Tea and Cookies

Met up with a friend from our old neighbourhood yesterday...we were going to go to a cafe and sit outside and eat ice cream, but the weather was cold and grey, so she made us tea and cookies at her place instead, and we exchanged news and thoughts, about pretty much everything. She is working on an essay about the Cretan Paradox, but won't show even a page of it, until she likes it better. We talked about deconstructed literature, and she--she's a mathematician by formation--plumped for arguments in the traditional fashion, with a beginning, a middle and an end. The time passed quickly. I tried to keep track of her stories--she and her husband, who died a couple of years ago, have known a dizzying number of figures of American and French intellectual and creative life over the past 70 years and have stories about them all--Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell at Yaddo, or so-and-so in Paris in such and such a cafe or gathering.

Today the sun is shining, the washing machine is humming in the background, and I have my seminar for 3 hours this afternoon, then the gym, and it's biking weather again.

The Contemporary

I'm sitting in on a seminar called "The Contemporary,' with students from different departments, German and Complit but also Education and Anthropology. The problem is partly to define what 'contemporary' means: e.g, a moving target...not an epoch but an ethos... . The professor, Amir Eshel, is a German/Complit person and for the first session we read Coetzee and Celan. Last week I was away, and missed a discussion that included a New Yorker article on catching Bin Laden and the film 'Zero Dark Thirty,' which I tried to watch anyway, but couldn't get past the initial torture scenes. History was the theme. This week Paul Rabinow is coming over from Berkeley and the readings are from his books. One especially interests me--about a German writer, Alexander Kluge, who has collaborated on books with Gerhard Richter. The reading is from an article--an assemblage of 'posts' by Rabinow on an assemblage of posts by Kluge, interspersed with Richter photographs of snowy woods: December. I'm going to have buy the book, which Seagull has brought out, because I'm trying to figure out where to go with my own thoughts and Kluge's texts--what I've seen so far--fascinate me.

Here, I've just found this online, for anyone who might be interested. I suspect my own interest is partly literary, partly the snow (Robert Frost's 'Whose Woods These Are" was my formative poetry experience and my dad's favourite poem), partly World War 2, which is also an obsession of Kluge who was 10 at the time.)

And something about how landscape, not people/characters, is the agent.

Yesterday I worked at the farm, weeding celeriac and garlic. My reward was two leeks, some flowers and strawberries.

Microclimates

Just back from three days in Utah and winter's end: patches of snow melting into rivulets flowing into streams and ponds, rushing over beaver dams in need of rebuilding. Out hiking yesterday morning I stepped onto what looked like hard snow and my leg plunged down a foot or two--I was walking on a log over a gully. The dogs ran out on the ice of the beaver ponds, barking at ducks swimming in a melted bit of the pond, and both of them went right through the ice and had trouble getting back up onto solid ice. Elk meandered through empty fields between houses and horses. The sagebrush looks bedraggled, the high cold desert bare and grey-brown, with just the odd small yellow wildflower popping up.

We left the coast in the middle of a heat wave and have returned to rain. But it's still bare feet weather.

Zumba

Tuesday and Thursday, late afternoon, I go to a Zumba class. It takes place on one of the gym's three basketball courts, glassed-in, but I think soundproof, since the folks passing by look in, perhaps surprised by all the jumping bodies, but I have the feeling they can't hear the music which is, well, loud and latin. 

We're a mixed bag of participants. Last quarter there were a couple of game men, but this term we're all women, backgrounds Latina, African-American, a large Asian contingent and the Caucasians. In general the Latin-Americans are really good at the Twerk, the rest of us, it depends, partly on age, ethnic background, possibly also marital status...  And the instructor, male, Latino, is amazing: he can move every part of his body separately, starting, say, at the shoulders and working down. It's fluid, it's like waves moving down his body. Me, I just try to get the footwork and occasionally, if I can, add in some arms. A woman who's new this term, from Guatamala, who is an interpreter at the Children's Hospital, says I should come with her to another zumba class, where the instructor pays a lot more attention to detail which, she says, is good for the form of it, but perhaps less aerobic. "Do you like dancing?" she asks. "Oh yes," I say, "but I'm no good." I don't add that once I could do a mean Twist.

I could editorialize: about how the Latinas are so much better at this than most of the rest of us. There's one younger woman from Latin America somewhere, originally, who hardly seems to move at all, but still manages to be incredibly sexy, from her Nikes to the aloofness of her head in a turn. It's definitely not a Anglo thing (nor, based on the evidence of a few participants in one class, Chinese) and it makes me really envious. I Imagine households where everyone is dancing all the time, noisy, joyful--and then I remember how I like quiet corners, stillness and books.

