A love letter to Paris and a meditation on how it has changed in two decades, evolving from the twentieth century into the twenty-first, from analog to digital. Your telephone is precious. It may be envied. We recommend vigilance when using it in public. —Paris bus public notice In fall 2014 Lauren Elkin began keeping a diary of her bus commutes in the Notes app on her iPhone 5c, writing down the interesting things and people she saw in a Perecquian homage to Bus Lines 91 and 92, which she took from her apartment in the 5th Arrondissement to her teaching job in the 7th. Reading the notice, she decided to be vigilant when using her phone: she would carry out a public transport vigil, using it to take in the world around her and notice all the things she would miss if she continued using it the way she had been, the way everyone does—to surf the web, check social media, maintain her daily sense of self through digital interaction. Her goal became to observe the world through the screen of her phone, rather than using her phone to distract from the world. During the course of that academic year, the Charlie Hebdo attacks occurred and Elkin had an ectopic pregnancy, requiring emergency surgery. At that point, her diary of dailiness became a study of the counterpoint between the everyday and the Event, mediated through early twenty-first century technology, and observed from the height of a bus seat. 91/92 is a love letter to Paris, and a meditation on how it has changed in the two decades the author has lived there, evolving from the twentieth century into the twenty-first, from analog to digital.
Author
Originally from New York (the suburbs, then the city), I moved to Paris in 1999, settling here for good in 2004; since then I’ve spent varying periods of time in London, Venice, Tokyo, and Hong Kong. Recently transplanted to the Right Bank after years on the Left, I now spend most of my time tramping around Belleville. My essays on books and culture have appeared in many publications, including The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, the Times Literary Supplement, the FT, and frieze (some of which you can read here), and I'm a contributing editor at The White Review. I tend to write on women’s writing, experimental poetics, life-writing, studies of place, and visual culture, especially photography. My most recent book, Flâneuse: Women Walk the City, is out in the UK from Chatto & Windus and Farrar, Straus & Giroux in the US. Flâneuse is a cultural history of women writers and artists who have found personal freedom as well as inspiration by engaging with cities on foot, and includes chapters on Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, Sophie Calle, and Agnès Varda, among others. It was short-listed for the 2018 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay (I lost to Ursula K. Le Guin, which seems only right). The New York Times Book Review named it an Editor’s Choice and then one of their 100 Notable Books of 2017, Radio 4 very kindly chose it as their Book of the Week, and it was selected as best book of 2016 by the Guardian, the Financial Times, the New Statesman, and the Observer. It has recently been released in Spanish (Malpaso) and is currently being translated into five other languages. Awhile back I wrote a novel called Floating Cities which came out in France under the ridiculous title Une Année à Venise (Editions Héloïse d’Ormesson), and which was awarded the Prix des Lecteurs at the Rue des Livres literary festival. After that I co-authored a book with Scott Esposito called The End of Oulipo? An Attempt to Exhaust a Movement, published by Zer0 Books; I love the Oulipo but after that book, they don’t love me. I’ve been slowly writing my second novel, Scaffolding, set in Paris in 1972 and the present day, which I’ve masochistically chosen to write in both English and French. With Charlotte Mandell, I recently translated Claude Arnaud’s biography of Jean Cocteau (Yale UP, 2016). We won the 2017 French-American Foundation Translation Prize! I recently translated Michelle Perrot’s fascinating history of the bedroom, The Bedroom: An Intimate History, also for Yale UP; that should be out in August 2018.
