Henry Miller fucked here! And the beds have not been changed! "If you can't get laid in there, you is ropey!" says your airline stewardess. (My translation.) I am first to wake from my palette in this much storied, glorious heap of books at the foot of Notre Dame. Best view of Paris! Last night we got running water! "Live For Humanity" carved into its stone stairs. Here I met a zaftig Swedish "dancer" who climbs up the outside of apartment bldgs. alone at night in Paris, and watches the bourgeois sleep! Shakespeare and Co.'s Eminence Grise, George Whitman, serves a celebrated Sunday "Tea" (which he does not attend), shrewd in his knowing it to be crude-brewed by two hippie girls just hitch-hiked in from Croatia--in the pot he uses to boil his socks! Today's talk in this literary salon is of The Autobiography Of Malcolm X. An educated Englishman actually asks if we still have "racism and Welfare" in the U.S.? I put a stop on saying that problem was solved by killing all poor blacks. He is not the idiot! Though no doubt woefully (willfully?) under-informed, in all innocence, Europeans simply may not see how an "advanced" country with so much principle, principal, and power can still support (read, enforce) racism and poverty, anymore than can they understand or even know how many Americans are without medical coverage because we cannot afford it. It's beat, and it goes on.
     At Lookout Sculpture, a 3 building 3 years and running Art squat in St. Ouen, a semi-industrial flea-market suburb of Paris, I meet 26-year-old poet Nolwen Gaumend (this name an anagram for Guennael Dumond) who writes "rhymed science fiction poetry about India." I ask if he is from India. He says "My mind is from India!" He has so elegantly published his own book Reves Mecaniques, at an Indian printer's (of course) because, as he states "In France there is no chance." His favorite English expression is "In the middle of nowhere."
     In the Quartier Latin I greet Alexander Nouvel, a thwarted Doctoral candidate at the Sorbonne. He maintains that Blaise Cendrars, poet, world traveler, and world-class liar collaborated secretly with his friend, the little-known travel writer A. T'serstevens; that these two devised a code in which they alone could communicate, swapping letters to co-author "Cendrars'" work. Nouvel has cracked this code, and soon means to vindicate his much villified thesis. (Uh huh. I also met a "Gypsy" who was making a Tarot deck based on the stations of the Paris Metro.)
     Amongst wildly appreciative afficionados and the cognoscenti, I was pleased to be present at the premiere of Nouvel's 3, a 3-minute film in an alley off Rue Verneuil, a stone(d) keg's throw from former Existentialism's Café Deux Magots.
     These films feature Michel Butor, author of Histoire Extraordinaire, comfortable at home smearing fingerpaints on the pages of irreplaceable manuscripts; George Whitman (Spahn Movie Ranch, Paris Branch), looking every bit the "great grandson of Walt Whitman" he now tells tourists he is; and the noir-war film director Samuel Fuller, waiting. Let me explain. Nouvel came upon Fuller waiting for his camera man in the Metro. Having a Super 8 camera, he then pretended to be that camera man. . . No slack hat, Fuller said, "you're not my camera man!" Nouvel shot one spool of Fuller waiting.
     
Later, at the Sexpatriots Club, an all-girl "wilding" society in way gay Paree, Americam author Karen E. Lillis read from I, Scorpion: Foul Belly-Crawler of the Desert, at its Paris premiere. She appeared literally dressed to kill, in an Elsa Lanchester Bride of Frankenstein fright wig replete with lightning bolts. The novel, too, is killer.
     And as for George Whitman, what hasn't already been said? At 89, he is our fair Earth's most gracious gentleman caller. Though he threw one girl out of his haunts for crying, saying, "You can't be that sad in here!" I saw the next day she gave him a spanking. . .

Paris Sept.-Oct. 2000.

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