It's Sunday Evening

This time last week we were in London and had spent a lovely afternoon 1) walking along Regent's Canal east to Victoria Park where we had lunch, and then 2) continuing east to the Olympic Park. Today we went to an organ concert (Bach) in St Germain des Pres and then walked down to the Seine and east along the Right Bank quais to the bridge after the Pont Notre Dame and back. We would have gone to Mariage Freres for tea but we got lost in the labyrinth of streets and gave up looking for the right one--rue des Grands Augustins, I think. And home to a Scotch instead.

Yesterday evening we met friends for a drink rue Cler and walked home. I volunteered at the Soupe Populaire for lunch: it was cold and raining and the lunchers were pounding on the door to get in, especially if we were late, as we inevitably are. They could stand in the Arcades across the street in front of the Apple Store, but they don't want to miss their place in line (so to speak; mostly they crowd and push) and the security guards keep a close eye on our bunch. Dessert was apples from one or two of the 200 or so apple trees in the Luxembourg Garden orchards. I snuck one home.

This Wednesday Morning

I am sitting in bed in my daughter's Hackney flat, with a teapot on a tray beside me, reading, writing and intermittently listening to life go by on the street below: a bus drawing up to the stop, letting off, then taking on new passengers, people going to work, children in their English school uniforms (flannels, ties and jackets that make everyone look equal--this is a rapidly gentrifying neighbourhood, but the majority of the children I see are of African descent)--going to school. There is a tree in the brick courtyard with maybe half of its leaves still. 

On the other side of the flat there is a pocket garden, then a grassy space with some playground equipment, then Regent's canal, lined with canal boats, and with a tow path on which, in one direction, you can walk or ride a bike towards Kings Cross; and other the other side (which we took on Sunday) towards Victoria Park and eventually (we got there) the River Lee and the Olympic stadium. The canal in fact bifurcates and the fork we didn't take goes south towards the Thames (I almost said the Seine).

Plans for today: writing this morning: tinkering with my new poetry manuscript, mostly minute (but enormous to me) changes to one or two poems, but also a book review I am working on for the TLS. Lunch, then I'll put a second coat of paint on the entryway to my daughter's flat, which was painted dark blue, but is now turning white. Later I'll meet someone for a drink and after that a reading in Notting Hill, a trek from here, but a neighbourhood I also know a little because mmy daughter lived there before she moved east, to Hackney, a few years ago.

Eurostar

We are on the train, traversing northern France. Large, flat green fields—beets?—smallish, tidy, new houses like Monopoly houses, or children’s drawings of houses: a cube or a rectangle with a peaked roof, two window and a door. Then suddenly, on the horizon, slowly turning, like a clock whose arms circle incessantly, a wind farm, then another, then they are behind us, dark against the winter sunlight. It was damp in Paris, it is sunny here. Everything is tinged gold or bronze, leaves still on the trees, mostly. Here, right now, a circular village with small newish houses, a spire in the middle, scattered trees, in the middle of green fields or ploughed fields, patches of dark, a pond, some swans, or a river.

Now gently rolling hills, a line of poplars, backlit, some cattle, small roads with the odd car, like a toy car. And another wind farm on the horizon, a water tower, warehouses

London

We are off to London in a couple of hours. I love train trips, I've loved them since I was a kid, travelling across Canada, through the Rockies from Vancouver-Jasper, when I was a student, working at a resort there in the summers, or to Toronto and Montreal, on family trips or on my own: the Rockies, the endless prairies then the rolling hills into Ontario and Quebec. It now seems like the stuff of myth.

We are taking the Eurostar of course, out of the Gare du Nord to St Pancras in London. Even the stations are mythic--rolling out of Paris across the hilly north, villages and towns clustered around grey stone churches, fields and of course, shopping malls and highways; then into London, coming out along Regent's Canal. St Pancras is much nicer than the Gare du Nord and more recent. It's a place people go, not only to catch a train. The British Library is nearby, you quickly walk into Bloomsbury. But we are headed to Hackney where our daughter lives.

Set of French Dictionaries, free to a good home

Many years ago I subscribed to a dictionary called Tresors de la Langue Francaise, and over years, received 11 volumes (A-Nat), and then I decided to stop receiving it. Perhaps the internet was by then making dictionaries and encyclopedias redundant. The TLF is edited by the CNRS, the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, and it was, at the time, novel, because it was being prepared by computer and it was about the language of the 19th and 20th centuries. All 11 volumes sit at the bottom of a floor-ceiling bookshelf, and I want to give them away, but of course no one wants them. I stop in to used and antique book sellers and they refuse; I connect academic friends in French departments but no, sorry, they don't know anyone who...

