Spindry

One review complete, I think. One I'm still reading for. Two other bits of journalism maybe almost done. Four translations-in-progress, two now with the publisher, who wonders if I'll take on something else by the same writer. Yes, I will, because I learn so much myself, and because it is gratifying to publish books. Once a bookworm always a bookworm, but to produce the things yourself? You feel you exist--a kind of super pinch-me.

Sunday morning. Husband gone biking in the suburbs, friends coming for early (by European standards) supper. Two painters, a physicist and a computer person turned sculptor with bits of old pianos, also a collector of stone tools (from the ground) and partner-backpackers. 

Yesterday afternoon: Centre Pompidou, on foot (nice walk) to check out the children's art classes, the Robert Delaunay show and Frank Gehry (crowds there). Sat on the 6th floor sofas at the entry to the Duchamp show and watched people come and go, ordinary people with lots of kids apparently consenting to Duchamp. What would an 8 year old make of Duchamp? They should like the idea of turning stuff into art. I read the last section of the poetry book I have to review there. Bought underwear in a shop (Intimissimo? Italian?) and thought about how French women have nice underthings, which sure isn't Protestant. Lots of 20-somes trying on red lace bras and asking for bigger sizes. Me: something invisible to wear under gym leggings.

Washing machine just stopped spinning (silence suddenly, and not the silence of between spins, but the end-silence--what's the difference?) 

Reviewing

I like reviewing books. Well, I like it once the first draft is done. The first draft is a pain, but then it's sheer fun, fiddling with it. And I have just finished 500 or so words on a new poetry book, which I have made myself file away until tomorrow when I can reread what I've written like someone else's work (this gets harder at each stage of revision).

There are touchy political issues in reviewing. You want to be honest, but the world of poetry books is small and reasonably paranoiac and it is generally not a good idea to make enemies. (How i did Michael Hofmann have the courage to review Martin Amis's new book as he so pungently does in the latest LRB?) In fact, it would be better if poetry books were not reviewed by poets, just as films are not usually reviewed by filmmakers. 

Mostly the books I get to review are neither very good nor very bad; they are in that middle ground, and they make you wonder--for yourself as much as anything--why they aren't better, what would make them better. Is it lack of nature or lack of nurture? I would like to figure this out and also maybe say something helpful to the writer--though, like me, she will hate anything less than superlative, and especially advice from someone whose right to criticize is hardly a given.

I have another book to review. I haven't looked at it yet; the problem is going to be the sensational background to some of the material. Suicide, terminal illness, child abuse--throw them into the poetry pot and it changes everything. 

A little humour goes a long way.

Origes, orgies

Paris. The sky is California blue, the shadows on the stones of the church across the street sharply cut, like the stones themselves, even if they are falling into the street at intervals and needing to be wrapped in nets pending the arrival of a philanthropically-minded company, foundation, individual (Dan Brown, who used it in a movie?) , and subsequent restoration--probably not near the top of the things that need financing in France at the moment.

It seems, according to Le Monde this week, that the bottom line at Paris's Big Stores (grands magasins = department stores) is down, only somewhat mitigated by the Chinese whose tour bus companies are bribed to drop off tourists on their way to and from the Mona Lisa. It has been many years since I set foot in the Galeries Lafayettes or Printemps but I can't resist the Bon Marché and my husband is a sucker for the BHV (Bazaar de l'Hotel de Ville, on the quai near City Hall) basement hardware department, which has a café with workbenches for tables, and everything else, from doorknobs to nails, that anyone with a fixation on Parisian buildings could dream of. It reminds me that when I was little my mother used to take us to the basement of The Hudson's Bay Company store on Granville Street in downtown Vancouver (or Eaton's?) for a "malted milk," a flesh pink shake so thick you could cut it with a knife. Small wonder I have a sweet tooth.

Later in life--not much later--I had holiday jobs in the upper levels: filling ketchup containers in the restaurant, selling socks... . That was before I was old enough to be a full-fledged waitress at a summer resort in the Rockies and lived in the longest log cabin in Canada with a matron guarding each end of it, notwithstanding everyone slipped out every night with blankets for orgies in the--what else? primal forest.

Back...

in Paris, and a day spent catching up on emails and filling the fridge. Now home and watching it grow dark outside at 5pm, which makes it much harder to spend the late afternoons reading Borges on a chair under the Luxembourg Garden redwoods, even if the weather is warm enough to do so. 

There were pumpkins "for jack o'lanterns" in the supermarket--a first. In the south we observed the Toussaint (All Saints, Nov 1, the day of the dead) in advance by doing a little cleaning up of my husband's parents' grave, reminding me of the year we visited, by ferry--extra sailings in November--Venice's island cemetery over All Saints. Whole families sweeping tombs, picnicking on and beside them. My husband says he was dragged as a boy to Marseille's cemetery every year in November, and hated it. 

