This, that and the other

This

I have been doing a bit of research for the notes to a new translation of an Hélène Cixous book, and it has led me to Proust's unfinished Contre Sainte Beuve, just now a draft essay on Baudelaire. It made me want to translate Baudelaire, but realize what an impossible project that would be: the relationship between content and form is too tight. Translating poetry that is metred and rhymed, something has to give: either the content or the form: there is no way to translate Baudelaire without significant loss. Maybe a poem or two, no more. 

That

Thinking about France's beef farmers, who are fighting back against industrial-scale production. France, as the New York Times editorializes today, is attached to its family farms, but they can't compete with the industrial farming going on elsewhere. It's the corner store problem all over. It seems to me less and less clear that "European" (meaning North American too) commerce is evolving in the right direction. Everything is increasingly in the hands of fewer people, jobs are disappearing, owners of the means of production are in a position to determine who will be the candidates for the 2016 US presidential election, and to set the agenda. I see that industrial-scale farming is efficient, but it must be time we considered what is being lost. One could, of course, and has said the same of companies like Amazon and what they are doing to book-selling, but the production of food worldwide is clearly a more general problem.

The other

We were up on Vancouver Island for a family occasion last weekend, and found the house my grandparents built on the edge of Georgia Strait. They bought a big chunk of land, cleared enough of it to build a house (in the postwar ranch style) and a garden, and left much of it forest. Now there are several houses and only a screen of trees on the edge of the very steep bluff above the Strait. A public stairway wound down to the cove, where I used to play as a child, still wild, overgrown with blackberries, with a flock of Canada Geese gazing out to sea. 

Corner Stores

The neighbours on California Street here in Palo Alto are fighting to keep their small, non-chain stores as rents go up and Starbucks moves in. Once, living here, I needed to buy a spool of thread and some needles and learned I would have to drive to Redwood City, 4 suburbs north, where there was a chain store for that. Just last week I ordered a three dollar packet of iron-on mending tape from Amazon Prime. Mending tape!

So now the Greeks are being ordered to modernise in ways that will replace the neighborhood bakeries with supermarket bread and the local pharmacy with a behemoth selling industrial quantities of halloween candy alongside the aspirin.  I see it all around me here, and maybe it's better for something but it's not so good for a whole lot of other things. You end up with streets that have all the personality of a shopping mall: CVS, Starbucks, Restoration Hardware, West Elm, Walgreens, and the Carpet Store that has been Going-Out-Of-Business for six years. A dozen absolutely uninviting chain restaurants. And I can see there are two sides to the Greek question, but do we really have to lose so much character to gain what? Bland efficiency? Economic viability? Something is wrong here somewhere.

Sure, I like one-stop shopping--I couldn't have managed otherwise when I was raising a family, but I also like the texture of, say, Paris streets, with one pharmacy every three or four blocks, and the pharmacist knows you, and if there's a line, well, it's a chance to talk to the person ahead or behind you, or eye the  display of magnifying mirrors.

William Maxwell, "So Long, See You Tomorrow" (1980)

"Fourteen was when boys graduated into long trousers and since I hadn't yet arrived at that age I was still wearing corduroy knickerbockers. When I couldn't stop reading A Tale of Two Cities, I put my long black cotton stockings across the bottom of the bedroom door so my father wouldn't see the crack of light and come in and tell me to go to sleep."

Calvino, in Once on a Winter's Night, writes that he is only able to read with his feet up, which struck a chord with me. And reading after lights-out strikes another. Me, it was a flashlight under the covers. My bedroom was at the top of the stairs and they were, I think, carpeted, but still I was fairly confident I would hear any adult coming up and have time to put out the light and lapse into a simulacrum of sleep. But once my grandmother caught me--was she particularly light on her feet or was the book a particularly absorbing one?--and I remember begging her not to tell on me. I suppose I was simply oversensitive to scoldings. Funny the things we remember. 

We lived in that house, whose rooms I can still visit in my mind, from when I was in third grade (so about 8?) until I was in university (which I commuted to), when we moved from Vancouver to West Vancouver, over the Lion's Gate Bridge on the side of one of the mountains that rise behind the city and plunge fairly steeply downhill to the harbour. When I was growing up we would get a bus up Seymour Mountain on Saturdays to go skiing.

My grandparents lived in Victoria but we visited back and forth. At some point my grandmother caught cancer, and she died when I was 14. What would I have been reading under the bedclothes between the ages of 8 and 14? Not yet Gone with the Wind, surely. Too old for Beatrix Potter, though I remember writing my own Potterish stories in that bedroom. Little Women? There was a leatherbound set of Dickens at my grandparents' but I don't remember reading it. It sat on a shelf with a set of Churchill's Gathering Storm. My grandfather admired Churchill.

Everyone should have read Maxwell's novel which is also a memoir, written about his childhood in the 1920s in Lincoln, Illinois, marked by his mother's death and his businessman-father's getting on with life in a way that perturbed the boy, though, writing from the perspective of grown-upness, he understands that his father probably was as kind as he knew how. Maxwell, who was the New Yorker fiction editor for many years, wanted to call his book The Palace at 4 a.m. after Giacometti's sculpture. Mara Naselli has written a beautiful essay on the book in the Autumn 2014 issue of The Hudson Review. It has sent me back to the book, even though I read it only a couple of years ago.

