More Marseille (Photos I)

After my initial arrival in Marseille and encounter with a grifter posing as a cabbie, I wasn't sure what to expect on my return for several days of stay after that inspiring and inspiriting James Baldwin conference in Montpellier, a city that exudes charm from every stone and plaster wall, but Marseille, I learned quickly, has its charms too, and is a city of great beauty, historical and cultural richness, and, yes, grit, a huge Mediterranean port city that looks north and south, east and west. In just a few days I have traced the usual tourist steps, though I have not (yet?) seen l'Estaque, where Renoir, Cézanne and others painted, or Joliette, where Claude McKay's Banjo strolled and lolled, making music), but the Mediterranean sun and light that drew those great painters, and the cultural diversity and richness that McKay's novel portrays are very present. There are times walking the streets here that I forget I am not in North Africa, and at other times I think, this could easily be Harlem, or Brooklyn. There are also signs everywhere of the pan-or-trans-Mediterranean, as well as of France's multiple European facets, among them those of the Provence region, something I think I forgot before I arrived, until I began to see "PROVENCE" everywhere. (I have not yet heard anyone speaking Provençal, though, not that I would be able to distinguish it from Catalan if I heard it.) So far it has proved a a stirring mix of a place to see, not as run-down or seedy as I had been warned by some, and full of the joie de vivre and vivacity that I had long imagined and which two friends (N and TJ) had implied in their excellent recommendations of things to do and see.

Marseille, from the heights of
Notre Dame de la Garde

Yesterday I went to Mucem, the Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilizations, located partially in the Fort Saint-Jean as well as in an adjacent, striking building I'd spotted the night I arrived from a nearby promontory in the Jardin du Pharo. The fort (and there are several here) commands the eye, but far more intriguing was the modern building, clad in a metal netting that looked like a green spider web from afar and up close. The Museum itself was most interesting to me for its architecture; I found myself less engaged by its accounts of European and Mediterranean history, a good deal of which I knew, and which stinted a bit on some of the peoples involved in creating the Mediterranean we know today. Yet I expected nothing less. The puppet exhibit, which I snapped a few photos of, did hold my interest, but I have to admit, some to the puppets were a bit scary. It was, nevertheless, an enjoyable visit, and I walked all around the fort and the new building, also viewing and photographing but not entering the cantilevered Villa Mediterranée. I love the tagline on the door, though, which reminded me oddly enough of the famous May '68 slogan "Sous les pavés la plage" (Under the paving stones a beach): "Sous la mer, un monde." (Under the sea, a world).

On my way to Mucem, I detoured along a historic trail that took me to various key sites and points in Marseille history, including the Hotel Dieu, which is now an Intercontinental Hotel; the Hotel de Ville; the Église des Accoules, which was completely razed during the French Revolution; the site of Roman Docks; another site (which I did not see but had a plaque marking it--?) of a Greek amphitheater; and the 12th century Church of Saint Laurent, which the revolutionaries (thankfully) saw fit not to burn down. Further walking took me past the Cathédral du Majore, the Roman Catholic Church's main church in Marseille. It is in a neo-Byzantine style, which seems appropriate given the multiple strands on which the city is built. I had missed the ferry across the Old Port and ended up walking all the way around it, which was invigorating, but after several hours in the relentless heat, I was crisping. I took the ferry back, and walked back up the long road to my hotel, on the Corniche near the Anse des Catalans, and by the time I got to my room, I was ready to pass out.

