a few words from miranda

Faux ami no. 3: Scotch and Scotch

2012-01-27T14:48:00.008+01:00

If you look up “tape” in a bilingual dictionary it will tell you that the French say “ruban adhésif,” but if you ever find yourself in a situation like the one below, it’s good to know that’s not the word they use in real life.

The first time I ever stayed in my grandparents’ house in La Roche, my grandfather warned me to watch out for shady characters.

It was the summer after my sophomore year in college, and I was going to spend six weeks in La Roche with my friends Matt and Harry, and whoever else happened to wander through (Alba may be in the boonies, but you’d be surprised). The weeks went by and we didn’t see any shady characters, and I forgot all about my grandfather’s warning until one night Harry came into the kitchen and whispered to me that there were two people standing in the street with blackface on.

I was doing the dishes and wasn’t sure I’d heard him right. “What did you say?” I shut off the water and turned to face him. “Why are you whispering?”

“There are two people standing in the street with blackface on,” he repeated.

“Blackface?”

He nodded. “Down below the window. They have on black robes, they’re holding spears, they’ve got bones tucked into their belts, and they’re wearing blackface.”

“Bones?”

“Yes. Bones in their belts. Like some kind of tribal thing or something. Also knives. They’re stuck in the belts, too. They look like steak knives.”

Harry is a great raconteur, and I suspected him of pulling my leg, but steak knives seemed like the kind of detail you wouldn’t make up. “Are they druids?” I asked. I abandoned the dishes. “You’re making this up.”

“Why would I be making it up?” he asked. “People in the street with blackface? How would I even have thought of that?”

“How could you not be making it up?” I countered. “Blackface and robes and spears?”

“They asked me if I had any Scotch.”

“Any what?”

“Du scotch.” He imitated their accent.

“Why would they want Scotch? Are they drunk? Is it for some kind of ritual?”

Harry shrugged. “Ask them yourself.”

I remembered my grandfather’s warning. “Do they seem dangerous?”

Harry shrugged again. “Not really.”

I crept out of the kitchen and up to the window in the front room and peeked out. There were, as Harry had promised, two men in blackface leaning against the rampart walls below the house. The green streetlight cast eerie shadows over their faces, and their pale, knobby knees peeped out from knee-length black tunics tied at the waist with a piece of rope, which gleamed a little when the men moved. The steak knives, tied to their rope belts with string, were smudged with red.

It took me a second to realize that tunics were made from large plastic trash bags. Along with the knife, each man had a cardboard cutout of a bone stuck in the front of his belt. They also each had cardboard-tipped spears, one of which had lost its tip. I gave up hiding and stuck my head out the window to get a better look.

The one with the broken spear saw me. He waved hello. “Excusez-moi, est-ce-que vous auriez du Scotch, par hazard ?”

Matt had come over to the window, as well. “I don’t think we should give them any alcohol,” he whispered.

“For your spear?” I yelled down, and they nodded.

“Scotch like Scotch tape,” I said to Matt and Harry, in English. Someone went and found a roll of tape and we tossed it down to them.

The three of us stood at the window and watched them try and fix the cardboard point back onto the end of the spear handle. It wasn’t going very well. Even with several layers of scotch, the point flopped in a manner not really befitting a spear. It was a hot night, and their blackface was getting smeary from the exertion.

We got tired of being squished up at the window, and we went back out onto the terrace. “I want dessert,” Matt said. “Is there any more of that pudding?”

“Nope. Harry and I finished it yesterday.”

“Jerks.”

“We have Nutella,” I suggested. “And white wine.”

We agreed this would do in a pinch, and Harry went inside to fetch it. When he came back, he went and peered over the side of the terrace. He waved politely. “Ask them if they want some wine,” he said to me.

“Wine,” Matt said. “Wine –– why don’t you ask them what the hell they’re doing in our street at ten o’clock at night in blackface, for God’s sake.”

I sidled over to the terrace wall and looked down. They waved. “Want some wine?” I asked.

“Not with the kids,” said Droopy Spear.

“We’ve got to be in good shape for the kids,” Pointy Spear agreed.

I turned back to Matt and Harry. “They can’t drink because they’ve got to wait for the kids.”

“Are they going to do some human sacrifice?” Harry inquired.

I turned back to the guys in the street. “What kids?”

“At the summer camp in Aubignas,” Droopy Spear explained. “We always bring the kids over to Alba and do a scavenger hunt with them.”

I related this to Matt and Harry.

“Ask them when their Birth of a Nation reenactment is,” Matt said.

“A scavenger hunt in costume?” I asked, not sure how to broach the whole blackface issue.

“You know, an African princess gets kidnapped, and the kids have to go all over Alba and la Roche and ask questions, to find out who did it,” said Pointy Spear, as if he were going over the rules of Simon Says with a mental patient.

“We’re the king’s guards,” Droopy Spear added. “They can only ask us yes or no questions.”

We heard footsteps clattering down the street, and Droopy Spear hid the Scotch tape and snapped to attention. A group of kids and with a bored-looking counselor straggled to stop in front of the guards, and we ducked behind the wall of the terrace.

“Those aren’t real bones,” a kid said.

“QUIET!” Droopy Spear thundered. “WHO GOES THERE?”

The kids giggled. “Where’s the princess?”

“You may ask yes or no questions.”

“Why is there blood on your knife?”

“You may ask yes or no questions,” pointy spear repeated.

“Where is the king?”

“You may––”

“Remember, the king’s dead, we just found out,” the bored counselor reminded them.

“Ask them since when it’s okay to wear blackface,” said Matt.

“That’s not a yes or no question,” Harry pointed out.

“Is the princess with you?”

“No.”

“Have you seen the princess today?”

“Yes.”

Droopy spear cleared his throat.

It shall ever thus be told

what some bad men will do for gold.

The king is dead, the princess gone,

In this plot she is a pawn.

Before the young girl’s life’s cut short,

Look for her inside the fort.

Silence. "What is that supposed to mean?”

“The fort,” the counselor sighed. Silence. She pointed up the hill. “You know, like a castle,” she added.

The kids clattered off towards Alba’s castle. Before we had time to say anything else, Droopy Spear and Pointy Spear had packed up their arsenal, shouted goodbye, and disappeared into the shadows beyond the rampart walls.

