Joanna Biggar's Blog

What’s in a word? An impression, a sound, a scent, an evocation? All of that and more in the word “Indochine” which exists in films and books and calls up tropical heat in fragrant gardens, broad tree-lined boulevards in the formal French manner,

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My first exposure to traffic in Paris was dizzying, and nowhere more than in the madness zooming around the Etoile, where cars circulate at mad speeds according to rules only divined by those with French blood types.

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Yesterday I had the lovely experience of time-travel, only the gate I passed through did not take me to some imaginary historical moment or gauzy future, but rather to my own past. A classmate who came to hear me address the students of my alma mater, Pomona College, had the experience, too. He saw me [...]

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J.J. here – There’s a new book out about Americans in Paris, called The Greater Journey, by historian David McCullough. It’s about influential Americans who went to Paris to learn stuff they couldn’t learn at home. Although many went for their formal education, such as in art schools, most often the real education was along [...]

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[/caption] J.J. here…It looks as if fate has turned again for M. Dominique Strauss-Kahn, and in another stunning reversal of fortune, he may soon be a free man. He may even, who knows, once again be the Socialist candidate and a real contender to become President of France. If so, the real question will be, [...]

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A couple days ago I did an interview with French-American t.v., and one of the questions that came up was about Paris in the old days, meaning the ‘60s. Was it better then or now? Not a new question to be sure: Just ask M.F.K. Fisher or Proust, or Woody Allen for heaven’s sake, who [...]

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MFK Fisher, the incomparable chronicler of France (and food) wrote that her husband used to regale her with tales of the “real Paris” – in the ‘20s – while they were living in France in the ‘30s. Later she revisited old haunts while introducing her children to France in the ‘50s, telling them about the [...]

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Seeing the great French film “Of Gods and Men,” recently, which documents the lives of a small group of Cistercian Brothers living their monastic lives among the rural people of mountainous Algeria in the early 1990’s, I was reminded of my friend Hugues. A French colleague had asked if I might be able to put [...]

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     For les demoiselles, arriving in Paris meant a daily exercise in educating the senses, and nothing was more transforming than the sense of taste, in the form of French food.

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