Archive for November, 2012

Wine, books, philosophy, conviviality … and a very good vieux prune and eau de vie.

When I told friends in Paris I was going to Lagrasse, no one had even heard of it.  “Grasse?” they kept asking in puzzlement.  “Non, Lagrasse,” I kept insisting. They didn’t quite believe me.

Chez moi … at least for a day or two

Yet this little village in Languedoc-Roussillon is a gem is rated as one of “Les Plus Beaux Villages de France.” Nestled in the foothills of the Pyrénées, it hosts a twice-a-year literary festival, Banquet des Livres and also hosts a very active philosophy society.  As Libération puts it: “Au cœur des Corbières, le village de Lagrasse mêle le goût du vin à celui de la parole, la philosophie à la littérature, l’exigence à la convivialité.”

Charlemagne okayed it.

I went on a walking tour along the narrow medieval streets with a friend I hadn’t seen in 35 years – the way-back days in Pokhara and Kathmandu.  The village of about 500 is easily walkable.  A few minutes walk away from his home, where I’m a guest for a few days, is the abbey built in the time of Charlemagne, and the 1303 Pont-Vieux à Lagrasse on the river l’Orbieu.

We are in the very south of France, close to the Spanish border.  Lots of signs say that this is “Pays Cathars” – an odd thing to brag about, since the Cathars were slaughtered mercilessly in these parts.  For me, it was a bit like seeing advertisements directing drivers to the locales of concentration camps.

But after a spirited dinner party (with an excellent locally made vieux prune and eau de vie), my dinner companions explained to me that the Cathar movement symbolized local resistance, and is a sign of local pride.

Maybe.  I guess I can see it.

Simone Weil of course wrote a great deal about the Albigensian crusades that routed out the Cathar heresy.  I like this quote from her the best: “Official history is believing the murderers at their word.”

Mama’s boy.

When the legendary biographer Diane Middlebrook died of cancer in 2007, she left behind an unfinished manuscript about the Roman poet who had been her lifelong passion. Had death not halted her progress, Ovid: A Biography would almost certainly be in print by now.

In her last months, she tried to radically revamp her book into a study of Ovid’s early years, Young Ovid. Finally she had to abandon the project altogether, leaving as her completed legacy Anne Sexton: A Biography (1992), Suits Me: The Double Life of Billie Tipton (1999), and Her Husband: Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, A Marriage (2003).

Her executors, her daughter Leah Middlebrook and literary scholar Nancy K. Miller, are working to publish the completed sections of the book. The first of their efforts has been published in the current edition of Feminist Studies as “20 March, 43 BCE: Ovid is Born.”

Her work cut short.

The piece describes childbirth practices in ancient Rome as well as the role of Ovid’s family – particularly his mother – in his writing and his life.

“Was it in childhood that Ovid’s imagination was captivated by what went on among women sitting together over their spindles and their looms?” Middlebrook asks. “If Ovid’s poetry is original in its treatment of fathers, it is unique in ancient literature in its representation of the social world that women created for themselves within the household, a world largely concealed from the attention of men. Women of all ages and kinds appear and interact with one another in Ovid’s tales, enriching the world of the poem and broadening its emotional and social reach. If an unwelcome man should arrive on the scene, interrupting the women, this world would immediately fold itself up and away out of sight. A male child of less than 7 years, however, might have been a tolerated exception.”

Stanford colleague and friend Terry Castle said of the article (which can be ordered online here), “It’s a lovely memorial to Diane, but also a marvelously interesting essay on Ovid and the nature of childbirth in ancient Rome: a feminist topic if ever there were one.”

(By the by, I just discovered Diane Middlebrook’s 1998 lecture on Ovid online here.)

The superb Prélude de Paris playing for free in Colette Place. (Photo: C.L. Haven)

It’s hard to avoid cultural life in Paris – unless you put your mind to it.  And to my continual surprise, some people do precisely that.

As I was leaving my apartment today to say farewell to a few haunts in Paris, I heard a professional or quasi-professional choir on the streets below singing Christmas carols to an audience of passers-by.  By the time I got to Colette Place next to the Louvre, I ran into Prélude de Paris playing Vivaldi for whoever would like to listen.  (If you would like to listen to them, try here.)

