I am writing from the lobby of the W Hotel in Victoria Square Montréal.

We’re here essentially to celebrate Linda’s birthday, and, well, to be in Montréal, where we have not been in some time.

I had thought by today I would long since have posted a different essay—a proto-review of a new barbeque joint in Boston, but somehow it became a fiesta of divagations, diversions and digressions. How do these things happen? And I’ve written over 2000 words so far and haven’t even mentioned the name of the place, so it will have to wait for a later posting date.

In the meantime, here are some preliminary notes about our digs for the next three days.

Victoria Square is within walking distance of the vieux port or old town of Montréal, by the waters of the St. Lawrence, where the French is thick as pâté en bloc, and the streets as labyrinthine as a Paris neighborhood. It’s a recovering part of Montréal, Victoria Square is, having been allowed to degenerate into a kind of bureaucratic, semi-industrial squalor.

W goes a long way to dispel all that. It is owned by the Starwood Group, whose flagship chain is Sheraton. You’d never know it from a W.

It’s relentlessly modern, indeed modernist. In this one, the prevailing lighting is red, and dim, and lest you begin to conjure images of bordellos and women in bustiers and net stockings, the illumination in the lobby (the halle) is mainly provided by some six monoliths lit from within by red sources of illumination. Red cubes of plexiglas adorn the floor, and are themselves adorned with small sandblasted cylinders of smokey glass with a votive candle within. Above my head are huge globes fashioned of fiberglass strands that were molded around spheres that were then deflated and removed after the epoxy setting the strands in a circumferential matrix had hardened. Centered within each globe in a cluster of five globes is a dim clear incandescent bulb dangling from a chrome cylindrical socket.

There are also tiny halogen down lights in a ceiling of hardwood stained rosewood crimson, and so far above our heads as to be useless as illumination. In short, the brightest thing in this large, echoey space is the screen of my laptop, and the screen of another geek, sitting opposite me, no doubt also too cheap to pay the 20 bucks a day (Canadian, but these days, same difference) for 24 hours wireless service in the room. Here in la halle, it’s free.

We’re lying like Passover celebrants, truly half-reclining because the cushions of the sofas are too deep—I’d say about four feet—and the absence of any but soft pillows for support make it necessary either to sit bolt upright with the laptop on one of those crimson cubes, or to lie as I am, as if wondering where the fourth glass of wine went, and who the hell stole the afikomen anyway?

We arrived an hour ago. From the valet dispatcher, to the bellman, to the receptionist the staff is flamboyantly cheerful. It made me think, having stayed at a W (the one in Union Square in New York last Christmas) before that was not half so friendly, shall we say, that they’ve got the staff drinking a lot of the Cool-Aid, a sort of fancy version of which they bring you in a cup as a refreshment from the journey while you’re standing there checking in. The dispatcher and the receptionist both wore headsets into which they murmured French once every so often, and who apologized profusely to me each time, as I responded with a “wha’?” And I soon realized, of course. They’re not juiced up. This isn’t some corporate facade of packaged bonhomie. Of course, this is Canada. The last civilized English speaking democracy left on the planet. Well, French and English. Well, mainly French and a little English, with a flip on that ratio just across Lake Ontario into Toronto.

Our room is also a cube of extreme dimensions. Big couches must be a theme. If we make friends they can sleep over, all six of them.

The theme of the room is black and white. At least I think so. It’s a little dim in there. I did have my laptop on for a bit before discovering the hook-up ain’t free in the room, which required dialing the front desk, which, in the spirit of zestful relentless modernity, is labeled tout divers/whatever whenever. I had visions of calling at three in the morning for a gram of cocaine, just to see what would happen… The bellman, zealously friendly, but sincere somehow, and in a postmodern kind of forlorn-looking tee-shirt, and with a day-and-half growth (don’t get the wrong idea—published rates for the rooms here start at $339US) showed us how to swipe our room key in the elevator to get to our floor, which is above the first few floors, and he explained that the clubs and disco crowd had to be discouraged from wandering the hotel. I asked, “But what if you’re lonely?” and he took that in his stride, chortling and suggesting we could wander the floors of the clubs.

The bathroom is a kind of open design, at least for bathing and washing up. The toilet is in a separate chamber with a huge floor to ceiling door that swings shut, but doesn’t latch, and in addition to the tub, perfectly square, there is a tiled shower stall about as large as my small office back at the apartment at home. All the fixtures are cylindrical, stubby chrome horizontal tubs that pull away at the stroke of a lever, also chrome, a kind of attenuated cylinder, slender, and levered, pulled it controls the flow, turned it controls the temperature. I don’t have the heart to tell them this all went out somehow when Walter Gropius died, although it does raise interesting questions about the degree to which modernism can penetrate the redivivus gestalt of post-modernism.

For all my sarcasm, this is, in fact, a very nice place. Quite luxe, for all the hard surfaces, and studiously subdued sensoria (music is constantly playing, which is moody, suggestive, not quite the bilge that’s called “soft jazz” or “smooth jazz” or whatever euphemism is used to cover the fact that it’s not jazz at all but some kind of white-bread pap. It’s not soul. And it’s not mood music. It’s probably some package from Muzak, and it’s probably called MZ647 World Pop Instrumental).

It’s a little déclassé if you ask me to charge for the Internet connection in the rooms. What’s that all about? In the halle any geek with a laptop can walk in and jack in. Where’s the cachet in that?

Nevertheless, the bed is very comfortable, and huge, and the surface obliterated with pillows and soft fabrics. And I know they leave delicious candy for you when you turn in, when they steal in, while you’re eating out, and turn down all those layers of finery.

Two last things: there is other music; it just played out… Vocals, vaguely African, and now there’s what is clearly Arab stuff playing, so I have a hunch (in my best mock humble shoulder-shrugging style, I ask, “but what do I know?”), but with a soprano sax hook, so someone is up to something (and it’s probably for sale on a CD on the “W” label somewhere in this joint—everything has a price). And finally, for those of you who care about these things, those globes of fiberglass strands are called “Random Lights.” They’re made in the Netherlands, and were designed by Bertjan Pot for Moooi.

I figure the rig here in the lobby is worth about three grand retail, plus installation.

Look it up yourself if you’re interested. I’m tired of doing all the work, and this is supposed to be kind of a vacation.

by

[written from the United States, but retrospectively; prepared in part from notes taken in France and in mid-flight from Nice to New York]

Nice, Sunset during a rainstorm, 2006 August 6

Morts et vivants, tout dormait. Et le silence qui regnait était un grand silence de province.

Everyone, the dead and the living, was asleep. And the silence that reigned was a deep, provincial silence.
—Paris, by Julian Green; tr., J.A. Underwood

Aside from the food, the views, the air, the culture (by which I mean the pace and style of everyday life), the essential prevailing climate (meteorological), and the people on a one-on-one basis, there is another significant advantage to life in rural France. It is there, not here. By which I mean that, perspective being all, the vantage of 3500 miles makes things, if not clearer, at least not so hazy, if not removing the fog of incoherency altogether.

For the writer, any writer, whatever his or her merits, clarity is all. For me, there is inspiration in the clarity of being in France. Combined with what is, no doubt, and even after over 20 years of regular intimacy with the life, the sheer otherness—the strangeness to me, plus my overwhelming ignorance—of life in France, there is always a great deal to write about.

To my mind, I am often writing less about the French (though some readers seem to think so, and react solely to this nominal subject), and a great deal more about what are our similarities, if only by way of delineating differences. In short, it is a way to write about myself, or, to depersonalize this, as the subject loses interest rapidly, and most of all for me, when it is a matter of pure self-reflection: it is a way of writing about us, yes, we Americans, but, more importantly, we humans.

One thing to remember, after three weeks in another country, at every conceivable remove, except the electronic, from what is familiar and routine, is that I am not only a long way away from that reality. I am also a great deal closer to another reality, yet one which preoccupies so much of the civilized world. It’s not my purpose to disabuse my fellow Americans of any presentiment they may have about the fate of the civilized world insofar as it consists of the lands contained by territorial borders of the United States. Rather, it is, for starters, to remind them that civilization does not end at the departure gate at Logan or JFK, or wherever.

We are deeply troubled by the state of the world, even from our largely still untouched enclave of a continent buffered by the two largest oceans on the planet—and before the wrath of God and righteous Americans rains down on me, I am well aware of the awful event, and its consequences, known as 9/11. And I do not forget Pearl Harbor. And I remember the Maine.

However, for the sake of defining a certain psychic perspective, I also have the capacity to recall the bombing of Dresden (and innumerable other cities in Europe, including the fire bombing and rockets that rained down on London), the annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the siege of Stalingrad, the Killing Fields of Cambodia, and the War of 1812.

Our own latest suffering, however severe and inhumane, is yet another chapter in the lamentable history of human civilization on planet earth. To keep that history at bay, we have, for much of the history of our nation, more or less kept the world at bay, as if we do, indeed, inhabit an enclave. Though if it is an enclave, it is increasingly unclear (at least to a polarizing degree) of exactly what.

Our watery isolation (of an immensity we forget, unless flying over it, however swiftly—it takes five hours of an eight-hour transatlantic flight at over 500 knots to traverse open water to get from America to Europe, or vice versa) has lately proven its inadequacy for preserving a sense of political isolation, for those for whom this has always been a preferred modality. However, whether you are an isolationist, cocooned in the fantasy that the world can somehow be kept not only away, but kept out utterly from a properly defended fortress, or you are more a citizen of the world, with some sense that we have neighbors whose fate just might very well affect ours, we do seem to harbor one frail sense of calm. It’s best expressed in the throw-weights and range of weapons in the hands of those we deem dangerous. For now, we are safe to some degree—what else can we do but think it—as long as Hezbollah can hurl rockets only 20 miles, or North Korea can reach Seoul or the frontier of Japan, but no further.

Tell that to an Israeli or a Japanese.

We do worry about the price and availability of oil, the preponderance of which, even with our record thirst for it, comes from elsewhere, and, in particular, the volatile Middle East. And one must fly even greater lengths to reach these climes than the downrange capability of the missiles of members of the Axis of Evil. I mean to excuse nothing, on any part or any side. I merely wish to point out that weapons—real or suspected—in the hands of Arab states are much closer to another set of first world countries, otherwise known as Europe (new or “old” it makes no difference). And the weapons that we know are in the hands of Israel, for one, because a great many of them we sold them, paid for with money we give them, may someday—with their application—set off a war that will be one time zone away from our friends on the “Continent.” And, incidentally, a single time zone from our bucolic village near the foothills of the Alps.

Hence we have the paradox that shapes the perspective I referred to when I started. One sees things more closely, in a quite literal sense, when one is in Europe. As we sat rapt, watching CNN on our hotel television in Nice the night before departure, for three hours as the Israelis bombed even more of Beirut in a “daring” and rare daytime raid, and, in bloody riposte, the Hezbollah fired six very deadly rockets (the deadliest yet in a single attack) into an Arab neighborhood in Haifa. This too was daring, as they fired the rockets at dusk—which they never do as it immediately pinpoints their position; and indeed, during the night the IDF overran and destroyed the launch site.

What I was mindful of, as the sun set over the Mediterranean just outside our window, during a premature twilight as a brief storm set in, was that we were watching in what I’ll call “very real time.” As it was noon in the U.S. when the rockets struck Haifa, this very live story would have a certain distance, not only in miles, but in time, when it opened that evening’s news broadcast in New York. For me the story happened just across that azure sea, whose coast touches Nice with such allure, but touches Beirut and Haifa too, and gives one a sense of the salty consanguinity of fishermen from Maine to Key West. And one may fly from Nice to the Middle East in the time it takes to fly from Boston to Charlotte Amalie in the Virgin Islands.

As we waited, indolently, at Nice airport to get through passport control, our line was regularly interrupted by late arrivals for the flight in the next gate over. We were flying to New York, they to Tunis. It makes for intimations of a shared fate not felt so keenly on our still safe shores.

The paradox arises from the famous languorous pace of life on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea set against the time it would take to fly to Haifa (or Beirut, if you prefer) from Nice—1600 miles apart. More or less the distance between Houston and Cambridge.

No one has ever said it to me outright, while I’ve been in France, but one is mindful of how much closer things are to each other, when speaking of “hot spots,” than those very places are to our homes in the United States. I must assume this mindfulness, this vintage thought, sitting quietly, half-forgotten, in the wine cellar of one’s mind is true for natives, whose stay is permanent. We can only imagine the effect of this condition on the thinking of Europeans, who have seen their homes destroyed utterly—indeed twice, in the course of less than a hundred years.

