shhh, peaceful

Friday, 4/24, in Cherbourg, morning at La Hague waste-processing site, afternoon at the construction site of a new state-of-the art EPR reactor at nearby Flamanville, then train back to Paris for the night.

Okay, kind of funny story this morning—our bus was leaving the hotel to go to the La Hague site where they treat spent nuclear fuel and process it before sending it off to the MELOX plant we saw on Wednesday for recycling. And at one point we were stuck behind a flatbed that had a huge cement half-cylinder on it and an escort of flashing trucks. So naturally, being budding nuke dorks, we all excitedly thought it was a part for the Flamanville nuclear plant being constructed that we were going to see later that afternoon. So everyone got out their cameras and we were all thrilled that here we were stuck in a traffic jam behind some key reactor component and whooo. Except after about 20 minutes it turned off on a totally different road and it was clear that it must’ve just been some concrete sewage pipe part or something mundane that we had all taken endless pictures of.

La Hague was seriously cool. Here’s what happens: The used nuclear fuel rods come in on a giant truck and, they’re highly radioactive, so they’re stuck in a room where the windows are all one-meter thick leaded glass, and they’re manipulated with these giant robot arms. Anyone who went into the room would be in bad shape very quickly, so you don’t go in there. Then the old fuel rods are placed in a casket and put in a gigantic swimming pool so that they can cool off for a few years.

Next we saw the swimming pool itself and stood near it and all that lay between us and highly toxic used fuel rods was four meters of water. You could see the caskets down below, glimmering at the bottom of the pool. So naturally I asked what would happen if you fell into the water, because there was only a thin guardrail preventing that. It turns out that water stops radioactive particles very well, and as long as you stuck to the surface of the pool, you’d be quite fine. It’d just be a terrible idea to try to dive deep down and try to touch the barrels.

Then after the fuel rods cool in the pools for a few years, they’re chopped up and the metal is separated from the uranium and plutonium and toxic fission products, and then the uranium and plutonium is separated and sent off for recycling to create new fuel, and all that’s left are the highly dangerous fission products (about 4 percent of the spent fuel—so recycling essentially reuses 96 percent of used nuclear fuel). Then the fission stuff is melted into a goo and mixed with glass so that it turns into glass particles and goes into a new cask and is then being stored temporarily at La Hague while France comes up with a new permanent repository.

Next we sauntered into the room that held all the fission-product waste deep underground and stood on top of it all. We were quite safe—several meters of steel and concrete were shielding us from the radiation—but there it was, 40 years worth of French nuclear waste, piled up in three rooms the size of high school gymnasiums. I’m still not convinced that nuclear-waste recycling is the greatest thing since sliced atoms, but it was certainly striking to see that finding space to store it all was certainly not the issue. There it all was, in a few medium-sized rooms, the final unusable waste, supposedly fused with glass and unable to get out even if the glass shatters (although I’m not totally sure how that works—a very nice Areva chemical engineer from South Carolina who looked just like Pryzbylewski from The Wire explained how vitrification works, even though I kept asking stuff like, “But how do you know as an Absolute 100% Truth that the contamination will never escape the glass?). It was striking, that’s for sure.

Naturally we had to wear hardhats and white jumpsuits. Also, all of the safety signs in La Hague were pretty hilarious. One seemed to be informing workers that they should look all around them when handling something or other, but the cartoon showed a worker who appeared to have three faces on his head, which, it must be said, is not the most inspiring image when you’re wandering near radioactive waste. Also, all the computers in the control room looked straight out of some 1960s NASA station with big clunky buttons and four-color screens and a lemon-yellow chassis. But I’m sure it’s all state of the art. I hope so!

Anyway, lunch was like eight different types of meat (like I said, it’s futile to be a vegetarian here—the only salad to be found half the time is the bed of lettuce used to display the slices of roast beef), and then we went on to the Flamanville construction site, where they’re building a new state-of-the-art reactor right by the ocean. I’m not sure I learned much from this place. At one point, our guide (this was an EDF site, not Areva—EDF runs the reactors, remember, and they also manage the worksite) was mentioning that the water pumps have a flow of such-and-such cubic meters per second, and I was scribbling it down diligently in my notebook until I realized, “When the FUCK will I ever need to remember this? What am I doing?”

On the plus side, the view was impressive: Seventeen giant cranes and a huge yawning pit where the reactor would go, and the whole thing entailed 70,000 tons of iron for the rebar and 300,000 cubic meters of cement (these beasts are designed to withstand plane crashes, after all). It sort of looked like SimCity, with a new downtown rising up before our eyes, except it wasn’t a downtown it was a giant concrete shell that would house a radioactive core and steam generators and whatever else. Mostly I just wanted to ask questions like, “How do you get the cranes down when you’re done?” and “What happens if a crane falls?” and “Why do you need more security here than at the regular sites—isn’t it safer if someone just tries to blow up a construction site than the real thing?” But the EDF people weren’t amused.

Well, hell, that about covers my trip. Basically I’ve learned all about how they go about their atomic business in France, and I guess I feel slightly less queasy about all those new plants trying to sprout up in the United States. But then again, that was always sort of the case, since even the risk of a Chernobyl-type incident once every 20 years isn’t nearly as scary as the risk of really drastic global warming that turns us into chestnuts roasting on an open fire. So maybe I’ll go full shill when I come back to America and will start saying stuff like, “Hell, I stood on top of all of France’s nuclear waste and look at me! I could’ve gone swimming in the swimming pool!” Except it doesn’t work like that.

Blah, well, much to think about. I’m actually glad I’m coming home tomorrow—I’ve been running on way too little sleep these days and doing a full morning of briefings and tours and then racing across France on a train in the evening (and then those marathon five-course dinners with otherworldly meats and matching wines).

I sort of wish I’d taken pictures on this trip, but cameras weren’t allowed in most of the nuclear facilities anyway (we’re allowed to download Areva stock photos, oh joy) and I guess I described most of the highlights, which isn’t really a good substitute but how often do you like seeing someone else’s pictures anyway if you weren’t there. I took plenty of pictures in Moscow and St. Petersburg when I went in 2003, and all those crooked chapels I snapped now look as appealing as telephone poles, whereas I still get a kick out of re-reading all the frantic crepe-fueled e-mails I sent from St. Petersburg Internet cafes where I was sitting elbow to elbow with Nigerian scammers and Russian toughs in pointy black shoes and I was complaining to friends back home about starving to death because I couldn’t order anything in the Russian stores without Andrey by my side and in all of the supermarkets the bread and cheese was behind the shelf so you had to ask for what you wanted by some unknown name rather than being able to haul your goods up to the cash register and that was all well and good for the Russians (or as they say in France, Rooshans), but what about me and how I finally just caved and went to Pizzeria Uno because I had ordered some vile animal organ at the last restaurant I had braved.

***

Final bit of the final entry: I should say, the junket group had a fun last night together. None of us could stomach yet another gorilla-sized four-course Paris dinner, so we just slummed it at a bar with beer and fries. Then the older folks in our group got tipsy and wanted to ask get-to-know-you questions, so we did favorite author, favorite book, favorite actor, one-thing-we-don’t-know-about-you… sort of painfully awkward.

But it was also nothing a little wine couldn’t cure, so embarrassed silence quickly gave way to much guffawing. Highlights were when Mike, the conservative radio show guy with the bicked-bald head (who has done some pretty nifty things in his life—he was an extra in Air Force One; he’s a licensed farrier; he once lived on a Caribbean island for three years doing a startup radio station), well, sure enough, Mike listed Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism as the best book he’s read of late and I almost audibly rolled my eyes and blurted out, “That’s the most laughably horrible book anyone could possibly list…,” but then everyone snickered and I felt cruel so I added brightly, “But that’s just because I’m a liberal fascist!” But that created awkwardness, I felt, so I forced myself later to agree with Mike’s paean to Laurence Olivier (not such a stretch for me) and also then laughed heartily at his Richard Burton imitation (that was a little more painful). Then Mike and Nancy, both in their 50s at least, started squabbling yet again like siblings on a road trip over the precise parameters of each other’s questions. (Mike: “You’re listing two authors and you said we could only list one!” Nancy: “Well it’s my question, so I can do what I want. When it was your dumb question about why everyone was afraid of nuclear power you were allowed to define it the way you wanted.” Mike: “I’m not complaining, I’m just reminding you of the rules. We need to have rules.”)