Lonely guy.

Meanwhile, since Paris is the City of Love, I have to confess I fell hard while visiting the celebrated “Raphaël, les dernières années” at the Louvre, a historic collection exhibition in partnership with Prado (it continues till January 14). The Louvre itself lends itself to the sublime – and so does Jean-Baptiste, at right.  He was skilfully set in a small passageway of great paintings, all making the same gesture.  But he was … special.

Now here’s the thing:  I was all alone in my passion.  Everyone was swarming where they were told to swarm – the pack was thick around some of the bigger paintings, but Leonardo da Vinci‘s stunning work was all by its lonesome. It is believed to be Leonardo’s last painting, sometime between 1513-1516.

Different story a few floors above (no pun intended).  In deference to Zbigniew Herbert‘s poem, I dutifully made the trek, following the prominent signs, to the Mona Lisa.  I couldn’t get within 15 feet of it, the crowds waving cellphones at it, like masses of seaweed swaying on the ocean floor.

My friend Max Taylor said it’s the same old, same old:  “I will never forget the first time I saw this painting, in July 1976, about a month before I turned fifteen. The Mona Lisa was behind glass a few paintings away on the same wall and was attracting all the attention, while everyone was ignoring this mysterious and fascinating painting.”

My friend and artist Susan Williamson told me I better enjoy it while it lasts.  He will not always be “‘a light that shineth in the darkness.” Jean-Baptiste is about to vanish on me.  Apparently Leonardo, who was always experimenting with pigments, mixed resin tar tar in one of the layers of paint. Susan has tried it herself, and said it gives a beautiful, honey-colored glow to her painting … at first.  Then it keeps darkening and darkening over the years, to pitch black eventually.  It’s not a fixable problem, because the resin and paint and tar are all mixed up together.

Enjoy him while he lasts.  He’s worth it.  Only another century or so to go … then pffffftttt!

Is it really so bad? The view outside my window. (Louvre at back, with trees of the Jardin du Palais Royal.)

Paris is for lovers, right?  Mais non.

I actually enjoy wandering the narrow streets of the first arrondissement alone, exploring the byways that open unexpectedly to a spectacular scene like the autumn trees of the Jardin du Palais Royal, or ducking out to the fromagerie for some Roquefort from the Pyrenées, or discovering a 200-year-old bakery around the corner, Au Grand Richelieu, which provides homemade marrons glacés – or simply sitting alone, in my tiny studio apartment overlooking the Louvre.  There is no one to mediate or mitigate my interaction with the city – it’s a direct hit, every step I take.

Susan Sontag, who adored Paris, nevertheless found being alone a drag – even for a quick croissant and coffee in the morning with Le Monde.  She told memoirist  Sigrid Nunez that when she was alone, her “mind went blank” like “static on the screen when a channel stops broadcasting.” Yet she also claimed, “One can never be alone enough to write.”  Well, that’s the point, isn’t it?

Emily Cooke discusses the writer’s solitude over at The New Inquiry:  “Being alone lets you develop, become strange, be mad. If to be with people is to be socialized, to submit your rough edges to the whetstone of others’ desires, to be asocial is to be ragged and, thus, original.”

Sontag falls under her lorgnette, but so does Vivian Gornick and Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik.

Read the whole thing here.

Postscript on 11/25:  My friend Pierre de Taille over at La Plume Périodique  tells me what I already knew: “Roquefort cheese is not from the Pyrenées but from the region of the village of Roquefort, south of Le Massif Central (http://www.roquefort.fr/decouvrir/le-village/).  There are similar kinds of cheeses in the Pyrénées, one of the best being from the town of Salies-du-Salat, a little hard to find but delicious.”  What can I say?  They told me it was Roquefort from the Pyrenées, but maybe they didn’t want to explain to all their customers why a very similar cheese is from the Pyrenées.  It just confuses us.  The price would certainly suggest it was hard-to-find. Thanks, Pierre!

