Paris in the ‘70’s

PAUL:	I’m comfortably ensconced in 
	the Cafe des Poseurs, a 
	humming java joint with little 
	natural light, done in a kind 
	of ---  what would you call 
	it, Fred ?

FRED:	Oooh, I don’t know, kind of a 
	late millenial roco-deco 
	Vienna nightmare swirl?

PAUL:	(considers) Ya, I spose.  More 
	importantly, I’m sipping on my 
	personal favourite, the Great 
	Eastern Depth Charge, a shot 
	of 300,000 psi espresso with a 
	muddy dark roast poured atop.  
	With me is Fred Raymond, 
	author of a fascinating new 
	memoir, “Paris in the ‘70’s : 
	My Life Amongst the Modern 
	French Philosophers”.

FRED:	Thank you.

PAUL:	“Paris in the ‘70’s”  -- 
	curious title.  Now, Paris in 
	the twenties ... I mean, sure, 
	the names and images just 
	abound, ahhhh,  (can’t think 
	of any for a while)
	
FRED:	Josephine Baker and her Banana 
	dance,

PAUL:	Right, and ...

FRED:	Well, the ex-pats, Hemingway, 
	Stein and so on...

PAUL:	Of course.

FRED:	Joyce.

PAUL:	Joyce, and ... the Dreyfuss 
	Affair, and Jean Claude 
	Kielly...  We could go on.  
	But the point is, was Paris in 
	the ‘70s really so grand as to 
	merit a decade?

FRED:	Well, it was the crucible for 
	all contemporary critical 
	thought. 
	
PAUL:	Not to put too fine a point on 
	it, but so what?

FRED:	All of our art, our 
	literature, our film, our 
	advertising -- it’s all coming 
	out of the intellectual 
	movements that took shape in 
	Paris in that decade.  
	Derrida, Baudrillard, 
	Bataille...

PAUL:	So, deconstructionism, post-
	modernism, nouvelle cuisine-- 
	we have Paris in the ‘70’s to 
	thank, then, for the death of 
	all meaning.

FRED:	Yes.

PAUL:	Wait a minute, though, meaning 
	was dying all over the place 
	in the ‘70’s -- I killed quite 
	a bit of it myself.
	
FRED:	Ah, but it was only theorized 
	in Paris.

PAUL:	I hate that.  The French 
	discovered meaninglessness.  
	They’ll be lording that over 
	us forever now.  Oh.

WAITER:	Who ordered the orange 
	jouissance? 

FRED:	That’s mine.

WAITER:	And the Foucault Anthology 
	Platter?

PAUL:	Over here.

BOTH:	Mmmn.   

PAUL:	Now Fred, how did you, a 
	Townee lad from round the 
	corner, get tangled up in this 
	highbrow Parisian cesspool in 
	the first place?

FREDDIE:	I was backpacking around 
	Europe in ‘68, and I got 
	involved with the 
	Situationalists.  After a 
	failed carreer as a 
	revolutionary, I dunno, it 
	seemed natural to go on to 
	grad school.
	
PAUL:	Ya, that’s how I got into 
	journalism.

FRED:	Anyway, Julia Kristeva at 
	Paris VI got me a fellowship 
	in return for sexual favours, 
	and that was my ticket to the 
	social whirl of Paris 
	intellectuals.

PAUL:	What was the scene like?

FRED:	Well, it wasn’t so much a 
	scene as it was a “scene”.

PAUL:	Of course, it would have been, 
	being Paris and all.

FRED:	Not an easy world to live in -
	- deeply factionalized -- 
	bitter rivalries -- giant 
	egos.

PAUL:	In your view it was the 
	infamous seminars conducted by 
	psychoanalytical guru, Jacques 
	Lacan that brought that world 
	together.

FRED:	Yes.

PAUL:	And yet you say that Lacan 
	himself was really quite an 
	ass.

FRED:	Yes and no, I mean, it was 
	hard to tell, because no 
	understood a thing he was 
	saying.

PAUL:	The decade closed on a tragic 
	note didn’t it, with the death 
	of the great cultural critic, 
	Roland Barthes -- which you 
	yourself actually witnessed.

FRED:	Yes.  March, 1980.  I’ll never 
	forget it.  We were meeting to 
	go to a Brady Bunch 
	retrospective at a drag club 
	in Pigalle.  Roland raced down 
	the steps of Montmartre, 
	waving at me frantically, and 
	crossed the Champs Magnetiques 
	without looking...

PAUL:	Blind-sided by an ice-cream 
	truck.

FRED:	Barthes, the master of signs, 
	he actually --and this is true 
	-- as he flew through the air, 
	he gave the driver of the ice 
	cream van the French 
	equivalent of “the finger” --

PAUL:	Which would be?

FRED:	It’s like ... “le doigt”.

PAUL:	Oh right, “le doigt”, of 
	course.

FRED:	Ya anyway, he actually managed 
	to give the guy the finger, 
	prior to crashing into the 
	Trevi Fountain.

PAUL:	Where he met his dreadful end.

FRED:	As so many of his lovers had 
	before him.   Gone: signifier, 
	signified and all.

PAUL:	Wow.
 
FRED:	But everyone came out for the 
	funeral -- the intellectual 
	event of the decade, without a 
	doubt; and with all the booze 
	flowing, and the dirty stories 
	about Barthes and what a 
	hippocrite he was and so on, 
	it just brought people 
	together.

PAUL:	I loved that part in the book, 
	where you and ... Gilles 
	Deleuze, was it?  get loaded, 
	and head back to Montparnasse 
	cemetery to exhume Barthes.

FRED:	Deleuze and Guatarri were such 
	pranksters.  After the funeral 
	we all went off to this place 
	in the Arab quarter and got 
	smashed.  So Gilles and Felix 
	haul out shovels and a set of 
	leggo, and insist they’re 
	going  to reconstitute a 
	structuralist body of 
	knowledge on Barthes’ 
	corpse...  

PAUL:	That is such a funny part of 
	the book.

FRED:	But by the time we got there, 
	one of Levy Strauss’ advanced 
	grad seminars was already 
	exhuming the body.

PAUL:	Perfect.

FRED:	So typical of the crowd at the 
	College de France.

PAUL:	There’s so much more to talk 
	about.  A stunning portrait of 
	the witticisms, the personal 
	feuds, the sexual peccadillos 
	and the bad breath of the 
	great philosphers of our day, 
	as told by local boy, Freddie 
	Raymond in his new memoir, 
	“Paris in the ‘70’s”.  It’s 
	published by M & S, and 
	retails for 29 dollars.  
	Thanks for this.

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