In Praise of Hackney

My daughter was sharing a house (built in a gap left by the Blitz) in Notting Hill on the west side of London. The house was sold, one after another her friends moved on until on my daughter was left. One could do worse, even if the boiler did keep breaking down. The sale fell through, she hung on some more.

Eventually though she moved clear across London to Hackney, a more affordable borough, not lacking in its own history, with lots of brick and grungy facades and non-posh accents. Tracts of Hackney were bombed during WW2; postwar a lot of public (“Council”) Housing went up in guise of urban renewal and filled with a diverse population trickling, maybe pouring, into England from the Empire the sun was setting on, and lots of native British, too, in addition to those for whom Hackney had long been home.

Decades later, Hackney is gentrifying, but it’s still diverse, it’s cool. The original tenants are there, many of them, raising families in public housing, whose units can, since Thatcher, now be sold on the open market. A more recent immigration of young people from Europe and elsewhere in the UK and Ireland is moving in. For better or for worse Hackney is gentrifying. There are galleries, bookstores, markets; there’s Regents Canal with locks and boats, its tow path for bikes and jogging. Brexit, which London strongly rejected, may slow the gentrification.

Cafés

There are a variety on campus, not quite one per building, but close. The quality of the espresso counts, but also the clientele. There's one in the main quad near the English department I like, especially in the citrus season because it is in the middle of a citrus orchard: grapefruits, oranges, kumquats. Business School not so good, I mean, the coffee is good, but the customers tend not to be my sort of folks. My preference is for the one outside the main library that satisfies all my criteria. I can sit there for a good long while with my finger in a book and an empty cup, listening to the buzz of conversation around me.

In Paris, the café I am most often tempted by is the Café de la Mairie, on the Place St Sulpice. It is old, run down, grubby, venerable. The waiters are all pre-war. Georges Perec wrote a book about it. It has a quiet upstairs if quiet is what you want and a bustling downstairs and, weather-permitting, a terrace, covered, heated in winter. I like the seats inside the front window. Some sad day someone will buy out the owners, whoever they are, (as happened with the Hotel Récamier across the Place), and turn it into a glossy tourist attraction on the order of Les Deux Magots, but for now, it's authentic.

Corn/Maize

Yesterday at the farm, we pulled the plastic out from around the roots of the strawberries, we made a pot of lavender-rosemary tea (from the herbs) and exchanged our news: Mika's wife is being transferred to Paris and he graduates in a month; Nasser went to China last week...and then we husked corn, pulling the wrapping and corn silk off to expose the red-gold cobs--is it Indian corn? no one seemed to know--soon it will be time to rub the kernels off the cobs. I think this is where I came in, a year ago. Next week there'll be a pizza party, outside, firing up the pizza oven.

And all night I dreamt of husking corn.

Still translating Baudelaire. This morning I revised "La servante au grand coeur," which is #C/100 in the Fleurs du Mal. I think about the poets who were satisfied to publish less and better: Larkin, Bishop, Baudelaire. I have moved gradually away from aspiring to originality to a modest faithfulness. I've consulted some translations that veer from the originals, whether because they wanted to keep the rhymes or because they wanted poems that would be their own poems and have come to respect literalness more. Robert Lowell is the exception, for me, that proves the rule.

Utah

We spent a couple days in Utah last weekend. Sunday was beautiful, deep blue sky, bright sun, and we went snow-shoeing up a creek between two mountains, where in summer there is a string of beaver-ponds (though possibly no longer any beavers, since the available tree trunks are now at an unsafe-for-beavers distance from the streambed). The snow glittered, the sensuous shapes of the drifts cast soft shadows, and we pushed on till we came to a fence marked private property, though there was, from the valley, no sign of a house nearby. Anyway, we were tired, the sun was sinking, and we turned around and slogged back. Snow-shoes are a very satisfactory way to get around on deep, untouched snow.

Monday we woke up to a blizzard, but still made it to the airport, where our flight left on time and returned to the Bay Area, where it was spring.

The strange satisfaction

of re-ordering one's bookshelf.

We don't have a lot of books in California. Most of them are in Paris: the ones I read in high school, then university, the favourite kids' books, the poetry. When we downsized there, the most important part of the move was planning linear feet of book-space, so that books that had been scattered hither-thither around various rooms. Eventually we had to close a set of double doors to create more wall space in the new place.

Then, two years ago, we thought it would be prudent to get our own place here, even though we were happy renting. And I went to Ikea and brought home a long black bookshelf for the long wall beside the bed. A poetry place. It's maybe a quarter full, but each time I go to Paris I weed out a few more books to settle here--a lot of Larkin? Divide them between my continents? Etc.

Last week I rearranged them. It involved separating the B's (a lot of B's, which include a collection of Bonnefoy, whom I have translated, and Baudelaire, whom I'm translating) from the A's: ie, moving everything down a shelf or two (a lot of H's, too, gave them a shelf by themselves). This took a week or so, and it was a pleasant distraction. Now I look from bed to books: the vertical ones, the ones lying flat, the objets (family photographs, empty tea boxes, a cage for crickets, postcards from art exhibits), and it is good.

Weeding

Saturday, a perfectly sunny day, I headed to "the farm" where the afternoon's job was to weed the student plots, abandoned over the winter, of the deep-rooted mallows that had invaded them. There were a lot of volunteers, some new, some from last year, including N, an Iranian-American, who came all last spring and summer, often with his wife, occasionally with his student-daughter. There was a Japanese man and his young son, and a group of campus students, plus M, the coordinator. 

It's like sorting beans, mindless, physical, satisfying, rote. Yank the weeds, bringing up the roots, heap them on the paths, fill a wheelbarrow and take them to the compost. Some people began loading mulch and dumping it on the paths, delineating the plots. Every now and then I'd stand up and look at what we'd done. By the end of the afternoon, most of the dozen or so plots had been weeded, forked over, seeded with a cover crop and, in some case, covered with weeds to keep the birds off. Among the weeds I'd found a few leeks and a couple of lettuces to take home for supper.

N said he was supposed to go to Iran next week for business, but his company was looking into whether that was still feasible. He has double citizenship; maybe he shouldn't risk leaving the country.

Cakes and Emily

 A friend, Ditta Baron Hoeber, has a wonderfully meandering, complex, humorous poem online at the moment. It's called "Cakes and Emily." Ditta, whom I met years ago at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, is also a visual artist whose website I love to explore.

Marches

In October 1967, when I was a student at Columbia University, a bunch of us piled into a friend's old car and went to Washington for the March on the Pentagon. My friends were from Chicago; I was Canadian, just back from a two-year stint as a volunteer teacher in Ghana, where I witnessed my first political marches following Nkrumah's overthrow--brightly coloured, with lots of music and dancing (in Ghana, even funeral colors are bright). I went along to Washington pretty much by accident, not knowing a whole lot about U.S. politics at the time. I'm glad I was there. It was one of those historical moments. 

Last night I stood in the rain with a couple hundred other people on the edge of El Camino Real, a local prelude to today's Women's Marches in Washington and elsewhere. My sign said Not My President on one side and Love Trumps Hate on the other. In red and black. (I've seen some terrific signs in the news stories, including Grab your own). There were lots of kids and their parents, a drummer, and cars driving by honked happily. The March in Washington looks awesome and I wish I were there: this time I'd have been a fully-committed demonstrator.