Reading in Paris - Thursday 3rd July

Paris Writers Workshop
and the literary journal Upstairs at Duroc

invite you to a reading
featuring prose and poetry by

Jeffrey Greene
Marilyn Hacker
Ellen Hinsey
Chim Nwabueze
Jonathan Wonham

At Forum 104
104 rue de Vaugirard
75006 Paris
Metro St. Placide or Montparnasse
(in the Bibliothèque of Forum 104)

Thursday July 3, 2008, 7 PM

Adieu

Our days in France are limited. Limited to only a couple of weeks in fact. Where has the time gone? We've been in France for five years now, having arrived in the midst of the dreadful canicule heat wave summer of 2003. I remember when we first arrived at our new house, walking in through the door at 10 pm in the evening and feeling the heat trapped inside. I touched the radiator and shouted "some idiots left the heating turned on!" But they hadn't. It was just the latent heat of that tremendously hot day still throbbing through the pipes.

My younger daughter, that's her in the photograph above, has grown up here, and it's her who will miss the place most. I can hear her playing next door at the moment, talking to herself in French. Luckily we have been able to find a French school in the place we are going to, so she will not lose this gift. It has been great to see her slowly fitting in among her French peer group, and to see how well loved she is by the teacher, whom she adores in return, kissing her on the cheek in the morning when she arrives and in the evening when she leaves. She is the only child that does this!

France hasn't changed very radically in the five years we have been here, and I think that is, on the whole, a good thing. The longer I am here, the more I appreciate the rather conservative approach of the French. A suspicious approach to liberal free market economics, a healthy over-evaluation of their own culture, a robust state bureaucracy, plenty of rules, plenty of formality, no Sunday opening. All of this is good for France in an odd sort of way. It slows down the pace of life to one that is manageable, not frenetic. It values traditional things and at the same time does not seem to stymie innovation.

There is, in France, a level of group activity which should be the envy of other countries in Europe. In my sphere of interest, for example, there is the 'Marche de la Poesie' which brings together all the small publishers of poetry from all over France and unites them in a single poetry jamboree. This kind of event, which exists in all different spheres and at both regional and countrywide level, can allow you to become passionate about the things you love, whether that be reading poetry, consuming wine and cheese or touring on a racing bicycle.

So now we have to bid our adieus. Several friends have said they wished we were staying. Have said how much they value our contributions to the community. They are especially referring to my wife who has energetically supported almost every organisation known in Croissy-sur-Seine. But... our thoughts are already moving on, we have found a new house, are dreaming of mountains, fjords and sandy beaches...

A House I Pass Every Morning No. 9: The Brick House

The intelligent pig built his house of bricks.

He sat quite safe and snug inside, watching the remains of a wolf turning in the pot.

He was proud of his house and its beautiful bricks.

They fitted together so neatly, and the brickmaker had delivered two different colours so that, almost by chance, the pig had found himself positioning his bricks to make fancy patterns.

He was not quite sure why he had started making patterns, but it was sure that once he had started, it had become difficult to stop.

His house was so unlike the others. The different coloured bricks, the pattern.

A pig who built his house of stone could never have a house like that. Stone was all rough edged, a thousand mottled shades. There was no precision in it. You couldn't even lie them in an even row.

Precision and strength, that's what his house had. It was the embodiment of law and order. Any wolf that snuck up to his door would get what it had coming to it.

A grey day in Paris, with a flash of red

It's been a grey day in Paris, cloud chasing cloud across a sombre sky patched with blue, occasional spatters of rain on the windows. This time of year seems to be generally quite wet. Freakishly powerful thunderstorms strike the city from time to time causing flooding, interspersed with a few hot days here and there, just enough to get the mould spores growing. A couple of weeks ago I was walking home in the evening from the train when it started to rain. A few minutes later, before I made the safety of my home, the lightning was crashing so close to me I put my umbrella down and decided to run for it. By the time I got inside I was drowned like a rat.

Toay, I left my office at La Defense early in order to come home and see my daughter play guitar in her school music concert. I rarely leave the office as early as 3.30 pm, and I don't know what encouraged me to walk a little further down the platform than I usually do, but when I sat down on the train, I suddenly realised that I was sitting opposite an extremely old man.

It is quite rare to see very old people on the RER. Maybe it's the door handles that can be difficult to turn which discourages them. Maybe its the rude character of the seats and the grafitti scratched on the windows. This very old man was shrewd looking and turning his head rapidly from side to side in order to look out of the windows and peer all around him. He was not just sitting, but animatedly observing.

His skin was very pale, almost transparent, patched here and there on his neck with light brown liver spots. He was wearing golden glasses with rather large lenses that gave his face a hawkish appearance, his nose slightly hooked and his head turning as if looking for prey. His hair was completely white, a little tufty in places and forming a halo around his head. There was a plump man sitting next to him, hemming him in, and when this man got off at Nanterre Université, the old man got up, apparently rather relieved, and took off his thick winter coat.

