What I'm reading? Often Modiano

I read a lot of books by Patrick Modiano -- thank God he is so prolific! I'm sort of obsessed by him and his work.

So I figured why not review his latest work from Yale University Press?

It's not his best, as I say in this review below for Cleaver Magazine, a lit mag based in Philadelphia and run by some fellow Bennington Writing Seminar alums, but you won't regret reading it (and in the review I tell you which books to seek out, including the title in the picture).

Here's a link to the full review:

https://www.cleavermagazine.com/scene-of-the-crime-a-novel-by-patrick-modianom-reviewed-by-jeanne-bonner/

As I mention in the review, the action in Scene of the Crime revolves around a character called Jean Bosmans who stumbles upon a series of coincidences involving his childhood home and a group of shady individuals who are alarmingly interested in his past.

The plot is par for the course for this French Nobel Laureate who has dedicated his literary career to exhuming the ghosts of wartime Paris through semi-autobiographical fiction.

The plot is also beside the point—and in some ways, I love that.

Nearly all of Modiano’s works touch on memory and childhood, as the author pieces together fictionalized episodes with his father, a shadowy figure who was on the run during World War II because of his Jewish heritage and willing to get his hands dirty to stay free. Born in 1945, Modiano has trained his gaze permanently on the war years that immediately preceded his birth, and the post-war years that are often referred to as the Thirty Glorious Years. As Alice Kaplan noted in a 2017 article for the Paris Review, Modiano likes to say he “is a child of the war.” She quotes him as saying: “Faced with the silence of our parents we worked it all out as if we had lived it ourselves.”

Modiano has been accused of writing the same book over and over. Many writers have been the subject of such an accusation and it’s probably true, but few are as magnanimous about it. Indeed, Modiano has admitted it during interviews, perhaps because he doesn’t see it as an insult or a problem.

Similarly, I enjoy reading his work because I'm always hoping he will add to the portrait he's been building of his father. And of course he always does. Sometimes more satisfactorily, sometimes less so.

But he's sifting through the wreckage of memories, and using fiction to uncover something that's even truer than fact.

I enjoy reading Modiano's work so much that I've begun reading one of his books in French -- desperately relying on knowledge I stored up for the most part back in Junior High School! I keep the English translation in my lap and refer to it every other sentence -- what passes for fun in my world.

-30-

Italy, or walk, eat, drink, pray, revel

Here in Italy, I want, I want, I want.

I want to explore, roam, browse, buy, consume, swim, run, row, climb, grab, have, revel. 

In my other life, I have learned to tame some of my worst desires and urges so I can (quite happily, most days) live a nice, quiet suburban, semi-Catholic life. 

But here in Florence (and before that, to some degree, in Rome and Milan), I become someone  who could work for the Home Shopping Network. I walk into stores I like and just begin grabbing things (mentally, at least) because I know I want everything and my time is limited and I need to go home with something that reminds me of the holiday's golden hours (which, of course, remind me of the original golden hours, so many years ago).

I want to do high-brow and low-brow and no brow. I want to spend the time here tiring my body -- no, I want to spend the day tiring my mind. Wait, no: I want to spend the day tiring my spirit.

I engineered it so I would wake up early today – usually that means writing, and here we are, 7 a.m., Thursday morning. But I also want to run along the Arno. And I also want to see the pietre d’inciampo.  And search for the best ciambellina (while having another caffe). I want to revisit old haunts but no, I want to find new worlds and environments.

That's not all: I want to write in my journal. I want to take photos. I want to record snippets of conversation at bus stops.

Also, like I said: I want to shop until I drop (which I NEVER want to do). Oh and I’d like, with Leo, to light a candle in every church we encounter (while saying a prayer for Mommy).

I want to walk along the cobblestones. I want to find the rare green oases hidden in this city (or go up into the mountains, as we did yesterday with Mike's friend, Dante. The other Dante?). I want a holiday with my family where I am explaining my Italian world in English to my American son, and I also want to be so immersed in Italian I feel buried by la lingua di Dante (Dante Alghieri and Mike's friend, Dante).

I want it all.