We weep for Beirut, and for Haifa, of course. And the tears are most bitter for the fellow citizens of these homelands. Hardly less so are the tears for inhabitants of a continent that saw the utter destruction of Dresden and Coventry within the living memory of many.

It is therefore not with the same poignance that one experiences the beauties of life that we know we will miss when we are gone.

Frequent visits like ours only make the poignance sharper, if anything. Sweet partings that much more so, from our friends, so recently made dear. Each passage is a reminder that life, as we have noted since the Greeks and Romans who first settled the Mediterranean basin, is short. Fondness even fonder. The beauty of the land so much more beautiful.

I don’t know if this makes it better or worse to visit the way we do, in spurts of weeks, brief sojourns spread apart as they are. It’s taken me 18 years of visiting Provence to have visited now every month of the year. By now I should be used to it. But every leave-taking is a wrench, a cloying tug that begins days before the date we must lock up and bid the village farewell until another time. The distance is nothing for the nearness of it all. And I would like to suggest that this mode of constant longing, which does not abate even as we measure each day by the rising and the setting of that piercing Provençal sun, is the stuff of love and deep remembrance.

Beneath the rasp of the cicadas, the buzz of flies, the rustle of Mistral-driven foliage, beneath the random rumble of trucks through the village to pierce the drowzy minutes, the whoops of the neighbors at bowls in today’s contest, beneath the clamor of the chapel bell at each breaking hour, below the stentorian bark of this neighbor’s dog, and the insinuating meow of that one’s cat, beneath it all is a silence, a kind of stillness. Enduring and perhaps only truly known to the sheep and the goats, to the donkeys, and the quail, the rabbits, and the wild boar deep in the woods—the original inhabitants of these eternal hills, a reverie.

But once again, we have left all this. And we force ourselves to scheme for the next visit. And we force ourselves to tamp down that deeper hurt.

Endings have a special melancholy. What has been will no longer be. No matter how much we may expect to return. Any break in continuity is an end. Whatever the promise that one may begin again, and however soon, there is the promise within that beginning of another end.

by

Now that the readership of this blog has swollen to dozens, I feel there is the necessary critical mass to bring to your attention the ongoing labors of an inestimable cultural worker (he would never consider himself management, though he has found himself in the odd position of having the title of editor innumerable times and publisher somewhat less often—indeed, if truth be told, one of his very few deficiencies is, let me say, a certain inattentiveness to the quotidian requirements of managing the exigencies and demands of life; but this mainly because he lives for his son, his canine companion, the equally inestimable Rosie—a yellow Lab of nobility and gentility—and his art, and likely in precisely that order, and sometimes his own needs receive less than the requisite regard).

Robert Birnbaum—the redoubtable and irrespressible “Izzy” whose chastening remarks
and gentle if insistent chiding now give all signs of appearing regularly on these virtual pages—is a literary journalist, raconteur, and literary conversationalist of national repute. In the past 20 years he has conversed (he eschews the term, “interview” for reasons readily apparent when you read any representative transcript) with upwards of 500 or 600 companions of letters. These are, in the main, published authors, of fiction and non-fiction alike, who have grounds for the designation, “literary.” This is as opposed to your garden variety pot-boiler types.

I commend to your immediate attention, that is, after first checking these haunts for the latest post, which you must read before hying off to some other outpost with a URL designation, either of the Websites through whose channels Robert emits his verbal exertions.

The conversations (you may discover that either or both of these Websites refer to them as “interviews;” I certainly, and Robert likely, accept no responsibility for such misnomers) appear here:

His main outlet, added since the original posting of this essay, is now his own blog, Our Man in Boston: http://ourmaninboston.com, to whose feed I strongly suggest you subscribe.

His many conversations have appeared in a number of places, but mainly in the two following, which maintain an archive of his interviews and where it is safe, for the time being, to go looking for the more historic encounters.

Identity Theory, The Narrative Thread: http://www.identitytheory.com/interviews/ and also here:
The Morning News: http://www.themorningnews.org/

In the fullness of time, that is, once I’ve learned how Typepad allows such things, I will place these as permanent links on the pages of this blog. Until then, you are on your own to roll your own. Go hie, and godspeed…

by

In the middle of the city of Aix-en-Provence, generally referred to as “Aix” (and pronounced “e(gg)ks”—the parenthetical double-g is in there to suggest that the sound is softened from a hard “ex”) there is a large asphalt paved plaza in front of the Palais de Justice, or court house. I honestly don’t know how much justice has to do with it (in the sense that, on hearing a companion exclaim, “My goodness!” on seeing Mae West’s jewelry and finery, she quipped, “Honey, goodness had nothing to do with it”).

One of the last times we saw this particular plaza was during a visit in March, more than a year ago. The French were demonstrating, specifically the teachers and students, and many other workers as well, but in Aix, the University town, it was your education base of demonstraters. Nothing unusual in this, though, I suppose, it wasn’t entirely usual either. It was orderly. There was a lot of smoking. And they filled this plaza—essentially a huge car park most days, with grand, broad steps of stone leading to the imposing collonaded entry, with metal detectors just visible inside. Then they congregated on the steps, which is where I believe the police preferred them to be.

The students were aroused, but not rowdy, and seemed to be having a good old energy-infused time. They chanted rhythmically, something about “taking it to the streets,” only in French of course, so the word rue was invoked. They carried signs and placards, and ultimately massed on the steps, as if they were on a major, but really big, slightly rowdy school trip, maybe associated with the Future Farmers of France or the high school traffic crossing guards, and had been told to assemble for a group photo.

[Ex post facto correction: Before my vigilant French readers take me to task—they are small in number, but eagle-eyed and armed with facts, which they are not afraid to wield: The particular demonstration I described, involving myriad students in the Aix school system, actually involved the imminent implementation of the "Fillon Law" (Fillon being the Minster of Education, who proposed sweeping reforms). The students and some teachers, on their behalf, particularly objected to a proposed core curriculum, which was noteworthy for excluding the arts,  and the abandonment of a program of  personal study, guided by teachers, and which combined several subjects, research, and independent study. These are not labor issues, as I go on, below, to discuss. However, the degree of backlash is as much a template as the actual law I do mention. I don’t know the fate of Fillon, but I do know what I go on to say about Villepin, who was vilified as a primary villain in the hiring law—later modified and gutted—is true. Sorry for the incorrect implications, and the temporary memory lapse. However, this did give me a chance to use three words, and one a proper name, beginning with the syllable "vil" in one sentence.]

The issue was a labor issue. France, as you may or may not know (one can never tell with Americans), has an unwieldy unemployment problem, as does much of Europe, save for Great Britain and Ireland. The government (the French one) cooked up a scheme whereby the laws concerning hiring and firing would be relaxed sufficiently as to allow employers—small businesses in particular—to engage new hires on a probationary basis, up to two years (without getting into really messy details—the Napoleonic Code is filled with those) without penalty. To the businessman that is.

It seems it’s very difficult to be fired in France, even for what we call “cause.” In France, I think sometimes, the word cause is used, and may only be used, for circumstances that lead to the massing of many French people waving banners and placards and smoking cigarettes on the steps of impressive federal buildings, or, if the cause is really hot, and the people especially incensed, to storm police barricades. This is as I understand it, and I will admit I have spoken only to a very small number of small businessmen (two or three more and it’s probably statistically significant for a group you would still be forced to call “Friends of Howard”—there is a great tendency over here, as there is in the U.S., to form a group at the drop of a hat; the streets are practically awash in posters with arcane acronyms; I myself, having seen a number of likely recruits in the streets of the cities AND the country, want to organize a group for which I already have a name: HFF, which stands for Hooligans Futurs de France (I think it’s kind of neat that the words are practically cognate in English, which means it will be very easy to import, if it catches on; the only difference is, I think, they only mainly look like hooligans over here… I’m assured they’re all very nice boys, but I digress)). You simply cannot call someone to account, never mind fire them. I mean, that is, unless they do something really outrageous like threaten your life with a kitchen knife, and maybe draw a little blood. And even then, you better have iron-clad proof and, I think it’s, six witnesses.

With the proposed law, there would actually have been more people put to work. French business people are remarkably astute in the application of what is called logic. They prefer not to hire beyond a certain point, if the risk is too great that they will be stuck with a dud. In large companies and the government, otherwise known as the biggest company of all, l’état, the State, a fairly huge percentage of duds only keeps the country perking along at some steady state of what is still high productivity. The productivity here, remarkable as it may sound to Francophobic U.S. patriots, is maintained at a fairly high rate—though it slowly erodes, as one must expect, when so many remain unemployed, and so many of those unemployed are third world immigrants who simply refuse to be deracinated (imagine that…).

The people in government aren’t stupid either. Though they do often give the appearance of let us say, losing attention, through several governments over the years hovering around the center mark of a political spectrum, which has shades of left and shades of right of sufficient bandwidth to make the U.S. look like a one-party state, not unlike, let’s say, Russia, but don’t tell anybody I said that. This too is not surprising, as they, the senior French government members, mainly all went to the equivalent of Harvard, Cal Tech, MIT, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and the University of Chicago, and, oh, what the hell, Johns Hopkins, combined. They want not only to extricate the country from what is a current mess, but what promises to be an even greater mess, entropy being what it is in the course of human affairs, and there being an equivalent desire to preserve what is, after all a unique culture, having been preserved for at least a thousand years, with some variations, and which suits a lot of people who, for lack of a better modern defining principle, simply don’t want to live like we do. I mean Americans.

Part of that culture renders all other parts sacrosanct, or such is the common myth here in France. So try to change the status quo, and the people rise up and say, “Don’t touch that.”

In the end, the forces of labor, represented there on the steps of the Aixoise Palais de Justice (don’t get labor and justice confused in this sentence), prevailed, and the Prime Minister, for one, found himself in deep doodoo (also don’t make the mistake of saying “doodoo” in French, as they won’t know what you’re talking about; toutou is a term of endearment for a pooch, and chouchou (little cauliflower [sigh]) is what you call your sweetie, even if she’s not in the produce game, but shit is merde—and Villepin is still, today, in the merde profond because of that little fiasco over a year ago).

But that demonstration was an anomaly for us. We love Aix. It’s a beautiful city, easy to get around in. Lots of places to shop and eat. A general absence of demonstrations and, in fact, most other disturbances. Even the Musée Granet, the one major museum in the city, has gotten its act together, totally renovated itself a year ago, and is worth visiting more than the once we managed about 11 years ago where I feel asleep while walking through one of the galleries. Every so often, cooped up as we are in the briar patch of very rural Provence, we like to get into a metropolis, kick back, and have a citron pressé at the Deux Garçons, which is the Aixois equivalent of the Deux Magots café in Paris, and more or less as old, being in operation since 1792 (this is what I mean about a culture that don’t fix what ain’t broken).

We don’t always make it to Aix, but this trip had an added frisson for us in that the “Cezanne in Provence” exhibition—a major show of his works associated with his studios in Provence, and mainly in Aix and environs, as this was his hometown—dreamed up and largely curated at the U.S. National Gallery in Washington, D.C., where it opened first, opened next at the aforementioned Musée Granet in Aix. So we demurred from a trip to Washington and planned on catching the show here. It is so popular that tickets obtainable from other outlets and on-line, that is, other than the ticket office of the museum, are now sold out up to three weeks in advance. Like American museums, they let you in by the hour at a scheduled time. It turned out you could get tickets by standing in line at the ticket office for an hour, but I’m glad I didn’t know that. I ordered the tickets on-line in advance from FNAC, which is a strange combination of consumer electronics store, café, serious bookstore, and DVD and CD shop, oh, and also a good place to get a new telephone, whether wired or mobile.

They mailed the tickets to us here in Fox, which is a scary proposition. It turns out the French do this all the time, without worrying about the consequences. As it also turns out, La Poste, the national postal service, is NOT the USPS, despite popular rumor. The tickets arrived two days later.

As a kind of reconnoiter, and because we didn’t want to wait the additional week that Nicole’s schedule required if she was to join us (though, as it turned out, she didn’t), we decided to take a trip to Aix in addition to our scheduled museum visit. We arrived around lunch time as is our wont. We parked, a bit of an ordeal, as always in summer, as the underground parking garages fill up by about 10am. We couldn’t park in the plaza in front of the Palais de Justice, because there is a marché in the plaza, and in other plazas around the city, every Thursday, until 1 pm.

