A survivor of the French Revolution and a protégée of the physician and waxworks hobbyist Philippe Curtius, Marie Tussaud, born Anna Maria Grosholtz, brought a traveling roadshow of wax figures she had created through England between 1802 and 1835, after which she set up a permanent exhibition in London. (Notable characters including Benjamin Franklin and Voltaire sat for her back in the day.)
When the museum burned down in 1925, firefighters saved the attraction’s on-site parrot, which, once revived, is said to have remarked to the crowd that had gathered, “This is a rotten business.”
Good journalism is always hard to do, but there’s a new generation of reporters who take nothing for granted because of what they know about Vietnam. Their work is everywhere in the best daily newspapers, on cable news and in online newsletters, blogs and websites. Of course journalism is populated by an assortment of people. There’s no entrance exam, so a lot of reporting is done by people who are ignorant and inexperienced about the subjects they pretend to know. Journalism is no better or worse than any other American institution. But the best young reporters have learned from the Vietnam War to question authority and find out for themselves what’s really going on. And that’s how it’s supposed to work in a democracy.
Every few days, working on my new novel, my thoughts flash back to something Colm Tóibín said at the Hay-on-Wye literary festival nine months ago: that flashbacks are infuriating. Speaking at an event to celebrate the two hundredth anniversary of Jane Austen’s death, Tóibín said Austen was marvelous because she was able to convey character and plot in the most satisfying way without the “clumsiness” of the flashback. Today, on the other hand, we have to hear how a character’s parents and even grandparents met and married. Writers skip back and forth in time filling in the gaps in their shaky stories. It is dull and incompetent.
Is Tóibín right? I worry, as I prepare to put together a flashback myself. Is there no merit or sense in the device? Didn’t Joyce use it? And Faulkner? Or David Lodge, for that matter? Or John Updike? Or going back before Austen, Laurence Sterne? In which case, can there really be, as Tóibín appears to suggest, an association between the flashback and “our unhappy age”?
Perhaps deep down I knew my experience in Paris couldn’t really be the way I had imagined. But I was steadfast in my delusions. My parents had recently separated, and on the heels of our family’s final, ugly collapse, I hoped to fall into someone else’s happy home, miles away from what little remained of mine.
A semester abroad hardly qualifies as an authoritative introduction to any city. But like many of my travels in the years since, I hadn’t flown to Paris to become an expert on its streets or history. I went, instead, equipped with the foolish notion that a change in location and context could suddenly stir to life my truer, best self — and that I could present that counterfeit iteration to the world, and people might believe it. I didn’t know then the impossibility of such a pursuit; that you don’t get to choose how to be seen, or whether you’ll be embraced or discarded — that neither the city, nor the mirage of reinvention, can ever really belong to you.
Food marketers freely use words like “guilt” and “sin” and “cheat” in the context of food, so what we eat is wrapped up in who we are and the choices we make. We judge food as being either good or bad, and then judge ourselves based on what we choose to eat. If we enjoy salad, we are good, but if we indulge in ice cream, we are bad . . . unless it’s guilt-free ice cream, of course. Doesn’t this sound absurd?
It’s time to remove food from the scales of judgment, and remember that food is fuel for your body, and nothing more. Maybe you’d feel guilty for stealing food from a store, but for eating cake? Ridiculous.