I have lived in Alba on and off for many years now, and though I have encountered more than a few scorpions, I never saw those two young men again. So if ever you’re in the Ardèche and you run across someone in blackface, would you do me a favor and ask for my tape back? And please, for the sake of the kids, don’t give them anything to drink.

French vocabulary no. 4: the boonies

2012-01-20T14:46:00.010+01:00

In English you’d say Alba was in the boonies.

In French you might say it was paumé. Paumé comes from the word for "palm"

and it took a while for it to mean what it does today:

in 1290 (around when our hamlet first appears on the historical record)

it meant laying your hand on the bible to swear to something;

by 1649 (which is probably around when the foundations of our house were laid)

I guess people were getting a little vehement about their swears

and paumé came to mean slapping.

Two centuries later and slapping had become grabbing -

in 1815 you could "palm" (catch) someone red-handed.

But in 1489, thanks to François Villon

(who was probably keenly aware

of how slippery swearing can be)

"paumé" also came to mean "lost."

Paumé is not the only way we have of saying we live in the boonies.

French has lots of words for little villages like ours, perhaps because there are so many of them.

Patelin, which makes a green and orange sound in the mouth, jolly and plump,

is the most affectionate.

Bled, which was brought back to France by colonial troops stationed in North Africa,

is usually paired with paumé to mean a place in the middle of nowhere,

though mon bled can also be a way of saying “back home.”

Perpète (from perpetuity) was once slang for a life sentence,

but it bled (sorry, no pun intended)

over into spatial infinity,

so when someone lives in perpète

you know it will take a while to get to their house.

And from there we come to whole collection of made-up places that sound far off when you roll them off your tongue: going to Perpète-les-Oies or Pétaouchnok means going to a place that is inconveniently far from everything.

Once, my husband and I stopped to buy a postcard in the tiny village of

Sospel (pictured bottom right), which sits perched on a mountainside

on a twisty, windy road

battered by wind and snow

in the middle, of, well, nowhere.

"Where do you come from?" asked the lady selling the postcards.

"Alba la Romaine," we told her.

"My god," she cried. "I've been there. How can you stand to live in such an isolated place?"

Which goes to show that like everything else,

boonies are in the eye of the beholder.

It's cold enough to crack a stone

2012-01-13T11:34:00.008+01:00

That's what they say when it's very cold here (geler à pierre fendre).

It is cold,
but it's my husband,
not the cold,
been doing the rock cracking around here.
(In French, rock cracking
- casser des cailloux -
is an idiomatic expression for
working hard.)
To the right, you can see where he,
rock cracking all the way,
has exposed
the backbone of our back room,
the summit of the vaulted cellar upon which
this half of the house is built.

Someday soon, it will be the living room.

Since you can't get a car down our street,
once the rocks are cracked,
rock cracking all the way,
my husband hauls everything out in buckets.

Other good French expressions involving rocks are "sad as a stone" and "bald as a stone,"
but they,
thank goodness,
do not apply here.

What do you see in 583?

2012-01-05T15:08:00.005+01:00

The photo to the right shows you the colors that appear in my head when I think about the number 583.

Nabokov called it "colored hearing."
Most people nowadays call it synaesthesia,
which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as the
"production, from a sense-impression of one kind,
of an associated mental image of a sense-impression of another kind." Right.

This is how I would explain it:

When I hear a sound, I see a color.
When I do mental math, I add colors together to get other colors.
When I smell cinnamon sticks, I see swirls of peacock blue and violet. (If you are wondering, cinnamon powder is paler; it includes terra cotta, yellow, and peach tones.)
When I taste a rice cake, it is pale blue marbled with pink and gray.

My synaesthesia is particularly strong when it comes to words. To spell the word "house" I do not think "h-o-u-s-e," I see, "fir green-transparent-pale gray-yellow-pale orange," and write that down.
But I don't like the word "house" much, since that color combination isn't too attractive. Furthermore, since my synaesthesia includes scent and texture, the word "house" trails an unpleasant smell produced by the combination of the yellow "s" and the green "h" - a musty, slightly acidic tang, like a lunchbox you left in the trunk overnight. For look and smell I prefer the scent and color of the French "maison." But for texture, "house" is smoother and more pleasant than "maison," which is warm and sticky.

I therefore find certain words totally intolerable, and others irrationally pleasing. The word "chalumeau" (French for blowtorch) makes me quite giddy, the way you might react to tasting an ethereal bonbon (see illustration). The word "stagflation," on the other hand, evokes in me the same nausea you might feel when scraping something putrid off the bottom of your shoe (I will spare you an illustration). I can barely stand to look at it on the page.

I only realized synaesthesia was a "condition" after stumbling on an article about it in a magazine - before that I thought that everyone's brains worked that way. To be honest, I still have trouble believing that they don't. So you tell me: does your brain work like mine? What does the number 583 evoke to you?

A hole in the universe

2011-12-08T15:18:00.006+01:00

At the age of eight,
while seated at an outdoor dinner party,
I discovered a hole in the universe.

My mother,
busy talking to the other guests at our table,
had not noticed me
sorting the red bell peppers
out of my tabbouleh
and pushing them neatly to the edge of my plate, so she did not make me finish them.

Pleased with this small victory, I quietly ate around my abandoned pepper bits, then
settled in for the Long Wait for Dessert,
daydreaming and drowsy,
lulled by a full stomach and the grownups' chatter.

And then something happened.

One of my red bell pepper bits began to move.

In the blink of an eye,
it had slipped off my plate,
scuttled across the dinner table,
slid down the tablecloth,
and disappeared.

It would be understating things
to say I was astonished.

A great wind had blown through my life.
I remember feeling quite grave:
I was going to have to reconsider everything I know about the world.
Also, my mother and I were vegetarian, and
I wondered what we were going to eat from now on.

I felt a little excited. If bell pepper bits could walk,
then the world must be brimming with hidden talents.

I looked up to see if anyone else had noticed
this dramatic turn of events,
and noticed a family friend
fiddling with his laser pointer,
whose bell-pepper-red light was now dancing across the back of someone's chair.

My disappointment was leavened by the arrival of chocolate cake.