We headed for the plaza anyway, because there’s a small brasserie there that we like. The plaza, incidentally, is named Place de Verdun. This is significant, and I’ll explain this way. It would be as if a plaza in a U.S. city—albeit the likelihood of a plaza in the U.S. with a major courthouse, and ringed by cafés, boutiques, bookstores, pharmacies, and immediately contiguous to a carriage trade kind of neighborhood of even smarter little boutiques and antique stores is remote in my experience—were to be called Plaza of the Battle of the Bulge.

Verdun, for those of you weak in history, and especially deficient in the European variety, was, of course, one of the great protracted battles of the First World War, prior to the entry of the United States. It occurred because the Germans, in a massive effort to end the war by effecting as many French casualities as possible—the German general in charge of their effort spoke of “bleeding the French white.” The battle produced 400,000 casualties on each side. In the end, the Germans did not prevail, because the defensive strategy of the French, masterminded by General Pétain (thereby rendering him a great national hero, at least for next 23 years) prevented the Germans from overruning the French positions around the town of Verdun. These included a salient, or bulge, ironically (for purposes of my analogy), just like the bulge of the ensuing World War II battle, which very much involved American forces.

In 1944, again to force an end to the war on better terms than Germany otherwise might expect given the progress of the war to that point, the Germans mounted an offensive intended to split the Allied forces into four splinters. The Germans thought this would be cause enough to effect a stalemate and cease-fire, and would allow them to sue for peace on more favorable terms. The Germans did not succeed, as they had not in 1916, against the French, though the Allies, and the Americans in particular, suffered heavy casualties in what was the largest battle of the war for them to that point.

The café we like is, indeed, Café de Verdun (so, again, imagine a delightful restaurant, with outdoor seating, traditional American favorites, wonderfully prepared, an excellent wine list, and snappy waiters, called: Battle of the Bulge Café, in, I don’t know, Providence, RI, which is about the size of Aix, and you’ll get some understanding of the somewhat subtle, but not too subtle differences in the ways the two cultures assimilate their own history). I make no invidious comparisons, mind you, so please don’t assume there is some innate advantage to one way of looking at the world versus the other. I just happen to prefer one to the other, and I leave you free to make your own favorites among any set of choices you care to define.

We arrived at almost exactly 1pm. That’s a kind of witching hour. The marché is officially ended. All the goods (produce, clothing, jewelry, gewgaws, tourist junk, etc.) must be packed up, along with their stalls, the huge parasols to protect customers from the fierce sun, and the vehicles which carry all thereof must be removed. The cafés, bistros, brasseries, and other eating establishments which line the plaza’s periphery will then as hurriedly as they may set up tables and chairs, and their own parasols, to the limit of their “territory” encroaching on the public space of the place. The people setting things up and the people breaking things down work in a kind of improvised primitive ballet, always managing to stay out of one another’s way.

It’s when the vendors are gone, and the restos are still setting up that the fun really begins. It seems the parking must be once again available to the public at about 2pm. The city is also very much interested in preserving its image, and the image thereunto appertaining, and so they send in a crew from pubic works, with coveralls and vehicles emblazoned with the logo “Ville Aix Propre” (essentially “A Clean Aix”).

Some fairly burly dudes haul a very long hose onto the place. There are high pressure spigots in the street, and the spraying and hosing begin—the technique consists largely of using the high pressure jet to drive the jetsam and detritus of the marché to centralized piles, where other workers with brooms and pans can pick it up. It is then my new champion appears. He, a vaguely devilish looking fellow with a very closely shorn brush cut is behind the wheel of a cleaning truck, aptly called (by its manufacturer) the Scarab Majeur. The truck—indeed, a huge white beetle of a thing—is rigged with a water tank and a storage tank. It sports outrigger brushes on flexible arms, with a large rotor brush underneath. Clearly the guy has trained in a combination of a French bumper car park and stock car rally.

He speeds the truck through the place, making a bee-line for curbs, restaurant barriers, and piles of garbage. He stops on the proverbial dime. He spins the steering wheel like the controls of an X-Box 360. He clearly delights in terrorizing the pedestrians who should have better sense than to venture, at the usual French pedestrian’s indolent saunter, across this temporary battle zone—workers against trash.

It also seems to me, having witnessed it twice now, that this is a bit of impromptu revanche des ouvriers (revenge of the workers). At one point, on our first visit (the food was so good, added to the endorsement, post hoc, of Café de Verdun in my bible of restaurant recommendations, the Guide Gantié, we decided to return the following week, that is, two days, ago, for lunch before our visit to see Cézanne) I watched from my seat in the café across the plaza as the Scarab dive-bombed a prematurely matronly woman, carrying three large shopping bags, and stopped likely just feet from her, from behind. I saw both her feet leave the ground, her legs bent, before she landed and scurried off.

He kept coming back to our end of the plaza, and stopping short of the borders of the plaza, including the barrier of the Café de Verdun. At the table of the next party over, sitting right on the waterproof divider set up by the Vietnamese workers of the restaurant—who had already done yeoman duty setting up tables and chairs for another 60 diners, plus the shade-producing umbrellas as coveralls, in the space of 12 minutes—a young woman in the party of eight, watching the antics of le Scarab with increasing dismay, suddenly arose and went off in search of someone, anyone.

Clearly she was on a mission to stop this menace to society. She returned, having consulted with the wait staff and the maître d’, shaking her head disconsolately, and glowering in the direction of the denizen of Ville Aix Propre, as he maneuvered his war chariot in several more, what can I call them, but pasobdobles. If only there had been musical accompaniment (we were, in Aix, only minutes from the cities of southern France where French-style bullfighting—no killing—is conducted). Another triumph for labor.

I am not sure, but it is possible that I recognized this young woman as one of those manning the barricades back in September. So much for solidarity.

by

Ratatouille is one of the many recipes native to this region—and in saying this, as when I say so many things, I cut a wide swath—by which I mean to include any definition of the south of France called Provence, and Nice. The French nicely separate Provence from the Côte d’Azur, of which Nice is the undisputable capital. Our chief agency for France Telecom, for example is in Nice, and it is the office for all telephone business in Provence-Côte d’Azur, part of the official name. Same goes for our branch, and the larger managing office, for our bank, Crédit-Agricole, one of the largest banks in Europe, and the largest mortgage holder in France—it’s C-A/PACA, and now you know what “PCA” stands for, when you see it. In fact, officially, the region subsumed is referred to as Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, but usually the Alpes are left out of it (except in the case of the bank).

It’s my theory that it’s intrinsic in any organizing scheme or management scheme in France that things are viewed in this departmental way. Ultimately, of course, all things flow from Paris, and the central government. It is through and through, administratively, a federalized bureaucracy. France is a big country, however, and hard to govern. It’s not only the largest, or close to it (I simply won’t look it up on-line—not while FT/PCA has us in a holding pattern with regard to the Internet, and our connectivity is dial-up; besides Linda is on the phone, so I can’t use it anyway—and I don’t want the readers here, those even more obsessive than I, and who ache for the chance to tell me I’m wrong about something, to have that chance), sovereign land area in Europe, with one of the largest populations. It not only has one of the largest GNPs of the EU, and one of the largest federal budgets. But it produces umpteen many different cheeses, even more now than when Degaulle made his famous comment about the ungovernability of this country, purely in terms of the number of cheeses it produced.

All moneys come from the central government, but increasingly are not only distributed, but budgeted at the prefectual level. The prefect is the highest government officer in any department. There are 95 departments, or so (there’s that hedge again) in Metropolitan France, that is, what we’d call mainland France, as opposed to the islands in the Caribbean, which are not protectorates, or territories, or any of that wishy-washy stuff, that leaves them nominally (at least) subjugated. When you’re on French soil in Guadeloupe, or in the French Pacific islands, you are on French soil, and subject to French taxes and the entirety of the Napoleonic Code.

That’s a fairly far-flung way of keeping track of things, especially money, when it flows from a single source. It tends to force a people who grow up thinking of themselves first and foremost as French, immediately to think about themselves next in terms of that ineffable, rich French word, terroir, which is essentially untranslatable readily into English.

A French-English dictionary may translate it as “region,” but that’s not adequate, because terroir can be understood sometimes with the same degree of fineness as a micro-climate. It really refers to some unique combination of factors—some incontrovertible, like the chemical composition of the soil, and some more subtle, like the difference between a cheese distinguished by one form of mold (we’re talking blue cheeses; so don’t let your gorge rise) versus another, possibly identical to the untutored palate, with a slightly different mold.

Not all differences are chemical, of course, except possibly in the metaphorical sense. The chemistry is different in one terroir versus another, and it leads to differences in speech, differences in dress, and particularly differences in food, both the native flora and fauna to a terroir, and the ingredients that go into exactly the same dish—exactly the same at least in name. Terroir is the major taxonomical differentiator, I would say, in determining one AOC wine or cheese from another. May be the same mix of grape varieties, but it produces a different wine when the grapes come from one hillside (côte in French) as opposed to another. So there is Côteaux Varois, but there is also Côtes de Provence.

There are five departments in Provence, and the cuisine of most of them—excluding pretty much Les Alpes de Haute Provence, which is one of the two landlocked departments, the other being the Vaucluse—is what comprises what has become known as the essentially heart-healthy, longevity inducing Mediterranean diet of Provence and neighboring Liguria, the section of Italy immediately contiguous and also with a long coast, or riviera, on the ocean. Much of Ligurian cuisine migrated and mingled and became transformed to a variant called Niçois, which the natives of that city (for so long ruled by others than the French; it was Italian, it was Savoyard (named for the mountainous region, now in France, known as the Savoie)) will tell you is not Italian, though it features many pasta dishes, and, as one small example, a basil sauce called pistou, and which, with a little jiggering and the addition of another ingredient or two, becomes what we know as the ambrosial pesto of Liguria. But it’s not the same.

And in the same way, to move rapidly to the opposite end of Provence, the western end, which borders near Marseille on the Mediterranean, there are differences, matters of terroir, between what is called bouillabaise in Marseille, which is located in the department called the Bouches de Rhône (the “mouths of the Rhone,” a major river debouching into the Mediterranean Sea in a delta surrounding Marseille), and what is called bouillabaise in a little seaside resort town called Cassis, about ten kilometers east of Marseille, but in the department called the Var (which also happens to be where we are located). There are terrible arguments about the right constituents of a true bouillabaise, which fishes go into it, whether potatoes are part of the dish, how it is served, etc. There is even an official society of bouillabaise makers, represented by any number of restaurants serving the dish in Provence, and none of them serve it the same way. In this, we see the chief, and chiefly benign, manifestation of the concept of terroir.

I guess if forced to some up with a one-word translation it would be “turf” in the sense that gangs, at least, used to use that word in major American cities, back in the 40s, 50s and 60s. Distinguishable, inviolate, and ingrained, though with none of the political motive inherent in the ways gangs used the term.

So, what does all this have to do with ratatouille, that ineluctably wonderful vegetable stew indigenous to Provence, and possibly the apotheosis, in vegetal terms, of what Provençal cuisine is all about?

Without all the brouhaha that surrounds bouillabaise (and which gets its energy—the brouhaha, that is—no doubt from the money involved, as a dish of bouillabaise, often mandated in a restaurant as a dish to be ordered only for two persons, can cost as much as 160 euros for a serving; it is labor intensive, and tricky, and must be made from scratch to order, and has a number of constituent parts, is served in two courses, and involves some very expensive species of Mediterranean fishes), ratatouille also has its terroir influenced variations. But it is mainly a homely dish. More often than not served as a garnish to a fish or flesh main dish, though Linda and I just recently feasted on a huge helping of freshly made ratatouille served over a steaming mound of semoule (that is, couscous), and that was dinner.

I like to make ratatouille at least once, or twice a visit. And even the meager proportions of the recipe to follow (it’s coming, trust me), guarantees leftovers for at least two more meals, even if one of them is only lunch, with smaller portions to go around. For one thing, ratatouille is a dish best served, unlike Sicilian revenge, not only hot, but cold, or at room temperature, which has a lot to say for it.

There is a kind of basic list of ingredients, and it reads like the ur-definition of the Provençal or Mediterranean diet. It almost always includes zucchini, onions, eggplant, tomatoes, and peppers. It is invariably made with olive oil, lots of olive oil, in which it is stewed. What I will tell you is you can add, within a fairly broad band of extras, just about anything you want, to push the flavor of the thing in one direction or another, grossly or subtly.

I like piquancy, and I like that so-called “fifth taste” called umami, so those are the variants I will include with the basic recipe I’ve contrived.

Those who know me, and know my cooking, know that I work as much as possible from scratch (but don’t be surprised to see some canned ingredients here; I’ll also include a way to be a little more pure, if you are even nuttier than I am, and must do virtually everything from the raw ingredients). When I say contrived, I mean that.

