New & Notable
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One of the greatest benefits of living a wandering life is all the people you meet and how you can just show up in their cities and demand to sleep on their couches. Seriously, the extended Kilometer Zero family acts like a worldwide shelter system, offering kindness, meals and bed whenever possible. In Boston, I am lucky enough to know two incredible people.
The first is Onna Solomon, who was in Paris during the Paris years and worked with Kilometer Zero to organize the 24 Hour theatre project at the Chateaudun Art Squat. She is now in Boston, taking an MFA at Boston Univeristy and writing really magnificent poetry. Here is one of my favourites.
Things Begin To Change
As workers scour the storefront windows clear,
Their plastic buckets slosh, a squeegee rakes
What’s left of winter down the stairs into
The streets. You don’t know what it means
To be anything but a pale-skinned girl
Men with drenched sleeves turn to watch in the early spring.
The knuckles of their bare hands gleam like pearl
Above the muck of sandy snow along
Your route each morning – so when they’ve gone
You think of how their gazes guided you:
The easy way your eyes met theirs while everything
Was opening – you smiled generously:
You knew that every lustrous day this year
Was still untouched and just ahead of you.
The second is Mr. Craig Walzer. He goes around telling people he is 24 but he is clearly lying. How could a 24 year old have attended Brown and Oxford, travelled the world, and spent two years opening the most joyful bookstore in Greece? (Atlantis Books. www.atlantisbooks.org. Visit sometime. I will be there February to May, 2006.)
Now Craig is taking a four year international law/human rights/hyper genius program at Harvard. He and his classmates had lunch with John Kerry last week. That’s the kind of place it is. (I find it amusing that Craig lives in the zip code 02138 which, according to him, is the zip code which writes the most letters to the editor in America.) This morning, Craig was such a gentleman and kind soul that he invited me along to a class taught by Michael Ignatieff. It was about how religions and human rights clash and it was brilliant for everyone but especially brilliant for me because Michael Ignatieff is Canadian and there are rumours he is going to enter politics. I accosted him after his class and vowed to support him. If he becomes prime minister, he could be Trudeau II.
Ottawa to Boston
Me, Sparkle, dark highways, the just released Tragically Hip collection. What better way to spend 8 hours?
Posted in New & Notable, Waystations | Leave a commentCBC
For those unaware, Canada is blessed with a most wonderful public broadcaster. CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) is sort of like the BBC, without as many radio frequencies but with just as impressive content, news, and music. Recently, CBC management locked out employees because they are trying crush the souls of the journalists by hiring casual workers who don’t have any job security or extended benefits. Why are they doing this? Because they care more about cutting a few taxes than protecting Canada’s cultural identity. This is why you should get involved in politics. Because if the good people sit on the sidelines (and I know you are a good person) than the visionless and the vain will seek public office and destroy all that is beautiful and worthy in government.
My family has been a CBC radio family since forever. Among my first memories are sitting on the heat vent on a winter morning, eating a bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios and listening to the local Ottawa CBC morning show. It made me happy then, and when I visit my parents’ house, it still makes me happy, though the Cheerios are replaced by strong black coffee now.
All this is to say that is an honour to be interviewed by the CBC about my book and tour and it was a thrill for my whole family to welcome Lucy van Oldenbarneveld to our home. Long live the CBC, long live Julie Delaney.
Posted in New & Notable, Waystations | 2 CommentsHalloween
There is a very important reason why I am leaving for my book tour on the morning of November 1st. I had to spend Halloween at home.
Halloween is without a doubt my favourite holiday of the year. There is no religious tie, so everybody can participate without spiritual discord. Everyone becomes a sculptor when they face a pumpkin with knife in hand and everybody becomes an actor when they don their face paint. And the kids and their costumes are the epitome of adorable. And the candy – who doesn’t like candy? And the macabre subtext to it all …
With all modesty, I believe I my parents’ house was the best decorated house on the street.(Though sadly the photo is all blurry.) We had six pumpkins, plus a pumpkin display in the front window, plus strings of lights wrapped around spooky branches attached to the porch, plus strings of skeletons and ghosts. My cousin Mike (that’s him carving a pumpkin with my dear friend Sparkle Hayter) is an extremely talented carver whose intricate designs put us all to shame, while his wife Laura stunned us by carving the symbol pi onto her pumpkin to create ‘pumpkin pi’.
Sparkle, who is coming along with me from Ottawa to Boston to New York, took dozens of photos of the costumed children. Her favourite was two girls dressed as ying and yang and you can see the picture of her taking a picture of them.