Underneath he was wearing a jacket and tie, the jacket cut in a heavy dark green tweed. On one thick, wide lapel of the jacket, a tiny but bright flash of red had been sown that stood out against the dark green wool. It is the sign that this very old man was a member of France's 'Légion d’Honneur'. Now I was sure. It was Claude Levi-Strauss. This year, on 28th November, he will be 100 years old.

"When the miracle occurs, as it sometimes does; when, on one side and the other of the hidden crack, there are suddenly to be found cheek-by-jowl two green plants of hidden species, each of which has chosen the most favourable soil; and when at the same time two ammonites with unevenly intricate involutions can be glimpsed in the rocks, thus testifying in their own way to a gap of several tens of thousands of years suddenly space and time become one: the living diversity of the moment juxtaposes and perpetuates the ages. Thought and emotion move into a new dimension where every drop of sweat, every muscular movement, every gasp of breath becomes symbolic of a past history, the development of which is reproduced in my body, at the same time as my thought embraces its significance. I feel myself to be steeped in a more dense intelligibility, within which centuries and distances answer each other and speak with one and the same voice." Claude Levi-Strauss 'Tristes Tropiques'

A Brick Is... (Part 2)

Beach Brick
Originally uploaded by SideLong.


Following their summary of the historical development of brick-making and its cultural impact, the authors move on to an analysis of the brick in the collective imagination. Their method is to make a questionnaire which draws responses on the associative aspects of bricks. Questions such as: "If a brick was an animal, what animal would it be?" A question frequently answered by the response 'tortoise', a creature with a somewhat brick like shape, but which also carried its home on its back.

The responses of 120 questioned people are analysed in a structured way, looking at (1) substance: fire, earth (2) fabrication (3) aspect: form, colour, texture, density (4) construction role: basic element, decoration (5) use (6) properties: durability, weaknesses, physical constraints.

The author's interpretations are preceded by short 'poems' which reuse the words issued from the questionnaire. Here is the first one, in translation, preceding the section on 'Fire'.

THE FIRE
which smoulders under the RED EARTH
the HOT STONE
sparked from the FLINTSTONE
split by the FLAME-THROWER
the LIGHTNING
the THUNDER
disappearing into SULPHUR
ACRID SMELL OF BURNING
touching the STARS
the UNIVERSE
reappearing as a god RA SUN FLAMING
LIGHT
falling as METEOR
accompanying ORPHEUS to HELL
SATAN

VOLCANO
with its HAMMERS its ANVILS
will deliver it to men

Half the people qquestioned made reference to fire in their responses, sometimes by reference to the sun, but more often to subterranean fire, hell, volcanos... fire at once purifying, living and at the same time destructive, choking. Here, already, is the first break in signification: well-being and isolation versus violence, war and suffocation.

Moving to the second quality of substance: 'Earth' preceded by the following:

MAN
locks up the FIRE
in the BREAD OVEN
and returns TO WORK THE EARTH
HUMID
WARM
AROMATIC

Where ELMS grow
the EARTH
is HEAVY
PLASTIC
he MOULDS it

DUST
under the SUN
WATER
indeed a MUSH
that he KNEADS BY HAND
as he has seen his MOTHER do
KNEADING THE ESSENTIAL BREAD

He invents a tool to FASHION it
BEAT it
FORM it
MOULD it

So that with his MOTHER
and his FOREBEARS
leading his BROTHERS
his COUSINS
his UNCLES
he reopens the OVEN
where the BREAD is cooked
and places his DOUGH

Clay and earth are named, sometimes with the rhyming asociation of 'Terre-Mere'. reminsicent of the earth's fecundity and the matriarchal gods (Persephone, Inanna-Ishtar) worshipped by the first agricultural civilisations and later side-lined by male celestial deities in more urban, hierarchical societies.

A Brick Is... (Part 1)

Bricks
Originally uploaded by Esparta.

Last week I was invited to our neighbour's house to participate in a "soiree de conversation anglais". Each member of the group prepares a short recitation in English on a set subject. The contributions are generally humorous and eccentric explorations of an alien language. This week the subject was 'Hot and Cold'. We learnt that a 'hot seat' in America is an electric chair and pondered the origin of 'cold turkey', wondering if perhaps the phrase 'cold chicken' might be used to describe the enforced deprivation of minor drugs such as caffeine. After a dose of language, the evening moved on to a pot-luck supper - which turned out to be very pot-luck: black pudding, onion quiche and seven different desserts...

Our neighbours, both members of the group, have lived in their house for more than thirty years. The husband is an architect who designed the house in the 1970s. It is semi-detached, originally built as an experiment in communal living with his neighbour (not us, the other one). The interior design is open plan with upper and lower level connected to form a large open space in the living area. Our neighbours love to travel and have many souveniers of visits to Africa. The book case is also quite fascinating and I sometimes glance surreptitiously at it when I visit.