A long time ago, as is always the case when I am cooking something I have never cooked before, and often never eaten before (one of the “joys of cooking” is not reading recipes out of that horrendous collection—revered as it may be; salvation as it may have been to so many neophyte cooks; one of the joys of cooking is deconstructing a dish one has been served, without help, but with one’s analytic skills alone, and figuring out how to replicate it, or at least come up with an acceptable personal variation), a long time ago, probably very long, I read a recipe or two for ratatouille. After that, I’ve always winged it, and I cannot tell you how much is a vestigial remnant of some original recipe, which may have come from Julia Child, or from Larousse—two favorite sources from the period I would have first attempted a ratatouille, probably back in the 70s.

Further, here in Provence, where the ingredients in the summer are always local and always to hand, it’s much easier to just take the best of what looks good at the greengrocer at marché. The other requirement is to make sure the larder or pantry is stocked with at least a few basics that should always be on hand when cooking Provençal.

So the bottom line is, as I head into the recipe proper, this is a very localized version of ratatouille. Localized not only to the Var, not only to the Haut Var on whose edge our village sits, not only to our village (though nobody in the village has anything to do with the genesis of this recipe, but not a few have tasted it), but it’s localized chez nous, to our house… and I say that with neither defiance nor shame.

Universal Almost Foolproof Ratatouille (Provençal Vegetable Stew)

What I think you should have in your larder or pantry (especially if you’re cooking Provençal):

Pepper grinder (with black peppercorns—and, if gilding the lily, another with white, though white peppercorns have a different flavor and less bite and heat; the difference is not only on the palate, obviously, but esthetic, unless you don’t mind the color of pepper, even in a white sauce; personally I don’t mind at all, and it’s a pain to keep white peppercorns on hand)

Sea salt, preferably French, preferably Atlantic: mild, and generally in coarse medium-sized crystals

Green peppercorns, usually in a dilute vinegar solution

Capers

Tinned anchovies in olive oil, flat filets and/or flat fillets in salt, either tinned or in a jar

Tomato paste (or as they say in Europe “double concentrated”)

Whole Roma tomatoes, skinned, in their own juice, tinned—one can that has a gross weight of a pound will suffice; if you’re a purist, or prefer fresh ingredients, and you can obtain really good tasting Roma tomatoes, skin and seed about eight or nine medium sized fresh Roma tomatoes and chop very coarsely, and add to the recipe where stated as indicated for the tinned tomatoes

Fresh garlic, whole heads

Yellow onions, either medium or large

Harissa, which is a very hot Tunisian or Moroccan condiment, made mainly from pépins, which are quite hot fresh red peppers, perhaps like serrano, though hotter, and certainly hotter than jalapeño; there are recipes for making your own, but it’s a lot of work—hit the local Middle Eastern market, especially if they make their own (we buy ours in Aups from Chantal, the Olive Lady); it’s also sold under different brands in the foreign food sections of many American markets, either in tins or in tubes. Use it up, or throw it out; it loses its heat, efficacy and flavor very soon after opening.

Cremini mushrooms, medium sized.

Chicken stock, and/or vegetable stock.

Here’s definitely what you’ll need for the ratatouille:

Two medium Italian eggplants (these are smaller variety than the monsters usually sold in the U.S.; I also think they’re more flavorful, easier to work with, and less woody)

Two medium zucchini

Two large red Bell peppers (I wish I could import the local ones that are available everywhere here, even in supermarkets; so much more flavorful, with a musky peppery perfume that you rarely experience in the U.S.)

Celery, in a bunch; you’ll need one stalk of a large-sized bunch

Small amount, say 1/2 cup, of French rosé or white wine; if you use white, you can use a California or Italian dry white

Vodka

The trick, and the heartache, of this recipe is that you more or less sauté each ingredient separately, store it in a bowl along with the other ingredients to be returned to the sauce pan for final cooking.

Chop one medium to large yellow onion. (with this step and from here on, the directions and the measurements are coarse and approximate at best; if you really need precise measurements, this recipe, and most of my others, are not for you)

Slice at least two large cloves of garlic very thin, as if with a razor. The more garlic the better as far as I’m concerned, but two large cloves are minimal. Chop the slices coarsely.

De-stem and skin the eggplants, and slice into 1/2 inch slices. Line a colander with the one layer of slices, salt that layer generously, and flip the slices and salt again, add another layer, salt that layer on the exposed surfaces, and keep layering in this fashion until you’ve added all the eggplant slices. Cover the last layer with two thicknesses of paper towel, making sure the toweling clings to the surface. Let sit for at least 20 minutes, and no more than a half hour.

Skin the zucchinis. What I like to do with zucchini is to cut it into uneven polyhedrons, not bigger than about 3/4 to one inch in any dimension. This means cutting the zucchini along its length at acute angles, rotating it as you cut, forming these odd shaped objects with many surfaces at varying angles to one another. It’s the closest you’ll come to making round balls out of them, without making yourself crazy.

Cut the stem out of each of the red peppers. Cut each pepper in half, and with a very sharp paring knife, cut away all the whitish pith from the inside. Rinse each half of the peppers under running cold water to get rid of all seeds. With a very sharp knife, cut each half of the peppers into long strips about 3/8 of an inch wide. When all halves are in strips, cut all strips in half width-wise.

Take one stalk of celery (or more, if you really like celery, or none if you don’t) and cut into half-inch slices.

With the mushrooms, again, you’re dealing with an optional ingredient. Use at least a cup and-a-half, but no more than two cups. Cut off the stems, and cut the larger heads in half, or more parts than that if they’re monsters.

Keep each of these ingredients in its own bowl, ready to toss into the sauce pan. Have a large stainless or ceramic bowl handy to accept the cooked vegetables as you finish them.

For each of these ingredients, you will need one to two tablespoons of olive oil for each batch, except the eggplant, which will require three or four, and the mushrooms, which will require four or five. These last two are sponges for oil. The mushrooms will give up whatever oil they absorb once cooked, however, so don’t go crazy with the oil.

Heat the sauce pan (medium sized, probably at least six quart, with a cover) over medium to medium-high heat, depending on the efficiency of your stove’s burner. If it’s a “professional home” stove, use a proportionately lower flame—15,000 BTU burners and higher get quite hot. Add one to two tablespoons of oil while it’s heating up and when the surface of the oil shows it’s hot—it gets kind of roiled, as if a slight wind were blowing across still water—add the onions and garlic and toss, or if you’re not adapt at tossing things in a pan, use a wooden flat bladed spatula to constantly move the ingredients around and get everything coated with oil. Toss occasionally, or mix with the spatula, the onions and garlic should turn translucent and begin to brown around the edges. Probably five minutes of active movement cooking will be enough.

Dump the onions and garlic into the large bowl.

One or two more tablespoons of oil, and once it’s hot, toss in the zucchini. Same deal, only it won’t get translucent, but will soften slightly. The browning is more important. Don’t let it burn, but make sure it browns.

While the zucchini is cooking, remove the paper towel, now soaked with liquid from the eggplant, and rinse the eggplant in cold water. Rinse off all the salt. Keep your eye on the zucchini. Pat dry the eggplant.

While the zucchini continues to cook, cut the eggplant slices into 1/2 inch dice.

When the zucchini is done, dump it into the bowl with the onions and garlic.

Add three to four tablespoons of oil to the pan and when it’s hot, add the eggplant. It will soften and get brown, but keep it moving, little enough to brown, but enough to keep from burning. When it’s done, add to the bowl with the other cooked ingredients.

Add two tablespoons of olive oil to the pan and heat it, and add all the pepper strips. Brown them lightly. Don’t let them get overly limp. Add the cooked peppers to the other ingredients in the bowl.

Cook the optional celery, if desired, with a little oil (even less than the onions), and when lightly browned, add to the other cooked ingredients.

Use four or five tablespoons of olive and heat it for the optional mushrooms, add these to the hot oil and toss constantly. They will first absorb the oil and then begin to brown and then release the oil. With a slotted spoon or drainer, remove the mushrooms and add to the other ingredients once the mushrooms are browned. Don’t let the mushrooms get soft.

If there’s an appreciable amount of oil, say more than a tablespoon, in the pan after removing the mushrooms, drain the excess oil, and return the pan to the stove. The pan should be well coated with a dark brown fond from all the vegetables you’ve cooked in it. Heat the pan, but don’t let it smoke, and add the wine and a splash or two of vodka. You may also add some chicken stock, or vegetable stock, if you’re a purist, as much as 1/4 to 1/2 cup. Turn the heat to high and let the liquids boil rapidly and while they do, scrape the fond from the surfaces of the pan with a flat wooden spatula.

When the liquids have reduced to a very thick syrup, dump the can of tomatoes and their juices into the pan. Leave the heat on high. Mash the tomatoes with the flat blade of the spatula, and get the liquid boiling. Add a couple of pinches of salt and a few grinds of fresh pepper. Turn down the heat to medium, and add the cooked vegetables.

Then add from two to four tablespoons of tomato paste. It’s packed in very small cans in Europe. They’re about two-ounce cans. I add the whole can, scraping out all of it with a silicone rubber spatula.

While the vegetables heat up again (and keep an eye on the pan while you do this) drain the tinned anchovies, and dump the anchovy fillets into a mortar and pestle. If you use salted filets, rinse them thoroughly, shake them dry and dump these into the mortar and pestle. With some force, grind the anchovies into a paste. Do it thoroughly.

Once you have your anchovy paste, dump it into the sauce pan. Add from 1/2 teaspoon to 1-1/2 teaspoons—depending on the volume of vegetables, which is a function of whether you added the celery and or mushrooms—of the harissa to the mix, and blend thoroughly. (Warning: harissa is a very hot condiment; if you’re a spice-a-phobe, don’t add any; and if you do add it, in any amount, don’t blame me if you know what…) You may also add green peppercorns at this time and/or capers, depending on your preference, and the degree of piquancy you like in your ratatouille.

Stir occasionally, and when the whole thing is bubbling, reduce heat to medium-low or low, depending on your stove, cover to keep a simmer, and simmer for at least 10 minutes and probably no more than 20. Stir occasionally. Taste and add salt and pepper if required. Probably not.

Serve very hot over your choice of couscous, or polenta, or rice, or by itself as a side dish.

Can be kept refrigerated for up to a week. If preferred hot, reheat only to the point of serving temperature. Otherwise it’s perfectly good cold or at room temperature.

This is only a basic recipe, remember, so be inventive or experimental.

by

[no animals were harmed in the making of this blog entry]

I’ll try to make this quick, because it’s a little late, and I have other things to do before I go to sleep.

The walls are famously thick of the houses here in the village. The rule of thumb and usual reference is three feet. It’s not quite that, but probably at the base of the house it’s close to that. They are, indeed, masonry walls, and mainly on the periphery walls of stone, either as rubble within the wall or as large stones carefully fitted to one another.

As a result the windows are projections, and our pretty much modern windows, all of them casements opening inward, are set midway in the opening. Hence the sills are deep, and form a shelf in every window. These are commonly tiled. They are in our house. On the outside, to cover the window opening are shutters, which open outward, and these, like the windows, are either split “French-style,” that is there are two hinged shutters meeting in the middle, or there is a single shutter, hinged on one side or the other.

With the shutters closed, the house is quite dark within.

The front of the house, which constitutes one of only two walls with access to the out of doors, faces west. The other outer wall faces south. We sit, in short, on a corner, and our other inner walls are party to our neighbors: one to the north, and another “behind” us, to the east.

The result of this aspect and configuration is that the front of the house is in shadow until well past noon, but we see the sunny opposite side of the place almost as soon as the sun rises in the morning. The houses are sufficiently high opposite us, and slightly elevated relative to our position that we don’t get that much direct sun. So the inside of the house, on the first two floors, anyway, stays moderately cool and livable, even in the worst of the dog days, which have, incidentally, returned after a respite following a clamorous thunderstorm of two hours duration a few days ago.

The top floor where I toil away, entertaining you sporadically, is just under the roof, and there is no insulation, and it gets warm, unless we keep the air moving, which we do. My fingers move very quickly across the keyboard setting up a slight breeze. That and the four foot circular fan I described a few entries back make all the difference.

The house has no screens. Most houses don’t. On the plain, it’s a problem, because of the flies. Up here in the village the flies are less of a problem, and there are few mosquitoes, if any.

