<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"FacebookPinterest\n\n Paris, I Love You But You're Bringing Me Down\n\nThere might not be anything more welcome for a guy who likes writing than writing about Paris. Walking its streets and evading a poetic thought would be like swimming to the bottom of the ocean and not getting wet. And yet for all the shelves of reverent, ecstatic volumes\u2014by writers writing about writers in the caf\u00E9s on Montparnasse; about readers reading about the writers in the caf\u00E9s on Montparnasse\u2014there comes a natural treachery: Paris ain't all it's cracked up to be when rent costs actual money, and labor is required. Rosecrans Baldwin, who'd long dreamed of living the life of weightless artistry as an American in Paris, seized an opportunity to move from New York to take a job at an ad agency. While his and his wife's days were filled with scenes that confirmed the expectation of Paris having \"the world's best everything. Girls, food, the crumble-down buildings. Even the dust was arousing,\" Baldwin's hours in the office served to round out a more grounded picture of what it's like to live and work\u2014like, work work\u2014in a city understood by most Americans only through tourist goggles. It's this balance of the city's dirty deceptions\u2014that attempting to live at fully-functioning levels while speaking un-fluently is a bitch; that desk jobs are desk jobs here and there both, and that co-workers are just as dark, and odd, and motley everywhere; that Parisian winters blow\u2014with the timeless elegance of every boulevard and back-alley bistro that makes the book feel so necessary and welcome. The poet Robert Pinsky\u2014former American laureate; diehard BoSox fan; just flat-out formidable in a way the popular conception of a poet eludes\u2014once told me he could never write a poem about Fenway Park 'cause it's already too poetic. The same can be said about Paris. Unless a writer finds the filth under the fingernails, you feel like you've heard it all before. But when you, lover and reader of all things in that city, find out there's something beautiful and honest and hilarious you haven't yet experienced first- or even second-hand, it makes it sort of a big deal\u2014a reason to buy a book with \"Paris\" in the title.\n\nHere's the excerpt we published from Paris, I Love You But You're Bringing Me Down; Amazon says it's not out till next week, but they're not right.\n\n\n\nGQ: Have you been back to Paris to visit since you left?\n\n Rosecrans Baldwin: No, not yet. I mean, I'm dying to go. That's the whole thing. Before the book, during the book, after the book, I'm still the same person\u2014Paris was always the next place I wanted to be. I remember talking to a friend at one point while we were living there. I thought he'd been to Paris before, but he hadn't. This was in the midst of one of the darker moments of just being really frustrated living there. And when I realized he hadn't been there, part of me was like, \"Why not? You've been to other places. You can scrape the money together. Why wouldn't Paris be at the top of the list?\" It's still, for me, the number-one place I would go if tomorrow someone was like, \"Here's a free plane ticket.\" \n\nGQ: Obviously you don't need to do the whirlwind tourist spots, but what are the musts on your trip back?\n\n Rosecrans Baldwin: For a while I had a PDF of things to do and see that I would just give to people, but now it's out of date. No idea about restaurants now, but generally, I would go to a great place for lunch. Lunch is the best time of day to eat in Paris. Then you get to go walk it off afterwards. Let me pull this up on Google Maps because I want to tell you the right garden I was thinking of... Google's fucking memory thinks I'm talking about Paris, Kentucky. Fucking Google. I would go to the Jardin du Palais Royal, the Garden of the Royal Palace, because it's beautiful, and there's a lot of great restaurants surrounding it. Then walk to the Tuileries, can't miss that. I think one of my favorite things about Paris is the ever-present, nonstop beauty of the city. So I would just walk as much as possible. Do a lap, a corkscrew over into the Left Bank and go through all the way down into the Lumbourg Gardens and up across the river and go up near Oberkampf. Do a circle and just keep wandering around.\n\nGQ: Were there any corners you found in maybe outer districts that are underappreciated in your mind?\n\n Rosecrans Baldwin: I think the place we love the most is the Parc des Buttes Chaumont. It's in the 19th arrondissement. It's where I would go jogging and my wife, Rachel, and I would go for walks. It's appreciated by Parisians but it's not really known to tourists. People might go to Paris three or four times and have no idea to go there, the reason being that it's really this bizarre Disneyland of a park. I believe all artificially constructed. There's a lake in the middle with a mountain rising out of it, and on the top of the mountain is a Greek temple that you can walk to across a narrow bridge. The foliage, the trees are gorgeous. They have all these Japanese maples. Beautiful landscapes, wild hills. It's not very manicured. It's sort of a safari park terrain. But the wild animals are Parisians having picnics. A lot of Orthodox Jews go there to walk on Saturday mornings. You also get lots of serious athletes. Hardcore runners, people who are really into martial arts, practicing with swords. Puppet theater, too. Great park.\n\nGQ: You mention in the book that something was happening while you were there with regard to Sarkozy and his jogging\u2014where people finally felt comfortable ercising publicly. Do you think that's fully the case now? \n\n Rosecrans Baldwin: Yeah, I think so. There were coworkers of mine who were going off to participate in a Nike race. It was a 5K, or 7K, or 10K. Lots of people I knew at work did yoga or went to the gym. For example, this is funny, there was one woman I worked with who went to the gym on her lunch breaks. But she was very secretive about it.