I have just posted, under Events, a list of readings scheduled so far for my new collection, The Hotel Eden:
2 October, Amsterdam
17th and 22nd October, London
15th November, Edinburgh
See Events for more details
I hope you can make one!
What keeps me reading when I pick up a new work of literature by a writer whose work I don't know, or whose work I don't know well?
I've been asking myself this question this week, in part because I was discovering the French writer Dominique Rolin. A friend mentioned her, I put her name and some call numbers on an envelope I keep in my backpack with the names and call numbers of books I want to read, so that when I go to the library I can find them.
Rolin was born in 1913 and died in 2012. She had an interesting life (after I'd read the first chapter, and become intrigued, I wanted to know more about her life, as one does)--see the internet. She is not well known outside France and Belgium, but my guess is that she will endure. Her writing is beautiful--deconstructed, essaylike meditations, without a plot. This one, Lettre a Lise (Letter to Lise) was published by Gallimard in 2003. It might be her last book. It is addressed to her granddaughter, but mostly it talks about her thoughts, her daily activities, life and death (she wrote it in her 90s) and the comings and goings of her lover, a much younger man with whom she has had a 50-year relationship, himself a famous French writer.
Rolin has a rich inner life, but it is also something anyone can relate to: love, writing, relationships with her granddaughter and her great granddaughters, bodies, the pleasures of the flesh, of watching people, out her window or in her street near the Musee d'Orsay. Taking a shower, waiting for a friend, wondering when and how death will come, starting the day with hot coffee.
I guess I read it, for the beauty of the writing and because, in the absence of a 'plot,' I still want to know more about this woman, the life of her body and the life of her mind.
Our apartment overlooks a street that runs along the edge of a creek (dry in summer) that is the boundary between two towns. Our street is a bike boulevard with two bike bridges across the creek about a half a mile apart. Therefore it is also a commuter route from various places, including the university and lots of Silicon Valley startups, to housing in the next town. The creek is lined with leftover woods, which is also nice, and there are crickets at night. And train whistles from the train to the city--I mean San Francisco--or St Jose to the south.
There is very little automobile traffic along our street, but a lot of other kinds of traffic from the obvious, bikes (road bikes, dirt bikes, city bikes, bikes towing babies in side-cars that are behind-cars, bikes where people pedal with their feet up...) to scooters, motorized or non-motorized; skateboards, ditto, those things with two wheels that people stand on, motorized, etc. It occurs to me that I could assess the state of private, personal transportation just by sitting looking off our deck for an hour each morning or evening. Not forgetting motorized wheelchairs, of course, pedestrians and
The sun has just set, a flaming red ball in a smoke haze, which makes the trees across the street look hazy. I rode my bike up Alpine Road to Portola Valley Road after lunch and the smoke was worse up there. Can't even see the hills that separate us from the coast. People are advised to stay indoors with closed windows.
Talked to my daughter up on St Juan Island in Washington, just opposite Victoria. There are fires in British Columbia too, whose smoke was so bad yesterday that no planes could take off or land from their island. Couldn't see across the valley, she said. It was like walking in fog. Talked to a friend further up the coast of Vancouver Island, who said the same thing. She's a friend of my mother and is in a senior place. The last few days they've been advised to stay indoors with their windows shut. Rainy Vancouver is also having a drought--no rain all summer. Paris friends who were planning to visit Sooke, near Victoria, are wondering if they should cancel their trip.
Has anyone else noticed that phrasal verbs are vanishing from American English, as sanctioned by the New York Times if not the New Yorker (which still spells focussed, thank god, with 2 s's). Soon we'll be getting 'alot'--one word?
Phrasal verbs (I think some people call them modal verbs) are the ones that come with a preposition attached; eg, look over an article, run up a bill. But what about 'mull over'? Nope, it's become 'mull' just as 'hang out' has become 'hang' ('I'm just going to hang with my friends'). Soon we'll be back to baby books, with a basic vocabulary of 25 one-syllable words, or a few grunts, like one of my neighbours, if I meet him on a good day (otherwise he ignores me--really wouldn't like to meet him after dark in the garage).
Am I sounding cranky? Too bad. You should have been at our HOA (condo association) meeting last night.
'One remembers what hurt,' writes C. Milosz in his diary of the year 1987, A Year of the Hunter.
Milosz is pondering remembering and forgetting and the education of American students, who, it seems, have very short memories.
A few weeks ago I was at an afternoon meeting of a group of local women writers, where a woman read us excerpts from her recently published book about the Holocaust. There was a lively discussion after. I remembered how French pupils are taught about the Holocaust and each year at about the age of 14 may make a visit to a Camp, the way British pupils of about the same age study World War 1, and--in the British school I was teaching in--go to visit the battlefields in the north of France. A day trip for us, from Paris.
But I also read once, in Le Monde, France's newspaper of reference, an article about a Jesuit in, I believe, Cambodia, who was trying to inculcate the idea of remembrance in Cambodians, and while they listened politely they also said that this was contrary to their own culture, which believed in forgetting, in, as we say, 'letting go, moving on.'
'One remembers what hurt.' I brood over the hurtful things, the things I feel guilty about. I often wonder whether, the day we can turn our memories off and on, I won't choose to forget a lot of things that are still painful.
I have just discovered a Carcanet blog post I wrote a while back, but didn't realise had been published a couple of weeks ago. It concerns the writing of a poem that is in my new collection, a poem called 'Future Perfect,' a poem that took--like lots of poems--several years to get right. As I explain, here.
For the past few days the sky has been white, orange-white, instead of the usual blue, and the air has begun to smell of smoke from the fires up north and perhaps also the fires south-east of here. Tomorrow morning we have planned to drive east to the Sierras between Lake Tahoe and Yosemite, to visit an area my son has been talking about. But the air quality up there is very poor and it is unusually hot, so we may have to spend our time inside looking out at the creek. I'm packing books--not the worst thing in the world to do. Occasionally I think about getting caught in an inferno, but I tend to be an optimist, even about the weather, always finding it hard to believe that the weather wherever I'm going is any different from the weather here.
Two days in the Sierras, then off south to the desert east of Sierras down by Bishop where a friend is teaching at Deep Springs College for the summer. My husband wanted to teach there, a course over the summer of next year, and we're looking forward to seeing what it looks like, this very small, but notable college, where the students run the ranch and hire the professors.