The Lexicographer's Rules

You just knew I'd start sprinkling everything with French words, didn't you? So far, everything seems slightly cheaper than New York City, probably because of the great exchange rate. Shopping last night: muesli (hey, it's Europe), orange juice, butter (the real kind), a box of Earl Grey tea, sterilized milk in a box, two peaches: FF51.55, about US$7.34, figuring about seven francs to the dollar. Left to right shots of my apartment (closet, radiator, windows, yellow curtains, etc.), and a picture of the kitchenette.

I am now in Paris. An uneventful flight. I exchanged my seat with an old Frenchman so he could sit next to his wife, which meant I sat next to a thin scummy Chinese man in a three-days-old, three-days-worn tan crepe suit over a horizontally striped French-style t-shirt. He wore a platinum and diamond ring the size of tractor lugnut and carried a woman's Louis Vuitton handbag. He fondled two expensive pens bought duty-free. His hair was half-peroxide auburn, half grown-out black. He stank of unwashed Chinaman and cigarettes. But when he asked me to fill out his disembarkment card, I did it anyway. He said "I no speak English" as if he'd spent more time listening to Tonto and Tarzan tapes than he had listening to native speakers. Or as if he was actually faking not speaking English, though I don't know why he would. He pulled out his wallet and gave it to me. I went through it in order to fill out the blanks on the form. Two driver's licenses, one from New York, expired in 1997, the other from New Jersey, expires 2002. So he's at least been here six years. And that's all the English he speaks? Seven credit cards. Same birthday as mine, but different year: July 16, 1957. I put "businessman" in the appropriate field, but I think he's a snakehead on his way to spend some of his extortion money as the illegals he imported wade ashore off of Red Hook. The first photo is out my kitchenette window. The second is a look out the window on the stairwell. This is the stairwell itself.

In preparation for Paris I have been reading books. I am in the middle of my 22nd book about Paris, or France, or the French, this one "The Oxford History of the French Revolution" by William Doyle. I recommend it as a quick, smart gloss on a complicated bit of world history. I also recommend "Portraits of France" by Robert Daley. He knits together personal stories and history in a pleasant, engaging way, in which the reader is tied up, bound, and beaten about the neck and head with the story of Roquefort cheese or the momentous opening of an ancient bottle of wine. A good book, whether you're France-ward or not. Please notice the absence of links to an online bookseller. This is intentional. You are capable of finding them on your own, I think. I should also like to take this moment to say that if you are in the market for used books, and you live in or are visiting New York City, you should go to the Strand at 12th Street and Broadway where you will find approximately one-half of all of my books on sale for less than the cover price but for more than I was paid for them. Rex and Carol and I hauled them downtown yesterday, a supposedly quick task turning into a multi-hour trauma due to cars from Maine and Delaware clogging the streets looking for God knows what. The Strand's buy-back policy is efficient. You bring in your books. If you have a lot, they only want to see a box or two to start (I had eight boxes) to verify that you are not trying to pass off crap. People do that. I saw them. Old, crumby books used until that moment to prop up furniture or to wipe dripping grease off of restaurant exhaust hoods. Then one of the NYU students the Strand employs takes your books out of the boxes, creating hard- and soft-cover stacks. A curt no-nonsense man takes a quick look at each book, stacks the ones he wants near him, slides the rejects your way. He decides, he says, based solely on quality, although he's partial to art books and academic texts. It's fast. It took about 15 minutes to go through all eight boxes. They bought a little more than half of my books, not counting the ones I couldn't part with. It felt criminal. They paid me $205. That's about, oh, I dunno, $2800 less than those books were worth new. Not that I bought them new. I buy books for the words, not as fashion accessories. Seemed like free money to me, so I took Rex and Carol out to Good World, a pleasant little Scandinavian restaurant in the untouristed part of Chinatown. Orchard and Division streets. There used to be a barbershop there by the same name. We sat and ate in the brick and iron courtyard for two hours, loving the company of our cute Swedish waitress (who appreciated my few polite Swedish phrases), the beer and the pytt i panna. The books the Strand didn't buy and I didn't keep I took around the corner to the Salvation Army where the staff will probably take them home, read them, and then try to sell them to the Strand again. Who hates Paris? Also in preparation for my departure, now less than a week away, I have during the last few months quizzed 13 people and talked to another 28 idly and frivolously about Paris, France and the French. They ranged from Paris natives to college kids on holiday. This might surprise you, but about one-quarter