Food for the soul

The reading tonight that will include Ian Frazier, Susan Shapiro, and Holy Apostles Church soup kitchen writers workshop participants reading their latest stories and poems will be a lot of fun--and good for your soul!

Wednesday, May 30
7:00 p.m.
Holy Apostles Church
W. 28th St. & 9th Ave.

It's free and open to the public, although most people will make a donation at the door.

What Tony is Dreaming: No Problem

Three weeks ago today I was in Paris having an extremely French day: Used book shops on the left bank, bouquinistes, café crème at a sidewalk café with my friend, contemporary theatre, and a dinner whose first course was a thick warm blood pudding on toast with a layer of caramelized peaches on top, presented in a perfect, hockey-puck-shaped and sized disk.

Last night I dreamed I was suddenly back in Paris. It was a rush trip. In fact, I had come with only my wallet, as if while at lunch I went to Paris instead of back to work. In the dream, R.G. Sand and I are on a houseboat in Paris--not having planned far enough in advance to make hotel reservations.

"You wanted to be back in Paris, and here you are," R.G. Sand says.

I go through my pockets and find my ATM card.

"We can get euros," I say. "I can't believe I left my map at home. Now I'll have to buy another. And I need a pen." I open a drawer in a desk on the houseboat. It is filled with pencils, compasses, fountain pen nibs, erasers . . . "I still need to buy a pen," I say. "And paper."

The interior of the cabin is roomy. It's wooden and cozy. The capacious room is lighted by sconces and the many windows are hung with translucent white organdy. We go out on the deck. The houseboat is floating on the Canal Saint Martin.

"I know where we are," I say. "Les Abîmés has closed, but I can show you where the Théâtre du Marais is without a map. It's on the other side of the Place de la République." We debark and head toward Rue de Malte. (At the beginning of this month the Place de la République was the hub of my universe for a whole week.) "We can get some money and I can show you where that restaurant is. Maybe the theatre has another play." I'm sure that's the first thing you would do when you get to Paris: Find the theatre.

"We should get an umbrella," says R.G. Sand. "Look."

I can't say it was frightening, but a huge cloud, like thick black wool was drifting toward us--actually all of Paris.

"It's Sarkozy!" shouts R.G. Sand. "And it's coming right toward us!" Now it is frightening, and we run.

The cloud is so huge and so close and so thick I can reach up and almost touch it

"It probably isn't that bad even if it is Sarkozy," I say as we get back to the houseboat and go inside. (Sometimes I am overly rational in my dreams.) The rain starts. "See? It's just rain." I resume searching through my pockets. "I forgot to bring my passport," I say. And as the black wool Sarkozy rain turns the view out the houseboat windows to a complete blur I contemplate that without my passport I will not be able to leave Paris. No problem.

Letting the serendipities happen

I have a bad habit of trying to make things happen when--and I know better--if I didn't, they would happen anyway if they were meant to, or not happen if they were not meant to, or something better would happen. This is not to say that my philosophy of life is that things go best when I float along passively letting things happen. Rather it is the recognition of my uncanny ability to wreck what I'm trying to do. Or if I actually brought about what I thought I wanted, I would be precluding something better--and unanticipated--from happening. It's like when I was six years old and the Zimmer kids said there was a robin's nest in their attic. We all took turns trying to lift out the beautiful blue eggs--which broke the moment we even touched them. "Here, let me try," I said when I watched Danny Zimmer cloddishly destroy one of the eggs between his thumb and forefinger. The one I tried to lift broke too--their shells were as thin as tissue paper. If we had done nothing, there would have been baby birds.

That's way too much preamble to get to here: namely that I knew Marcel Proust lived at 102 Boulevard Haussmann and that the room where he wrote most of Remembrance of Things Past is now an office of a bank. However, Boulevard Haussmann is quite long, and I didn't know the cross street--so, I had no intention of looking for it. For what? To take a picture of me in front of the building? To bother the bank people?

