Italy is bright and white and clean. The streets are full of big beautiful archways and boys in tight overalls and girls in overly large sunglasses. It’s the American Idol factor. I’m not convinced it’s a good look, but hey I’m just a tourist. And everyone is walking around with ice cream cones. Everyone. The provolone is sharp and good and the beer is fairly cheap. Actually everything was fairly cheap compared to what we are used to. The weather was so nice that we didn’t even make it into the world famous Egyptian Museum. We basically walked around and ate our way across the city. We sampled fresh focaccia bread at the market, nutella ice cream, a piping hot margarita pizza. As it got later in the afternoon we started seeing restaurants and bars advertising appetizer buffets. All you can eat thinly sliced salamis, focaccia pizza, little white bread sandwiches, tomato with fresh mozzarella. We ate outside in a huge square and although a pigeon did manage to nail Adrian on the arm from above with a big greenish mess, it was a beautiful time.

Our only bad food experience was the free breakfast buffet at our lovely hotel. It consisted of tang, white bread and ham, packaged croissants and prepackaged slices of some sort of indistinguishable white cheese. But we rallied. We spent the night at a dark bar playing checkers, drinking tall beers, cracking peanuts and watching old MTV videos (including a Nick Cave number). My only regret is that we couldn’t stay a bit longer. I want to go back already.

Stay tuned for Adrian’s perspective, maybe he had a horrible time…

When I saw the posters advertising that Christian Prigent was coming to Chambery for Poetry Day at the Chambery literary center, I couldn’t believe it. I don’t know how many poets there are in France, but out of them all here was CP coming to our humble little village. It seemed like fate had dealt me a special card when I saw this announcement. I have been working on a translation of Prigent’s poetry for the last five months. I hadn’t even heard of him before I came here and found his Lecon d’Anatomie (An Anatomy Lesson) at the library. His work is delightfully dirty and full of puns and rhymes – not the rhymes of ‘roses are red’ but of a schizophrenic who can’t untangle himself from his own tongue wrapped several times around his body. The Anatomy Lesson is not much longer than a chapbook and features 17th century medical woodcuts showing men flayed and pinned open like frog dissections except that the men are smiling and holding their body cavities open with their own hands. This, of course, is what drew me to Prigent’s poetry. Pictures, baby!

The reading was held in a room at the end of a long dark alley. You might think that sounds scary until you realize that you’re going to a poetry lecture on Saturday morning. When I got there the entrance was choked with women and men clad in black smoking cigarettes just like you would imagine French intellectuals from 1968. In fact, I think many of them were alive in 1968. I was the youngest person there and obviously the only American, dressed in my Carthart pants and plaid wool shirt. I asked a woman who was smoking what the program was for the day and upon hearing my accent, she got very curious about me. Was I student? What was I doing there? Remembering, my dad’s introduction of myself to a taxidermist in the Bob Marshall Wilderness, I said, “I’m an American Poet. I’m working on a translation of Prigent’s work.” I wasn’t sure if I even believed that sentence but she bought it and I was quickly welcomed and introduced to various professors and fed croissants and coffee. And after everybody had finished their cigarettes and coffee we found our seats and listened to a long lecture about Prigent, in which I was even mentioned, followed by a long Q and A session. I hadn’t realized how hungry I was for literary theory and thoughts about language until I sat through the lecture. I just ate it up.

Next we took a break for lunch and then for the afternoon Prigent came and read for forty minutes. His reading was awesome. He convulsed. He wove his finger around. He tapped his feet. He strung long lines of lines around us. I was always three or four words behind him because of my French but what I understood was one man’s unique madness. The only truth we can hope to obtain. The audience just ate it up. They laughed and laughed. They were on the edges of their seats. People were taking photograph after photograph. Videotaping him. When he finished reading the crowd (of 20 people) was ecstatic. Then the second Q and A started. . . . and continued . . . for two hours. Whatever happened to the Mouth and Thistle reading series’ slogan of no Q and A’s? Regardless, Prigent considered every question thoughtfully and expounded ad nauseam. Finally, at the end, I was able to buy one of his books and get an autograph and shyly say that I was translating his work. He seemed happy about it, if a little doubtful. He gave me his email address. So any great small presses out there looking to publish some translations – Get Ready!

