of trifling concern

dispatch #90

Monday. . .

Here I am in my proper place, squarely on the couch looking out at the brilliant colours and finding my way into this, my 90^th dispatch. I’ve been home for five days and still feel a bit adrift. For the first three days my cold wiped me out and I still wake up at least three hours earlier than I want to. Which will only be exacerbated by the insanity of the hour change in a couple of weeks. Last night I had very complicated dreams that had unresolved plot points so that I would drift into a semi-awareness trying to work them out. Ridiculous. At four-thirty I gave up and read for a bit.

Yesterday I got some things done. I cleaned my brushes (no mean feat any oil painter will tell you) and gessoed three canvases ready to paint. On Saturday I painted. Calloo Callay oh Frabjous Day. I want to go out and work on the two paintings I started. One is an abstracted landscape of Dartmouth from the Halifax side with the smoke stacks. It is completely different than anything I’ve ever painted. The other one is the chair from our room in Hotel de Nice, Paris – a bright pinkish velvet chair with the open window behind it. Perhaps a trifle in the Bonnard school. I’m not sure. I also did a couple of washes though it was too dampish to hang them out so I hung them in.

Today I’m going to go out and work in the studio again. I’m going to clean one room in this house every day this week which is much needed – but painting comes first. And I’m going to try and make arrangements for Butter and Snow to be distributed in the new year, which is turning out to be surprisingly tricky. I’m not quite ready to get back to my strength exercises yet – when the cold has completely left my body I will. My poor fella caught the cold from me and is also on the mend but a few days behind me. So we’re moving but slowly.

The background to this busyness and this slowness is a movie of my ten days in Paris. People keep asking me what I liked and what I didn’t and so I keep thinking about that, which really is not so important. It is more like a gestalt of the whole thing, or even bits of it. The colours of the sky, the golden light in the bistro we went to, the hubbub of the cafe below our room each evening. I’m also thinking a great deal of this age of travel, where so many people are in the air with their children or partners or old friends, whizzing about going here and there. I’m very aware of the consumer mentality of that.

My least favourite thing was the crowds at the Musée d’Orsay. Not the museum. I loved the museum – the building itself was worth a visit, and the art! But the crowds were overwhelming. For the most part, and this is of course only my very opinionated opinion, they weren’t looking at the art. They were collecting it, very methodically, on their cell phones. I’d be standing there, in tears of joy, looking at Van Gogh’s Church at Auvers, and someone with their cell held in front of them would move in front of me, without so much as a gesture, as if I were an elderly ghost, in order to take a photo (or a video!) of it, seemingly unaware that I was in contemplation of it. At one point, well at that point to be honest, I started muttering under my breath ‘they aren’t even looking at it’. If they aren’t going to look at it when they are in front of it, why might they look at it later on their stupid cells? A man near me heard me and agreed wholeheartedly. Marion and I talked later and thought that the museum might do well to institute some times in which cell-phones were not permitted. Ironically there was a sign in the gift store saying no photographs. Right.

Marion and I did not go through the museums in lock-step – she has her way and I have mine. I quickly find the art works I wish to worship at and ignore the others and I can sort it out pretty quickly. I, for instance, have zero interest in Monet. I checked them out and yep, zip. So I could zoom through those rooms and get to Van Gogh and Gaugin and Bonnard and a few others who I didn’t know but now do.

Would I go again? Probably not. If I lived in Paris and had a membership and could come at less stressful times I for sure would. And I do wish the guards were more guard like. The only time they seemed alert was when I would sit in one of their chairs. Then they’d be all official. Sure.

Other than the crowd thing, and that was truthfully nearly everywhere including on the street, my affection was pretty unalloyed.

One favourite experience was going to visit the bookstore Shakespeare and Company. The store I visited (which is the only one you can) was born, like me, in 1951, and was called then Le Mistral. The original Shakespeare and Co was brought into being in 1919 by Sylvia Beach, an American. She closed it down in 1941 when a German officer demanded her last copy of Finnegan’s Wake. She refused him and he told her he’d be back that evening to close down her shop. She moved everything immediately upstairs to her apartment. She never opened it again but it seems clear that she approved of Le Mistral being renamed in her honour in 1964 by the owner, an American named George Whitman. His daughter Sylvia (named after Beach) now runs the store. The store is full of books and rooms and pilgrims and ghosts. One waits in line to get in but as soon as we approached the line went in and so we only stood outside for a short time. Unlike the Musee no photographs are allowed. You are allowed to take your time and go through the books there in many little rooms and take the staircase up to the next floor where there are old books not for sale and that you can pick up and find a chair or couch and just read. Okay, enough background. For me it was a pilgrimage. I didn’t expect to be as hit by emotion as I was. I was okay downstairs, wandering around with the crowds and choosing a book as a souvenir – Michael Ondaatje’s newest book of poetry A Year of Last Things – and then I went upstairs and sat in the front reading room. And the ghosts of my two great pals, Kerol and Cindy, joined me on my little couch to consider words and writers and reading. Readers – I did cry. But not too much because I didn’t want to be tossed out of the joint as a weeping ninny. I thought of Allen Ginsburg who I was so lucky to meet years ago, and I thought of Ferlinghetti and well, of so many expats writers who’d graced this place.