Gardening/'Farming'

 I stood for a couple of hours at a high shaded table, pricking out tomato seedlings from tiny containers into slightly bigger ones. The seedlings--half a dozen different varieties, for cooking and eating, red, yellow--are a healthy size, and it felt good easing them out of one container into another, centering them, sifting potting mixture around them, tucking them in, labelling them, moving trays of them into another plastic-wrapped greenhouse till they are the right size to slip into the ground. 

When all the tomatoes had been done, we--me and a bunch of student volunteers putting in their required time at the 'farm' for a class in earth sciences--switched to peppers, frailer subjects, mostly just a tiny leaf or two trailing roots, but same process. 

The thing about tomatoes is the smell of the leaves. I squeeze them and then I sniff my fingers, revelling in it. It's as good as the tomatoes themselves, though tomatoes off the vine are pretty terrific too.

My reward for my labour is two fat leeks, a visit to the chickens that netted three fresh eggs, a bag of strawberries, some fresh oregano, and a bouquet of orange and yellow flowers that look like marigolds but aren't. Their petals are edible. Dinner: leeks (I wrote leaks) with olive oil, an omelet, strawberries.

Cooking

For some years our evening meal has been spaghetti and tomato sauce made at the last minute with a couple of egg-shaped tomatoes, a lot of freshly chopped parsley, garlic, salt and pepper and occasionally a sprinkle of thyme. It was easy, we both like eating it, with some olive oil and cheese maybe added at the end. But now that we have our own--as opposed to a rented--kitchen again here in California, I've been making soups: leek soup, turnip soup, lentil soup, broccoli soup, all just as easy as spaghetti and tomato sauce, and I have acquired a neat little gizmo to blend the ingredients (potato + veg + cream) to a smooth finish. 

In France, we still make spaghetti, but given the variety of the food, cooking dinner in France is a different proposition. Grocery-shopping here in California is a little like shopping for books: you have to get in the car and go somewhere big, and a lot of it is pre-cut and pre-wrapped. I've been thinking about "economies of scale." Sure, for groceries, I like being able to get everything at one store, but I also like the neighborhood fabric of small stores in France. I like the small meat market, the small cheese store, the corner pharmacy where the owners know you and the salespeople are part of the extended family. I like buying the newspaper from a kiosk. I dislike supermarket pharmacies intensely. France is trying to rationalize its small businesses, perhaps just as the US is starting a movement to bring them back, by not allowing chain stores to take over Main Street, by thinking about global trade's effect on employment, as well as the stock market.

The Farm

So last Monday I went to the weekly volunteer orientation at the farm. There were two of us, a student in her third year, switching to a major in earth sciences and me, and we ended up weeding a patch of onions, then cutting back some kale, a very satisfactory way to spend a couple of hours, what with the chickens clucking contentedly in the background and the free produce at the end (three leeks I made into soup that night and lots of strawberries, all organic). I'll go again tomorrow.

I've always enjoyed weeding. It's another of those mindless, domestic tasks, like ironing, that leave you feeling the world is a tidier place, that you haven't messed it up with any stray thoughts. But I'm going to need to be more diligent with the sunscreen if I keep up, which I plan to.

Tuesday and Thursday volunteers harvest--for the university dining halls and the odd "farm to table" local restaurant. But that's in the morning and I like to think I 'work' in the morning, meaning putter around on my computer, playing with Baudelaire or my own little eggs of poems.

Late Saturday afternoon

A peaceful afternoon, with sunshine and a breeze. We visited the community garden (lots of abandoned plots) and the "O'Donahue Family Farm"--wonder who the O'Don0hues, who preferred to have their name on a farm with chickens and leeks rather than a big fancy building housing gym equipment or computers, are.

I could move into the chicken coop--it would be a squeeze, but a bed of hay and a nice weedy field to peck in, and companions whose political opinions are limited to cut-cut-cut. We had a conversation leaning over the electric fence, which fortunately wasn't plugged in. Anyway, half the chickens had escaped to the surrounding field, and after we wondered if we should get them back, we saw a sign: "Don't worry about us, we can get ourselves back in. We are at Stanford after all."

This is my sort of place, with a bench in the shade of an old, spreading live oak tree, and stink of manure, and the little sounds hens make when they are foraging.  A few bikes off in the corner of the field, a shed covered in a sheet of  plastic with tools and seedlings, some wheelbarrows (none of them red) and a densely-planted band of orange and yellow marigolds. I could have settled down with a book.