Faire la bise

About French politesse. The kissing on both cheeks. Very confusing, even for an old hand (or lips). In Paris one kisses twice, moving from (my) left to right. In Provence one kisses thrice, starting on and returning to the right. Always a few days of getting it all wrong and ending up in the middle, which is not done, as my US resident of a granddaughter discovered, when she kissed a second or third cousin over Christmas, on the mouth, shocking him mightily. But, I explained, my parents kissed me on the mouth, and I am pretty sure that in the UK people sometimes kiss socially on the mouth too. A fellow, but English, volunteer at the Soupe Populaire confirmed this yesterday as we were gearing up to serve lunch  (Tuesday: fresh vegetable soup, boeuf bourguignon with potato purée, cheese + cakes donated by a neighbourhood patisserie, French bread, of course.  A meal unaccompanied by bread is inconceivable in France. And "on ne jette pas le pain," children learned in the French school I used to teach in: "one does not throw bread out."). 

The mornings are growing darker, but it seems to me that there are a few more minutes of daylight in the evening. I miss my September-October afternoons reading in the Luxembourg Garden. It's too cold and too wet and too dark for that now. 

Off to San Francisco tomorrow. They are expecting a big rainstorm with flash floods. We live next to a creek that barely trickles most of the time, but can rise fast when it rains.

Paris Bookstores

Le Monde says that French bookstores had a good year financially, despite a drop around the 13 November terrorist attacks. Le Monde says bookstores in France are recovering from the digital thing. I can believe it, because every time I go to a Paris bookstore it is full of people caressing books: touching them, lifting them up, turning them over, reading the back cover, shuffling the pages, all the amorous things one does with books. Like today, when I went to Compagnie on the rue des Ecoles across the street from the Sorbonne, a few steps from the statue of Montaigne (and, not coincidentally, my gym). A lovely, light spacious place with as many tables of books as shelves, where you can dream your way from book to book, regretting all the ones you are not going to be able to read. I want to suck them all up into me...I bought the Correspondence of Paul Celan and René Char, just published, to take back to Palo Alto. Tomorrow I have to go through two or three stacks of books here and decide which ones will go in the suitcase. My idea was that when I had several books by one writer I could move one or two to the other side of the world, where I often wish I had this or that book to hand.

Oh, and Bill Gates reads books, real, paper books, not electronic books. He likes real books, he even blogs about them, he has a book blog, says the New York Times this week. I don't believe digital books are going to be a big thing, that's my hunch. My tip. But I wish the English-speaking world did what the French do, viz. controlled the price of books. It feels civilized to stroll into a bookstore full of people browsing. 

Books etc

Before I return to California (on Thursday) I plan to buy a book reviewed in Le Monde des livres this week: correspondence between Paul Celan and René Char. Meanwhile I am still reading a sort-of-detective story by an Italian woman writer, Dacia Maraini, recommended by my local Italian bookstore: good, in a literary way, full of words not available in my desk Italian dictionary (and I don't like using my much better online dictionary while reading for fun, so mostly I get a vague meaning via context), definitely not as thrillingly good as Elena Ferrante, whom I think the Italian bookseller was less than enthusiastic about, though I didn't push him too far on that. There's a story in the New York Times weekend magazine section this week about brain surgery by K. Ove Knaussgard, probably the other big literary discovery of the last five years, and it is way too sublimely lyrical about brain tissue.

Finished Joseph Roth's The Radetzky March (in French, wonderful), started a Garcia Marquez, a hardcover in English I found on a shelf in the Vaucluse, brand new, maybe never read--where did it come from?--which I left unfinished on the bedside table. Also Baudelaire, Thom Gunn, Hedi Khaddour, and back here to Auden's Oxford Poetry Lectures, in which I think I am a little disappointed. His whimsy about the young poet grates after a while.

Happy New Year

We returned to Paris last night from the Vaucluse on a train crowded with sleepy passengers and their luggage. I had been thinking about French rules of etiquette, for reasons I'll get to, but then was once again, after so many years, taken by surprise when the cashier in the Kaiser bakery-cafe in the Avignon train station wished me a happy new year and I stumbled over wishing him the same in return. In France it is rude not to wish people Happy New Year ("Bonne Année") the first time you see them in the new year, or on New Year's Day in shops. Christmas cards are traditionally not Christmas cards but New Year's greetings and go out in January, though this may be changing. Year after year I am caught, forgetting to wish my neighbours "Bonne Année," talking about other things, and then realizing, shame-facedly, that I have overlooked a ritual.

NOT

a sparkling day that makes you want to rush out and do something. No, it's grey and damp, the zinc roofs round about look rained on, or about to be rained on. The streets are quiet, perhaps too quiet for the run-up to Christmas. France has dragged its feet about de-regulating shopping, letting stores open late and on Sundays, the way they do in the US and Canada: "We don't want to turn into a nation of shoppers"; and I can sympathise with that. However, there's a feeling that the economy is weak--weaker than a year ago. My gym is empty most days, the squad of personal trainers has vanished, save for one or two, and last night, when I popped into Monoprix to buy [rice, ground, meat, zucchini] for my son, who arrives tomorrow, I didn't have to wait in line at the cash registers. And tourism has certainly dropped off--the Picasso Museum was well, practically empty, last week when I went back for a second visit.

