#jody gladding

Vincent Zonca, Lichens. Toward a Minimal Resistance, Translation by Jody Gladding, Foreword by Emanuele Coccia, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2022 [Zabriskie Buchladen für Kultur und Natur, Berlin]

4 In the wake of these two lights I wake to no thing that is not wholly how it lives the warm egg the slow wait of stone those unintelligible lines I can say now how blood blesses the yolk how stones die

5 And I can say how I will fall away from what breathing arc into what breath of calm

above what the green frog plucks hovering there.

2 At one end of this road the whole moon sun at the other makes it all light between them a juncture giving rise to Chinese characters a character say for heaven: sky/hall a corridor lined with shadows

in which the sky has taken over making even my shadow pay attention

3 letting me take on such shapes a dead jay's stiff wing the flattened length of a garter snake seared limb ruined web the bruised back of a salamander until I am every tongue this way has stilled

until I am taken up by one great horned owl.

4 In the wake of these two lights I wake to

no thing that is not

wholly how it lives

the warm egg the slow wait of stone

those unintelligible lines I can say now how blood blesses the yolk how stones die.

5 And I can say how I will fall away from what breathing arc into what breath of calm.

It’s raining light: Second Star and Other Reasons for Lingering by Philippe Delerm @archipelagobks

In the waiting area, they’ve installed a piano. There’s one in each of the big Paris railway stations now, but you never know how that will go. In the Gare du Nord the other day, an older woman set her suitcase down beside her and then played, with great application, Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring before melting back into the crowd, aware that no one had stopped to listen. She left without looking…

FINDING DORA MAAR An Artist, an Address Book, a Life By Brigitte Benkemoun Translated by Jody Gladding 216 pp. Getty Publications. Paper, $24.95.

It must rank among the most satisfying eBay purchases on record. Benkemoun ordered a vintage Hermès diary for her partner, who was highly particular about his leather preferences; new models didn’t cut it. When Benkemoun, a French journalist, received the address book, tucked away in a pocket she found a list of names and phone numbers: Breton, Balthus, Cocteau, Tzara — a roster of some of the early 1900s’ greatest artists. Bit by bit, she pieced together clues to the diary’s first owner. Slight misspellings of names suggested a foreigner. An address for Jacques Lacan? He or she must have been a patient.

It didn’t take long for Benkemoun to determine the owner. But the pleasures of this mystery are far from over.

Henriette Theodora Markovitch, the photographer and painter known as Dora Maar, is widely remembered as one of Pablo Picasso’s lovers and martyred muses. Her own artistic ventures have been eclipsed by her relationship with the Spanish painter; she was his “Weeping Woman.”

Though Benkemoun’s book is structured around Maar’s relationships, with chapters corresponding to entries in the diary, it rejects any suggestion that she was significant primarily for her social ties. Each section draws out a complicated, often contradictory, side of Maar, from her seduction of Picasso at Les Deux Magots, to her later years as a prideful and deeply religious older woman who kept a copy of “Mein Kampf” in plain view on her shelves. Even an entry for the plumber is the jumping-off point for a memory of Picasso, and an opportunity for Benkemoun to imagine Maar’s inner life: “She was delighted to see him marvel each morning at the magic of a hot bath. She was still the magician.”

Benkemoun spent two years on this spirited and deeply researched project, and often pauses to reflect on the relationship she formed with Maar while she was at work. “I was afraid of her silences,” she writes, “her fits of anger, her moods, her judgments, her gaze that looked right through you.”

Her affection for her subject is infectious. This book gives a satisfying treatment to a woman who has been confined for decades to a Cubist’s limited interpretation.

A GIRL’S STORY By Annie Ernaux Translated by Alison L. Strayer 156 pp. Seven Stories. Paper, $18.95.

Ernaux, one of France’s leading contemporary writers, mines her shame to good effect. There’s no hysteria or prurience in her writing; she approaches her history with precision, never sentimentality. As she wrote in an earlier book: “I shall carry out an ethnological study of myself.”

