Yesterday

morning early I went to Hélène Cixous's first fall seminar at the Maison Heine at the Cité universitaire. I met a friend at the Luxembourg metro stop, and to get there I cut through the Luxembourg Garden. It had just opened. The morning was crisp and sunny and the sun was shining through the yellow leaves still on the trees and shining on the brown leaves puddled on the ground. The Medici Fountain glimmered, chairs were already set at tables outside the café on the Latin Quarter side of the Garden--not my usual side--where the style is formal and French (my usual side, the western side, is dotted with lawns in the "English," more "natural" style. There were joggers...

The seminar, with a text from a letter Kafka wrote to one of his sisters, focussed on the "Familyanimal" (Familientier) and the US election and the archaic, mythological character of the Trump persona.  "He comes from under the earth," HC said, "terrifying, but fascinating."

Geoffrey Wheatcroft in the NYReview of Books on the Chilcot Report on Blair and the Iraq War: if Gore had been declared--as he should have been--winner of the election in 2000, no Bush, no Iraq War, no Syria...

The chaos that can be brought about by incompetent--or worse--leadership is criminal.

I, Daniel Blake

Just back from seeing the last 2/3 of Ken Loach's new film, I, Daniel Blake. A really good movie, with terrific actors, though perhaps the social service workers, with the exception of one, and the Food Bank people, are too patently the villains...but I don't know, because I don't have a lot to do with social service workers. And I think I trust Loach. I'd like to see the movie again, including the first third of it. I also started to watch his Irish movie (Wind in the Barley) on Netflix the other night, but the humiliation of the small Irish folks by the British soldiers was unbearable and I turned it off.

A small movie house, only one film, near the Place de la Sorbonne. The ticket seller tried to discourage me from going in because the movie had started half an hour earlier, but I'm glad I went.

The end of the afternoon comes early these days, now that the time has changed. Yesterday I went out around four, walked through the Luxembourg Garden, partly to see if anyone had turned in my glasses to the Lost and Found. A guardian in their kiosque, behind the merry-go-round and tennis courts, pulled out a large black ledger and ran his finger down the entries...finding two pairs of glasses turned in in the last week or so, but both had been forwarded to the Police Station next to the town hall on the Place St Sulpice. Come back next week, the guardian said, sometimes the gardeners discover glasses in the leaves they sweep up.

I'll check at the police station next week, too, since I also have to arrange for a procuration for next year's presidential elections.

I had a couple errands to run, so I walked down the Rue d'Assas towards the Rue du Cherche-Midi, and the river. Night was falling, it was drizzling, but not enough to get out my umbrella, lights were coming on in apartments and shops, people were settling onto sidewalk terraces for a drink... 

Manchester Lit Festival + Bolton

A wonderful reading at the Manchester Lit Festival, on October 10th with Jeffrey Wainwright and Matthew Welton, moderated by John McAuliffe. This was my second trip to Manchester, where I've thoroughly enjoyed meeting these Northern poets and hearing them read from their new books.

The next night it was over to Bolton with Canadian poet Evan Jones, who teaches at the university there. Evan's most recent book is Paralogues. Evan is also the editor (with Todd Swift) of Modern Canadian Poets: an Anthology, also from Carcanet.

I had a day to explore Manchester, and ended up at the Art Museum, where there was a room full of drawings and paintings by British WW1 artists, commemorating the Battle of the Somme which was, of course, a hundred  years ago, in the summer of 1916. I visited the battlefields of the Somme, north of Paris, some years ago, on a school trip, and I remember very clearly the various sites, including some of the Canadian trenches. Last summer I also read some of Pat Barker's grippingly human novels about the artists commissioned to record Britain's side of both world wars. Here's an image from the Manchester Art Museum's show: http://manchesterartgallery.org/exhibitions-and-events/exhibition/goodbyetoallthat/

Away

We're off to the Vaucluse this morning--catching a train at noon, for a journey that will take a couple of hours, plus a shortish drive at the other end. Trying to get everything into one suitcase, including the books, music and my husband's biking shoes. He will wear the Irish sweater, I have moved the extra books to my backpack, whose zipper is shot and won't be helped by a heavy load (books, laptop, lipstick) in the large pocket. My daughter offered me a kilt safety pin the other day, but I forgot to take it.

No internet down there, so here are a couple photos from the 27th September reading at Shakespeare and Company, here in Paris, with the readers and the London trios' wonderful B&B host, Yann Barouch, who lives next door to Shakespeare & Company, came to the reading, took the pictures, bought books.

The Broadway Book Shop, Hackney

And for good measure, here is a photo of the window, this week, of the Broadway Book Shop, on Broadway Market. That's my book, possibly the first time it--I?--has been in a bookshop window, and you can also see Patrick's, to the right. This is a delightful, small book shop, and the first time I went in, several years ago, I was surprised and delighted to find two of my books in stock, another first for me,

Reading tonight, in London, Broadway Bookstore, Hackney

 I seem to have been neglecting the blog--it's just that I was beginning to feel awfully repetitive. Which is ok, because when my life has a lot of routine I sleep better. In fact, I'm falling asleep over my book at 10 pm.

On the other hand, when I'm leading an exciting, varied life, as I have been for the past few days, I'm still wired at midnight and looking for purple pills.

I've been in the UK for a week. Came to London, spent three days with my daughter, partly in our favourite bakery/café, e5, which she says has just opened a shop in Kenya, partly flat-hunting around Broadway Market. Tonight I'm giving a reading in one the 3 (I think) bookstores there (in the space of 2 blocks) with Patrick Mackie, another CB editions writer. There's a review of Patrick's new book in this week's TLS. 

Then I was invited to Manchester to read at the Manchester Lit Festival, this past Monday, along with Jeffrey Wainwright and Matthew Welton, very different but equally superb poets and readers. And a terrific audience, too, as in Bolton, just outside Manchester last night. And today I'm back in London. It's a lovely 2-hour train ride between the two: rolling green fields, streams, sheep, cows, the odd horse, the odd town. My only complaint: hotels whose windows don't open.

The weather is mild, blue sky with clouds, some dark, some white--a change from California. Back to Paris tomorrow.

When I left last year, I left the books I was in the middle of where I had last put them down--one way of making two strands of a life feel connected. Beside my bed, Virginia Woolf's diary, read a long time ago, good bedtime reading. I'm in, I think, 1932, just after she published The Waves. Lytton Strachey has just died, she goes to Greece--for the first time?--with Roger and his sister, and here the entries become much more excited by her discovery of Greece, which she compares to England in the time of Chaucer, and her reflections on beginning to lose friends. She's a wonderful writer, and when she is jarred out of her routine noting of social engagements and her private, writing life, you feel you connect with the source of her life, in ways you don't just reading the day to day chronicle of events and places.

I'm also reading, more closely than before, the poems of a friend with a wonderfully fine, nuanced mind, poems that feel as if a surgeon (the conscious writer) were probing with an instrument the various regions of his brain and recording the images, feelings and thoughts each probe momentarily calls up, poems that are cerebral, but far more. Another thing they make me think of are Piranesi's prisons.