A quick post, to recommend an excellent, short article by Craig Raine in last week’s Times Literary Supplement. It is about Rimbaud, in light of Mallarmé’s definition or description of Symbolism: “peindre non la chose, mais l’effet qu’elle produit”. Paint not the thing, but the effect it produces. Raine applies this statement to one of Rimbaud’s poems; I’m not sure I’ve ever read such a succinctly illuminating piece of criticism.
I’ve been sitting in the garden in a collapsible deck chair for hours. First I was reading a very good book by Jhumpa Lahiri. Full of lovely clutter, but shaped, like the top of a chest of drawers scattered with things, but all of them held in a wide but shallow bowl. The sun was out, I dragged my chair to the back of the garden under the wall, protected from the mistral, which was blowing quite hard. After a while I got tired of reading, or rather I didn’t want to finish the whole book in one afternoon, I wanted some chapters in reserve. Not eat all the cookies at once. So I looked into the gravel around my chair and saw a weed, then another, and pretty soon I was down in the gravel pulling weeds, one of those mindless tasks that keep your hands busy and your head empty. My husband had put a vinegar weedkiller they said at the Co-op in Beaumes de Venise wouldn’t poison the ground and I didn’t need to weed. It was hard to stop.Yesterday we hiked with friends to the top of a lowish local mountain and I felt like spending a day in a deck chair and scooting across gravel pulling weeds, most of them just one or two blades of grass, hardly hatched. And now that the sun is lower in the sky I can see I missed a lot.
We’ve been in the Vaucluse for a couple weeks. I was thinking back to when we began coming in winter, rather than in the autumn, and how one of the reasons we changed seasons was because it had been so long since we had been here for the almond trees’ blooming (when we lived in Marseille we were often here). It is almost magical: everything is dead, the farmers are trimming the vineyards and olive groves and collecting the dead branches (the vine wood is good for fires) but there isn’t much sign of vegetable life, and then, across the bare countryside in the south, the almonds trees begin to bloom, some very early, others later, so they are staggered over a month or so, their colours white and or pink, or white shading to pink as the bloom starts and end. The bees come, swarms of them, there all of a sudden one morning in a tree, and so noisy! Right now in the vacant space out back there are at least 3 almond trees in various stages of bloom. Soon other plants will begin—yesterday, biking, I noticed the wild orchids beginning. Most of the almond trees are wild, or almost; only occasionally are there orchards of them, unlike in California’s Central Valley.
Bonnard painted a flowering almond tree. It is one of my favourite paintings of his.
It’s Sunday, 11 am, the sun is shining, temperature around freezing. Across the street, church bells are ringing, I suppose a service is about to start. I like the bells—who could not like bells? You really don’t need a watch here, there are always bells, sacred and secular, to tell you what time it is: time to get up, time to start work, time to meet a friend for a drink…
I’ve been listening to poets reading online, prompted by a comment I read about Plath’s gorgeous throaty voice. I’ve never heard Plath reading her poems, I thought, and of course, there are recordings online, and yes, she is a very good reader. This led me to Lowell, then Wilbur - a rabbit hole of poets-before-the-internet. I’ve also been listening to audiobooks: Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, really wonderfully read, now Ishiguro, also excellent, Joyce read by someone with an Irish accent, Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. The problem, if it is a problem, is that listening makes me fall asleep and miss half the story so I have to rewind and fall asleep in different places the next night.
Sunday morning, blue sky, sunlight bouncing off building facades. Last night, bedtime, pouring rain drumming on the zinc roof of the church opposite. We kept the window open at bedtime to listen to it. After living with California drought for years, I’m magicked immediately by the sound of rain, a sound from childhood in drizzly Vancouver, except then I hated it because it made my hair curl—frizz, rather. Now it soothes me.
My daughter has popped over from London; I’m trying to unload stuff on her, but no go, except for a kite I hung in a window until I fell for a bigger and more beautiful kite from Japan. Better than curtains and just as good, almost. She’s going to try it in her Hackney street-facing window.
Maybe a day for a walk along the Right Bank quay?
Just back from food shopping. I walked across the Luxembourg Garden. The day was mildish, grey, the trees leafless, which was nice in a way: the starkness of bare branches, birds’ nests perched in their crooks, squawks of, probably, the parakeet population. I stopped to watch the petanque players for a few minutes, then out the southern side where school had just let out, and crowds of adolescents jammed the sidewalks. Friday afternoon. Coming back, a group of middle school boys and girls were play soccer in a patch of dirt between the tennis courts and the merry-go-round. Now home, I have started reading a book I bought last year, by T.J. Clark and Anne Wagner about the northern English painter, Lowry. I saw some of his work when I visited the Manchester Art Gallery a few years ago, and liked it very much, so when I saw this book in a secondhand book catalogue last year I ordered it. It is bleak, but intense and somehow beautiful like a mild, grey day.
Palo Alto. Home by dark, barely, from a bike ride up Alpine Road to the top, though not all the way to Skyline, the road along the ridge that overlooks the Pacific. Alpine Road used to go to the top, I believe, but a landslide cut the paved road some time in the past. There is still a mountain-bike trail.
I saw my first Christmas tree of the season yesterday. My granddaughter was excited by the remote control that allowed her to change the lights from all-white to redyellowgreenblue at the touch of a button. She may need new batteries before the 25th. In my childhood the lights were red and green and firemen came round to school to make sure we told our parents not to run cords under rugs. My mother was in charge of decorations and she made sure that on New Year’s Day we carefully removed each piece of tinsel from the branches (real pine—the smell!) and put it back in the little flat packages for next year’s tree. My grandaughters’ tree does look pretty with all-white and coloured lights, and brings back most of the magic I must have felt at her age.
We’ll be celebrating this year in a village in the Vaucluse in the south of France with my husband’s family. In France Christmas is all about food (not everyone will agree). A nativity scene of little clay manger figures is traditional, a tree isn’t, at least not in Provence and northerners would scorn the scrawny conifers that pass for Christmas trees in the local supermarkets and garden centres. My husband’s grandfather was a potter, and his mother had at least two sets of Crèche figures he’d made. I remember seeing a crèche she had assembled in an abalone shell we brought from California with about the size of a fingernail. Place St Sulpice in Paris has a shop that sells santons from various potters but the traditional place to shop for them is the Foire aux Santons on the Vieux Port in Marseille.
Already August, mid- or becoming-late August. I have just finished a morning of translation, a new book by Hélène Cixous that I may translate. I have been doing the last section, which struck me as particularly moving, to see whether I want to do the rest. Yes, I think, so far, but I shall have a look at the first section next week. I am working from Gallimard’s pdf of the book which came out last year, and which has a translator’s nightmare of a title: Rêvoir: straightforward if it weren’t for for that little circumflex capping the e…
Also correcting the copy-edited Cixous translation I worked on in the south of France during Covid, one of my Covid confinement memories,Well-kept Ruins in English, Ruines bien rangées in French, first published, by Gallimard, in 2020 and published by Seagull Books in English. Thank you to my (I’m feeling possessive!) excellent copy-editor, Sunandini Banerjee, and of course to Naveen Kishore, publisher par excellence.. It should be off to the printer soon.
A sunny day with cool breezes. Hoping for a bike ride later this afternoon. Now for lunch.