We found it anyway. I might as well say Proust's apartment building found me. Here is a picture of me looking rumpled and touristy (don't worry, I told everyone I was from Texas) doing what hundreds of people do all day long--getting their picture taken in front of the building where the greatest novel of the twentieth century was written:

Here I am eating a hotdog (or, as the French say, "un hot dog") in the gardens surrounding Notre Dame with someone who is more glamorous than I will ever be:

Thank you for taking those pictures, Marty!

To Proustify

Marcel Proust spoke in long sentences early in life. By the time he was in junior high or high school his friends made up a word for it that translates into English as "to Proustify." In Search of Lost Time is a very long book--which doesn't mean you will drop dead upon finishing it. However, there are people who claim that it is the best novel written in the 20th century. If they are right, all those other novels you read in the rest of your life just won't as good as they might have been if you'd saved Proust till last.

I bought a full paperback set of what I call "the Kilmartin edition" for just $47.25, which is cheaper than used copies on eBay. This edition is the C.K. Scott-Moncrieff translation that Terence Kilmartin revised based on a better edition of Proust in French being made available. Kilmartin's revision also eliminates Scott-Moncrieff's excesses. I have only read the first part: Swann's Way (656 pages).

I have so far managed to assemble three of the volumes of the six-volume edition that editor Christopher Prendergast oversaw, published by Viking in 2003. This got my attention when I saw the smashing review Lydia Davis received for her translation of the first part: Swann's Way (468 pages). Apparently Viking had a big print run for the first volume but printed fewer copies of some of the others. It doesn't seem to be sold as a set; so, you have to track down its parts. I have never seen all six volumes together in a bookstore. In her introduction, Davis says that Proust is not wordy. In fact, she says, he is concise, but it takes him as many words as it does to articulate the fineness of nuance that he achieves.

I'm reading other stuff right now, but I do occasionally dip into the 2003 Penguin edition. In The Guermantes Way, translated into English by Mark Treharne, I found the following:

Ever since I had ceased to see actors solely as the depositories, in their diction and acting ability, of an artistic truth, the had begun to interest me in their own right; with the feeling that I was watching the characters from some old comic novel, I was amused to see the naïve heroine of a play, he attention drawn to the new face of some young duke who has just taken his seat in the theater, listen abstractedly to the declaration of love the juvenile lead was addressing to her, while he, through the rolling passion of this declaration, was in turn directing an enamored eye at an old lady seated in a stage box, whose magnificent pearls had caught his interest; and in this way, largely owing to what Saint-Loup had told me about the private lives of actors, I saw another drama, silent but telling, being played out beneath the words of the play that was being performed, yet the play itself, however uninspired, was still something that interested me, too; for within it I could feel germinating and blossoming for an hour in the glare of the footlights--created out of the agglutination on the face of an actor of another face of greasepaint and pasteboard, and on his individual soul the words of a part--the ephemeral and spirited personalities, captivating, too, who form the cast of a play, whom one loves, admires, pities, whom one would like to met again after the play is over, but who by that time have already disintegrated into the actors, who are no longer what they were in their roles. into a script that no longer shows the actors' faces, into a colored powder that can be wiped off by a handkerchief, who have reverted, in a word, to elements that contain nothing of them, because their dissolution is complete as soon as the play has ended, and this, like the dissolution of a loved one, causes one to doubt the reality of the self and to meditate on the mystery of death.

That paragraph is one sentence long. That isn't the longest sentence in In Search of Lost Time, and Proust did not always write in long sentences. But it is a tribute to Proust as an author and Treharne as a translator that it is a beautiful sentence--the kind of thing that Proust produces, sentence after sentence, for thousands of pages. And although it is a translation, few native-English-speaking writers today can ever hope to write a sentence as good.