of all of these people do not or did not like Paris. This leaves San Francisco at the top of my list of "places people like unreservedly," barring the one person I know who hated it because that's where she found out her beautiful, seven-year husband was gay and had been sleeping around. But I think I have determined, without ever actually having been to Paris, why these people dislike it. There's the group for whom Paris was their first venture into any true urban area, any pedestrian city of any real size at all. So the noise and the dirt and the crowds seemed to those people as if they were characteristics of Paris alone. This is particularly true for those people who are almost completely car-bound when they are at home. They don't know what a great pedestrian city is like. Despite the logic error, I think their dislike of Paris is fair. A few of them, I know, also do not like New York City for the same reasons. They are not devoted pedestrians or urbanites. These are, I think, reasonable dislikes. Then there are the people who hate Paris because they are imbeciles. I found one in the form of a "native New Yorker." A couple of weeks ago I was meeting Mac on Avenue B to eat at Max's, a rinky-dink pasta joint with chintzy interior and the kind of pasta you want to spoon into your shirt pocket so as to eat it more of it later when you're not so full. So I showed up early, popped into a nearby bar for some neat rum, and started chatting with the Lesbian couple to my left and Miss Cleavage to my right. As it tends to do, housing came up, and rents, and apartments, and where we've all lived and blah de blah blah. Miss Cleavage apparently is a "native New Yorker." I use the quotes with some seriousness, to indicate the questionability of this application of the term, particularly as it is self-applied. A Native New Yorker, in my opinion, need not only be born here, but must know the city. That is, Know The City. Anyway, Miss Cleavage is also bicoastal. San Francisco and New York. She likes San Francisco better she says, and hates Paris most of all. She brought it up, not me. Paris? You "hate" Paris? How's that? "Well, they were just, so, you know, rude, just like everyone said they would be. They, like were so just like 'Oh zee dirty Americans.'" What? What part of Paris were you in? "Well, one time we were in McDonald's and..." Dear Reader, you're understanding this right? She went to McDonald's. In Paris. Some of the best food in the world she passed up. Even the homeless eat better in Paris than McDonald's can serve. Or so I'm told. Which, uh, McDonald's? "The one on the Champs Elysèes. We were just checking it out. We just wanted to see what McDonald's in Paris is like." This is a Big Lie. This is a Big Lie I've heard a thousand times. "We just wanted to see what it was like." Crap. Bullshit. You were a stupid American tourist without the guts or the gumption or whatever small little bit of toenail dirt it takes to actually walk into a strange restaurant in a strange city and try to make sense of the place. You didn't even have the spine to at least eat local fast food, but had to eat at McDonald's. Dear Reader, please don't get all defensive. I know you've done it. I've done it. You've travelled away from home, even in the US, and automatically headed for the Arches when you were hungry. It's so easy. So simple. Automatic. Like smiling at someone who smiles at you first. Like taking a flier someone hands you on the street. I forgive you. But please don't compound it with rationalizations, justifications. In a big city, I can't think of a single good reason to eat there. You can just go ahead and use the restroom, you know. You don't really have to be a customer. Her justification was that McDonald's was cheap. Sure it was. I'm sure it was the cheapest thing on the great Champs Elysèes. That's because the Champs Elysèes is one of the worst tourist bungholes ever invented and trod upon by fat American tourists in stone-washed jeans and white running shoes. It's like the Hard Rock Cafe, Rockefeller Center and Big Apple Tours rolled into one. A Huge Waste of Money and Time. Of course, she, like most of the other people who "hate Paris" spent three days there. Part of a whirlwind, three-week tour of all of Europe. I always like to ask these people how they liked Warsaw, and did they find Danes to be nice people, but Europe for these types consists of no nations, just the cities of London, Paris, Amsterdam and Florence. The rest of Europe is of much of an interest to them as Nebraska is to Parisians. Miss Cleavage also does not qualify as a native New Yorker. She's one of those provincial New Yorkers for whom a trip to Shea Stadium is like taking the train to Boston: a real event. The only reason she's bi-coastal is because her parents are divorced. A hundred bucks says she's never been to Oakland, either. She's the kind of person who thinks everything above 96th Street in Manhattan is Harlem and is always amazed to be reminded that there are different, unconnected Broadways in the other boroughs. There was, I must admit, a gleam of perverse pleasure in her eye. It seemed to me she did not really hate Paris. She just liked telling the lie. The obstinancy and contrariness brought any attention that her cleavage hadn't already procured.