And I have already written this diary entry! More or less -- four years ago, and also six years ago and also…

But I feel these desires so keenly now because I know how time works. When I was here in 2018, we were already speaking of a future trip in 2020.

Need I say there was no future trip in 2020? We were prisoners of the backyard.

Yet even now, as Covid has slightly receded (or our fear of it has), I know I won’t be back next month – maybe not even next year.

And so I want, I want, I want. And I only have three days left to fulfill all of these voglie and desideri and fantasie.

While I would prefer to want less, I am happy to say the thing I want most is to walk every street in Florence. And you might be surprised how close I am to doing just that!

-30-

My First Mother's Day

The morning of my first Mother’s Day, something strange happened. Something that has nothing to do with motherhood -- or not exactly. 

I was sleep-deprived like any other first-time mom that morning. 

But it wasn't because of Leo, who was ten months old. Instead, the day before, I had worked obsessively on a short story in between Saturday chores. Fiction, in other words. What on earth, I thought. I was a journalist, pure and simple.

The piece – my first attempt at writing fiction since the seminal (!) story "Mrs. GoodCookies," which I wrote in childhood -- wouldn’t leave me alone; what double life was the main character hiding? (An American ex-pat, as it turns out).

While I endeavored to figure this out, a double life of my own emerged, as I contrived to find time to write as if scrambling to conceal an affair. I invented an excuse about having to drive to the office to work on a project – on Saturday, something I never did. I also wrote – in my head – while pushing my son in his stroller through the Grant Park farmer’s market, then raced to my computer once back home so I could transcribe the lines.

That night, I went to bed late (10:30 p.m.!!! no joke), still on a high from having written the story. I awoke the next morning at 4:30 a.m., unable to get back to sleep because sentences for the story were chasing me around in the dark. What was happening to me?

Spoiler alert: the story hasn't been published, beyond my Bennington thesis, and may never be ready for print.

But the experience galvanized me to make writing my primary hobby, my main vice, my eternal crutch, my singular passion, my vocation. If you want to torture me -- do you?! -- take away my writing implements (and my Italian coffee, which happen to go hand in hand -- #5amwritersclub #sometimes).

Ten days before Leo was born, I'd scribbled something on the back of an envelope while sleepless in the middle of the night. (I wrote about it briefly here for Longreads). The next night I did the same thing. Then in the hospital that warm July I brought along a journal (as the photo above attests) -- something I hadn't done since my ex-pat years in Italy.

Slowly I began making time and space for writing, especially after Mr. Leonardo Patrick began sleeping through the night.

Yet the Mother's Day of my first full year as a mother was the turning point. Writing took over my brain. And thankfully it continues to pull the levers.

For years, I was convinced becoming a mother would force me to abandon all thought of books, politics, current events – everything. I would cease to be me, I assumed, even as my Aunt Maureen said motherhood made her more flexible (turns out: she was right!).

Instead, the birth of Leo sparked the rebirth of my writing life. Far from sending the life of the mind in exile, it reunited me with creative writing. 

(I think it helps that I only have one child; there was no time for my mother to reunite with anything other than the vacuum or the dishes).

I don't live an unusual life. I certainly don't live an unusually successful life. But this one unusual happenstance changed everything.

Long had I searched for the door into the World of Writing -- the door to wanting to write all the time. I was told at age 9 that I would become a writer, for better or for worse. But how to do that? I didn't know.

With great envy did I read profiles of writers and artists, whose passion for their craft seeped out of the pages and into my jaded mind.

What I know now: they had given up everything for their work. 

And I believe that when I gave up everything to have Leo -- infertility will convince you that most of your worldly vices need to go -- the result was not only a baby (THANK GOD THANK GOD THANK GOD) but a writing life, too.

Not the writing life I dreamed of -- the one I didn't even allow myself to imagine.

To be clear, it's a writing life that so far hasn't yielded a book (I was thrilled about the short story I wrote on my first Mother's Day but I don't remember my classmates being all that thrilled with it later during at a workshop at Bennington -- my blessed destination after writing that story). No one knows my name. I don't even teach writing full-time. But I write all the time -- and it's, again, a vocation, a vacation, a trip to the spa (and to the moon), an evening out, a session with the therapist.