Also, there’s something called eau de vie that the waitress brought us at the end for dessert and it’s some sort of schnapps-like liquid that hits you with peppermint in areas of your mouth that don’t ever see much action.

Anyway, when dinner was over, I strolled around Montmarte with a few people in the group and saw Sacre Coeur once again in the pitch black (sure enough, the b-list performers were still commandeering the adjoining plaza—we saw some teens in the dark twirling firesticks who would not even be skilled enough to hang at Newport). Off in the distance, the Eiffel tower was glittering like a sparkler on the beach. They really know how to light that sucker up at night. And then we rolled through the Moulin Rouge/Sex Museum strip where the nudie joints are blowing up and the West Africans are hustlin’. The seedy neon signs remind me of Roppongi and strangely, with that gaudy windmill atop the Moulin Rouge and the slightly flat karaoke singers flooding various cafes, I felt at home for a brief moment.

Thursday, 4/23, spend the morning in Paris at Areva HQ, then take evening the train up to Cherbourg in Normandy.

Not sure what there is to say about our morning meetings with Areva officials at downtown HQ. We asked questions. They did their best not to answer our questions. Everyone walked away happy.

Actually, here’s one interesting thing I learned. Italy was the first country ever to build a nuclear power plant and the first to shutter its civilian program completely after Chernobyl. But Italy still had all this waste that they just sat on for decades. Then, very recently, they finally decided to ship off the used fuel to Areva’s treatment plant in La Hague for recycling, and once they did that, popular opinion somersaulted and the government announced that it would start building nuclear reactors again.

So I guess the moral is that people will cozy up to the idea of new nukes if they know that there’s some master plan for the waste. That clusterfuck known as Yucca Mountain hasn’t exactly inspired the same confidence in the U.S.A. So I guess the whole point of Areva bringing us here was to make us journalists see that recycling spent nuclear fuel into yet more fuel (leaving behind a much smaller amount of unusable waste) is the ultimate sensible master plan that will enable a big nuclear renaissance. Yup, it’s all becoming clear now…

I don’t know if my questions at Areva HQ were good ones—they were about bottlenecks in the supply chain for building new plants and about how a Copenhagen climate treaty in December might “reshape the landscape” or “tilt the playing field” or some cliché like that. Their answers involved a lot of lame hand-waving. But afterward I was chatting with Kate, the reporter from Greenwire, about this and I noted how often after asking a question I’ll instantly realize I phrased it stupidly because it left the respondent an easy escape hatch, like just saying “no” or “yes” without elaboration. She assured me this was very common and it took a fair bit of experience to outmaneuver them and often you just can’t, so that’s encouraging.

Anyway, once we were done with all that I clopped over to the Musee D’Orsay in my painful new brown shoes (now with CVS-brand Styrofoam insoles for maximum toe-pinch). Oh man oh man oh man oh man. This was like top five all time in terms of museum-going adventures, not least because they had four of my five favorite Manet paintings: Olympia, Le Balcon, La Lecture, and Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe….

****SLIGHTLY OFF-TOPIC INTERLUDE****

Here’s why I like Manet so much. For one, he painted eyes better than anyone else ever, including Rembrandt, who did some really fine eyes, and including Degas, who had a few portraits with really haunting stares.

But so take Olympia, which is his most famous and shocked the art world when it was shown in 1863 because here you had a prostitute reclining on a bed looking both seductive and truly bored, with a defiant hand over her crotch, and what’s worse (according to the French academic snoots at the time), he didn’t even bother to put finishing touches on her face or bow. But what gets me is her unsettling stare, which is completely oblivious both to the maid showing her a bow of flowers and even the audience.

Most critics consider Manet a painter of exteriors, not someone who plumbs the depths of his subjects the way Rembrandt did. But this seems quite wrongheaded t ome. Many of Manet’s best works pretty clearly depict a rich interior life—that famous half-bored faraway gaze, which so many of his subjects assume, carries them aloft, out of the painting. It’s clear they’re somewhere else entirely and having their own thoughts and keeping part of themselves private even if they’re totally nude (like Olympia) or being dissected by the painter.

Another painting you can really see this is Le Balcon, which is a scene on a balcony and focuses on Berthe Morisot (a very great female painter and friend of Manet’s who has deep intense bores for eyes). The painting focuses on her—the other two figures on the balcony are out of focus, which I think was another good innovation because it’s just like how real vision works, rather than what you see in most paintings where all the subjects are all in focus the same way. Anyway, so the other figures are rushing about caught up in their day-to-day duties and minutiae, only partly themselves at the moment, but the camera lens focuses on Berthe who is staring off in intense concentration and the only one fully alive.

Look how hard it is to capture that. Look at a painting and then look at a person, even the dullest brain-dead person standing in front of a famous painting and getting their picture taken with it (everyone in Paris does this—why?), and even that dolt will generally have something to his whole visage that the painting lacks. Some jolt of life or something I can’t say. But I think Manet was one of the best at teasing out whatever that something was.

La Lecture is another innovation like this where a woman is being read to, but the reader is blotchy and painted with crude impressionist brushstrokes in the background like a ghost. And woman who’s the main subject is sitting and you can tell by her glance that she’s half-listening and half-elsewhere, and the fingers on her right hand are resting on the couch arm caught mid-gesture as if her idle boredom was suddenly interrupted by a pleasant daydream and then her right hand pinches the couch in very intense concentration, like she is split body in where her brain is, and wow wow wow. Also, the color is intense: the couch and her dress and the curtains behind her are all a slate-shaded white that covers three-fourths of the painting and makes the scene simultaneously both mundane and ethereal but also a prison.

There was also a great painting I had never seen before, and it was called Madame Manet au piano, and of course it was of his wife sitting in quiet concentration at the piano. This one is really breathtaking, but it’s subtle so there’s no actual taking of the breath until you sit and watch for a few minutes. And what you realize is that his portrait of his wife is unbelievably tender. It’s not valorizing her or making her into some elevated goddess—but it also doesn’t make her homely or earthly, the way some painters tried to do to their wives, as if that somehow made them more real. All Manet does is capture her in a muted everyday moment and demonstrates the ultimate lover’s gesture by simply wondering what she’s thinking. And because of that, even though she’s not as striking as Berthe Morisot it’s because of that that she looks very radiant there in her black sheer dress working pedantically through some etude or other.

So that private element is I think why I like Manet the most—all of his best subjects actually look like they have free will and aren’t caught up in some rote set piece or historical act unfolding inexorably toward some known conclusion but people who manage to find their own place in the world. Of course, a century later Kafka would point out very wisely that anyone trying to fence off their own private corner of existence ends up putting himself in a cage. (OK, Kafka never actually said that, but I’m pretty sure that’s the moral of most of his stories, and it’s a pretty hilarious joke when you think about it.) Still, I like Manet’s version better, even if it’s only an illusion.

****END INTERLUDE****

Where was I? Oh yeah! I’d go back to the Musee D’Orsay anytime. Like I said above: Wow wow wow wow wow. Not only is there the sweeping hall and a giant clock face that you can peer out through, but the huge Impressionist collection really helped me appreciate a lot of painters I haven’t always loved. Like, they had a wonderful Toulouse-Lautrec room with a pastel drawing called Le Lit (The Bed) that had two people cozied under a big red comforter so that you could just see their faces and their sleep eyes were staring very softly at each other. I’d never liked Toulouse-Lautrec before but now I’ll have to reconsider because anyone who can do a drawing like that is capable of a lot of very great stuff. Plus lots of other good paintings but I won’t list them all.

Paris is so arty—the Place Concorde train station had ads for Proust readings and the subway car had posters with poems on it. One went La nuit / On ne peut pas / Voir la nuit / Parce qu’il fait nuit, which basically means “the night / it can’t / see the night / because it’s making night,” which isn’t the most profound ever, but it’s better than the Lockheed Martin ads you see jousting with the Northrop Grumman ads on the D.C. Metro. But now that I think about it, there were poems in the NYC subway when I lived there in 2002, particularly one by Dylan Thomas and one by Claude McKay that I loved and remembered by heart because for some reason I remembered every poem I read that summer by heart but can’t do that anymore. Maybe it’s because brains start losing their acuity after the age of 27—it’s scientifically proven!