I was reminded recently of the fact that I have used the Internet longer than 95 percent of its current users. That still puts me in the company of thousands, tens of thousands even. But it also means I remember things at the beginning of the explosion that millions don't. I clearly remember when I could keep up with all the new cool web sites on the web. All of them. I remember when the blink tag rebellion started. I remember Yahoo! from the beginning. Also there's the memory of the burgeoning New York new media crowd, in its prime in 1994 and 1995. I attended those early meetings. I read their newsletters, scoped their web sites, sent them email. What stands out in my mind was the sinking feeling that overcame me when I read and heard what they had to say: these people were rejects. They were failed advertising account executives, pony-tailed musicians who peaked in high school, middle-level print production grunts, art school grads temping for a living, ex-models of both sexes, a slough of writers who'd yet to find their niche and hoped to create a new market for their detritus, hopeful actors who kept dropping trays. These people believed they would lead the way. They would succeed at last. That they were a whining, noogey splotch of pedants never seemed to bother them. That they were already late-comers didn't seem to bother them a bit. Their ideas amounted to rebelling against traditional media. Destroy the tyranny. But the ideas were retreads and backed by greed more than business plans. About the time Kyle Shannon gave me his business card for the seventh time, not remembering giving me the first six, I was ready to give it up. That was not the cause of my disgruntlement, only symptomatic. I wanted no part of "new media." I rejected the glad-handing, dollar-oriented approach, pleated pants and white oxford shirts with sweat-stained collars and cheap running shoes. It was worse than the fakey-fakey world of advertising I loathed, but at least as IT Director of a 60-person ad agency I could avoid the worst of it, and I could stay out of new media. Underlying my rejection was the tendency to avoid something based upon the people who have taken it up, to judge music or a trend or a work of art not by the characteristics of the product, but by the nature of its supporters, by the quality of its fans. I rejected the new media business because I felt fouled by its proponents. After the glut of one-man web site building shops had begun to blur the difference between 12-year-old HTML wizzes in Kansas City and professional graphic designers gone digital, conglomerated agencies of the supposed pros struggled to find a white collar niche that would put them above the blue collar labor of site building. Against all odds (and ultimately doomed to failure), I convinced the old-school ad agency I was working with to seek an alliance with one of these new companies. The Internet, I predicted, would ultimately join print and broadcast as a medium crucial to the advertising business. As much as I loathed new media, I knew it was the way to go. An old-school agency could give a new media group expertise in everything they lacked, and they could provide the digital age component. Originally we submitted requests for proposal to eight agencies; six declined to respond. I knew people at these companies personally and I found out why they declined: they wanted to be seen as something other than web page creators. "We," I heard in these exact words more than once, "do not build web sites." What these new media companies laid claim to was the realm of the traditional advertising agency outside of actual advertising itself: branding, media buying, marketing, public relations, anything just short of advertising. They rarely laid claim to advertising because they believed advertising agencies were representatives of Satan. You never heard a mob cheer louder than at a New York New Media Association meeting when somebody ripped into traditional advertising agencies. If they had an effigy, they would have burned it. One reason they didn't want to be seen as web site builders is because the exorbitant fees could no longer be charged for that service. Anyone could do web pages, and would, for far less than the $80 or more dollars per hour or the $7500 dollars a site some companies were charging. When times were good in the beginning, when talent was rare, these companies