Web of The Week - Shakespeare and Company



Screenshot of Shakespeare and Company website

Shakespeare and Company is an independent bookstore located opposite Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris's Left Bank. Originally established in 1919 by Sylvia Beach, the store became a gathering place for writers such as Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, William S. Burroughs, James Joyce and Ford Madox Ford. So great is the list of great writers who have passed through its doors or spent time living on its upper floors, that Shakespeare and Company has grown from a bookstore into an institution.

During the pre-war years the store was considered the centre of Anglo-American literary culture in Paris, which saw writers and artists of the "Lost Generation," spending a great deal of time at Shakespeare and Company. In fact, it was Sylvia Beach who initially published James Joyce's book Ulysses in 1922, which was subsequently banned in the United States and in the United Kingdom.

Shakespeare and Company has always been more than just a bookstore. From the beginning the shop included kitchen and sleeping facilities, and even today, volunteer workers are able to stay in the store, working, reading, writing and discussing literary ideas, theories, and more. After Sylvia Beach’s death the store was taken over by George Whitman, and following his passing, the store is now run by his daughter, Sylvia Beach Whitman.

The home page for the website has the very unusual characteristic of loading something different every time you press the F5 (or Refresh) key. In deed, the scrapbook nature of the layout, featuring multiple images and scraps of writing, leads to a cornucopia of other images that seem to lead off in an endless and haphazard way into the bowels of the site. It is impossible to know how many layers deep the site goes, which makes exploring Shakespeare and Company either endlessly frustrating, or infinitely fascinating. It all depends on how you approach it.

More Information
A 2005, fifty-two minute documentary film about Shakespeare and Company, Portrait of a Bookstore as an Old Man, can be seen here in its entirety...

Shakespeare and Company on Wikipedia…

The shop was featured in the Woody Allen film Midnight in Paris.

-o0o-

In-Flight Magazines

Image: Cover shot of December 2010, Air France magazine

…

There they are, jammed into the storage pocket located behind every airline passenger seat – generally between the vomit bag and the in-flight shopping catalogue.

I’m talking about in-flight magazines, those relentlessly cheerful, glossy publications produced by the world’s major airlines to keep bored passengers entertained with stories featuring exotic locales, illustrated with stunning sunset shots, and peopled by natives whose only pleasure in life seems to be administering to your every wish and whim.

Take the December 2010 issue of Air France Magazine. Come to think of it – following my return to Greece from Paris flying with Air France – I did take it. It’s lying open on the table in front of me generating a severe case of buyers remorse (see footnote).

Why is it that in-flight magazines always seem to feature gushing stories about locations you are not flying to? A case in point: the December issue of Air France Magazine. I mean, there I am, flying to Paris, one of the most romantic and idealized cities in the world, reading about the incredible kingdom of Bhutan, and sun drenched New Caledonia.

New Caledonia? What was I thinking? I could have been sunning myself in the South Pacific for the past two months. Instead, I spent ten days freezing my butt in Paris, and now here I am freezing my ears on the Aegean island of Ikaria!

…

Image: Screen shot of Air France magazine accommodation feature

…

Then there is the article about luxurious accommodations in Bali, Thailand, Shanghai and elsewhere which make my 35 euro budget hotel look like a flop house for vagrants.

I looked in vain for a guide to the prices charged by the hotels featured, but none was to be found anywhere – not in the magazine, anyway. Fearing this was a clear case of “If you have to ask the price – you can’t afford it,” I took a deep breath and headed online.

I was right. I couldn’t afford it. Even at the special internet rate of “from USD $245++” per night I was not going to be staying at the Alila Ubud Resort in Bali anytime soon. Clearly, my copy of the in-flight magazine had inadvertently strayed from First Class down to Economy.

How else do you account for the high priced advertisements for higher priced luxury goods and products, modeled by even higher priced Hollywood actors. Surely Penélope Cruz, Charlize Theron, and Leonardo DiCaprio are not so strapped for cash that they have to tout for watch makers and perfume companies. Surely! Leonardo – say it isn’t so.

The next time I take an airline flight I’m going to carry a good book to read and leave the in-flight magazine where it belongs, jammed between the in-flight shopping guide and the vomit bag.

…

Image: Screen shot of New Caledonia article including obligatory friendly native

…

Footnote: Buyer's remorse is the sense of regret some people have after purchasing big-ticket items such as a car or house [or in my case, I trip to Paris]. It may stem from a sense of not wishing to be wrong, of guilt over extravagance, or of suspecting you have been "snowed" by a salesperson. [Source: Wikipedia...]

Airport Taxes Be D@md!

Image: Air France A320 coming into land

…

I’ve just finished booking a ten night stay in Paris, France. All my bookings were done online, and I’m happy to say the whole process was relatively quick and trouble free. But having booked a return ticket from Athens, Greece to Paris, with Air France I still feel a need to vent my spleen.

The actual cost of the flight is just €52.00euros (US$71.00). Return!

This is a bargain if ever I saw one so I have no complaints here. However. Once airport taxes and fees are added to the cost of the ticket, the price jumps to €171.64 (US$235.00)!

Don’t bother, I already have the answer – that amounts to an additional €118.64 (US$162.00) in various taxes and extra fees. Yes, that’s well over double the actual cost of the airline fee. Here’s a breakdown of those extras courtesy of Air France:

…

Image: Air France Taxes and Surcharges screenshot

…

If you are having trouble reading the screen shot, here are the itemized extras (in Euros):

…

...

I’m not blaming Air France for all these ‘Taxes and Surcharges’. The figures include taxes and fees levied by Athens’ Eleftherios Venizelos International Airport as well as those by Paris’s Charles De Gaulle airport, and I have no way of knowing who gets what when the spoils are divided up between them. But the fact remains, that a cheap €52.00 euro return ticket has more than doubled due to corporate and government greed that happily continues to milk travelers for as much as they can get.

I’m not happy. Not happy at all.

What on earth is a Solidarity Tax? I don’t care if it is only one euro – I want to know what it is, and who gets it. And how does an Airport Fee differ from the Passenger terminal facility charge and the Airport development tax? And what is the Passenger service charge international anyway?

And what about those ridiculous figures? A French airport tax of 4.11? Couldn’t they round the eleven cents down to 10, and the 10.13 cent Passenger service charge international up to 15? Imagine how many croissants the could buy with all those extra millions of 1 cents collected. Yes, I am being sarcastic.

This is patently ridiculous. Imagine how much cheaper air travel would be all over the world if taxes like these were done away with. Ok, that’s expecting too much. Halved, then. Imagine how much cheaper air travel would be all over the world if taxes like these were halved.

Surely someone, somewhere has done the sums on this. Surely, people would travel more if the costs were cheaper. As a case in point, take myself. I would love to visit several other countries in Europe, particularly Italy and Spain and even some of the northern European countries, but simply can’t afford to. I certainly can’t afford to fly to them anyway. So instead of visiting several countries I am only visiting France (apart from Greece where I am currently located).

Sure, if I was visiting three or four additional countries, I would spend fewer days in each destination, but if more people could afford to fly to more countries, one would expect the extra visitor numbers would more than make up for any drop in the length of each visit.

I don’t expect all air travel costs would be reduced by two-thirds if all these extra fees were eliminated, but my one example does shows how cheap air travel could be, if they were.