So on Mother's Day, I plan to do a little writing. 

Oh and HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY, ladies!

-30-

When an ex-reporter like me tries to write fiction

“Well, is he crooked or not? 

My editor didn’t bother waiting for me to walk across the newsroom to his desk. He'd spotted me the moment I turned the corner from the hall by the elevator into the large open space where all of us reporters and editors worked. I was reading an email from my father on my smartphone while nibbling a bagel. Another day in journalism – fielding quasi-existential questions while inhaling lunch on the fly after a news conference ran long.

 

I was sapped. But I had been on the beat long enough to understand his unspoken question.

 

Without looking him in the eye, I said, “You ever cheat on your wife?”

 

I could feel Joe smile immediately, as if to say, “Now we’re getting somewhere.” It was almost as if I were able read his thoughts – how he preferred saucy women reporters to the men who wandered into the field with a sense of entitlement even though he wasn't going to object too much to the routine promotions of said men.

 

He allowed himself -- and me -- a small chuckle. “Not if I can help it.”

 

“Exactly.”

 

“Exactly what?” Looking at his watch, he picked up some papers from his desk. “I have to go into a roomful of editors right now and they’re going to want to know if the Mayor is crooked enough to put on the front page.”

 

“I know. And I’m telling you he might be as crooked as you are. Or he might be a helluva lot more crooked. Just can’t tell yet.”

 

The police scanner blared with static, and then the dispatcher's voice emerged. “Stay on the line caller,” she said, then nothing, followed by, “Caller advises that her husband has locked himself in the bathroom with a handgun and a three-year-old child…..”

 

We listened for a moment instinctively, then ignored it. Not our problem. Our corner of the City Desk didn't deal with the cop beat.

My Year in Writing (2017)

I began writing an annual 'Year in Writing' roundup after I discovered a 2014 piece by the writer Alexander Chee where he catalogued the many career milestones he'd wracked up that year. A year in review, as it were, but for writing. It looked incredibly impressive (he was the guy who came up with the Amtrak Writer-in-Residence idea) and something I wanted to do, probably because he is an extremely accomplished novelist who also publishes some fantastic travel writing! (He is).

Nonetheless I took the plunge, even though I'd never before written a post summing up the year in anything, writing or otherwise. As I wrote last year at this time, "You manage what you measure, right?"

For a long time, as I said then, I wasn't in any way measuring how much I wasn't accomplishing in the world of writing. 

But I'd say Bennington pretty much changed that. Once I enrolled in the MFA program there, I began to see possibilities -- and to use the words of Charles Bock, an author and Bennington alum, I also began to see writing as my permanent side job.

I've now begun to set writing goals for myself each year -- concrete objectives, some of which are definitely within reach. 

(There are also 'non-concrete' goals, like collaborate with Bono on a project. Yes that Bono! And no, it's not a joke! For me, at least).

This year, I wanted to publish something in a national magazine and I also wanted to publish some travel writing.

And....I did both! Although I should I say I did both with ONE assignment, rather than two.

I wrote two long stories, including a destination piece on Atlanta, for Delta Sky Magazine (you know, the mag in your seat pocket when you fly on Delta). As a longtime Delta flyer, I was thrilled to land a piece in a magazine I've cheerfully read many times! Plus, it was truly travel writing! You can read those pieces, plus a short profile of Mayor Kasim Reed, here.

There was another bit of travel writing that inspired an equal measure of pride because it was for CNN Travel (whose stories I occasionally edit as a contract editor for CNN) and because it was an honest-to-God personal essay about Italy (you pretty much can't beat an assignment that allows you to wax poetic about your version of heaven). I'm also proud to say the piece, entitled "You Can Return to Italy," gave me a chance to lay out my personal traveling style -- what I call nostalgia tourism. Where you have a private list of stops that allow you to take the pulse of a place you know so well. You can read the piece here.

A few other milestones:

*On the literary translation front, I published my first translation (for Drunken Boat).

*I also reported on Italy's largest book fair -- and the positioning of Italian women authors -- for the bookworld website Literary Hub. It's called, "Where are all the great Italian women writers?"

