Bonjour/hi!
I am the sort of person who struggles with “vacation”: What is vacation if not a better time to work on my little side hustles and projects and schemes?? If you do, too, please see at bottom for a preview of a new essay — otherwise, the news from France!
1. Holiday was the greatest magazine of the 20th century: Think of the New Yorker, but it’s only about travel — in its heyday in the 1950s/60s, it had over a million subscribers and contributors including Ernest Hemingway, Joan Didion, and Truman Capote. After shutting down in 1977, it was relaunched in 2014 (by a French team, in fact, but written in English.) The new one is very good and glossy and expensive (€28!), but it’s not the original. (Here’s a NYT piece explaining the relaunch.) Anyway, Sézane launched a new fashion collab with the new-look Holiday, which has long been talking up a fashion line and café — these are my picks, though tbh I find it a little boring. You can find vintage Holidays, like the two above, on eBay, though they’ve gotten tragically more expensive in recent years (prices vary from $10 – $100). Honestly the best suggestion of all of these things might be an exquisite book collecting the best of the vintage Holiday — it’s a treasure.
2. “I Just Got Back From Paris and Saw These 4 Summer Trends on the Chicest Women”
3. You can now swim in the Seine: “Officials now say the Seine meets European water quality standards on most days.” “Most days,” hurrah!
4. Could a six-day tour of France by train possibly be worth almost $20,000? We can all find out beginning in September on Le Grand Tour.
5. I want to say there is so much cute stuff in the FP Frenchy 50!
6. A new museum will celebrate the work of Hector Guimard, the Art Nouveau designer best known for his work for the Paris Métro: “When installed in the early 1900s, many Parisiens were scandalised. One critic declared the green paint “un-French” and another said the ornate [Métropolitain] signs were “confusing to children trying to learn their letters … and stupefying to foreigners”.
7. There is a rude story in the WP about the Paris dining scene: “I’m sorry to report that many visitors, even those who do some research, are likely to have a bad meal, or more probably a forgettable one. And they will return home disappointed, having eaten French food that is tame, timid and far less exciting — let alone revelatory — than what they can find in plenty of U.S. cities and elsewhere.” [gift link]
8. So as I was saying above: I have been thinking about proper vacations, and how to achieve them, and I realized that the key is: variability from the every day. Paradoxically, I think this is a condition worse among travel writers like myself, who are all the time admixing work with travel — so maximum variability (you’re in a totally new place) with maximum sameness (you’re still somehow on a Zoom call).
I don’t say this for most people, who are able to vacation without instructions, but for people like me, who are type-type-typing away on a summer weekend and could potentially not be doing that exact thing, I say get your typing done and then vary the rest of your day as much humanly possible. That is what the French do, by having a normal-life zone and then a vacation zone that is geographically different (no staycations, a worm of an idea if ever there was one), completely different routines, etc. The best travel advice I have for anyone, ever, is to come up with a new routine for wherever you are — for example, when I was recently in Lake Okoboji (IYKYK), getting my chai latte from the same place every morning. I spent an entire summer in Paris going nowhere in the Louvre except for a single gallery.
I think we too often mistake the quality of a vacation by measuring its expense rather than its variability. Now of course, that variability should be mostly pleasant — no one fondly remembers, or indeed experiences, seven days of poor meals and uncomfortable beds. But luxury is not the point, only variability, and I think it is why we so often return from vacation dissatisfied: Because we spent too much and still had a bad time, because we were in a hurry to do too many things and the cost of that pressure was variability. I know I am not the only person who is a member of a family that resorted to Denny’s on vacation, when a no-more-expensive option — indeed better from a perspective of cost, taste, and variability — could have been had at a family-owned restaurant equally nearby. There’s a reason why, when you’re a kid, “breakfast for dinner” is so revolutionary and fun. Variability!! Variability from the everyday.
What can I do today that will be unlike my regular, workaday life? I am personally if not precisely on vacation than visiting central New Jersey, my favorite place in the world, and on Wednesday went with my mom to a farm in a neighboring county. Instead of taking the regular highway, we drove through the Ken Lockwood Gorge, on rocky roads that had we taken a slightly less agile car would have meant turning around. For days now we’ve talked about our adventure — through a county park no more than 15 miles from the house where we moved when I was 12. If it cost any more than driving the highway, it could not have been more than a dollar. We took pictures out the window like we had on a summer trip to Brittany five years ago.