As for other insectivora there are plenty of critters, of every conceivable type. In particular there are wasps and hornets, though I’m hard put to tell the difference. One of them has wings that jut straight out, like a spy plane, and the other has wings that sit at an angle, sort of swept-wing, like fighter planes. It doesn’t much matter, as they don’t bother anyone most of the time, unless you’re eating, and they don’t usually get into the house. The eating thing is a problem only when we entertain out on the terrace on the roof.

On the third floor, the only windows that open are in front, as per the rest of the house, and facing south, again normale, but in the kitchen up here, and so around a jog in the wall, because of the doorway into the kitchen. there is also a unique fixed window, that is, it can’t be opened, but it looks out on the terrace and faces east, so there is mucho sun up here in the morning, starting at sunrise.

We leave the French double casement windows open in front on this floor. Hence there is a slow, but steady stream of either wasps or hornets—these particular beasts are on the small side and have the delta wing design. They fly to the fixed window. I would too. It looks like the way out again. But of course it isn’t. Poor things. And so they loiter, buzzing around the window, up and down, side to side. At night, once a crowd has accumulated—about the third day we had been here—they bunch up at the top of the window, as if keeping one another warm, not that it gets that cool up here. But there is a community thing happening. They’re in a bunch right now, a tight bunch, right in the corner, out of reach—though the last thing I would think of doing is reaching for them.This has been going on for almost two weeks now. Every morning, I come up here to check the mail that arrived overnight: and say, folks, the mail has been slim in this direction. You know who you are.

Every morning I expect to find a little pile of hornet or wasp corpses on the sill. But nothing. They’re keeping alive somehow. The size of the bunch has stabilized so maybe they’re eating each other, or maybe a few of them have an extra brain cell or two and they are finding their way back to the open window, or are feeling adventurous and going around the corner into the kitchen, where there’s about one and-a-half square meters of wide open window (that’s about 15 square feet for you culture-centric or math-challenged).

Anyway, that’s the wasp and hornet story. There’s a bunch of other singular specimens of a variety of species, very much smaller, except the moths, and they flit around, not bothering me or anybody else. And that’s pretty much their story.

On the floors, especially in corners in the dark, we find corpses, speaking of corpses, of beetles and tiny critters that look exactly like scorpions, but they are only related and don’t pack quite the same wallop. They’re about an inch and-a-quarter long, and their stingers rise maybe three-eighths of an inch above them. They move kind of slowly, and we’ve mainly seen dead ones. Nevertheless we check our shoes before we put them on. I do and Linda is supposed to. So far no stings. Nevertheless, they like dark tight spaces. And I guess they either have no olfactory development worth speaking of, or they like the smell of feet. And that’s the little scorpion-not-really story.

I mentioned the cicadas, cigales in French, and one of the symbols of Provence. There is at least one restaurant called Les Cigales for, I’d say, every 10,000 people who live in Provence. Our favorite Les Cigales, though we’ve hardly been to all of them (would make a nice project though) is in Aix. Their pizza is particularly good, and they have a nice terrace on the street.

The cicadas have been active and voluble of late, because of the heat, as I said.

One evening last week, a cicada landed on Linda’s shoulder while we were out eating at a restaurant in Aups, called La Provencale (not very good, and our waitress was trop attitude, so you won’t be hearing much about that place, much as I have a masterly way with a complaint or a disparaging word, but this was, except for the cicada, just beyond the pale and not worth my typing about). Anyway, this monster lands on her shoulder, and scares the crap, but only for a moment, out of Linda, who then did not know what to do.

I sat next to her, so I had the best view. It was a beautiful thing, a sort of matte medium gray, warmish in tone, and almost monochromatic. There was a couple of little kids at the table next to us, Irish as it happened, so I thought it would be easy to attract their attention without groping for French. But they didn’t take much interest. Though Grandpa did, and he remarked on the size of it. I had mistaken them for Americans, so I said it was a Texas cicada, and he allowed as it probably was, in quite a brogue, which immediately disabused me of their origins. Linda was getting tired of not moving a muscle, and I guess the little creature also was getting bored because in one leap or short flight it landed on a roost about five feet away, and we lost him. Perfect camouflage.

I like moments like that. These creatures are truly beautiful, and, though not privy to Linda’s fantasies as she sat there, at first unknowing, and then terrified—the thing was about four inches long and they are all legs and wings, folded back in a characteristic aerodynamic foil, even at rest—I myself wished for another encounter. In the end they are not harmful, or so I gather.

And that was that for cigales, or at least the larger species of insect beasts, until today.

Last night, as I leaned out the front window of the salon on the ground floor, I noticed Nicole, the innkeeper and our good friend in the doorway of the inn, returning from watering their plants on the facade. I noticed that the kitchen was dark and the kitchen door closed, though usually wide open, with the bug zapper and its eery blue light visible across the way, even with all the lights on in there. This meant their cook was, once again, hors de combat.

Nicole and Rudolf’s trials with kitchen staff would make a book, but I won’t get into that. I just knew, as I leaned on the tiles of the sill, which is about 28 inches above the floor (and yet, on the other side, the outside of our place, the bottom of the window is practically level with the street—but I’ll explain the significance of that in a moment), that Nicole was probably fit to be tied. With the cook out, the restaurant could not serve dinner even to the guests of the Inn who didn’t fell like driving the few miles to the nearest eatery, in any one of several towns surrounding us.

She usually notices everything going on within eyesight, but such was her reverie and preoccupation that I had to call, “Nicole” before she took notice, just as she was going to disappear inside. In effect, I said what gives and she told me he was calling in “sick” again. I said, well then come in and have a glass of wine, an invitation she rarely refuses if it’s possible to take it up.

I was in the midst of making dinner, and she came in and joined us, for just one glass of wine. We killed the entire bottle with her, and she also had dinner, as she couldn’t remember if she had even eaten (this cook business is very upsetting). She insisted she would replace the bottle—a rosé from the Chateau La Curniéres, which is in neighboring Tavernes, and a very good value: I bought half a case for 27 euros just that afternoon, and it’s a wine featured at the Inn (for 22 euros a bottle, and quite a value at that). We insisted she wouldn’t. Finally we bid one another good night and I locked up.

This morning, after looking through my sparse pickings in the email department (see above: inadequate communications from friends) I headed downstairs, and passing through the salon sensed more than noticed that something was amiss.

The window in there, as I say, faces the place with a sill about two and-a-half feet above the floor and about four or five inches above the pavement which comes right up to the stone wall of the facade of our house. The entire first floor of our house is below grade, with the kitchen floor down a deep step further. This means mainly that outside the house at least, the grade has been raised a number of times, I’d guess since our house was built. The town was established in the 12th century, probably late in that period. We are told our house is either 14th or 15th century in origin. That’s a long time to be putting layer on layer.

The chief deficit of this is, with stone walls, and a floor inside closer to the water table and below the grade outdoors, the walls wick moisture out of the ground and that moisture stays insulated by about two feet of earth and stone. Hence we have a perpetual decaying of the inside plaster on the front wall. We’ll suffer, thanks.

Window treatments in southern France are represented in a narrow band of interpretations. There’s your lace window curtains. There’s your lined drapes. There’s your wooden-beaded curtains—popular in doorways and windows down on the plain: they admit light and aren’t a barrier to humans and pets, but they keep out flies. There are some other treatments even less attractive to us than these. For four years now, and longer, we’ve had naked windows, though you’d never know it from outside, which is what counts, with the shutters closed. They mainly are closed, we’re so seldom here of late.

But you gotta’ have window treatments. The compulsion is Linda’s, and I don’t disagree. I’m just your usual persnickety picky mate, as I am with more or less everything else, and not just any treatment will do.

We both agreed that a nice, plain, sort of gauzy see-through kind of curtain would do. For the salon, we found a nice piece of gauze they would use up in about three minutes at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, for a mere 150 bucks for this flimsy bit of, well, I can’t even call it cloth. About seven feet long, and about five feet wide, with ties attached at the top to go round a curtain rod. It took us six months to get it hemmed, possibly in the ‘States, flying it back and forth with us, because who knows a good seamstress in Fox-Amphoux? But I’m not sure of these details.

It does lend a nice dreamy romantic quality during the day to the light coming into the room. And you can’t really see in, because we don’t have lights on, certainly none brighter than the blazing sunlight. And, remarkably, no one looks into other people’s windows over here. At least not while I’m watching, sometimes deep in the shadows of the salon.

So this morning I detected something different about the room, and I looked around quickly and noticed the curtain was disturbed—pushed aside slightly—and there, sitting on the sill, was a bottle of Chateau La Curniéres Rosé 2004. Magic. I went over to retrieve it, and as I straightened the curtain on the rod, noticed a slight movement above my head.

A very large bug, with very big legs, what I originally thought might be a cigale (but have been told, by Pascal Masi, is not possible with such legs—more likely a grasshopper or locust, or maybe a cricket; all are related) was sitting there on the rod, and he suddenly leaped to the floor. I spotted him, not moving, and I ran into the kitchen, grabbed a colander, ran back, and threw it over him. I went up to the third floor and grabbed a sheaf of ink-jet paper to slip beneath the colander, retrieved my camera, and went back to the salon. I switched lenses, slid the paper under the colander, lifted the whole deal off the floor and put it on a table, raised the colander. Nothing. Gone. Vanished.

Actually he was clinging to the inner surface of the colander, and I gingerly coaxed him onto the paper, and then somehow onto the outside of the colander. Tough to shoot. Very small, maybe three inches long, and all tension. No way to tell when and in what direction he would spring. I grabbed a couple of shots, and then brought him to the open window, and he immediately jumped to the ground, a distance of maybe eight inches, thanks to the raised surface of the road. I took one more picture.

This last one was sort of mano à bêto I stared at him, and I know he was scrutinizing me. Big eyes, taking in everything. The rest of him blended beautifully with the leafy detritus on the ground outside our ill-kempt street front. I know what you’re thinking. What’s with all the brown leaves and junk? It’s summer. Well, they’ve probably been there since our last visit, in January. What I want to know is, how does he know, blending in perfectly, when you come right down to it?

This is wholly beside the point. What struck me is the way he studied me. I know he was memorizing every feature: the beard, the glasses, the wild white hair, the slight skin condition. The next time we meet, I know one of us will be ready, and it won’t be me.

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I really thought the weather had had its back broken with a monumental thunderstorm as they can only have in Provence—the conditions are ripe for big forest fires and big storms, they seem to go hand in hand, but never in such a way that the latter can absolutely prevent the former. It was beautiful yesterday. And the first third of the daytime and the evening hours are lovely in any event.

But the heat is back, and it means that mid-day is killer.

We went on a little excursion today. Linda wanted to go someplace we hadn’t been. So we stopped for coffee and croissants (it’s Sunday, so we had pain au chocolat) in Aups, and then stopped on the road to Tourtour to check out a personal “museum” kept by a woman sculptor in the midst of acres and acres and acres of garrigue (an essentially untranslatable word, peculiar to Provence, like maquis, but differentiated because of the combination of flora that characterizes either of these kinds of hilly shrub lands—very rough country—the garrigue has an abundance of aromatic shrubs: lavender, rosemary, and Artemisia), with her little sculpture park at the end of almost a mile of dirt road, which has been paved over with raw concrete in places because, it’s obvious, it would be impassable otherwise, especially in the rain.

Her name is Faykod (last name—the rest of it is Maria-Zsuzsa de… born in Hungary, of a Swedish father and an “Austro-Hungarian” mother; I love this kind of detail, straight from the official biography—let’s see, the last of Austro-Hungary, you remember?, the Empire that whipped the crap out of the French in the 70s, the 1870s, was pretty much last seen not long after their swan-song as a great political entity, and that would be right after the WWI, when the Allies said, “thanks for the memories and auf wiedersehen”) and she has done some very strange stuff, I mean aside from keeping alive in this small way what had been a great empire, in a galaxy far far away.

Working almost exclusively in white Carrara marble (the finest stuff—the stone that Michelangelo used), she sculpts mostly figurative pieces. A great many are clearly allegorical. Many female nudes. And then, in the middle of things like a draped corpse, life-size, that represents the Resurrection, there’s a "Head of Diana" only it is not merely the goddess, but it’s Princess Di, with a clenched-tooth smile and small round earrings. A life size figure of Mozart, with his fingers melting into a keyboard from his left hand, and a violin from his right.

Dozens of pieces in a little arid park, filled with trees, very dry lonely kind of trees, and a fountain, with a bronze female nude in the middle of it. If you keep walking along the dirt road that snakes through the property (which has a wrought iron portail guarding the entrance to the fenced in portion of her land), and a little ticket takers booth (it was free today, but ordinarily it’s six euros) you reach her studio, with the manicured lawn festooned with huge blocks of marble, and guarded by a ferocious bichon frise, which is a dog about the size of both your fists and the color of raw Carrara marble.