*I said goodbye to Atlanta through a 3,000-word personal essay for the AJC's Personal Journeys rubric, which appears on Sundays. What an honor! As soon as I knew we'd be leaving Atlanta, I began writing the essay in my head. To have an editor actually want to print some of those thoughts, well, it's cool (Thanks, Suzanne!). You can read it here. 

I wouldn't want to paint too rosy a picture. I think you'd all know already if I were some super successful writer! I didn't publish anything in The New York Times this year, which, after the high of my essay and reported piece last year, was a grave disappointment. I was hoping The Gray Lady needed me! She does not. But you can still read the essay I wrote (about recording Leo's first sounds and words) here. 

There were many other writing milestones I did not reach, such as polishing a short story and moving forward on a longer project I've begun.

As I've said before, it wasn't an Alexander Chee year (he's so successful now, he doesn't write his year in review anymore!). But there's no question that as a writer, I'm not where I was a year ago or two years ago. A little more than five years ago, I wasn't even writing every day outside my job as a journalist.

And besides, taking stock of the year that's about to end isn't an exercise in comparing yourself with someone else. That won't work. And it isn't the point, is it?

So about those fiction projects I didn't get to: Shall I put them on the list for next year? I think I will.

Last but not least, where is YOUR 'Year in Writing'? You know who you are. Post it here in the comments or on Facebook. 

-30-

Dear Marie Kondo

Dear Marie Kondo,

I know that your book has helped many people pare down, and since a relocation has consumed me for much of 2017 – moving away from my Atlanta home of 9 years to begin a new life in Connecticut – I thought it might make sense to seek you out.

If I got it right, you tell people to ask -- as they inventory their things -- does it “spark joy”?

Except, Marie -- can I call you Marie? -- you don't understand how many things spark joy for me.

Or merely incite some kind of emotion inside.

Or, in the case of Elmo Peter Elson, represent a line in the sand. He’s my childhood teddy bear – and he’s dressed in my childhood clothes (a blue windbreaker with a faulty zipper and riotous 1970s toddler pants). I can’t throw him out now. (No, I don’t know why his name is Elmo Peter Elson.)

Elmo’s making the journey along with a cassette tape of U2’s “Boy” album that’s unspooled, and half-used notepads engraved with the name of my deceased uncle and a button for a failed political campaign where I volunteered 20 years ago, plus a vintage pin from Bayonne, N.J., my father’s hometown (because sometimes other people’s mementos, especially one’s parents, are even more potent than your own) and the pregnancy tester stick – positive! – that forget ‘changed my life’ – it gave me the life I didn’t know I was even craving. Also: bus, train and plane tickets, mainly to and from Italy, and a lot of Lira – Italy’s old currency -- that can no longer be used. But they’re like my bank statements from Cassa Di Risparmio di Firenze, which remind me that I was lucky enough to live long enough in the city of Dante to open up an account at the Florence Savings Bank. (I’ve also kept the Enrico Coveri scarf Melanie gave me and the plastic shopping bag she used to give it to me because while it is a relatively ordinary yellow and green plastic bag it is also instantly recognizable as a bag not produced in the US or used by a US retail establishment. Reason to keep it.)

Plus writing journals.

Lots and lots of journals, including ones from grammar school that I find unreadable (some thoughts should be kept inside, I’ve concluded.)

Lots of letters, too, including the one from a very dear friend that remains unopened and will likely stay in that virgin state until we die. You see, Marie, it’s a condolence card. Everything there was to know -- and everything we didn’t want to know -- is discernible on the outside of the card. Her careful handwriting, our names, the date stamp the week Mike’s father died -- without any need to open it. She is sorry and we are sorry and nothing can be done to erase the death that occasioned the card. To paraphrase the poet Donald Hall, the dead stay dead. So it’s still sealed but my God, Marie, how can I throw it out? Her kindness can’t be discarded.


I also still have Doug K.’s business card. In fact, I have two of them. I know what you're thinking -- who uses business cards anymore? Especially one for a man I last spoke to back in 2000. No, I don't need it. But you see, I do.