I don't really know French, but, for the curious, here is the foregoing translated passage in Proust's own words:

Depuis que les acteurs n'étaient plus exclusivement, pour moi, les dépositaires, en leur diction et leur jeu, d'une vérité artistique, ils m'intéressaient en eux-mêmes; je m'amusais, croyant contempler les personnages d'un vieux roman comique, de voir du visage nouveau d'un jeune seigneur qui venait d'entrer dans la salle, l'ingénue écouter distraitement la déclaration que lui faisait le jeune premier dans la pièce, tandis que celui-ci, dans le feu roulant de sa tirade amoureuse, n'en dirigeait pas moins une oeillade enflammée vers une vieille dame assise dans une loge voisine, et dont les magnifiques perles l'avaient frappé; et ainsi, surtout grâce aux renseignements que Saint-Loup me donnait sur la vie privée des artistes, je voyais une autre pièce, muette et expressive se jouer sous la pièce parlée, laquelle d'ailleurs, quoique médiocre, m'intéressait; car j'y sentais germer et s'épanouir pour une heure, à la lumière de la rampe, faites de l'agglutinement sur le visage d'un acteur d'un autre visage de fard et de carton, sur son âme personnelle des paroles d'un rôle, ces individualités éphémères et vivaces que sont les personnages d'une pièce, séduisantes aussi, qu'on aime, qu'on admire, qu'on plaint, qu'on voudrait retrouver encore, une fois qu'on a quitté le théâtre, mais qui déjà se sont désagrégées en un comédien qui n'a plus la condition qu'il avait dans la pièce, en un texte qui ne montre plus le visage du comédien, en une poudre colorée qu'efface le mouchoir, qui sont retournées en un mot à des éléments qui n'ont plus rien d'elles, à cause de leur dissolution, consommée sitôt après la fin du spectacle, et qui fait, comme celle d'un être aimé, douter de la réalité du moi et méditer sur la mort.

Mr. Coughy

I have a long ride from my D stop in The Bronx to my job at W. 15th St. and 8th Ave., but at least I always get a seat. Today the guy sitting behind me coughed four or five times a minute all the way down to midtown Manhattan--about 45 minutes till he finally got off. I am mindful that the New York City Subway is mass transit for pathogens too. I can't say that I blame the guy: He should've stood in bed. But there were times when I had a deadline and went to work with a cold--and probably infected everybody. So, deadline met, and it's not as if there's an incentive to stay home sick.

When I got to work this morning, I Googled to find out whether there were any health benefits to catching cold (why not think positive!). I didn't find any benefits, but I did find this news item. Also, if that guy's condition deteriorates totally, there is at least this positive benefit. Presumably my fellow passenger from The Bronx is a Yankees fan.

Off Off Off Off Broadway: Les Abîmés

This was one of those long travel days that make a mockery of distance. I began this day with café crème and pain du chocolat with my friends at a little place on the corner of Rue des Archives and Rue de Bretagne. Paris was cool from the rain last night, and we were up early enough on a Saturday morning that the city had just a smattering of traffic and people walking their dogs as we waited for our van to the airport. Later today I found myself in my local supermarket in the Bronx picking up a few groceries till I figure out what to do tomorrow. So close and so far and seen through a sense of time distorted by jet lag.

Now that I’m not married I don’t have to spend obsessive amounts time shopping for accessories (shoes, handbags, watch bands). I wanted to see what was happening in the Paris equivalent of Off Off Broadway theatre. So, I did. This was a trip filled with serendipities, by the way; the best things I found seemed to be making a point of manifesting themselves without my looking for them. This was how I found the Théâtre du Marais, at 37 rue Volta, in the 3rd Arrondissement, not far from my hotel, off the Place de la République: On Thursday I had stopped off at an ATM to get more euros and the damned machine rejected my card (thank you, you damned beautiful blessed machine!). So I combed the streets looking for another ATM half wondering if the computers at Chase had cut off my card for suspicious activity (i.e. cash withdrawals in a foreign city). If they’ve cut off my card, I’ll let them have an earful, I’m thinking as I wander up and down alleys past cheap shoe stores looking for a main street with banks and ATMs. I turned a corner and there it was: Could I believe my eyes? It could be a storefront theatre in New York. Rue Volta, no need to write that down--I had an adviser in college named Volta. The play was Les Abîmés.