Tuesday . . .

It is early evening on Tuesday now. I can barely write this as the light is so astounding and the trees so bedazzled in colour and that light and well, I feel I’ve taken some hallucinogenic. At the usual time I go for a walk with Bella (8 am) it was raining and thundering out. I went out a bit after 9 am and the light then was so astounding that I didn’t give a care if Bella smelled every leaf of grass. I stood in wonder looking at the dark rain-slicked road with streaks of red reflected on it, trees of every colour crowding the edges and I thought I wouldn’t trade it for all the beauty in the Musée d’Orsay.

It has been in this state of perfection for most of the day. There are a lot of leaves down so the colour won’t be here too long, but the autumn light is truly the best.

I’ve spent a few hours each afternoon in my studio. It is still warm enough to not need to light the stove and I have brought out a thermos of tea, and something to eat. Before I paint I sip and nosh and read. I’m reading this enormous book of letters to and from and about Vincent Van Gogh. It puts me in the right mood for sure and it is full of interesting observations. Unlike me, muttering under my breath, I’m fairly sure Van Gogh would’ve started hitting people in the Musée d’Orsay. The more I read of him the more fond of him I get. I always had a soft spot for a Dutchman.

I think I’m finished Harbour with Smoke Stacks or whatever I end up calling it. I am dead pleased with it. It isn’t a pretty painting and I might be the only one but that’s okay with me. And I have three boards ready to paint.

But now I’ll stop. I’ve eaten my dinner since I started this bit – a beautiful potato and carrot soup that the fella made and I’m going to take it easy from my busy day of not much.

Because I can.

Wednesday . . .

The light continues to enthrall me. Ron is off at some appointment and gone to get groceries as well. Our cupboard was bare for the last few days but due to feeling punk and pure laziness we put off a trip to town.

I’m reading a book that Marion had begun in the upstairs room at Shakespeare and Co. It is called Paris Journal 1944 -1965 by Janet Flanner. It is the collection of the column she wrote for The New Yorker during those years. A dense compilation of those years and especially interesting to me is how the Parisians survived those difficult years after they were liberated. Flanner was a key figure in the development of the journalistic essay and her writing style will be familiar to anyone who reads a New Yorker from time to time. Here’s a quote by her “I act as a sponge. I soak it up and squeeze it out in ink every two weeks.” Flanner also covered the Nuremberg trials as did one of (in my opinion) the most brilliant writers, Rebecca West. Both posted articles in the New Yorker on that experience.

And yes, I’m being particularly idle this week. Recovering from my illness, the common cold, and of course my adventure on the continent. Other than keeping up this dispatch there is nothing compelling me to do anything whatsoever. Even the weather is not scaring me enough to strip the garden and although the house is slightly untidy, it is far from slovenly and so will do for a bit with a minimum of care. I would be flying at getting my book out but the company that I would like to distribute it does not get back to me. Two emails and now a phone message later, I still wait. I’m not asking them to represent me mind – it is a simple business transaction – you distribute my book with those others you’ve taken on from small one-off publishers and I pay you so much a book. But crickets. This is the times I know.

Now I will wander to my atelier in the woods to start another painting. This one a still life perhaps. Something slow and yellow and gold.

Thursday . . .

A clear and pretty day. A clean world as it got a good scrubbing last night. My bed is by a window that is uncurtained and so I had a ringside seat to the rain, the lightening and the thunder last night. There is a certain tree shape in the night from out my window that looks to me like a chunky circus horse and it was galloping heartily in the storm. I cannot find that shape in the daylight – it becomes, I suppose, obscured by colour and reason. But at night it comes out, its curved neck and prancing form.

I’m rereading Colette’s Claudine in Paris – it was her second book and was published in 1901 under the name of her husband, Monsieur Willy – who coerced her into writing books for his publishing business. I mostly read Colette’s later books – my favourite being one about her young life and her mother, who she adored – Sido which was published in 1929. That I keep to hand and dip into often – the descriptions of her country life and the people who populated it are witty and warm. Not so this book – it is all too clear how Willy shaped this book into appealing to a more prurient interest. The funny dear narrator – Claudine – is such a wonderful story teller and the stories of how she misses her country life but how interesting the people she meets in Paris as a seventeen year old are quite obviously pastiches of Colette’s own life, but pasted on top here and there are tales of Claudine’s childish play at being a lesbian – that do not ring of the truth of the rest of it. I know that Colette had many love affairs with women in her life, but these do not feel like that – they feel like a man’s desire to be titillated and a writer who had to bend to that desire. Oh well. It is fun to read about Paris streets that I recognize so there’s that.

And so this is how this week goes. Dipping into various books, a little painting, a contemplation of the glory that the trees are (even as I write this the leaves are dropping so quickly) and a slow coming back to a routine.