We named Doug Security Director of the Year in 2000, back when I was an editor on a trade pub that covered security systems and metal detectors and locks with audit trails.

He'd done such a bang-up job in his position as security director of -- wait for it -- the World Trade Center, that he won the annual contest that year. Security Director of the Year. In Doug’s case, it might as well have said ‘of the decade.’ His picture was on the cover and everything, with the two towers looming behind him. And then on Sept. 11 – you know the year -- I tried calling the number on the business card but I couldn't get through. You see what I mean, Marie? I've got to keep his business card. I need something to remember him by. Just like the page I ripped from an old calendar of New York. The last image I have of those Twin Towers. Where we went after we saw "Annie" on Broadway with Uncle Pat and Aunt Maureen, before they had children -- a thousand years ago, give or take.

Final projects for 2016 -- how's it looking?

One way to consider the end of the year is to think about holiday parties and shopping.

But writers (and other creative people) have to also think about what they can finish (and possibly submit) in the final weeks of the year.

Yes, now's the time to think about this!

Take a look at your goals for the year. How are you doing? You don't need to grade too hard -- things change. Look at me.

My original goals for the year were:

*Publish a work of fiction somewhere (Ha ha!!!! Did not happen)
*Establish a regular exercise routine (not so much)
*Get a byline in a major national magazine (Still working on that one)

Then halfway through the year, I invented some other goals -- really I suppose replacement goals. And I'm doing pretty good on that front:

*Begin translating in earnest (I submitted my first translation to a literary magazine so I will check this one off)

*Find a regular editing gig (I'm now a contract editor, working part-time, at CNN so I will also check this off)

*Blog regularly for a literary magazine (I've developed a good relationship with Asymptote Journal, a wonderful online literary mag that celebrates writing in translation and world literature -- so that gets crossed off, too! Woot!)

But there's still more work to be done. Here's what I hope to do before Dec. 31, 2016:

*Finish translating the first half of an Italian novel I've been working on this year

*Submit something to a literary magazine before the end of the year -- in my case, probably a story from my Bennington thesis

*Finish the short autobiographical essay for a reach publication (reach!)

*Capitalize on the success of my New York Times essay by submitting another essay about parenting (possibly to the Washington Post)

I would love to hear from others (writers but also other creatives) about how you're mapping out the final leg of the year.

Buon lavoro, as they say in Italian!

Montreal Journal

As I'm about to publish this excerpt of my Montreal journal, I realize I've included almost nothing about where we walked or what we saw (the McCord Museum of Canadian History, for example, the Parc Jean Drapeau, which overlooks the city, the Marche Jean Talon where we stocked up on lunch supplies for a picnic).

 

It's all about me and language. Not even sure what to say about that.

 

I left out the lovely park on Rue Beaubien Est across from the cinema, I left out the birreria where Mike lounged two nights of our stay after Leo went to bed. I left out the Basilica of Notre Dame and the view of the city we glimpsed from the island park where we had our picnic (and visited a science museum that was not the science museum we thought we were visiting).

 

I also said very little (in the entries below) about the market, which is such a key part of any vacation we take. The Marche Jean Talon (see the picture above -- we had the most delightful Quebecois tomatoes there).

 

And Little Italy! Just a quick mention. Three days, as you will see from my gush of emotion, are not enough to explore Montreal. Not by a long shot. Just enough to give you heartache.

  

June 27, 2016

3:30 p.m.

 

On the highway, the signs as we near Canada say “hebergement” – lodging! I'm giddy with excitement!

 

Later

 

It’s dangerous for a writer to go to a foreign city….and by dangerous I mean, there’s a very real peril of the writer going insane from a linguistic orgasm…especially if the writer knows even just a little of the country’s native language.

 

I’m here in Montreal dumbfounded and ecstatic about being surrounded by French and I think, almost instantly, what would it take to become fluent? Or semi-fluent? Without having spoken French since visiting Luxembourg in 1997, I’m able to tell the waiter that I do want to speak French but I’ve just arrived and need a moment to get myself acclimated. Then I order my dinner at La Boulette, a nice neighborhood restaurant in Rosemount-La Petite Patrie ('Rosemount, the little country'). Later, I order ice cream.

