Not much Paris left.
There is an odd smell here, not like the usual museum smells. It smells like sulfur. Could it be farts from antiquity? Would they save those? Could they save those?
~
The little infant Christ looks so confident when he stands up. Belly thrust forward, two fingers in the air, he looks like a tiny anime superhero.
~
There's this long, long hallway lined with paintings, and hundreds of people are milling through it, and I'm seized by deja vu. Where have I seen this before? Then I realize that the scene before me represents the common ground between the Louvre and Disneyland's Haunted Mansion.
~
If you equate the world of spirituality and religion with the world of dreams, I think the classical painters were really the first Surrealists. All these paintings of realistic scenes with angels hovering above on clouds, whispering shit. Somehow I don't think either the Classicists or the Surrealists would be too happy with the comparison, though.
~
There is a food court in the Louvre, and in its way the Louvre is the food court of museums. An immense obtuse arc of art from which you can select and sample a smorgasbord of city-states and siècles.
The above is my attempt at a Nabokov-ian alliteration. So far, I consider the peak experience of my Paris visit a post-Louvre interim at the Cafe de Comedie, completing a snack's-worth of transaction in my fledgling French (un café et un pain au chocolat; oui, café black*; c'est tout?; oui, un pain au chocolat; merci, au revoir) and reading Nabokov's Ada; a book which I now realize I've mispronounced in a great many crossword-puzzle solutions.
Tomorrow I head for Prague. I'm sorry I haven't been able to follow all of your suggestions: Absinthe is going to wait for Prague (where it's better and cheaper). I couldn't go everywhere people suggested, I spent too much time being lost instead. And Bree, I didn't take your suggestion, as it was unclear - was there a specific French girl you wanted me to fuck? I couldn't find Audrey Tautou.