***

Okay, just a wee bit about Cherbourg. Northern France is totally different from southern France. In fact, Normandy’s very much like the English countryside, with mist all in the air and tough gnarled plants gripping for dear life on the soggy ground and gray stone houses with dark sloping roofs and a very chilly wind that crawls you’re your neck and gets under your clothes. Whereas down south it’s more Mediterranean and has that warm stiff breeze that smacks you in the chest like a locker-room shove and all the roofs have terracotta shingles the color of flowerpots that are there baking in the sunlight. Also, down south it’s all vineyards but up north it’s cows and sheep so it smells like Iowa.

I’ve forgotten to mention what all the business journalists on this trip are like. I’d say the trade reporters tend to be less literary—they read spy novels or Anne Rice if they read at all and love movies like Seabiscuit. (Granted, who am I to talk because I’ve hardly been reading all on this trip and didn’t I say my favorite movie was Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade at dinner one night? Yes I did.)

But the bigger point is that they all seem to have no use for color. Whenever we arrive at a new town and have maybe 20 minutes of milling-around time before we go to our four-hour dinner (yes, every night is an epic four-hour dinner—there’s no getting around it), then this one British guy named Peter Reina who works for some engineering trade pub is the only other person beside me to dash out and try to explore as many old buildings and cool nooks and crannies in our medieval locale as possible before the night is essentially lost to dining. And it’s not like I’m an especially curious person or that they’re all doing work or taking much-needed showers after a long trip or checking e-mail, because they always just end up herding outside the hotel, patiently waiting for Jarrett, our press liaison, to tell us where to go for dinner. Maybe these reporters just have instincts for certain things and not others. Trade secrets and production figures, yes. Magical alleyways nestled in a 13th century town, no.

Jarrett Adams, our Areva guide, is terrific, by the way. He’s maybe in his mid-30s, and was a journalist for a trade publication as well as Red Herring (a defunct European tech magazine similar to Wired that resembled Vogue at the height of the dot-com boom—with 450 page issues and lavish photo spreads of Nokia execs). But he’s extremely jocular and not a single ticket mix-up or reservation screw-up has phased him, and he’ll happily explain what each and every item on the menu is to all us braying journalists, and he never tries to insist on spinning nuclear power. He just seems to really believe in what he says and figures if he just slowly unspools facts whenever asked then it won’t take much to convince anyone. I guess that’s what makes a successful flack—you don’t look like you’re flacking.

Jarrett’s also happy to make fun of Areva or joke about radiation poisoning—things that might make a more uptight flack go pale—and has a warm meaty crooked smile. One time, though, he got a bit territorial and snorted about Westinghouse (one of Areva’s competitors), “Yeah, please, where’s the Westinghouse junket going, Shippingport, PA?” He then looked around and burst out laughing and said, “Don’t quote me on that!” and we all laughed too and maybe that’s what it’s like to get spun.

Meanwhile, that damned kidney/gizzard taste was still lodged in the back of my throat all Thursday, releasing some sort of acrid ooze into my mouth at random intervals. Grawwrrrrrr.

Oh, by the way, the hotel outside of Cherbourg that we stayed in was the poshest shit I’ve ever stayed in in all my mostly unposh life. The room was massive—we’ve each gotten our own rooms all trip, by the way—with a deck that looked out over the river that sweeps upward into the English channel. Fishing boats were moored at the harbor and it smelled like wet rock and algae.

Unfortunately we didn’t have time to do any sightseeing in Cherboury, but I would’ve loved to tour Normandy and the sites of the D-Day landings, even though it’s chilly here and rains 200 days per year (Jarrett, who went to journalism school in France, lived near this area for two years and says that his rugby gear was permanently soggy and caked with mud all season). Also, everyone around Cherbourg seems to have a backyard grill, just like they do in America! Rustling up some grilled kidney no doubt.

To go back to the business journalist bit for a second, that was sort of unfair what I wrote earlier about them not being curious. They’re all fantastically smart and we’ve had great arguments and discussions about all sorts of things.

One funny dynamic is that Michael, this stern older bald guy from Texas who has a radio show and might be a Republican, is constantly getting into passive-aggressive feuds with Nancy, the older woman who looks like Frances McDormand and owns horses in Oklahoma. At dinner on Wednesday I was talking about countries that set aside endangered ecosystems as wildlife preserves, and at the end Mike solemnly declared that, “Well I don’t know about that. Down in Texas, our belief is that if you want to take the land, you have to pay for it. Property rights are important.” Immediately, Nancy, who had just been off in the corner craning her neck at all the décor and quietly mouthing French words to herself suddenly snapped to attention and barbed, “Well, maybe you people should just secede if you don’t like it.” Then it was silent and no one knew where this sudden burst of hostility had come from and we all laughed nervously.

Luckily, we cut the tension by joking about radiation poisoning and how the Areva representatives everywhere we go always show us the same slide (called the “Snail Trail”) about how they manage all parts of the nuclear process, from mining to building components to recycling waste to transmission and distribution (the only thing they don’t do is run the plants, which EDF does). So we joked about things we’d ask Areva folks at the next site, like, “So I don’t understand, do you guys handle like the whole nuclear fuel cycle? Is there maybe some sort of slide we could see?” or asking prickly questions like “So you guys don’t operate the reactors? That’s lame.” And they were dumb jokes but good for when you’re a bunch of strangers trying to bond in a group and needing your own personal in-jokes.

(Of course, another great in-joke these days is that kidney/gizzard combo I gulped down on Wednesday. Har dee har har. Except then I burp up that taste onto my tongue and it’s no longer funny.)

Wednesday, 4/22, spending the day at both the GB2 enrichment facility north of Avignon and then the MELOX reprocessing plant and then a TGV back to Paris for the night.

Huh, today was busier than ever, but what to report. We saw a uranium enrichment facility, but it was still under construction, so there wasn’t all that much to see Welders and things that looked like giant Lego blocks that would hold some of the centrifuges for turning mined uranium into something that can be turned into fuel. So this is what Iran is trying to perfect. The Areva reps wouldn’t tell us certain details about the site like how many centrifuges fit in a room because maybe we’re really spies, but we’re not. Kind of boring, except we learned all about the enrichment market and why centrifuge enrichment was much better than gaseous diffusion enrichment. This facility (called Tricastin) has four (!) nuclear reactors and three of them were used to power the old gaseous diffusion process, but now they’re building a centrifuge plant for enrichment and that will take much less power. I won’t bore with details.

What’s cool is that there are a couple of wind turbines outside the giant cooling towers. Good photo op and I caught it on cell phone but maybe someone on this junket will Flickr a better shot.

What’s also cool is we had to walk around the construction site with white moon shoes and a hard hat and a neon green safety vest and a pouch with a gas mask in case there was a leak from the enrichment plant and the UF6 (uranium hexafluoride gas) started leaking and ripping our lungs apart. Fortunately that didn’t happen. We also saw some IAEA inspectors who should’ve been menacing but they were wearing the same white moon shoes we were.

Then we went off to Areva’s MELOX reprocessing plant, where treated spent fuel from nuclear power plants is taken after it’s been turned into powder at the La Hague treatment facility up north. Here at Melox, that powder is then smushed into pellets, heated, dropped into rods, the rods are placed into assemblies, and voila, you have MOX fuel that can be used for nuclear plants. This is actually how they make normal uranium fuel except the reprocessed fuel made here has plutonium, too, so it’s much more radioactive and has to be processed behind lead-lined “glove boxes” which have the little gloves in the walls for workers to reach in and manipulate without getting cancer. That means we had to wear white jumpsuits and gas masks and docimeters that measured our radioactive dosage and get checked for contamination before leaving every room. The jumpsuits were sort of stylish.

Anyway, I’m back in Paris now and exhausted. All this travel is wiping me out. For dinner I had oysters and kidneys and pig intestine and it was all rather disgusting but I had to try it because how often do you get to try this? The kidneys were just like Joyce described them in Ulysses, bearing that “fine tang of faintly scented urine,” although rather than eating them with relish, I almost ralphed all over yon table. Then I tried an andouillette sausage, which was essentially a motley crew of inner organs wrapped in intestines and it did not go down any easier, but the waiter had insisted I wasn’t ready for this when I had originally ordered it so of course to prove him wrong I downed the whole thing with a strong pastis and generous pours of white wine and French fries. Whoever might be the patron of wheat and vegetarianism please welcome me back! I repent! Good fucking lord!