 

And I soak in the surprisingly foreign vibe of Montreal (surprising to moi). A city surrounded by the English language and its serpent-like hold on communications world-wide. And yet I feel as though I am in a French version of London. Every sign is in French and French only. Every transaction is presumed to be in French until you signal you’re an idiotic American who can’t step up.

 

And the architecture of this neighborhood (which, again, is called 'Rosemount-La Petite Patrie') – a bit off the beaten path in Montreal, I would say – is just delightful: duplex apartments with second floor balconies and front stoops overflowing with flowers and bikes and the odd pair of running shoes oh and personality.

 

It would take nothing to be sucked into the allure of French-speaking Canada.

 

June 28, 2016

8:41 a.m.

 

Montreal absolutely deserves a week of our time. The people are lovely, the city – especially this neighborhood with its rowhouse duplexes – is a place to settle into, the food a dieter’s nightmare, which is so good for a foodie vacation spot. I listen now as a typical Tuesday night plays out for the family below us – the family renting us our apartment. Dinner, familiar yelling between the main house and an out-building where they appear to hole up when this apartment where we are is occupied. My view from the kitchen: a cozy, leafy enclave framed by back veranda. It gives onto the bowels of a residential neighborhood where 'bowels' means how we live and love and cook and vent.

 

My Montreal Journal. Here it is. In dribs and drabs. So overwhelmed, so caught off guard, so trying to hold it together so I'm not submerged into another intellectual obsession.

 

5:03 p.m.

On trips like these, I see everything through the prism of whether I understand the language or not, whether I make myself understood or not.

 

Yes, like I said, it’s dangerous to drop an aspiring writer, such as myself, with an incurable addiction to Romance languages, into a proud Francophone city like Montreal. Within hours, I’ve hatched half a dozen projects in my mind, including translating a French-Canadian book that would illustrate the culture’s fight against English-language hegemony.

All because I was able to say "Bonjour" and "je voudrais" and "comme ca" a few times.

June 29

6:20 a.m.

 

A word about the houses: They are mainly two-story apartment buildings that sort of look like homes you’d expect to see in New Orleans perhaps because they have prominent outdoor stairs linking the upper unit to the sidewalk. Stairs that people sometimes paint pretty colors or adorn with plants. Bikes grip the railings of every other bottom unit’s front gate. Touches of home, touches of personality, the sense of home pride … everywhere, everywhere on the facades of these apartment homes.

 

8:20 a.m.

 

Update: I’ve learned to say "bonne journée" as opposed to “bonjour” at the end of transactions (as I’m saying goodbye to merchants), and given the hum in my step, you’d think I’d discovered the cure for cancer.

 

Really: big whoop since it’s the same in Italian. Buona giornata or buona serata (note the suffix ‘ata’) when you’re taking your leave. But whatevs. I’m re-learning French! Bonne journée!

 

8:45 p.m.

 

A walk after dinner as the sun prepares to set, casting my new neighborhood in a golden glow, as if anything more were needed to render these days in sepia tones. The sunset’s palette adds texture to this urban French neighborhood. The duplexes, each different, each an opportunity for human contact – not that I would necessarily be talking to anyone -- but for research purposes. I try to divine something or instill some sense of kinship because I see a flower pot, a bike chained to a railing, a wreath on a door. As if the eye were begging for variation. Even when the nuance or variation is a vacant storefront (rare) or a cluttered porch. Somehow these somewhat unpleasant variations set the stage even better for tender displays of picture-perfect flower boxes, a family of cats supping on a patio, an aged but stately stained-glass window in a home.

 

The sky becomes purple as I walk and I crane my neck to see more of the sunset. I even cross the street to improve my vantage point. I know this moment, occasioned by the decision on a whim to take a walk when otherwise I would be reading or working, is special. I was meant to fall in love just a little more with Montreal, and the sunset’s colorful blanket thrown so perfectly over the neighborhood is doing the trick.

