Paris Notes

The shadows are sculpted into the stones of the church across the street. The sun also is telling me how dirty my kitchen windows are. Yesterday I traipsed back to the Flower Market on the Ile St Louis behind the Hotel-Dieu, with my shopping trolley, to find myself a Mexican Orange Tree for the kitchen porch. I also pulled a few weedy catalpa shoots out of the cobbles, the offspring of the ones that line the square. Two of them look like they might survive. 

Loud car radio music in the middle of the night. I was awake, listened, went back to sleep, closing the windows on the street and opening the kitchen one. This morning, Saturday, the street is calm. I like the noises, cars cruising for parking spots, people whose offices expand to the sidewalk and their cell phones, a child talking to a parent, a clock striking the quarter hours. I think I'll go to the Centre Pompidou later.

Paris in September

Life repeats at shorter or longer intervals. After nine months away it is good to be back and a little startling how quickly one adjusts to the change of setting, the feeling of having left just a few days ago. True, the people sleeping in the side door to the church have changed: now it is a family of Roms, by the look of the colourful bedding and the women's gypsy skirts. They turn in at nightfall--it takes them a while to set up camp, tuck themselves in, hang their laundry to dry on the railing, and when at 2 am, some yobs arrive in a noisy car, park, shout, get out, piss, toss beer cans about, one feels a little nervous for them, but no, they have other things on their mind, and I close my window and quiet myself again.

Just a reminder--I'll be reading on Tuesday the 27th at Shakespeare and Company, in the 5e, with Charles Boyle, Laura Pawson and Will Eaves.

Sunday's Hike

Saw a great little bookstore while hiking in the Glen Park neighbourhood of San Francisco on Sunday.

News about books and readings

Back from London last night, with news about CB editions' upcoming publications and readings, including a couple I will be part of.

London

Rain--gentle rain falling all night. A sound I love...for a few days. Yesterday my daughter took me to evensong at St Paul's, on our way home from the Tate Modern.

Love the Tate--as opposed to a more traditional museum--I'm also hoping to go and see Hockney's portraits at the Royal Academy--it's organized to make the visitor feel like part of the creative process. It's chaotic to the right degree: curated chaos, I guess you could call it.

Shakespeare and Company, the Paris bookshop, has posted the notice of our CB Editions Reading in September, with all the info. I'll be reading with Charles Boyle, the publisher and writer, Will Eaves, and Lara Pawson. Follow the link for more info, but also take time to explore the rest of the website. It's a great bookshop, with a long and fascinating history. I'm really excited, hope you can be there!

Yves Bonnefoy

Yves Bonnefoy, one of the French poets whose books I have translated, died in Paris on July 1. He had just turned 94. Cynthia Haven asked me to write something about M. Bonnefoy, which she has published on her Stanford literary blog, The Book Haven.

No Comment

from Europe's Tragedy: a History of the Thirty Years War, chapter 18 (1641):

"Rulers wanted to persuade their subjects to continue paying high taxes to support armies in peacetime. These were considered necessary to promote princely dignity and facilitate a greater role in European affairs... .

"There were certainly serious problems by the 1640s. The war's rapid expansion dislocated social and economic structures and disabled territorial administration..." (p. 622)

. . . 

"Resistance to recruitment and taxation was motivated by more than fear of dying or inability to pay. There was also a growing sense that royal demands were no longer reasonable.(...) Across society, people felt they were already doing more than they were obliged to. They did not feel responsible for the defeats, since command was reserved for the monarchy. Where the crown saw disobedience, its subjects saw ineptitude and injustice." (p. 657)

I love EU

Maybe we should have said more often how much we loved the idea of Europe: how it widened the horizons of our lives 1) to have the vision of building a "world" on a continent that has been at war in one way or another for centuries; 2) to see our children able to cross borders and go to school or work so easily in other countries whose languages they may have learned in school (our children had the good fortune to be tri-national from birth and bilingual from the time they started talking; in school they spoke two languages and learned two more--German, Italian and Russian, depending on the child--and regularly travelled "abroad" with their teachers). It was exciting. There was a European Dream quite distinct from the American one, less based on personal happiness and wealth.

Clearly not everyone has had the same experience. Rich countries with dominant languages, like the UK, have been flooded with young people from poorer nations. Polish workers kept a French electrician's costs down. Still, the redistribution of wealth did work in many directions, as some British farmers are belatedly discovering.

Where are the French politicians who are going to stop the Front National from using the Brexit as an argument in next year's French elections?