Reverence!
Reve
Errance!
Raie faite rance!

Reverence aux trous de la viande

Worship!
Wonder!
Wander through shit!
Welcome rancid fish!

Throat chopped cave
of butchery.

and laughs he heartily
to be thus far gone.

But outback they jeer:

change that manmeat!
I mean look at this hole, it’s barfroast!

Reverence to the meaty hole!

Croziflette is Tartiflette’s cousin. Just substitute Crozettes (little square pastas made locally in the Savoie) for the potatoes.

It involves lots of Reblochon cheese.

A lot of onions and lardons.

A huge casserole dish. And an oven - imagine that!

Finished product weighed out at least 20 lbs.

Beautiful.

This weekend we went to the Areche Beaufort to see the Pierra Menta - an alpine touring race that goes for four days and includes 10,000 meters of climbing over the course of the race. That’s over 30,000 feet of climbing! These guys and gals are tough. We stayed at a friend’s chalet in Quiege, a little hamlet on the way to the ski area. The chalet was everything you could imagine a ski chalet in the alps to be. It was very dark. There was a lot of wood. A fireplace. And socks and gloves hung from the rafters drying.

The race on Saturday morning started around 7am and the people we were staying with wanted to cheer on the racers when they reached the top of the Grand Mont (a peak at the top of the ski area). So this meant that we had to beat the racers to the top of the mountain if we wanted to cheer them on. And so we had to get to the ski area at 5 am where there were already 300 or so people waiting in line to ride the quad chair up the mountain. It was crazy. I have never seen so many ski fans, especially at that time of the morning. After we rode up the lift, we then had to climb up the rest of the mountain to the top. Kelly wore snowshoes and I skinned up using some rented alpine touring skis. From the top of the ski lift to the top of the mountain, there was a continuous trail of people. It looked like those pictures of the Klondike gold rush. And it was beautiful. The sun rose as we were climbing and all of the alps laid before us including the Mont Blanc which dominated the sky to the East. The race wasn’t too much to watch - just a bunch of deliriously exhausted skiers fumbling about on the edge of a cliff trying to put on and take off their skins. But the fans were great. By 9am there were hundreds of people on top of the Grand Mont making a tremendous noise with their cow bells, horns and screams. There was a group of Italian fans that were really into it, drinking liters of box wine and screaming for every racer that past. By 11am the portion of the race that we could watch was over so we started our descent. The skiing was great on some nice corn snow.

When we returned to the chalet Saturday night we had a great dinner of croziflette - a casserole of little square pastas made in Chambery, bacon; onions, creme fraiche, white wine and lots of rebluchon cheese. I think we were at the table either eating or thinking about eating from 6:30 to Midnight. The french’s delight for food is contagious. It was wonderful to be sitting amongst friends, stoking the fire, eating and looking at maps of the alps, possible ascents and descents. Even if I didn’t get to ski as much as I would have wanted, I felt like I had made a pilgrimage to the roots of skiing.

If I had know what I was getting myself into this past weekend I probably would have stayed home and holed up with a bad book and some decent wine. But no, I got up at 3:45 am to snowshoe up a mountain. My under preparedness became painfully apparent when we got in line for the ski lift with hundreds of decked out French skiers in spandex and fancy skis. Me in my borrowed boots, borrowed jacket and borrowed snowshoes. It was still pitch dark and being unfamiliar with the sounds of a ski resort, the chair lift sounded ominous, a mechanical Moluch, ready to take me up a mountain I was convinced I could never leave.

Yes in the light of day, all this seems a bit dramatic and of course everything was just fine. I made it most of the way up the mountain and although it took me twice as long to get down and I thought my toes were going to be pinched off, I got down. As the faster hard core skiers broke from the pack on our trek up, I hiked up surrounded by a myriad of interesting French characters. Gone were the spandex racing suits, in came my folk in jeans, full-body snowsuits and really old gear. Even an older man on cross-country skis from the 70’s, which is quite a feat actually (later he passed me snowplowing his way down).

