First set goes to the viral team

Never mind about writing anything meaningful – my biggest problem right now is staying awake long enough to read my way to the end of a sentence. Addissiatz pla brave mounde translates more or less as Hey y’all! in Occitanian.  I’ll be back later –  for the time being, I have to go root for the lymphatic system again.

And, preferably, some funny reading

I just suggested the garlic treatment to someone whose personal internal drive is under viral attack. I’ll save the garlic for later, in my case: six am is a bit early for garlic, even in France. I’ll stick to tea with lemon and ibuprofene, for the time being. No, I hadn’t intended to blog about my virus attack but I offer it up in a spirit of blogger solidarity, so to speak.

The photo du jour is part of same: I grabbed it the other day on rue des Peseignes. As with just about everything on that street, Monsieur Gout’s supermarket was felled by the crash of the leather industry in this town. In French, ‘gout’ does not describe the same  painful condition it does in English; if you add an accent on the ‘u’, you get the word ‘goût’ which means taste.

In story, I stopped yesterday at a point when one of my characters was having thoughts of goofing off – a fairly uncharacteristic activity for her. I did some random reading, then picked up my good old Pablo Neruda.  Found him in Paris, after the Spanish Civil War, goofing off with none other than French poet Paul Éluard. At which point Neruda reveals the  following secret: nothing is more important to poets than wasting their time. Apparently Neruda and Éluard did wonders together in that regard. Neruda writes: “Avec Paul, je perdais la notion du jour et de la nuit qui s’écoulaient et je n’ai jamais su si nos propos avaient ou non de l’importance.” (With Paul, I lost all notion of the passing of both the day and the night time, and I never found out if our exchanges mattered or not.) Sounds like high-quality moodling to me.

I see Pablo is about to meet Nancy Cunard who has a printing press. Apparently, Nancy translated Lewis Carroll’s  Fit the Fourth into French. The mind boggles. How do you translate ‘Snark’? What about ‘uffish’, ‘gallumphing’, or ‘Jubjub’?

More tea is in order over here, for now. My best to mankind, both in the general and in its particular manifestations.

***

P.S. at 13:20 (it’s that kind of day):  a new Not To Be Missed link on the blogroll – the one, the only Bureau of Public Secrets. You’re welcome. I’ll now attempt a bit of writing( but sleeping and playing mah-jong solitaire come more naturally today).

Structure and chronology

Two surprises yesterday: forty-seven years after the events, I finally managed to get down in writing a specific set of  inter-related incidents from that summer, in exactly the words needed for them – no more, no less. Once that was done, I found my way back into my story – not because I’m using any of those incidents in it but because some of the energy locked away in those memories finally became available for other uses. Things and people ripen at their own pace, if you let them.

That last truism also applies to administrative matters, apparently: the second surprise was receiving a letter from l’administration française informing me I have suddenly been deemed eligible to the ten-year  residency permit, will I kindly forward an entirely new set of those papers already provided for the one-year version. I admit turning the letter over several times and then reading through slowly again, looking for the administrative escape clause.  I haven’t found it yet. Still, I reserve my elation for the day when I’ll see the document itself. For the time being, I’m mostly  laughing at the thought of a paper with an expiry date that may well outlast my own.

Finished  The Plague of Doves last night. Apart from the pleasure of reading such a fabulous storyteller, the greatest thing about the experience is a renewed sense of freedom concerning my own writing. Erdrich’s book is tautly structured in a way that’s uniquely her own. Anyone who would set out to replicate such an approach would probably end up with a sorry mess, whereas here you have different sections of the story reverberating off each other. They’ll probably continue to do so for a long time in my own mind. On a personal and idiosyncratic note, I was really pleased to come across a dog named Pogo, living out his days in Louise Erdrich storyland – long may he thrive.

So I’m back in my own story with  these important pieces of additional knowledge: 1)beyond length or number of chapters and sections,  the structure of the work is determined by the author’s way of setting out what matters and why; 2) the only chronology that counts is the one having to do with the fruit being ready to drop from the tree.

Photo done on rue de Peseignes, two days ago while I pondered where I was going with my manuscript.

P.S. A happy Thanksgiving to my American friends.