Wednesday 15 January, Paris

Oh, goodness, it really has been a while since I wrote here, and only about new-book-related things. So I’ll begin by saying that we have been in Paris (and the Vaucluse over the holidays) for over a month; right now I’m looking out the study window at rain pouring steadily down. An occasion to remind myself of Ponge’s wonderful prose poem about rain, the poem that is at the very beginning of Le Parti Pris des Choses, where he describes — pretty much without subtext— the sights and sounds of rain falling outside his (Paris?) window. Here it’s the sort of a day when you keep the lights on, but I’m quite content to sit at my desk, which was once the childhood bedroom desk of one of my daughters, the set designer who now raises alpacas on a rainy island in the Pacific Ocean.

Time for the pitch: I gave a reading at the Red Wheelbarrow bookshop in Paris last night, and today one of the audience members wrote about it on her substack: https://open.substack.com/pub/vamoul/p/i-leave-this-at-your-ear-for-when?r=18fxj0&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email. You might also enjoy Victoria’s other posts — she’s a gifted writer.

Second \ pitch: I’ll be reading at the Broadway Bookshop in London (Hackney) on Thursday Feb 13.

I guess that’s all for today. I shall try to be more regular. I’ve been reading Dorothy Wordsworth’s diary and I see that a few lines every day is worthwhile. Virginia Woolf admires DW in her Second Common Reader: Four Figures: ‘She scarcely seemed to shut her eyes…as if some secret of the utmost importance lay hidden beneath the surface.’ If that rings a bell, reread Elizabeth Bishop’s poem ‘Over 2000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance,’ easily available online.