Books of the Year

If you are a Christmas book buyer, here are some suggestions from the authors at CB editions.

Modern

Yesterday, after lunch, I went to the Centre Pompidou for the second time this week. The first time I went to see the current Big Show--Wilfredo Lam, a Cuban painter of the Picasso era, whose name I thought I knew as a painter the poet Wallace Stevens had collected--and then a small show by Karel Appel, a Dutch painter of the Cobra group. I went back for the contemporary stuff, much of it conceptual and overtly political. Stopped to read a photo-story by Sophie Calle. Mostly I wondered what might stop me in my tracks. I like the tactility of paint, I like colour, I like the feeling of life in motion in kinetic abstract painting. The Appel was expressive:  scribbled kids' black-lined drawings of people, loud colour, in your-face aggressivity. 

The Museum was pretty much deserted.

I took public transportation over, instead of walking.  Metro, Line 4, coming up at Les Halles. The Metro was half-empty--there are lots of ways of getting around the centre of Paris, including scooters, skateboards and bikes (at least as life-threatening, I would guess, as bombs) --and jittery. Les Halles is an underground, multi-level mall smack in the city centre, a hub for all the big north-south, east-west commuter express lines. That Line 11 was shut down at Chatelet--the PA system kept warning--for a bomb scare is routine at the best of times. I walked home.

Allonzenfon...

What a tearjerker a national anthem is. This morning, lathering honey on my online New York Times (Le Monde is an afternoon paper which, when I am here, I read on paper, enjoying the civilized pleasure of walking out to a neighbourhood kiosque, pulling acopy out from underneath the top copy on the stack, fumbling for the coins, exchanging a word or two with the vendor,  then on to the boulangerie for supper's loaf) I happened across a rendition of La Marseillaise at the Metropolitan Opera matinee yesterday, and the tears welled up. Seconds before, I had been wondering about the difference between the Paris shootings and a drive-by or multiplex mass murder in the US. Well, I can see the obvious differences, but basically--?

One of the things I did when I first arrived here in Paris in September was to go through my poetry books and take some down for the US bookshelf, which is relatively empty. That made some space on the shelves, but it also made two tall stacks of books on the left side of my desk. This morning I reshelved Les Murray, whom I've been reading, and took two Berrymans from the desk pile. I hesitated, wondering if I was still interested in the Berryman voice, but opened "Homage to Mistress Bradstreet and other poems," and began reading.  And it is good, I'd forgotten how good, how full but trim (Les Murray is full, but not trim--he's more of an Australian Whitman). 

Aftermath

Our neighbourhood has been calm, many shops shuttered, like the Luxembourg Garden, where I went yesterday afternoon and founds the gates locked for the weekend, a couple of guards standing in the middle of deserted alleyways and forlorn-looking trees. Sad to see the trees locked up, locked of. I also called the Soupe Kitchen I sometimes help out in, thinking some of the Saturday team of volunteers might not make it, and they were open, preparing for the usual four or five lunch services with a full contingent of volunteers. "Call on Monday," they said.

I have been reading--well, as usual, lots of books at once: Reginald Gibbons' How Does Poetry Think, a new book with a dense argument but also an interesting narrative thread about his own growth as a poet, Maire-Hélène Lafon, a newish French writer, recommended by my brother- and sister-in-law, and Svetlana Alexievich, who won the Nobel Prize this year for her books. I'm reading her raw account of Tchernobyl and its aftermath, from a French collection of various things she has written about World War 2 and after. Oh, and for the third time, this time with a French-Italian dictionary, Elena Ferrante's Days of Abandonment.

Reading

I will be reading alongside Yves Bonnefoy at Shakespeare and Company, Paris 5e on Monday 23 November at 7 pm. We will read in French and in English from three of my recent translations of his work, The Present Hour, Rue Traversière and The Anchor's Long Chain, all published by Seagull Books. This is a wonderful chance to hear an extraordinary French poet read his poems in the setting of one of the English language's great bookstores.

