The Grand Tour pt 3: Straw Dogs

photo by Samantha Decker.

Odlef and I follow a tour in a Paris guidebook in which you pretend you are walking through Montparnasse during the Lost Generation of the 1920’s. It is as though we are two starving nihilists who, armed with the guidebook, torch everything in the city while preserving only those great artifacts from Gertrude Stein’s Montparnasse. We see a new restaurant called the Hippo Grill; it does not exist. There is a café called Le Select, but at this hour in the tour guidebook there are no people. But I see the people, smoking, reading papers, making all of the correct motions of intellectuals, and yet we drop the curtain on their play; they do not exist.

We are poor and unknown. We smoke cigarettes on the curb outside of Closerie des Lilas. We cannot sit at the tables of Hemmingway and Fitzgerald. This is how we visit the cafes. This is our straw dog generation. Intoxicated on hunger, road fatigue, anonymity, and yet irrevocably present. Our goal is to become known, our ideas to become respected, or at least to have our presence affirmed, but according to the guidebook, we don’t exist either. There are only the ghosts of Ernie and Ezra huddled around a sidewalk table, and we are but the smoke from their cigarettes. What have we done to deserve our place at the table? Nibble the crusts of bread from the curb outside the cafés? Follow history from a tourist book and follow the movements dictated in a game of Simon Says? Perhaps Jim Morrison, too mythified and all too godlike in my eyes, said it best: “Where is the new wine, dying on the vine?” We need to kill our gods to take their seat.