Tuesday, 4/21. Spending the day in Chalon at AREVA’s St. Marcel manufacturing plant.

Let’s just say touring a large industrial plant is not something I’ve done a lot of in my day. Welders. Drills. Giant cranes. Metal broaches. Brushing robots. AREVA’s St. Marcel plant near Chalon is a massive factory where AREVA makes steam generators, pressurizers, and reactor vessels for its nuclear reactors all over the world. I had no idea how a nuclear reactor works and was desperately trying to figure out as I was scribbling down notes so furiously that my left arm cupping the notebook cramped up something horrible. Also, somewhere along the line I touched some dust crap—metal-cutting residue, maybe—and smudged all my pages.

Notable nuclear fact: Apparently there are two types of reactors. In one, the Boiling Water Reactor (BWR), the nuclear rods by some magic process boil water directly that then creates steam to spin turbines and create electricity. GE makes those plants in the United States. But AREVA makes Pressurized Water Reactors (PWR) where a smaller quantity of water is heated by the nuclear rods and then shot up 6,000 pressurized tubes that heat other, non-radioactive water that turn to steam and turbines and yada yada. What’s curious is that no one has decisively settled which approach is better. You’d think engineers would know this by now but no. But AREVA’s approach involves making steam generators and we saw how they make the steel shells and cut out the giant manhole screens to hold the tubes and when I say giant I meant GIANT, these steam generators are like 24 meters high and up to 500 tons for the newer models.

All the while I asked a lot of hilariously inane questions that actually turned out to be useful. Like our French AREVA tour guide explained how at the bottom of the steam generator there’s a porthole for a maintenance man to slip in for 20 seconds and insert a robot that can monitor the tubes for cracks or leaks. (When a tube gets a crack it has to be plugged and when 10 percent of the tubes get plugged you need to get yourself a new generator—they maybe last 40 years or so. But the curious thing here is that another thing engineers don’t quite know with Total Infallible Accuracy is how to predict when a generator will need replacing, and since it takes about six years from ordering a new one to having it assembled and delivered, it’s helpful to plan ahead. But they can’t. So regulators get angry and mishaps ensue and shouldn’t engineers know this stuff?) Um, where was I? Oh, so the maintenance man can only be in the generator for about 20 seconds before he has to get out. So I asked what happens if he doesn’t get out in time like if his shoe gets stuck does he boil to death? No, he doesn’t, but it turns out the worker can only take so much radiation exposure per year before he gets swapped out, so it’s best to keep things to a minimum. So then I asked why don’t they invent robots to put the other robots in the generator? But actually AREVA is working on that in Lynchburg. So maybe they weren’t such dumb questions.

None of the parts we saw today were radioactive—they were just components that would become radioactive later. When a plant needs a new steam generator it has to shut down for about a month while it’s replaced.

Anyway, these gigantic components get assembled bit by bit with all the welding robots and human welders and brushing robots that sand them down and lots of heavy machines. A generator takes 40 months of hard work and then it’s hauled from the large bay of the big warehouse-sized plant up to the ceiling by a massive ceiling crane and floats across the room and is then plunked down on a barge that goes out the River Saone. Actually, there’s one plane—only one in the world—that can carry some heavy components, a Russian Antonov that can haul 115 tons. I asked if pirates could steal the parts but that wasn’t an inane question that was secretly good, it was just plain inane, because what would a pirate do with a giant steel reactor vessel weighing 500 tons? Sell it off, maybe, but those pirates would have to have one hell of a crane and I don’t think they do. (Research topic!)

We were all issued hardhats that were actually red baseball caps with lining and a crumple zone on top, plus safety glasses, and everyone else’s glasses just looked like normal glasses but mine were huge and transparent and Urkelish and I looked like a South Florida retiree asking things like, “So how could a steam generator fail the safety test, like maybe if it exploded?” (Another bad question—these things never fail the test.)

It seems to me that maybe we should build some of these manufacturing plants in the United States. Oh, wait, right, AREVA is building one in Newport News, Virginia to fill the market. But why not more? Nuclear policy is all about industrial policy, I’m learning. In the 1980s the St. Marcel plant had manufactured its last French nuclear reactor and was going to shut down just like steel mills and auto plants across the United States but the French government stepped in and kept it running by pre-ordering all of its replacement parts early. It was a good move because now there’s a nuclear renaissance and the St. Marcel plant is now doing so well it’s expanding. I sound like a nuclear shill already, I know. The thing is, the French would’ve lost a lot if St. Marcel had closed because heavy industry takes a lot of specialized workers, and you can’t just close a plant and then open one back up later when demand revives and hire any old Jean, Jacques, or Harry. (AREVA actually opened a welding school for the next generation of welders.) In Newport News, it was hard finding anywhere in America where workers still had skills in heavy industry because we have lost all that, so they came to Virginia partly for the tax breaks but partly to partner with Northrop Grumman, a defense contractor with lots of experience building complicated stuff.

Also, there are a few nuclear component parts (the AREVA guide called them “lingots”) that are so big that only one steel forge in the world can make them—the ultraforge at Japan Steel Works. So Japan has an absolute monopoly on a few crucial pieces. We saw one and it looked like a massive gear or ring that held the outer shell of the generator together. But you can’t do without it. Same story here: The United States used to have a forge this big but it closed when the steel industry withered in the 1980s, while Japan was propping its up with subsidies. I don’t know if we should be propping up dying manufacturing industries or if it’s always wise to maintain a capacity to make stuff—some people would say that’s crucial for national security—but it sure is interesting anyway to see the consequences of these old trade decisions.

The big policy question is whether the United States should subsidize nuclear power massively, at least in the beginning. There’s still so much uncertainty about building new plants that private investors are reluctant to jump in. So maybe McCain is right and the government needs to kickstart the industry the way the French did. (Although the French government is the majority shareholder in all the private nuclear companies like AREVA and EDF—that is actual socialism and I do wonder if McCain is down for it). Or maybe that public money would be better spent on renewables or research or efficiency or who knows. Maybe this junket will convince me or maybe not…

***

Anyway, after the plant we zoomed by TGV down to Avignon, which I want to visit again when I have time to do sightseeing. Sadly, we got here late for dinner (another epic three-hour affair) and are leaving early tomorrow for the MELOX plant which recycles spent fuel into MOX fuel. (No idea what that means yet.)

Avignon is spectacular, wowza! It’s down near the southern coast, on the Rhone river, and is an old 13th century town that gained fame after the Holy Roman Empire moved the Holy See here in the late 1300s because they were afraid the popes were falling under the spell of the Medici family in Italy. Froissart called it the greatest fortress on earth at the time, and the city walls are still standing high and majestic around the downtown. The old city itself is all white, built with bricks of some sort of sandstone that crumbles slightly when you brush your fingers on it, but crumble or no it has stood for 700 years (the anniversary is this June) so I won’t gainsay it. In the middle of the city is the Palais des Papes where the popes were brought. I like the image of the Frankish king pulling his son out of school: “I don’t like those Italian friends of yours—they’re a bad influence!” “Aww, piss off dad, I’ll hang out with whaddever I want!”

The palais itself is a gorgeous building with dog statues instead of gargoyles and a high golden statue of the Virgin Mary that overlooks the river, and down below is the plaza where I guess the masses could get their papal fix. Even after the Holy See shuffled back to Rome a big schism unfolded with muddled lines of succession and a few imposter popes still held court in Avignon for decades.

Alas, I only had the evening to hang out there, after getting off the TGV and before dinner, so I may not have the history down pat. The city, as best I know, has never been sacked even though it has lovely Mediterranean weather and famous mustard (the Pope himself had a beloved moutardier to make his holy Dijon) and if I was a Visigoth in the 13th freezing up in Normandy or the German woods eating charred pigeon with no condiments and had heard about Avignon, I would’ve thought it worth the risk of a boiling oil shower poured down from the ramparts to at least try and sack the place.

Oh, wait, I lied. It’s not purely beautiful weather here. There’s also a strong wind called the Mistral that blows up from the Mediterranean constantly. It’s said (by a local ruffian I peppered with ungrammatical questions) that the Mistral drives people in Provence crazy, but I could not confirm this while sober.

At dinner I ate a baby lamb because Kate the Greenwire reporter had told me that the lambs were best when they had just been newly born at this time of year. It was solid but I’m rapidly descending into unchecked carnivorism and luckily the United States with its dry chicken and gritty beef should help me convert back when I return.

