My new bike

I have a new bike, carbon-fibre frame, blue with orange accents, brand new unlike my campus bike which was pre-owned, as the car ads now say. Two gears in front, lots more in back. I got it a week ago and have been up Alpine to the green gate, where the road stops, three times now, once without stopping. Like the best hikes and rides, the green gate is downhill all the way home. Takes me now an hour and a quarter up and maybe half an hour back, though I wasn’t keeping close track, because mainly I’m happy just to reach the top (though actually there is a hiking trail further up, to Skyline from the green gate. I think, however, that I’ve shaved about ten minutes off my campus-bike time. I do feel sleeker, with my thinner tires and no bike basket jingling.

The bottom part of the ride is on a commuter road up (down) the Sandhill of the venture capitalists, Stanford campus and shopping centre with its not-quite plastic plantings and fancy shops. The top part of the ride is beautiful, along a gorge with a creek bubbling in the bottom, madrone, redwoods, oak, bay laurels, deer…the top part is the reward.

I sent my Baudelaire translation, Invitation to the Voyage, to the publisher yesterday. Sorry to see it go, I could tinker forever and never arrive at perfection. It is scheduled to be out mid-November. It will be followed, also from Seagull, by a translation of Hélène Cixous’s wonderful book We Defy Augury, of which PN Review has just published a chapter.

Madame L's House, the poem

I am tinkering with a poem this morning, one that I wrote a couple years ago, and have been tinkering with off and on. It helps to forget about it for a while. It’s coming along, but still needs work.

I’m looking at the first line (‘Madame L. is selling the house’) right now, and wondering if there’s a better word than ‘house.’ ‘Farmhouse’ maybe?

This leads me to think that a ‘farmhouse’ in North America and maybe in the UK and Ireland (I’m not sure about this) suggests a house that is outside the village, in the middle of the farmer’s land. But in France, at least in the South, though there are farms surround by land, most farmers, or peasants live in villages where the houses are pressed together, perhaps for safety and sociability. Farm implements and machines, say tractors, are kept in a ‘remise’ (no real word for this in English; ‘barn’ and ‘garage’ don’t really fit) in the village too.

Madame L’s house is such a village house; but a big one, with some land attached. It sits on the side of a hill leading up the castle; once it was the schoolhouse. We went to visit it when it was for sale, because my husband’s family house was losing its view to new construction. But her house was too big and needed too much work for us.

So I guess, to stay close to the truth, ‘farmhouse’ won’t do. In French it’s a ‘maison de village’ with all that suggests, of village life after the day’s work on the farm, which can be and often is, land without a house, or only a one-room stone hut, without a door, to keep the horse in, if necessary, maybe a place to shelter from the weather, if necessary.

Wednesday 26 June

The temperature is down to 80 degree fahrenheit this morning, by the thermostat out the kitchen, but the sun is shining on it, so it is probably cooler. There is a breeze and the air feels cooler.

School is out, the bac is over, only middle schoolers need to hang around for their exams, which were put off till next week, because of the heat wave. Parents complained, of course, they were planning to go places, but the National Education Authority said school didn’t officially end in any case until July 5 and then relented and said those who had tickets (a privileged group of course) could take the exams in September’s catch-up session. The neigbourhood teens were skateboarding in the street last night.

We leave tomorrow.

Too hot

to sleep. We really do need a fan, but everywhere everything is sold out. I’m not sure what the temperature is here this morning because we have draped sheets over the outside of the kitchen windows, hiding the thermometer. Definitely hotter than yesterday. I’m going to stay in my little red cotton nightie all day. It is sleeveless, it stops above the knees and it doesn’t touch my skin anywhere. It could be a dress. Exactly the same cut in an African print would be lovely.

Last night I dreamed the city spontaneously combusted.

Paris is a very mineral city. Not many green areas. The sun from all directions reverberates off buildings, reflecting light into windows even in the absence of direct sun.

Heat Wave

Everywhere we turn we are warned about this week’s heat wave, and how to survive it. So when the sun hit the kitchen windows this morning we hung sheets, from my pile of torn sheets, over them, on the outside, naturally. Now, mid-afternoon by Anglo-Saxon standards, and early afternoon by French calculation, the sun has clouded over and the sun does not appear, but it is hot and muggy and we have drawn the shutters and closed the windows like good Mediterraneans (in my husband’s case) and are keeping the house as cool as we can for tonight. Unlike in the Bay Area, when night brings cool air, the temperature in Paris doesn’t drop much. Still, we will open the windows wide and let somewhat cooler air in. We need fans but we leave in two days, so perhaps we can get by.