 

I catch a glimpse of soccer players on a sliver of parkland I spy between duplexes. I’m writing an ode to something simple, yet lived-in, loved-in. Ode to the basic architecture of a neighborhood that has a bit of everything – as good city nabes do – a church, a corner store, a grocer, an off-license, a hair salon, a book shop, a toy emporium, a real estate office, the tax attorney, the plumber, the driving school (automatique et manuelle). Plus, a glance down an alley is repaid as if it were a glimpse into a diary: those back decks stuffed with people’s lives that one spies between duplexes and humble neighborhood businesses.

 

Once again, a five-minute walk is a passage into the sublime because I can observe. Nothing wrong with the suburbs or the countryside. But the myriad impressions of the human stamp in the city become a feast of plenty. One more pang for someone who’s always searching for the perfect city and who knows it’s stitched together with a 1,000 imperfect but highly imaginative, highly personal strands (no cookie-cutter cul de sacs here).

 

Ah Montreal, after all these years (~three decades), oui oui je t’aime.

 

June 30, 2016

9:03 a.m.

 

This is a city … that I’d like to call my own, in the way, as a traveler, I collect cities around the world.

 

1 p.m.

 

Visits today to the Marche Jean Talon and Petite Italie.

 

We are skimming the surface. A relatively quick, disorganized, disjointed shopping excursion followed by the pedestrian equivalent of a driveby to Little Italy. A cultural fusion that even just briefly left me sbalordita. 

 

An American Italophile visits an Italian bastion within a French-speaking city of a largely Anglophone country. 

 

Whoa! Any way you sliced it – Bonjour madame or buongiorno, I was good!

 

All of these glancing encounters temporarily fire up my brain and lead to brief intellectual explorations that must be aborted. To wit:

 

*What’s Quebecois culture all about?

*How to understand the fight for instilling the French language as the dominant form of communication in Montreal

*How does Quebecois Italian culture fit in?

*What can the U.S. learn about relations with indigenous people?

When we visited Little Italy – ‘Petite Italie’ en francais -- I wandered into a bookstore (its name, 'Librarie Italienne,' look like magical words to me), and the proprietor said, "Buongiorno. Cerchi qualcosa di particolare?" You know, as if the shop were in Rome.

Another shop sold the Italian newspaper and a recent copy of L'Espresso (which I bought because Matteo Renzi was on the cover with a very clever hashtag headline).

This morning when we woke up, the kittens belonging to the duplex next door were lined up on the patio, suckling milk from the Mommy cat.

 

6 p.m.

 

Out in our neighborhood in Montreal and from across the street I peer into a salon where a small boy is squirming in the arms of his father, crying, scared, as a hairdresser hovers about his head, trying gamely to snip a few locks. A scene of uncommon yet everyday tenderness that draws me into Montreal and a mere 36 hours into my stay convinces me I’m a part of the city and it is a part of me.

 

Quotes for the Leo journal: “Rain is like a shower for animals,” and “It could be funny if chickens knowed how to drive!” Oh, dude it already is funny!

-30-

Bennington journal - June 2016 - #2

Back in big sky country (Vermont edition).

Walking in the wild-flower filled fields this morning, I think about the lessons I’ve learned and those I can impart, perhaps, to students of my own some day. And it’s this: seek out hard work and start doing so now. Pursuing hard work entails a monumental shift – a conversion, occasioned by the process of learning something new, something vital while aiming at an objective (a goal). You may quickly abandon your original goal or add new ones. You may have to adjust the measurements of your project – instead of one year, it may take two to reach your goal, for example. It matters not – in setting a goal and striving to reach it through hard work you are transformed. I was. And that’s hard work’s gift to each of us.

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I’m sitting in Tishman casually analyzing my lecture, given yesterday morning, through the prism of today’s lectures. Comparing delivery and topic, etc. Then I see it in my mind – the moment Leo (and Mike) entered the lecture hall. The moment during my lecture when my heart leapt, and I was moved to murmur, “My son is here,” (or something to that effect – in the preciousness of the moment the words have been erased, the singular, stunning emotion of being a mother remains). There was a catch in my voice, a momentary loss of control. The vision of him holding Mike’s hand, his smile as he watches me, then looking down at the stairs so he can watch his steps – it’s fixed in my head, like a favorite movie scene, something I’ll cherish and relive for a long time. Like breathing in his scent, instead I’m searing forever in my memory his gorgeous face and the joy it has given me.

