Switzerland, technically, does not belong to the European Union, although they share some interesting agreements, like the one which allows me, finally, to live and work here. Nor do they belong to NATO, and they only very recently joined the United Nations. They go it alone, do things their way, don’t want to be dictated to by Brussels, let alone Washington.

So on first glance there might seem to be a slight irony to the fact that they’re hosting, together with Austria (an EU member) this year’s Euro 2008, the European football (or soccer if you prefer) championship held every four years. But then of course all these categorizations and groupings are as arbitrary and fundamentally meaningless as many words in the dictionary. Turkey is participating in the championship and may well win it, although we know that many EU members are opposed to Turkey joining the EU, and many people would argue that Turkey is not Europe. But that is matter for another debate; you could also argue that Russia is as European, or not, as Turkey…

I have been watching many of the games over the last two weeks. It feels like a civic duty: streets, supermarkets, shops, cars, houses are all festooned with flags not only from Switzerland, but also Italy, Spain, Turkey, Portugal, representing large and influential immigrant communities. Whenever a team scores a goal, you can hear horns blowing, sometimes in the house next door (at least they don’t shoot, like in Croatia). After the decisive victory, supporters of the winning teams drive around town honking. Apparently they are allowed by law to half an hour, but after Spain’s victory last night I was hearing honking well into the night. It’s only once every four years (two if you count the World Cup), so the police tend to be indulgent. They may even be out honking themselves, if they’re second generation immigrants…

Four years ago I was in Greece when the Greek team won the championship. It was wild, unheard of, one of Europe’s dark horses, little Greece beating host country Portugal in the final. I was on the staid, religious island of Tinos and even the priests were shouting and screaming. Fireworks outside the churches; honking all night long. Friends in Athens said they did not sleep.

What is it about this football fever that makes everyone go wild? Why do I, a perfectly sedate and graying woman, sit all alone in front of the television screaming “Allez Ribé!” or “Ajde Hrvatska!” or “Elate paidia!” Is it memories of the 1998 World Cup final when Croatia lost to France, but not before scoring a goal that showed me briefly, in the café on Hvar where I sat watching the game surrounded by Croatian nationalists, how a collective fever can blind you, intoxicate you, make you do ridiculous and dangerous things you would never do otherwise? Football is a tremendous safety valve; but it is also a fervent way of feeling human, of sharing with strangers, of knowing what it is to be together on this tiny planet and having to get along. Friends who were in Paris in 1998 or Rome in 2006 say how unforgettable the experience was—as was my time on Tinos. I am deeply sorry the Swiss team have not made it to the final: their generosity, their hospitality, surely makes them as deserving as Greece, or any host country in the end. But especially one that is more truly European than most.

But then, the Swiss have Roger Federer. And Wimbledon has just started…

Flag photo courtesy Getty images

Someday I’ll look back on these days with a sort of rueful sadness, thinking, Remember how awful that time was, how you thought it would never end? Because end it will, sooner or later, for better or worse, but a page will be turned, or even a chapter, and the story will continue.

For now I am in a strange limboland of not there and not here. I left there, California, a week ago to start a new life in Switzerland, but I’m not here yet. I’m in a sad and horrible place of looking after my sick cat, who clearly did not want to leave California. (more…)

It was one of those phone calls when you know there’s something not right. This person shouldn’t be calling you at this time of day, or on your cell phone. You answer, and to make things worse, it’s your landlady, and after a moment of annoyance that she is calling you at work, you hear her saying right up front that she has bad news.

Pick one, goes your catastrophe-panicked brain:

a) The house has burnt down.

b) She has to raise the rent, or sell, and who knows who your landlord will be then.

c) She found your kitty run over in the street. (more…)

Last week I was in my favorite bookstore, Stacey’s, on Market Street in San Francisco, trying to buy a copy of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones. Why I was looking for Tom Jones is a long story which I won’t go into. What I will mention is that, first of all, Stacey’s is an endangered species. It is one of the last independent bookstores in San Francisco. Since I began working here, I have seen half a dozen independent bookstores close, most recently Cody’s and Clean Well Lighted Place, within a few weeks of each other. When I go into a place like Stacey’s I almost feel endangered myself: there are fewer and fewer customers, and seemingly endless piles of shiny, alluring books that no one has time to read anymore. As an (erstwhile) writer in a place like that, I feel both the awed reverence that a worshipper can feel in a temple, and the vague unease that I am on a leaky ship without lifeboats. There is a sadness about the place, now. (more…)

January 3, 2008

Today we had the first of our “winter storms.” Read—where California is concerned—heavy, relentless rain, and wild winds, up to 80 miles an hour. Trees across the road. Surges of waves in the normally tranquil bay. Power outages for sure, up to a million homes, from Santa Rosa to San Jose. Traffic disrupted, accidents, freeway closures.
All of these things have happened. Hurricane force winds, said the radio.

