Wednesday 4 pm

Work on poems and translations and a book review for PNR--a book about Apollinaire. I have written mostly about Apollinaire. I have another review waiting to be finished, waiting for the final copy of the book itself, so I can, if necessary, correction the quotations I've used from the advance copy.

My own poems--better not thought about too much. It's a pleasure to work on them, and feel I can still change, which is probably an illusion, but it still feels like a worthwhile way to spend my time--and it is the important time of the day. What I read the rest of the day feeds into that. My life feeds into it. 'You must change your life,' says Rilke in someone's translation, and though I'm not a big fan of Rilke, however much I admire his craft and intensity, he is right. You don't change the poetry without changing the life--minutely.

Warm and overcast. Muggy, sort of. Is it the fires up north and down south? I see people smoking in dry grass along our (dry) creek and want to scold them, but don't. Yesterday both the sun coming up and the sun going down had a ominous red tinge through clouds...fog...smoke?

We have a new gardner in our apartment building. The old one got fired, I think, after he suggested we should water more. He was, apparently, sinking into dementia and used to shout quite horribly at his assistant, a minority person. Hearing him, horrified, I'd go out on the balcony and tell him to pipe down, and then he was utterly, disarmingly apologetic. Perhaps the assistant just put it to dementia of some kind, the way the assistants in nursing homes must live with the horrors of scolding old age.

The new gardener has a battered red pickup, and he seemed to be spending his morning tinkering with the watering system.

And now off to Redwood City for a lecture on facts and fiction about sleep... . And maybe on the way home, I'll swing by Portola Valley and pick up some Graventstein apples they had yesterday in a bin out front of the market, when I was on my bike and couldn't take any.

It's Sunday morning, 10 a.m.

and I am sitting on my bed (made), books spread around me, a tray with the last mug of tea from this morning's pot (tea is my husband's department, both the choosing of and the making of) and a dish of roasted almonds, ready to write: 1) another page from Hélène Cixous's wonderful new book  Défions l'augure, which Seagull Books will publish eventually, in English; and 2) some poems of my own for my next book, should I be so lucky as to have 'a next book.'

(But I have a title for it, after a story in the NYTimes, last week: 'How to Have Sex in a Canoe.')

It's cool, sunny, getting hotter...but when I read about the temperatures in Europe at the moment, I thank heavens for coastal Northern California's fog and cool overnight temperatures. My husband has gone biking with a friend. Yesterday the two of us rode up Alpine almost to 'The Green Gate,' a landmark for bikers at the top of Alpine, where the road has been closed for x years because there was a landslide. It doesn't go to Skyline Bd (the road along the ridge with the Pacific Ocean to the west and Silicon Valley and the SF Bay to the east) any more. It's the first time I've tried to ride up that far, and we had to turn around more because it was getting late, and dark, especially under the Redwoods. A beautiful road with almost no traffic, wild, steep hills on one side and a drop into a valley where a creek is still running (where does the water come from? It hasn't rained for a couple of months) on the other. Sublime.

Too late to stop at the Alpine Inn for a beer.

The Beekeepers

Carcanet has published 'The Beekeepers,' one of the poems from my new collection today. It is one of a group of poems set in the Luxembourg Garden in Paris's 6th arrondissement. I hope you enjoy it.

In addition to a book launch at Stanford/Palo Alto, California on 15 September, I will be reading from the new book on October 2nd at Waterstone's in Edinburgh, on October 17th at Broadway Books on Broadway Market, Hackney, London; at Blacks Club, 67 Dean Street, Soho, London; and in Edinburgh on 15th November. More details to follow!

Inventions...

A car wash that fits in my shower.

A bathing cap that keeps my hair bone dry in the swimming pool.

A machine with human hands to massage my scalp.

Package Waiting...

Two days ago I found this package sitting in front of our apartment door, brought up, no doubt, by a kind neighbour, or perhaps the postman. I wondered what it was, then realised that it must be the 20 copies of my new collection of poems, The Hotel Eden, that I ordered from Carcanet,  along with my 6 complimentary copies.

I brought it in, of course, and set it on the bench in the entry with the shoes, my keys, my sunglasses, my backpack. Did I tear it open? Nope. Two days later it is still there, as pictured. My husband was ready to open it the first day, couldn't believe I wouldn't. Last night again. This morning. 'When I get results in the lab, I want to see them right away,' he said. 'What's with you?'

This happens with each book, not the translated ones so much as the ones I write for myself.  Am I afraid I'll be disappointed in the poems? If only I'd had ten more years to work on them? Once I get the books there's nothing more I can do to improve them? It's way too final...

'I'm waiting to be in the mood,' I told my husband.

Mueller's Indictment, 13 July 2018

This makes for utterly fascinating reading. I downloaded it, amazed at the amount of detail and the clarity of its 30 pages. It's a quick read and as a good a read--even for a person not interested in the problem of the hacking into the 2016 American election (and the possibility that something similar occurred in the UK)--as a thriller. And it gives a glimpse into how the folks behind the scenes in the Mueller investigation work. Hats off to them.

Here is a link via the New York Times story on the indictment in today's paper:

Biker's High

I think I have at last understood the expression 'runner's high.' Getting most of my exercise in the gym or walking, it was a mystery to me. But lately, biking, I've got it. Nothing fancy, you understand. In my husband's book of Bay Area bike rides, the one I do rates a 2 (out of 5). It climbs, but fairly easily, and then it goes up and down for a while, and then it's a straight downhill shoot back home. On the uphill part I feel like The Little Engine That Could: 'I think I can, I think I can, I think I can'; then when I reach the highest point, if I've got enough wind left in my lungs, I say, 'I knew I could, I knew I could, I knew I could!'

If I left home thinking 'why am I doing this? Why don't I just stretch out in the hammock on the deck with a book?' by the time I get back home, usually about 2 hours later, I am exhilarated. And that's my 'biker's high.'

I don't have a cell phone

Don't plan to get one either. In fact, I'm sort of phone-phobic. It might be one of those genes your parents hand down to you, in my case, my father, who never answered the phone if he could avoid it, and if he did have to pick it up, he'd say, pretty quickly, 'I hear your mother on the other line, so I'll hang up.'

Once I asked him about this. His answer: 'I'm always afraid when I pick up that there'll be someone there.'

Not only I don't have a cell phone, but I don't have an answering machine either, or if I do, I mean, if it's built in somehow, then I don't know how to consult it. I hate the idea of coming home and having to listen to a bunch of messages. Also, I don't answer the phone even if I home, if it's in the morning, because that's my writing time, and if I get interrupted I might never go back to work. Ever. (I have the same sort of anxieties about other things, like going to the gym, or letting stuff pile up. Stop one day and I might never go again. Let stuff pile up where it's not supposed to and I might never find it again.)

Of course, there are inconveniences, like when someone needs to get in touch with you, but family and friends know about my quirks, and others, well, I say, use email.

My parents were of a generation when the phone was not something you spent time on, especially if it was long distance. When I grew up and moved away, I was amazed when I insulted my French mother-in-law by offering to pay for a phone call I made. My own mother expected me to pay, or at least offer to pay. I used to think that was her, but I now think it was a whole culture.