Chrysanthemums--France's traditional cemetery flowers--everywhere, huge sprays of them in autumn colours. Once, as a young bride in the south of France I took a bouquet of chrysanthemums, then just pretty flowers for me, with perhaps Asian associations, to a dinner party, and my hostess looked at me strangely. Later my husband explained. Couldn't he have told me ahead of time and saved me the retrospective embarrassment? Not the last time someone in France was to look at me strangely--say for sitting on a sofa with my legs curled up under me, or, running around the house barefoot.

Finished reading Elena Ferrante's Story of Those Who Flee and Those Who Stay. Two more volumes of hers waiting on my doorstep last night. And that it one thing about Amazon--I can buy Italian books, which would otherwise be difficult to obtain, as easily as if I were living in Italy.

Favourite Walk

It is four o’clock in the afternoon and I am walking to the next village, some 45 minutes on foot, 10 in a car. The road climbs through olive groves and vineyards, reaches a col, winds down through vineyards—Cotes du Rhone now, so every available patch of land is cultivated. The grapes have been harvested and the vines are turning yellow—soon they will red. I eat some of the tiny clusters the pickers left, glean more to take home for supper. The light is beautiful, warm, glittering off pines trees on the hills above the road.

This is one of my favourite walks—because it is beautiful in the way of land that has been farmed for ages, whose fields are contoured by time and geology; because it goes mostly uphill one the way there and downhill back, as all good hikes do; because the other village, off the beaten track, has changed very little in the past thirty years and because its Place de l’Eglise has a spectacular view of the Dentelles de Montmirail. Houses tumble down the hillside. Above the church there is a rock molar with an old iron cross askew at the top. Its limestone is crumbly. The Dentelles de Montmirail are known to rock climbers around the world; here signs warn us clear, even of the trail that twists up to the cross.

Café du Village

We have been in a village, connected to my husband's family, in the south of France for almost a week now. We have no internet in the house, so I am sitting on a stone bench outside my brother-in-law's house borrowing his connection. It is Sunday noon; I've just been to the village shop to buy some yogurt, pears, tomatoes and pate to keep us going until Tuesday when the shop will open again. And also the paper, Le Monde.

The café cum shop was busy: a couple of men sitting at the counter talking with the cafe owner and his wife, more outside on the terrace, and several of us in the grocery-magazine-newspaper section, buying provisions, or just looking at the wine selection. Now I am going to trek back down hill and think about lunch.

Crowds

Baudelaire's theme, or one of them. Of which my favourite poem is his sonnet "The Passerby," a classic anecdote about the person whose eye you catch in some public place, the person with whom you feel an immediate rapport, but whom you will never see again. In his case, and most often, in poetry, it is a man who sees a woman, This can be updated, not just the woman who sees the man, but any potential friendlover. When there is no erotic ping is perhaps the most moving: you have a sense of connecting with some other. It could be a dog you are about to euthanise...

But I was thinking about something else when I got onto this. How, when I walk down the Bd St Germain, among the crowds, I always find myself zigzagging to avoid the people walking against me. Why don't they zigzag, I think resentfully, why always me? So when they come on, I stop, I force them to flow around me.

But I have discovered the secret of walking in Paris crowds (does this happen in NYC, in London?): no one makes eye contact, but if you keep walking, at the last moment, everyone twitches their shoulder slightly, so that you pass without touching, though you feel the slight change in airflow.

I could compare this to crossing the street. In California, mostly the cars slow well before the crosswalk, if you are waiting to cross. Here, the cars stop--at the last possible second, and sometimes you need to look like you are going to walk right out in front of them: they aren't going to hit you, but if you have a heart attack, that's ok.

Shopping

There's always the Bon Marché (see Zola, Au Bonheur des Dames aka The Ladies' Delight for the story of the growth of a department store--or as in Babar  "The Big Store" (le grand magasin)--in c19 Paris) of course, nice to walk around, but only on a day you leave your purse and your appetite at home. I go there if I want something normally cheap and useful, a very nice tea towel, say, the one you hang on the oven and never use, but which matches the floor tiles and the set of mugs you found at Monoprix.

Monoprix! I haven't been there yet. It's a treat I'm saving. Monoprix on the Bd St. Michel, in between two branches of the bookstore, Gibert: papeterie and three floors of books, one on the corner of the rue Racine (which meets the rue Corneille at the Odéon) and the other on the corner of the rue des Ecoles. Groceries downstairs, scarves and face creams and toothpaste on the main level, and upstairs, clothes and colour-coordinated household goods, mugs, plates. Everything here changes every month or so, including the colours, and it's a great place to pick up a bargain whatnot or other. A pair of slippers. It's on my way to and from the gym, behind the Musee de Cluny, whose courtyard I ducked into yesterday. Sure enough the hot pink hollyhock was poking up through the cobbles, almost a weed, unplanned, but left to return again and again.