Clearly, I’m eying totes these days. These are by Amy Kathryn, about whom I know very little except that Bags! Pretty!

I was at the post office and there was this display rack of red postcards advertising lala - trade your CD’s for a dollar! and I thought - huh. I’d like like to trade CD’s for a dollar and so I went home and looked up lala.com and now 35 people have CD’s that I didn’t want anymore and I have 35 CD’s that I do want. And they gave me a cute t-shirt for pimping out their service to my friends. It’s like … recycling! and addictive. and I wish that the mailman would deliver on Sundays.

How to Fall Down

• By Melissa Kirsch

(Photo: Kagen McLeod)

Y ou never forget your first fall. Mine was in the stairwell of my building. I was simultaneously putting on my coat while balancing a behemoth shoulder satchel and two bags of recycling while wearing, of course, a ridiculously pitched pair of Barbie-appropriate pumps. I was three blocks away before I realized my tights were torn and both knees were bleeding.

With the sheer volume of crap we lug around, the urge to be the first in the crosswalk when the light changes, and our beloved, perilous footwear, it is no wonder that a stroll down Madison Avenue can be a dangerous act for women. Sidewalk cracks, iPod-induced disorientation, and cell-phone walk-and-talk only add to the inevitability of trips and slips. The most hazardous zone by far is the subway, where the potential for a chipped tooth and scraped palms lies at the bottom of every stairway.

When the inevitable occurs, try the following for minimal bruising to body and ego:

1. Go limp. If you try to play it off like you were just breaking into a jog, you’ll gain momentum, which means a harder impact.

2. Use your hands. Grab on to a wall, banister, or person (taking care not to bring them down with you). You won’t land as hard or bruise as much.

3. It’s better to fall backward on your behind than forward on your face. The exception is climbing stairs, in which case attempt to catch yourself with your hands and knees. In all instances, avoid the chin plant.

4. Get up as fast as possible, with little fanfare. Don’t examine the sidewalk accusingly. Tell concerned passersby you’re fine, and walk away briskly.

5. Try to laugh. I took a nasty plunge down the main staircase at the Astor Place Barnes & Noble (knee-high, stack-heel boots). I picked myself up, straightened my skirt, and asked, nonchalantly, “Who wants my number?” We fall down. It happens. The best we can do is try to ensure we don’t fall apart.

just in case the basil won’t come back, these little packets of organic spices would be fantastic. Expensive, but fantastic.

I’m such a sucker for packaging.

at the Rudolf Stingel exhibit at MCA Chicago, the walls are made of foam core with silver on top and you can write on them or color or otherwise make them your own. Like this:

I wrote a love poem to Kris and doodled a bit, just to take advantage of the opportunity.

I am very fond of a good independent coffee shop. This is Filter and it’s quite fine, but I’m not particular. It’s a special pleasure if you can happen upon one unexpectedly while travelling and then have awhile to linger with the locals.

I love this picture because of the contrast.

I was all excited about visiting because of the vivid descriptions in the Time Traveller’s Wife and because I’m a museum whore. It was so much better than I’d even expected. And they have student discounts!

it’s a restaurant and a command! at Graze, all of the food is served beautifully and in small proportions. Like this:

I had to steal this picture off of the website because I’m disappointed to say that I neglected to bring my camera to dinner. Everything was delicious, everything was attractive, definitely get the trio of seasonal soups, although you can skip the meatloaf and the wines are lovely. Eat at Graze!

Greg Clarke

PARIS : The Secret History. By Andrew Hussey. Illustrated. 485 pp. Bloomsbury. $32.50.

With “Paris: The Secret History,” Andrew Hussey shows that it was ever thus, as he sifts through two millenniums of history to expose the dark side of the City of Light. Addictively readable and richly detailed, the book recounts “the story of Paris from the point of view of … marginal and subversive elements in the city,” those “insurrectionists, vagabonds, immigrants, sexual outsiders, criminals … whose experiences contradict and oppose official history.” For Hussey, a biographer of the Situationist thinker Guy Debord, these elements make up an essential part of the Parisian landscape. Following the poet Jean de Boschère, he emphasizes the “endless play of polarities — shadow and light, past and present” — that give the city not just its charm, but its edge.

By CAROLINE WEBER; NYTimes; Published: February 4, 2007

Paris Confidential

Years ago, while strolling through a Parisian flower market, I was accosted by a man with a posy in his hands and a poem on his lips. “Here are some fruits, some flowers, some leaves and some branches,” he declaimed, quoting the poet Paul Verlaine, “And here is my heart, which beats only for you.” At which the stranger dropped his bouquet, unzipped his pants and presented me with an organ quite different from his heart. In Paris, I reflected as I hurried away, the boundary between lyricism and squalor is as fragile as a rosebud, and as permeable as a man’s fly.

