Normality

In lieu of other cities. The dryer is spinning away with a reassuringly repetitive hum. Normality. Nothing but normality. Even the front page, normality. And the harping on atrocity of one kind or another (beheadings, the domestic abuse of various heroes of popular and money-making sports, the war cries, Scotland, the stock market). Normality. I mean the sky is blue, without a crack. There are birds chirping. The campus prepares for the onslaught of new and returning students by painting bicycle lanes with one-way arrows in front of the library, and shifting a few palm trees around. I'm going to make lunch, fold the dry laundry. Normality. What could go wrong?

Back to School

Just found this found poem in my Work in Progress file, which provides mostly horrors to trash and a few gems. Since this "poem" is in fact almost entirely (I added the spacing) a math teacher's back-to-school note to parents, I think I can, without immodesty, call it a gem. The school in question was no doubt the one I taught in, an English school in France.

Mathematics is

“Mathematics is
     a useful and important discipline,
which offers many opportunities
     for pleasure, satisfaction and wonder.

Pupils, however,
     may spoil exercises for themselves
and others when they forget equipment.
     So please ensure your son / daughter

has a pencil case
     containing: a compass, stubby pencil
and ruler 20 cm long,
     a protractor, an HB pencil

and a sharpener
     (with reservoir), eraser and a small
safe pair of scissors. These things must come
     to school each day, and we advise

they be kept away
     from the coloured pens and pencils, keys
and marbles, jacks and other items
     children bring to school.’

Park City, Utah, Notes

Two large black dogs. One can no longer hop back into the back of the car. Lift front legs, lift hind legs. Push.

A child's first spelling test. A list of words, some of them tricky: mask: m-a-k-s. Picnic: p-i-k-n-i-k (take two cats on a picnic). The French spelling (pique-nique) doesn't help. Sandwich. Samwhich. There is is in his, I say. Ask the mask, I say.

A flock of wild turkeys crossing the road. Elk bellowing on the other side of the hill. Hawks.

Leaves turn colour. A bow and arrow. The cold of the ground, and the nights.

from Downtown Abbey to Breaking Bad

A year ago my daughter turned me on to Downtown Abbey. I don't have TV and I only agreed to watch because I'd read so much about it in the paper that I felt I should see at least one episode. Totally addictive, of course. I've even watched most of Season 3 (4?) twice, on my iPad. It got me across the Atlantic on at least one flight without complaining or standing up and screaming Let me out of here!

Then, in a rental up in the Sierras, while we (daughter, son, us) were hiking the Desolation Wilderness, I asked to see an episode of House of Cards on Netflix (no self-respecting rental in the backwoods would not have Internet, cable tv and Netflix). That was the same weekend I tried my luck at Candycrush. It took me about two weeks to watch all of House of Cards. And now I'm in the middle of Breaking Bad, which is truly extraordinary, so extraordinary that I wouldn't miss a minute of the credits even. I turn the sound down low or use headphones because I would be embarrassed if any of my neighbours heard all the shooting and screaming and wondered what was going on up here.

Delete, delete, delete

There is a story in the Times this morning about how scientists have figured out how to turn off the memory function in mice. Well, I exaggerate, a little. It involves inserting fiber optic wires into the brain and injecting a virus containing a protein. Thanks to this the scientists can switch neurons on and off and the mice forget all those bad mice memories that keep them from sleeping at night. This makes them happier mice.

And since we now know that there is only the slimmest difference between how mice work and how human beings work, in the not-too-distant future we too should be able to decide what and how much we want to remember. No Joyce, no Proust, no Kafka. 

I link this in my mind to another study I read this week, about how people tend to remember bad things much longer than good things. This fits my personal experience to a T, and I've often wondered why I was so perverse. We shouldn't take such experiences personally, I see--I often see, way after the fact--because they are hard-wired. One thing I have learned is that if you resolutely DON'T think about your setbacks, your failures, your humiliations, your tactlessness, you can ensure that these memories don't come back to plague you at 3 a.m. Wish I'd known this sooner--or maybe not. 

Would you rather be Socrates or a satisfied pig goes the old question in Philosophy for Beginners. I once thought the question was rhetorical. I'm no longer sure.

Why don't you put that book down and...

Just discovered, via a friend, a wonderful, new-to-me blog on books. And since I'm just back from the library, where I had the stacks pretty much to myself, let me list for my own future reference--I've taken to doing this in my agenda, whenever I think of it, so I can look back and say "I didn't know I'd read that." My Italian writer at the moment in my ongoing learn-to-at-least-read Italian project is La Coscienza de Zeno," --Zeno's Conscience /Consciousness--I'm assuming since in French that word could be taken either way, and I don't believe in looking up words until I'm really, really stuck. It's by Italo Svevo, who was a friend of Joyce's, if I recall. In the first long chapter he fails to stop smoking; in the second he married a woman after being turned down by all three of her sisters; and in the chapter I'm in the middle of (chapters are novella-length) he's juggling wife and mistress). 

I'm also binge-reading the extraordinary Penelope Fitzgerald and on the side some essays by Paul de Mann after reading a so-so but unputdownable biography of his life as a Nazi collaborator in his native Belgium and con-artist of various kinds in academia: Bard, Harvard, Yale. The essays are fascinating; easy to see why he was such a successful teacher of literature: he's passionate about books and writers.

But the best book I've read all year is probably Agota Kristof's The Big Notebook, along with its accompanying text The Illiterate, in Nina Bogin's translation, both recently published  by CB Editions (republished in the case of Notebook). Kristof was a Hungarian who fled to Western Europe and had to learn to write all over again in French--how she did this is the story of The Illiterate. The Big Notebook is her stripped-to-the-bare-wood tale of a pair of twin boys abandoned to the care of the grandmother, one tough cookie, during the War (Second) and how they survived. It's terrifying and funny, one of my preferred combinations.

In Defense of Bookstores

Librairie Compagnie, Paris

One of the great pleasures of living in Paris is the bookstores. The one I drop into regularly is Compagnie, on the rue des Ecoles, opposite the Sorbonne. I can spend hours browsing among the tables on the main floor or downstairs. Just skimming the covers of the books with my fingers--a laying on of hands--feels good. I never walk by Compagnie without slowing down to window shop. And I buy a lot of books. This is something I don't do in California, in part because there aren't many bookstores I can walk to, and the one I can walk to sells baseball caps and mugs in addition to books, making feel like a pharmacy that has pushed the drugs to the back corner and filled the rest of the store with pop and Halloween decorations.

Besides it is simpler and cheaper to buy books from Amazon. So I do. But I don't in France, where a law prohibits discounting books, because France and a few other European countries, such as Germany, think a literary culture is worth protecting. And I concur.

Laws prohibiting discounts on books won't be enacted in the US--they would be unAmerican, un-free market. You would think, though, that a movement might be started in Ireland and the UK, with their long literary traditions. Surely these countries don't want to turn into nations of malls and chain stores. Such a movement might also be possible in other parts of Europe where such laws don't already exist. The present climate of anger with Amazon would be a good starting point.

Back

Back in business after a few weeks of looking for a solution to Redroom's abrupt end. Somewhat disturbing to be at the mercy of Redroom or another provider for the retrieval of one's content. But then, does one's content really matter? Other than to me, for whom it was a kind of journal.

It seems I can retrieve some of the blog posts, though it is going to be laborious. Meanwhile here is a new website, complete with blog. I am still learning how it works, so bear with me.