New Paris York

Al Stotts

Description

New Paris York is a passionate love letter to Paris and New York and a tale of romance between admirers of the urban icons.
New Paris York is a love story that explores the histories, cultures, politics, art and architecture of its three geographic locations: Paris, New York and New Mexico. The story begins before the Covid pandemic and continues into the spread of the virus around the world. There’s sexual and romantic intrigue as well. Before meeting Taos Pueblo artist Betty Lujan in New York, history professor Kiloran Hamill has a complicated relationship with a fashion journalist who lives in his East Village building. And Betty is pursued in Paris by a wealthy French high-tech executive who is obsessed with art and with her. As French author Anatole France observed, a tale without romance is like beef without mustard -- an insipid dish.

Sujets

• Covid
• Nueva York
• Literature
• New York City
• Albuquerque, New Mexico
• Politics
• New Mexico
• Art
• Taos
• History
• Paris
• Romance
• Albuquerque
• Fiction
• Nouveau-Mexique
• New York
• Architecture

Informations

• Publié par: iUniverse
• Date de parution: 05 juillet 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781663241009
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

NEW PARIS YORK
a novel
 
 
 
 
AL STOTTS
 
 
 
 
 

 
NEW PARIS YORK
A NOVEL
 
Copyright © 2022 Al Stotts.
 
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
 
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
 
 
 
iUniverse
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www.iuniverse.com
844-349-9409
 
Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.
 
Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.
 
ISBN: 978-1-6632-4101-6 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-6632-4100-9 (e)
 
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022910752
 
 
iUniverse rev. date: 06/06/2022
Contents
Prologue
Names Given and Taken
Fleeting Passion
Progressive Roots
Portrait by the Artist
New Mexico Paris York
Nude York
New York to New Mexico
Manhattan Through Taos Eyes
The Beauty of Manhattan
Parlez Vous Tiwa?
The Roof of Paris
Champ de Repos
Champ de Mars
Flâneurs
La Galerie Moderne
Commune de New York
Le Bistrot
The Judgment of Paris
La Peste
Séduction
Les Microbes
Saint-Pol-de-Leon
Pilgrims
Far From the Madding Crowd
Ideological Virus
Underlying Conditions
The Best of Times in the Worst of Times
J’ai Trois Amours
Art in the Time of Covid
Plein Air
Portrait of the Art Collector
Seeing the Face, Seeing the Soul
Covid Dreams
Lost Illusions
The Place
City of Romance
Paris Mon Amour
Le Jour du Mariage
God Bless Amérique
Ville Lumière
Au Revoir, Paris
Manhattan est Belle
News of Paris
Like a Siren
I am learning that there are cities, like certain women, who annoy you, overwhelm you, and lay bare your soul, and whose scorching contact, scandalous and delightful at the same time, clings to every pore of your body.
~ Albert Camus, The Rains of New York (1947)
 