This woman Nancy from Nuclear Power International, who is maybe 50, sounds like my Grandma Joan and looks like Frances McDormand (one of the journalists crudely pointed out while drunk that she should star in her biopic, which was perhaps overly forward but apt all the same). She bravely insists on trying to pronounce every French word with a flourished accent—extra hairball hacking on the “r”s, you know how it goes. “Monsieur,” she asked our cab driver as we drove by the Rhone, “Je m’apelle la rive?” What she had said was, “My name is the river?” rather than what she meant: “What is that river called?” And the driver just grinned and said oui, prompting her to redouble her efforts, pronouncing “rive” over and over with more throat clearing and hocking of the “r” each time even though that wasn’t the problem here.

All the other journalists are unbelievably smart about their areas of expertise and I learn as much from them as I do from the AREVA reps and I want to take notes when they talk but maybe that would be awkward.

(Q: What does AREVA stand for? A: Jarrett says it stands for nothing and was just an onomonapeiac name they adopted when they were rechristened in the 1990s. So from now on I’ll keep it downcased. My bad!)

Maybe I’ll start keeping a journal like permanently. It’s tedious reading but no one would read it of course and writing down your day at least helps you feel for a brief bit that the hours aren’t just tumbling on by but can linger if you want them to. You know, I used to write long sweeping e-mails to all my friends all the time, blathering at length about anything, whether it was my misshapen love life or why Don DeLillo is the only real American heir to Shelley and why that’s not a good thing (this is absolutely true, by the way, truer than math or a good bleu cheese), or just things that were going on. Sometimes those e-mails were amusing to read and sometimes not and sometimes I got generous responses and sometimes not but it was all a way of preventing the hours from outracing me. Now there’s just Gchat and sputtered half-thoughts with people I no longer know well and can no longer really, I mean really, communicate with, and maybe those cranky technophobes preventing text and the like are onto something after all.

Every night we’ve gotten our own hotel rooms—this is a lavish junket!—and tonight is the best of all, since my window faces the old Palais with its crumbling white stone and I can peer down into a narrow alley that sneaks under a flying buttress. Wow, wow, wow! The stars are everywhere.

Monday, 4/20. Morning in Paris and then train to Chalon-sur-Saone.

It’s getting easier ordering breakfast. “Je voudrais un café, s’il vous plait,” and then you jab an unknowing finger at a random breakfast entry that usually turns out to be delightful. I thought about racing through the Louvre today but it seemed too onerous—and there was nothing I particularly wanted to see, except whatever Manet paintings they might have. I’m always up for Manet paintings. I once made a self-deprecating joke in a Craigslist dating ad about how I didn’t know the difference between Monet and Manet but of course it was a dirty lie just intended to make me seem the opposite of snooty because I know most of Manet’s paintings by sight and try to make it my business to see each and every one.

Oh well, not today. The sun finally came out! I can put away that sweater of mine which is starting to stink.

Instead I lugged my suitcase up and down the streets, wheeling around dog crap. Even homeless people have dogs in Paris, and whether that’s for companionship or to tug at the heartstrings of passersby (or both) no one has told me. But happily there seem to be a lot of newly painted signs telling people that if you love ton cher chien then you will for the love of Dieu put the shit in its proper receptacle. The campaign seems to be working; the sidewalks are halfway between Green Point and D.C. in terms of cleanliness—getting there.

A few more sights to see: A big mosque with minarets and an interior foyer with aqua-colored marble and I wondered about the Islamic community in Paris but NO TIME because on to the Jardin des Plantes with a menagerie housing red pandas and wallabies slumped over in the heat and a garden with bright orange dahlias and yellow pansies and then down the Seine and GOOD FUCKING LORD the National Library. Let’s pause here and give this fucker its own sentence. This is the biggest library I’ve ever seen—four 22-floor L-shaped buildings (the term is “dihedral,” and I guess they look like open books) each forming corners around an open air plaza. How many books? Does everyone read them? Alas, closed. Monday. Finally the Promenade Plantee which is that big elevated park built on an unused railroad viaduct that Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke frolicked down in Before Sunrise.

I know my way around the city so well after two days. I barely need a map for anything. But there’s so much more to do. I’ll have to come back.

What I love about Paris is that the tables and seats at all the cafés and restaurants are jammed tight together, so that you can practically inhale the dinner of the family sitting next to you. Americans need their space, I guess, though not if we environmental fascists get their way and make everything more like… the French! Packed like herring. Speaking of which, I had an excellent anchovy and herring dish for lunch, though too salty for the heat (it was really scorching now, and lugging that suitcase around didn’t help).

Finally I went to Gare de Lyon to meet the junket group. The business journalists are all very friendly, but I’m the youngest by far and they’re all way more experience than I am, which makes me naturally feel anxious. There’s an editor from The Hill who covers lobbying and some nuclear trade-publication folks who really know their gravy and two Clean Skies TV people who will shoot video and make the rest of us look unproductive and here I am just a blogger who occasionally wheedles in a print piece when they have nothing better to run in TNR.

I’m afraid of sounding ignorant on this trip and have only read a Wikipedia printout about nuclear power in France, but sometimes it’s worth asking naïve questions so I do. “How is that European Pressurized Reactor coming along?” I ask brightly. Um, the pros all call it the “EPR.” Haha, oops. Jarrett Adams, the AREVA press guy, is very dudely but very outgoing, which you have to be to guide ten bumbling journalists through reservation after reservation and answer their dogged questions and make sure no one’s unhappy. He was at TNR’s green event at the Democratic convention and apparently got into a tussle with the Sierra Club’s Carl Pope over the future of nukes. I’ll try not to let on just yet that I’m an ice-cold environmentalist.

Maybe this trip will spur me to be a better and less lazy and more industrious journalist even though that’s not what I want to be in my heart but it’s what I’m probably going to be for the foreseeable future so why not try to at least do it well?

Now we’re on the high-speed TGV train going to Chalon, a small industrial town near to where AREVA apparently forges and manufactures nuclear components. The hills are all lush and some of the fields are a neon yellow—dandelions? tulips? My mom knows so many flower species and sometimes I wish I did, too, it might make scenery seem more lively and variegated. The yellow stuff looks like something out of Ghostbusters. What is it?

AHA. Got it. I asked the conductor about les fleurs jaunes and from what I can tell it’s some type of flower used for biofuels. Maybe it’s rapeseed, used to make a sort of canola oil. I wonder if they grow it in these fields as part of a rotation to keep the soil fallow and fertile. The yellow and green looks like a Brazilian soccer jersey.

I may not be ready to go nuke-crazy just yet (our junket has only just begun!) but I’m sold, 100 percent, on high-speed rail. The TGV goes so fast the raindrops hit the window horizontally and when one train passes another they make a loud sonic burst that lasts just a second but makes your aorta wiggle with exhilaration all the same.

***

Oh, wow, okay, I’m writing a bit later from the hotel and Chalon is so nifty. It’s a town of about 100,000 mostly working in the steel industry and AREVA’s nuclear-component plant, but this is also Burgundy country. The town is on the River Saone, which is cleaner and more tranquil than the Seine, which has to get up and go to work every morning in Paris with that same gray haggard visage knowing that the whole city depends on it for character and what thanks does it get but garbage tossed on its banks and pollution and noisy tour boats paddling up and down. It’s a bit much for one river to bear. But the Saone just has to provide rustic charm, something rivers have been doing for millennia and millennia, so it just babbles gaily, oblivious to whatever heavy industry might be spewing its poison further south.

Dinner was absolutely epic tonight. We were joined by this reporter from Greenwire who is at last someone my own age (and none too soon, since I was getting tired of explaining yet again the point of Twitter). All five courses took nearly four hours, and, since the meatless options were negligible, I decided not just to turn my back on the vegetarian lifestyle but to declare total war on some of our best-loved and cuddliest herbivores. Course one was lapin, a poor widdle bunny that tasted like corn beef hash, only more adorable. Course two was scallops, which in French are called saint Jacques and I’m not sure what they did to acquire sainthood, since they don’t even have a central nervous system, which you’d think would be a prerequisite alongside performing a miracle (and even then, they were tasty but hardly miraculous in the mouth). Course three was pigeon, so rare it was nearly indigo. I had to rip small chunks off the bone and hope that this particular bird hadn’t been fattened on park pebbles and breadcrumbs tossed by old ladies. THEN a cheese platter with various sorts of mold and THEN dessert. Dear god. We sat there forever, unable to get off the meal treadmill we had unwittingly set in motion.