I am reading Virginia Woolf’s Second Common Reader, which I stumbled on in a second-hand bookstore a few months ago. It is brilliant. I don’t need to be passionate about Gissing to love her writing. And now, soon, I must find the first Common Reader, which her friend Lytton Strachey liked better than Mrs Dalloway (they were both published at about the same time), because he found Clarissa Dalloway trivial or perhaps shallow and not very likable. I know what he meant, but I’m still very fond of the book. I reread the last scenes of the party again last week, to think again about the old woman whom Clarissa sees, as if she had caught sight of another self in a mirror, walking through the house next door, doing this and that. Does the woman see her? It seems not. It is a tiny but fascinating scene en abyme, that seems divorced from the book, but isn’t, any more than the parallel suicide plot is.

I have just looked at the thermometer outside the kitchen. It says 90 degrees Fahrenheit (it comes from my grandparents’ house is Saskatoon, and has a photograph of the house and my mother and her sister as young girls on it). Too hot for serious reading. And I want to go to the gym, but the AC there is broken.

Alice Oswald elected Oxford Professor of Poetry

This is very good news, and overdue, because Oswald would have been an excellent candidate already the last time round (but maybe she wasn’t ready at the time for more responsibility), and also, of course, because she will be the first woman elected to this position in the 300 years of its existence. I have just finished rereading Seamus Heaney’s Oxford lectures in The Redress of Poetry; I’m looking forward to reading, possibly hearing as podcasts each of Oswald’s 12 lectures, and eventually having them in book form. And to reading and rereading her poems. She is a funny, moving, original poet—intelligent in every sense of the word.

Cafe de la Mairie

I was one of a group of readers last week, celebrating the Poetry Festival at the Café de la Mairie, Place St Sulpice, where I met another writer for a glass of cold Sancerre (it was a hot day, the café is not air-conditioned) a couple afternoons ago. He is publishing a poetry collection in the fall in New Zealand; we discussed revision, especially up-to-the-finish-line revisions, always a little dicey, in part because one wants the book to be perfect, in part because one tends to make last-minute changes and then regret them, when it’s too late. I’d been thinking about unity of tone in a collection: what makes for unity of tone, and whether it is desirable. So maybe the question is how to have a ‘harmonious’ (whatever that is) range of tones, as in Heaney, Ashbery, Milosz or Larkin (even): poignant, funny, erotic…

I like miscellanies, collections you can open and read anywhere. In the best of these, of course, the writer’s ‘voice’ (another broad concept that needs defining) is the unifying element—and perhaps the small links, a phrase, a word, that lead from one poem to the next, or the poem that signals a change in thematic material, autobiographical to erotic, say. Putting a book together is like hanging paintings for a show. Sometimes you can get away with throwing a Braque into the middle of Picasso…you couldn’t throw a Matisse in though. Where is this analogy leading me? Strong personalities make strong books?

It is raining this morning in Paris. The zinc roofs shine, the pigeons coo on their ledges (and sometimes on my kitchen porch, landing on my oranger du mexique and breaking the branches). We have tried children’s windmills, skewers, forks, old CDs, but still they come. Ten years ago I was charmed by a pigeon raising a brood there. No longer. It is amazing what they find to build with in the streets of this ungreen city: a few twigs, bits of somewhat flexible wire, hairpins.

The rain has stopped. The zinc roofs have dried. A class of schoolchildren with a teacher in front and a teacher behind chatter on their way to the swimming pool. A car, looking for a parking place. Pigeons cooing.

June

Church bells raining over the neighbourhood. You really never need a watch or clock in Paris, there are always bells pealing or tolling, or a face to consult by leaning out the window in the morning (on the Town Tall, for instance). If you want to know the time, that is.

June is the busiest month? The square has been busy for three weeks now: a succession of events, from the mathematical games show, which drew a large crowd of kids and parents, to the Poetry Festival, to the (now) antique show, really just brocante. Once we bought back from a neighbour in the country, the sleigh bed my parents-in-law had given away. Another time, when I came home with a china lavatory basin and pitcher, my father-in-law turned to my mother-in-law and said one should never give anything away. We still have that; the sleigh bed got sold when we moved into the city.

It must be the last week of school for primary; the older kids are out for their baccalaureate exams. Soon everyone will disappear to the country or day camps and only tourists will remain. Yesterday, the newspaper says, a first mass was celebrated in Notre Dame, very small, priests in hard hats. My husband, who went to a concert at the Centre Pompidou last night, says that the quaies were absolutely packed with people picnicking when he walked home at close to midnight.

The weather iffy: sometimes sun, sometimes a downpour. I don’t go out without an umbrella.