At 8:00 a.m. I decided—unilaterally—to stay home. It’s a Friday, and I should have been at work, on a quiet, end of holiday season day; but when I looked out the window and saw the madness—tree branches and debris on my patio, my little cottage vibrating like a sailboat at its moorings, and just my imagination telling me what crossing the Golden Gate Bridge in a rickety, American public transit bus would be like—I took the decision. (See the photo of my usual number 4 commuter bus below…) Don’t think I had a free day, an enjoyable day off similar to a holiday. I was unspeakably bored. Because the power went out at 4 a.m. and has still not returned sixteen hours later; the light from outdoors was dim and uncooperative: Thou shalt not read, sayeth the Lord. Candles are of little use when you have a 530 page novel to plough through; and this blog is being written on precious battery time (3:31 at the moment, and I also have a film to watch). (more…)

I recently flew from San Francisco to Dallas on my way to visit a friend in the Deep South. Ever mindful of finding a reasonably priced flight, given the recent hikes in air fare, I capitulated to the worst case scenario: a red eye for my outbound flight, a return on Christmas day. You gets what you pays for.

We took off at one o’clock in the morning: the plane was full, long gone the days of having three seats to oneself on such a flight (my last full row to myself flight was on a red-eye a year before 9/11…) I was trapped moreover in a middle seat, but my neighbors on either side were quiet and slim and like me, wanted only to grab three hours’ sleep before landing in Dallas. (more…)

It seems I’m not alone.

If you google “Words, words, words, I’m so sick of words,” never so eloquently stated as by Julie Andrews in her incarnation as Eliza Doolittle, you will find a whole stream of bloggers et al. who feel the same. Being sick of words, I did not take the time to explore why they were sick of words; suffice to say, it seems a common enough ailment. It is also why I have not been on this blog for a while. There were just no words left over for self-expression…

At the recent (what, six weeks ago?!) conference of the American Translators’ Association, one of the presenters gave a talk on her profession and confessed she no longer did crossword puzzles. By the end of an entire day spent translating, she couldn’t bear the idea of any more words. It was time to walk the dog, listen to music, watch a film. I listened in dismay: if I am to become a full-time translator, will I lose the pleasure of crosswords? Is it that strenuous a profession? (more…)

Every year I would think to myself, who would I like to win the Nobel prize for literature? And most of my own personal nominees were either dead or not quite of the stature of a Nobel prizewinner, and very often not male enough. Or they’d won it already. But I would often think, quite wistfully, of Doris Lessing, that if she were awarded the prize, that would be a worthy recognition by my own Nobel standards (Steinbeck, Pasternak, Seamus Heaney). But she was passed over so often, and was getting on, and it seemed as if she were going to get it, she would have got it by now. I assumed those gentlemen in Stockholm found her too little of a lady to their liking: too feisty and feminist, her work most definitely not male enough. (more…)

Every now and again you find yourself in a strange wrinkle of synchronicity. You think of someone and they call; you find your friends reading the same book at the same time; you rant at lunchtime about the perfidy of Blackberries and find an editorial on the subject in the paper that very evening. Coincidence? Zeitgeist? A periodically more alert sensibility? No one has figured it out satisfactorily, but it’s intriguing when it happens, and it can even deepen your understanding of time or your engagement with the world and its mysteries.Recently, I watched two films back to back that couldn’t have been more different and more similar at the same time. They landed randomly in my mailbox through the mystery that is a “Netflix” queue—I selected the films weeks ago and with no intention whatsoever of having a mini-festival of a certain type of film. But in fact that is what happened, and what I’m writing about today; call it the Women’s Choices Film Festival, or, more ominously, The Women and Marriage Film Festival, or more reassuringly The Women and Careers Film Festival… (more…)

Just a few words for the passing of someone extraordinary. Larger than life, to be sure; larger than death too, as his voice will stay with us, after a fashion, thanks to technology, although an mp3 can never compare with a live performance. I never had the good fortune to hear him live, I’m not sure I’ve ever even heard him on an excellent sound system. My only recording, I’m ashamed to say, is a cassette copied from a cassette, a hodge podge of O Sole mio and Ave Maria and Nessun Dorma. A cassette that accompanied me on a sailboat trip to Mexico, through storms both natural and of the man-made, emotional variety. But I have always known the power of that voice, how it can move you to tears even from the tinny speaker of a second-rate television.