She emerged herself from the back of a low very modern building and said hello and urged me into the studio proper, which had a lot of small pieces and some beautiful, very pricey furniture (ditto in the living portion, which I could spy through an open door). She resembles her portrait on the Website (http://www.musee-de-faykod.com/), but only sufficiently that you wouldn’t mistake her at a cocktail party. Her portrait shows her in a kind of Byronic pose, wearing an outfit that I could imagine Byron might look upon as pajamas. I think it’s the Mittel-Europa idea of Romantic chic. The Website is a little cagey about her age, though it’s clear she was finished with her earliest education, graduating from the Sorbonne in 1978. Which puts her in the neighborhood of 50. And a still handsome neighborhood it is. She is trim and lithe, and who wouldn’t be muscling huge hunks of expensive rock around?

Also, her tools are serious, as you can see from the photograph I shot in her atelier. She pointed me to it,  after describing some pieces she was in the midst of and then sort of disappeared.

She had showed me a huge crucified Christ she’s working on, and there were a number of other religious themed pieces strewn about the place, in various stages of emerging from the rock. On the handout it said she has a Christ in black marble that was commissioned by the Vatican Museum.

There’s also a huge swimming pool on the property, very fancy, with a glassed in covering, very much like a nursery hothouse, and clearly meant to allow swimming year round.

Of the little pieces, the few we could come close to actually putting in a living space we could afford to live in were some very small bronze nudes, female, about a foot long in various states of prostration or writhing. These were 8,000 euros. Each. So I would imagine she is, indeed, doing OK and can afford the land, the gate, the fence around the sculpture garden and studio, which must encompass about 20 or 30 acres. This Musée Faykod has been a local feature for ten years, as of this year. That was how I knew about the free admission—it was mentioned in today’s paper. I do recall when I first came here in 1988 there was a gallery right in the town of Aups by the same name—this museum to herself is about three miles out of town. The gallery, it turns out, closed that same year, and I assume she needed eight years to re-group and accumulate the gelt to go really big time.

In the end, she is quite prolific and eclectic in her subjects, which range from many Christs, in many aspects of his life, but particularly popular are crucifixions (one of which was the one commissioned by and now residing in The Vatican) to, well, there’s no other word for it but, celebrities. For example, there’s a full figure (in every sense of the word) statue of Marilyn Monroe, commissioned for use by the Cannes Film Festival, but now standing, with a hip cocked in her sculpture park, an image more or less crafted of MM in the ’62 era Madison Square Garden "Happy Birthday Mr. President" period of the movie goddess’s tragically short life—you remember, she wore a gauzy gold dress that fit so well she might as well not have bothered with it.

Maybe there’s a minor theme detectable in that both Marilyn and Diana died at the same age. And there’s an irony my mother would have immediately detected in that that age was 36, or, in Yiddish and Hebrew "double chai" or double "life," because 18 in Hebrew characters also spells the word, "life." Maybe if they’d been Jewish. But then, who knows what Ms. Austro-Hungary would have done with them.

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Montpellier, in the Hérault. The caption on the advert says: "Lesson #13: Unveil to him his line of opportunity" [click on the image for larger view]

"What they [the French] were still good at were the arts of intimacy. Eats still rated high…In every other quartier, the fresh produce markets, the good bakeries, the charcuterie with its cold cuts. Also the great displays of intimate garments. The shameless love of fine bedding…It was wonderful to be so public about the private, about the living creature and its needs. Slick magazines in New York imitated this but never got it right…Yes, and then there was the French street life. "American residential streets are humanly nine-tenths barren. Here humankind is still acting up," said Ravelstein.
—Ravelstein by Saul Bellow
[acknowledgement and thanks to Rick Cohn for sending this quote along]

There is a feature of every provincial market (that is, the out regions, where we are, where the locals depend on market day, the one day a week, or two, when presumably fresher and better, and more local, goods are for sale, and they get to see their friends face to face and chew the fat, have an expresso, or something a little stronger, and immerse themselves fully in the culture — Ravelstein was talking about Paris, his French bailiwick, where it’s an everyday occurrence; the biggest cities in the south also have a market day every day, purely a matter of, well, marketing). It would make for a good short subject, or, I suppose, in my hands, a good long discourse. Ravelstein alludes to this feature in "shameless love of fine bedding." He’s probably talking high thread count Egyptian cotton or even linen bed clothing.

In the markets around here, summer and winter, at least one stall is taken up with beds. Mainly mattresses and box springs, or all in one units. Many are attended to by women, and, being French, more often than not, comely women. The other day, in Aups, one of them, one of these femmes des literies [women of bedding; I simply will not say "bedding women"] held a small crowd, mainly of men, transfixed, as she bulled a mattress, which she picked up two handed and hoisted off the ground, to another location in her stall. To paraphrase a great line from "Damn Yankees," — many minds on a single thought.

Ravelstein [read: Bellow] speaks of the "arts of intimacy." To me, rather, it is a matter of the arts of culture and society, and a much finer tuning of the ensemble as they play much more appealing melodies of the quotidian — a very much different experience than that in the United States. And on that, clearly, we both agree.

I’d expect Bellow to take the thread up that he does here, and weave it into this transfixing, compressed, yet poetic social commentary. He was a sensual man, and, fathering a child in his 80s, obviously, like another great artist, a Spaniard who transplanted himself to another Catholic country that was far less repressed in that regard—Picasso, I mean—he was fortunate to be highly sexed and able to do something about it until several years near the end.

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Our dear friend Mikki Lipsey, actor extraordinaire, is in repertory in two Shakespeare plays in a new Shakespeare company (if you’re in northern New England, near Waterville Valley, you should try and catch either or both shows… they’re very well credited and reviewed: http://www.shakespeareinthevalley.com/). She’s cast as Leonata in Much Ado about Nothing, and Peter Quince in Mid-Summer Night’s Dream. It’s the latter that got me to thinking. When exactly is mid-summer night?

I learned, to my surprise, that mid-summer eve, according to old folk calendars, including the Celtic, actually falls on what has always been the fixed date that we know as the summer solstice—the zenith of the sun’s path with respect to earth and the length of the daylight hours. That’s June 23, always. Though we of course, have a variable date, because we’re scientists, not old folk.

If we were old folk, summer would begin on May 1, or May Day, and end on August 1, also known as Lamas Day. Hence mid-summer, with a certain logic as well, as the height of summer should be the day that the sun shines longest, falls on June 23, also known as St. John’s Day. Hence it’s somewhat past.

This would be a hard lesson to deliver to the old folk around the village.

We’re contending, as I’ve made much of, with the days of la Canicule, dog days, and it is hard to believe that summer would end, as it did in the old days, just four days from now. I had been hoping that somehow, mathematically, mid-summer night or eve, was about to fall—I assumed about 45 days after the solstice, which would make it the day we leave the village to return to the U.S. Not to be, but a thesis forms itself.

Let us say that mid-summer is not the height, or the middle, or anything of the sort, but is the very thesis of summer, its paradigm, if you will. Even after only ten days here (and an aggregate of a great many more days than that, but never in the past during la Canicule, a set of factors that adds a certain sweaty frisson to the concept) it is clear that any one day is much like the next or the one before, here in the Haut Var, in this little village—I am told like so many other little villages—and inhabited largely by people who either see the world, not with sameness, but with a continuity, or see "thw world" as a place far away from here, where other people occupy themselves with things like dates and times, temperature variations.

In fact, it is inhabited mainly by very old people, people who have seen the world, and had their share of clocks and timers, and shared and imbibed in many a feast, both of the moveable sort, and now, of the sort that has a certain timeless quality, still with rich portions, and the wine has reached its peak. This is not to say the sun neither rises nor sets for the village, and for its constituency of elders, statesmen of their sort and venerable women, who keep history in their heads.

Almost every evening there is a beautiful sunset just beyond Mont Ste.-Victoire in the distance, shrouded as it may be in haze or smog, or whatever its particular constituents. When we drove to Aix-en-Provence two days ago, we saw one of those roadway warnings the newspaper told us about [see my earlier posting] just as we exited the autoroute. “Pollution warning—speed limit 100kph.” But that trip will have to wait for another entry. The sun is a disk over the horizon, an orange almost scarlet in intensity, suffused, tranquil, supernal. The mood lasts even after the sun has set behind distant hills, and the light doesn’t so much disappear as mellow out to dusk, and then about 10:30 it is dark for certain. The sky clears completely and the milky way and likely a million other stars, much closer, are visible.

However, before that happens and in a metaphor, I think, for what we all dream will be the very very slow transfiguration of our lives into mild decrepitude, if not senescence, the day takes its good old sweet time ending. On a recent afternoon/evening, with the sun still high, the same afternoon I began this post two days ago (a note for those of you imagining I am chained to the bistro table in the attic) I decided to take a stroll around the village. I did, and I promptly strolled again, this time with my camera, as—and this has happened too many times—there was many a picture I spotted on what amounts to my scouting mission.

Every time this tiny village leaves me with the sense that I have mined every conceivable image—I say this with no prejudice; this is my village and my images: some of them to some of you hackneyed and stereotypical, to others the occasion of gushing, as the world so often does, over images possibly so trite and hackneyed and, well, stereotypical, that one may only conclude that some of us have the gene, and some of us simply hate sentimentality—I discover that the changes a day brings, or a month or a season are worth recording. And, much as we have not been here year-round, there are many such instances. We have never been here this late in July, and never at all in August. So I live to shoot again.

The great photographer Eduard Steichen—one of the greats of all time and one of the greats in photo history, as one of the dons of early and mid-20th century photography, and he who captured some of the seminal images of American photography (if we must make such distinctions)—spent a great part of the ending 20 years of his long life regularly shooting photos, morning noon and night, in every season, of a favorite shadblow tree on his property in Connecticut. This gives me permission to believe, if it does not, in itself, mute the prejudices of you out there who thinks that “seen one, seen them all.” I am beginning to think that the same phenomenon may obtain, if not everywhere, then at least in our village.

Just down the descent into the lower square, or place, largely indistinguishable from the upper square, or place, where we are located (across from the chapel and the Inn next door to it), a boisterous crowd is having their end-of-day match of pétanque. Pétanque is the Provençal version of boules, or “bowls,” of which another variant is the Italian bocci. We Americans have bowling, of course, dating back at least to to the time in Washington Irving’s immortalization of the legend of Dutch spirits playing “bowls” in the Kaatskil Mountains in upstate New York, and thereby explaining the local phenomenon of thunder in the hills, with no ensuing rain.

There is thunder here too, but largely ignored, and largely subsumed, as the match progresses, by the manly basso guffaws, and the more shrill squeals of the women and the few older children participating, as the lead see-saws among the hurlers to the latest one, who jigs in triumph. I asked Jean-Jacques, our beloved neighbor, a retired businessman, and former global salesman of French molded rubber goods, such as shoe soles and the like, if this was the training for équipe Fox—the very local Juventus, or Manchester Union. And he chuckled, and said, “Non, l’équipe Normande.” Team Normandy. Presumably this is his native terroir, as well as that of at least some others of this generally spry bunch.

Jean-Jacques is, by his own description, “a very old man.” He certainly has some bragging rights to the title of doyen of the village, though the doyenne, Frieda, his next-door neighbor, is very much older. Frieda sits tranquilly in her tiny terrace in front of her door, attended usually by a small number of younger neighbors, to do the seeing to her needs—she is nearly blind, and one must announce oneself, with name and relation, as she recognizes very few people in the village merely by the sound of their voices. Most of us are an itinerant and international crowd—though among the first things she tells you is that she is originally Swiss and her French is terrible, and it isn’t, and she speaks no English, but she does. It’s not surprising she cannot keep track of us. Whether she tracks the hoots and triumphs of the pétanque players grappling either right under her nose, or across the place in another clear area in front of the houses on that side, is unknown.

Jean-Jacques does, often, gird himself for battle, and brings out his little zippered case for the three steel pétanque balls (differentiated by the differences in a swirling arabesque of fine lines molded or etched into the surface), each about the size of a major league American baseball. He manages one match or two, and then sits and watches on the edge of the field of battle. On the first days we arrived, he had visitors in the form of one of his sons  en famille and a number of them the members of what J-J called Team Normandy.

