the plus sides

Today was mostly.... hot.  I spent lots of today walking, mostly on fruitless errands (no luck on the mail front).  On the plus sides... I had a pain au chocolat on the way to the bank (hm, dangerously close placement of the patisserie, luckily they're only open in the mornings).  I got to dance, again with the studio to myself, and tried some of the trickier moves that they're going to teach me next week without ending up on my butt (yay for having a DVD).  I got a ride from a very nice stranger who took pity on me because I was walking in the 95º heat, on the way back from a closed for summertime-lunch-2 hours-that-is-not-posted-except-on-some-bitty-sign-next-to-the-big-letters-saying-they're-open-all-day post office.  Unfortunately the pity of strangers didn't manifest every time I got the joneses to take a trip from the bus to the studio, back, UP the hill to the post office, or down the hill again through all sorts of streets that all of a sudden were very unfamiliar for being within 4 square blocks of my house.  Did I mention it's actually summer here in the south of France? 


Oh, and the other plus side?  I got to come home to this, on our back porch (and why yes, I did buy that baguette this morning):

I'm loving Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, it's Dad's old copy (the cover loooooks there like it's attached, but don't be fooled by a crafty photographer) from probably about when it came out (one might hazard a guess it could be from a time when he owned a motorcycle himself), but it's tying in to all sorts of pieces going on right now.  Certainly travel -- it's set on a motorcycle trip from Minnesota to Bozeman, MT, going through Yellowstone, which was exactly where Mackenzie and I were this summer (hm, might Dante know something about this?).  It's always fun to get to actually know the place an author is talking about, with mountain air and how fast it comes at you after the summer heat of the plains, the silence and space of Yellowstone.  

One of the main discussion points Mister Pirsig has set up so far is the comparison between classical and romantic knowledge.  Science versus Art, how they have been separated, the vast differences.  He gets at this with the idea of motorcycle maintenance, how it is closer to an art than a science while at the same time being incredibly logical, rational, reasoned, because without that logic the mechanic would be completely useless.  Lots of questioning underlying form, not thinking but thinking about how one thinks.  It makes me think of the famous choreographer Twyla Tharp's book, The Creative Habit, how she went about creating art almost as though it were science, with endless experimentation in front of a video camera that she then would go through each day to find the seconds and minutes of successful data points, and then string those steps together into incredible pieces of dance.  

More musing later, I'm already thinking I might have to start over as soon as I finish it, figure out what he was actually trying to say.  Word of warning to those of you contemplating coming over to this side of the pond: watch out for bleu cheese. The switching of the "ue" to "eu" is key in this arena.  The French like their fromage staaaann-ky.  Don't say you weren't warned.