Büches de Noël

California celebrates rainfall is today's news. I heard from friends whose students have just won Rhodes scholarships, one of whom (the student) had been memorably articulate in Montaigne class I audited; my friends mentioned umbrellas, puddles, mud.

Here in Paris it is cold, on the cusp of freezing, which is to say the drizzle coming down looks and feels like sleet. I take my gloves when I go out, and then stuff them into my backpack for fear I'll lose them, like my reading glasses, somewhere, a week ago. An inexpensive drugstore pair, but I liked the Japanese fabric of the case, and anyway I hate losing things, as Elizabeth Bishop said. And also Robert Hass: all the new poetry is about loss, like the old poetry. 

I visited my friend Susan Cantrick yesterday. We talked and looked at her year's worth of work, which includes the large painting to the right of this paragraph; then we went to a cafe and talked some more. And then it was getting close to dinnertime; she walked home and I walked back to the Metro past flower shops full of fake firs with fake snow, some of it bright red, fuchsia. We will not have a Christmas tree, but maybe an olive tree branch, since it will be olive-tree-pruning time of year. 

An hour or so ago I rang the pastry shop in Carpentras to order bûches de Noël for 17 + people. Kerfuffle in the background. I pictured the receiver lying on a counter near some string for wrapping packages (with a loop for one's finger, so they can dangle without the contents shifting). At last someone came to the phone, apologised and asked if I would mind calling back later: they have a new system for the bûche de Noël orders this year, and it is not "à point" (working). They have, in fact, computerised the system. No more fat school notebook with the orders recorded in Madame Jouvaud's pale blue handwriting. Madame Jouvaud died in August. 

Simultaneously

Coming back from the Sonia Delaunay show at the Paris Museum of Modern Art I crossed the Pont d'Alma and took the new pedestrian route along the quais. I used to drive along this route to get to my teaching job at the British School in Croissy-sur-Seine. It has been closed to cars, and, I discovered, a few days ago, turned into a wonderful place to walk, out of earshot of traffic (mostly), but within hearing of the river traffic, currents, waves...there are people biking, jogging, playing board games on tables and in little huts. There are pocket playgrounds and climbing walls. There are places to stop and eat and drink, more or less formally, railroad ties arranged as benches. Under one bridge there is music to dance to, and a little girl, walking with her parents, began dancing, like an automat, as she passed under the bridge.  There was a big silver tent in which people were learning to tango--this was an all-afternoon-into-the-evening event for beginners and experts--and I went in and regretted that it was just a little too far from home (it was on the quai below the Musee d'Orsay) to bring my husband back to.

The Delaunay show? Mixed feelings. Loved the gouaches and paintings, less interested in her fashion and upholstery business, even if it contributed to her return to abstraction post-World War 2 and the work I do love. If she had been recognised earlier in her life, might she have--with that encouragement--developed more as a painter?

Quiet

A quiet Saturday, with books, watching the shadow stretch across the walls of the buildings outside, and on those inside too: three sheets of music tacked to the wall over my desk each extend an elliptical strip of shadow to the left; the button on a closet, the door doubled by its darker shadow.

My family has been here. Yesterday they flew back to the US. The day before we went to the Jardin des Plantes and the Museum of Natural History, which was full of lyçée students sketching stuffed animals or filling out questionnaires. Afterwards we had mint tea at the mosque and cakes, poked our noses into the hammam, and walked back home along the rue Mouffetard.

Went

down into a tunnel in London and came up, 2 hours later, in Paris, where the weather was much better. Dry roof tiles instead of damp. A few stars. Spent most of today in the Luxembourg Garden, sitting on a bench in the playground watching Lucie go round and round on the zip line, and thinking about why a seven-year-old would want to spend her day lining up, jumping on, going round, repeat. There was the obvious physical pleasure of spinning through the air, as on a swing, but slightly different, since there is a track and some distance is covered. But maybe equally pleasant the presence of potential friends. "I'm bored," meant the latest new friend had gone home. Eyes rolling meant the new friend had abandoned her for either another new friend or an old friend. Is this how most seven year old girls behave or only some of them? What if, unlike Lucie, they are shy or, heaven forbid, unsociable? How hardwired would that be?