My friends, Marty and Rebeca, were busy the next night with Marty’s relatives, which gave me a chance to go see the play. At 10 minutes to 7 I headed out of my hotel for the 7:30 show--or, as the French say, “19 h 30”--and could not find the theatre. I could not remember the name of the street. Now every street name looked familiar and I couldn’t remember the mnemonic about my college adviser’s name. I started looking for narrow streets with cheap shoe stores. I started looking for the ATM that had rejected my card except now I was coming across more ATMs than you ever thought Paris had. I tried to find the ATM that had accepted my card and work backwards from there. Then it started to rain. A walk down a long narrow street on a warm night with plenty of rain. I turned a corner--a different one from the night before--and there it was. They were just setting up to sell tickets.

I checked my phrasebook, looking up how to say “Is a seat available for tonight?” The man said yes and sold me a ticket (€15). He then asked me (in French) if I realized that the play was in French (wow, my accent must be really bad if I can use a grammatically correct and complete phrase out of my book and still sound like I have no idea what I’m talking about). I told him I understood.

Can I level with you? That wasn't exactly true. My French is not very good. My listening and reading comprehension are easily 10 times my ability to create my own sentences and say them and be understood. And when I say “listening comprehension,” it’s like a very static-y radio that lets you have wisps of phrases here and there supplemented by occasional disconnected words.

Someone in the doorway asked me--with a resonant voice that I envy--something in French. I thought he was asking me whether I was from New York. But I wasn’t sure; however, if he was, he was using real French rather than the schoolbook formal French that gets foisted off on students as if they would never be able to learn to read Flaubert if they learned colloquial French first (colloquial is harder to learn, by the way, not some lazy shortcut). Anyway, my mind went blank trying to think of the phrase to ask the guy to repeat his question. I gave up and told him that I didn’t speak French--which as soon as I said I regretted, because I wanted to say I didn’t speak French well (the phrase is only one word different in French as well as in English).

As the rain grew heavier and then lighter the rest of the audience milled with me outside the theatre. This audience looked more committed than audiences I have seen at Off Off Broadway shows in New York. For one thing it wasn’t demographically overweighted toward any particular group. There were trendy-looking young people, there were couples, there were people who came alone (I wasn't the only one), there were old people, I saw what I took to be a mother and her daughter, and so on. Yay culturally astute audiences who support the theatre and are rewarded with fine contemporary plays!

The house opened. The Théâtre du Marais is a small black-box theatre that seats about 45. There were 25 or 30 audience members--not a bad turnout on a rainy night for a contemporary play that costs €15.

Les Abîmés is about two couples, played by a marvelous cast in their early 20s to early 30s (Bénédicte Budan, Nicolas Martinez, Rébecca Azan, and Philippe Meimoun). I don’t know whether the play, written by Michaël Cohen, has been translated into English. The word “abîmé” means “hurt” or “damage” but it also has a meaning of--or at least a resonance with--“gulf” in the sense of a chasm. The couples are not complete emotional cripples, but they do have difficulty making contact across emotional chasms and this inability is played out in different ways. Bénédicte Budan is pretty and willowy and her scenes with Nicolas Martinez tend toward the tenuousness of human connection. Rébecca Azan makes her entrance marching onto the stage mid-tirade--and to her credit as an actress, the vulnerability of the character seeps through her tough façade. Her scenes with Philippe Meimoun and their tendency toward anger and high energy as a substitute for (and impediment to) intimacy illustrate a different way for a couple to not cross the emotional chasm.

A clip has been posted on YouTube:

Unfortunately that clip left out what I thought was most affecting action in the play, that of Bénédicte Budan placing Nicolas Martinez’s hand on her face to show him how to reach her.

Hurry if you want to see this play: It closes on May 13th.