beverley bie brahic's Blog
RSS
Sep.13.2009
An uneventful flight. "Uneventful," one notes, when applied to air travel is the highest of compliments, the adjectival equivalent of 10/10.
Having retrieved my suitcase I exited baggage claim and paused behind two American women who were trying to figure out how to get where I was...
Continue Reading »
Sep.06.2009
A quick update on the vegetable garden. I think the mystery squash is probably some kind of yellow-skinned pumpkin. They have pumpkin leaves, and pumpkin shapes and are growing to pumpkin size. Their flesh is also yellow, squash yellow, not orange at all. They are sweet, wonderful to cook. I...
Continue Reading »
Sep.02.2009
Have just heard from CBeditions that Unfinished Ode to Mud, my translation from French of a selection of Francis Ponge's poems, has been shortlisted for the Corneliu M Popescu Prize.
Continue Reading »
Aug.31.2009
...home again, as the nursery rhyme goes (not quite jiggedy-jog, given the inevitable delays of air travel: an hour at take-off in Albany magnifying itself into a missed connection in Philadelphia, where it was pouring rain). Goodbye Yaddo, I'm hooked, hope to be back soon.
Hello California. ...
Continue Reading »
Aug.22.2009
Some time ago I wrote that Beckett's Letters were hard to read with pleasure because of the way the editorial apparatus is interwoven in the text. I've just read Coetzee's comments in the NYR of Books of April 30, 2009, and had second thoughts. He talks about how SB describes "language as a...
Continue Reading »
Aug.16.2009
I have just opened the NYT and seen that Ken Bacon, who was my classmate at the Columbia Journalism School, died yesterday. Ken worked at the Wall Street Journal, then, during the Clinton presidency, as spokesman for the Pentagon. Most recently he was president of Refugees International. After...
Continue Reading »
Aug.13.2009
Long ago, in an African village in which I was living, I was invited to visit the Medicine Man, or Witch Doctor—but perhaps there was another name, like Priest. He received us in his hut, under his grass—or was it tin?—roof. He sat on a low, carved stool. At the end of our visit he asked what...
Continue Reading »
Aug.06.2009
I have been away, north to the Napa Valley and the velvet of vineyards. Sat in my car at a level crossing, while the Wine Train went by, car after burgundy car of diners, elbows on white linens.
Off tonight on the red-eye for the east coast, Saratoga Springs sometime tomorrow.
Continue Reading »
1 comment
Jul.16.2009
I cooked the yellow squash. I sliced it fine and cooked it in a soup spoon full olive oil. It was delicious. I went to Google Images and wrote "smooth-skinned, round, yellow squash" and looked at the photographs, but nothing resembled that squash. They were too small, egg- or eyeball-...
Continue Reading »
Jul.16.2009
The TLS of July 10th has a review of Claude Lanzmann's memoires Le Lièvre de Patagonie (Gallimard), 558 pages of a life of "accurate indignation," and "many loves." Lanzmann was at school in Clermont-Ferrand when he began running arms for the Resistance and scarcely older in...
Continue Reading »
Jul.11.2009
The eco-students have gone away for the summer and left a row of ripening and green tomatoes, strawberries, overgrown celery and basil, and zucchini that are index-finger-length and flowery one day and two days later--well, you can imagine. Last week I stole a strange yellow--what? Is it a squash...
Continue Reading »
Jul.08.2009
In the house of my dreams there will be a laundry room, with a big warm white washing machine, and a dryer for the days when it is too wet to hang laundry outside (there will be an outside to hang laundry). The machines will have portholes, and make comforting sudsy and drying sounds. There'll be...
Continue Reading »
2 comments
Jul.03.2009
Last night I almost finished Larkin's second novel, A Girl in Winter. Both books are psychologically unnerving in their grasp of human loneliness. I couldn't read the Girl, whose protagonist is a female version of the male protagonist in Jill, to the end yesterday: it was too disturbing. "...
Continue Reading »
Jul.01.2009
The leaves of the oak are nothing like the leather of bookbinding. Leather is supple, tactile, pleasing. It gives like the skin it is. The leaves of the oak in autumn stay on the trees. They scrape in the wind like dead crickets. When they fall they don't rot--not quickly--you can crumble them,...
Continue Reading »
Jun.26.2009
"...it made life seem like an unsuccessful attempt to light a candle in the wind."
This is from Philip Larkin's novel Jill, which I am reading or maybe re-reading (troubling not to know which: I know I have read one of his novels, borrowed, when I taught there, from the library--sorry...
Continue Reading »
About beverley
BEVERLEY BIE BRAHIC was born in Canada, and lives in Paris and Stanford, California. A translator and poet, her work has appeared in Field, Literary Imagination, Notre Dame Review, Oxford Poetry, PN Review, Poetry, The Times Literary Supplement, and...