I'm thinking how everything is sexier in Paris, but in particular, from a female perspective, the men, who dress in tight trousers and swing their hips. It looks good coming and going, or following.
Also, lots of people on bikes, but no one--no one!--wears a helmet. Girls with their hair streaming behind them--a helmet would spoil that, but still, doesn't anyone care about the cars?
Bonsoir Madame. Vous venez de chez Mme B, n'est-ce pas? Je said que c'est l'heure ou vous vous retrouvez...
Oh vous savez, on a tres peu de choses en commun...
Ah?
On a des douleurs par ce temps, n'est-ce pas?
I think I have a new manuscript of poems that I am provisionally calling "In-flight entertainment." But I've worked on it so much that I need not to think about it for a while and then go back and see if it still holds up, both the individual poems and the overall shape of the collection.
So in the meantime I am going back through old poems, the ones that were half-finished and left aside, ones I thought were finished but which I now see weren't, but which feel worth working more on--which, increasingly, means whittling them down to something barer and maybe rougher. Other activities--like looking at Duchamp, like moving to another part of the world, with the shocks, like translating or writing an article--help to see things differently.
Can't always trust my judgement, however. A couple weeks ago I took a poem I'd pulled out of my own slush pile, and which surprised me by its rightness to a poetry group meeting over in Berkeley. Only my friends there weren't impressed by most of it--I'd been so sure it was a keeper, but there you go. I put most of it back in the slush pile. They are people whose judgement I respect.
Cooler and cloudy today in Paris, though the sun came out at the end of the afternoon, which I spent at the Centre Pompidou visiting the Duchamp exhibit. Crowded--today was the first Sunday in the month, I realised, and free. Still lots to learn about Duchamp and the show has several strong points, including a chronological treatment of his evolution from Fauvism to Cubism to his own particular brand of Cubism which involved not looking at an object from all sides simultaneously--though he did that too--but portraying something, a woman, two chess players at several different moments in time, and putting all the moments together on the same canvas, the most famous example being the "Nude Descending a Staircase." The last part of the exhibit showed the development of the Grand Glass, the Bride and her Bachelors. I knew the big well-known works, but it is very interesting to see the smaller, less well known works that link his different styles together and show how and why he evolved as he did. I remember once seeing a Mondrian show in The Hague that did the same.
All squished into too small a space for the number of visitors, given that there are a lot of very small pieces of paper to look at closely. Still, it's a key period in the history of c20 art, not just visual, and worth going back to, partly for Duchamp's own analyses of his development--say the way his titles moved from being descriptive to being thematic/allegorical to being utterly enigmatic and oblique.
Crossing the Place St Michel on the way home, I stopped to listen to a pianist playing a concert on a piano he had put in the middle of the square. His concentration and accuracy and verve were quite moving.
Every year the beekeepers of the Luxembourg Garden sell their honey to the public. It has a special flavour, maybe due to Paris pollution.
I thought today was the day. I rushed over with my cash. I even found one last cheque in my French checkbook, in case I didn't have enough cash (beekeepers don't take credit cards). Alas, I was wrong about the date.
"It was last weekend," a lady sitting at a table in front of the beekeepers' clubhouse, a table spread with cookies and a pot of honey. She pointed to the poster above her head, which I'd already seen earlier this week. Sure enough--I was a week out. Crestfallen. But all these people lined up--weren't they waiting to buy honey? (Last year it was rationed; only 1 pot per family.) No, they were waiting to take the exam.
When I come back to live in Paris, I will become a beekeeper in the Luxembourg Garden. I will take the exam.
(I found a link to a blog about Paris's beekeepers, from which I borrowed my photo.)
Locking the public garden for the night.
The Luxembourg Garden, which has a fence around it, an elegant fence with a number of gates that are closed at night, keeping the birds in and people out, is locked at sundown like many other French parks. There is a ritual for this; last night I stayed to enjoy it.
At about 6:15 pm (at the moment) policemen close the children's playground, a gated enclosure within the gated enclosure. You hear their whistles in the background over the noise of the children. More whistles, loud, short, shrill, playful, and fewer children's voices. The merry-go-round is wrapped up.
Now there is a half hour of quiet before--6:45 on the dot--the whistles begin again for the rest of the garden--a whistle off to the left, to the right, in the distance, coming closer--until the last chair is vacated, the last basketball-tossing kid throws his last shot, the last chess players gather up their board. Small children have gone, older ones head off on their skateboards, the petanque players put on their coats. People walk towards the exits, north, south, east and west. The joggers continue--I've been among them; you avoid catching the policemen's eyes until you've made it round for the last time and out the right gate. A policeman stands at each gate, keeping people from coming in--I've tried to do that too--if you are crossing the neighbourhood from west to east or vice versa, it is a good deal further when you can't cut across the Garden. The policeman will make no exceptions, the garden is closed, sorry.
Bonsoir Madame, the policeman says to the frowzy blonde woman in a mini-skirt. A demain.
Today I met an old friend for lunch, and we talked and talked. Each of us wanted to catch up on a year's news of the other and her family, but the conversation kept going off on a tangent, tangents which would eventually lead to a question that brought us back to our immediate lives, but it all came in fragments, pieces, a puzzle to be put together later, connections made. It is a kind of literature, the kind with no beginning and no end, just middle, everything always middle. it was lovely and we made a date to go to the Nikki de Saint Phalle show at the Grand Palais next week, having not begun to say everything we had to say. She left to go to a Borgia exhibit at the Musée Maillol, I came home to work on an introduction to a translation, and now having done what I can for today on that, I am going to crunch a Melatonin pill (for jet lag, see The Fleet Street Jet Lag Calculator, online, it seems to be working) and take a book--which book, Elena Ferrante, I think--to my corner of the Luxembourg Garden, under the sequoias, put my feet up and read until the sun goes down and they whistle us out.
Predictably, the plants on the back porch died over the summer, of heat and thirst. So today I walked over to the flower market on the Ile de la Cité to replace the Choisya with another Choisya--I love the lightness of its leaves, the way they flutter. As I was leaving I noticed that the seller had some plants sitting along the edge of the metal roof of the building, a couple of which looked like just-sprouted catalpa--the market is surrounded by catalpas. So he climbed up a ladder and brought them down and sold me a pot with two six-inch catalpas.
I window-shopped home: j'ai fait du lèche-vitrine, I licked the windows, lots of windows, and the bookstalls along the Seine, and I came home and read the second chapter of my new book by Elena Ferrante.