Jean-Jacques is a recipient of the emails that I send to update Linda’s condition, when it’s been warranted in the past, and also to warn all recipients of the posting of what are now these blog entries. He invariably sends a response, sometimes ventured in English, but usually very brief and in closing he writes, “amitiés,” in friendship, as indeed he should. He is game even to try this tortuous English of mine, as he is not nearly as advanced in the language as his sprightly, very dear wife Paule who, in contradistinction, and if I understood properly, reads at least one book in English a week.

I always respond to his email in French, most recently by thanking J-J for his exertions in trying to read “la langue difficile.” I also told him it was difficult for me writing it, so I understood. The next day, his son, a man at least in his 40s, came to me as I sat in our car, preparatory to a day trip, and effusively thanked me for writing to his “papa” in French, and that he appreciated it, and his papa very much enjoyed the missives in any event. He said Jean-Jacques knows many little words (in English). I said I knew too many big words, and I knew it was very difficult.

I do not have either as tight, or amiable (or tender) a relationship with the others of the sizable elderly cadre of citizens of Fox. One fellow, with whom I mainly exchange greetings—this means not a thing except for engagement in the absolutely minimal protocol or etiquette for civilized social discourse; one says “bon jour” or whatever, depending on the time of day, to even the most remote members of one’s circle of acquaintance, if not to strangers, say, strolling through the village. With Jean Jacques (who, incidentally, when he essays an email to me, styles himself, “Jan-Jak from Fox!”), as with Paule, and the Jouves, our neighbors further up the street, and Nicole and Rudolf , our close friends who keep the Inn, and maybe one or two others in the village, we do exchange the famous French two-cheek kiss—and none of your air kisses either—on greeting if we stream within at least a meter of one another.

This one fellow, who always says, “Good day,” to me, as do I to him, and shares, as well, a twinkle-eyed grin, seems to me to strut about a bit, and in the heat always without a shirt, in shorts, and flip-flops with no socks, if he is wearing footwear at all. It reminds me overall of Picasso, or perhaps Tony Hopkins’s wonderful interpretation of the painter in the film, “Surviving Picasso,” with the delicious Natasha McIlhone as Françoise Gilot, whose story the movie actually told—surviving his sometimes demonic self-possession and will. The one difference right off, is that my friend from the village has a mop of thick straight dead-white hair (much like Picasso’s would have been, had he kept it)—which you’d think would give the two of us another point of affinity, but I try to ignore this, as well as refusing to appear in public without a shirt. He does not lack in cocky self-possession. Some might call it smugness, but I, who believe in at least a little bit of sensitivity to nuance in the French character (and Picasso was, of course, Catalan—not the same thing at all, just ask a Catalan), think it is more akin to a very typical self-assurance, mixed with certitude, a dash of joie de vivre, and a soupçon of sheer blindness to others (and which I usually prefer to call narcissism, but I wish to preserve the informal entente cordiale which I have maintained with no treaty conferences necessary for my entire career in the French provinces).

I am sure he is a splendid fellow, and trés gentil (the catch-all minimal phrase of greater than anticipated approbation: “very nice”), but whenever I see him, I can’t help but think about one quirk of his: A penchant that clearly he cannot control.

I must first explain very briefly that the chapel has in its belfry a clock. The clock strikes the hour, and the half-hour. It does this 24/7 as we Americans like to say. You either get used to it, or you don’t. I have gotten used to Linda’s white noise machine all night after 12 years, so I can’t hear the bells anyway. Within the entrance to the chapel there is a bell pull, accessible to all, because Francine, our neighbor two doors away up the street, who is charged as beadle with keeping the keys, opens the doors at about 7:30 every morning, and locks up the doors at about eight in the evening.

The clock has its own chimes, which are sufficiently loud, and actually somewhat musical, for the village, but can actually barely be heard once you are down on the plain below. The hand-pulled bell, on the other hand, has a robust clamorous tone to it, and it is very loud.

The only other matter of note is that now that the clock is fixed, at the insistence of the mayor (after having the clock silent for almost three years in the absence of a bronze part for the ancient mechanism, a part that had to be ordered and hand forged and crafted), it rings more or less on time for at least a week after the mechanism is adjusted. Then it begins to stray. We have been here for almost two weeks on this typical visit, and the clock is now four minutes slow (with a second “ring” of the hour, three minutes after the first, which makes the second ring seven minutes late).

At noon, my stalwart Picasso-double copain (“buddy”) strides into the chapel, grabs the bell pull, and rings it like all hell is breaking loose. A cluster of three rings of three strikes of the bell each, and then, in as fast succession and loudly as possible, any number of rings. I don’t think he keeps count. I do from time to time. It’s always more than 12 and less than 24. And it also annoys the shit out of me, because, well, as the telephone repairman who was here earlier in the week remarked to me, without asking or provocation, “C’est calme. Très calme…” [in effect, “it’s very quiet here!” suggesting not only this fact, but also, “how nice”] Why Pablo has to ring that bell, who knows? It’s better to get pissed and then imagine all kinds of psychopathic tendencies for any number of reasons than to confront him if only to ask why, never mind to suggest that he is not only disturbing my peace, but that of any number of others likely. I’ve actually taken a very limited poll, and yes, it’s been noted by others, but “C’est normale.” Which is the usual hapless Gallic verbal shrug.

He’s prominent, always, among the pétanque players, and though I always expect him to be boisterous, given his bell-ringing exploits, he remains serious, if not studious, of every game.

I shoot my shots and move on, below the Place de Siret (I am at a total loss as to what this means, or to whom it may refer; the only siret I know in French is the acronym siret which refers to the national system of codifying businesses, much like the U.S. SIC codes, as to type of business and with all imaginable sub-categories, such that a siret is a 14-digit number, without which you cannot do business in France, and it is very difficult to do business—at the industrial and mercantile level—without knowing the siret code of the enterprise with which you are dealing). It’s true the mayor, who insisted on naming every street up here in the village, is a mason, that is, a stoneworker, and a businessman. But he is a very minor businessman, if a very important mayor, or so he makes himself, in this town of 380 citizens and 16 square miles, most of which are farms, or forest (and one-third of the town is national forest, outside his jurisdiction). I will learn by and by who or what Siret is. In the meantime, I am in a very small way grateful that I am above the invisible division between the Place de Siret and my own,  the Place de l’Église, which is no mystery at all, as the chapel entrance is 75 feet from my door. I would hate my address to be Place de Siret.

The sun beams on the parking lot overlooking the plain. Just below is the Chateau de Barras and its fields, and beyond that, more woods and forest in the direction of Barjols. Slightly to the north of this westerly view is the aforementioned Mont Ste.-Victoire, growing hazier as the day dwindles despite the sun. North off the parking lot is the other main street of Fox, though it’s hard to think of these barely paved or unpaved byways as streets. There are only three worth talking about all told. There is one on either side of the village, running parallel, and overlooking the plain on either side, just above the ancient ramparts. This is just as the Knights Templar planned it. From the highest point in the village one can see anything and anyone approaching from all directions. If you actually get into the village you must cope with a mare’s nest of tiny alleys—ruelles—and culs de sac.

The westerly street, running south to north, is the rue Berri—again a mystery as to reference. I don’t like blanks, so I have imagined the street is an homage to Claude Berri, a famous director-producer-writer, among whose creations is the wonderful duet of films made in 1986, based on Marcel Pagnol novels. Pagnol is the Steinbeck of Provence, writing mainly in the first half of the 20th century, and living to engage in the film industry of France, and getting to see many of his stories, which take place at the beginning of that century, turned into cinema. Berri directed and helped write Jean de Florette and its companion piece, Manon des Sources, which starred, in the title role of Manon, the stunning Emmanuelle Béart, still barely out of her teens when the films were made.

Pagnol grew up in and wrote about that part of Provence to the west, in the département called the Vaucluse, a very much rougher place, containing the gigantic national park, left largely untamed, if studded with many mountainous towns, called the Luberon. Those films of Berri were shot in the Vaucluse, and I can imagine the presence of the stars caused quite a stir in whichever villages at the time their mayors decided to disoblige by permitting a movie to be shot: Gérard Depardieu, Yves Montand (in one of his last, and possibly his most triumphant, cinematic roles—playing an ur-paysan, the wily peasant-farmer, whose craftiness and love of money, land, and power has clearly left him, unknowingly bereft of whatever humanity he was born with), Daniel Auteuil, in a role that is a masterpiece of subtlety and utterly natural mimesis, playing a man who in his clottish stupidity and cupidity, belies the true nature of this gifted brilliant actor, and, of course, la Béart, who plays the grown daughter of the Montand character’s victim. It is a tale, in two parts, of a very satisfying ultimate revenge.

I tell you all this, because our little village is on the verge of an onslaught of filmmakers. This may sound a bit déja lu, but it is not. A French production company has unfortunately found our village and deems it the perfect setting for a pair of films that will interpret two other Pagnol novels, set in 1905, tales of memory and love. This is somewhat smaller scale as the films are intended ultimately for the French cinema channel on national television. It is expected that the production values will be high, the company will be uppity and demanding, as they commandeer the Inn for the lodgings of the stars and the other important company members, and as the production makes an ordeal for the entirety of the village. Among other things they will fill both the Place de Siret and the Place de l’Église with tons of sand, to obliterate the asphalt and the modern paving stones, and the painted parking demarcations, in order to simulate conditions of the turn of the last century.

No one has said how the sand will be removed, and I gather I daren’t ask. No one else has either. The icing on this cake, and one that poisons the dish for me, is that Monsieur le maire autocratically granted permission to the production company without consulting with a single taxpayer (which would include me). We will catch only the tail end of the inconvenience. The chief malaise will be having to shlep our bags as we leave to our car, wherever we may be able to park it. Once the sand is spread, parking is forbidden in the convenience of the places for the residents.

Hence this early evening walk of mine is also to refresh my memory, and to give it fresh material to hold there before the barbarians storm the gates, with nary a kettle of boiling oil to be dropped upon them from the citadel.

The rue Berri is incredibly narrow, being formed of the walls at the backs of houses that front the places and the facades of houses that teeter above where the ramparts of this classic ville perché once stood to defend the residents, especially at night, after the farmers had returned from working the land on the plain. A brand new road sign, comprised mainly of the economical iconography of the universal language of signage in Europe, shows that somewhere ahead the street narrows to 2 1/2 meters, or barely more than 6 1/2 feet, a little more than the width of a car. One has the most live sense of this dimension only when one tries to pass between these ancient stones behind the wheel of a mid-size car. It is a testament generally to the driving of most Europeans, natives and tourists alike, that the chief demolition of the walls, if any, has been via the ravages of time, rather than the errant bumpers and fenders of a Citrôen. There is indeed a great deal of construction on the rue Berri and this has meant for one place at least, where an absolute ruin has been slowly turned into what promises to be a magnificent terraced stone box, preserving much of the ruined detail and replicating the same ancient techniques of building the new additions and extensions, that trucks of building materials, two small cranes, and other semi-heavy equipment has found their way down and then back again out of this back street.

One nice small sign of the triumph of time and nature over the folly of politics and economics: I see that ivy has already begun to obliterate one of the street signs, mounted only two years ago. I wish I had reserved my wrath—the chief victim of which was myself; as there’s no one to complain to, as I have already noted: I’m a taxpayer, but not a voter. It is now clear to me that these signs will not withstand the ravages of not only the local flora, but of the rough mistral-driven weather, and the unintended blows of passing vehicles, falling rocks, and the accidents of renovation. Indeed, in a wryly ironic footnote to the otherwise unseemly assault on the town by the cinéastes who will arrive soon, lights, cameras, sand truck, and actors in tow: they have insisted on removing the street signs for the shooting. Inauthentic. If the mayor were a thinking man, this might have kept him awake at least one night.

The rest of my walk was unremarkable, save for its being in a village still inhabited and largely intact, as it has mainly been throughout its 800 year-old history, since its founding by the Knights Templar. The area was originally settled in a sporadic way by Greeks, and later Romans, who overran them. The town, and in particular the plain, was considered an ideal encampment by the army. And so beloved did it become, apparently by these originally Legionnaires that, mustered out and retired to a pension from Rome, they elected to settle here in Fox Amphoux, or whatever exactly it was called then. “Fox” is a corruption of the Latin, though what Latin exactly I’m not sure. Amphoux, also, has devolved from some more ancient tongue and vocabulary.