It is slowly getting dark at 5 pm. Tea noises from the kitchen. Card game noises from the living room.

Came back with a pile of new books: Boland, Vona Groarke, Hugo Williams, Maurice Riordan, Sebald, Harry Mathews, Kathleen Jamie, Stallings, May Lan Tan. 

Tate etc

Did some work this morning, then, after lunch, I took a bus to St Paul's and walked across the footbridge to the Tate Modern. Looked at the giant tapestry in the turbine hall, then the Surrealist collection, in itself a reason to be there. Then the view from the espresso bar across the Thames to the London skyline, with the dome of St Paul's smack in the middle. Sat there and read my book (Eavan Boland's new collection from Carcanet) for a while, before going to see the Louise Bourgeois' works on paper,' which interest me more than her sculpture, I think. They range from some small, early, already sophisticatedly naive pencil drawings (two boys in a bathtub, for example, but the bathtub is transparent) to a patch work composed bits of cloth left over from the family business--repairing tapestries--in Antony, a southern suburb of Paris. Some of the squares of fabric bore stitched-on name tags, of the kind a child going away on a  'classe de nature' might have stitched into their clothing--honest-to-god  machine-embroidered name tags. And buttonholes, beautifully stitched buttonholes. 

Got on the wrong bus to come home. 

England's green and pleasant land

I have just returned to London after a visit to Manchester, a first for me. Taking the train up I was astonished at the beauty of the English countryside, even at this time of year. I think what struck me most, as a Canadian with roots in the much more sublime landscapes of the North American west, was the human scale of the land: rolling green fields, hedgerows, streams and canals, farms, cows, sheep, a man walking in a field with a dog. The clouds were low, sometimes very dark, but the sun was shining through and the leaves were yellow, some on the ground, a lot still on the trees. I thought I could get down and sit in one of those fields quite happily, for a long time. 

Yesterday

On my way to Hélène Cixous's first seminar of the year at the Cité Universitaire yesterday morning I walked to the Metro through the Luxembourg Garden which was empty, except for the odd person like me and a handful of joggers. The sun hadn't been up for long, the tops of the chestnut trees were still gold, the limes lemonier, autumn chrysanthemums gold and purple. Buttery leaves round the trunks of trees, more of them marshalled into wire pens where, later in the day, coming home, I saw gardeners raking them into trucks to be taken away and turned into compost, I suppose. Very cyclical. The trunks and branches of trees showing black through the remaining leaves. 

The café beside the bandstand on the eastern side of the garden, Pantheon side, was closed, but the tables were lined up, two chairs per table, all facing southwest towards the setting sun. 

Then I was out the east side and down into the Metro and up again in the Parc Montsouris, a wilder, less groomed Paris park. And into the Cité. The seminar was full, old friends, people I don't know, Emmanuelle Riva was there, dishevelled like us all so early in the morning, before we've had time to wet the backs of our heads and tame night's cowlicks. And the seminar was wonderful, a digressive riff on Rousseau, Genet, Shakespeare and Derrida.  Sadly it's the only one I'll be able to attend this year. They are one of the things I miss most about living in California for a large part of each year. 

Shadows

It finally hit me--the difference between city shadows--or maybe Paris city shadows--and country shadows.  

Country shadows--Edward Thomas, leafy, bobbing, irregular, trembling etc.

City shadows--all straight lines, vertical, horizontal, angled, according to the planes of buildings. No vegetation within sight. Hard-edged, precise, moving in ways that could be plotted across the surface of buildings. Sundials.

Cubistic. Obviously. If Baudelaire is the originator of the city poem--as some would have him, maybe the city poem engendered Cubism, with its overlapping plane surfaces. Just a thought. Because the weather has been nice. Good for shadows.