But I have always treasured that moment,
that tiny sliver of time in which
my world turned upside down.
I have never forgotten what powerful magic
is misunderstanding
and what marvelous and unlikely holes it can rip in our realities.

Pictures in words, needles in haystacks, and the price of a suntan

2011-12-02T09:46:00.010+01:00

If you have ever done archival research, you know
that it can be a bit like
searching for a needle in a haystack.
(which, by the way, the French do, too, though they prefer
to look for their needles in bales, not stacks, of hay:
chercher une aiguille dans une botte de foin)

I would even argue that haystacks (or bales)
are easier than archives:
although the pen is mightier than the sword,
it's hard to prick your finger on a word.

Most of the people who generated all that paper disappeared without
ever suspecting that the things
they were scratching out on those pages would be preserved in a heavy box
and trundled from dim shelf to dim research carrel
by people wearing cotton gloves.

And thank goodness they never suspected:
the most unsuspecting of their pen scratches
are the unexpected pinpricks that keep you awake as you work,
winking reminders that the past isn't always a blur,
that boredom has ever been the same
and that no matter how dusty and dry the task,
we all enjoy a bit of whimsy.

This doodle was drawn by a list-maker in Tunisia
at the turn of the last century.

And speaking of mysterious words (see my last post),
his list is full of them:
apparently,
1 suntan, 1 khodfu, and 1 chasuch
will set you back 3,360 francs.

I'm sure such glittering treasures are worth the money,
but the legs on that officer are really priceless.

All that glitters

2011-11-22T12:02:00.003+01:00

When I was a child, I thought a "chester of doors" was a complex and wonderful construction that promised to open the way to a million new worlds. I can still feel that magical possibility when I write those words, even though it's been years since I figured out that a chest of drawers was merely where my socks and undershirts lived. And I still love the mysterious glamor of a word or phrase whose meaning is completely obscure to you, whether it is because you have misheard it, have no idea of the context, or simply don't know.

When your job is words, these moments become rarer and rarer, though technical terms do afford a certain pleasure: how lovely, the moments I spent imagining that "pléochroïque" was the era of rainbow-colored dinosaurs, rather than a crystallographic term. Charming, the few seconds I dreamed of "calandreuses," which in my mind ought to mean ladies who make calendars. (They're actually a kind of leather embossing press.)

That is why I am so grateful to the fashion world. Just one fashion event can give you enough of these mysterious phrases to last a lifetime. My favorite of them all, the one I carry with me happy in the knowledge that it will never be elucidated, is one I picked up at a Lanvin runway show I attended last year. I was working for an agency whose job it was to transcribe and translate post-show interviews, which are so esoteric they require an eyewitness to make any sense of them at all.

Seeing a runway show in real life is kind of like seeing the Tour de France in real life: an immense amount of hype and chaos for something that is over in a flash. After the show, it was my job to push through the crowd to listen to the press conference. As I was pushing I saw two men who looked like they'd been dressed by André 3000 from Outkast. For all I know, they may have been André 3000 from Outkast. In any case, as I pushed, I heard one of them say to the other,

"Yeah, I need to get some more, though. It's like all my diamonds are falling out."

I have turned this phrase over in my mind a million times, and it never looses its sheen. What must it feel like when all one's diamonds fall out? Sometimes I think it must be a chilly, shivery sensation, not entirely unpleasant. Other times I imagine it's painful, like those awful dreams where your teeth get wobbly and you can't keep them in your mouth. And what could you get more of that would keep them in place? How many diamonds do you need to have before you casually can say the words "all my diamonds"? Three? Seventeen? How big do they need to be? Oh, the possibilities are endless.

Listen-if-it’s-raining

2011-11-10T14:59:00.007+01:00

Rain has been a major preoccupation this week in Alba: we’ve had nearly a foot of it.

Il pleut: it’s come down hard – in buckets, you’d say in both English and French. It’s been pouring, as we say – or raining spouts, as they say. (Il pleut des trombes) The French find it amusing that we English speakers complain it’s raining cats and dogs; I hope you find it amusing that here in France it rains ropes (des cordes), and, if things get really bad, it comes down like a cow pisses (comme vache qui pisse).

Over the past week we’ve had it in ropes and buckets and cats and cows. In a village full of farmers and broken down old houses, you feel torn between happy for the crops and sad for all the cooped-up stonemasons, and of course irritated you left your laundry out on the line.

But then on Friday morning we woke up and began to feel nervous. We live right next to the River Escoutay, which, on most days is barely more than a cheerful trickle. But early Friday morning there was a lull in the rain, and we realized the roaring we heard was the Escoutay. It rose and rose. On Saturday night, my husband filled up sand bags for my mother-in-law, who lives on the ground floor and didn’t sleep much listening out for the river to stop roaring and begin to clank, which is how you know it has rolled all its rocks right up into to the back yard and is about to flood your kitchen.

Luckily, the river subsided, and the rain died back down to a drizzle (which the French describe in diminutives of il pleut, as if we were saying “it’s rain-ish-ing” – il pleuvine, il pleuviote, il pleuvasse).

Lying in bed with the sound of those drops falling and falling on our skylights has made me realize how much country living is full of listening for rain; it has made me nostalgic for a French expression that died away as we and our language have drained out of the countryside and flooded into cities, with their clothes dryers and indoor jobs.

The expression is ecoute-s’il-pleut (listen-if-it’s-raining). It was what people would call a river like the Escoutay that runs slow and lazy until it roars up into your back yard, or a mill that didn’t work too well in the dry seasons. By extension, it was used to describe the a kind of lazy person who sat around waiting for a stroke of luck, or who was too busy listening for the rain to get out and get anything done. Or someone like me, who’s waiting for the sun to come so she can get those wet clothes in off the line.

French vocabulary nos. 2 and 3: faux ami and quid pro quo

2011-11-03T15:27:00.003+01:00

Translated literally, faux ami means “false friend”:

it’s a word you ought to be able to snap like a Lego

out of English

and into French

(or vice versa)

but you can’t.

One false friend that still occasionally trips me up is “isolation,”

which means “insulation” and not “isolation.”

If, when describing Alba to a Frenchman, you mention the "isolation," he may start thinking about

fiberglass versus cellulose and thermal coefficients

as you try to conjure a solitary village perched on a hill, looking out over endless rows of grapevines.