Hurry and delay

Up in the dark, breakfast in bed, reading every small story in the NYT (Le Monde is an afternoon pleasure, on paper, purchased at a corner kiosk, sometimes read in the park, feet up on a chair), for example, airport security, or lack of, in Charm-el-sheik (sp?). Newspaper reading expands to fit the time available.

Bed made to gloomy organ music from the church across the way, English children's voices down on the sidewalk, also a lot of last night's trash (truly the cash-strapped city must have laid off its sweepers, those gentle green men--in fact, mostly black--with their brooms).

I can delay a little longer. I make myself a cup of instant coffee, and top up the teapot with hot water (Joyce says somewhere, perhaps in Portrait of the Artist, that his family was so poor they used the morning tea leaves three times over): I chain-smoke tea, or shall we say, lightly-flavoured hot water. Waiting for the water to boil I clean up the breakfast dishes, sweep oatmeal and breadcrumbs off the floor, dump all the organic trash into my compost; ie, one of the balcony pots, either the one with the catalapa stripling I was given in September at the Marché aux fleurs, or the mock orange I bought: porridge, apple cores, wilted lettuce, tea leaves, coffee grounds. I sweep the balcony...I

So here I am, no more excuses for not getting down to work. But what work? A book review?--do that later. A Baudelaire translation--maybe. Baudelaire is a good poetry school. I think I said this already. I'm learning to rhyme, Baudelaire to my left, Robert Lowell's Imitations to the right. Lowell's translations of Baudelaire are extraordinary, like his Rimbaud. They are not always accurate in terms of semantics, but they are terrific poems in their own right, and I can rummage through them for ideas, diction, tone, a zillion things the run-of-the-mill academic, accurate, literal translation can't offer. Lowell is best, it seems to me, at the chewy, realist poems: early (!) Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Pasternak. 

Last evening I went to a memorial film viewing for Chantal Akerman at the Brussels--Wallonie Cultural Centre over by the Centre Pompidou. They showed her last film, which contains excerpts from earlier films, none of which I have ever seen.  I thought I might only stay for a bit, but it was extraordinary, and I stayed till the end, though not for the discussion afterwards.  It began late: I watched people arrive, meet friends, settle and wondered who this person was behind my eyes, my skin, watching, feeling insignificant, foreign, even to myself.

PS

Actually, I think books are becoming trendy. Yesterday, on my way to get my flu shot on the Rue Monsieur le Prince, I walked past a Kitchen Place, very chic, Boffi or something, and on the shelves above the cooking island on display, there was: dishware? No. Shiny pots and pans? No. Books, and not cookbooks either.

Diito. If you are nearby head to Sonia Rykiel on the Boulevard St Germain. If it hasn't changed since I last went by in September, the very elegant couture on offer is, throughout the large store, on two levels, surrounded by bookshelves, tall, wide, and packed with real books, not books by the foot. It's a stage set, but it's worth a look. Lick the window, as the French call window shopping.

Bookstores are safe (France)

Sure, it frees up a lot of space if you read books online, but I've tried and it doesn't begin to match the pleasure of holding a book in your hands, as French--and other European (but not the UK?)--know. Book prices are protected in France, so sellers like Amazon can't undercut them. Which means that there are still book stores in every city neighbourhood and town, and folks who like spending time in them, looking over the tables, browsing the shelves, picking up and putting down volumes as tenderly as relics, as the New York Times records in a story this morning. Now I know I'm in the middle of a literary neighbourhood in a literary city--Paris--right now, but in California I live in the Latin Quarter of one of the world's big universities, Stanford, and the bookstores are few and far between and the university one, in particular, sells sweatshirts and mugs in most of its (considerable) ground floor square footage. I'd have to go to City Lights in San Francisco to find the atmosphere I can find in innumerable small and bigger bookstores on every block in the fifth and sixth arrondissements of Paris. So vive le prix unique for books. And down with chain stores.