A wonderful post, on his blog, by a wonderful publisher, Charles Boyle of CBeditions, and the author of several poetry collections, most recently, The Age of Cardboard and String (Faber) and the novel An Overcoat by Jack Robinson (CBeditions): http://sonofabook.blogspot.com/
I've been working for years on a fourteen-liner, and I don't know, but some reason tweaking it again today (probably because I introduced some details about the Bd. St Michel and a newsstand on the corner of the Bd St Germain) I thought, as yesterday with the street-sweepers, about how much things like corner newsstands, of which there are many in Paris, add to the texture of city life. I'd rather pick up my newspaper at a newsstand than have it delivered to my door. You look at all the papers and magazines on display, you exchange a few words and coins with the newsie, some of them grouchy, most friendly, maybe you sit down somewhere on a bench or in a cafe to read the paper, watch people, eavesdrop on their conversations. I remember years ago we tried having the paper delivered to our suburban home--Le Monde was promoting home delivery--but my husband liked buying it before his long Metro trip home at the end of the day. In the morning he worked on the Metro; at night he read the paper (there's an art to folding a broadsheet to read it in the confined space of a Metro seat).
Even in a small village you can do this, even in the absence of corner newsstands. In our village in the south of France the municipality subsidises a cafe, cum grocery, cum newsstand cum post office. It's small, it's friendly, there are always a few people standing at the counter drinking, others sitting at the half dozen tables in the back. Everybody probably knows too much about everybody else, they look at you curiously, summing you up, you look at them curiously.
But just look, in the pictures, at the street furniture, the newsstand kiosques, and their design. Will they all turn into images on our ipads?
I've been reading a book about gardens, a collection of essays, Of Gardens, by Paula Deitz. Last night I came to one called 'Autumn in Japan,' about visiting a temple in Kyoto where 'entering the moss garden, there comes from outside the rhythmic sound of sweeping. Inside the garden, this sound pervades the autumnal air. Its visual accompaniments include the implements used to sweep the leaves--rustic brooms and woven winnowers that scoop up the piles--and the sweepers themselves dressed in faded indigo stripes and plaids.' This reminded me of one of my favourite Paris sounds, as I know I've written before: the sound of sweepers sweeping up leaves in the fall--but also cleaning gutters year-round--with their brooms, now green plastic, but once rustic too. Every time I pass one of these sweepers in the street I want to stop and say thank you, I love listening to you work, thank you for not being machines.
Of course, they might rather be driving a great noisy truck, instead of catering to my sensuous, and leisurely, pleasures. Probably 'brooming' the streets is a pretty lowly task in the life of a city like Paris. Most of them are first--or second?--generation immigrants. Which brings me to another book I've just read, Samuel Selvon's The Lonely Londoners, about a population of Caribbean immigrants settling in London after WW2. It begins with a man called Moses, going to meet the 'boat train' at Waterloo Station, a friend of a friend of a..., who is arriving from overseas and may need a little help finding a place to live and a job; and ends with Moses years later, now a Londoner, but thinking about where his decade or so of London life has got him, and wondering if he should return to his island in the Caribbean. It is an immensely human, alive, funny, sad book. I would probably never have come across it had I not been auditing a class on the city of London, that combines history of the city's past hundred years, along with representative books in which the city is the background--like Samuel Selvon's novel.
My daughter was sharing a house (built in a gap left by the Blitz) in Notting Hill on the west side of London. The house was sold, one after another her friends moved on until on my daughter was left. One could do worse, even if the boiler did keep breaking down. The sale fell through, she hung on some more.
Eventually though she moved clear across London to Hackney, a more affordable borough, not lacking in its own history, with lots of brick and grungy facades and non-posh accents. Tracts of Hackney were bombed during WW2; postwar a lot of public (“Council”) Housing went up in guise of urban renewal and filled with a diverse population trickling, maybe pouring, into England from the Empire the sun was setting on, and lots of native British, too, in addition to those for whom Hackney had long been home.