Of course, insulation can be a confusing topic even when you’re not worried about translation –

or maybe I should say that translation can be a problem even within a language.

I’m thinking of what the French call a quid pro quo, which, as it happens, is another example of a faux ami.

In Latin, quid pro quo means “this for that.”

In English, it denotes a tit-for-tat exchange.

In French, it is what tends to occur when you bring together the two main populations of Alba,

the good ol’ boy set

and the organic-crunchy-yuppie set.

At a recent party, we overheard Rafael,

who is a builder,

chatting

with Daniel, who quit his office job to move to the country and build straw bale houses.

“Straw bales are the future,” Daniel enthused. “Have you read much about them?”

“Not sure exactly you’d need to read about them,” said Rafael.

“That’s how I feel,” Daniel exclaimed. “It’s what’s so great – they’re just intuitive.”

“I guess so,” said Rafael.

“The only thing you really need to know about straw bales,” Daniel observed, taking a gulp of his artisanal beer, “is that you have to be careful not to pack them too tightly.”

Rafael poured himself another pastis. “Uh-huh,” he said.

“Because if you pack them too tightly,” Daniel went on, “the straw gets crushed, and then you lose the hollow part in the stem that holds the air, and it’s not as effective.”

Rafael took a long, thoughtful sip of pastis. “Well I wouldn’t worry too much,” he said. “You know, you bale it, you roll it, you stack it, I don’t think your animals are gonna be that picky – if it’s straw, they’ll eat it.”

The Densest Object in the World

2011-10-27T20:18:00.001+02:00

Today it is time for a cautionary tale about a little detail that might trip you up as you toggle between numbers in French and English.

Once upon a time, shortly after I moved to France for good to live with the man I would later marry, the postman delivered a little blue envelope to our house. It contained a blue, handwritten square of paper with the following information on it:

I arrived: March 31, 2005 at 11:30pm

I weigh: 3,650 kg

I measure: 52 cm

You may visit me on Sunday, April 9, between 9am and noon.

There was no signature. It was some kind of party invitation, but who would have a party on a Sunday morning?

And who would couch the invitation as a riddle?

I had never heard of anything that dense.

Was it an asteroid?

Surely I would have heard of an asteroid landing near our village. It would have made a big hole, too.

Besides, only quarks and stuff are dense like that. You can’t even see them.

This is ridiculous, I thought.

No one is going to come to their party.

I tossed the invitation on the table and forgot about it until my husband came home. “Any mail?” he asked.

“Just this stupid riddle,” I said, handing him the blue piece of paper. As I passed it to him, I noticed there was something on the back of it. It was a picture of a newborn baby, whose birth his parents and grandparents were very happy to announce.

“Ah, Fred had his baby,” Julien said, tossing the birth announcement back on the table. “I guess we should buy them a present. What do you mean, riddle?”

And that is why you should never forget that the French use commas where Americans use decimal points, and vice versa.

The world's most powerful word

2011-10-18T17:26:00.000+02:00

My husband and I used to have an ongoing argument about the merits of French versus the merits of English. “Come on,” I would tell him. “English is so much more descriptive. The language of Shakespeare. There’s so much more you can say.”

“That’s because Shakespeare went around inventing words,” he’d scoff.

“But that’s exactly my point,” I’d counter. “Look how many more words English has than French.”

He pooh-poohed this. “Toothbrush, flatiron, hamstring, fairytale - it’s just because you count compound words. That’s cheating.”

“Serendipity, retch, doodle,” I parried. “Or how about silly? Your language doesn’t have a word for silly, for God’s sake.”

“But that doesn’t stop us from being silly. Or describing it. We’re simply more efficient. We do more with less. Eventually, we’ll have reduced the whole of French down to a single, extremely expressive syllable. Like bah.”

My husband may actually be right about this, but he’s got the wrong syllable. If I had to bet on French boiling down to one syllable I’d bet on doux, which, might be the most versatile word I know.

This one little word can mean:

sweet

gentle

soft (in texture or in sound)

temperate

loving

slow

nice

pleasant

warm

easy

mild

Imagine a language in which your baby’s hair, your lover’s gaze, the weather this afternoon, the pace at which you’re getting things done, the way you woke up, the breakfast you ate, the volume of the radio, your cat’s nap, and a million other things can all be described with a single word. Double it into two syllables – doudou – and it becomes your child’s security blanket, a nickname for your lover, a way to describe a cuddly person. Roll it over your tongue a few times and it fancies up into douillet, adding coziness and luxuriance to the mix.

Doux is so shy and unassuming, and yet so powerful. If the meek shall inherit the earth and language is slowly distilling itself down into a single super-syllable, let this be the one.

Never a dull moment

2011-10-14T11:03:00.003+02:00

While looking around for a good translation for the French verb "deciller" (which, literally, means "to make someone regain his lucidity") I learned that "ciller" means "to sew shut the eyelids of a bird of prey for training purposes." (The little guy to your right does not approve.)

And there, again, is the tragedy of translation - no matter how I translate that word (which occurs in the context of a book about social dialogue in the EU), the connotation of a falcon with its eyes sewn shut will be lost forever.

My only comfort is that it's such a rare word in French that I think the nuance is lost on most French readers, too...

French vocabulary no. 1: La Recup'

2011-10-10T17:07:00.005+02:00

Récuperer is the verb with which you regain possession, use, or enjoyment of something spent, lost, left, lent, or entrusted to someone else. Like its English colleague, recuperate, it comes from the Latin: re – back – and capere – take. It comes to the rescue, gives you time off to compensate for hours worked overtime, neutralizes potentially opposed ideas, and heals the sick and injured. Most of all, it gives new life to objects that would otherwise go in the trash. The French language has subjected this verb to its own treatment and made it into a noun to describe and categorize both the things you have recovered, reclaimed, or rescued: la récup’. La récup’ is a also a pastime, a calling, a matter of pride.

This makes Alba’s dump quite the hotspot. The village employs someone whose official job it is to make sure you toss your trash in the right place. Unofficially – but much more importantly in the eyes of the village – she keeps an eye out for anything that can be récupéré. If you are a real regular, you can place orders with her, and she will keep an eye out for the things you need. Going to the dump is an event in and of itself, and quite often you come back with as much stuff as you went to throw away.