As soon as I read this passage in Marcel Proust‘s Swann’s Way, I knew I must have one:

Being the only rather vulgar person in our family, she took care to point out to strangers, when they were talking about Swann, that, had he wanted to, he could have lived on the boulevard Haussmann or the avenue de l’Opéra, that he was the son of M. Swann, who must have left four or five million, but that this was his whim.  One that she felt moreover must be so amusing to others that in Paris, when M. Swann came on New Year’s Day to bring her her bag of marrons glacés, she never failed, if there was company, to say to him: “Well, Monsieur Swann! Do you still live next door to the wine warehouse, so as to be sure of not missing the train when you go to Lyon?”  And she would look out of the corner of her eye, over her lorgnon, at the other visitors.

These candied chestnuts migrated to northern Italy and southern France after the Crusades.  Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about them:

“The earliest known record of a recipe for marrons glacés was written by the French at the end of 17th century in Louis XIV‘s Versailles court.  In 1667, François Pierre La Varenne, ten years’ chef de cuisine to Nicolas Chalon du Blé, Marquis of Uxelles (near Lyon and a chestnut-producing area), and foremost figure of the nouvelle cuisine movement of the time, published his best-selling book Le parfaict confiturier. In it he describes ‘la façon de faire marron pour tirer au sec’ (‘the way to make (a) chestnut (so as) to “pull it dry”‘); this may well be the first record of the recipe for marrons glacés. ‘Tirer au sec’ means, in a confectionery context, ‘to remove (what’s being candied) from the syrup’. La Varenne’s book was edited 30 times in 75 years.”

Good enough for him.

So that’s how I celebrated my Thanksgiving.  Returning home from the Sorbonne, I stopped in a boulangerie on the Rue de Richelieu for a baguette, and saw a enormous pile of marrons glacés.  I had my doubts.  The little suckers were going for 1.80 euros apiece.  I’ve never been able to quite make friends with the humble chestnut – you know, the “chestnuts roasting on an open fire,” and so on every Christmas – and that, despite making a reasonably good chestnut soufflé in the wintertime.  But the marron glacé?  Un vrai délice!

Have a happy Thanksgiving.  And don’t pass them up, if you get the chance.

(Or try the recipe here.)

It is too late to make your own nominations this year, but London’s Literary Review is about to announce this year’s winners for one of the world’s most dreaded competitions:  the 20th annual award for the most embarrassing passage of sexual description in a novel, to take place  on December 4, 2012.

According to Jonathan Beckman, a senior editor, wrote in the Financial Times last year: “Auberon Waugh, Literary Review’s former editor, founded the prize with crusading purpose. He was genuinely convinced that publishers were encouraging novelists to include sex scenes solely in order to increase sales. The award’s remit was ‘to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it’. But it is rather hard to convey the redundancy of a passage to an audience that has not read the entire novel, and so the prize has evolved to acknowledge the absurd, the implausible, the overwritten and the unwittingly comical.”

This year’s finalists are:

• The Yips by Nicola Barker
• The Adventuress by Nicholas Coleridge
• Infrared by Nancy Huston
• Rare Earth by Paul Mason
• Noughties by Ben Masters
• The Quiddity of Will Self by Sam Mills
• The Divine Comedy by Craig Raine
• Back to Blood by Tom Wolfe  (he was a 2004 winner, too!)

I think they’ll have difficulty topping previous winners.  Rowan Somerville was awarded for this passage in The Shape of Her: “Like a lepidopterist mounting a tough-skinned insect with a too blunt pin he screwed himself into her.”  Tom Wolfe winning 2004 entry in I Am Charlotte Simmons: “Moan moan moan moan moan went Hoyt as he slithered slithered slithered slithered and caress caress caress caress went the fingers.”

Go over to the #LRBadSex2012 twitter hashtag to check out some of this year’s more promising contenders. How about this one? “She smells of almonds, like a plump Bakewell pudding; and he is the spoon, the whipped cream, the helpless dollop of custard.”

Beckman wrote: “It did not occur to me on joining the magazine that my job would include, every autumn, the corralling of a selection of egregious descriptions of sexual activity.”

It’s a tough job, but somebody’s got to do it.  The difficult work is described in the video below.