I’m the least knowledgeable person in the group by like light years when it comes to the (literally) nuts and bolts of the nuclear industry, so I decided to make up for it by talking a lot about irrelevant subjects and lightening the mood with “jokes” and asking a lot of questions about nukes that other people nod vigorously to while I’m asking as if they’re preparing to buzz in on Jeopardy. Or maybe I talked a lot at dinner because I hadn’t conversed with another human being in ages. Or maybe I was the only one not jetlagged.

Non-nuclear-related things I found out: In the cab from the TGV station I talked with this woman Nancy, who writes for Nuclear Power International in Tulsa, and what brought you to Tulsa and oh you own horses and how do you breed them and what tricks do they do. Racehorses, like mathematicians, peak very young—they’re usually over the hill by age three or so, because you race them when they’re as fit as they’ll ever be and you don’t need to worry about them being young and stupid because all they need to do is trot over to the gate and then follow a straight line. Anyone can do it except the absolute dumbest horses. But older horses like the ones Nancy and her cowboy husband own can be trained to rope steer and run steeplechase courses. More: Unlike with mutts, mixed-breed horses aren’t necessarily smarter than the thoroughbreds that have lots of incest in their family tree. At least according to Nancy. Actually, that seems dubious, given everything we know about genetics, but without Internet, it’ll do for actual true fact.

France’s 35-hour workweek is one hell of an innovation. The guidebook says that people work to live rather than live to work, which sounds like an old chestnut but I thought that was a neat way of putting it. The Clean Skies TV correspondent, Tyler, told me that a friend of his works at KPMG in France, and when tax times rolls around, the company has to haul people in to grind out accounting returns on the weekends, so disgruntled employees will often snitch to the labor police, who then raid the office and check to make sure people aren’t working. I imagined all these KPMG France employees frantically closing their Excel windows and opening a game of Solitaire to make it seem like that’s what they’d been doing all along.

Sunday. 4/19. Paris. Still the same hotel.

Had jet lag during the night and was wide awake from 4 to 6 but such is life. The walls of this hotel are so thin that every toilet flush sounds like it’s about to spill down on your head. I woke up in terror because I thought someone was banging on my door. Turns out it was someone for the neighbor.

I’m staying near Place de la Contrescarpe, which is one big place where Hemingway lived and worked when he lived in Paris (there’s a plaque marking his house on Rue de Cardinal Lemoin). Not that I care very much for Hemingway; he always seemed scarily stoic like the generation of quiet abusive fathers in the ’50s who had all served in the war. Still, I like being in a place that someone had haunted before and had specific thoughts and likes and dislikes and specific passionate preferences about the place.

Speaking of Hemingway, I hit up the Shakespeare & Company bookstore today, the old Sylvia Beach joint where Hem and Dos Passos and Joyce all hung out (Sylvia Beach, quite a spectacular woman in her own right, published Ulysses in 1922 when no one else would) and it’s nothing special downstairs now, aside from a bit of kitsch desperately trying to relive the glory days, but upstairs—eeeeeeeeeek—I was in pig heaven: There’s a de facto library with all these yellowing old books and plush comfy chairs that anyone is allowed to just stay and sit and read for hours (you can’t bring coffee in, but no one gets to-go cups of coffee in Paris; you sit and pound your espresso at a café before venturing onward), and every old peeling cranny in the store was stuffed with books in the way only a true book-lover would know how to place them, so as to let other fellow book-lovers make surprise discoveries anywhere they turned.

Then I hit up Sainte Chapelle which is an old 13th century church that I’d actually visited with Mer and Evan last time in Paris, but I’d forgotten until I was already inside. It’s so tourist-infested that it doesn’t inspire any awe, and what’s funny is that you have these fifteen 100-foot-high stained glass windows each depicting a book of the Old Testament and then in the last window, the guy who built the chapel, King Louis, had himself depicted receiving the relics of the Passion and placing himself in the line of biblical kings that stretched from Saul to David to Solomon. This is how nationalism works, I guess, and it could be hugely sacrilegious, this reinterpretation of biblical history, but I couldn’t get a sense amid all the yelping children and the middle-aged American woman fiddling with her digital camera and yelling at her husband, “How do you get it to DELETE, George? I can’t get it to DELETE.” So I wonder if we have anything at present that inspires genuine awe and respect now but will soon become tourist fodder centuries from now. Maybe the old World Trade Center site or maybe football stadiums.

Oh, in the old Jewish quarter on Francesca’s recommendation I ate the best falafel I have ever had at L’as de Felafel and it’s a bit sad because this place has a line stretching for half a block while all the other falafel places are trying in vain to hawk their inferior wares with no success. But crispy chickpeas and sloppy toppings! Happily Paris lets you eat while you walk, but the whole ordeal was an exercise in juggling napkins.

Um, a few museums: The Musee Carnavalet, which has lots of French history I didn’t care about (yes, yes, got it, 18th-century Paris was just like modern Paris only everyone rode horses and olive-colored shit smeared the streets) but I did see Marcel Proust’s famous bedroom that he lined with cork to keep the noise out. How did they know to preserve this room? Did someone buy it and cut it up and transport it to a museum as soon as Proust died, knowing someday it’d be of interest?

Picasso Museum: I’d never loved Picasso but seeing the full span of his life was fascinating. I liked that he was always brimming with ideas and was basically several painters in one, from the haunting Blue Period, to the cubist experiments, to the exaggerated portraiture where everyone has a big nose and thick lips, to Guernica, to the African-art obsession. But even though he was always bounding like a child at Christmastime ahead to a new idea he was also always returning to old ideas at the same time, so he might revisit cubism long after Cubism had died out. It’s notable that painters can always do multiple paintings on a single theme, each one a very slight variation, and you can look at all of them and see how the artist was trying it first this way, then this way, then what if we do this? I guess short-story writers can’t really do that because who would read all the different iterations?

Onward: Failed entry into the Catacombs (I would’ve gotten to see half-interred bones and chunks of preserved marrow) so instead, determined to see dead people, I went to Cimetière de Montparnasse, where everyone had thrown their used Metro stubs on Serge Gainsbourg’s grave (I was afraid of disturbing some carefully calibrated tradition so I didn’t) and then, even though the ligaments on the backs of my knees felt like they were about to snap, I pushed on to Sacre Coeur up on the hill in Montmarte and saw the city from overhead and dodged the Indian guy singing, “And I said hey-ey-ey-ey-ey, hey-ey-ey, I said hey, what’s going on?” (and not very well, either) and went into the church.

Sacre Coeur is another solid cathedral effort, what with the evening sun casting rays down through a stained glass window directly onto the nave. But I didn’t really feel anything religious, even though I have felt religious before and did a bit the last time I visited Notre Dame. I guess I grew up with what could be called the American religion, which is what William James defined as a personal relationship with whatever we consider to be divine. It has nothing to do with awe or terror or glitter or ritual the way European religions do (Catholicism is a perfect example). Bold churches don’t do much for me. The only time I’d ever sneak in a prayer even possibly would be if I was worried about someone I love, but again, that’s a very American thing to do, expecting that you have a personal line to the Lord to ask for favors. People awestruck and made to feel religion by big glittering holy houses would never do the same.

Oh, while I was wandering around the steep cobbled streets of Montmarte, which is the site of the original village that metastasized into Paris, I stumbled on both Maison Collignon and Bar a Deux Moulins from Amelie. The latter is the café where Amelie worked and aside from a small poster they have in the back it’s basically a normal local hangout and not (at least anymore) a light source for tourist moths. I really like the sloping cobblestone streets like you see in Bond movies or Ronin with its harrowing car chase scenes down narrow Italian back alleys. The streets are so vertigo-inducing and the small shops make it all seem so serene that a blazing car chase right through this sort of thing really does give a jolt to watch. It was enough just to hear a police car blaze through with its cute French siren (mee-MAW, mee-MAW, mee-MAW).

Getting a late afternoon wine in a café, much recommended. Maybe I should make it a habit here. Though you really need to sit outside in a table facing the street. I wish I could talk to more French people. I speak what seems to be the next level above “Survival French,” which is Misanthrope French—i.e, I can talk to people if I must but only brusquely and try to avoid any extended pleasantries.

