Heat Wave

We're having a heat wave: temperatures at 105 degrees fahrenheit (40 celsius) for the past three days. When you walk out into it, you hit a wall of heat that feels like it should any minute spontaneously combust. "Spontaneous combustion" is term I learned in primary school from the Fire Department, which used to make a yearly visit to the classroom to warn another 30 budding householders about the dangers of running electric cords under rugs and storing oily paint rags. In other, less democratic (?) parts of the world children have been encouraged to turn their parents in for impolitic opinions; but where I grew up we were encouraged to report their dangerously incivil attention to the trajectories of electric lamp cords and leftover paint rags.

Last evening at about 6 pm, two hours before sunset, having been stuck inside all day, I betook myself to the university vegetable and flower farm to do a spot of weeding. In no time sweat was rolling down my cheeks, fogging my sunglasses. And it didn't let up. However, like the good calvinist I am, I persisted. I weeded all of "A Block" (tomatoes, bachelor buttons, various sizes, colours and hotness of peppers, parsley. . .) before I put my tools and bucket back, changed from sneakers to flipflops (feet dust-coloured), snipped some basil for dinner, a few tomatoes and 4 or 5 sunflowers, and headed home, where my husband was about to depart, by bike, on a search-and-rescue mission.

Two Fillings

I went to the dentist the other day to get a couple of teeth filled, one "the smallest we've done all year," the other, well, a filling.

I was early.  I'm always early; otherwise I am stressed. I'm always the one waiting at the front door  to leave, fuming because my husband, after he says, "Let's go," always finds three more things to do, plus putting on his shoes. OK, so this is a much healthier attitude to time, but can I help how I am? Two of my kids are like me with respect to time, one is like him. So...

I was sitting looking through the stack of magazines and eavesdropping on a conversation between the dentist's helper and a new receptionist-accountant, which went like this:

"How come there are so many unpaid accounts? This is really a lot of outstanding bills. People are supposed to pay on the way out. The insurance will reimburse them directly." (She is upset; it is her responsibility to break in the new receptionist. There has been a big turnover in receptionist-accountants since the old--but not old in that sense--dentist died very suddenly nine months ago.)

New accountant-receptionist: "This man was in a hurry when he left. He told me to send him a bill..."

Dentist's helper, nice, but clearly unhappy: "When they go to the supermarket, do they tell the cashier, 'I'm in a hurry, send me a bill?"

I paid for my fillings on the way out.

Tuesday, 2 pm

Yesterday I took my courage (and my credit card) in my hands and set out to reserve tickets to Paris in September. I have some conspiracy theories: 1) it's better to book at the beginning of the week; 2) as soon as you begin searching prices, they go up, as if the computer knew that you--you personally--were looking to buy a ticket, the way they target you with furniture ads, because they know you like furniture, or porn. Better take the cheapest price of the day, because tomorrow, should you 'think it over' (as my mother used to say when she was shopping for clothes), they'll know you are trapped and the price will be higher. "Only two seats left!' Air France warns in red letters, but when I jump on it and try to select a seat, it turns out there are no seats left. Presumably I am overbooked...

I hope our apartment building roof will be done before we go. They began mid-June when I was last in Paris. For two weeks no workers have turned up, and meanwhile it has looked like rain a few times. "We can't afford to cover rain damage" for the top floor apartments, another resident warns the project manager. The roofer promises a big team as soon as the inspector comes. Today there are a couple of workers up there; I hear some desultory--perhaps I'm unfair?--hammering. Every now and then we send up an ollalieberry pie as a bribe.

Today the air is blue, the chute that runs past our window to the dumpster is orange, which is fortunate, because orange is my sitting room accent colour. We watched the eclipse yesterday from the building roof and found it (not total) underwhelming. UPS has just pulled up, part of the daily ballet of deliveries. Now I'm going to return a couple books to the university library: a Philip Kerr mystery I didn't dislike, but didn't love either--too wisecracking; and a fascinating book called Retour a Reims, by Didier Eribon, a combination of sociology and personal history.

Elizabeth Bowen, The House in Paris

I'm not, as a rule, a big fan of Elizabeth Bowen. But I have a friend whose opinion I respect who often talks about her, so that is one reason I persist in reading her novels: a few months ago, The Heat of the Day, a WW2 novel set in London, whose dialogues struck me, as Bowen's often do, as stilted and theatrical--unless they are utterly natural and simply out of my range.