Even businesses in Alba participate in la récup’. When I waitressed at La Petite Chaumière, La Roche’s only restaurant, people recuperated dry bread for their horses; we kept all our wine corks for someone who made cork insulation, and we saved all our bottle caps for reasons I have yet to understand. The butcher will set aside the plastic buckets he orders olives and mayonnaise in if you are looking for free containers, and Charlie, who raises goats and sells their cheese at the market, will save the whey to wash your face in if you ask him. I recently phoned Marco, our grocer, to ask if he had any fresh cilantro, and he exclaimed, “You should have called five minutes ago! I just threw it out. You want me to fish it out of the garbage for you?”

“Sure,” I said. “Si tu penses que je peux la récuperer – if you think I can rescue any of it.”

“It’s on the top,” he assured me.

“I’ll be right there.”

Transposed into English, an epicerie would be spicery - a place that sells spices. Epiceries have existed since the middle ages, when they actually sold only spices. They evolved into dry-goods stores in the 19^th century, and now an epicerie is a small grocery store. In the city, an epicerie is like a bodega, a place you go when you forgot something at the real grocery store, but in a village, it’s all you’ve got. Alba has two of them. They both have actual titles, but everyone refers to them as the epicerie d’en bas and the epicerie d’en haut, the grocery store down there and the grocery store up there. The grocery store down there has a dull, oversanitized feel to it, and though the owners are nice, almost no one goes there unless the grocery store up there is closed. The grocery store up there is a tiny cavern crammed with just about everything you could possibly ever need, from cotton balls and kitty litter to organic hair conditioner, locally grown heirloom tomatoes, even fresh cilantro. It is cool, dimly lit, and twice as long as it is wide. The checkout counter is beside the door, and there is nearly always a traffic jam in front of it. To get in you have to jostle past tourists picking out postcards, children gazing longingly at the toy shelf, and grandmas at the register waiting for Marco or Béatrice, the owners, to loosen a jar lid for them or count out their change.

When I arrived Marco was issuing instructions to a customer on how to fry the tiny spring artichokes he had in from a farmer in the Vaucluse. The line was backed up all the way to the produce bins. I caught his eye and he handed me a bundle of damp paper towel. “I sorted it out for you and rinsed it off,” he said with a wink. “Good as new.”

When I got home I heard a jingling from our neighbor’s terrace, which forms a bridge over the street between her house and ours. “Yoo-hoo,” she called down. “You want a toy for your baby?” She shook a large yellow and red ball with a bell trapped inside of it, and it jingled again.

“Sure,” I said, and she tossed it down to me. I fingered a place where the plastic had broken in just the right shape for Estelle to put in her mouth and cut herself.

“It came with the cathouse,” she told me. “Wash it before you use it.”

By Alba standards, at least compared to some, I am not a real recuperator. I freely admit that I threw our neighbor’s broken cat toy out.

Our friend Silvann, on the other hand, is a pro. When Julien and I bought our house (you talk about something that needs recuperating), he took Julien to the dump to celebrate. They returned with two sinks for our house, one for the kitchen and one to recycle into a vessel sink for the bathroom. Silvann had collected an array of items, including some chairs for his garden, a wall-mounted sculpture of cherubim playing around a fountain, and a metal funerary urn.

“Who would throw out a funerary urn?” I wondered.

“Well, once you scatter the ashes, what are you going to do, keep it on top of your television?” Silvann pointed out.

“What are you going to do with it?”

“I’ll find a use for it,” he said, with a dreamy look.

That afternoon, we all went to the trou de Saint Jean to go swimming. A trou is a hole; in the Ardèche there is no need to specify it is a swimming hole. The path to the river was lined with blackberry cane spilling down the hillside in treacherous curtains and prickly tufts of dark purplish green, brimming with ripe fruit. On the way back from our swim we were all hungry, and straggled out along the path to eat the berries, the adults holding up the children so they could reach the fat and juicy ones higher up.

I don’t know whether it was too many blackberries, or the hot sun and the cold water, or way Françoise and Silvann’s van swayed and clattered on the mountain, but suddenly, out of the lazy August afternoon silence, Jaëlle, their seven-year-old daughter, called out that she was going to be sick. We all scrambled for a receptacle, or even a towel, and just like that, la récup came to the rescue, and Silvann found a use for his funerary urn.

Photos: this may look like a pile of rubble, but it is full of stones that we sorted out for Julien to use when he added height to the streetside facade. (Can you see where the new part of the wall begins?)

2011-09-06T15:16:00.003+02:00

it poured this weekend, the figs have all burst from the humidity, and I'm hunting around for just the right story to tell...

When in Rome

2011-07-18T08:55:00.003+02:00

A little over a thousand years ago, the Romans chased Alba's inhabitants off of their little hill and across the River Escoutay. They built an outpost of their empire on the plain below the village, which became a thriving city, with a forum, luxurious homes, a temple, baths, and a 3,000-seat theater.

No one knows why the Roman city disappeared and Alba's inhabitants moved back up onto their hill; nor can anyone say just how long it took for the earth to swallow up the old city. We do know that once it had been lost, it took centuries to find again.

The theater was excavated and partially restored in the mid-twentieth century. Now, every summer, the Alba circus festival hosts shows there. On long summer evenings, there's no need for lights - the theater was designed so that the sun fills it with soft light without blinding the players. The acoustics are grand, as long as they remember to chase the frogs out of the canal that runs behind the stage before the show starts.

Saturday night, seated on giant volcanic stones warmed all day by the sun, while we waited for La Compagnie XY to perform their acrobatic show "Le Grand C," we wondered what it must have been like when the theater was more than a majestic ghost of its former self, when the stands were covered and the canal played host to miniature naval battles. But when the acrobats sped nimbly onto the stage and began to scale, swing, spin, and toss each other against a backdrop of sunset and vineyards, the hour of pure grace more than made up for all that time had swallowed up.

Big Top

2011-07-15T10:25:00.002+02:00

Yes, that is a circus tent in our back yard.

I hope your weekend is as full of adventure as ours promises to be...