The only sad part of this Halloween is that I didn’t get to execute my full pumpkin installation. Last year I had a theme of giant pumpkins crushing smaller pumpkins to death in their jaws. This year I had an incredibly wonderful plan but it involved wooden stakes and a dozen pumpkins and I just didn’t have time to pull it off. Next year, oh sweet next year. If you are in the neighbourhood – 4th Avenue in Ottawa – drop by. We give away superb treats.
Posted in New & Notable, Waystations | 1 CommentSeeing George
Let us just say that George Whitman can be a difficult character. While in Paris, I dropped by the Shakespeare and Company bookstore to give both George and his daughter Sylvia copies of the book. Sylvia was charming and gracious and wonderful. George, as cantankerous as ever, snarled and closed the door on me.
I concede that it must be difficult to read about yourself in a book, to see yourself in the mirror of another person’s eyes. And I know that George believes that if I was his true friend, I would have presented a more bucolic vision of Shakespeare and Company and written a romantic fairy tale. But, the journalist in me dies hard, and I wrote about everything I saw and experienced, both the magical and the unsavoury, and George still doesn’t forgive me.
His rejection is harder to take at a time when Diane Johnson (Le Divorce etc) has published such spurious rumours about George. How can he be angry with me writing about the lack of proper bathing facilities at this store when she raises such ugly spectres with no proof or attribution? If nothing else, my book was written with love and respect for the man who created Shakespeare and Company and I hope George comes to see that.
In blazing contrast was my visit with Simon Green, the extremely talented and rabidly eccentric poet who lived at Shakespeare and Company and figures largely in my book. He invited me and our mutual friend Ryan McGlynn to an apartment in Clichy where he was dog-sitting. Ryan had his video camera with him and thankfully so for nobody will ever believe Simon’s manic genius unless they see it for themselves. Simon offered us bourbon and other combustible treats, regaled us with photos of his garden on Belle Isle, and soliloquized on everything from Mao’s atrocities to Bob Dylan, all while wearing 150-euro designer T-shirt. To think this man used to scrape baguette money from the wishing well.
A final note about my Paris visit. I had lunch and beer with Buster Burk and learned that he had received a stunning 18 on 20 on his D.E.A. thesis at the Sorbonne. The D.E.A. is a one-year degree between Master’s and PhD and in the soul-devouring French system, students are happy with a 12 or 13 on 20 and over-the-moon delighted with a 15 on 20. For Buster, an English speaker from South Carolina to write a 100-page thesis about Apollinaire in French and get an 18 is unheard of. The boy is talented and I tip my cap to him.
Posted in New & Notable, Waystations | Leave a commentMarseille-Paris
The train north is a depressing affair at the best of times. The sun is inevitably shining when I leave Marseille and just as inevitably the clouds thicken the farther north I get. Everybody who lives in the south of France talks about the weather and for good reason: it is so damn wonderful. When I lived in Paris, winters were wet and grey and it often rained six days a week. In Marseille, I can take my afternoon coffee on an outside terrace in February and last year my dear friend Buster Burk and I went swimming – briskly, I admit – and then sunned ourselves on the rocks on New Year’s Day. The longer I live in the south, the more allergic I become to clouds and cold, and I loathe to leave when winter is approaching.
But this time, the departure was nearly crushing. I have fallen in love with Marseille, a 2600-year-old port city that is raw and rough and alive. I have never really felt at home until Marseille. I think I dreamt a city like it might exist but never thought it could: ringed by mountains, soaked in sun, on the shores of the Mediterranean, a vibrant and diverse community that has earned it the nickname ‘the most northern city in Africa.’ After years of drifting and travelling, I finally found a place I could put down roots. And yet I leave, on this daunting book tour, to the cold winter of North America no less, with no sure plans of when I will call it my home again.
I also feared I had been too optimistic in the planning of this book tour. How can I manage to 10,000 miles on the road? Being ‘on’ all the time, no corner of my own to curl up, long and lonely highways. Sitting in the train, watching the city blur away from me, I wanted to throw it all in, to cancel everything and return home where I can take afternoon siestas and drink perroquets for my appero and simply be happy.
And, probably the most important reason for my depression, was the woman who waved me goodbye as the train pulled out of Gare St. Charles. She is the woman I thought I would spend my life with, the woman who stood by me while I wrote the book. We are travelling that treacherous bridge between love and friendship and I as journey out into the cold world once more, I fully understand all I am leaving behind.
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