On this latest occasion, I noticed a copy of Ferdinand de Saussure's 'Cours de linguistique générale', a large, daunting-looking book with a bright orange cover. I asked if I could have a look at it and immediately noticed that it had been read and analysed in some detail with pencil jottings in the margin. When I asked about this, our friend explained that it had been one of the basic texts that had informed his architectural thesis, an analysis of the signification of bricks.

I have borrowed this thesis, written in 1978, and have it in front of me now. The introduction outlines the scope of the study: "We have tried a different approach to the problem (of the signification of architecture). If architecture - a social product - can be a bearer of signs, it is not architecture itself which should be interpreted, but the conditions which produce it... but the subject is too vast, and we must find a narrower point of focus. The brick is the first achieved element in the history of architecture of which a trace can be found..."

The thesis charts the use of brick from the moment 9000 years ago when, with the cultivation of wheat, mediterranean peoples began a sedentary lifestyle and began to invest their energy in the building of permanent homes using brick. They discuss the first brick to have been discovered from archaeological investigations, which comes from Jericho and was made around the 8th millenium. The clay in this area, a powdery aeolian silt containing a strong proportion of lime creates a maleable mixture which is extremely strong when it dries. For the authors, the finger prints made along the top of these bricks, evokes a loaf of bread.

They trace the importance of brick in the building of the earliest great civilisations of Sumeria and Mesopotamia. The god of brick was called Kulla, created from a pinch of clay drawn from the Apson, the "primordial river". "The brick is the symbol of the man fixed in his home, with security and divine protection; but also of limit: of rules, of measure. The closed society as opposed to the open society of the nomad." The development of the oven-baked brick facilitated, according to the authors, a social stratification of society with these better quality bricks being used for palaces and official buildings. Eventually, among the Babylonians, the oven-baked bricks of palaces began to be marked with the seal of the god-king.

The Romans were responsible for propagating brick-making technology throughout their empire, and hence into all parts of Europe. Through the next centuries, however, it was generally the regions that lacked building stone which turned to brick as a building material. This meant that certain regions of Europe became strongly identified with brick built buildings, others not. In Tudor Britain, however, the use of brick became fashioanble since it was associated with the cnstruction of royal palaces, even to the extent that, in regions where stone was common, brick remained the preferred building material among the nobility. In regions where stone was not present, itinerant brick-makers would construct houses from bricks made of clay extracted from a pit that eventually became the house's own cellar.

By 1820, in a world of economic liberalism and inexistant work laws, whole families would manufacture tonnes of brick during 16 hour work days. The quality of the bricks was better when worked by hand, moulding the clay with sand scattered on the work bench in the same manner that a baker would kneed bread on a bench scattered with flour, to stop the dough from sticking. From around this date, the hand-process was replaced little-by-little by machines which accelerated the brick-making process, while replicating the traditional mixing and moulding manipulations of the hand process.

Industrialisation, and the seach for materials which would allow the bricks to bake more quickly - thereby saving energy costs, degraded the quality of bricks and gave them the reputation of a cheap material. In Britain, the 'Fletton Brick' quarried from the Lower Oxford Clay near Peterborough, was found to use 65% less energy to bake than other bricks and gave rise to the London Brick Company, a business so successful that its economical product was able to fight off all competition and hence provide a distinctive face to much British architecture.

Industrialisation also led to innovation in brick production, notably in the creation of perforated bricks of different size and shape with a variety of surface textures. This in turn led to a technicialisation of what had always been a relatively simple process: the building of a wall. Now different kinds of brick were required to provide strength, ventilation, insulation etc.

In opposition to this specialism, at the close of the 20th Century, brick-makers were also returning to traditional methods of brick-creation. Such bricks were expensive and were used in a distinctly different manner than the traditional, as decorative gables and entrance decorations, their presence symbolic of a 'lost paradise'.

All of this historical evolution has left the brick with a very varied image and symbolic significance which is then taken up in the second part of the thesis by an analysis of the associative and significatory aspects of brick (to be continued...)

Vicky's Tips

Vicky, my better half, is currently making regular appearances on the Yvelines Premiere cable TV network: "L'atualité des Yvelines dans la langue de Shakespeare..." It's a TV show aimed at ex-pats living in Paris.

This week, Vicky scrubs up well as a James Bond girl...

She appears about half way through...

And if you feel in need of further tippilation, there are two of her other shows here.

Reading in Aberdeen, Thursday 15th May 2008

I will be reading my poetry in Aberdeen tomorrow evening, Thursday 15th May, with three other poets from Paris: Joe Ross, Michelle Noteboom and Rufo Quintavalle.

The reading is part of Aberdeen's Wordfringe festival and will be held at Books and Beans bookshop, 22 Belmont Street, starting at 6.30 pm.

Further details can be found here.