London

Rain--gentle rain falling all night. A sound I love...for a few days. Yesterday my daughter took me to evensong at St Paul's, on our way home from the Tate Modern.

Love the Tate--as opposed to a more traditional museum--I'm also hoping to go and see Hockney's portraits at the Royal Academy--it's organized to make the visitor feel like part of the creative process. It's chaotic to the right degree: curated chaos, I guess you could call it.

Shakespeare and Company, the Paris bookshop, has posted the notice of our CB Editions Reading in September, with all the info. I'll be reading with Charles Boyle, the publisher and writer, Will Eaves, and Lara Pawson. Follow the link for more info, but also take time to explore the rest of the website. It's a great bookshop, with a long and fascinating history. I'm really excited, hope you can be there!

Yves Bonnefoy

Yves Bonnefoy, one of the French poets whose books I have translated, died in Paris on July 1. He had just turned 94. Cynthia Haven asked me to write something about M. Bonnefoy, which she has published on her Stanford literary blog, The Book Haven.

No Comment

from Europe's Tragedy: a History of the Thirty Years War, chapter 18 (1641):

"Rulers wanted to persuade their subjects to continue paying high taxes to support armies in peacetime. These were considered necessary to promote princely dignity and facilitate a greater role in European affairs... .

"There were certainly serious problems by the 1640s. The war's rapid expansion dislocated social and economic structures and disabled territorial administration..." (p. 622)

. . . 

"Resistance to recruitment and taxation was motivated by more than fear of dying or inability to pay. There was also a growing sense that royal demands were no longer reasonable.(...) Across society, people felt they were already doing more than they were obliged to. They did not feel responsible for the defeats, since command was reserved for the monarchy. Where the crown saw disobedience, its subjects saw ineptitude and injustice." (p. 657)

I love EU

Maybe we should have said more often how much we loved the idea of Europe: how it widened the horizons of our lives 1) to have the vision of building a "world" on a continent that has been at war in one way or another for centuries; 2) to see our children able to cross borders and go to school or work so easily in other countries whose languages they may have learned in school (our children had the good fortune to be tri-national from birth and bilingual from the time they started talking; in school they spoke two languages and learned two more--German, Italian and Russian, depending on the child--and regularly travelled "abroad" with their teachers). It was exciting. There was a European Dream quite distinct from the American one, less based on personal happiness and wealth.

Clearly not everyone has had the same experience. Rich countries with dominant languages, like the UK, have been flooded with young people from poorer nations. Polish workers kept a French electrician's costs down. Still, the redistribution of wealth did work in many directions, as some British farmers are belatedly discovering.

Where are the French politicians who are going to stop the Front National from using the Brexit as an argument in next year's French elections?

Brexit, Europe

The UK vote's still uppermost in my mind. I've been reading a book about the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) called The European Tragedy, a real doorstopper of a book that goes into the politicking on the continent leading up to (the part I've read so far) and during the War in tremendous detail. And it sounds familiar: the dynastic fights, and those over resources, religion (Catholic, Lutheran, Calvinist). Of course, it's mainly a story of leadership and personal ambition, and you imagine, beneath that, ordinary people trying to get on with their lives, buffeted this way and that by infighting higher up the socio-economic scale. A thousand years of war in Europe, at least. The building of a supranational entity, the European Union, seems so hopeful, even when it is floundering--at least in part following a financial crisis that started in the US.

Does this sound like an argument for a retreat into Little England, Little France? I don't mean it to. I like to think about young people all over Europe being able to call the whole continent their country.

Saturday I harvested lavender again at the Farm, then, since it was hot, took cover and tied it all (lots, but only 10 or 12 plants, with six of us working) in sheafs in the shade of a building. My fellow harvesters were a couple from Iran and two young women from Berkeley. They are involved with the UC Berkeley urban farm and wanted to see how the Stanford farm works. The Iranian couple brought pickled garlic for us to taste--because the garlic is also being harvested at the moment, though not by us.

The Vote

I moved to France from Canada in 1970, and I have lived there most of my adult life. The building of Europe has been the continent's most hopeful and visionary project, for us and for our children, even if the vision has been badly shaken by financial and refugee crises, lack of leadership and resistance to what seems to me inevitable globalism among segments of the population who have not only least profited, but perhaps most suffered from it. Yesterday's vote is a tremendous disappointment; I hope it's not the tip of a great big mid-Atlantic iceberg.

I've just returned from a few days in Park City, Utah, where the skies are almost always blue and at night filled with stars--perhaps because of the altitude (7000 feet) because one is closer to them? With a telescope and the help and enthusiasm of my scientist daughter we were able to look at the moon with its lacy inner edge, very visible as it set at about 10 pm, and also at Jupiter, Mars and Saturn with their colours and rings and moons. And more earthly things--one morning as I was dressing I looked out and saw a moose eating the tops of the scrub oaks in my daughter's back yard, and he (it was a he) circled around and turned up again on the other side of the house in the afternoon, almost close enough to touch. It was the first time I had ever seen a moose that close, though I've had some close calls with bears in the Canadian Rockies.

Waiting for me back home a copy of Wallace Stevens' Harmonium, a collection of poems I've only ever read as part of a Selected or Collected. My copy was re-published in 2003 by Faber and Faber, and it is quite an extraordinary beast to have in one's hands, and ponder the order of poems one knows, but generally not as part of a collection. It is really quite wonderful to have it--even just to look at and read the first poem, which is not a particularly familiar one, and wonder why Stevens put it there, in that position, and to think about the history of this book since it was first published in 1923.

Lavender

On Saturday mornings I've been spending a couple of hours at the campus "farm," an experiment in suburban agriculture: organic, sustainable, relatively small-scaled. There are a dozen chickens who produce a fair number of multicoloured eggs, of which the pale blue are my favourites, but for the moment--though there is a horse barn in the background--the main crop is vegetables that are sold to the student dining halls and a few local restaurants.

Yesterday my task was to help harvesting the lavender, a deep purple variety I was told was English lavender, good for essential oils, but not for cooking (that's French lavender and we have some of that too, it's paler in colour, and was quite ready to be picked). One of the farm managers gave us knives and told us where to cut it; we stored it in rows in waxed cardboard boxes, where it will dry. The next step will be to extract the oil. I brought some home for my closets.

The previous Saturday we had done some mulching and weeding in the sunchoke plot and then shucked dry corn, destined to be crushed and turned to tortillas. I gained a whole new appreciation for the labour-intensive side of tortillas, and imagined women in tortilla-eating countries spending their days clacking dry ears of corn together and ground the kernels in a mortar, as they watched their children and gossiped. I was ready for Mexican food by the end of the morning.