The Place In Which We Find Ourselves. A collection of short stories and poems by Darran Biles, Adam Biles and Jean-François Caro, illustrated by Adeline Darling and designed by Rob Chant.
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Purchase through Paypal for €12. Postage and packing costs:
- France: €2
- Europe: €3
- Rest of world: €3.5
Limited numbers are also available from Shakespeare and Co. (37 Rue de la Bücherie, Paris).
Images from a reading at Shakespeare and Co., by Darran Biles, Jean-François Caro and Adam Biles.
L'Arc, lofty centre-piece of the world's largest traffic roundabout, yet more than a little intractable, obstinate, wilful (some would like to say, more than a little French) as it disdains to perform for us, its spectators and supplicants on the ground stuck in cars or on benches, to even the tiniest degree that duty we might expect comes with being granted centre stage: that of making yourself entirely available to every viewpoint, transfixing all viewers with scattered projectiles to the eyes containing the same undiminished presence. We've paid for you and we expect to get you, the whole package, no matter where we're sat. But the Arc requires us to move. The supposed finest of its bas-reliefs rendering the 1792 Departure of Volunteers — just one of whom is curiously without clothes from the waist down and is walking off to war with nothing whatever covering his genitals — is to be found on the side of the Arc facing down the Champs-Élysées. Napoleon himself also favours, bestows his Triumph upon, this side, which must after all be the front of the Arc.
Darran Biles, Paris Printemps
First day of spring!
naked trees greet
the newborn sky.
Spring air whistles
between our eyes —
tired subway ride.
Songs of spring morning —
reverberations
around the gem-green bottle.
Early spring —
on the dusty ground
pigeons all in love again.
March zenith —
a pigeon imitates
the pace of the tourists.
Lying on the spring grass —
fresh rainscent, wet dirt;
the haze of the sun.
Sunbathed promenade —
slow shadows walking
in Sunday spring loneliness.
Jean-François Caro, Poems
In the sole tavern of a small settlement some two days walk from Galilee, home to no more than thirty families — ignoring the clan of desert-dusted nomads who had been pitched nearby for three days now and whose cattle fouled the watering hole and whose unfathomable children, their evergreen eyes charged with that disturbing feral energy, spent their days on the main drag digging countless small pot-sized holes with their fingernails whilst their parents begged for scraps — darkness was beginning to encroach on proceedings. Talk had been of the harvest, which would be completed within a week if the heavens permitted, of the nomads and how they should be persuaded to leave without bringing a hex upon the village (and some laughed at this: but they could laugh, because they were young and had forgotten the fire that ravaged the grain store, and the locusts, and the distressed cattle — the nomads had a way of arriving just before everything went to shit), of Shem the village elder and his taking of a twelfth wife in his seven-hundredth year and of Noah, whose absence from the harvesting workforce for another day was being profited from by Adam, his wife's brother…
Adam Biles, Putting The World To Rights
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