Happy Bastille Day

2011-07-14T16:07:00.004+02:00

Here in France we call it La Fête Nationale, or just July 14.
And so you know, it doesn't actually commemorate the taking of the Bastille.
It actually commemorates the Fête de la Fédération,
which was organized on July 14, 1790
to commemorate the taking of the Bastille.
On that day, King Louis XVI swore allegiance
to the Nation and the Constitution.
We don't have a king anymore,
and we've changed constitutions a few times since then,
but the French didn't want their national holiday to commemorate violence.
So instead we have a holiday that commemorates a holiday that commemorates violence.
Huh?
I know, I know. We may not like violence over here, but you know what we do like?
Complication.

Julien and I celebrated by hauling 700 kg of concrete to pour reinforcements for the doorway of the master bedroom in our house. Then we swore allegiance to each other over lunch, and took a nap.

Pictured above: Minus, our worksite safety inspector, and the bathroom doorway, standing in for the bedroom doorway (not available for photos) to show you what it looks like when you pour reinforced concrete in the wall of an extremely elderly house.

Words, words, words

2011-07-13T09:59:00.004+02:00

Friends, it's been a while.
We've had a baby, moved to the Ardèche, and bought a house to restore. I've started work on a new book.
I hereby announce that I will be keeping you apprised of the progress of our house, and of my musings about words, and possibly of the vicissitudes and lassitudes (as Romain Gary once said) of life in the country. Stay tuned...

Here's the new house, which is very, very old.

Say cheese! It's a new year

2010-01-25T08:18:00.006+01:00

The Saturday after New Year's we were at the market ordering cheese at our favorite cheese stall (run by two cheese geniuses, whom I'll call M. and Mme. Cheese.) when a round-ish, fur clad woman swept up and brushed us aside.
She fixed Mme. Cheese with a stare. "I must say this in front of everyone!" she said.
Mme. Cheese, who had been chatting with us and packing up our order, stopped dead in her tracks. "How was it?" she asked.
The fur-clad lady, now that she had everyone's attention, repeated her announcement. "I am obliged say it in front of everyone," she trumpeted.
M. Cheese had dropped his own order and hurried over to his wife, who had paled visibly. They both stared anxiously at the fur-clad lady. "Well?" M. Cheese asked.
The fur clad lady's gaze swept up and down the line of people waiting for their cheese. "Picture this," she said. "Twenty people." She gestured to indicate a long table. "Twenty of the most discriminating people." She held up her hands, palms flat up, to indicate a platter. "I bring it out. I put it on the table. I serve it." She paused and looked around again. The rest of the patrons of the cheese stall had given up any pretense they might have had of minding their own business and were staring openly. The air was thick with the possibility of a scandal.
"And?" Mme. Cheese prompted.
"Silence." The fur-clad lady waved her hands up and down the imaginary table in front of her. The cheese stall was also silent. The fur-clad lady drank it up.
"IT WAS SUBLIME," she thundered. "SU-B-L-IME!!!"

Here's hoping that 2010 is as rich and full and delicious for all of us as the fur-clad lady's brie.

(Photo by Joe Hale)

The Yellowjacket

2009-08-04T09:14:00.003+02:00

I meant no harm.
Only the tip of my middle finger -
blind and round
and monstrously bigger than
your yellow, fast little body in its fierce rugby jersey -
alerted to a small tickle, made a lazy tour of the back of my collar
and encountered you,
dutifully inspecting the pale expanse of my neck
in fruitless pursuit of the possibilities implied by my misleading perfume,
baffled but industrious.
Stung,
you zipped off, leaving an angry souvenir
in my dumb digit. I meant no harm,
but then again, neither had you
and for a moment (how it hurt!)
for a moment you were the more powerful.

Take me out to the (foot)ball game

2009-07-30T09:20:00.004+02:00

In honor of Marseille's winning 1-0 against St. Etienne last night, an old one from the Miranda file (excerpts):

i have not seem much of marseille but the
stadium, which sits in the middle of
a sort of postmodern wasteland, looking like an enormous cement spaceship.

marseille fans are not like american sports fans.
sure, like everyone else, they take it hard if the team doesn’t win,
but in their case, if the OM loses for too long, they fire the coaches and
take to the streets.

as you approach the stadium, you pass from the ring of comestibles vendors to the ring of ticket
scalpers. “does anyone need an extra ticket?” they chant, dolefully.
once you’re past them, you come to the realm of people looking for tickets.
they say, “does anyone have an extra ticket?” wistfully.
you would think that eventually one group would meet up with the other
but i think that it is some level in the dantean hell, and they are forever separated, kept apart
by vigilant hawkers of unauthorized olympique de marseille paraphernalia.

the stadium itself holds 65,000 people
and is usually nearly full.
nestled in the bottom of it, the field itself, and the players, look almost insignificant.
on the north end and the south end of the stadium are the virages, or bleachers.
they are controlled by two separate factions, the fanatics and the ultras, respectively.

the virage du nord (fanatics) is more homey and slapdash looking
most of their flags are drawn and colored in by hand;
the main theme is written at the top of the virage:
“MARSEILLE TROP PUISSANT”
and the color scheme is pure Marseille: pale blue, white, and yellow
but they’ve got a lot else going on––there’s a big banner that says
“Trichosomie” (Downs Syndrome)
and another that says “TOLERANCE” which is rather funny
coming from a group of people who spend hours of their lives
shouting rude things about the sexual histories of the opposing team members as well as their mothers and wives.

the virage du sud (ultras) is much slicker and meaner.
the top of their virage says
“INDEPENDANCE SOUTH WINNERS”
then a picture of Che Guevara
then “MARSEILLE KAOTIC GROUP 1987”
the color scheme there is orange and blue.
and they have a drum corps with orange drums.

both sides set off flares when the OM marks a goal
but neither group has a single mascot.
i have tried to detect some themes:
the sudistes have gone with a grim-looking man whose flesh is decomposing
off of his face while he clutches his throat
and proclaims his (undying, i presume) allegiance to the OM.
they also favor large confederate flags––an interesting choice
for a fan base which is largely of arab and african origin––
which they wave vigorously throughout the match.

the virage du nord has a lot of banners that say
YANKEES
but i am not sure whether this is a continuation of the civil war theme
or just some strange alliance to new york, since they also have banners that say
DODGER’S
either way, the nord’s main mascot seems to be an extremely angry looking octopus
clutching, among other things, an enormous petard (joint), a beer, a banner, and a football in its tentacles as it writhes menacingly over planet earth.

