Saturday 26 April 2025

Have been very conscious of the death of the pope all week, because we live across the street from a church, and bells have been ringing at times of day when I think it must have something to do with the death. Right now — I think he is being buried today — they have just rung for many minutes.

I love how Paris’s many churches mark the passing hours of the day with bells. Here we are surrounded: according to which way the wind is blowing and and other atmospheric conditions, we can sometimes hear bells from three nearby churches, plus the townhall, rarely in sync. A few times we have wondered whether we are hearing Notre Dame, now that its bells are again ringing out.

It is for now a blue-sky morning, though there’ve been some sudden downpours these last ten days. I’m itching to repeat the walk my fourth floor neighbours took last week: across the river and north to Belleville, a town I haven’t visited since we first moved to Paris.

Sunday, 20 April 2025 (Easter Sunday)

Easter…we live across the street from a Paris church so I cannot be unaware that it is Easter: bells have been chiming at various moments all weekend and I try to remember the biblical sequence of events. As a child I would have been taken to church, on Palm Sunday, on Easter. I remember the branches and I remember that it was day when women got a chance to wear a hat — but I guess Christmas traditions and songs made a deeper furrow in my psyche.

What I really meant to say is that I am in the middle of watching A.E. Stallings February (2025) Oxford Lecture on Cavafy, and I’m thinking that both her lectures and Alice Oswalds’ are quite a triumph, in their different and original ways for women: that women bring something new to the male-monopolised field of lecturing, from the gesture (Stallings) of tucking a pesky strand of blonde hair (she has a lovely poem about going to the hairdresser in Like) behind her ear, to Oswald’s limpid lyricism in her plain (do I recall this?) knit jumper and her audios. Really, I think if women, they say, bring a je-ne-sais-quoi to the corporate boardroom, they also refresh and enliven their turns at the lectern. Brava and thank you!

Saturday 19 April 2025, Paris (Easter Weekend)

I’ve been thinking about the word brutal and cruel a lot, reading the news. Brutal has appeared a lot, cruel, I think, has been more rare this past week, though I’ve seen it in other weeks. I’m wondering how I hear each of them, what overtones each has. I looked in the dictionary, and both come from Latin words, the one, says my quick check online dictionary ‘dull, stupid,’ but also ‘characterized by an absence of reasoning or intelligence,’ hence its use for animals or beasts (about, not to be unfair to animals) whose brains we know little, to date). Cruel is from crudus, ‘raw, rough’ (think ‘crudities’). And cruel is defined as ‘willfully causing pain or suffering or (and?) feeling no concern about it.’ So which would one choose to use, if one were a journalist writing about the current political news? Why does ‘brutal’ feel more banal and ‘cruel’ more thought-burdened, to me? How do other people reading the one and the other?

Sunday 13 April 2025

I just dipped into Victoria Moul’s wonderful substack, ‘Horace & Friends, and got a shock, because it’s about women-in-childbirth-in-poems. I’d never thought how rare a subject this was, but the reason I was startled is that I’ve had a poem in the works for most of two years that goes from (well, I can’t even remembered where it started), let’s say, from my father at the Battle of the Bulge to a group of men and women comparing their military service and the throes of childbirth. It was to have been a long-lined conversational poem with surprising turns, something on the order of Ciaran Carson’s poems in his last book Still Life (not that I could match it) with its dailiness, chemotherapy and paintings.

The weather turned rainy and grey yesterday evening while I was walking the Rue Monge in the 5th arrondissement from bottom to top, noticing the entry to the Arènes de Lutèce, the little garden under the old premises of the École Normale Superièure, the hardware stores, the florists, the market place… . It was a good choice of a street, not being on any tourist’s list, and yet has a fine flavour of ordinary Paris, and because you don’t feel like elbowing people aside.

I’ve been reading/rereading Walter Benjamin’s essays on Baudelaire’s Paris and thinking what a poor ‘flâneur’ I’d make, because I find it hard to slow my pace to a window shopper’s stroll or amble (lècher les vitrines is the French expression: lick the windows) stroll. At least when I’m going somewhere. For humans-watching a café terrace is best, as Perec has demonstrated in Tentative d’épuisement d’un lieu parisien (1974) when he sat in the window of the Café de la Mairie and noted everything he saw over a period of three days.

But now I must go for a walk. But where? Perhaps, the weather being grey and threatening rain, the river path might not be too crowded?

Paris, Monday 31 March 2025

Busy weekend.

Saturday afternoon, before meeting friends for dinner on the Right Bank, Place de l’Alma, I decided to walk over. It took about an hour and a half to go from the 6th to Trocadero, where I spent half an hour in the Musée de l’Art Moderne, entirely in front of the very first room filled with three huge paintings by Sonia Delaunay and her husband Robert, all as spectacularly joyful, as a collection of ferris wheels. After dinner we took a bus home, more complicated than we anticipated, because the ticketing has changed: one ticket if you want to ride a bus and/or the tramway, another if you want to ride the metro, RER or train, and various other options. Previously, you could use the same ticket, in Paris for everything. The ticket vendor was as confused as the snake of customers.