According to my Move app I managed to walk 9.1 miles one day in Montpellier, and 7.2 miles on Saturday, when I traveled back to Marseille, but the lack of wifi meant I could not record how far I walked yesterday, which could easily have been 12 miles or more. I had drunk water all day and taken pauses in the shade and cool spots, but was so sore--my body, my back, my shoulders, my legs, my feet--hat I had to lie down, and wasn't sure I'd be able to get up to meet friends for dinner. By the time we did meet up after 8 pm, I had revived, and was ready to spend this morning getting gifts and gearing up for the next big tourist goal, which was to climb up to Notre Dame de la Garde, the highest point (I believe) in Marseille. My friend Trasi had said that church was not architecturally distinguished, and it isn't, looking almost like a sibling of the cathedral far below. But the vistas it offers are astonishing, and the packed interior basilica, chock full of paintings and relics and votives and believers, moved me to give the sign of the cross, and to light a candle for friends and acquaintances who are facing various challenges. To get there, though, you must climb a very steep hill, steeper I think that the one at Montmartre to reach Sacré Coeur, which made me think about how suffering is woven into Catholic experience, and to ponder, as I always do with such things who and how those whos pulled this off. Just getting up here was exhausting enough, so to imagine bring all the materials, to be working in this southern heat, or even in the cold, etc., made me think about all the labor, casualties and so on the creation of such a site of devotion requires.

The medieval church of St. Laurent

I have tried not to load up on books as I tend to do when I travel, and my first order of business tomorrow is to mail the ones I've purchased back, but I could not help myself in the Mucem's bookstore, which was decent, and bought a few books that caught my eye, including Scholastique Mukasonga's Notre-Dame du Nil [Notre Dame of the Nile], which was published by Gallimard in 2012 and won the Prix Renaudot that year; Djilal Bencheikh's novel Tes yeux bleus occupent mon esprit [roughly: Your Blue Eyes Occupy My Spirit], published by Elyzad in its Poche series and winner of the Prix Maghreb 2007 de l'Association des Écrivains de langue française (ADELF) [2007 Maghreb Prize of the French Language Writers' Association]; Nouvelles du Maroc, featuring the work of writers Mohamed Leftah, Abdellah Taïa, Karim Boukhari, Fadwa Islah, Abdelaziz Errachdi, and Zineb El Rhazoui, published in 2011 by MAGELLAN & Cie/Courrier International in their Miniatures Series; Slam Poésie by Sunjata Sabir, published by Vents d'ailleurs in 2014; and the fascinatingly named Christophe Ono-Dit-Biot's Plonger, another Gallimard publication, from 2013, which received the Grand Prix du Roman de l'Académie Française and the Prix Renaudot des Lycéens in 2013. (I especially liked that he had written a novel entitled Génération Spontanée in 2004. I look forward to reading at least some of them this summer.

On a political tip I have been curious to see if I pick up any of the tensions that have led to the high vote totals for the far right in France (and for alternative conservative parties in the UK, Denmark, and elsewhere in Europe) in the EU elections, but I would be lying if I said, in my few days as a tourist, that I saw anything at all. Marseille is, as I noted above, very diverse, with a sizable population of people of North African and sub-Saharan ancestry, as well as many people with ancestry from the Comoros, other parts of the Mediterranean, and so on. It has been a gateway city for centuries and questions of diversity, migration, globalism and global flows, borders, and so forth are hardly new here, nor are political contestations over immigration, demographics, power, everything underpinning the recent victories by right-leaning parties in the EU parliament. (Even Montpellier was visibly more diverse than I remembered from a brief prior visit more than 20 years ago.) From what I can tell, people appear to get along, though this could be because of my routes here and hardly reflective of the realities. A colleague from Montpellier told me that the wealthier cities on the French Riviera, like Nice, Cannes, Cap d'Antibes, as well as rural areas and the formerly industrial North of the country provided votes for Marine Le Pen's National Front, though I thought I had seen some mention of support in Marseille and surrounding areas as well. I am keeping my antennae up, and taking notes.

I'll stop there but here are a few photos from my perambulations. I'll post more in a subsequent entry. Enjoy.