Picking a dinner spot again felt awkward because I was alone, and I walked by L’Escargot, a famous snail restaurant, two or three times wanting to go in but not being able to justify sitting outside at a semi-pricey restaurant alone, staring glumly into the distance and swishing my wine glass while everyone on Rue Montorgueil walked by and wondered what was wrong with me that I was all alone.

Instead I went to a cheaper place called L’Epicerie and got escargot cassolette dipped in a basil butter sauce, plus some sort of side of veal slathered in Roquefort. Escargot are slightly tougher than clams, while the veal was bloody and the cheese stinky. Terrific! But again, lonely dining is awkward. Even French families seem to go out and eat together happily, spending the epic three-hour evenings together. The only other person in the restaurant sitting alone was a middle-aged man with sad eyes. He was concentrating his food more than anyone else in the restaurant, except me, and appreciating the bland décor more than anyone else, except me.

I do wish I could’ve traveled with someone. Granted, no one else would put up with my Bataan Death March through the city, traversing miles per hour and eating on the go and pounding my crumpled feet further than they could take. But it’d be nice to have company for dinner. Every time someone stared I wanted to protest and tell them that I had the most beautiful girlfriend in the world and she just happened not to be here tonight, but, but, but… Generally, I start to go a bit crazy in isolation, like prisoners in solitary confinement. The only other solo diner in the restaurant had a slightly crazed look in his sad eyes. Back in 2002, during the summer, when I lived in New York, I went crazy in a weirdly megalomaniacal way after barely talking to anyone for three months and it took awhile to recover. I start thinking things are profonde that are not, in fact, profonde. Here in Paris it’s worse because I can barely even converse a few fleeting minutes with the waitress. I can only blunder my way through a few stilted French phrases that put up more of a shield between us than if I just goofily spoke English.

The waitress, by the way, had a crooked nose and a harried face with glacial crevasses down her cheeks but she has the nicest smile I’ve ever seen. The tendons in her fingers were hard and strong from carrying plates and I’d never noticed that but many waiters must have that on their hands.

French restaurants don’t rush you—you have to seize someone’s attention, grab them by the lapels, and demand the check before they even deign to consider ushering you out. They figure you have a purpose for staying at their restaurant and they’re content to let you see that purpose through to the end. Even the busy ones. Four-hour dinners are common.

What else to tell. So many of the women here wear thongs, even older mothers who shouldn’t. Many of the roads here have only red crosses for lights—when it’s time to go, the red simply vanishes, and there’s no green. There are not many Japanese tourists here, and maybe that’s because this place is ridiculously similar to Tokyo, from the kids with their perfectly slim jeans to boutique shops with thumping music to the whole futuristic urban aesthetic. Also, lots of sushi restaurants. Also, nuclear power and spectacular trains. Also, a real ease with being crammed together in tight confines.

P.S. Holy f—, the sex scenes on French TV are really explicit. Guess kids have to learn somehow.

Saturday, 4/18. Paris. Staying at the Hotel de France in the Latin Quarter.

So… all this week I’m going on a journalist junket to France, where we’ll see Areva’s nuclear-waste reprocessing program, and I thought I’d jot down a little journal along the way. We’ll see how it goes. I flew over early so I’d have the Saturday and Sunday (April 18th and 19th) to explore Paris on my own before the trip started.

***

Let’s skip the flight to Paris, shall we? I slept miserably and it didn’t help that every seat on Air France has a personal television with hundreds of movie options (Quantum of Solace managed to bang out a nice-car chase scene before putting me to sleep).

At around 11 in the morning, when I got to Paris, the sky was overcast and soggy but I started walking around as soon as I got off the Metro, wheeling my big suitcase around, killing time before I could check into the hotel at 2pm. Ann would’ve hated the brutal sightseeing schedule I was keeping, but I couldn’t resist. Tick these off the list: Notre Dame, the Islamic Institute du Monde designed by Jean Nouvel, streets and alleys, streets and alleys, the used-book vendors lining the Seine who sell rare English books for a pittance. When I got to the hotel I only stopped for a shave and a brush and then out, sans shower. My favorite type of architecture is Brutalist and my favorite mode of tourism is also… brutalist.

My hotel had a tiny room just big enough for a bed with two absurdly dim lamps. Maybe this is how the French manage to gobble up less than half the energy Americans do. Most of the apartments in the city are tiny single-occupancy units squashed close together, because Paris, like D.C., has a height limit—no building can climb higher than two-thirds the Eiffel Tower, with a few exceptions. (The Green Party and some prominent architects are trying to pare back the law.) That forces people out of their homes and into the local cafés and shops, the charcuteries and fromageries and boulangeries where it seems people burn away hours. Bonjour, monsieur you’re supposed to say before you enter a shop, but then the store owner starts in with his rapid-fire French and I panic and flee.

The drip, drip, drip sort of rain all day Saturday. But all I wanted to do was walk and eat, walk and eat, walk and eat. Tick more sights off the list: Rue Mouffetard, a narrow cobblestone street lined with cheap open-air markets peddling delicious unpasteurized cheese; the Latin Quarter, where the students smoke outside sporting tall puffy hairdos; the Jardin de Luxembourg, which was filled with empty chairs because of the rain but I could imagine happy families all there; some downtown shopping center with tons of cinemas where American movies were all the rage, Gran Torino and Fast and Furious 4; the sprawling Hotel Invalides built in 1670 to house war vets; a quick peek at Napoleon’s tomb; a glimpse of the Eiffel tower—I still prefer the garish orange-and-white Tokyo Tower, which was built to be just a few feet taller to spite the French; skim by the Louvre (didn’t go in, life’s too short)… what a great city this is to get lost in.

Actually, this city is a perfect combination of everything Ann loves and I love. On the one hand: Creative fashion and pitch-perfect food and sparkly water. On the other hand: Books and socialism and zero air conditioning.

What’s weird is when you only crudely know the local language, you pay more attention to signage than actual sightseeing, because the signs are all tablets to decode—even bus stops, which I’ll stand in front of squinting and mouth the words like trying to solve a calculus problem.

Toward the end of the afternoon I went to the Musee D’Orsay mistakenly thinking it was open till 9:45. It wasn’t, it was in fact closing, but I stood behind some loiterers thinking I was patiently standing in line for a good 20 minutes. Oops.

Instead I went to the Centre Pompidou, which is the modern-art building and is a big garish tower whose exterior is all industrial piping and wiring and tubes painted in loud beach-ball colors. Apparently all of Paris was scandalized by this leprously bright building when it was built in the ’70s, but nowadays everyone loves it. Same goes for that glass pyramid in front of the Louvre. I waited forever to get a ticket standing behind a young couple loudly smacking each other on the lips and cheeks. Nauseating.

I wanted to see exhibits in Paris rather than collections, because usually I forget everything I see in the collections. I was expecting to like the Kandinsky exhibit at the Pompidou but only because I once saw a Kandinsky painting that really stuck with me, with its shades of light green and magenta—pretty much the colors of all my clothes. But I was so jetlagged for this exhibit that I sat on a sofa and fell asleep until some museum guard shook me awake. I did, however, go see the exhibit of Calder’s Paris years and that was terrific—it focused less on his lame mobiles (sorry, they leave me limp every time) and more on his early wire sculptures and portraits.

What was also funny is that they had a collection of “modern art” videos and two of them by David Byrne: the music videos for “Once in a Lifetime” and “Road to Nowhere.” On the top of the Pompidou building you could look out over the city through the rain-flecked window and all the roofs are caked in graffiti.

It took me forever to find a dinner location because I felt weird about traveling alone while everyone in Paris seemed to be dining a deux. When I finally sat down at a cozy restaurant in the Marais district I noticed the menu had nothing vegetarian, so why not go whole hog—or, in this case, whole fowl—and fell upon the macaroni with duck foie gras. Yes, yes, I know all about how foie gras is as cruel a food as you can possibly eat (they force-feed the duck to fatten its liver) but I guess I don’t want everything to be about politics all the time so let’s do it and my god! This dish was terrific. The last time I was in Paris, my traveling buddies Mer and Evan and I went to some restaurant where English was scorned (the city has become more angolophilic over the last six years, from what I can gather) and the waiter flopped down in a chair beside us mocking three dumb English-speaking tourists, and Mer ordered the foie de veau not knowing what it was, and it was dry and harsh like a deer’s fart and I had to hide it under lettuce. That was bad. This time, the duck foie gras was sweet and slimy and interlocked perfectly with the brackish cheese to create one seamless flavor with the wine.

