Je suis absent du bureau.
I am in France, but not really.
I’m still in France
No I’m not. Sacha and I returned to Philadelphia last Wednesday evening after five weeks, thirty-five days in France. As we were sitting here on the sofa on Thursday morning, with the cats and the laptops and the coffee, just like pretty much every morning before we left, we were thinking about how, just one day earlier, we had left the town of Menton, on the Italian border, and driven to Nice, across unrealistically high viaducts and through long tunnels in the mountains above Monte Carlo, with the Mediterranean Sea glistening in the morning sun. That was weird.
I tried to capture it in my sketchbook as soon as we got to the plane.
But, I’m still in France
I’m still processing this trip. I will be doing this for a while in ways mundane, as well as deep and philosophical. How we have our back yard set up. How we cook and eat. The country we live in and its politics (which, well, has been depressing since we got back). Writing and drawing. This processing will inform future trips that Sacha and I take, and how we want to spend our time and money as we get into our late 50s and beyond.1
Sacha and I each had our own personal agendas with which we arrived in Provence, and over the course of five weeks we had to reckon with some things that surprised us. The trip was originally formed around Villecroze, the town where Sacha lived for a year with her parents and little sister in 1979, when she was eight years old. We thought it would be fun to try to find the old farmhouse where they lived, spend some time in the square near the school she attended, and remember her parents2. Though we saw her old school, and the town square where 8-year-old Sacha spent some time, and these things delighted me, we didn’t find the house. Unsurprisingly in retrospect, it dredged up a lot of stuff that I watched her work through.
My stuff was different and less visceral. I lived in Paris for a year in 1988-89, as a junior in college, and again in 1990-91 when I returned after graduation. I loved Paris. I loved France. I was dead-broke when I was there, jumping turnstiles and living on friends’ floors and sofas. I did some work as a graphic designer and I wrote and drew what became my first graphic novel, my first published book of any kind, while living near Place Pigalle. Creatively, it set in motion everything that came afterward, and I really believed I would stay in Paris forever.
I didn’t, of course. I ran out of money and options in June of 1991 and I left Paris, returning home to my mother’s house in the Fort Worth suburbs. Two years later I moved to San Francisco, and then Philadelphia, and here we are. I last traveled to France in 2004, and now I can’t believe I went two decades between visiting. In that two decades, I’d romanticized France, and travel, and living somewhere else, and maybe at times I’d romanticized a life, a life in France, that I didn’t end up leading. This France looked and smelled and felt a certain way, the way I remembered it looking and smelling when I was young and hungry in 1991. France doesn’t look that way, not Paris and not Provence, and probably didn’t even back then.
I realized that this trip was going to frame a different perspective on France, on travel, and on me as a 56-year-old artist. I kept a journal. I’m working this out. It might take a while. Stay with me.
I’m in my studio.
Okay, I’m actually on the sofa in my living room, in my house, with a cup of coffee. But since we’re talking about head-space here, not actual physical locations, I’m in my studio. While I was in France, I was not in my studio, and I missed it. One thing that I realized very quickly is that I was not going to get the work done that I’d expected and planned to. I just didn’t see the option to have a dedicated place and time to live in my own head the way I need to so that I can make art. If we do this again, I told Sacha, in France, or Mexico City, or anywhere, I need to center it around a workshop, or a teaching gig, or something. Some sort of structure.
We returned to Philadelphia on Wednesday, we did laundry and paced around aimlessly on Thursday, and on Friday I actually forced myself to go to the studio and draw. And what did I draw? I drew France.
After drawing those two little drawings, and before leaving the studio for the weekend,3 I began a collage. I knew I wouldn’t get very far, but leaving this partial collage on the desk would keep me thinking about it over the weekend, and give me something other than a blank page on Monday morning.
This was a very good idea. I got to the studio Monday morning and was able to immediately dive back into this collage, by (ha ha) scrapping almost the entire thing and starting over. I actually made two collages. These were made on two old book covers from the same old book, and are the first time I’ve used a substrate other than wood.
They’re for sale, by the way.
Now I need to get back to work. Like, work, work. Getting-paid work. My fall semester begins in six weeks, the insect stories won’t write themselves, and there’s a book I’m illustrating whose sketches were due a month ago. If you need me, I’ll be in my studio.
But really, I’m in France.4
I’m reading a book that I love, and I’ve been wanting to talk about it for a month. As we began packing and getting ready for this trip, back in May, Sacha and I had several conversations about the books we planned to take with us. I asked for some sci-fi recommendations and found a book at the public library called Invincible by Stanislav Lem. I’d read some Lem previously, and though it’s not the one I’m talking about, it did not disappoint.
I also wanted something with short-attention-span short stories, or essays. Something I could pick up here and there and feel less committed to. I’d learned about a writer named Lydia Davis when Paul Auster, her first husband, passed away in April. She was described as a writer of short experimental fiction, which piqued my interest, and when I found a recent book of her essays where she writes about writing, and especially her own writing, I bought it. Typically, a requirement for travel-reading is that the book is paperback and easy to carry around. Essays One is neither. 528 pages, hardcover, and it’s basically a brick. And it’s the most delightful, interesting, educational brick I could have taken with me to France for five weeks.
By the time we’d arrived, I’d already began Invincible, so it stayed next on the bedside table as my nighttime reading. And it worked well in that role, as each day I looked forward to finding out what happens to the stalwart crew of the Invincible on this inhospitable planet inhabited by mysterious swarming machines. In the mornings I’d read a few pages of Essays One, and found myself underlining passages, and dog-earring pages, and reading sections aloud to Sacha, and googling writers and books that Davis mentions. I really love this book and could not have been more pleased when I saw that there is a 592-page follow-up, published in 2021, called, of course, Essays Two. The internet tells me that it weighs almost a half pound more than Essays One.
I feel like I need to plan another long trip.
One of the first things Sacha said to me when we got home was that it was time to start thinking about getting a dog. I am 100% on board with that.
Who passed away in 2014 and 2018, fuck cancer, thank you.
Working and starting new things on Fridays is always fraught with the problem of weekends.
Anecdotes and thoughts and photographs from this trip will be making their way into these newsletters for a while. If you’re really curious, there’s a photo-blog Sacha and I put together that I plan to update soon.
Love it. More journal flip-throughs, please.
Hi Brian, Great read. Now you have perked my interest in the essays book. hum. OK I bought Vol 1 and 2.