So yes, I am glad I went and thankful for our friends for inviting us and giving us the chance to experience a weekend in the Alps. They are really a nice group. Just playing cards, drinking tea and munching on chips while the wood stove crackles and outside the rain dumps is reason enough to brave the unknown and head for the mountains.

I think our walk from Beaune to Pommard will be one of those things I will always doing and remembering in the back of my mind. Nothing miraculous happened. The wind blew. The fields were only bare vines and wire. Of course we got lost and it seemed to go on forever, but our destination was always in sight, just beyond the next rise. Pommard on a Sunday felt like what happens on westerns when all the townspeople have been told to go to their houses because there will be a shootout and the only people crazy enough to be walking around don’t really know what’s going on. We sat next to the church and ate Edam cheese and baguette. Windows are shuttered and the only sound is the wind ripping through the streets and the bells of the church. We wandered around town looking for the cemetery so Adrian could give his respects to Dominique, Adrian’s host father, but we couldn’t find the cemetery. We knocked on the door to the house/winery where Adrian lived with his host family, but nobody was around. Our trip was semi-spur of the moment, so we didn’t arrange any plans to meet anyone. We were able to find an open wine store and found a bottle of Domaine Lahaye Pere & Fils wine from 1999, the same year Adrian lived in Pommard and thus the wine he had helped make. I think we will save it for his birthday.

Photos: snails and meats with jellied parsley, walking in the vineyards, A’s old digs with the Layhaye family. Keep in mind no showers and a lot of wind.

On Thursday we finally got word that our housing assistance application went through so bang! On Friday we made our way to Dijon via Lyon. We stayed at a very cheap hotel half a block from the train station. The floor was precariously slanted and induced vertigo at every small step, we could hear the baby down the hall and the people above sounded as though they were continuously moving the furniture around and every time a toilet flushed our sink gurgled and burped quite loudly. But the sheets and blankets were clean and that is really the only thing that matters.

We wandered around town visiting Adrian’s old kebab shop, his old apartment, the places he used to skateboard. At aperitif time, we went to Au vieux Leon, quite possibly the best bar ever. Old socks hang in the window, various strings of colored lights provide the only illumination and the stereo only plays accordion music. We sat on benches and drank heavy mugs of beer on a slab of ancient wood that served as a table. It is the kind of place where hobbits might live. The bartender (who looked kind of like Tom Waits) came around with toasted slices of bread topped with crusty cheese and bowls of peanuts and cheese puffs. If we can’t go but a few times in our lives, it’s good to know there is a place in France that is exactly how you want it to be. And there are people there now eating appetizers and listening to Tetes Raides.

The next day we went to the market, Bourgogne has interesting gastronomic tastes and there were a lot of skinned rabbits with their eyeballs still on and various molded and jellied meats. Thankfully, the museums in Dijon are free so we visited the Beaux Arts Museum and saw more paintings by Nicolas de Stael, my new favorite artist. For lunch we lucked out and picked a restaurant that was affordable and friendly. I ordered a tartine with Morbier cheese and Adrian got a salad, both came with really tasty coin potatoes. The huge plates of food filled the whole table. They also threw in an appetizer of pickled eggplant with mint and an after lunch digestif of blackberry liqueur. Really one of our best meals ever. We ended the night at Chez Nous, where a glass of Cote de Rhone is a mere 1.60 Euros. We met a guy that used to be a mime and actually showed us some of his “work,” talked with an Irishman that works as a translator and had a European night of many languages and interesting characters.

We discovered and rediscovered the essence of France in Dijon. We had started to question why we were here. The endless twisting streets, tall churches and spirit of Dijon brought us back. It’s not us, it’s the sprawl and ugly buildings of Chambery that has got us down.

Photos: Adrian’s old apartment, our hotel, around town, raviolis at the market

On Saturday Chambery held its annual Carnaval. Although I do not know the historical significance of this event, I do know that today it appears to be a mix of some sort of tame Mari Gras and Halloween. A time to dress up and get just a little weird. There were a lot of spidermen and a lot of jokers. Also a weird mix of futuristic/turn of the 20th century characters: spacemen with odd machines made with dryer hoses and gold spray paint, steam power and bicycles, big moustaches and a lot of stilts. (I really like this notion of these post-apocalyptic people piecing together the remains of society to create these faux modern machines whose sole purpose is to blow bubbles.) Think Erin Ruiz or Ben Wilson. A time when kids can silly string practically anyone without much repercussion and the local firebreather exchanges his 1664 tallboy for a bottle of kerosene and “magically” producing mouthfuls of fire. Also it was refreshing to go to a parade that isn’t a constant stream of realtors, radio station floats and politicians. But sadly, not a tootsie roll in sight, only the smell of churros and out-of-our-price-range bags of roasted almonds. We consoled ourselves with some Buffy and a package of madeline’s covered in Nutella.

