California Bay Area, Saturday 28 June, 2025

‘The weather here is boring,’ my husband said yesterday as another cool blue morning dawned out the windows of our north-facing, therefore cool, apartment. There was a rising intonation in his voice, as if this were a question (6 months of blue skies?) We’d been hearing about the storm in Paris this past week, and the ‘canicule’.

Yesterday ended with a bike ride to the top of Alpine Road, along a little, but valiantly running creek, a creek whose water supply is replenished, even in summer, by coastal fog. I love the sound of water running over stones, but it isn’t always enough to distract myself when climbing the steepest hills, I recite poems to myself; it’s remarkably effective at taking my mind off how out-of-breath I am, especially on the last three or four really steep, sharp turns.

I was reminded of this again this morning by Victoria Moul, a Paris-based poet, classicist and critic, whose all-things-poetry substack I love reading. And one of the things on my list of things to do this weekend is to read her interview with on another substacker, Henry Oliver whose Common Reader is, thanks to Victoria, a new discovery. In it Victoria recounts reciting poems (to herself?) during dental visits and childbirth. Aha, I thought, so I’m not the only one.

It interests me how I can distract my mind from hills-on-bikes and other things (insomnia) by reciting poems to myself. The oldest poem I remember learning by heart is from a high school assignment to learn and say out loud in front of the class ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,’ not the most cheerful lines I know. Recently I refreshed my memory of ‘Loveliest of Trees’ (Housman), pairing it with Frost’s ‘Whose woods they are.’ Dental visits don’t bother me, but I wish I’d known this mind-distracting technique when I was bringing children into the world.

We are going to San Francisco this afternoon to see the Wayne Thiebaud exhibit at the Palace of the Legion of Honour, another of those joy-of-life artists, like Matisse and Hockney.

Monday 9 June

This is a PS to my earlier post. For some reason I was thinking about the poet A E Housman — no, I remember why; it was because when I was scrolling through Instagram yesterday, I came upon Judy Dench reciting ‘Loveliest of Trees,’ school-girlishly, then with her mischievous smile. I was pleased that I could still recite it along with her.

It came to me that ‘Loveliest of Trees’ must have helped inspire Robert Frost’s poem ‘Stopping by woods on a Snowy Evening,’ but to what a enormous difference of tone. Housman’s being pure reason (and joy) and Frost’s poem very dark, as every reader, even a schoolchild must intuitively understand, without the help of Joseph Brodsky’s brilliant essay. I also read Housman’s ‘Shropshire Lad XXX’’ and notice that he speaks of ‘fire and ice,’ not perhaps coincidently the title of another Frost poem: “Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice…’

This naive discovery exemplified for me the difference between Romanticism and Classicism. Duh!

9 June 2025

June, the days still grow longer, for two more weeks. In the Place St Sulpice the antiques market and the painters market will soon yield the space to the poetry market. I’ve been reading a lovely small book by Colm Toibin about Elizabeth Bishop. I actually finished it 2 or 3 weeks ago, and then began over. It makes it own special contribution to the EB literature in its lovely clear simple prose. The chapter I read a couple days ago was about Bishop story called ‘The Scream’ ; it’s a story about her Nova Scotia childhood and the scream is a scream of pain that ‘was not even loud to begin with… . its pitch would be the pitch of my village. Flick the lightning rod on top of the church steeple with your fingernail and you will hear it.’ My thought was, I think, about Marianne Moore’s Steeple, and then I looked up from my book, and out across the street and my eyes saw the lightning rod on the roof of the church and I flicked it with my fingernail. And now I remember that about a year ago, returning from an errand, I walked along the back ( ‘the holy end’) of the church just as lightning struck and there was a crash of thunder, both together: hitting the lightning rod, I imagined.

I think I’ll take Toibin’s book On Elizabeth Bishop (2015, Princeton UP) back to the Bay Area with me. We fly early tomorrow morning.

Paris, Friday 30 May 2025

We have just returned from several weeks in the shade of the Mont Ventoux, which was lovely and lately sunny , almost midsummer hot. The train ride back was lovely too, carrying us from the blue skies and sun of Avignon over mostly farmland, overcast but green. Reddish-brown, then white cows grazed or hung out in the shade of a single tree, Flat or rolling hills, with the occasional village or stone farm that looked as though life in them had not much changed for centuries, Then Paris. I went to bed listening to street noise and have woken to sun making sharp shadows on the protruberences of the neoclassical church across the street, It is a long weekend. Paris residents will have gone away for the last of May’s long weekends (Ascension Thursday through Sunday). I had to run to the neighbourhood nursing station to get the bandage on an incision on my leg changed, and coming back the rue de l’Odeon was full to the brim with people supping with friends.

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?