Amsterdam Reading

A great reading with a wonderful audience on Tuesday evening. It went on until 10 pm, and then Marilyn and I went back to our hotel, had a bite and headed off to our rooms on the 12th floor of The Student Hotel, two metro stops from downtown. The next morning we went to the Rembrandt Haus museum and lucked into a talk about engravings in Rembrandt’s studio. The curator was fascinating and explained very clearly the whole process (etching, dry point…) including how Rembrandt, unlike most of his more academic predecessors, mixed his methods and was able to print far more subtley in terms of clarity of line or deliberate blurriness, darker or lighter; and how different supports (rag paper, velum, various Japanese papers) affected the result. Everything was demonstrated on Rembrandt’s bench, then printed on a press that was not original but just like the original. We visited the rest of the house, then went across the street for lunch at the Dance School, visited the Beguinage, before I headed to the station to get my train back to Paris and Marilyn returned to the hotel for another night.

Here is a link to some photos from Tuesday’s reading.

Today is another beautiful October day and I have worked, grocery shopped, taking pleasure in small stores—the Tunisian fruit and vegetable specialist, the Asian counter in the Marché St Germain for pot stickers, because the nearest supermarket is shutting down for remodeling. And so to bed, soon.

Sunday morning, Paris

Every time I come to Paris, I notice all the differences again, for a while, and then it all seems ‘normal,’ just a familiar part of my life. Yesterday I wrote in the morning, had lunch, went to the supermarket a couple of blocks away to buy—what? toilet paper, garbage bags—then took my grocery bag and a book to the Luxembourg Garden, found a sunny chair up by the orchard, and read (kafka, ‘The Burrow’; a new book by Cixous that I found here when I arrived). My usual spot under the two sequoias. A group of high school kids were talking beside me—one boy very loud, drowning out the girls, later one of the girls, very loud. Eventually someone higher up towards the southern rim of the Garden left, and I moved to their chair (musical chairs), later I moved again in search of sun. And still later, when the sun went down behind the buildings, I went to the indoor market to buy a head of lettuce and some vegetables to stock, because Sunday afternoon and Monday most food stores are closed. Parsnips (panais) and turnips, must be winter!

Forgot to mention that I sat for a bit on the edge of the lawn that contains the bust of Verlaine, scowling atop his column, with a pigeon sitting on his head.

And now, 7 pm, home from a walk on the Right Bank Quai of the Seine, which was packed with people, of all ages, walking, cycling, skateboarding, roller skating, scootering (electric and other0 hoverboarding, and all other means of transportation you can think of, except cars. I went not quite as far as the Arsenal, sat for a while, finished reading Kafka’s “The Burrow,’ lay down for a while on a bench and looked at the coach doors on the buildings on the Ile St Louis, and walked back to the foot bridge between the Louvre and the Institut, returned to the Left Bank, and home.

Blasey-Ford and Kavanaugh

I watched Blasey-Ford on tv at my downstairs neighbours on Thursday—was it (still a little blurry from jet lag)?—then came upstairs, made myself some dinner and watched Kavanaugh’s opening statement, which was enough to give me nightmares, apparently, since I woke myself up in the small hours, struggling to cry ‘Help, help!’ but not making much noise—not enough to bring the neighbours running. Was I reliving Blasey-Ford’s experience? Maybe.

Yesterday I ran errands again, to the SNCF to print out my Amsterdam tickets for Tuesday’s trip, a newstand to buy a magazine, then, though it was cold, through the Luxembourg Garden where I found a comfy chair near the duck pond and read for a while before returning home for supper and early bed. In fact, I fell asleep over a detective novel I downloaded to my ipad for the plane trip, but, to my annoyance, find I’ve already read. It shouldn’t matter, should it, since the plots of this series are all pretty much the same? That reminded me of the time I wanted to buy a copy of the previous day’s Le Monde; the newsie allowed as he had a copy, but ‘it’s been read.’ I bought it anyway…

It looks like a sunny day outside: sharply angular shadows on the buildings across the street. But the air is cold.

Paris noises

I arrived here yesterday late afternoon, and did the usual things that need to be done: getting some food in the house. Stayed up until 11, took my melatonin and went to bed. Listened to the street noises, which are very different from what I’d hear in Palo Alto—no commuter train whistle, but church bells, cars, people walking and talking under the window or on a nearby street. A concert of some kind down the street, impromptu, I think. Right now young voices laughing together, maybe coming out of the dental school a few doors away. When I woke up at 3:30 am, there was a couple talking and walking, her in high heels. Earlier I noticed, as I have before, that everything grows very quiet from 1 to 3 in the afternoon, when people are eating lunch; the same thing happens from 8-10 in the evening. That is very different—just the fact that lunch and dinner are quiet periods of the day in the centre of the city, and that they last more than half an hour.

