Mardi 29 Juillet

Bought some pants, a shirt, some empty notebooks down near St Germain after a bit of coffee at the Cafe de la Mairie on St Sulpice. There's been a lovely warm breeze through the city the last few days, which this morning effectively cleared away a sordid mood which had afflicted me since my return, sunday evening, from a good friend's wedding down near Avignon. No doubt, that the wedding was so excellent as to require a bit of physical recuperation may have had its part to play in said mood (the neck part of the physical, in particular, was in need of attention from the body-particles).While I'm just beginning the 'summer' part of my summer (in this we find that the author still relates to seasons from a predominantly juvenile anchor) I've begun thinking towards an amusing task for the fall - exploring what kind of analogy might be drawn between the arrival of the Israelite tribes in Palestine ca 1300-1200 B.C. on one hand, and the Arab conquest of Palestine in 635-637 A.D. on the other. The topic (for a seminar paper) emerged from a conversation with my advisor and it's been floating in Lake semi-conscious since late June. Accordingly, as I got back to Paris I wandered through a few bookstores and poked at texts relating to the events of the 7th century since I'm completely unfamiliar with them. This brought me to some excellent shops (again, near st Sulpice) where I found some old publications of sites like Tello (Ah, vulture Stela, you taunt us once again!). The kind with wax paper over the cover.
as far as my above analogy goes, it looks like it may be a bit of a stretch to get it to fly... The originally intriguing fact was that of tribes emerging from the Saudi peninsula bearing monotheism and rapidly rallying local Levantine peoples to their cause. Of course, the contexts are so radically different...
On verra.