A Spring Story:

We entered March on a bridled lamb 36 feet tall and on her head we fitted a yellow strobe light such as men working so as to spread caution in our wake. And from the yellow lenses of our eyes we saw pass a parade of children done up like aliens and deep sea divers. They marched into a manger of straw and more lights. Every UFO is a barn. We made a stirrup of goat meat for our feet and so controlled our wanderings. Had we been leaches or ticks we could not hold better to the blood bodies, the lamb, the confetti and the season of mud. Our legs sunk deeper into wool. It was raining below us. We were raining and wind blew chaff into our eyes. From the discarded fields, we made hats and shoveled ourselves into the boredom of spectators. Were we invited to the sky, what language could we have spoken but smoke.

cool tunnel and before mille feuille and after mille feuille

Sunday, I climbed the Mont Granier. It is a rather ominous peak that rises steeply above Chambery (250m). In the middle ages, it was the site of one of the largest landslides in European history. Half of the mountain fell off and in the valley below, you can still see huge boulders that stick up out of the vineyards that run along the base of the mountain.

Once again, this hike started off with a good 10 – 12 mile bike ride to a trailhead at 840 meters and then a long steep hike through logging operations, avalanche chutes and finally a rolling snow-covered summit. It was a beautiful, warm day. And fortunately, it had been warm for several days leading up to my hike, because I wouldn’t have wanted to do it when the avalanche chutes had been active. I had to cross quite a bit of debris on my traverse beneath the cliffs of the main summit.

For all the beautiful and it being a Sunday, I was amazed to not see a single other person on the hike.

When I got home, it was a delight to eat rice and beans and drink a well-deserved bottle of Leffe beer.

From the journal:

What are you supposed to write when you reach the top of a mountain? “I’m at the top of the mountain,” I guess. But that’s rather obvious. So I’ll say that I can see the Mont Blanc and the Alps extending ever and ever and “there is a blessing in this wind” and “I lift mine eyes to the hills.” And the zeroes I am make up my mind and swell in the sun burnt pustules on my lips. At the summit, the brief lunch of avocado, golden apple, pain de campagne and cookies is time out of time. The hand on the page, the foot on the rock of the mountain. The wind and the sun in a bare place. Mostly, I am quiet awhile and have cold fingers.

No, the top of the mountain is not a place for words. It is where you go to be cleared of words – to let the oblivion stretching from outside to inside exchange in breath.

There is a peak I can see from my window called the Galoppaz in the Massif des Bauges. It is looks just like you think a peak should look in a child’s drawing. It is a snow-capped pyramid. Ever since December when we were riding on the train from Grenoble to Chambery in the evening and I saw this peak with the moon rising above of it, I have wanted to climb it. Finally, on Wednesday, I got up the energy to make the climb, and energy I needed. The trailhead is about ten miles and three thousand vertical feet from our house, just off the Col des Pres (col means pass) above the village of Thoiry. The bike ride to the trailhead was a workout in itself but fortunately the climb was pretty easy. As I hiked I thought of Wordsworth. I thought of the words errant and wander and roam and was happy to know that they applied to me. And I was happy to see the old sheep barn near the summit, to know that it would dilapidate into the mountains and so would I.

When I got to the top, I found that the peak was really the summit of a long ridge. The south side was barren of snow and trees. It looked like you could roll down it forever. From the top I could look out and see all the Belledonne mountains, the Chartreuse mountains (including the Mont Granier – my next summit) and the thick brown cloud of pollution that has been filling all the valleys for the last three weeks.

For my descent I could have used some skis – there were tracks all over the place. But nevertheless I had a great time sliding down many vertical feet on my butt.