Hardware

 Just back, sleep-deprived but well-fed and -wined from five days in Napa  at the writers' conf.  From the total silence of a cottage in the foggy woods to the sound of teenagers departing from the houses across the street. They mill around the front lawn moaning "byyyye....byyyye...looove ya".  

Napa = strange mixture of the cute and the authentic. Like the shady front porches,  like the tanned, rotund Spanish-talking  cowboys chewing the fat on a bench in front of the supermarket in Calistoga two nights ago.  About four of them, watching life go buy, and the women, behind them sun setting on a range of mountains I have in other seasons climbed.  Would gladly have climbed again, but this week no time between readings and driving up and down the valley to events.  Vineyards amazingly lush--all irrigated, all head high, undulating, greener than any vineyards I've seen in Provence.  Must be the drip systems.  They say the Valley is running out of water.  Movie memorabilia at the Francis Ford Coppola Winery.

 The hardware store:  downtown St Helena, with everything a hardware store should have, nails to pipes to housewares, happy customers and clerks who looking like they'd been selling U-bends for decades and could not imagine anything they'd rather be doing. 

Keywords:

• hardware
•  
• Napa

Breathing through my toes

Summer activities:  visiting the student garden for herbs.  They've planted less this summer, no--not many--exuberant zucchini, but a few strawberries, a few tomatoes, lots of basil and thyme, which I don't feel guilty about cutting, since really I'm keeping the plants under control.  

Meditation aka Stress Reduction.  This is something I believe I first took up in preparation for giving birth.  I might be getting better at it (meditation), though I confess that there comes a moment in the tape when I wonder if I couldn't be doing something else with my time. However, part of the purpose is to develop a different relationship with Time, so I'm hanging in there.  What do monks do when their right leg, folded over their left leg, falls asleep?  Do they really manage to "breathe into it"?  Why do I feel I'm a failure when I shift position?  (But, I know, part of the purpose is not to feel like a failure:  "nothing is good, or bad'). Afterwards, ok, I do feel swept clean of my obsessions, as if I'd had a good session with the dental hygienist.

Keywords:

• meditation

Adornment

In January, returning from Vancouver, I tried to smuggle a polished lump of jade green beach stone through Airport Security.  A polite young man asked me to open my suitcase.  "Did I have a large rock inside?" he asked, puzzled.  Well, I did, in the toe of a sock, and he was chagrined to confiscate it, though if I wished to return to the airport concourse, he said I would find everything I needed to mail it to myself.  But I wasn't that attached  to the stone, even if it did feel good in the palm of my hand and came from my parents' beach.  It was a stone with a history.

I thought of this yesterday, going through Security at Vancouver Airport again. This time my socks were full of sea-polished oyster shells:  tools, not weapons, my inner primitive told me, though my stone would have made a nice tool as well, raw material for a stone blade, maybe a hammer to break open a live oyster, or pound a teepee pole into hard ground.  My oyster shells made it through Security.  I have given them to my Park City, Utah (I have travelled from sea level to Katmandou) granddaughter; like good primitives we have made them into a necklace.  

Bookaholics Anonymous

I am thinking about a friend who buys books without having any immediate intention of reading them.   He sees a tempting-looking book and he buys it.  For future use.  When he retires he says he imagines he will have time to read the books he has accumulated, unread, over the years.  He sees himself in a comfy armchair with a fire in the grate and a tower or two of books leaning from the floor beside him.  I am adding a bottle of whisky in case he hasn't thought of it. 

In the meantime, I wonder, what does he do with them?  Does he shelve them, in their rightful place, alphabetically?  Does he have a special shelf he keeps for unread books:  Books I will Read Some Day?  If he puts them in the literature (or philosophy or non-fiction (assuming he can keep these categories apart, I know I can't)) section of his library, will he remember he hasn't read them and will he ever read them? It gives me nightmares to think about it.  As it gives me nightmares to go into the stacks at the library and look at all the books I will never read.