Today I was volunteering at 'my' soup kitchen and I asked my fellow volunteers as we sat around eating our lunch after serving lunch whether there was anything like Craig's List or Nextdoor. Oh, yes, they said, there's 'Le Bon Coin' (leboncoin), literally 'the good corner' or, let's see, what would we say in California English--a good little place? No, there's bound to be a better translation than that but it will do for now. Anyhow, long story short, I took some pictures of my ('condition: new') row of dictionaries and posted an ad. Maybe an art student could make some kind of sculpture using the pages, or a furniture designer could turn them into a coffee table.

I'm in need of a book to read. Finished Anna Karenina 10 days ago. Am still reading Woolf's Journals, but I've reached 1940 and the Blitz, and I'm not sure I want to read to the end. I continue to read Bonnefoy's Inachevable; Entretiens sur la poésie; I finished La Mennulara, which was wonderful and went to Tour de Babel, the lovely Italian bookshop in the Marais, and bought another book by Simonetta Agnello Hornby, which I am just beginning to read. I just ran my eyes over my bookshelf and didn't see anything that immediately caught my eye. There's a lot of Dostoyevsky I've never read to the end, but no, not Dostoyevsky. Elizabeth Bowen? I did pull all of Lawrence Durrell (still with cash register receipt from Montreal inside of one) off the shelf and decide to take it to the English Used Books down the street on Rue Monsieur Leprince and trade them in for something else--maybe a Donna Leon?

Sunday morning

Buckets of rain coming down, first slantwise, and now straight in big fat drops that are so thick that they blur the church across the street, and make a wonderful rain noise, even drowning out the dirge sound of the organ. I can, from my window, see a network of gutters that ultimately pour rain into the street four stories below. Wind too, and a few autumn leaves blowing around even, four and five stories above street level. Zinc roofs glisten.

But I would love to have a good long walk this afternoon, so I hope it dries up. There's a show I'd like to see at a gallery in the Marais.

Blablabla

The performance in the downstairs Grande Salle of the Centre Pompidou was excellent, a one woman show for grownups and children, of whom there were masses, under the aegis of the Encyclopedia of Talk [la Parole]. This is an artistic project that explores orality, the things we say and hear: tv ads, youtube, train station announcements, football games, street fights, school teacher talk. A montage of different voices in different situations, linked but not linear, the way what you hear around you overlaps in your head, in the moment and in your memory. One actress, Armelle Dousset, does all the voices. It began funny, became scary with aggressiveness and anger (street, home, classroom), references to politics and terrorist attacks, then cooled off. If I were a young kid I might have had nightmares, or maybe it was a way to face and evacuate fear and anger. There was, I see, a workshop for kids and parents, connected with the performance. Very impressive. 

Rainy today. Noon, church bells ringing. No plans for this afternoon, other than reading some more of the book I'm reviewing for the TLS.

Blabla

Wet and grey but warmer this morning (why does the weather always come first to mind?) Just finished working which included thinking about the choices for the cover of my new collection of poems, The Hotel Eden, to be published by the British poetry press, Carcanet, at the end of next coming summer. Which means the manuscript needs to be done by the beginning of January, a daunting feeling, because of course the Ms will never be done. But you just have to grit your teeth and let go of it. (I'm having the same problem with my Baudelaire Ms for Seagull Books, don't want to let go, because it's so far from what I want it to be, which is, naturally, and impossibly, up to Baudelaire's original. Actually I think my Ponge book and my Apollinaire book were up to the originals, but Baudelaire is a different kettle of fish, partly because of the form, mostly sonnets, but in any case rhymed and metred.)

Plans for the rest of the day. Supermarket shopping, for the stuff my husband doesn't find in the local covered market a block away: Scotch, yoghurt, grated cheese, olive oil...want to go right after lunch because the lines won't be so long and I won't feel so grumpy and on the qui vive for that inevitable Parisian phenomenon: the line-jumper.

Then, maybe the Bon Marche to look for a shawl or something to throw on the clunky Ikea sofa we bought to distract your eye from its clunkiness. It was cheap and the right length.

Then I have a ticket for an event called Blabla at the Centre Pompidou, a kind of play whose script, if I get it, is a collage of people talking about nothing.

Like me here.