South

We took the train to Avignon this midday, rented a car and drove towards the Mont Ventoux, stopping to buy fruit and vegetables and some caillettes and boudin blanc in the next good-sized town.

When we arrived in our village (which has only a cafe-grocery-post office), our next door neighbour had just come back from chopping wood. It’s what he does every year in December, after he picks his olives and takes them to the mill to be crushed into oil. It’s part of the annual routine: harvest the cherries, harvest the apricots, harvest the grapes, harvest the olives and chop wood for the winter.

‘But,’ my husband protested, ‘your shed is already full of wood.' 

'Oh,’ said P--, who is 90-something, ‘one of these years I won’t be able to cut wood any more, and then I might be cold.”

Birdlife

Elizabeth Bishop wrote a poem about a crow, and perhaps that is why they interest me, though they tend to leave my kitchen balcony to the pigeons. But the woman who lives across the street, as I've said, occasionally dumps a little dish of leftovers on a ledge of the church's buttress, watched, from a safe distance, by a couple of crows. When she goes back inside, the crows swoop down and pick through the goodies. Once they brought a chicken leg or thigh to the zinc roof out the kitchen door and cleaned it meticulously and left the bone lying on the roof. It's still there, a couple of months later. Sky burial, I guess, though it also brings to mind a wonderful children's book I may have a copy of, somewhere, about a talking bone. I wonder if the clean white bone on the slope of the roof opposite is talking, only too low for me to hear it.

I put a still meaty chicken leg on one of my flower pots, hoping to attract a crow of my own, but not luck. It was untouched a week later, so I threw it out. Meanwhile my husband has bought some little plastic pinwheels to stick in the flower pots and keep the pigeons away. I think I was hoping that if I had a crow of my own, the pigeons might not try to sneak back in our absence.

We are off to the Vaucluse this morning on a nice fast train, to spend Christmas with my husband's family. 

Soup Kitchen

In another life I could be a very good cleaning lady, I told another volunteer as we swept up after lunch at the soup kitchen on Tuesday.

In this one, I've been lucky.

Up late

after a friend's harpsichord concert (Art of the Fugue) at the Columbia University Paris Center in Montparnasse last night, with drinks after at the Tschann bookstore, a Paris landmark, open late, with tables full of literature and people browsing. Still chilly but sunny here, the damper air settling on the zinc roofs, and drying off more slowly than earlier this week. My neighbour across the street has just put out breakfast for the crows, that were waiting on the church buttress for her to emerge with her dish of leftovers. It's weather to be out walking in, along the quais, newly closed to traffic on the Right (sunny) Bank--but early, because the sun is down by 4 pm along the river.

A Quiet Day...

the kind I like best. A day of running errands, to the supermarket down the block, after lunch when it's not too crowded, because the aisles (I wrote 'isles') are narrow and cluttered and there are usually employees loading the shelves or pushing some kind of cleaning machine around...and around. I ran into my neighbour, the guardian of our building, who was remitting money to her mother in the Philippines. We talked about her son, who is getting a masters in business at the Sorbonne. I bought some yogurts, potatoes, lettuce, toothpaste and dragged it all home in my shopping cart, and then I gathered three books (Robert Lowell) and went to the Luxembourg Garden to read in a deep comfortable chair in a sunny spot with my back to the wall of the Orangerie, until closing time. It was frosty and nice, and gardeners were rushing about with leaves, piling them up, moving them, and mothers and nannies were walking in pairs and groups with strollers. There seemed to be a lot of twins, and one very odd couple: a very tall, masculine-looking woman with a stroller walking fast and her mother (?) very small and bent, trying to keep up and having a conversation with the infant in the stroller.

On my way home I went by San Francisco Books, a secondhand place, to see if they had a copy of Woodward and Bernstein's All the President's Men, about the Watergate Affair. I have a feeling the next four years are going to be full of opportunities for investigative journalism. They had a copy but it was a hardback first edition, so I turned it down and bought a detective story instead, and V.S Naipaul's Half a Life. I loved his The Enigma of Arrival.

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.