\n\nGQ: Secret healthy. \n\n Rosecrans Baldwin: [Laughs] Yeah, secret healthy. I think gyms broke through in the &amp;amp;#x2018;90s. I don't remember if I make this point in the book or not, but the idea of working out is still relatively American or Anglo. A love for sport is long-held in France.\n\nGQ: You don't really talk about the culture surrounding French sports in the book. Did you catch any sort of football bug, or anything?\n\n Rosecrans Baldwin: It's hard to follow. I did for the rugby team, because while I was there the World Cup was going on. Rugby is one of those sports where everyone but Americans know who the All Blacks team are and what the Haka is. It's a global sport, just like soccer. Speaking of which, we went to go see a Paris match. Paris was playing up in the main stadium against another French team, but it wasn't as big as like, Paris-Marseilles. As we walked into the stadium there's already chanting. As we sit down in our seats the chanting is overwhelming. You look into these blocks of fandom. People have taken up huge bos of 40, 60, 100 seats. They're all coming from the same booster club. They've brought enormous flags they're waving that are like 10-by-30 feet. They've got ten songs memorized. They've got horns, they've got noisemakers. I've never seen that at any kind of sporting event in the States. And I live in Chapel Hill. And I've been now to, I think, four Carolina-Duke games. It's just not the same.\n\nGQ: Seems like you can't fully be part of it unless you're born into it, raised with the rest of them. \n\n Rosecrans Baldwin: You have to be born and raised\u2014that's how you know all the songs. That's how you know the cues. It's similar to that thing about office greetings in the excerpt. If you want to know who to kiss, be born there. Otherwise, expect that you might get it wrong.\n\nGQ: Speaking of the excerpt and the workplace, did you always plan to write extensively about your coworkers?\n\n Rosecrans Baldwin: While I was there I got in the habit of writing notes to myself and texting myself things that I overheard, sending myself e-mails. I was getting up early in the morning to work on my novel, and something I would do to sort of get going would be to go back through my notes of the previous day, just shit that happened in Paris, and try to put it into cohesive paragraphs. When I came back here and thought seriously about writing a book, I felt more comfortable because I had all these notes to go from. I didn't have to rely on my memory, which definitely could be spotty. In terms of writing about my coworkers, when I started writing the book\u2014this is totally true\u2014it wasn't nearly as much about my office life. But once I started writing it\u2014the way people talk about how when you write fiction the characters sort of take over\u2014it totally happened. The more I wrote, the more it seemed to take place in the office, and that happened to be true of my life there. Ten hours a day I was at my desk. I wasn't smoking in the Tuileries contemplating Sartre. It just happened to be my life. That sort of naturally turned into the book. It helps that it was odd, unsettling, and amusing at times.\n\nGQ: Was there any resistance from any of the coworkers or were they all\u2014\n\n Rosecrans Baldwin: Well... I didn't talk to any of them. They're all learning about this now on Facebook.\n\nGQ: [Laughs] Oh, good. Well, there's not too much that's unflattering. \n\n Rosecrans Baldwin: Yeah, I don't think... I think they're largely flattering portrayals. I at least felt obliged to change everybody's names and some identifying characteristics.\n\nGQ: So the only people who will know are the ten people who recognize themselves.\n\n Rosecrans Baldwin: Right, and the good news, too, is that they haven't sold the French rights yet. So there's a good chance that people two thousand miles away will never get a chance to look through the book in their own language.\n\nGQ: In a day-to-day living sense, what can we, as an American culture, benefit most from adopting?\n\n Rosecrans Baldwin: I'm trying to give you a sincere answer and not a glib one. The glib one, the automatic first reaction, is to flirt more. It is one of the few clich\u00E9s that holds up. On a daily basis, in almost every interaction, French people have more fun just in terms of the daily back and forth nonsense of you're at the post office or the car wash or meeting someone for a drink that you used to work with. There's more playful engagement. On the more serious note, I think one thing French culture encourages, and it's a good thing, is to be a little adversarial and confrontational. People will make their opinions known and be frank with you from the get-go. I was recently in southern Idaho, and I was in this bar with these cowboys. I'd had enough and they'd had enough to drink so that we all got along with each other and they had sort of taken me on as their little buddy. I made the point that the contemporary working cowboy in southern Idaho and the contemporary Parisian are actually kind of similar. Along the lines of both of them sort of giving off the vibe of \"This is who I am, fuck you very much.\" These guys thought that was great, and they got in this whole conversation about \"Hey Mike, you hear that?\" And he's like \"What?\" \"Yeah, we're French!\" And he's like \"We're what?\" And he's like \"Yeah, we're highfalutin!\" I don't know why I gave them a Southern accent just now, but that's the best I could do for Idaho."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.gq.com/story/rosecrans-baldwin-interview-paris-i-love-you-but-youre-bringing-me-down?currentPage=1>