He seemed to leave his presence behind in places he had been, a shadow, an echo. The Music Concourse in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco where he had once performed for free and al fresco, or so I was told, before I moved there. A street in Mostar in Bosnia where there was a music school for children that he had founded after the war.

It’s just hard to imagine a world without him; he belongs to that tiny group of people that you grow up with, your own generation or the one just ahead of you, who define your world as a better place, a place worth sticking around as long as you can, even if it’s just to watch reruns of The Three Tenors.

I went through Modena on the train about six months ago. I kept looking for balsamic vinegar distilleries. I didn’t know he lived there, or I might have shouted out the window, Ciao, Luciano!

Life has just gotten that bit smaller, and shorter. And this time Ciao seems to mean, So long, Luciano.  There’s a strange silence on the planet now, the place your voice used to fill.

This has been a hard weekend. One where in my personal zone I have gone through a great searing change; and on the global scale, one where a whole country has been blazing out of control, victim to greed and carelessness and the planet’s own revenge.

In my efforts to forget my own transitions, I have been relentless in my anxiety over Greece. All summer there have been forest fires there, most of them started intentionally. Every year there are fires: there is some obtuse law, poorly formulated, that seeks to protect the environment but somehow ends up destroying it: forest land is not open to development, but if it is unforested, it can be developed. Beware of Greek developers bearing matches. (more…)

Yes, it’s been a while.

It’s not exactly writer’s block, but rather a mixture of inertia, lack of topics, and summer vacation. I haven’t been doing yoga either. Sick of things. Blogck. Or blockg. Fog, or fogck on the brain.

How many websites and blogs do you go to only to find they have been abandoned or neglected for months? Even Jenny Diski, the British writer who was the inspiration, indirectly, for my own blog (see the very first entry), neglected hers for at least two months if not more. What is it in the human psyche that grows tired, gives up, fails to maintain the enthusiasm of departure and discovery? (more…)

He’s quite a famous author, let’s just start with that. No longer young, and his great success came well into middle age after years of respectable literary obscurity. International prizes, Hollywood film, all that. He publishes rarely, so it’s an event to see him on stage with an eminent poet interviewing him.

The interview was somehow lackluster; maybe I felt I already knew everything he was saying, or not enough, as I haven’t yet read his latest novel. Or maybe it was the warm weather and the Prosecco I’d had with dinner. The sound was poor and I found myself wishing I were at home listening to the interview on the radio. But I was with a friend and we were still enjoying a nice evening, and had bought copies of the latest book to have signed after the interview. (more…)

 I didn’t really feel like going; I dislike crowds. I tend to be a melancholy stay-at-home recluse (see my earlier blog on melancholy). But the friends who invited me are always good company, and I knew it would do me good to get out (the refrain of many a recluse), to stop brooding about everything that is going wrong with my life (the refrain of many a melancholic).

On the flank of Mt. Tamalpais, the lovely mountain in whose shadow I have lived for nearly the last twenty years, there is an outdoor amphitheatre where every summer devoted theatre troupes put on musicals on bright weekend afternoons. It is a sort of local tradition, where people go early to stake out a good spot with a view or shade; they take picnics, the Sunday paper, the kids. Sort of a baseball game without hotdog vendors and teams. Predictably, the event is known as Mountain Play, and on Sunday morning the local parking lots fill up early as school buses shuttle people up the long drive. The bus ride itself is a memory trip: only instead of screaming children there are shouting adults. The road winds in and out of fog and view, until you arrive in streaming sunshine and the picturesque heat trap that is the amphitheatre. Finding my friends was a bit like finding Waldo. And don’t count on cell phones on flanks of magical mountains. (more…)

(Or, how not to get seasick)
If I were a teacher of creative writing, I would assign one task to my students for the year, and be paid handsomely for doing very little: I would have them read George Gissing’s New Grub Street over and over until they were all convinced they would change their degree to something useful like computer science or quantum physics, and thereby spare the world the spectacle of yet another struggling writer languishing in poverty, tuberculosis and marital strife.