That’s it right there – the boy whose sheer presence, whose birth (deemed by me miraculous) set this journey in motion was there to see its fruition. The lecture is now part of our shared life together.
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On the mother-child bond, writer Vivian Gornick tells us during a lecture, “This is how we become human.”

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Other indelible moments: David Gates reading from "Banishment": “Reader, she dumped me.” His shout-out to Jane Austen? Possibly. He's named-checked her in interviews.

*Click on continua a leggere below to read more...

Bennington journal (June 2016 edition)

My beloved classmates – those who are graduating with me – are giving their lectures as we prepare to complete our MFAs in Creative Writing at Bennington College.

And per my usual, I’m jotting down notes about anything that interests me. 

Snippets of their lectures, lines from the poems they are reciting or stories they are reading as part of the graduation requirements.

And I’m finding wisdom, I’m finding mastery, I’m finding love for this world of writing, this world we finally realized we had no choice but to occupy, to stake out as our own.

Some excerpts (including a few choice bits from professors' lectures and readings):

“The little headstones of a season we will never sip” (Lucas)

“I was paralyzed by my own desire to be good” (Liz)

“All that chatter of being good or better than someone else fell away by not looking at the page” in a drawing class (Liz)

Advice to a young poet: “Listen to how people talk….Love what’s available” (Ed Ochester, professor)

And

"I cried out, 'My son, my only son'" (Ochester, again)

“Hers was a past I felt I had a right to know” (Rowena)

"That was so long ago." "Not for her." (Rowena) 

Paraphrasing: “Put people somewhere…given them a passion, an obsession” (Julie quoting Amy Hempel)

“Worm girl” (the name of a belittled childhood friend from an essay – Gwen) 

"Write about what you fear is true" -- not what is true (Bret Anthony Johnston, professor)

-30-

MILESTONE

My thesis!

For Bennington!

“He” looks at the massive pile of printed pages that is my thesis and he says, “That looks like a book.”

God-willing, kid. God-willing.

Kind of amazing how you set a goal and then get so busy moving toward the goal that when you reach it, or are about to reach it, you hardly pay it attention. Yes, I guess I'm about to get that graduate degree I've always wanted. Yes, I guess I've completed a 120-page thesis containing six short stories written in a genre -- Fiction -- that until three years ago I never thought I could even attempt.

But my goodness, I still have to finish writing my graduate lecture, and I have to print out the thesis, and plan the post-graduation trip to Montreal (if I really do graduate, which is so hard to imagine) and I have a dozen other writing and translation projects I'm working on in one way or another, and I'm thinking about my next freelance journalism pitches and where I will work when my contract gig at HLN/CNN finishes up this month. 

And yet look at the picture. 

It says: Refugees and Other Stories. Jeanne Bonner. 

Milestone.

-30-

What I'm reading (literary schizophrenia)

I want to record life exactly as it happens. But that's not easy.

I mean, these days, you would need, in any given moment, to write down what you're thinking, what you're doing, the texts you're writing, the emails you're sending, the stories you're scrolling through online.

In fact, your reading life is probably like your real life. Mine is. I'm reading some books start to finish. Others I'm re-reading. Still others I'm skimming, almost like a few pages or a chapter packs the punch of a quick pick-me-up. 'Oh! I needed that dose of Hemingway.'

Okay, so here's 30 days in the life of Jeanne reading (books only).

Books read for Bennington:

Raymond Carver, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

Denis Johnson, Incognito Lounge (poetry)

Denis Johnson, Jesus’ Son

Antonya Nelson, Female Trouble

Other books read:

David Gates, Jernigan

Alice McDermott, Charming Bill (re-read parts)
Antonio Tabucchi, Viaggi e altri viaggi (re-reading parts)

Also reading (for book reviews):

Viola Di Grado, Hollow Heart

Reading excerpts of:

Jhumpa Lahiri, In Other Words

Started reading, then stopped:

Ben Lerner, 10:04

Books I've started to read and plan to finish:
Jane Austen, Emma