The steps of the Fort d'Entrecasteaux 

A sculpture in the Jardin du Pharo,
with the Palais du Pharo in the background 

On the lower level of the Jardin du Pharo,
with the Digue du Large in the background

In the Jardin du Pharo, with
Notre Dame de la Garde in the distance

A sculpture sitting between the Old Port
and the Lower Fort Saint Nicolas 

Acrobats along the Old Port's Quai

The Hôtel DeVille's façade
along the Old Port's Quai

The Hôtel Dieu, now the Intercontinental 

One part of the Hôtel de Ville 

The reconstructed Church of the Accoules 

Heading up to the Préau des Accoules

Street art

An exhibit 

The St. Laurent Church 

Puppets, from an exhibit in the
Fort Saint-Jean

At the Fort Saint-Jean

At the Fort 

One of its towers, from a northeast view

The striking Mucem building, with
the Villa Méditerranée beside it

Inside Mucem

Along the rocks outside the Fort 

The Villa Méditerranée 

The Cathédrale de la Major
(Marseille Cathedral)

Art students drawing the cathedral 

Sculptures near the
Hôtel de Ville

On the ferry boat back across
the Old Part 

A political statement, on my way back
to my hotel 

The Abbaye of St.-Victor
of Marseille

Along the Corniche

James Baldwin Conference at Université Paul-Valéry

The James Baldwin: Transatlantic Commuter conference is underway at the Université Paul-Valéry, Montpellier, and it has been an amazing experience thus far. Organized by D. Quentin Miller of Suffolk University and Claudine Raynaud of Université Paul-Valéry, Montpellier, the conference has brought together many of the major scholars of Baldwin's work, as well as creative writers, filmmakers, longtime friends of Baldwin, and graduate students now in the process of writing and thinking about Baldwin's life, work and legacy.

Thus far there have been several keynote talks. Yesterday David Leeming, widely considered one of the leading Baldwin scholars and his major biographer, delivered the first, offering personal anecdotes about his experiences with "Jimmy," with one highlight an extraordinary story about the time he collected painter-seer Beauford Delaney from his Paris apartment-temple, though only after lying head to head with him on cots, in a sheet-draped room, and talking about everything for five days. He then drove Delaney and another poet to Baldwin's lodgings in Istanbul, and to keep Delaney from running off (he was falling apart mentally) had to hold him in bed to keep him lying down.

Today Magdalena Zaborowska, author of the award-winning James Baldwin's Turkish Decade: Erotics of Exile (Duke, 2009), who talked about Baldwin's final home in St. Paul de Vence, France, and how we might recover from "the material the metaphorical," and "the literal the literary" new ways of thinking about Baldwin's archive. One aspect of her forthcoming project that I found particularly fascinating was her discussion of how Baldwin's interest in certain women in his life increased toward the end of his life, and in his clothing and mannerisms began to play with gender more openly. She linked these shifts to his final work, The Welcome Table, which captured both this turn and social aspects of his life, including his relationships with women friends, in his final days.

On a plenary panel yesterday author and screenwriter Cecil Brown spoke about his friendship with Baldwin from the early 1970s on, when Baldwin was being heavily surveilled by the FBI and carefully considering the terms of his exile. A number of his anecdotes centered on time he spent with Baldwin at the house in St. Paul de Vence, and on the relative rarity in those days, compared with today, of American black people in France. Some of Brown's comments veered into problematic territory and his comments today in response to a presentation again did so, but one way of looking at this was that he was giving his unvarnished truth, offensive as it might be. Jacqueline Jones Compaore, who was Baldwin's student during his stint at the western Massachusetts 5-college system, joined him on the plenary panel, talking quite movingly of Baldwin as a teacher who could terrify students by challenging their BS outright, but also showed great care for many of them and deeply inspired her. 

Amidst the keynotes have been full days of panels, on all aspects of Baldwin, from discussions of music in his work to his public and private lives to a digital annotations project now underway to to his transatlanticism. My panel, on new approaches, was the first of this afternoon, and I gave an abridged (because of time) version of a paper on "queer futurity" and James Baldwin's final novel, Just Above My Head, which I think even more now having reread and thought about it carefully deserves to have much stronger cases made on its behalf. It is a novel in which nearly all of Baldwin's concerns come together--often felicitously but sometimes not--with some of his most astonishing prose, and, as David Leeming noted in his talk, it is a "experimental," often shocking work that rewards its reader in multiple ways.