For Paris and New York
 
 
With special thanks to my friend Eric Hajas of Saint-Pol-de-Leon, France, for making valuable edits and comments on numerous drafts. I also want to thank Jim Danneskiold, Michael Bustamante, Zandra Trujillo, Steve Baca, Maureen Baca, Melissa Stotts, and Liz Dineen for taking time to review initial drafts.
“Well,” I said, “Paris is old , is many centuries. You feel, in Paris, all the time gone by. That isn’t what you feel in New York —” He was smiling. I stopped.
“What do you feel in New York?” he asked.
“Perhaps you feel,” I told him, “all the time to come. There’s such power there, everything is in such movement. You can’t help wondering—I can’t help wondering—what it will all be like—many years from now.”
~ James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room (1956)
Prologue
New York City and Paris captured Kiloran Hamill’s heart when he was young, long before he had an opportunity to visit either city. Both had great literary traditions, and it was their novelists who taught him most of what he knew and appreciated about them as he grew up.
Kiloran’s literary education about the two cities was facilitated by the Albuquerque Public Library in New Mexico. Albuquerque was as unlike Paris or New York as it could be. Yet he loved his hometown and New Mexico with the same passion he had for what he considered to be the two greatest cities of the world. It was an urban love triangle that would help shape his life.
His love of New York started with baseball because the Yankees were his favorite team. A city with such a legendary team must be great in other ways, he reasoned. His preoccupation was nurtured by all the images of the city he saw in movies and in the works of John Dos Passos, Bernard Malamud, Pete Hamill, Piri Thomas, Toni Morrison, Truman Capote, Edith Wharton, James Baldwin, and Henry Roth, who died in Albuquerque in 1995.
His affection for Paris began with his French grandmother who grew up in Suresnes, a commune in the western suburbs of Paris. He was fascinated by her stories about Paris and by her French accent. As a boy, he wondered what life would be like in a country without baseball. His grandmother introduced him to the writings of Honoré de Balzac, Victor Hugo, Émile Zola, George Sand, Anatole France, Marcel Proust, and Guy de Maupassant; so he developed an affinity for 19 th century French authors. Their stories transported him to the streets of Paris in centuries past. The books he befriended when he was young had become friends for life.
Kiloran thought about how Victor Hugo described Notre Dame as a chimera among the other old churches of Paris: it had the head of one, the limbs of another, the back of a third. The same was true for New York and Paris – sometimes they borrowed from each other culturally, artistically, and politically.
It was more broadly true of France and America. After all, France had been an ally of America in the War for Independence from England and the U.S. had helped liberate France from Hitler’s occupation in World War II. And the flags of both nations shared the colors red, white, and blue.
In 1776 the Marquis de La Fayette expressed his hope for the new American experiment: “The happiness of America is intimately connected with the happiness of mankind; She is destined to become the safe and venerable asylum of virtue, of honesty, of tolerance, and of peaceful liberty.”
More recently , New York Times columnist Roger Cohen wrote about the shared Franco-American ideal: “Perhaps the root of the mutual fascination that binds France and the United States is that each sees itself as an idea, a model of some kind for the rest of the world. This is an immodest but tenacious notion, bound up with the founding articles and myths of both republics. No other countries make such claims for the universality of their virtue.”
As a historian, Kiloran understood that the two nations also shared darker realities in their pasts, including slave-trading and colonialism. Early in the 20 th century, fascist ideology took seed in the U.S. and France. It grew during World War II but went mostly dormant after the defeat of Hitler. Then it emerged from the fringes of both societies in the 21 st century to seek and achieve political power.
In the U.S., the Republican Party’s capitulation to Donald Trump made the GOP a political safe haven for white nationalism. Gold Star father Khizar Khan called Republican leaders the “mute enablers” of Trump’s fascism.
In France, right-wing figures such as Marine Le Pen and fiery orator Éric Zemmour, a nationalist with an ominous view of the future, experienced rising popularity. Trump was also a cult figure for all of Europe’s far-right organizations.
The Trump administration’s antipathy toward immigrants caused Kiloran to worry that the separation of families and caging of immigrant children at America’s southern border could be the first step along a path to the industrialized barbarism that Nazi Germany unleashed in World War II.
The former television personality had demonstrated autocratic aspirations from the beginning of his presidency. Kiloran was particularly alarmed by how much influence Russia’s Communist-dictator-turned-Fascist-despot, Vladimir Putin, had over him. At an infamous Helsinki news conference with Putin in 2018, Trump refused to blame the Russian president for meddling in the 2016 election or to acknowledge Russia’s ongoing cyber war against the United States.
The puppet did the bidding of the puppet master. In an astonishing statement from a U.S. President, Trump accepted Putin’s word over the assessment of the American intelligence community: “My people came to me, Dan Coats came to me and some others, they said they think it’s Russia. I have President Putin; he just said it’s not Russia. I will say this: I don’t see any reason why it would be.”
Then in 2019 the U.S. House of Representatives impeached Trump for soliciting Russia’s election interference in the 2016 presidential election and for promotion of a debunked conspiracy theory that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered. He was also accused of withholding military aid to Ukraine u nless President Volodymyr Zelensky initiated an investigation into former Vice President Joe Biden. Senate Republicans foolishly refused to convict Trump.
America was at risk because Republicans no longer believed in the common good. They put power and party above country. For decades a faction of their leadership had preached a selfish philosophy of personal freedom and that had become the dominant creed of the party. They no longer believed in the rule of law, and they felt free to reject truth in favor of personal opinion and ideological purity.
How could anyone not understand the logical outcome of a political movement that thrived on hatred, greed, and corruption? In the middle of the previous century, the United States had helped France and the world defeat fascism. A mere eight decades later, the U.S. and France needed