Let me start by saying that I did not become a writer by attending creative writing classes, I do not have an MFA, and I have no intention of ever becoming a teacher of creative writing (nor would I be hired on the basis of the lazy curriculum I would impose—let them read Gissing while I go to the pool!) I have, however, taught a few weekend classes, somewhat guiltily, as I don’t believe in the ability to teach creative writing—it’s a bit like teaching a sailor how not to be seasick. (more…)

It was an exceptionally warm evening—far too lovely to spend in a dark room. A rare day of summer weather in the Bay Area and there we were, about to spend three hours indoors with hundreds of equally hot bodies, in a cinema—a neighborhood one at that—hardly renowned for its modern air conditioning installation.

We could have waited for the film’s general release, or worse yet, Netflix. But to see it at the film festival gave it a certain cachet, and echoed the novel’s original publication (only in Italy) in 1929: we would be the first in this country to see the full, unexpurgated version. (more…)

In the middle of the afternoon yesterday I felt a strange sad mood settle over me like a stubborn cloud, and I could find, at first, no explanation for it. I went about my work, spoke to colleagues, rode the bus home, under my little cartoon-character cloud. Only when I’d relaxed, in various ways, did another metaphorical meteorological phenomenon reveal the reasons for my cloud: a bolt from the blue told me it was because of the presidential debate we had watched earlier that day at work, during lunch and even well beyond. (more…)

Some weeks ago a friend of mine who is a professor at a college back east called to tell me he was depressed. We’ve known each other for thirty years or more; we were students together in a class of Modern Greek in Athens. With our professor we had a regular table at a local taverna where we liberally dosed our horiatiki salad days with retsina, conversation, and sexual innuendo. He was into the Greek girls; I was into the professor. Anyway, that was a long time ago. (more…)

If I’ve been absent from these pages for a few weeks, it’s because I’ve been away. Here. Chez moi.

Staying in a place like Paris can be a joy or a disaster. Over the years I’ve stayed in tiny garret rooms and comfortable hotels; I’ve stayed with friends and in the anonymity of a Méridien hotel. There have been quiet rooms and rooms across the street from all-night bars. I’ve stayed for free and I’ve paid the bill. The last few years I had stayed with a friend who lived around the corner from Place Bastille, but he has moved to Shanghai, so I had to choose where to stay this time. I had recommendations of hotels in the Latin Quarter, in the Marais. There was the cousin of my nieces and nephews, but I don’t know her very well. Dilemme. (more…)

Wandering through the halls of the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh some years ago, I came upon a little-known work by Lucas Cranach the Elder, a 16^th century German painter. Was it the title of the painting that captivated me—An Allegory of Melancholy—or the painting itself, so modern, almost surreal, in its juxtaposition of strangely discordant elements?

Let me start by explaining that I like the word melancholy, even though its Greek etymology is black bile, hardly an attractive notion. One of the four humors: I cannot see myself as choleric, or sanguine, or phlegmatic, so I’ve always opted for the melancholic side of things. Melancholy has a bad rap, especially in these days of enforced cheerfulness and tooth whitener smiles. The word melancholy is onomatopoeic to me, something about its consonants and rhythm suggestive of languor, gentle sadness, nostalgia. Sitting alone on a veranda watching the sun go down, missing some one, but gently. (more…)

She was born in the last of the colonial years, old enough to automatically become French at a later time in her life when she would have nowhere else to go. She was a teacher, worked at the Alliance Française in Saigon for seventeen years. She left the country, with her family, in 1981; they risked their lives on a leaky boat, more afraid of the victorious regime than of the pirates in the south China sea. There is a certain resonance in French to the English words “boat-people” that is lost in English, because it is reserved for that time when to leave Vietnam meant to survive, somehow, the terrible aftermath of a lost war. And when she says it, in her voice that is soft and questioning with a quiet humor, there is a resignation and dignity that comes from somewhere inside her, a place we can only understand intellectually. (more…)

In 1950 Charles Aznavour wrote a song which went on to become famous, sung by both Juliette Gréco and Edith Piaf, and perhaps others as well. The woman in the song is expressing a feeling which could be shared by many: she hates Sundays, finds them “pretentious” and rose-colored and filled with pretexts for the middle classes to parade in crowds and act smug, while the man she loves has to go to work. If only he had Sundays off, she says, she would love Sundays—and show it—so well that other people would envy her happiness.The subtext of her little musical scenario is the loneliness that Sundays inflict upon those who are neither en couple or en famille. And while she clearly sees the ritual that is behind the traditional Sunday—church, family dinners, after-dinner walks, excursions to the country or trips to museums, along with the pretense (we’re not lonely because we’re doing what normal people do on a Sunday), she also envies these traditional activities, even those who “make love because they have nothing else to do…” (more…)