Decades later, Hackney is gentrifying, but it’s still diverse, it’s cool. The original tenants are there, many of them, raising families in public housing, whose units can, since Thatcher, now be sold on the open market. A more recent immigration of young people from Europe and elsewhere in the UK and Ireland is moving in. For better or for worse Hackney is gentrifying. There are galleries, bookstores, markets; there’s Regents Canal with locks and boats, its tow path for bikes and jogging. Brexit, which London strongly rejected, may slow the gentrification.
There are a variety on campus, not quite one per building, but close. The quality of the espresso counts, but also the clientele. There's one in the main quad near the English department I like, especially in the citrus season because it is in the middle of a citrus orchard: grapefruits, oranges, kumquats. Business School not so good, I mean, the coffee is good, but the customers tend not to be my sort of folks. My preference is for the one outside the main library that satisfies all my criteria. I can sit there for a good long while with my finger in a book and an empty cup, listening to the buzz of conversation around me.
In Paris, the café I am most often tempted by is the Café de la Mairie, on the Place St Sulpice. It is old, run down, grubby, venerable. The waiters are all pre-war. Georges Perec wrote a book about it. It has a quiet upstairs if quiet is what you want and a bustling downstairs and, weather-permitting, a terrace, covered, heated in winter. I like the seats inside the front window. Some sad day someone will buy out the owners, whoever they are, (as happened with the Hotel Récamier across the Place), and turn it into a glossy tourist attraction on the order of Les Deux Magots, but for now, it's authentic.
Yesterday at the farm, we pulled the plastic out from around the roots of the strawberries, we made a pot of lavender-rosemary tea (from the herbs) and exchanged our news: Mika's wife is being transferred to Paris and he graduates in a month; Nasser went to China last week...and then we husked corn, pulling the wrapping and corn silk off to expose the red-gold cobs--is it Indian corn? no one seemed to know--soon it will be time to rub the kernels off the cobs. I think this is where I came in, a year ago. Next week there'll be a pizza party, outside, firing up the pizza oven.
And all night I dreamt of husking corn.
Still translating Baudelaire. This morning I revised "La servante au grand coeur," which is #C/100 in the Fleurs du Mal. I think about the poets who were satisfied to publish less and better: Larkin, Bishop, Baudelaire. I have moved gradually away from aspiring to originality to a modest faithfulness. I've consulted some translations that veer from the originals, whether because they wanted to keep the rhymes or because they wanted poems that would be their own poems and have come to respect literalness more. Robert Lowell is the exception, for me, that proves the rule.
We spent a couple days in Utah last weekend. Sunday was beautiful, deep blue sky, bright sun, and we went snow-shoeing up a creek between two mountains, where in summer there is a string of beaver-ponds (though possibly no longer any beavers, since the available tree trunks are now at an unsafe-for-beavers distance from the streambed). The snow glittered, the sensuous shapes of the drifts cast soft shadows, and we pushed on till we came to a fence marked private property, though there was, from the valley, no sign of a house nearby. Anyway, we were tired, the sun was sinking, and we turned around and slogged back. Snow-shoes are a very satisfactory way to get around on deep, untouched snow.
Monday we woke up to a blizzard, but still made it to the airport, where our flight left on time and returned to the Bay Area, where it was spring.
of re-ordering one's bookshelf.
We don't have a lot of books in California. Most of them are in Paris: the ones I read in high school, then university, the favourite kids' books, the poetry. When we downsized there, the most important part of the move was planning linear feet of book-space, so that books that had been scattered hither-thither around various rooms. Eventually we had to close a set of double doors to create more wall space in the new place.
Then, two years ago, we thought it would be prudent to get our own place here, even though we were happy renting. And I went to Ikea and brought home a long black bookshelf for the long wall beside the bed. A poetry place. It's maybe a quarter full, but each time I go to Paris I weed out a few more books to settle here--a lot of Larkin? Divide them between my continents? Etc.
Last week I rearranged them. It involved separating the B's (a lot of B's, which include a collection of Bonnefoy, whom I have translated, and Baudelaire, whom I'm translating) from the A's: ie, moving everything down a shelf or two (a lot of H's, too, gave them a shelf by themselves). This took a week or so, and it was a pleasant distraction. Now I look from bed to books: the vertical ones, the ones lying flat, the objets (family photographs, empty tea boxes, a cage for crickets, postcards from art exhibits), and it is good.