Yesterday we decided on lunch at a rather swanky auberge in the hills (the Alpes Maritimes, if you prefer) above Nice. Probably would cost over 100 euros--foie gras, you know, fine wine and all the rest. We would treat ourselves to a little luxury. Figured it would take half an hour to get there. Auberge was in Colomars, village so small it was hard to find on maps. Trouble was we hadn't been there in years and years and I wasn't too sure where it was. Road started to climb. Hairpins began. Road soon two car widths wide, had to slow way down to pass. Precipices to one side. Guard rails sometimes absent. Colomars failed to appear, road kept climbing, and I began to hear it from my passenger. Not much gas in the car, and in France on Sunday gas is hard to find. Plenty for the excursion we had planned, not for these mountains. Road still climbing. Gas needle begins descending in convulsive lurches. Still no Colomars. Red light comes on. Passed through other villages. Streets empty. No gas station. Our reservation was for 12:30. We had been driving over an hour and were now very late. Suddenly my passenger noted that the dashboard clock, always correct in the past, read 2:10. How could that be? Who changed the clock? Suddenly it dawned on us. Daylight saving came to France last night. It must be that. The clock changed itself automatically, God knows how. Signs for Colomars had begun to appear but the red light was blinking. My only thought was to get down out of the mountains and get gas. We coasted in neutral down to the flat, drove slowly along the river and finally found a gas station open. I filled up, and we checked the correct time: nearly three o'clock. I called the restaurant on my cell, but they would no longer take us. This late in the afternoon probably no restaurant would. This finished swanky restaurants for the day. What do we do now? We drove along beside the Var. We passed a few brasseries and lesser restaurants all closed. Of course we could just go home. My passenger commented drily that she really wasn't looking forward to cooking today. A sign caught our attention: McDonalds. There are now about 500 of them in France. Not our cup of tea at all. We had never been to one, but at this hour there was nothing else. I pulled in. We waited online, received our burgers in a paper bag and water in a paper cup. It cost 11 euros. We sat there munching away. That was the end of our "swanky" Sunday outing. With a brief laugh my passenger said: "If our children hear about this, they'll put us in a nursing home."
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A short discourse on language.
Also on rereading your own books in translation. Last night here in Nice we had a dinner party. Everyone at the table was French, except me, including the hostess. In the course of the conversation I found myself several times searching for, and not finding, whatever word I needed to complete what I was saying. This has happened several times lately and is somewhat disquieting. It has to do with age probably, but also to the vagaries of language itself. At 23, alone here, with about ten French words to my name, I got married to the aforementioned hostess. French terrorized me then, not now. For as I sometimes joke, I have gone to bed with my dictionary every night since. Each person in a lifetime moves through many small worlds, each time obliged to learn it's particular jargon: sports, police, medical, banking, legal words, etc. Most of this happens very young. New words pour into a mostly empty head, and stick there. But after a certain age they don't. In France I entered certain of these worlds relatively late in life, and a number them, classrooms, for instance, I never entered at all. I have no trouble with French words learned long ago. New ones is another story. They just don't stick the way they did, and when I need them they are sometimes not there. So I thought I should start reading French novels to keep my vocabulary up. Combing the titles on my shelves my eye lit on L'Année du Dragon. Why not, I thought with amusement. Year of the Dragon, published in America in 1981, and in French the following year, was made into an extremely lousy movie by Michael Cimino and Oliver Stone, academy award winners both, though not here. It cost $24 million to make and earned back $18,7. But it was a big hit in France, it made my literary reputation here, and everything I wrote over the next 20 or more years came out in French translation. I read L'Année du Dragon only once as I corrected the page proofs 34 years ago. I had forgotten nearly everything about it, and the words were the translator's, not mine, so none of it jogged my memory now. But reading it I was enthralled by the characters and the plot turns. I remembered the beginning and the end, but not the pages in between. What was going to happen next? I kept turning pages wanting to find out. Which is what I had wanted to do when I wrote it. It felt very strange, and I wonder if other writers have ever done this and felt the same. And yes, I came upon many half forgotten words that ought to be closer to the tip of my tongue than they have been. So in that sense it was a good experience too. Just back from three days in the Luberon, a part of Provence we did not know, though it has a big reputation in the tourism world, and it was three days of delight. It is farming country but with mountains all around, meaning fabulous views. Fabulous old villages to wander around in also. Some were walled, some perched on cliffs, and one is mostly in ruins. The tallest and most dominant mountain is the Mont Ventoux of terrible, terrible reputation in the bike racing world. It is almost 8,000 feet high, totally snow covered now and still icy in summer when it destroys the legs and will power of the Tour de France riders who must climb it.
We stayed at a bed and breakfast (the word in French is gite or table d'hotes) called Le Mas des Lônes near the village of Opped. This was a first time for us, but it was a nicer and more comfortable experience than any palace hotel we've ever stayed in. The house dates from the 1700's, meaning beamed ceilings and big fireplaces but with modern bathrooms, a big firm bed and marvelous breakfasts. In summer there is a pool. Surrounded by vines, it was on a side road off a side road, meaning that the nights were very dark and very quiet. Our hosts, Marie and Denis Marchal, could not have been warmer or more outgoing or more attentive. They are in their 50s, and they have lived everywhere, including California. He was an engineer at McDonald-Douglass in San Jose and she was a student at Stanford. I felt we had become friends before we left, and I would like to see them again. In response to a question from Naomi Klapper---No, I don't have a publishing company and never did. My 30 books were published by I think 17 different publishers. I always moved on to whatever book I wished to write next, and whoever was the publisher of my previous book sometimes refused to move with me, in which case I would shop my proposal around until I found some other publisher who was willing to do the book and would give me a contract and an advance. Nowadays I have no publisher and no agent, which seems to indicate that my novel writing career is over, and I spend my time writing what I like to think of as poetry. No contracts, no advances for poets, last I heard, and not much confidence by me that what I am writing is anywhere near as good as I'd like to think it might be. I used to take the money and the contract as proof that what I was writing must have some value if people were wiling to pay for it. None of that now. Still, putting my "poems" together gives me great pleasure. A different kind of value perhaps. Or perhaps just an illusion.
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