That intention also guides her latest book, “A Girl’s Story,” in which she revisits a pivotal summer. In 1958, she was 18 and away at a camp in northwestern France. As Ernaux writes of herself: “She is all desire and pride. And: She is waiting to fall madly in love.”

That heady mix — and the shame it eventually caused her — forms the basis of Ernaux’s identity as a writer. The rules of desire she followed as a teenager are a blueprint she has yet to discard. For years, she says, she had wanted to write about this version of herself and was “haunted” by the thought “that I could die without ever having written about ‘the girl of ’58.’”

The central event is her first sexual encounter, her introduction to a new cycle of submission and rejection. Ernaux evokes the mood of that summer, drawing on her sensory memories and calling up her desires of that time. Revisiting painful periods is hardly new territory for writers, but Ernaux distills a particular power from the exercise. As she puts it, “I am endowed by shame’s vast memory, more detailed and implacable than any other, a gift unique to shame.”

Listen, shepherds:

The worlds were in the god’s net like tuna in the madrague:

Flips of the tail and foam; a sound that rang out, expelling the wind from every side.

The god was in the sky up to his knees.

From time to time, he leaned over, he took some sky in his hands. It ran between his fingers. It was white as milk. It was full of creatures like a huge stream of ants. And in it, images became clear and then faded like things in dreams.

The god washed his whole body with the sky. Slowly, to get used to life’s cold. He had a sensitive belly. Because everything was created in his belly.

Afterwards, he began to walk into the sky until he was out of his depths, where he could no longer touch, and he began to swim. His huge hand rose and dipped like a spoon; his great feet dug like pickaxes with nails in front. He was followed all along by a swirl of ripped up grasses. After a little while, he was far over there, no more than an island amidst the spray.

“Here,” she went on, “you could say that I have the bread and the knife, but I like the bitterness of it; it makes my brain water, you might say. I’ve spent a long time listening to the sound of the earth and I’ve always listened to the neighbors, but here, the neighbors, well, first of all, it’s those huge gray pines and then those fine old oaks as thick as men, with human voices but so heavy with a power that comes from the depths of time, so that you say to yourself, ‘If they wanted to…!’ And at first, I lay down against the right wall. And there, all at once, as soon as I stretched out on my bed, I was plunged into sleep, like a candle blown out. A thing that blew out my life all at once. One night, I struggled with my eyelids. They lowered, I lifted them, until I had to hold them open with my fingertips. There was a purring, like a cat’s, in the earth’s big throat. And I was going into this noise, saying to myself, ‘It’s that, or that, or maybe it’s that!’ until the moment when I saw the black life of a spring, and I said, ‘Césaire, I’m making my bed over there, you can come if you like, and if you stay, there’ll be no more children, because I tell you I’m not leaving that side anymore. My mother didn’t make me for sleeping beside a spring that never sleeps.’ And Césaire came because he has to be against a woman’s flesh, that’s his nature.

(Césaire is still out in the night; the wife wets her lips.)

“…There, one fine evening, I heard scratching for a long time. It made a tock, and a bit of earth fell on the blanket and from the hole, a long white root came out. Ever since, it’s grown, it twists itself and twists again. Luckily it’s blind. It’s searching for me.

“It was a summer evening, and this big door was opened wide onto the night. That one lay down beside me and put her little arm around my neck. That was no good because I have a big neck and I’m heavy, and I said to her, ‘Move your arm, I’ll hurt you,’ but she stayed close to me and I was frozen with fear and she was hot as a coal burning me where she clung. And she said to me, ‘Mama, look at the night. It’s full of stars someone’s only just sown. Who is it who sows them? Who is it who has a sack full of them? It’s fistfuls and fistfuls that someone throws. They look like rice, look.’

Five Meditations on Death, by Francois Cheng

Five Meditations on Death: In Other Words… On Life, by Francois Cheng, trans. Jody Gladding Inner Traditions, 978-1620554944, 117 pp., 2016. When I requested Five Meditations on Death by Francois Cheng for review, I imagined that it would be five guided meditations around the concept of death. It isn’t, but I was not disappointed. The word “meditations” is used here in the more contemplative,…