Sunday morning

Buckets of rain coming down, first slantwise, and now straight in big fat drops that are so thick that they blur the church across the street, and make a wonderful rain noise, even drowning out the dirge sound of the organ. I can, from my window, see a network of gutters that ultimately pour rain into the street four stories below. Wind too, and a few autumn leaves blowing around even, four and five stories above street level. Zinc roofs glisten.

But I would love to have a good long walk this afternoon, so I hope it dries up. There's a show I'd like to see at a gallery in the Marais.

Blablabla

The performance in the downstairs Grande Salle of the Centre Pompidou was excellent, a one woman show for grownups and children, of whom there were masses, under the aegis of the Encyclopedia of Talk [la Parole]. This is an artistic project that explores orality, the things we say and hear: tv ads, youtube, train station announcements, football games, street fights, school teacher talk. A montage of different voices in different situations, linked but not linear, the way what you hear around you overlaps in your head, in the moment and in your memory. One actress, Armelle Dousset, does all the voices. It began funny, became scary with aggressiveness and anger (street, home, classroom), references to politics and terrorist attacks, then cooled off. If I were a young kid I might have had nightmares, or maybe it was a way to face and evacuate fear and anger. There was, I see, a workshop for kids and parents, connected with the performance. Very impressive. 

Rainy today. Noon, church bells ringing. No plans for this afternoon, other than reading some more of the book I'm reviewing for the TLS.

Blabla

Wet and grey but warmer this morning (why does the weather always come first to mind?) Just finished working which included thinking about the choices for the cover of my new collection of poems, The Hotel Eden, to be published by the British poetry press, Carcanet, at the end of next coming summer. Which means the manuscript needs to be done by the beginning of January, a daunting feeling, because of course the Ms will never be done. But you just have to grit your teeth and let go of it. (I'm having the same problem with my Baudelaire Ms for Seagull Books, don't want to let go, because it's so far from what I want it to be, which is, naturally, and impossibly, up to Baudelaire's original. Actually I think my Ponge book and my Apollinaire book were up to the originals, but Baudelaire is a different kettle of fish, partly because of the form, mostly sonnets, but in any case rhymed and metred.)

Plans for the rest of the day. Supermarket shopping, for the stuff my husband doesn't find in the local covered market a block away: Scotch, yoghurt, grated cheese, olive oil...want to go right after lunch because the lines won't be so long and I won't feel so grumpy and on the qui vive for that inevitable Parisian phenomenon: the line-jumper.

Then, maybe the Bon Marche to look for a shawl or something to throw on the clunky Ikea sofa we bought to distract your eye from its clunkiness. It was cheap and the right length.

Then I have a ticket for an event called Blabla at the Centre Pompidou, a kind of play whose script, if I get it, is a collage of people talking about nothing.

Like me here.

Reading in London on November 20th

I'll be reading at Blacks Club in Soho with Jacqueline Saphra whose collection All My Mad Mothers is up for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Hope you can come!

Here's a link to the Facebook announcement: 

Recours au poème

Some poems of mine translated into French for the review Recours au poème: http://www.recoursaupoeme.fr/essais-chroniques/beverley-bie-brahic/marilyne-bertoncini

This is only the second or third time some of my work has been translated, in this case by a translator and poet I met last June at the Festival de la poésie in Paris. It is exciting and a little strange to see your poems in another language. For one thing, you read them like a stranger, and you are not impressed... I'm grateful to Marilyne Bertoncini.

Back in Paris late last night. This morning cold and sunny and city noisy. Spent the day catching up on email and chores and now I am going out while there is still some sun. Did I say I don't like daylight saving--or rather I wish it would stay October all year round. I think it is my favourite season. 

Finished Anna K. Found it fairly boring at the end. That is, I knew the plot, so could hardly be carried along by what was happening to Anna. The interest, for me, was mainly in the matters that are secondary to the Anna-Vronsky plot; ie, Levin and the changes in his life and what they say about his character and his attempts to find a meaning for life. One senses that the answer in the book (Christianity, doing good) is only temporary. Already he's wondering about Jews, Moslems and Buddhists. Also interesting the changes in an agricultural society and how he, as a landowner, tries to come to terms with haves and have-nots. Plus ca change, plus...

Simonetta Agnello Horny is a lovely writer. Again the Italian bookstore in the Marais, Tour de Babel, has put me onto a wonderful author.

Wind and Rain

Full moon, the weather’s changing, and not for the better, unless of course you remember how badly rain is needed. The wind got stronger in the night—I love the feel of a cold breeze blowing across my bed: you pull the quilt higher and decide not to go and refill the hot water bottle with hotter water.

That was a few days ago, and it rained, hard, for 24 hours (the roof leaked in 3 places) and since then we've had strong, cold winds (the 'mistral'). Our neighbour Paul says normally it doesn't rain with the full moon, "but times have changed."

We are sitting in the Kayser cafe/bakery in Avignon train station having a sandwich and waiting to catch a late train back to Paris. The station is open to the winds and it is cold. At the next table a white dog in a red vest is being fed a bone--chicken?--on the floor at its owners' feet. Have had a quick look at the news--a mass shooting in Texas, financial documents leaked from tax havens etc. Business as usual.

Picking Olives

My brother-in-law is picking his olives and sometimes we help him (not enough, and he gives us oil; I think of the little red hen).  But there has been no rain since April and the olives are dry, not plump and oil-filled. Still, like our nextdoor neighbour, he hopes to squeeze enough oil out of the (abundant) olives to provide oil for the coming year. Last year there were worms—from Italy—in the olives and the harvest wasn’t great either. “Every two years,’ my brother-in-law says, ‘there’s a decent harvest. It’s a pattern. The life of a peasant is really not easy.’

Our neighbour says he’s not even going to bother harvesting the olives this year, but then he goes out and does it anyway, because he needs oil for the winter. How would he eat without olive oil?

A beautiful morning, crisp, sunny with bands of mist stretching across the Plain.

Still reading Tolstoy, and a lovely Italian novel called La Mennulara, and when we can get it—the village shop having closed for the holidays—Le Monde. And a strange mixture of Ashbery, Heaney, Douglas Dunn.

All Souls

It is the Toussaint (All Souls) holiday in France. Kids are out of school for two weeks, shops shut down, including the one and only village grocery cum café cum Post Office cum newsstand in the village. So if we want a paper (home delivery has never been a French thing) we have to walk or drive to the another, bigger town. Yesterday we walked. It’s 45 minutes downhill to get there and then, of course, (steeply) uphill returning. The shop that sells papers didn’t have any Le Mondes left. Needing my daily fix, I went to the village and downloaded Le Monde and the New York Times.  Never again, I promise. I read Le Monde; that was fine, but today I broke down and read the Times, an overdose of the latest Trump stories. Trump rates a very few mentions in the French papers, always either amused or just plain negative; basically you can ignore what’s going on in Washington, and think about the rest of the world, Europe, for instance, Spain in particular at the moment. The ongoing Brexit story. Or local politics. It’s amazing how easy it is to drop one narrative (Washington) and pick up another (Europe).

No internet for 3 weeks. It’s good. It leaves a lot of time for reading other things. Of course, sometimes I miss it. But what I really like is reading a real paper newspaper again.

Today we had a long walk towards La Roque Alric through the woods, back on the north side of the mountain. It was glorious, vineyards yellow (though there is a vicious wind, which is tearing the leaves off everything) and red, olive trees silvery green and blowing. The moon is almost half full. I need to ask our nextdoor neighbour what happens when the moon is half full—perhaps some badly-needed rain?