Sunday, May 3, 2015

oh, it's may!

I remember how it is in Paris on May 1, and you give (and we did) a lily of the valley to people you like or want to like...and how it always was on the day you remembered "the events" of 1968, which you would call by whatever name your political personality chose: "May" or "68" or "the events:... must remember to tell my class in translation/adaptation about that, how delightful they are, those participants
April I loved this year: loved being in Prague, with wonderul Irena Murray, whose brother wrote the biography  f Havel, with whom he was very close, and clambering with her up steps after stps to the tops of buildings from which  we could see the roofs of Prague spread out, like a cubist painting -- she being a famous and greatly admired historian of architecture, and being from Prague, was the absolutely perfect person to go there with, and she had come from afar -- as I had -- to be there those three days.. the soups! foamy carrot broth poured over chicken ravioli, or was it clear broth poured over carrots, whatever and wherever it was sumptuous, in her favorite cafe-restaurant or inthe one her family owned, the whole thing... then I loved being in Liege to talk on the prose poem, itself a joy, and this time i could project a powerpoint of Joan Mitchell's Bluets, and three poems about them:
from Maggie Nelson and James Schuyler and Lydia Davis, and then being in Brussels, oysters on the corner stall, a nd walking up to the Magritte museum, and being with Lucy Swan and her small children, one with large green glasses, the other bouncing about... and i loved Boulder and wandering its long street, staying in the Boulderado, being the art person at the University of Colorado for 2 days, geting to Handel's "Orlando" on a side street, sort of a magic time...
So it's time to get back to my little book on Pascal, fun to  write about  someone who has always haunted me.. tell me whom you haunt and I will tell you who you are, said Breton in  --  or more or less that  -- certainly not the religious side of him, but his own haunting by that night of revelation he never mention but kept the memorial of sewn into whatever garment he was wearing: the secrey of it, the unshowingoffness ot it....

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