after a Joseph Cornell box, is the title of my new collection of poems, which will be published by Carcanet Press (UK) at the end of August. It is in press right now, but here is a picture of the cover (designed by Luke Allan) with a painting by the artist Hope Gangloff, who had a show at Stanford's Cantor Museum last summer. Here also is a link to Carcanet's website for the book, where the collection can be pre-ordered.
I tipped this novel off the 'new books' shelf in the Lane Reading Room at the library a few days ago. Why? Nothing else tempted me, I thought I'd heard Stead was an interesting writer, though I'd never read anything of his. Also I thought he was a she, because it is, or used to be, often women who hide behind two initials, hoping not to give away their gender and be overlooked as 'women'.
Stead is a New Zealander (I thought British), but the novel is set in Paris, in the 5th and 6th arrondissements, also mine. The year 2014-15 (it ends with Houellebecq's Submission and the Charlie Hebdo attacks). He must live in Paris I thought, after a while; he certainly seemed to know all the obvious places to eat, walk and have coffee around St Sulpice, though he did get a few details wrong, such as a paid gardener raking/blowing leaves on the first of November, La Toussaint, one of those sacrosanct French holidays on which nobody works. This is not Anglosaxonia and its post-puritan work ethic. Holidays are holidays. There is more to life than work.
The characters: a 50-ish New Zealand professor of literature at the Sorbonne (already a stretch: it is hard for outsiders to get a foot in the highly protectionist academic door in France, especially in an old Paris institution); his French wife, Louise, a formidable academic (she's writing a book on Flaubert) from a formidable French family; a younger academic, Sylvie, with whom he has an affair while they are co-organising a colloquium to celebrate WW I poets; Helen, a charmingly worrisome, bipolar, recent Oxford graduate trying to understand Derrida ('We are dispossessed of the longed-for presence in the gesture of language by which we attempt to seize it'), who may or may not have stolen an heirloom Cezanne from over the mantel in Louise's living room. On the other hand maybe Louise's cousins stole and stashed it in a bank vault, out of spite that Louise inherited it, and they only got the castle which has depreciated, while the painting has increased x-fold in value. (Spoiler? Ok, no spoiler.)
It's tremendously readable, very well written, and, I think, very good, as long as one likes cool, well-written books. It would be a good movie, but it would have to be a French movie, because it's much too low-key to be an American movie. For example: on the subject of the revelations of American torture in Iraq: 'But either way, a short shrug or a lingering wince, what then? ...[Y]ou knew where yearning ended and reality began.'
Stead, it seems, lives in New Zealand. He was born in 1934. He has written a great deal: poetry collections, criticism, novels, an autobiography. I plan to read more.
A 'Bank Holiday' in Britain. In Canada we used to chant 'The 24th of May is the Queen's Birthday.'
And May is the month of holiday weekend after holiday weekend in France: the first of May (Labour Day), the 8th of May (WW2 Liberation), Ascension Thursday, et j'oublie). Not being entirely pragmatic, the French have not moved all their holiday days to a Monday, preferring to 'faire le pont (make the bridge)'; eg., if the holiday falls on a Tuesday then the holiday stretches over Monday to Tuesday, for four days instead of three...however, if the holiday falls on a Saturday or Sunday, no extra day. I suppose one could calculate whether this is better or worse for the worker. It does make the merry month of May in France a lot like a piece of Swiss cheese.
Here in the Bay Area, or at least in my part of it (south of San Francisco) today is one of the first really summery days, though if this keeps up it may become too hot. But for now all the windows and doors are wide open and it is comfortable in a sleeveless top and thin jogging pants, even on our side, the north side, of our building, which doesn't get sun until late afternoon. There's a little breeze stirring the leaves, the hammock on the deck looks inviting, though I have errands to run first. Plus a page of Hélène Cixous's latest book ('novel') Défions l'augure to block out, ie,. roughly translate, ready to start my writing day tomorrow. I find I can hardly wait to get my hands on it each morning, it's so delightful and so wide-ranging, and with my favourite character, her mother, front and centre.
Dear Blog Friends,
Here is a link to my story, featured on Poetry Daily today:
http://poems.com/special_features/prose/essay_brahic_darning.php#bio
I hope you enjoy it.
The latest PN Review arrived in my mailbox this week and it carries an article (I'm actually not sure what to call it, but anyway, a piece of prose writing) that I wrote and rewrote for years
and will probably revise again once I get over the shock of seeing it in print.
Here's a link:
https://www.pnreview.co.uk/cgi-bin/scribe?item_id=10206
The sun is trying to come out, without, so far, much success. I don't know if it's fog or clouds, but we are going to the Cantor cafe for lunch, so I hope it's warm enough to eat outside.
Caught up with some friends this week, one for lunch, one long distance on the phone from Boston, where she and her husband moved from the Paris area about a year ago. She is American, he French, and she can't get over how nice people are--she forgot. It's strange because you only notice these difference for a while, a few months, a year after you move and then everything shifts and seems normal and hardly worth commenting on. I notice this every time we go back and forth between here and Europe. You note, in writing, a flurry of things in the first flush of arrival on either side of the Atlantic, then it all begins to seem repetitive.
A young, Swiss woman in my graduate seminar (Socrates) said what she missed most in California was Europe's health system(s). (Can't remember how the subject came up, maybe because we were talking about Eryximachus', the doctor's speech in the Symposium?
And so to lunch.
Noon o-five and there's a small plane buzzing overhead, round and round, and I've just laid down Douglas Dunn's book of poems The Noise of a Fly (2017, Faber), from which I am trying to learn something, not so much about form, which he excells at, as about honesty, getting to the bottom of things, not sounding poetic, but like oneself, whoever that is.
The plane is dragging an advertisement for a bike shop fire sale.
Over to Berkeley this afternoon for my poetry group. Picking Peter (Dale Scott) up on my way. Taking a tarte tatin, as my contribution to dinner, after workshopping one another's work. Chances are the conversation will be political.
Middle child emailed from Hong Kong this morning, with pictures of food. I had no idea she was there. But the food looked yummy.
Hard, as always, to settle back into one's groove after being away, even just for a few days. I'm a creature of habit--is that a good thing or a bad in this part of the world where 'disruption' is the mantra; ie, thinking 'out of the box'? I'm quite happy with my box. Probably shouldn't admit this.
The routine: mornings spent writing and reading, legs stretched out on my (made) bed, books spread around, cups of tea or coffee or hot water with lemon, a handful of almonds. Lunch a salad and fruit, then a class and the gym and maybe the library, home to more reading. Classes at the moment are 1) The art of madness given by a psychiatrist-fiction writer, an hour and a half twice a week with slides. At the moment he is talking about delusions in psychosis and the art includes Elyn Saks' book about her (high-achieving) life with schizophrenia: The Center Cannot Hold.
2) My other class is in Classics, a graduate seminar on Plato and Eros, texts The Symposium and Phaedrus. That's 3 hours, once a week, with a long and fascinating reading list of secondary texts and terrific discussions among the dozen or so participants, several of them auditors like me.
I'm also reading Peter Handke, lots of poets, of course, including Kenneth Koch, Douglas Dunn and Hardy--and following the political situation here much too closely, like everyone I know.