squandered that easy cash, over-invested in technology, office space and personnel and failed to foresee the current glut of expertise; even old-school Olgilvy did it. Now that margins were thinner, they saw a need to diversify their areas of expertise into more profitable new media enterprises and so chose to abandon web page creation, at least in name. In truth, they were still building web sites but brushing on a thin patina of branding and marketing lingo. These new media agencies felt they could completely replace "old media." Completely. There was only one problem. Many of these new media agencies had virtually no experience in the areas they were trying lay claim to: no real branding experience, no media-buying capabilities, no way of launching a campaign in any medium but their own. They had no expertise. I sat in these meetings, both on behalf of my day job and on behalf of a couple of personal IT clients. I recognized what I was seeing, having seen it in the ad world before: they were going to pitch the business as if they could handle it, then hire freelance talent like mad, even job the business out wholesale to other, more capable companies. So they hired more of the failed account executives, the cast-offs. This talent was cheap. Some of the recycled talent thrived. Some brought in competent friends. In time, the new media agencies became traditional advertising clones, the ones we see today. They are indistinguishable from traditional agencies. A dot com in the name means nothing. It amuses me to remember the chorus of complaints against old media in those early meetings, then remember what new media has become. What does this sound like?

I don't remember where I first heard or read this story. A fakir in India a long time ago travelled from town to town putting on a performance. He had the ability to speak nearly all of India's 400 or more tongues fluently, as if he was born to them. He would stand in the center of town and challenge passers-by: "Win a piece of gold! I can speak any language in the world! I challenge you to stump me! Price of playing is a hand-full of rice. Speak to me in a language I can't speak! Nobody has stumped me yet! And you can win ten pieces of gold if you can tell me the language I learned at my mother's breast. Grand prize! Which language was my first? One hand-full of rice only!" And eventually, people would pay their handful of rice, and try a few words of the language their old grandmother taught them when they were young. The fakir always responded in kind, usually with a clever bit of poetry or doggerel, so he not only won, but was amusing and soon gathered a crowd. Then the old grandmothers themselves would come out, speaking languages out of the mountains, or from across the sea, or sacred tongues they had been taught on the sly by past lovers. The fakir spoke them all! Then one day he landed in a little town in Andra Pradesh where lived a clever little farmer who had a small rice paddy and two oxen. He was very successful but had never been educated. The farmer listened to the fakir tease and win and flirt with the crowd. And he considered the matter. At the end of the day, when the fakir was about to wrap it up and move on, the farmer spoke to him and said, "Please, stay with my family tonight. You are a very educated man and I think we may learn a thing or two from you." The fakir of course accepted and they spent the night eating bowls of rice and drinking wine and rice beer and laughing at each other's stories. That night as the village was sleeping, the farmer rose from his mat where he had been resting but not sleeping. He padded down to the river and drew a deep bucket of water. He hauled it back to the tent and threw it on his guest. "Aiiieeee! Oh Shiva!" The fakir called these words out in his birth tongue, a language from people far up the Ganges. "Why have you done this? Are we not friends?" he asked the farmer. The farmer replied, "Last night I fed you my rice. More than a handful by my count. And now I seek the ten gold coins in return. For the language you speak is..." and he named the language. The fakir laughed and laughed. "You are the first! No one else knew the trick, because they forgot a simple truth: we are what we were when we were in the houses of our mothers. And we become it again in moments of unthinking. We can build on top, but we cannot remove the foundation."