Did I say this? The best part of the Museum, for me, right now, is the fifth-floor attic rooms, which have hung a number of Picasso's paintings by other painters: a small mountain scene (peaks, meadow, farmhouse, winding road) by...Matisse. The head of a mountain goat, with human eyes,  by Courbet. Some cows and peasants by Le Nain--Picasso's animals are as expressive as people. And also, more expected, paintings by Cezanne and later Matisse. 

While I was over in the Marais I dropped into the Italian Bookshop, La Tour de Babel, on the Rue du Roi de Sicile, a lovely shop whose keeper found me something to fill the void left by having read all of Ferrante, some books twice. I ended up with a novel--a detective story--by a woman called Dacia Maraini, whom I didn't know and whom I'm enjoying. It's more conventionally literary and less tumultuous than Ferrante, but still a page-turner: a women returns from a few days' absence to discover that the woman in the next apartment has been murdered. A pair of turquoise trainers are neatly lined up just inside her apartment. Something about the shoes...

Election Day

in France. The elections are for representatives to the Regional Councils, and regrettably, it was a matter not of voting for a person or party but against the far right Front National which is said to have the support of close to a third of the voters in the Paris-Ile-de-France Region. There were, for a North American, an unwieldy plethora of parties and programmes to vote for, or against. Once the results of today's vote are in, the top two contenders will have a run-off vote next Sunday. So the electoral arithmetic will come down to whether centre- left and centre-right will join forces to defeat the far right, whose programme is anti-Europe, anti-immigrant, and totally nostalgic.

We voted in the City Hall of our arrondissement, down the block, a grand but drafty old building with chambers and anti-chambers and velvet-upholstered benches for courtiers to sit upon while they wait to be received by the prince. Citizen Brahic's credentials are examined, she takes some papers for the various parties to a rickety booth, inserts one in an plain blue envelope, leaves the others on the little shelf, takes it to the urn, waits while an official finds her name on the roll, then she drops it in the urn as another official intones "a voté," signs the register and leaves, feeling--what? Virtuous? Not so much. 

We went to the Luxembourg Garden, sat in a sunny spot as long as the sun lasted, then looked for another sunny spot, higher up, further east and south. The trees now bare, dark skeletons of trees, the statues (Verlaine, Baudelaire, some stags, the "Queens and Eminent Women of France") lightly dressed, shiver in the wind, crows and a seagull move some grass clippings around, children poke at sailboats on the duck pond, the uniformed guardians march around in pairs, deep in conversations. The persimmon tree, near the sequoias, is still laden with orange fruit.

129 Saskatchewan Crescent, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan

Begin, as always, with the weather.

Still grey, but 15 or so degrees Fahrenheit warmer than yesterday. Fahrenheit because the painted-pink wall-clock-sized thermometer on the back porch comes to me from Saskatoon: it must once have belonged to my grandparents, because in its middle there's a  black and white snapshot of their house on a bend of the Saskatchewan River, and individual snapshots of my grandfather, grandmother, my mother and my aunt, still small girls. The house's address is handwritten below the picture of the house, which is not yet landscaped, and there is a faded date: 19?8. My mother grew up there. I lived there for the first three years of my life. My memories of it come from photographs.

In my grandparents' time the street must have been quasi-frontier. A small prairie city on a river, traversed by a railway, surrounded by wheat fields. Barn-red grain elevators poking up. The land so flat you could seeing them for miles in all directions. When, later, we drove back to Saskatchewan in the summer, we played a car game that consisted in being first to spot the next clutch of elevators along the Trans Canada Highway, and calling out I can see the elevators! 

My grandfather ('Ga') worked in a bank, later started a moving company, Saskatoon Cartage, that was bought out later by a bigger moving company. We inherited some green padded moving blankets, stored in the car trunk, handy for picnics. There is still one downstairs in our basement storage room. Our storage room is the last. If you continue beyond it, you find yourself in a tunnel into Saint Sulpice Church. Part of our building was a convent. I have never been in the tunnel: it is dark, there is talk of rats; in fact the underground cellar area is totally creepy. Going down there, to rummage for an old rug or basket, I know exactly how Juliet felt.

So here I am in Paris. Last night we went to the new Woody Allen movie, Rational Man, which I heartily do not recommend. If we hadn't been wedged in by a row of occupied seats we would have left before the end. The movie was full. The cafés were busy.

Rooftop Fauna, 6th

The sun is back this morning, cutting out sharp shadows on the sides and roof of the church across the street. My neighbour, who lives in an apartment that gives on a section of the roof came out while I was having breakfast yesterday and scattered crumbs.  A pair of crows observed her from a higher level of roof and then, when she went inside, swooped down. 

Better crows than pigeons, I guess. The pigeons--city rats--build nests, of wonderful city stuff, in my flower pots and generally make a mess, though the first time this happened I was enthralled by the nestlings turning into fledglings. Then I was less enthralled and now I'm not at all enthralled. I put kid's plastic windmills in the flower pots to scare them away, and when I run out of windmills, shish-kebab skewers and forks, tines up.