The other panelist's talks, Brian Norman's on the "Cassandra effect" of Baldwin's use--the "ventriloquism" of him after his death--and Nigel Hatton's, on his work teaching Baldwin's fiction to young people in prison, and including the great writer's work in the field of narrative medicine, were excellent. Other panels have ranged widely, but in general, have provided a rich critical engagement with every aspect of James Baldwin the artist, the intellectual, the critic, the theorist, the activist, the visionary, the man. Concluding the today's session was a screening of The Price of the Ticket, with filmmaker Karen Thorsen present to discuss many aspects of her process, her contact with Baldwin, some particulars of the film, and related anecdotes. I have seen this film before, but hearing her provide background information enriched my thinking about it. There's one more day of Baldwiniana, and I'm looking forward to it and to seeing more of Montpellier!

First morning registration

The organizers, D. Quentin Miller
and Claudine Raynaud

Dennis Tyler, who gave the first talk
of the day, and D. Quentin Miller

David Leeming

Site St Charles, Université Paul-Valéry

Cecil Brown and Jacqueline Jones Compaore

Anti-fascist posters near the university 

Jezy Gray, Ed Pavlic, giving his paper,
and Quentin Miller 

Magdalena Zaborowska,
at right, at her keynote 

Actor and videographer Samuel
Légitimus, founder of the
Collectif James Baldwin

Rasheeda Briggs, Monica Miller,
and Christopher Driscoll

Scenes of Marseille & Montpellier

The James Baldwin: Transatlantic Commuter conference at the Université Paul-Valéry, Montpellier, has begun, and I'll post some photos from it tomorrow, but here are a few photos from Marseille, into which I flew yesterday, and Montpellier, where the conference is taking place. I'll note about the journey only that the plane I was to fly on from JFK was struck by lightning as it was arriving in New York, which meant that before we could take off it was grounded for hours until the repair crew could assure themselves and the pilots that everything was working well. That meant a horribly delayed flight into Toronto, sprints across two airports to make flights, and so on. Not for the faint-hearted.

But so it was, and I got to Marseille in one piece, took the train to Montpellier, settled in, and began the conference this morning, excited to be among the Baldwinophiles. It has been an excellent experience so far, especially meeting new people and seeing old colleagues, hearing Baldwin's famous biographer, David Leeming, offer personal anecdotes about the writer, and noting the smart, contemporary scholarship on one of America's greatest writers. Amidst this academic conversations I also got in a quick walking tour (to get a plug adapter) across Montpellier's old city, a visit to the Jardin des Plantes, and dinner one of the liveliest art gallery-tapas restaurants, located in a former pharmacy school, that I've ever set foot in. Well, it's the only art-gallery-tapas restaurant I've set foot in, but I'm glad I did. Some photos:

On the plane: Mike Tyson's Undisputed Truth
screening under "Avant Garde" films! 

Marseille from the sky

Marseille from the highway

At the train station

Arles, Van Gogh's and Gauguin's
one-time home, along the route from
Marseille to Montpellier 

Montpellier's aviary-church-like
main rail station 

The ancient gate leading to
the Rue de l'Université

The former Ursuline Convent, now
a center for dance 

One of the numerous old,
winding streets of Montpellier 

A protest facing the Préfecture 

Soft sculptures in a
courtyard 

A colloquy 

L'Opéra Comédie

On a Montpellier street

Église St. Pierre 

An allée of cypresses at the Jardin des Plantes

A statue honoring the founder
of Montpellier's Jardin des Plantes

A bamboo thicket in the
Jardin des Plantes 

A lily pond in the Jardin des Plantes 

A greenhouse (closed), housing
cactuses and succubuses 

Bougainvillea 

A tree of wishes
(it was quite full of them)

The tram line

The roofs of Montpellier 

The St. Pierre Church from on high 

Ubiquitous graffiti

Wall art (graffiti)

A tunnel-like street

Night life

Out and about