all sorts of chocolate, but they had no customers at all and the woman that worked there looked worried.
I did notice this -- Belgium is Africa-crazy. I saw African restaurants, advertisements for African vacations, stone buildings with thatched roofs like African huts. If you know your history you'll find this interesting, and this certainly makes me speculate about the connection between the Belgian Congo and WWI/WWII. Belgium, of course, is the preferred route for Germans invading France, and did not have an easy time of it. No, they did not. I did not take pictures of the "Mort a la Grande Guerre" memorials but they were common, and the lists of names were long.
The place is very hilly, stone buildings everywhere, quarries everywhere. I think a lot of Europe's buildings are made of little bits of Belgium. Everyone speaks French, no German, barely any Dutch. The people are pale and unassuming, jolly but resentful of the oncoming winter -- if you had to connect it to anywhere in America, I would say "Minneapolis people in a northern Appalachian setting." And it is very far north here indeed -- they're on the 54th parallel.
After a long, long, painful while I found the road again and hitched out with a very nice woman named Nadine (both my rides in Belgium were with middle-aged women, which now that I think of it is also unusual), and she dropped me of in Liege, which is another town that nobody ever heard of but they had a magnificent train station.
Look at it it is the future.
Or an egg slicer.
This is not a building, per se. It has no walls. It's just a giant hat they put over some trains.
Walkin' to the future.
I rode the train from here to Münster, arrived at 1am, no bus running, so I walked to Astrid's house, it was cold, I got lost, it took two hours.
So that's six hours of hiking with a backpack that weighs almost half as much as I do. GODdamn. What a long day. I think I went 30km in the day. This was easily the roughest day of hiking yet, beat hell out of the Marne.
And now I'm in Münster and everything's jake. We're going to see a castle on Friday, marking the second tourist-thing I've done in two months (this and the Louvre). Today we went to the art supplies store and I bought me a reasonably-priced German lead holder, which is only the fourth or fifth thing I've bought in France, and we went climbing at a little local climbing wall.
Astrid warming her hands before trying that wall again. Winter came to Deutschland the day before yesterday.
Then we played with the hedgehog for a bit and everybody went to work or sleep, except for me. I've been writing this for three hours.
The Last Temptation of Christ
I read The Last Temptation of Christ, which is sort of an interesting story in itself. Here's what happened:
I left America in a bit of a rush and forgot a couple important things, specifically books and t-shirts. I've been wearing the same three t-shirts, over and over, in different combinations for the last two months. And I haven't had much to read. I've been living off books that I found in my grandmother's attic. After I finished a YA book about the French Revolution back in August, I had three books in English:
The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco
In the Labyrinth, by Alain Robbe-Grillet
The Last Temptation of Christ, by Nikos Kazantzakis.
I read these in order of most enticing to least. When you consider that In the Labyrinth is a story about PTSD after WWII in a nameless French soldier who spends at least thirty pages describing wallpaper, you can get a sense of how much I was looking forward to The Last Temptation of Christ. And I almost put it down after opening it, despite the desperate situation, because this book was Not For Me. You know how some art is for some people and not for others? You know how you love Frank Sinatra even though he makes me want to kill my eardrums forever with flaming q-tips? It's not because Frank Sinatra is bad -- it's because he is Not For Me. I am not buying what he's selling.
If you read Roger Ebert's review of the Human Centipede you'll get an idea about how I feel about books like The Last Temptation of Christ. I'm an atheist. Although I believe Jesus was a real human being who really existed once, and the fact that we date our freakin' calendar from somewhere around his birthday seems to me to answer the question of his historical relevance or significance, I don't particularly care about the guy. I sure don't think he was magic. I think he was a cool dude who said some cool stuff and caught some shit for it, because that's the way the world is. I don't read the Bible or any other Jesus fanfic.
But a couple people who I really respect chimed in and said they loved the book, and besides, what were my options? So I read it. I'm glad I did. I'm not sure if I would call it a good book or not -- as I mentioned above, I'm pretty sure my opinion of this book is irrelevant because the overlap between me and the target audience is minimal -- but I learned a thing or two.
This book illustrates the opinion that Jesus had a really shitty life. Everything sucked. All his friends were assholes. Nobody liked him. He was a bullshit dude in a bullshit town and nothing was ever gonna change.
God comes into the book just as a jerk who tells Jesus what to do, and he's not nice about it. Jesus wants to marry Magdalene but God gave him epileptic spasms and he couldn't do it. So instead he builds crucifixes all day and listens to his mom complaining, when are you going to get married? And he stalks Mary Magdalene.
But then at some point he gets his act together and starts preaching. It doesn't go well at first, then it goes even worse but he attracts some disciples.