No Comment

Just reading Michael Hoffman's terrific new collection of essays, and found this, in a review of a book about the friendship between Robert Frost and Edward Thomas: "They both had families--Frost with his four children, Thomas with three--[...] but basically neither had very much to show for his time on earth... ."

Now, I'm thinking to myself, I guess that's not something you'd say of a woman with four, or even just three, children, so how come you can say it of a man? 

A Month in the Country

A friend--my beekeeper friend--gave me a book on Sunday by a writer I'd never heard of, J.L. Carr. The book is called A Month in the Country, it was published in 1980 and set in Yorkshire shortly after World War I, which is one of the traumas that run under the story (the second is a broken marriage). It is a quiet, beautifully written, sensuous, touching short novel, like a Hardy poem or an Edward Thomas. It is in fact a masterpiece, republished in 2000 by New York Review Books with an introduction by Michael Holroyd. It is perfect, without any reservations. The kind of book that leaves you with a inner smile. As with one of Edward Thomas's poem you think, if I'd written that I would have justified my existence.

And now, I shall take my inner smile and my bike and head for the campus gym, down a long shady street lined with small Victorian cottages and larger boarding houses, around the corner past Whole Foods, under the Caltrain tracks, down the bike path that runs behind the shopping centre and the high school, up another street and onto campus by the soccer fields. What will be on CNN today? It's a good bet they won't have anything to say about Greece, which is what interests me, but lots on jailbreaks and gun crimes.

Weather

I'm reading Wallace Stevens' 'Auroras of Autumn'--actually a lecture about Stevens, which quotes a poem that begins "Lights out. Shades up. / A look at the weather." And I'm looking out the window here in the California Bay Area, where the weather doesn't change very much from day to day. It's always beautiful, pretty much always an ideal temperature, with a cool breeze and blue sky. 

Kind of boring. I miss rainy Vancouver at times, I miss Paris clouds, I miss places where you look out the window at night before you close the shutters or draw the shades and imagine what the look of the sky portends in the way of weather for the following day; or when you get up in the morning and even before you open the shutters, from the tinge of the light that filters through them, or the sound of tires on the pavement outside, you sniff out what the weather is going to be like. The light, the sound--of rain for one, all the things that go with unpredictable weather places.

I'm not being entirely honest. In the south of France, where the weather is a lot like California, our next door neighbour, a farmer, tracks the phases of the moon, and wouldn't dream of planting out lettuce or cutting his hair or nails if the moon is waxing or waning (I forget which, though he has told me many times, and it doesn't upset him in the least that I think this is folklore: he knows he knows better). The weather matters to him, it's linked to his work, he steps out his front door each night, holds the screen open, and looks up at the sky, too, and sees probabilities in the stars that I am not conscious of. So probably there is more weather to be reckoned with, in sunny weather places, than I reckon.

Still, at least for a week or two, when I find myself back in the north, I am glad of the uncertainty. The grey areas.

Happy are the Happy

Yesterday I stopped by the library reading room, where they put new books, in glossy plastic, for a while before they move them to their proper stacks. It is always fun to scan the shelves for books you've seen reviewed or writers you've heard of but not read. I checked out three: Michael Hofmann's new collection of essays, a Bolano translation (I've only ever read short stories in the New Yorker) and Yasmina Reza's Happy are the Happy, translated from French.

I started with the Reza, which looked easy and played to my French nostalgia with an opening scene set in a supermarket cheese department. But I read two or three pages and decided it was boring and put it on the bench in the front hall to go back to the library. Maybe I'll have another go, I don't know. 

The title comes from a nice Borges quote. Layers of irony. The borrowed irony, the unhappy, but boring opening scene in the supermarket. Bah.

Amherst Apiaries

The streets around Stanford University and Palo Alto, its municipality, tend, like university towns everywhere, to be named after rival institutions--Princeton, Oxford--or historic figures--say, Tennyson and Kipling. Our friends live on Amherst Street, after the college and, presumably, Emily Dickinson. In their large front yard under a venerable oak tree they have raised vegetable beds and an array of beehives (and other hives, with permission, in friends' gardens). A month or so ago we were sitting in their garden talking about the trove of spring honey stored in the garage. The town yard sale was coming up: why not put a table on the sidewalk, a few flyers on the telephone poles and have a pop-up shop while the neighbours sold their cast-off pots and pans, and outgrown Ikea cribs?

And so they did. When I turned up, after lunch, there was a table set with a red and yellow cloth, and enough chairs for passersby to settle down and chat. The honey jars--most had been sold by then--were labelled 'Amherst Apiaries, 2015 Spring Honey.' The label on the top of the jars, designed by Marj, was round with a honey bee in its centre. The honey was, as honey is, translucent gold. I came home with 12-11 ounce jars of '2015 Spring Honey.' The jars, which say, 'Made in USA,' are embossed with grapes, apples, cherries, peaches and pears. The honey is delicious.