I have almost finished my Christmas books, including the Stieg Larsson books my son handed down to me, third or fourth hand. One I read on a transatlantic flight and on into jet lag nights in Paris.  Mr Larsson, you shouldn't have climbed those seven flights of stairs, you should have gone to the gym more, you should have smoked fewer cigarettes (I know, I'm confusing you with your journalist-hero), because I couldn't put The Girl with the Hornet's Nest down and now I have no Larsson books about powerful women.  You should have seen me stamping around the house.

Keywords:

• Anne Carson
•  
• Derrida
•  
• Stieg Larsson

Pensées

1) I don't get why over here in France we are storming the Bastille again while across the Channel, faced with more drastic budget cuts, the British get on with it.  (A nation fond of hyperbole versus one that prefers understatement?)  And who should I admire?

2) My friend's blog comments on the quality of academic writing.  I've been logging on toARCADES, the Stanford humanities website for a few months now.  Intelligent, and interesting for someone curious about what goes on in the back rooms of academia, but--with a few notable exceptions--it proves my friend's point.

3) Getting dark.  I love it when lights come on in other rooms.  Love the rectangles of light I can see across the street through the imbrications of buildings, shadows on the outside walls.  Love it most when I can look in.

4) Sounds.  My husband ironing.  Setting down the iron.  Water gurgling.  Breathing steam.  We're going to Barcelona tomorrow.  A place I've never been.  And then Madrid, the Prado, Goya and dinner with our friend, a painter, and his partner.

Keywords:

• Demonstrations etc
•  
• Paris

Anthony Hecht, Algeria

I've been reading  Anthony Hecht or, more exactly, I've been reading a lecture Christopher Ricks gave at Bard College on Hecht's borrowings or allusions or whatever you want to call them, from Eliot and others. Hecht is one of the poets who fascinate and repel me equally (Robinson Jeffers is another).  Why?  Probably because he does things I both do and don't want to do, writing, and on subjects that fascinate me as well, viz, the intersection of violence and eroticism.  I gorge on his poems and feel sick.  They make me think of over-furnished rooms, with moldings, parquet ("parquet-moulures-cheminées," as the French say of Paris's c19 Hausmanian style), gilding and lots of expensive bibelots (="inanités sonores")--see Hecht's caustically sensual poem on the 16th arrondissement and the Algerian War, "The Deodand."

Algeria, the Sahara, clean as an ocean.  Saw an aerial view, recently, of Ghardaia.  Looked down at the flat roofs and tried to pick out the place we stayed in as students on a Canadian university-sponsored trip in the summer of....  Too hot to sleep.  We wrapped ourselves in wet bedsheets and climbed up to the roofs.  There were no other visitors; it was the end of the Algerian war.  

Keywords:

• Anthony Hecht
•  
• Christopher Ricks
•  
• Robinson Jeffers

Calvino, by Calvino

In an article I'm reading (Sergio Blazina, "Italo Calvino:  Un Linguaggio fra Scienzo e Mito"), quoting Calvino on the language of science and what it can bring to the language of literature (my quick translation):

  "...the model of mathematical language, of formal logic, can keep the writer from the repetition into which words and images fall through their false use.  ...The writer must not believe he has found something absolute, however; here too the example of science can help:  in the patient modesty with which it considers each result as part of a perhaps infinite series of approximations."

(This is the/a key to Calvino's story, "L'avventura di un fotografo." )

 And also:

"In Palomar...a continuous need of real knowledge has led me to limit the field, descend ever further into the details.  In the end this type of research shows itself inexhaustible." 

  The game of language, in Calvino, a serious game, with serious objectives, despite the skepticism, despite the irony, is a grate of light (see his story, "The Count of Montecristo,") in the wee hours feeling of "what's the point"? I want to see it as a way out of Beckett.

Keywords:

• Italo Calvino

Pierre Boulez

Pierre Boulez at the Louvre. Went back to see it again this afternoon. Two rooms, a few drawings, water colors (Delacroix, Degas, Klee, Kandinsky, Giacometti), four glass cases of musical scores (Boulez, Stravinsky, Wagner, Berio...), a copy of Mallarme's "Coup de Des," four blocks of text about the sketchy, the unfinished, the ongoing, the fragment, the part for the whole, the erasure.

Keywords:

• Boulez
•  
• contemporary art
•  
• Louvre