The book tends to dodge all the miracles, casting them as dreams or crazy stories that people made up. At the end he actually does do a couple miracles but they're done in such a way that you can did-he-didn't-he. Ya know, like your average episode of X-Files. Kazantzakis also takes the interesting tack that Judas and Magdalene were the only disciples who were worth a wet fart. Magdalene is easily the most interesting and sympathetic character, and the story of why she became a prostitute is either incredibly insightful or just more bullshit about Jesus, I'm not sure. Actually, that could describe the whole book.
Anyway, yadda yadda yadda, Jesus does all this stuff that you already know, at the end he dies, there's a big twist but I won't waste your time, just watch the movie.
BUT.
Here's what I actually found interesting about the book.
First, it's an insight into my friends and the way they see the world. The Jesus portrayed here is full-on Suffering Jesus. It starts bad and gets worse for the poor guy. This book is actually an interesting paired opposite to The Name of the Rose, a book whose thesis is "God laughs (although we don't always get the joke)." In The Last Temptation of Christ God Does Not Laugh. At All, Ever. No jokes in this book. This is not the way my friends see the world -- if they did, I doubt they would be my friends, I'm fairly dedicated to the Trickster God. My supreme being does not exist, Bugs Bunny is their prophet, and their temple is the Louvre. I don't get along well with people who don't have a sense of humor about these things. But it's interesting, because these friends who like the book are people who have had a rough time and are up-front and honest about it. They are people who never really felt at place in the world. It's easy to see why they vibe with these particular chords.
Second, this book is sixty years old. I thought The Last Temptation of Christ was a recent book and Kazantzakis was still alive, because the movie faked me out I guess. It ain't. He ain't. It was written in the early 50s and he died in 57. K. lived through both World Wars -- as a matter of fact,
and here is an interesting fact that should be in all caps with big flashing lights around it
Kazantzakis lived in Berlin between 1922 and 1934.
Okay, chew on that for a second. Let's talk about Judas.
Judas is a good guy here. I guess this is sorta spoilers (and let it be noted here that I appreciate the majesty of a book that is a straight-out-retelling of the first four books of the Bible and still manages to be spoilerable), but Jesus straight-up tells Judas you have to betray me. It has to be you because all the other disciples are wimpy little dorks. Here is who I want you to betray me to. Why are you still standing here? Get betraying!
Judas says, I don't want to, this sucks.
Oh hell yes it sucks, says Jesus. I don't think I could do it myself. That's why you have to do it. You have the shitty job. All I have to do is get crucified.
Now if I can connect this back to real life for a second, one thing that my sojourn through Europe has shown me is that the Germans suffered more under the Nazis than ANYBODY else. The first and last victim of Nazi aggression was the Germans*, who no more wanted to invade Poland than you do. They were just people. And not only did they have the pleasure of seeing their homes torn apart by bombs and their neighbors carried off to death camps, but then they found themselves the permanent villians of the world's imagination. And then they got invaded. Fun fact -- they estimate something like ten million German women were raped in the postwar years.
Imagine if you got raped for something the Tea Party did. How fair would that be? Imagine people treated it as a moral failing that you personally did not assassinate George Bush. Multiply that unfairness by two decades and unimaginable numbers. That's what it must have been like to have the terrible misfortune to be born in Germany a hundred years ago.
Kazantzakis, as a denizen of the dream-turned-nightmare of 1930s Berlin, knew this better than I ever will.
There should be a lot of sympathy for the devil. Judas had the shit job.
This book has lead to some interesting speculations as to What Really Happened back in Anno Domini 0, but I'll save them for later. I'll mention these two because they seem important:
1) Making Matthew a disciple was the smartest thing Jesus ever did. Because if he didn't, who was gonna write the book of Matthew?
2) If you were at work one day...let's say you...you're a waiter. Or waitress. I should pick something with a gender-neutral title, make things easier. Cashier.
Let's say you work at Wal-Mart and you're in the break room with a bunch of other people and some freakin' hippie who doesn't even work there comes in with all his dirty hippie friends and says "What do y'all do?" And you say "We're cashiers." And he says, quit your job and let's go.
"What?"
Yeah, quit your job. We're gonna go wander around at random and tell other people how to live their lives.
What?
No, seriously. I'm magic. Today you are cashiers, but I shall make you cashiers of men.
Uh...ooo-kay. Freakin' hippie dude would have to be pretty dang convincing to sell me that one. I mean, I'm a freakin' hippie myself and I don't see anybody talking me into this. The apostles were either the sort of people who usually join cults (by which I mean morons and desperate folk), or Jesus had mind-control powers, or things were unimaginably bad in the fishing business, or it didn't really happen like that. Or some combination of the above. Whatever actually went down, something was lost in the translation.
*Please somebody be dumb enough to say "What about the jews and the gypsies" so I can point out the completely obvious fact that they were German too.
