Sun on the stones

Yesterday it was night all day, the sky so overcast that it seemed to be dusk all day long. I went to the Soupe Populaire to serve lunch, then home, to read, then out again around 6, to run errands and meet a friend, up from the Loire, where he teaches, for a drink at the Cafe de la Mairie. And so home, and so to bed.

This morning the sun is up casting angular shadows on the side of the church. The gypsies or Roms are back camping with their dogs and their colourful covers and foam mattresses and suitcases in the side doorway to the church. They were expulsed a few weeks ago, their cached belongings thrown away. But now they--the same group of two men and two women, I think--are back. They arrive late afternoon with all their belongings--they definitely don't travel light-- wait for the church to close, set up camp. Perhaps there is another camp somewhere outside the city--municipalities are obliged, I believe, to set aside some camping space for the communities, but for now these, at least, like to sleep at the foot of the rock face of the church.

Books of the Year

Somewhere in Virginia Woolf's Diary, volume 4, which I've been reading, a few pages a night at bedtime for a year (Paris bed), she asks a writer friend if he ever buys books. "Nope," he says. "Me neither," she says, and they conclude they can hardly complain if no one buys their books. (I once heard Hélène Cixous rage to her seminar that nobody bought her books, so I guess we all love it when people do buy our books. I do, I know.)

Each year for the past few years the Times Lit Supp has asked me to write 150 words max about the best books I've read in the current year, a short paragraph to be published under my name in bold print (see current issue of TLS). Very flattering. Not, the editor stipulates, books from 0ther Years, and not my friends' or lovers' or husband's or wife's or publishers' books.

Now I almost never buy books hot off the press...I don't buy books unless I want to keep them, which means I mostly buy poetry books, because my house is small, my shelves are full and it's very hard to discard books, even books I have several copies of (different family members had their own, for school, say). Sometimes I lay them on the top of the paper-recycling bin, hoping someone will adopt them, but even that feels like a betrayal.

Poetry Magazine, for which I wrote a review this month, asked me (and several others) what books we were currently reading, for their blog.

Baudelaire

For the last few years I've been sporadically translating Baudelaire, a fascinating but difficult task, given the compression of most of his work. At first I thought I'd concentrate on his poems about women--mostly one woman, whom he seems to have adored, perhaps partly due to her "coldness" to him. There are odes to her hair, to her skin colour ("amber," "tawny"), to her perfumes. Like Gauguin, like Rimbaud, he dreams of sailing off to some exotic, tropical, warm, blessed isle with her, or failing that to Amsterdam, with its sleeping ships and canals. I've since broadened my focus and my current title is "Invitation to the Voyage" after the famous poem. I think I've decided to include some prose works, because often these were the spark for poems, and it's fun to compare the prose with the poem.

When will this be done? Never maybe. Most Baudelaire translations are failures (you can see reams of them online), but Lowell's, however unfaithful and ramped up they are, are the watermark, and it's impossible to match.

Damp Paris morning. The zinc roof tiles around us are...well, damp, and not drying off quickly. The lady who lives across the street on the roof of the church puts out scraps for the crows on a bit of flying buttress. Somewhere else in the neighbourhood they find a piece of chicken and bring it back to a low roof outside our kitchen window, and nibble it down to the bones. A week or two later the bones are still sitting there, occasionally washed lower down by rain, occasionally moved higher up by hopeful crows.

Smart birds, crows.

I've just read Tolstoy, What is Art? or parts of it, found on line, probably a crumb from a seminar somewhere, with large sections X-ed out. The meat: art is a shaped sharing of the artist's feelings about something in the form of music, painting or writing. It is written with the intention of sharing the feelings. Its primary purpose is not pleasure. Sincerity is important. I suppose some of us would more or less agree with this, although I feeling it may have been written as a reaction to the art for art's sake movement of the end of the 19th-beginning of the 20th centuries.

And before that I went to pick up my backpack at the Bon Marche where I left it to be repaired, having purchased it there 10 years ago. The top zipper, the one for the pocket in which I carry my computer and my library books was broken, really broken, fixed-many-times-and-broken-for good. I used a safety pin for a while, but finally I could only use it by clenching it in my fist to keep the zipper together, sort of. Well, I have to report that the baggage department at the BM was utterly charming and helpful and the bag was returned to me after three-four weeks with a brand new zipper and key holder (also broken) and free of charge. My thrifty Scottish-Canadian soul is glad.

And night is falling in Paris. The street is quiet, though muffled traffic sounds are audible in the background, and the sound of giggling children below my window. The church across the street is crumbling: they were up there on a crane yesterday, tapping, tapping. They say they will have to wrap it in nets so no one is killed by a piece of stone dropping from a corniche. Just like the hillside in La Roque Alric, which has also been covered in nets. 

Poetry Daily 14 November 2016

My Poetry Magazine review, of Reginald Gibbons' book How Poems Thing is Poetry Daily's prose piece today: http://poems.com/special_features/prose/essay_brahic_gibbons.php

Yesterday

morning early I went to Hélène Cixous's first fall seminar at the Maison Heine at the Cité universitaire. I met a friend at the Luxembourg metro stop, and to get there I cut through the Luxembourg Garden. It had just opened. The morning was crisp and sunny and the sun was shining through the yellow leaves still on the trees and shining on the brown leaves puddled on the ground. The Medici Fountain glimmered, chairs were already set at tables outside the café on the Latin Quarter side of the Garden--not my usual side--where the style is formal and French (my usual side, the western side, is dotted with lawns in the "English," more "natural" style. There were joggers...

The seminar, with a text from a letter Kafka wrote to one of his sisters, focussed on the "Familyanimal" (Familientier) and the US election and the archaic, mythological character of the Trump persona.  "He comes from under the earth," HC said, "terrifying, but fascinating."

Geoffrey Wheatcroft in the NYReview of Books on the Chilcot Report on Blair and the Iraq War: if Gore had been declared--as he should have been--winner of the election in 2000, no Bush, no Iraq War, no Syria...

The chaos that can be brought about by incompetent--or worse--leadership is criminal.

I, Daniel Blake

Just back from seeing the last 2/3 of Ken Loach's new film, I, Daniel Blake. A really good movie, with terrific actors, though perhaps the social service workers, with the exception of one, and the Food Bank people, are too patently the villains...but I don't know, because I don't have a lot to do with social service workers. And I think I trust Loach. I'd like to see the movie again, including the first third of it. I also started to watch his Irish movie (Wind in the Barley) on Netflix the other night, but the humiliation of the small Irish folks by the British soldiers was unbearable and I turned it off.

A small movie house, only one film, near the Place de la Sorbonne. The ticket seller tried to discourage me from going in because the movie had started half an hour earlier, but I'm glad I went.

The end of the afternoon comes early these days, now that the time has changed. Yesterday I went out around four, walked through the Luxembourg Garden, partly to see if anyone had turned in my glasses to the Lost and Found. A guardian in their kiosque, behind the merry-go-round and tennis courts, pulled out a large black ledger and ran his finger down the entries...finding two pairs of glasses turned in in the last week or so, but both had been forwarded to the Police Station next to the town hall on the Place St Sulpice. Come back next week, the guardian said, sometimes the gardeners discover glasses in the leaves they sweep up.

I'll check at the police station next week, too, since I also have to arrange for a procuration for next year's presidential elections.

I had a couple errands to run, so I walked down the Rue d'Assas towards the Rue du Cherche-Midi, and the river. Night was falling, it was drizzling, but not enough to get out my umbrella, lights were coming on in apartments and shops, people were settling onto sidewalk terraces for a drink...