London

We are off to London in a couple of hours. I love train trips, I've loved them since I was a kid, travelling across Canada, through the Rockies from Vancouver-Jasper, when I was a student, working at a resort there in the summers, or to Toronto and Montreal, on family trips or on my own: the Rockies, the endless prairies then the rolling hills into Ontario and Quebec. It now seems like the stuff of myth.

We are taking the Eurostar of course, out of the Gare du Nord to St Pancras in London. Even the stations are mythic--rolling out of Paris across the hilly north, villages and towns clustered around grey stone churches, fields and of course, shopping malls and highways; then into London, coming out along Regent's Canal. St Pancras is much nicer than the Gare du Nord and more recent. It's a place people go, not only to catch a train. The British Library is nearby, you quickly walk into Bloomsbury. But we are headed to Hackney where our daughter lives.

Set of French Dictionaries, free to a good home

Many years ago I subscribed to a dictionary called Tresors de la Langue Francaise, and over years, received 11 volumes (A-Nat), and then I decided to stop receiving it. Perhaps the internet was by then making dictionaries and encyclopedias redundant. The TLF is edited by the CNRS, the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, and it was, at the time, novel, because it was being prepared by computer and it was about the language of the 19th and 20th centuries. All 11 volumes sit at the bottom of a floor-ceiling bookshelf, and I want to give them away, but of course no one wants them. I stop in to used and antique book sellers and they refuse; I connect academic friends in French departments but no, sorry, they don't know anyone who...

Today I was volunteering at 'my' soup kitchen and I asked my fellow volunteers as we sat around eating our lunch after serving lunch whether there was anything like Craig's List or Nextdoor. Oh, yes, they said, there's 'Le Bon Coin' (leboncoin), literally 'the good corner' or, let's see, what would we say in California English--a good little place? No, there's bound to be a better translation than that but it will do for now. Anyhow, long story short, I took some pictures of my ('condition: new') row of dictionaries and posted an ad. Maybe an art student could make some kind of sculpture using the pages, or a furniture designer could turn them into a coffee table.

I'm in need of a book to read. Finished Anna Karenina 10 days ago. Am still reading Woolf's Journals, but I've reached 1940 and the Blitz, and I'm not sure I want to read to the end. I continue to read Bonnefoy's Inachevable; Entretiens sur la poésie; I finished La Mennulara, which was wonderful and went to Tour de Babel, the lovely Italian bookshop in the Marais, and bought another book by Simonetta Agnello Hornby, which I am just beginning to read. I just ran my eyes over my bookshelf and didn't see anything that immediately caught my eye. There's a lot of Dostoyevsky I've never read to the end, but no, not Dostoyevsky. Elizabeth Bowen? I did pull all of Lawrence Durrell (still with cash register receipt from Montreal inside of one) off the shelf and decide to take it to the English Used Books down the street on Rue Monsieur Leprince and trade them in for something else--maybe a Donna Leon?

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.