But I've just finished The House in Paris, one I've been looking for for a while, which never seemed to be on the Bowen shelf in the library, and which I finally sought via its call number, and discovered, with tea-coloured pages, in a musty-smelling back section of the low-ceilinged, over-heated old stacks. I wanted to read it because of: 1) Paris; 2) the house. Houses are important for Bowen and often themselves as important as the characters in her books. I like houses too. This one seems to be close to the Luxembourg Garden, a high, narrow, dark old house, forbidding and foreboding. The story revolves around two children, strangers, and some mysterious grown-ups whose relationships are gradually elucidated. I have read that it was considered the most French, in style, of Bowen's books, though it doesn't seem particularly French to me, if I think of Colette and Duras and Sarraute and Beauvoir...

But it is psychologically subtle and finely written, or at least I found it so, and recommend it.

I turned down a page (many were dog-eared) so I could find a sentence again. It is from a scene between a mother and daughter. Of the over-devoted, controlling mother, the daughter, who is engaged to be married but has just returned from a rendez-vous with another manthinks: 'Dread of chaos filled the room... ."  And I thought, ah yes, the impulse to control comes from the dread of chaos.

Robinson

Charles Boyle, aka "Robinson" of Robinson  and The Overcoat (see below), says in a blog post: "Careers and livelihoods depend upon just the right degree of non-seriousness. It’s a British code."

Well yes. But it's also a French code. Go to a dinner party and wax serious and pretty soon people are looking at you funny, as if you'd forgotten the rules of conversation. Oops, time to talk to the person on the other side.

In the US on the other hand, irony doesn't always go down well. Better to know the company you are in before you ironise and your neighbours take it at face value.

Canada is somewhere in between... .

Indra's Net

Some months ago Deborah Bennison of Bennison Books contacted me to ask if I would contribute to an anthology of poetry to raise money for The Book Bus charity (chairity I keep writing, and correcting; II'm not the dyslexic type and these slips of the keyboard interest me).

So I sent Deborah three poems, two from each of my previous books and a new one (which will be in my new book) and she read them and has published them along with many, many others, introduced by the British poet Carol Rumens. The book is called Indra's Net, and it has just been published and is available on Amazon. All the profit from sales will go to The Book Bus, an organisation that is trying to get books to children in Africa, Asia and South America.

An ordinary Saturday

Our apartment building is reroofing, so what wasn't ordinary was the pounding overhead. We escaped for lunch at the Cantor Museum café, and later in the day, after the roofers left, I went to the campus vegetable and flower farm to do a spot of weeding and deadheading. Normally I love weeding (makes the world more orderly) but resist deadheading. But 'deadhead all the flowers' was already on the list of tasks for volunteers last week, so I attacked the magenta dahlias (never much liked magenta anyway), strewing still beautiful dahlia flowers in my wake. When I returned this week--a week later--the magenta dahlias were thriving, so I guess they didn't mind and, as the chief gardeners say, the cut flowers make good compost. And I always set aside a bouquet for the kitchen counter. 

I deadheaded the dahlias (magenta, pink Japanese-painting ones, some tight, balled-up orangey ones) and then I weeded the field they grow in--another of the volunteer tasks. There were some tough-rooted things I couldn't get.

Meanwhile my husband had gone to practice on the music department harpsichord, and when he came back, he helped me with the last few weeds and we rewarded ourselves with some lettuce, fennils and herbs. It's amazing the difference in taste between lettuce you pick and lettuce from the supermarket. The sun was setting. Another volunteer, someone we hadn't seen in a while, came along with his daughter to pick flowers.

Reading List

Need to mention some books I've been reading. Mostly I tabulate them on my weekly agenda, so I have some record, memory otherwise failing; besides I tend to have many books going at once: always, almost, an Italian, a longstanding language project (right now it's an early collection of short stories by Calvino, with notably, his tale about the Count of Monte Cristo). Then there was the unputdownable The Shepherd's Life by James Rebanks. And then there's Charles Boyle's Robinson, a wonderful rant cum meditation on just about everything, including RCrusoe, with tantalizing apercus of Boyle's own life. It's funny and sad and totally seamless, one of those books where you look up ten pages later and say 'how the hell did he get here from there?'  Couldn't put it down either.

(When I was a kid I read the gemütlich version of Crusoe, Swiss Family Robinson. Much later in life I decided to read all of Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year, but stopped reading it when I realized it was fiction.)

Then there's the sleeping pill book, at the moment Elizabeth Drew's 1974 Washington Diary, a day-by-day account of the last two years of the Nixon administration. It more or less parallels what's going on in Washington right now, and so when I've run out of the latest riveting 2017 news, I turn to it. A few pages are enough...