Background Music: Crickets

Growing up in Vancouver, B.C., I don't remember the chirp of crickets at night in summer, though I guess I would have known Jiminy Cricket, aka il grillo parlante. My first real encounter with crickets was as "grillons" in southern France. Living in Marseille and the Vaucluse, as we did for seven years, we heard them sing all summer long and occasionally we'd find one inside in winter, and feel lucky (roped in by Dickens and Disney and other local lore): a cricket on the hearth. 

Each night before I go to bed, here in the Bay Area, I hear the crickets, interrupted now and then by a plane flying over, the train whistling at the level passages at 30-minute intervals, a late bicycle whooshing past, a jogger, and I conjure up a long line of people in condos and cabins and caves in the August dark listening to crickets chirping.

                                                                  On a piece of  bark

                                                             drifting down the river

                                                                   a cricket, singing.

                                                                                                          (Issa)

Café living

I'm becoming a sitter in cafés. Campus has a number, with various personalities, subgroups and degrees of quality of espresso. Some are parts of chains. Most have pleasant outdoor places to sit in shade or sun. The Business School has wine in addition to excellent espresso, and a fancy monumental sculpture of chewed bronze, like a giant lump of spit-out chewing gum, smooth though, curves you'd like to stroke and all. My favourite is (naturally) the one in front of the main library, which is grubbier than the Business School (naturally) and full of humanities types, also grubbier. Eucalyptus trees, also a sculpture, the Red Loop, more playful, with an on-again off-again fountain. I take out my book, I read, I listen to conversations, I make up stories about the people around, I stare into space. Today I'm meeting a friend for lunch in a café I've never been to, over towards computer science territory: it's called Bytes.

Michael Hofmann, "Where Have You Been?"

The library has a high-ceilinged, clerestory-windowed reading room, big, thick, heavy oak tables, squeaky leather chairs, good lighting that manages to look gentleman's libraryish, a historic water clock and lots of computer plugs. It also has the LRB, the NYRB, the TLS and some French book reviews. It's where new books get shelved: just-catalogued, hardback, shiny-plastic-covered, no coffee stains, no grease marks, no blood, and you can be the first reader stamped on whatchmacallit in the back (big deal. I don't like to think of the number of books I have checked out over the years for which I am the first reader ever, and they still message me to return it 3--or is it 4?--weeks later, as if people were lined up to read it).

Anyway. That's where I found Michael Hofmann's essay collection a month ago and pounced. I binge-read the poetry section (Bishop, Lowell, Seidel etc) and the rest--most of which I'd probably read elsewhere over the years--and now I'm even reading the parts about people I'm unfamiliar with, mostly German. Yesterday I read a Paris Review Interview with Hofmann, how he felt a little embarrassed about his first poetry collection: lightweight alongside papa's novels. And this morning in the shower, having read Hofmann's essay on Antonioni twice yesterday, I was thinking: maybe Hofmann has invented some new manic-critic form, akin to Bernhardt's rants or Sebald's depressive meanderings or even Kundera's tamer fiction-as-essay style. Where Have You Been is, after all, honourably thick (unlike the slender, reductive distillations of a volume of poetry), Hofmann has a powerful (putting it mildly) presence in it, it is jam-packed with his taste and culture and vocab and sentences, it's sort of magic-realismy over-the-top, kid-on-christmas joyful (he's left out the hatchet jobs), bright-coloured torn tissue paper and ribbon tossed around--what would it take to tip all this towards the realm of capital-L enduring Literature? Who else writes like this? A new nonfiction form? Whitmanian capaciousness? Perec exploding out of the Oulipo straitjacket?

I had a twinge of an epiphany, reading the Antonioni piece, when Hofmann describes the film The Passenger's shape as "just something of a certain length. A piece of string. Scenes are knots along it. It is easy to imagine other ones, different ones. . .Finding fault with them doesn't seem to be the point. They aren't load bearing. Other cafés, other roads, other dialogues. It doesn't matter. [...] It is waiting, while nothing and everything, happens."

Paris and so forth

American poems are more associational and biographical than British poems, I read somewhere online yesterday...oh, an essay from Jacket (date?) about Seamus Heaney that harked back to Alvarez's 1980 NYRBooks review of Field Day.

This morning some twinge sends me off to read a bit of Dujardin's Les Lauriers sont coupés (1887) where I find an evocation of an April evening in Paris, "les feuillages d'ombres": the foliage of shadows. Here's the passage, roughly translated:

"...a bright evening with the sun setting, the monotonous noises, the white houses, the foliage of shadows; the evening softer, and a joy in being someone, of going about; the streets and the crowds, and in the air, very far off, stretched out, the sky; Paris all around sings, and in the mist of perceived forms, . .  " and so forth. Les Lauriers is thought to be the first novel to use stream of consciousness. . . .

Anyway, what stopped me, for one, was the neatly twisted "foliage of shadows," which reminded me of walking under a thickly-leafed chestnut tree that was hanging over someone's house wall on my way home one evening in the Paris suburbs, back when we lived in the Paris suburbs. It was dark (in Dujardin it is not dark, it a spring evening sunset--what time of day would that be?), it was mild--there was a street lamp and walking under the chestnut tree, though the thick shadows it cast on the sidewalk (not forgetting the probable dog shit on that sidewalk), was like walking through some substance--and then out the other side into less dense air.

The funny thing about Paris is that it is a twilight city: I mean, it's a place you want to be between seasons (in "la demi-saison", in fashion terms), not in the glare of summer, not in winter. 

Apollinaire

A recent review from the TLS has been picked up by the Wall Street Journal. 