Anouncement

2009-07-15T07:37:00.004+02:00

On July 14, 2009, at approximately 11:00pm, the Eiffel Tower celebrated its 120th birthday by dissolving into stardust. Spectators lined up along the Seine watched admiringly as the Tower, draped in dazzling gemstones, modeled her stellar coiffure and executed a few deft maneuvers with a highly original glittery hula hoop. "Do all those spouts of glitter tickle?" onlookers wondered to themselves; then the Paris night went silent for a split second and in the blink of an eye she had gone up in a flash of shimmer. A fitting end for the doyenne of the City of Lights.

Don't Complain, Don't Explain

2009-07-12T12:30:00.002+02:00

If I were a ship, I might get the above phrase carved on my masthead.
Barring that, I suppose I could tattoo it on my forehead.

Put another way; the deathless one-line rule for writers: show, don't tell.

(This is surely why I make so many faces; that and my grandma's face yoga, which has kept me supple as I inch my way toward the third-of-a-century mark.)

At right, I am showing, not telling, the bemusing challenge of unpacking
when you are addled by jetlag.

Don't complain, friends, and don't explain, but rest assured:
vacation (as you can see) has injected me with new life force
and the blog is up and running again.

Miranda Ventures Home

2009-07-10T06:00:00.003+02:00

We head south...
Asheville:
Shindig on the Green
is,
according to itself,
the oldest folk festival in
the United States of America.
According to me,
it is almost as homey as katydids;
an occasion to sit in a warm evening and hear music
that makes my heart ache for summer.
Once it was an occasion for frock envy;
now I am older than six
I am willing to leave the petticoats to the cloggers.
This year, we discovered a new wonderful thing:
quarter watermelons may be obtained there for a dollar.

Knoxville:
In Pigeon Forge,
we ate peanuts and drank bad beer while
the Montgomery Biscuits beat the Smokies 6-3.
Then the next day watched snakes hoist their bodies over tree branches
turtles kick their claws through mud
and various sleepy lonely creatures lazing in the mud
then hopped into the Tennessee River; fish nibbled our skin
we lazed in the water to another concert of katydids.

It's good to be home.

capricious and corybantic

2008-07-24T17:21:00.004+02:00

minus is
a very intelligent and highly communicative creature
who had an appointment with the veterinarian today at 5pm.
at 4:30 she sauntered in to the living room, sniffed at her carrying case,
stuck her head in, sat down in front of it, and began to give herself
a little bath (it's like brushing your teeth before you go to the dentist).

i thought, cats are so clairvoyant. all you need to do is
let them know your plans ahead of time, and they're really quite accommodating.

fifteen minutes later minus had disappeared onto the next door neighbor's balcony,
and i was the one in need of medical attention.

Metro Line 8: La Tour Maubourg

2008-04-18T09:43:00.004+02:00

Spring in the seventh arondissement calls a last-minute afternoon parade attended by dogs on leashes and some of their owners, taxi drivers waiting and smoking at the taxi stand, a tour guide with no tourists, holding a sign, two ladies swinging their pocketbooks back from lunch. Spring troops down the Boulevard de Grenelle, a float of ornamental cherries, pansies jostling their velveteen banners, a brassy ache of wind, barrelling brawling car horns and buses’ bells, churning lost scarves, sneezes, and stray leaves. The spoons glint crazily on the café terraces, the waiters’ aprons rattle their change, the lights go green yellow red, green yellow red. The chestnut trees blow down confetti from their roman candle bouquets. Pigeon policemen hustle sternly up and down the sidewalks, giving you the stinkeye: no loitering. The dogs sniff and trot away, the taxiphone rings, the tourists troop up, their dim offices suck the ladies back in to work, and the day moves on.

ABOVE LEFT: Marie Victor Nicolas de Fay de la Tour-Maubourg enjoys the parade.

Pizza from the past

2008-03-24T18:11:00.004+01:00

It is cold and rainy outside; also everything is closed for something the French state refers to as "Easter Monday."
So until I venture back out for another interview, here is something I wrote in avignon several years ago:

i do not usually like to make comments about
"the french" or "les americains" but
now i feel called to do so
like this:
in france those of us who have
had the privilege
of eating american pizza
we have become accustomed to the fact that the french
have a different understanding of what a pizza
ought to be;
for instance in america there is a sort of
general agreement that one should not
be able to cut pizza with scissors, whereas here in
france, scissors are the tool of choice, even amongst
professionals.

so granted we make a lot of jokes,
as we snip ourselves off a slice;
like, pizza delivery is easy in france
because you can just put the pizza
in an envelope and slide it under the door;
or, one friend, when his pizza arrived
forty minutes late and cold and soggy as a washcloth
someone had left in the tub after a bath
shouted at the delivery boy,
"well for god's sake,
why didnt you just fax it to me??"

you get the idea.

but, cosmopolitan as i may be
even i reeled upon disovering
while on my way to the organic supermarket

*an automatic pizza teller.*

yes that is right.
it is constructed exactly like an atm for cash, except
painted bright red, with a wider slot.
"24 hours a day," this machine proudly proclaims, "one
can obtain a hot pizza, just by pressing a button!"
i didn't try it, but it appears that you make your
selection of toppings, put in your credit card, and
out slips a pizza, paper thin.

by the time you get it home, it is sure to have cooled
and congealed enough for you to clip and enjoy.

Away from the rue Vasco de Gama: waiting for the metro

2008-03-19T17:32:00.000+01:00

To me, this advertisement is like a Barsotti cartoon. The longer I look at it, the funnier I think it is.