Monday September 24

I have just printed my boarding pass to Paris tomorrow evening. Was hoping to possibly change my seat, but all seat changes (for my class of passenger?) at the airport check-in, so that means I have to go by airport check-in. Perhaps I would have anyway—I don’t know yet whether I will need more than a carry-on.

Meanwhile, the sun is out and I am going to take my last bike ride, up Sandhill, on up Alpine to Portola Valley and, if I can, the ‘green gate.’ If I can, because the last bit is quite steep. Still, it would be good to do it once more before I leave. Lots of walking in Paris, but the only biking—without getting out of the city—is flat on city bikes and I’m not sure I’m ready for the dangers of Paris traffic. Years ago, when I learned to drive a car in the city, I ended up quite comfortable circling the Etoile (Arc de Triomphe) and the Porte Maillot, remembering not to make eye contact with any other drivers, unless I wanted to be edged out of my place in the race. If they think you aren’t paying attention to them, they give you a pass. Of course, out of the corner of your eye, you have an eye on everything going on around you—the insults, the fingers, the rudeness, which, frankly, I have never learned to enjoy; ie, not to take personally. Once, I recall, I told my dentist that taxi driver had shouted obscenities at me in a traffic jam, and he thought that was funny. Not me, as witness, I’m still traumatised. ‘What did you want me to do?’ I asked him, ‘Tell him to fuck off.’ Well, that shocked him. That was the good part.

Book Party

A wonderful, friend-filled party thrown by my friend Marguerite on Saturday afternoon. Old friends, going back to our first years in San Francisco and a carpool up and down the city’s steep hills) and new (Marguerite’s neighbours, Tian, the poet-breadmaker and her husband)—really it was such a pleasure, though also nervous-making because I never look forward to reading, to being the centre of attention. But afterwards, how glad I am it happened, and how kind of Marguerite to propose to hold it, not once now, but twice.

Sunday a baby-Q in Golden Gate Park with crowds of my son and daughter-in-law’s family and friends, and tents, and burgers and dim sum, and children’s games, then over to Berkeley for the poetry group, a small gathering, with three participants off eastwards—New York, Italy.

Sunny afternoon

cool breeze, the leaves are turning red and bronze, there are clouds across the blue sky. Rain? It seems not yet.

I could take my book to the Brazilian hammock ordered from Amazon and strung across the porch above the building parking ‘pad’, but no—because Chuck is on the ‘pad’ unloading 2 x 4s from Greg’s pickup, tying them to two ropes, which Greg pulls up to the roof and drops with a loud crash on the roof above my head. Hey Chuck, I say, ask Greg if he can set the wood down gently, I feel like the ceiling is coming down. No problem. Thumb’s up. The wood gets set down more gently and further away. Later, leaving in the pickup, they will have a laugh.

So I’m inside reading, because it would really seem rude to be lounging in a hammock (Brazilian red and orange) when they are working. And the sun will still be there, when they call it a day.

I am again reminded of when I was a young woman teaching in a Ghanaian school and went to Kumasi, the nearest city, on Saturday on a mammy wagon. There was no schedule: the drivers waited for the wagon to my village to fill up; when it was full it left. So I always had a book, but the other women looked at me curiously, wondering why I spent my time reading a printed packet of paper when there were so many other more exciting things to do. Like buying bananas off the huge hand of bananas a seller was carrying around on his head…

The Roof over my Head

Two workmen are doing some work on the roof over my head. On and off for a year now they have been reroofing. Last summer there were workmen (all men) up there every day doing stuff, usually a couple or three or more Spanish-speaking folks with large straw hats, like strawberry pickers wear, and a radio set to Latin American music. If the radio bothered me when I was working they’d move it to the other side of the roof, over my neighbors, who weren’t there, who worked all day, one at Facebook, one at Google. Until I got tired of the boards slamming down over my head, I’d take them supermarket pies for lunch. Sometimes. My nextdoor neighbor took them soft drinks.

The workmen today are Greg and Chuck, and they are replacing boards in the eaves. They hang over the side, attached by ropes to a beam, like climbers on El Cap. I prefer not to think about that part. And I’m trying not to mind the noise.

Reading a book by Dominique Rolin (1913-2012) called La Rénovation (The Renovation) about her apartment building on the Rue de Verneuil in Paris being renovated, gutted basically. She lived through it, She was a tenant, but because of her age (80 +) because of a postwar French law known famously as the Loi de ‘48, they couldn’t evict her. So they tried to kill her instead. She held on, and even wrote a few more books.