Les obus miaulent has more of Apollinaire's poetry from the first World War: poem-letters written to a friend (both the friend and Apollinaire died during the war), delightful and moving in themselves, but also drafts for the war poems that appeared in Calligrammes (1918), many of which are also in Apollinaire, The Little Auto (CB Editions, 2012).

This, that and the other

This

I have been doing a bit of research for the notes to a new translation of an Hélène Cixous book, and it has led me to Proust's unfinished Contre Sainte Beuve, just now a draft essay on Baudelaire. It made me want to translate Baudelaire, but realize what an impossible project that would be: the relationship between content and form is too tight. Translating poetry that is metred and rhymed, something has to give: either the content or the form: there is no way to translate Baudelaire without significant loss. Maybe a poem or two, no more. 

That

Thinking about France's beef farmers, who are fighting back against industrial-scale production. France, as the New York Times editorializes today, is attached to its family farms, but they can't compete with the industrial farming going on elsewhere. It's the corner store problem all over. It seems to me less and less clear that "European" (meaning North American too) commerce is evolving in the right direction. Everything is increasingly in the hands of fewer people, jobs are disappearing, owners of the means of production are in a position to determine who will be the candidates for the 2016 US presidential election, and to set the agenda. I see that industrial-scale farming is efficient, but it must be time we considered what is being lost. One could, of course, and has said the same of companies like Amazon and what they are doing to book-selling, but the production of food worldwide is clearly a more general problem.

The other

We were up on Vancouver Island for a family occasion last weekend, and found the house my grandparents built on the edge of Georgia Strait. They bought a big chunk of land, cleared enough of it to build a house (in the postwar ranch style) and a garden, and left much of it forest. Now there are several houses and only a screen of trees on the edge of the very steep bluff above the Strait. A public stairway wound down to the cove, where I used to play as a child, still wild, overgrown with blackberries, with a flock of Canada Geese gazing out to sea. 

Corner Stores

The neighbours on California Street here in Palo Alto are fighting to keep their small, non-chain stores as rents go up and Starbucks moves in. Once, living here, I needed to buy a spool of thread and some needles and learned I would have to drive to Redwood City, 4 suburbs north, where there was a chain store for that. Just last week I ordered a three dollar packet of iron-on mending tape from Amazon Prime. Mending tape!

So now the Greeks are being ordered to modernise in ways that will replace the neighborhood bakeries with supermarket bread and the local pharmacy with a behemoth selling industrial quantities of halloween candy alongside the aspirin.  I see it all around me here, and maybe it's better for something but it's not so good for a whole lot of other things. You end up with streets that have all the personality of a shopping mall: CVS, Starbucks, Restoration Hardware, West Elm, Walgreens, and the Carpet Store that has been Going-Out-Of-Business for six years. A dozen absolutely uninviting chain restaurants. And I can see there are two sides to the Greek question, but do we really have to lose so much character to gain what? Bland efficiency? Economic viability? Something is wrong here somewhere.

Sure, I like one-stop shopping--I couldn't have managed otherwise when I was raising a family, but I also like the texture of, say, Paris streets, with one pharmacy every three or four blocks, and the pharmacist knows you, and if there's a line, well, it's a chance to talk to the person ahead or behind you, or eye the  display of magnifying mirrors.

William Maxwell, "So Long, See You Tomorrow" (1980)

"Fourteen was when boys graduated into long trousers and since I hadn't yet arrived at that age I was still wearing corduroy knickerbockers. When I couldn't stop reading A Tale of Two Cities, I put my long black cotton stockings across the bottom of the bedroom door so my father wouldn't see the crack of light and come in and tell me to go to sleep."

Calvino, in Once on a Winter's Night, writes that he is only able to read with his feet up, which struck a chord with me. And reading after lights-out strikes another. Me, it was a flashlight under the covers. My bedroom was at the top of the stairs and they were, I think, carpeted, but still I was fairly confident I would hear any adult coming up and have time to put out the light and lapse into a simulacrum of sleep. But once my grandmother caught me--was she particularly light on her feet or was the book a particularly absorbing one?--and I remember begging her not to tell on me. I suppose I was simply oversensitive to scoldings. Funny the things we remember. 

We lived in that house, whose rooms I can still visit in my mind, from when I was in third grade (so about 8?) until I was in university (which I commuted to), when we moved from Vancouver to West Vancouver, over the Lion's Gate Bridge on the side of one of the mountains that rise behind the city and plunge fairly steeply downhill to the harbour. When I was growing up we would get a bus up Seymour Mountain on Saturdays to go skiing.

My grandparents lived in Victoria but we visited back and forth. At some point my grandmother caught cancer, and she died when I was 14. What would I have been reading under the bedclothes between the ages of 8 and 14? Not yet Gone with the Wind, surely. Too old for Beatrix Potter, though I remember writing my own Potterish stories in that bedroom. Little Women? There was a leatherbound set of Dickens at my grandparents' but I don't remember reading it. It sat on a shelf with a set of Churchill's Gathering Storm. My grandfather admired Churchill.

Everyone should have read Maxwell's novel which is also a memoir, written about his childhood in the 1920s in Lincoln, Illinois, marked by his mother's death and his businessman-father's getting on with life in a way that perturbed the boy, though, writing from the perspective of grown-upness, he understands that his father probably was as kind as he knew how. Maxwell, who was the New Yorker fiction editor for many years, wanted to call his book The Palace at 4 a.m. after Giacometti's sculpture. Mara Naselli has written a beautiful essay on the book in the Autumn 2014 issue of The Hudson Review. It has sent me back to the book, even though I read it only a couple of years ago.