I’ve noticed that Japanese cuisine tries to buckshot you with a variety of flavors (sushi is a perfect example), whereas with French cuisine each plate is perfectly arranged to jab your taste buds in just one specific place, hitting a particular chord and then finishing.

All the men in Paris dress like, well, um… me. Okay, kidding a bit, although H&M is very popular; I saw eight people wearing my corduroy jacket and three people with my striped dark and neon green sweater. The women tend to favor dark color shades with just one or two strikingly colored accessories. Even the men who dress badly at least look like they’ve put thought into things, like this man with a denim jacket, jeans, a bright red shirt, and bright red sneakers. It didn’t work but there was at least a plan.

Lots of foreigners have come up to me asking for directions, thinking I’m French. It’s actually hard to tell who’s French and who’s American, surprisingly. At the restaurant I saw one guy who would’ve been at home in Fort Greene, what between the black fedora and the distinctly Brooklyn chin smirk.

In the few moments when I need to rest my blistered feet I’ve been reading Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, which is maybe a clichéd thing to read while in Paris, but surely I can’t shun everything just because many other people like it. (In fact, I used to do that quite a bit; when I was in college, for instance, I never wanted to take a creative-writing class because I figured only dimwitted writers took those classes and it’d only instill in a person all the clichés of the eye and the heart that wreck a person not just professionally but also morally, that plus all the people who fancied themselves creative writers were super-earnest types that made me hate humanity… BUT in the end I wish I’d taken a class like that because maybe it would’ve helped me avoid being such a horrible writer. Point is, being instinctively reactionary to everything popular is no way to live).

My feet are killing me. Blisters bubbling out of calluses and my right pinkie toenail has jabbed deeply into its neighbor and there’s blood all over the sock the color of chocolate ice cream.

I don’t really want to move to Paris but being in this city makes me want to change everything I’m doing. It’s so lovely here. They name all the streets after writers and playwrights and painters and even if that’s contrived (of course it is), surely the fact of the gesture trickles into the national consciousness, the way it trickles down that we in the United Stats name all our streets after tycoons and generals. (Granted, they have tycoons and generals in France, too.)

I don’t know what that all means but I do know that I don’t want to be an environmental blogger anymore. I have no passion for it, even if I do care very much that the world is going to end in a big climatic calamity. The main problem is I have no talent for other sorts of writing. Maybe if I read more and stopped puttering around on the g-d Internet so much. Maybe I’m lucky there’s no connection in this tiny dim-lit hotel.

Yesterday, I needed an excuse to break in my new shoes, and the weather was pleasant, so I walked down toward the Mall, shuffling my way past some jam-packed Japanese-American festival commemorating the cherry-blossom season with yakisoba stands and a puppet rendition of Momotaro, and went on down to the Tidal Basin, where thousands of people were gawking at the bright budding trees that were all ringing the water. Pink! White! Ooh! Aah! From a distance, the foliage looked like cheap velvet fur to me, but maybe I’m just not a flower person.

Actually, I like the crowds and the tourists with their cameras. It reminds me of Tokyo, where every spring all the hanami-ers take their neon-blue plastic tarps and head off to Ueno Park or Aoyama Cemetery and elbow their way toward what free square footage is left on the soggy ground and then lay out their tarp, sit, pour out sake, unwrap their plastic bento boxes, and at last enjoy being part of a happy herd taking in the ume and sakura blossoms. Everyone takes photos, even if they have taken those exact same photos the year before, and the year before that. Personally, I hate mass congregations, and I dislike the idea of desperately trying to seize hold of one’s every last memory with a camera, but at the same time, whenever I’m feeling either lonely or embarrassed by my inability to remember events in my life vividly (and those two emotions sometimes go together), I think about Japan’s flower-watching season and wonder if those photo-snapping throngs might be on to something, after all.

Next I walked to the National Gallery and saw an exhibit on Robert Frank’s The Americans. Evidently, Frank’s some world-famous photographer. Very innovative in his day. Won a Guggenheim and everything. I’d never heard of him. But, no matter, the exhibit was terrific, and the whole thing was a great reminder that photography isn’t just a way of making tawdry mementos—it’s also a method of seeing. During his early, pre-Americans days in the 1940s, Frank published a photo titled “Funeral,” a murky black-and-white shot showing a crowd of mourners, and it focuses on their umbrellas gleaming bright black in the rain, rather than the people themselves. Had you given me a camera and told me to take an “artistic” shot of this scene, I would’ve honed in on the mourners’ faces, trying to capture their grief. Something obvious like that. But Frank noticed their umbrellas and put those in the foreground, and the result is a perfect gloomy dirge.

Like all genius photographers, Frank was an expert at picking out aspects of the world most of us overlook. He was one of the first to realize that sometimes you need to obscure a subject to reveal it more fully, like when he shot only the propped-up feet of an Army recruiter in Butte, Montana, concealing the rest of the man’s body behind the doorframe, and so conveying all the gentle absurdity and menacing tragedy of a recruiter, given this remote post for God knows what reason, who’s waiting in stony solitude for a rare 18-year-old to nervously enter the station and signal his willingness to leave behind Montana’s empty roads and dusty mines and join up with the most lethal war-fighting machine the world has ever known. It’s all there in a photo of a pair of crossed feet resting neatly on a desk in the next room over.

This may sound clichéd—no, this certainly sounds clichéd—but looking at good photography always bops me with the realization that both the world and experience itself are infinite, and there are a million ways to chop it up and pinpoint this or that, and no one can ever gather all of it in his or her arms and fully comprehend that infinity. My own pinpointing tends to be quite limited: Usually if I’m strolling through the city, I’ll look at buildings and streets and through the lens of urban politics. What sort of zoning laws and planning constraints led to this building being the way it is? Why are there shops on this street and not this one? It’s one intricate way of seeing the world, true, but I never look at things through a photographer’s eyes, never fixing my attention on, say, the way a waitress’s worn-down face contrasts with the jolly Santa clock beaming above her on the diner wall. And, naturally, the photographer has limits too; there are plenty of things he or she will never see and never capture, either.

When you’ve spent an intimate afternoon with a good artist, who has just expanded your sense of what’s out there in the world, you become ashamed of bad artists, who tend to straitjacket that same sense. After I left the National Gallery I saw a photographer outside pointing his camera down a narrow grassy pathway between two buildings, where a tree with dark lavender blossoms stood stark on the other side, shouting its colors like a can of paint dumped on a new white shirt. It was beautiful, and he was going to stake his claim to it. But it was an obvious thing to photograph, and I wondered about all the more muted things he’d never see with that device, even things that were right before his eyes.

When I arrived back at the Metro station, I saw a family of four going down on the escalator. The father’s face looked at once frayed and content, a not-uncommon look for a parent to have after a hectic vacation day. Behind him, his two young daughters were shoving their hands into a plastic bag and scooping out candy. And the mother, taking up the rear, had for just a brief moment a look out into the distance that could’ve meant anything or nothing. For a brief second, she was elsewhere entirely. I wished I had had a camera then, so that I could’ve tried to figure out what it meant.

Imagine two famous journalists, X and Y, who are each, by sheer coincidence, assigned to profile the other. Both writers are egomaniacs, so they’re eager for the attention. But they also know just how raw and probing a good profile can be, so they each maneuver to hide their secrets from the other, obsessing over how to fend off the most sensitive lines of inquiry. X wants to conceal her estranged half-sister in Portland, whom she has treated miserably. Y wants to divert focus away from his stint with Campus Crusade for Christ at Oberlin. X fabricated a key portion of her Pulitzer Prize-winning series on mental hospitals. Y once softpedaled his expose of a secret CIA program to placate key sources. They’re top-flight reporters, so they’re great at playing defense—they know how the other thinks, what their profiler will try to hunt down. But they’re also each furiously pursuing new ways to chink the other’s armor. Round and round it goes. They were once friendly rivals, but soon they just go insane—like, hey-it’s-no-longer-funny insane—and neither can finish their story, and the saga drags out for years and years. Eventually a third journalist leaps in, hastily writes up the whole affair, and sells the movie rights. It’s turned into a romance.