One feature that always is striking is the everchanging floral display. I am not speaking of the domestic arrangements of many of the current inhabitants, who, God bless them, have much greener thumbs than Linda or I could ever aspire to. For the first time, to divert attention to these domestic displays for a moment, we have seen the plants in pots at our front door in bloom. The plant is called a “Rose Laurel” (rose laurier) and we are told that the leaves and stems are toxic to the touch. I have no idea if this is a common trait of the laurel, but the leaves look awfully like the bay laurel that is an integral part of a great deal of my cooking, including, as it does, many stews, soups, and daubes, as well as tagines. I’ll have to find out. One of these rose laurels shows blooms that are, as it turns out, a fairly typical pink, not unlike the color of many rhodedendrons I have known. The other plant, however, shows a rarer, though by no means rare, flower that is somewhere between crimson and mauve. That’s the one I took a picture of.

Also, to return to my path and the things that grow with seemingly no assistance from anyone, the figs have begun to form. They will be ripe on our next visit, in fact in their last throes of ripeness, as we plan to be here, if it’s possible, in early October.

As it’s de rigeur for the comprehensiveness of my photo catalog, if for no other requirement, to take a few very close shots of the flowers that seem to grow wild, as they grow literally out of the walls all over the village. Inevitably, we’ve discovered, everything is owned by somebody, and there is no reason to think that property is any more in the public domain than that it is civic property. In fact, the mayor just had the town purchase a very small chapel at the edge of the entrance to the village—a spare cool room, with an arched ceiling and a very tiny stained glass window up high above the door, faced, in the opposite wall, with a vent. The design works, as in the middle of the hottest day last week, entering the semi-shadow of the chapel was like entering an air-conditioned haven. Currently the chapel is showing 14 terra-cotta panels, enamelled with art, representing the Stations of the Cross. It is part of a show of other pieces, dating from prehistoric times to the present, and the output of contemporary artists, most of whom live in neighboring towns. The theme is earth and fire—that is, terra cotta or terre cuit [cooked earth]. The show is sponsored by the village, an art gallery that has opened in the Chateau Barras, and one or two other sponsors, and somehow also cooked up by our attention-deprived mayor, whose ambitions for attracting glory seem also to produce worthy results as well as the dubious.

By the time I finished my walk, the pétanque crowd had retired, at least temporarily, and I went in to get ready for dinner. When I was finished, I went out one more time—by now it was just past nine in the evening—to take one more shot, looking down on the plain, in the direction of where the sun had just gone to bed.

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An odd sense of privacy

In today’s Var-Matin, one of the daily newspapers of Provence, there is a story about how the air pollution is almost as bad as it’s ever been, certainly the worst since 2003, which was some kind of banner year, but we missed summer here in Fox-Amphoux that year (we were here briefly in May) and so we have no personal reference.

For this story, by way of illustration, though of what I am not sure, there were photographs taken on the autoroute, the federal superhighway of France.The autoroute features immense overhead bulletin boards that span the road, which is sometimes as many as five lanes across. In these particular photos, one on the front page, and one on the interior page to which the story jumps, page 2 in this case, presumably because it’s such a big story, passing cars are shown from the rear. It is a section of highway near Brignoles, approriate to the Var edition of the newspaper (there is also a Nice edition, and Nice is in the département called Les Alpes-Maritimes, as opposed to the Var, right next door). Brignoles has one of the very few autoroute access points in any one of the départements through which it passes, and Brignoles is a larger than average town, though not a city, and one of the centers of commerce in the Central Var. When you’re in Brignoles, you’re halfway to the coast from our village. It takes about 30 minutes to drive there. And it’s probably another 40 minutes to anyplace worth going on the coast.

In the photos with the rears of the cars, there is also a vantage of the electronic bulletin board, and it shows an announcement telling drivers to slow to 80 kph (that’s about 50 mph, the normal speed limit in clement conditions is 130 kph [about 80+ mph]) because there is a high level of pollution.

Now here’s the curious thing (what? you think it’s curious there’s air pollution here in Paradise? you have a lot to learn… naturally, the Francophobes are not surprised, I am sure). In the photos, the license plates are clearly visible. In France, the typical license plate (which the driver supplies, incidentally, once granted a plate number—the key maker shops are big on supplying license plates in various designs and color patterns, all approved for use in the EU) is a wide, shallow rectangle, yellow, sort of an OSHA yellow, with very large black numerals and letters and, usually, to the side, a blue square with a ring of gold stars, the symbol of the EU, with an F in the middle or below it. These plates are far more readable from a much greater distance than any state license plate I have ever seen in America. In these photos, the plates have been electronically altered so that all you see is a cloudy dirty OSHA yellow rectangle.

Mind you, the only other information you have, is that the photo was clearly taken in daylight (which currently begins at about 6am and ends at about 9:15pm) and, because the caption says so, the otherwise anonymous bit of highway is near Brignoles.

Who is being protected from what and why?

No English Please

We just bought two fans. Both are the Alpatec brand, which I’ve seen before, mainly in the French big box stores. I’ve had to do a little, minimal Google-based research to go any further.

Alpatec is a French brand, acquired by a distributing company called White=Brown (actually, the logo incorporates three parallel horizontal lines between the words, but there’s no standard keyboard character for that) that was in business for years, apparently, distributing other people’s products, when they decided to establish their own brand of electrical home appliances.

Alpatec was a manufacturer of climatization equipment, room air conditioners, fans, etc. when White=Brown bought them, in 1999. The year before, White=Brown had opened a manufacturing facility in Sens, France, which, I have to infer, was meant to facilitate bringing all appliance production in-house.

Indeed, one of the fans, described on the box as a 16˝ High Velocity Standfan [sic], was delivered in a generic looking white corrugated carton with black lettering, a black line drawing of the product, and a black logo for Alpatec. It also shows the address of Alpatec in Sens, France, in the zone industrielle of that city (and since I’m being my usual fastidious self, that would be in the département called Yonne, in Burgundy, and hence, not very far from here; kind of central to the entire country, but this is irrelevant). The reverse side of the box (the broadest sides, incidentally) has exactly the same information, with the description of the product in French, but still designating the size as 16˝ [sic]. Just to finish establishing something, the narrower sides of the carton show technical specifications, with all metrics (air flow, basket, or cage, size) in metric units, in French on one side and in English on the other. The motor power is in watts on both sides. Nothing particularly remarkable about that, except all but the electrically challenged will know that US watts are different than metric watts. The presumption is, it makes no difference, as, in Europe, when addressing Anglophones in the same breath as Francophones, the default assumption is, you’re British if you speak English.

On Web sites, on some fancier packaging, such as for iPod accessories and other computer related accessories and peripherals, the little flag they show athwart the English version of the salient matter printed on the outside packaging is a Union Jack.

Quickly moving along here, the other fan is in a much fancier box, printed in four-color reproduction, with a photograph of the product—a contemporary cylinder, very tall (about four feet), so the box is tall and narrow. And once again, the product information is in French, and (presumably) British English.

So now what’s so weird about that, you’re asking me in your head, right after wondering when I’ll get to the point.

The point is this. On all other packaging, except the aforementioned fancy products in a specific category (and almost without exception from American brands: Logitech, Altec-Lansing, H-P, etc.) and absolutely without exception, French packaged goods never show product information in English, British or otherwise. Further, any product user manuals, Quick-start guides, recipes on foodstuffs, also are absent English versions on products clearly intended for the French market primarily.

Further, there will be other versions in other languages. The usual suspects: Spanish, Italian, German, and then usually, Dutch, Flemish, even Greek, Chinese, Japanese, and there have been languages I have not been able to identify.

These fans are the first products I have ever seen aimed at Anglophones, equally, never mind merely secondarily, to Francophones. Do they know something? Does every other brand in the friggin’ country know something they’re not telling White=Brown?

The Alpatec Web site is, as these Web sites tend to be, mildly (if that) funny, if you click on the “English” version button, where you find a translation that’s largely literal, and, for me, always, of its kind, reminiscent of the hilarious essay by Mark Twain, written late in life, in which he opines on the poverty of the quality of translation of his stories into French. And he proceeds to prove it by presenting the standard French translation of his most famous (and first published) story, “The Celebrated  Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” He then proves his point about the inadequacy of the French translation, by translating it back into literal English.

If you are an American, or a Brit, until you have elected to be in France such that you must equip yourself with the usual and nominal essentials, I mean in addition to food on a daily basis, like a vaccum cleaner, a radio, a power drill, etc. you will never have cause to wonder why the French marketers deliberately omit any guidance, explanation, caveat, or disclosure to their English speaking customers. Not to mention the stove(s), the refrigerator(s), the dishwasher(s), and the washing machine (OK, why in multiples? well, see, it’s like this, those of you not aware: there are two kitchens in the house, one on the ground floor, and one on the top floor, next to the terrace), all of which were left for us by the previous owners. And none with instructions of any kind in English.

And until you have so elected, judge not.

Cheesy

Speaking of those Alpatec fans, one other thing that’s omitted on these products, in addition to any other information save in the English and French languages, is an indication of the country of manufacture.

We are used, in the US, to seeing Made in China, or perhaps Taiwan, on an increasing number of consumer products. In fact, it’s the law to so indicate, not China, but whatever country in which the product was made. And you cannot say, made in the U.S.A., unless the final product, entirely assembled and ready for use, whatever the origin of the parts, was manufactured and packaged in the United State of America or its Territories.

I’ll tell you right off the bat, I have no idea if there is a similar law here. Some products tell you they’re from somewhere else. The grissini sésame (sesame breadsticks) I bought today, of the LU brand, which is French, were made in Italy. Says so right on the box, in French.

Neither of the fans we bought says anything. Not on the box. Not on the so-called “manual.” Not on the fans.

The White=Brown puffery on their Web site allows me to believe my original suspicions are correct.

When I removed the products from their respective boxes, and did the minimal assembly required so either of these tall fans could stand upright, I could not help but remark (to myself) on the cheesiness of the manufacturing: fabrication of parts, use of materials, fit and finish, etc. Must be made in France, I thought.

Here’s the thing. We have a similar fan to the tall cylinder, with the remote control, and the oscillating works, and the timer, etc. at our apartment in Cambridge. Bought it at Brookstone, under their brand. Cost about one hundred bucks, and a beauty. Nicely designed, nicely fabricated and assembled. Works well—been working for a year. And manufactured in China.

The two fans we bought here in France came to 198 euros. That’s about $250 at current rates of exchange. I don’t know which was how much, but it doesn’t much matter.

We already know from repeated attempts to find a sofa we really like that was designed and manufactured in Italy, where they know how to do these things, and which is, admittedly, expensive. It’s available in the UK, and it can be delivered here (for 400 euros). It’s available in the U.S, but that’s a ridiculous proposition. It is not available in France, as far as we can tell, and I’ve spent hours researching the beast.

A particularly snide, and knowing, sales rep from the UK told me on the phone that this is not surprising. The long and short of her superior opining was that the French don’t want to acknowledge the competition, and the best way to do it is simply not to let them in. This seems particularly true of household goods. And, though I hate to admit it, the French don’t make such good household goods. We do have Ligne-Roset and Roche-Bobois furniture either here in France, or at home in Cambridge, and it’s gorgeous, magnifique, very costly, well manufactured and it’s made in Italy. But those two brands are French—retailers, but French, and that makes it OK. I guess.

We also weren’t satisfied with any of the bathroom fixtures we were directed to look at by our French friends (at building materials outlets, and home furnishings big box stores outside Toulon, which is kind of the Newark of southern France). Then I stumbled—I seem to stumble a lot—on a store specializing in bathroom fixtures on a back street in Nice, where I found beautiful fixtures. And we bought (OK, now I have to admit to having two full bathrooms) towel bars, and hooks, and toilet tissue roll holders in two different styles—brushed nickel over solid brass for the contemporary bathroom downstairs, and solid brass, sort of Belle Epoque style, for the bathroom off our bedroom. All made by a company that has been making these things since 1820. Called Samuel Heath, and it’s in the United Kingdom. With prices to match. As I always like to say, there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

The result of these anecdotal observations is that I now know what accounts for those French worker productivity figures I keep hearing about—some of the best in Europe, and among the best in the world. But how can this be, with their level of unemployment, the famous French “attitude,” the culture of farniente? It can be, because the French likely do what we will not. They pay their workers far in excess of workers in the third world, and they keep the manufacturing at home. Not difficult, and they look upon the cheesy results and are satisfied, because the money stays here (I mean the money all stays with the government, because along with the relatively high wages come very high taxes), but that pays for a lot of beer and cigarettes, and your basic roof over the head of those en chômage (unemployed).

Or it could just be that I stumbled on not only the last two big fans in that particular store during the dog days that cleaned out every other store we went to prior. I may also have stumbled on the only products still manufactured in France, because who needs to be patriotic when it comes to cheap, but cheesy goods? Except the cheese that is, and that’s not cheap.

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