Yesterday we decided to (finally) visit Notre Dame, so walked over. The no-reservation line went on forever, though it seemed to be moving quickly. The with-reservation line was empty (no slots), though parents with babies in strollers were waved in. We chose the line for the 6 pm mass, and heard vespers. The cathedral is as spectacularly restored as it looks online. My husband found it too new looking. It’s true that there isnt an incongruous detail, unless it was the motley congregation.

Sun today, and sharp-angled shadows on our neighbourhood church,

In the Vaucluse, Wednesday 19 March 2025

It’s been a busy few weeks, beginning with a reading in London. Now we’ve been in the Vaucluse for a month, with and without visitors. We return to Paris tomorrow.

Books I’ve had on hold in my online library have been turning up, including the audio of Rushdie’s Midnight Children, a long term project for which I have 3 weeks and then it’s back to the waitlist. It’s wonderful; there are so many interlinking stories that you could probably pick it anywhere and be entertained. Earlier this year I listened to The Satanic Verses, the same experience: I could pick it up and ‘read’ anywhere with pleasure and some idea of the plots.

A few days ago I was notified, after another longish wait, that I could pick up (virtually) Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (print not audio). The story starts in an elevator, which ‘was so slow that all sense of direction simply vanished.’ I’ve had that experience, but in my case it was because I’ve pushed the number of the floor I’m on. My library warns me that three people are in line behind me.

Audiobooks are best for bedtime, or the middle of the night when you are rehashing an argument you had that day or 10 years ago, or when you’ve attended an overstimulating zoom meeting scheduled after your bedtime in another part of the world.

Back to Murakami.

Paris, Tuesday 18 February, 2025

I’ve been in London for a few days, to see family and for a reading at the Broadway Bookshop, a lovely place on Broadway Market in Hackney. Also an appearance on Poetry Breakfast, on the erotic, for Valentine’s Day. Back the day before yesterday, now slipping back into my usual writing: mornings writing and reading, afternoons: maybe more writing, maybe biking (in the Vaucluse, or walking (Paris) plus a Tai Chi class two evenings a week. I’m reading Heaney’s translations, Will Eaves’ new collection, working on Leopardi. Also reading Eli Weisel And the latest PNReview. Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal. My edition, which I bought second hand, much foxed, a little brittle. It includes the shorter poems that William was working on in the period she was writing her journal.

Weather cold and sunny. There’s a church (St Sulpice) across the street, and yesterday a team of rock climbers with helmets and ropes began placing climbing ropes on the church. I imagine they are going to do some work on the facade, without scaffolding. It’s quite wonderful to watch as they clank around the various terraces on our side of the church, or let themselves carefully down a zinc roof. Last year a staircase on the outside of our building, made of metal was cleaned and painted using a team of climbers, rather than scaffolding. That team said on the weekends they went climbing.

Working on a poem about a dental hygienist who taught me to hold my toothbrush like a Chinese calligraphy brush. I think it’s going to be fun. A poem I wrote about visits to the hammam here in Paris is in The London Magazine for February/March.

Paris, Monday 3 February 2025

February already. Did I really say I’d write here more regularly? As I think I said in January, I’ve been reading Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal before sleep, and it completely removes any shyness about starting out with a weather report. So — the temps have dropped again to around freezing overnight, which means that if I put yesterday’s pot au feu out on the kitchen balcony, in the morning the removal of the fat is made easier by its being frozen. Still a delicate operation, given that the surface of the pot is lumpy as a sea with wreckage, meaning lumps of ingredients: onion, leeks, carrots, meat, marrow bones, bouquet garni. But it lifts off fairly easily in your fingers. Today, because of the cold, the air is cold and dry and the sky is blue.

I’ve been working on some new poems, one that is only new in the sense that, after years of work, it is unfinished to my satisfaction. It’s about the hole in my tummy when I go to the university library or even just survey my own bookshelves and fact the fact that I will never be able to read (or reread) all the books. And about how my husband seems to read so much slower than I do, and yet (perhaps?) more deeply. That reminds me how much I love the French expression for ‘skimming a book’: to read diagonally (‘lire en diagonal’).

It’s going to be dark in an hour and a half, so I really should go outside for a bit—maybe check out the leaves (still invisible) on the neighbourhood trees, or go window-shopping (‘lecher les vitrines’ or lick the windows) now that the January Sales are over and our spring wardrobes are beginning to be displayed.

Off to London next week for a few days for a reading on Thursday Feb 13 at the Broadway Bookshop, in Hackney, East London, and to see my daughter and Co.