Reading Anne Carson in Paris and at Méricourt: Plainwave

I thought before I came to Paris that I would not haunt my old haunts, I would start again, but here I am, haunting, in an average café, with an omelette and a glass of wine, savouring the word Sully on his Hôtel across the street, and reading Anne Carson, a little, watching cyclists turn en masse onto the rue St Antoine.

Anne Carson on The Life of Towns: 'I am a scholar of towns, she says, let God command that. To explain what I do is simple enough.' 

The simpler you get the harder it is. Anne Carson leaps about & leaves spaces into which you fit— your omelette—your understanding—her writing hurtles, short talks, diary, things to say. 

A large part of the book is a diary written along the camino de compostela. My visit to Paris and Méricourt sur Seine was a diary week. I woke up, made tea, read Anne Carson, wrote my diary and looked at the Seine outside, the barges loaded with sand, gravel, and the bargees' cars. 

Have you seen Jean Vigo's film L'Atalante?

Anne Carson is in love with knowledge, she says. Each day of her diary is prefaced with a quote from one of the ancients, eastern or western. The depths and lacunae of ancient texts bring on her lurching style, words pulled from unexpected places, glistening.

Humpty Dumpty At Home

 Philip K Dick, Humpty Dumpty in Oakland, my choice this week. Going into abeyance. I always liked that word. I have been reading my America diaries, 1977 and 1980-1 and writing Monday Night At Home, after the radio programme, circa 1963, which I loved, where I first heard Ivor Cutler. Philip K Dick is never at home. No Direction Home. Not Monday nor any other night. The muddying of capitalism in Oakland, late nineteen-fifties. Humpty is a car mechanic, Dumpty is a car salesman. 

Why this was the choice a few days before going to Paris, I have no idea. Abeyance, perhaps. The chance to read afresh, in all innocence.

SPENT LIGHT : A GOOD RUIN

Architect Louis Kahn said a building is only good if its ruins will be good, I read in Lara Pawson's Spent Light. Louis Kahn believed that we humans are all made of spent light— ruins of another kind. I read Lara Pawson and as I read I am not sure this is where I want to be, on this bed of anger, indignation, among the barbed domestic objects of Lara Pawson's life, which is your life, my life, the objects that populate our domesticity, make up our errant psyche. 

The thing is, I like a bit of labour. I feel complete when I get down on my hands and knees on the kitchen floor. I take real pleasure retrieving the large sponge from the cupboard beneath the sink.

I polished the bathroom floor and the kitchen floor today. I know what she means. She and I can meet on our hands and knees.

Which is to say, viscerally. In a building, empty or full.  Ideal for nighttime reading; you read in good faith, you don't know if a line or two will gel and carry you or simply you'll get tired enough to sink into your own world, which is sleep.

Sunday Lunch in Ballinhassig, cooked by Joe, who had built his house from dreamtrade, the company he built on the red tape of international trade, he'd done the Ballymaloe cookery course, bought the Cambridge Beckett Letters and started Proust. It's a great beginning, I said, 'For a long time I used to go to bed early.' Actually I said that more to his daughter Lia, who is fifteen. She has no idea how going to bed early is a good beginning for anything, but she might remember later. 

Death Row, Texas, Global Indignation

In three consecutive baths I read an article by Lawrence Wright  in the New Yorker about a group of women on death row in Texas. I hadn't thought to read it but then I did. How does the New Yorker celebrate its centenary but with this enormous iniquity: women who seem to have done terrible things but if you consider their lives, their early years of abuse and neglect, if these women have killed someone it is equal to their having been killed, slowly, from the beginning, so any crime, so-called, any evil, any darkness clinging to them is hardly their own, and that's what they must die for.