Such an approach comes as a welcome corrective to the “cliché and commodity” that, Hussey rightly notes, mark most contemporary representations of Paris: “The Eiffel Tower, the Sacré-Coeur, Notre-Dame are all part of a global visual culture, a Disneyfied baby language that distorts and destroys real meaning.” This book seeks to restore “real history” by replacing “the kitsch tourist version of the city” with far grittier imagery.

The author duly strips even the city’s best-loved monuments of their “Disneyfied” patina. Notre-Dame, he writes, stands on “a place of Druidic sacrifices and pagan worship,” and “long into the 16th century” was the site of “an orgiastic, four-day saturnalia … often ending in murder and group sex.” The Sacré-Coeur basilica, built by the French government in 1873 on the very spot where it had brutally suppressed a workers’ uprising three years before, “represents the grim victory of the forces of social order over the oppressed.” In 1889, Parisians saw the construction of the Eiffel Tower as “almost certainly a bad omen,” and compared the structure to a “suppository.” The Place Dauphine — the deserted triangular square alongside the Pont-Neuf that Henri IV named for his son in the early 17th century — has since been known as “the clitoris of Paris.” With tidbits like this, readers will never look at Paris the same way again.

At its best, Hussey’s offbeat, irreverent approach also challenges received wisdom about French history. When tracing the larger political developments that shaped the city, he offers up many hair-raising, hilarious details. In 613, an early Frankish queen was “found guilty … on the charge of the murder of 10 kings. Her punishment was to be tied to a camel for three days, and to be beaten and raped by anyone passing by.” Why a camel? I have no idea, and Hussey offers no hypotheses. The factoid, though, amusingly illustrates the otherwise banal truism that “the Franks excelled at terror.” In much the same way, the author enlivens his remarks on the succession crisis of 1137 by noting that Louis VI’s heir “had been killed in an accident with one of the wild pigs which roamed the streets of Paris.” Who knew? Hussey did, and he is unstinting with his unforgettable trivia.

His care with basic historical facts, however, is not always so impressive. Writing about the Reign of Terror, Hussey refers — more than once — to the new regime’s quasi-executive organ, the Committee of Public Safety, in the plural, but there was only one such committee. Less trivially, he says that this body “quickly became a law unto” itself after its inception in the spring of 1793. While it was extremely powerful, it coexisted uneasily with the Committee of General Security and the Paris Commune, both of which also wielded considerable power. And Thomas Carlyle, one of the 19th century’s best-known chroniclers of the Revolution, was not “an Englishman” but a Scot.

Other missteps are also jarring. Notwithstanding his desire “to make my own maps of the city,” Hussey would have done well to stick to the grammatically correct names of the landmarks he catalogs, like the Palais du Luxembourg, which he calls “the Palais de Luxembourg.” When committed by a tourist asking for directions, this is exactly the sort of gaffe that inspires Parisians to claim they’ve never heard of the place.

Further, the author’s meditation on the sordid underbelly of classical-age Paris would have benefited from a mention of Michel Foucault’s “Madness and Civilization,” which famously showed that by 1656 one in a hundred of the city’s inhabitants languished in mental asylums. Similarly, when Hussey notes that in 18th-century Paris underground booksellers fed the public’s “appetite for politics and porn,” one misses a reference to Robert Darnton, who wrote three influential books on the subject. These works are all indispensable guides to the city’s “secret history,” and their absence is palpable here.

Still, Hussey makes an invaluable contribution by debunking the myth that Paris’s history is “a repository of all that is finest and most magnificent in the human spirit.” For this city is far more than the sum of its grand boulevards, quaint side streets and picturesque structures rising high above the Seine. It is a place where one medieval power broker “hung his enemies up by their penises”; where during the religious massacres of the late 16th century and the revolutionary purges of the late 18th, the streets ran red with blood; where the Second Empire’s most gifted poet, Charles Baudelaire, ordered his steak “as tender as the brain of a little child”; where the populace, during sieges both foreign and domestic, subsisted on rats, dogs and dead men’s bones; where “80,000 Jews, from all over France, had passed through” en route to the Nazi death camps; and where, as recently as the fall of 2005, suburban riots disrupted the country. Hussey does not comment on this last episode, but he includes a photograph of three agitators — all young men of African descent — facing off with invisible authorities against a backdrop of burning wreckage. Far crueler and more complicated than its picture postcards imply, Paris has always played host to outsiders and outlaws. In this respect its past, as rewritten by Hussey, may well hold a key to its future.

Caroline Weber, the author of “Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution and “Terror and Its Discontents: Suspect Words in Revolutionary France,” is a frequent contributor to the Book Review.

I’m quite sure that the world needed this desperartely. If it didn’t, well, then at least I’m entertained.