I’ve left Marseille for the summer and am now back at UCSD, but I still have some pictures/adventures as yet un-written, so I figured I’d post some final few entries from the sunny southern California beaches. (Just pretend they’re from the sunny southern French beaches.) (Actually, a more apt parallel is a screen-lit southern California cogsci lab masquerading as a screen-lit southern French cogsci lab.) Goodbye to everyone in Marseille… but maybe I’ll be back?! I’d certainly love to see you all again.
In early September, I went up to Paris for the AMLaP conference. I stayed an extra day to breathe in the Parisian scent, and took the opportunity to go up to La Porte de Clignancourt, an area in a northern quarter of Paris which is an enormous combination of 12 differently-themed flea markets. It’s quite the experience, really, wandering around the streets and seeing the rapid shifts in types of goods for sale – from sports clothes to shoes to antiques to furniture to enormous, ugly picture frames to boxes of utter junk. While wandering around, I came across a book store of the best kind – one tiny room, stuffed to exploding with books shoved onto shelves completely haphazardly, so anything interesting you might come across would be the result of pure luck and digging. It’s like a treasure hunt.
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I found a hardcover, gold-embossed, three-volume set of The Three Musketeers (in French, bien sur), but didn’t have enough cash with me to buy them, so I ran out to the nearest ATM. On my way back, however, it started to pour, so I hung out in the bookstore for a while, waiting for it to stop raining. While standing around, I started talking to the owner of the shop (after he offered me a coffee – “don’t worry, it’s free!” – from the coffee machine he’d stuck on the table in the middle of some relatively-well stacked books.) For once, it was me who got to spring the “Where are you from?” question, because his French, while excellent, was obviously accented. Turned out he’d emigrated from Lebanon in 1953, and had come to Paris to go to school at the Sorbonne and study psychology. Hey you, he called to one of his assistants, hand me that white book over there. (Which one? the assistant rather pointedly asked, given the rather large number of books, including white ones, scattered about. The one on top of the third stack, the owner replied.) The owner hands me the book, which is a child development book written by Piaget. You heard of him? he asked. Of course, I replied. (Piaget was one of the most influential forerunners of developmental psychology.)
Turns out the bookstore owner was taking classes with Piaget at the Sorbonne. Now that’s epic. This is like meeting someone who’s taken a class from Chomsky, or Descartes, or Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
After university, he said, he’d moved to Kuwait to start a grain import business, because there’s nothing there but “oil – just oil and sun.” And no income tax.
No wonder his bookstore was so darn awesome.
Storming The Brain 