Where Everything Is Sold

2008-03-10T22:19:00.000+01:00

Only Kamel knows his way entirely around his grocery store, which is small and dim.
He can find you 30-liter trashbags, or saffron, or tortillas,
or fresh mint,
or an extension cord.
If he doesn’t have a funnel to sell you, he’ll lend you one.
Everything is piled in so close together
you are worried:
if you pick up that can of tomatoes maybe the whole store will fall over.
Kamel’s answer to any request is “Ask me for the sun;
I’ll give you the moon, and the sun to go with it.” If he doesn’t have it today, it will be
arriving tomorrow. He will get the word out, too, that he has it for you.
His store is named Le Jardin d’Ulysse for Djerba’s first tourist,
and from time to time he disappears from the rue Vasco de Gama,
to the spare, spacious opposite of his grocery store.
He hasn’t eaten any lotuses, and Djerba is always bright in his mind,
and he will show it to you
if you know him well enough -
the flat expanse of the courtyard, the cool stone hallways,
the vast kitchen he built for his wife. In the pictures,
his children are never far.
Kamel, in a white robe, presides happily over them;
orange trees, grape vines, date palms and olive groves crowd around his big white house,
and his youngest son trails everywhere after him, adoringly.
Kamel’s children are his pride and joy.
Two or three weeks, at most, and he is back in the rue Vasco de Gama
in his dark sweater and wool fisherman’s cap,
standing in the doorway of his store beside a wealth
of fruit and vegetables.
He has returned to the other people who need him,
to his emporium
of cat food and milk on Sunday evening,
of beer and gumdrops after the other stores have closed.
Kamel likes to talk but will not tell you much: he loves the scent of jasmine, pistachio ice cream, the voice of Oum Kalthoum; in the morning, he drinks his coffee with a drop of orange flower water.
But one night, François (remember him?) calls to tell us Kamel has an urgent message.
“You’re late,” he says, when we walk into the store. He hands us a covered terra cotta dish. “Get out,” he tells us amiably. “Eat it before it’s cold.” And he sends us back to our apartment with a little taste of home.

72, rue Vasco de Gama

2008-03-07T18:08:00.000+01:00

François Pierre Stefanaggi,
who loves anything caramel,
would have liked to be named Arnaud
or Guillaume
or Clément
- any old name.
François was so old fashioned - rinky dink, sort of.
He doesn’t like people you can’t trust
or the taste of dirt.

François came to the rue Vasco de Gama because he wanted a job that would feed him. Also, he wanted to stop working as a checkout boy at the supermarket. Really, what he wanted was to quit the Sorbonne. He wanted to make music and write - he wrote a short story last night, actually. He wants to write a novel that would be like snaphots of life, snipped apart and reassembled. He plays the guitar.

When he got out of the metro for the first time he thought that the rue Vasco de Gama was long and empty; lifeless, but the restaurant was warm, much friendlier than he’d expected. He was coming from a certain emptiness himself. The first person he met here was the old chef - a foreshadowing of what was to come? Corinne, the owner, was late.
He came to be a waiter
(no pun intended),
and at the time he didn’t know the first thing about cooking.
It has been a year, and now he is the chef. He learns fast; he is proud of his adaptability.

He’s grateful to wake up every morning,
though he hates getting out of bed,
and likes a big cup of coffee with one sugar in it,
preferably accompanied by a cigarette.

In the kitchen he moves fast - sometimes too fast. His favorite thing to make is poitrine de volaille entre chair et peau de foie gras with choucroute au miel et aux raisins secs. He attracts problems,
confidences,
people.
If he had a soundtrack, no doubt about it,
it would be “Hotel California,” by the Eagles.
He gets a little melancholy sometimes
but really,
compared to the troubles he could have,
everything is so small,
he’d say he’s got a good lot in life.
Just because I’m interviewing him doesn’t mean he’s a complicated boy, you know?

The rue Vasco de Gama

2008-03-07T18:03:00.000+01:00

Vasco de Gama was a Portuguese explorer who, among other things, did a lot of bad stuff in India.
I hope it was for more noble reasons than that
they named our street after him.
You can see what it looks like.
And soon you can meet the people in our neighborhood...

French Girls

2008-03-07T09:03:00.001+01:00

For a long time I've done my best to blend in,
wearing grownup shoes, learning
the rules of soccer and never
mentioning peanut butter.
It's only fair to your adoptive country, and it has its rewards.

Julien and I were having a beer in a café near Notre Dame
and two teenage girls sat down. There was
no doubt about it: they were from the United States of America,
and they were SO EXCITED TO BE IN PARIS.
Let me tell you, you could just feel the glamour of them twinkling all over, Paris-happy eyes,
tennis shoes tired from walking, sklathed in their chairs, bristling with seeegahretts,
drinking cafay, drinking cafay oh lay, and du van du van du vin!!! This is the life!
Talking a mile a minute. Oh my god. So excited to be in Paris.
We were discussing our
new president (the one they call President Bling Bling)
and I was just warming to my topic
when their was a pause in the girls’ hyperactively raphsodic
conversation.
I noticed them looking at us.
“French girls are so dramatic, aren’t they?” one of them said.
They nodded blissfully and lit another seeghahrette.

speed rabbit pizza

2008-03-02T19:58:00.000+01:00

we really should have known better,
but we did it anyway,
we called the number one pizza delivery company in france,
Speed Rabbit Pizza
and asked them to bring us some pizza:
the two person special menu (only EUR 19.90).

forty five minutes later,
a young man with his scooter helmet still on his head (musn't reveal rabbit's identity) handed over the goods.
twenty euros ($800) for pizza, appetizer, and dessert for two.

eagerly, we sat down to our long awaited feast.

once we had shared our appetizer (onion rings - four each; diameter: 1.8 in (4.57 cm); ingestion time: 3 seconds)
it was time to heat the pizza.

presumably it was the great wind
stirred up as the speed rabbit
dashed towards us, pell mell,
through the streets of paris
that had cooled it down.

during the wait, we discussed the following:
in america, your pizza is delivered piping hot. without lifting a finger, you sit down and eat it.
in france, if you want your pizza hot, forces must be mobilized. you have to act.
we drew some parallels - obesity, the state of their respective democracies -
and then rushed to eat the pizzas
before they cooled down again.

we plan to discuss the issue further while we search for our desserts, which seem to have gotten lost in the cracks between the floorboards.

cure-all

2008-03-01T23:00:00.000+01:00

gerald durrell was right.
if you feed aspirin to saddish roses,
they recover their vigor with thrilling speed.
at least i think
it is thrilling.