The Accidental Tourist

I read Villette in Sardegna.
I read Tess of the D’Urbervilles in Bath, England.
I read Chrisina Rosetti in London, England, on the same trip.
I read The Collected Works of Billy the Kid in New Brunswick, NJ, shortly before my maiden voyage to New Mexico.
I read Reader’s Block in Santa Fe, NM.
I read Daniel Deronda in Madison, NJ.
I read The French Lieutenant’s Woman at home in Frankfurt. I think of this book, or at least the experience of reading this book, every day.
I read Under the Skin at home in Frankfurt.
I read The Passage in Frankfurt. It pissed me off.
I wish I could remember even one book I read in Kansas. A year there and I draw a blank. I remember considering reading My Antonia, but deciding not to.

Ditto Milan. No recollection of anything.
I read Voices of Chernobyl at my mother’s apartment in North Plainfield, NJ, where she set up a little card table-desk for me.
I read Dear Sugar at the same card table.
I read Jude the Obscure in the Austrian Alps.
I read Alcools in Davis, CA, while staying at my stepsister’s.
I read The Land of Green Plums at home in Frankfurt.
I read A Clockwork Orange in China, just days before the Tiananmen massacre.

Top 10

Chanson Triste - Bidu Sayao (Duparc)

Rich Girl - Lake Street Dive (Hall & Oates)

The Magic - Joan as Policewoman 

Reptile - Lisa Germano

Factory - Martha Wainwright 

Jacob Marley’s Chain - Aimee Mann 

En Gallop - Joanna Newsom 

Louise - Bonnie Raitt  

Lived in Bars - Cat Power

Montparnasse - Jessye Norman (Poulenc)

(most listened to songs sung by women - home iTunes version)

Lost Faith

I began Lost Illusions yesterday. It opens auspiciously in a print shop, and Balzac describes who was called a ‘monkey’ in the printing industry in those times, and who a ‘bear.’ The distinction had to do with a person's motions, which reminded me of Apollinaire’s poem “At the Santé:” Every morning I pace my pit like a bear.

The narrator talks about the transformation of printing, and how equipment then becoming obsolete had once brought "the beautiful books printed by Elzevir, Plantin, Aldus Didot, and the rest..." Wow, I thought. I like the typeface Didot - I will have to look up Aldus Didot.

I looked up Didot, indeed the name of a family of French typesetters, though none of them named Aldus. Well, I thought, maybe Balzac invented him, this being a work of fiction. But that would be weird since the Didots were real, and Elzevir and Plantin were also breathing people who now have typefaces named after them, and in fact, Aldus, too, is a typeface in and of itself..... ummm….

Helped by Amazon’s “Look Inside” function, I read the first page of Illusions Perdues in French, which said: "...les beaux livres des Elzevier, des Plantin, des Alde et des Didot…"

One needn’t be a French scholar to see the “and” separating Alde/us from Didot. In other words, there should have been a comma between them, or an “and.” Aldus Didot wasn’t meant to be a first and surname. I was so dismayed by this glaring error on the very first page - whether the translator’s or the proofreader’s - that I was unable to read any more of this untrustworthy edition, published by the way by Modern Library Classics!

And that is how I began The Pickwick Papers.

ange barbu

Last week we visited friends in Bad Honnef, a town on the Rhine where we've been many times, and my friend Ursula casually mentioned she'd passed a plaque in town saying Guillaume Apollinaire had lived there briefly more than a hundred years ago. Needless to say we set out to find it. Wherever he actually lived is quite gone, as some semi-modern apartments now stand behind the plaque.

Sleepy Bad Honnef, Germany seems an unlikely place for a pioneering French poet. I asked Ursula why on earth Apollinaire was living there. She explained "It's pretty here!"

doorstop and spitoon

What is it with journals that don’t take simultaneous submissions but also don’t send rejections – only acceptances? And on top of that don’t indicate how long their response period is (for accepted pieces)? What do you do? Grow cobwebs?

And ezines that only take postal submissions? The word that comes to mind is hypocritical. I understand the logic of this policy, but this policy is selfish.

I prefer if journals allow electronic submissions. I live in Germany, modestly. It gets kind of expensive. Don’t even ask about SASEs.

I also like journals that answer me in one or two days, and the answer is ‘yes.’ Call me if you know any of these.

Speaking of ‘yes,’ I love the last passage of Joyce’s Ulysses: and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

I also love Aretha Franklin singing "I Say a Little Prayer." That is hard to beat.

I do enjoy fat novels, too. Anna Karenina, Les Miserables, Bleak House, Cloudsplitter, Daniel Deronda, The Stand.

Don’t tell my colleagues but I like the coffee from the office coffee machine.

I am extremely fond of Paul Klee’s painting Fish Magic. It’s in the Philadelphia Museum of Art where I have seen it many times. Paul Klee is one of my favorites. I once seduced a very handsome man by talking about Paul Klee. It wasn’t my intention when I started talking. Other Paul Klee paintings I like are Landscape with Yellow Birds, Pastorale (at MoMA) and Vocal Fabric of the Singer Rosa Silber (MoMA).

I am a big fan of thunderstorms, too.

Not to mention Camper shoes.

et Guillaume Apollinaire!

book habit

I got five new books the other day:

Selected Writings of Guillaume Apollinaire (new directions). I haven’t really started reading this, but his Alcools is one of my favorite poetry books. Part of the reason I bought this book is to compare the translations of the poems in my version of Alcools. I love doing that.

“donnez moi pour toujours une chamber a semaine…”

I also got A Self Portrait in Letters, a collection of Anne Sexton letters. It’s interesting, but I must say I prefer reading her poetry. Apparently all her bad spelling has been corrected.

Shattered Sonnets, Love Cards, and Other Off and Back Handed Importunities, by Olena Kalytiak Davis. Oh, this is a disappointment. I hate to say it. Her first book was fabulous. I asked myself, if the book had been by another poet, would I have been more receptive? No. Except for “six apologies, lord,” which I love, the poems leave me asking myself “so what?”

More interesting is Brenda Shaughnessy’s Interior with Sudden Joy, but it’s also not a blockbuster. She’s a bit like an erotic Lucie Brock-Broido, whose influence is very clear. Shaughnessy acknowledges her in the book, saying Brock-Broido’s teaching “helped shape this book in a mysterious way.” Mysterious? It didn’t seem mysterious to me. Shaughnessy has a similarly nimble syntax and vocabulary. I love many of her phrases like “spastic blizzard” and “I’ve been so lovingly breathed into it appears I can’t move.” It’s good, and clever, and entertaining, but not a substitute for Brock-Broido.

The best of the five is Marie Howe’s What the Living Do. It’s beautiful, moving and spiritual. It knocks me out. So far my favorite poem is “My Dead Friends.” I know it’s a seemingly morbid title, but the poem is wonderful. It starts –

I have begun,
when I am weary and can’t decide an answer to a
bewildering question

to ask my dead friends for their opinion
and the answer is often immediate and clear.

Should I take the job? Move to the city? Should I try to conceive a child
in my middle age?

They stand in unison shaking their heads and smiling –
whatever leads
to joy they always answer,
….

This morning I am asking my cousin Christopher, who was killed in a hit-and-run accident about 15 years ago, if I should get the puppy we’re thinking about getting. I told him how it would surely be me doing most of the caretaking of this puppy and how my nerves are strained most of the time anyway. And Christopher answers?