Malaucene, France

This is from one of several village cafes in this town in the Vaucluse. It is Saturday evening (before dinnertime for French people) and it is busy. In fact, even the bar is standing-room only, though it is cold so there are lots of empty tables outside that in summer would be filled with tourists, a lot of them here for the biking. We are at the foot of the Mont Ventoux, which is a monument of the Tour de France and well-known for that, even as far away as California. Tonight the six or so tables are filled with people playing cards, grey-haired many of them: perhaps this is a Saturday-night ritual. There are two TV sets with soccer games on them, and they too have a crowd watching. There’s a little girl kneading yellow play-do; maybe it’s the barman’s daughter or granddaugher—no, she just went to ask some of the card players how much longer she is going to have to wait before they can all go home, or maybe she likes being here under TV set #2. I like it here. I wish I didn’t have to answer emails and could just people-watch. Someone just brought in a pizza from the pizza truck that has set up for the evening in the parking lot outside the small supermarket, a parking lot which is also the market place a couple mornings a week.

There. I’m just rattling on. It’s very distracting with all that’s happening. Someone has just given the little girl a piece of pizza.

StAnza Poetry Festival, March, St Andrews, Scotland

Oh dear, I haven’t written here in ages, mea culpa, and now I’m writing out of self-interest.

So let’s get that over with first: I will be reading on March 6th, 1-2 pm, in what I hear is an extraordinary celebration of poets and poetry. Here is the link: http://www.stanzapoetry.org/festival/poets-artists/bie-brahic. I will be reading alongside other winners of the Wigtown Book Festival 2019 Poetry Prizes. And there are lots of other wonderful events to go to and people to meet, all of which you can see by following the StAnza 2020 links.

I am sitting, with my husband in a Malaucene cafe, over Scotches and email. We don’t have internet in our house in a nearby Vaucluse village. It adds about 2 hours to my daily time for reading, biking and walking, but we do need to catch up on stuff, including the news, once or twice a week. And the Scotch is good, though today we are trying something cheaper than Glenfiddich. There are 2 television sets. One had something about horse racing and the other is too far away to see, though it seems to be mostly ads. When we’ve soaked in internet news for a while we will do something more banal, like grocery shopping.

The weather is cold—there’s a fierce mistral (north wind). Yesterday we hiked part way up the Mont Ventoux and it was snowing halfway up and we hadn’t even taken gloves. But we kept on doggedly and bought a hot water bottle on the way home. Today we hiked to La Roque Alric and back, and that was warmer, even sheltered in places. Too much wind to bike, but we’ve been doing lots of that too. Daily routine: write (me), play the flute (my husband), lunch, bike or walk, read, dinner, read, bed. Lovely.

'My' Baudelaire

An appreciative review of Invitation to the Voyage in Chicago Review of Books on December 4th.

The book will be published by Seagull Books on the first of January 2020.

At noon today

Rain is falling steadily, and since we are under the roof, I am loving the sound of it. Yesterday we squeezed in a bike ride between downpours and made it to the top of Alpine Road in Portola Valley along Corte Madera Creek, which was happily filling and burbling down along the San Andreas fault. Any houses up here are pretty well hidden so it’s one of my favourite bike routes.

Meanwhile our creek, the one that is dry at least six months of the year these days, is also filling up. Apparently folks on the other side of the creek, which is in Menlo Park, has spotted steelhead in it and the occasional coyote and fox visits their back yard. Sometimes it threatens to flood its banks, but that’s been pretty rare lately.

Thanksgiving

I admit to being ‘bah, humbug’ about holidays. And I don’t know much, beyond a children’s book retelling about the history of Thanksgiving. But why on earth did the ‘pilgrims’ put their feast so close to Christmas? Who wants to plan a Big Family Meal exactly one month before another Big Family Meal? And eat turkey when you still have the parched leftovers from the first bird still hanging around? And then there’s the problem of pumpkin pie, the candle-wax-and-smoke-infused flesh of the poor jack-o-lantern. I love pumpkin soup and pumpkin gratin, but pumpkin pie?

Canada, as is often the case, is much more sensible, celebrating its (copycat?) Thanksgiving on a Monday in early October, before the Christmas decorations are up and the travel problems due to weather are too acute. Less hoopla and less shopping too. Understatement is a Canadian strength.

Tuesday 26 November

It’s raining! The first rain we have seen, if I’m not mistaken, since we returned to California in late June. It was grey and leaden when we got up this morning, but usually the sky clears by midday and the afternoons have been brilliantly sunny, including yesterday when I met a friend on campus to talk about poetry over coffee outside Green Library and we were able to sit outside in the sun until it went down, when we moved into the library.

At 2 we headed for the hills on our bikes, got halfway up Sandhill, felt a few drops, went further, to Santa Cruz, by which time the drops were closer-spaced, reconnoitered the horizon—somewhat menacing—and turned back. Car wipers were coming on. As we walked into our apartment, it began to pour, and it has continued to pour. Love the sound of the rain on the roof. Love knowing we can stop worrying about tinder-dry conditions all around us. Of course, I’d also like it not to go on too long…but for now, we’re happy.

Kincade Fire

There is a smoke haze over the coastal hills, whose line we see from our northwest-facing deck, this morning. It was already there yesterday. Once you get up into the hills, as we did on a bike ride yesterday afternoon, you can see that the haze also covers the lowlands towards the east, and the Bay. It makes your eyes prick if you stay outside; I came back from our ride with a sore throat, so perhaps it was foolish to head out, but once you started uphill under the redwoods the air felt, at least, cleaner, as if the smoke were trapped high up in the treetops.

So far we haven’t lost power, though our county is on the list of those threatened with cut-offs. Since we live along a dry creek-bed, despite some recent cleaning out of the brushwood, we do think of fire. It doesn’t take much to start one in this parched environment.

6 pm: Strong smell of smoke when I step outside; the coast hills are pretty much hidden by the smoke and it is visibly hanging in the air. It’s become windy here.

Quake

An earthquake last night, the second recently, and a good jolt (4.5), though the epicenter was in the East Bay towards Walnut Creek. I happened just as i was dozing off, around 10:30 and I leapt out of bed, grabbed my robe and prepared to flee, if necessary, though it is really hard to decide whether to stay put and let the building collapse under you, or run into the street and get hit by debris. Still, if we had to get out, I needed some clothes. But nothing more happened and I went back to bed.