May 17, 2003 Nantes
C. up very late last night after tending to N.R. Up to go to La Petite Hollande. Light rain and it's warm. C.'s a bit angry with her father's birthday call and she's carrying it with her. I don't really have the power to take even little things like that off her shoulders. She shuffled along in the rain until she kissed me in front of the soldier's monument.

We bought fish, chicken, brioche, and spinach and met N.C. and had lunch at Le Flesselles. N. had dropped her purse on the street the night before and lost her car keys. Her car is right next to the police station, locked up and full of baggage from last week's trip (she took students to an island château to study the Lebanese pines that had been planted there).

Extremely irritating article in the NYT today about the recressance of writing programs in the States. It's hard to articulate my irritation, but here goes. Writing is not longer an art if it ever was. The commodification of fiction is complete in the workshop system by supposing cohorts of qualified craftsmen. (Anyone who burbles about craft really wants to be rich and famous. The good writers who have gone through workshops would write anyway). My own guilt at having participated in such a system in now way ameliorated by the knowing at the time I was selling myself out, by saying I was happy that someone was buying, someone who would give me two years of "peace" in which to conduct the laziness exercises necessary to my writing. I have rarely been more miserable. Reading the NYT chirp about what a great time it is to be a writer is double-edged for me: I failed to sell out at school and I failed to make anything I was happy with. It boggles my mind that I ever put myself in that situation. The hipper-than-thou pose of sellouts and wanna-be sellouts spitting on those who naively believe in the strangeness or danger of art. (This isn't exactly what I wanted to write--I had it earlier this evening but can't recall it right now). Still, stupidly, it frightens me that I am so far from "what is happening in the U.S." My weakness before the task of writing, before the task of resisting consumerism, before the task of remembering what the hell it is I am talking about.

Could a manifesto clear the air? Or could one simply adopt the futurist manifesto? Something better done while in the States. Next year, I must devote myself to finishing my book and to translation. I cannot say I've left the U.S. until I've made some progress at making a so-called literary life here.

I tried to call N.R. at a number I found in C.'s address book. I want to commission a dress for C. from her as a birthday present. Babbled like a child because I did not understand at first that it wasn't her on the other end of the line. Eventually not-N. simply hung up on my blathered excuses (which must have sounded like weird insistence that she was, indeed, the party I was trying to reach).

C. returned from helping N.C. rescue her car (the keys were simply hanging on a hook at Buck Mulligan's). As they were getting ready to leave, the aggressive panhandler who accosted us on the way to La Petite Holland this morning came over to N.'s car. Il est plus calme que d'habitude, she said as we hurried by him earlier. He tapped on N.'s window first, but as she was talking on her cellphone, he walked around to find C. stuck behind the broken window that can no longer be rolled down. C., helpless, made some unintelligible sign which sent him into an incoherent rage full of gestures heated with violence.

May 18, 2003 Nantes
C. up at six this morning and I followed her and we watched the television news. New bombings in Jerusalem and they're still picking up the pieces in Morocco. A German tourist bus overturned in the south. I went back to sleep and didn't get up until noon. Dreamed we were able to buy Le Château Duchesse Anne for a song. C. put together a classroom in the basement which I appropriated for an office. Do castles have basements?

Reading online today one discovers that Bush enjoys a seventy-percent approval rating. Am listening to L'Internationle and wallowing in its collectivist sentiment, while having no faith in the collective. The U.S. deserves what it has, in the election of Bush. It will deserve what it gets when he is re-elected. The silent majority an abject myth. You can fool them all of the time. We're back to Nixon's paranoia. I suppose that is how he, Bush, will be brought down.

So many Americans are content with having been lied to. The government doesn't make excuses because the citizenry does fine in supplying them. I still don't understand why we didn't bide our time and buy Bin Laden. That would have been a chilling message. We've hotly provoked the rest of the world. How we will cry and fix our regard to our wounds when we pay, before we lash out at what the lowest common denominator agrees ought to be our enemy.

N.C. and C. in the kitchen, correcting papers and preparing classes. One of N.'s biology students, in describing a heart attack in a dog, writes "poor dog" at every opportunity: "And then the poor dog's heart goes into what is termed fibrillation...."

May 19, 2003 Nantes
A fruitful, if slow, day. Ordered a dress for C. from N.R., who immediately tried to return half of the money I put on the table. "C.?" she looked at me and laughed, "A dress?" I must have looked cross because she dropped it immediately. She also explained that she had a big job in Poitiers, outfitting a rock band with red costumes. In fact, she is refitting the old ones she made them last year, as the band members have all gained weight. I'll be gone before the dress is finished. She was really apologetic about that. So I told her I would be happy as long as C. gets a mysterious call asking her to go to some anonymous address to have her measurements taken. I told C. to begin expecting a call yesterday, before the fix was in. It's eating at her--she runs to answer the phone, which suits me fine as I avoid speaking French to anonymous callers if at all possible.

Worked for a couple of hours on the B52 essay at Le Commerce. Discovered the truth behind Slim Pickens's yell in STRANGELOVE and was overjoyed to find that the movie was filmed in 1963, as I want to write that within the perversity of that yell, you can hear Vietnam. Moreover, it is a yell that still echoes with great strength today. Well, it sounded good at the time and perhaps will again with time. The essay needs some more research. Am going to reread Candide, in French this time.

C. cooked the expensive chicken we bought at La Petite Hollande the other day. She likes them, despite the price (ten euros and up!) because their "bones don't bend." Wonderful, anyway with rice and green and red peppers. Just a beautiful afternoon, reminiscent of that distilled sunlight that Chicago gets in the autumn. English people oddly numerous in the streets today. School holiday? H.'s Americans?

May 20, 2003 Nantes
We'll have L., C.'s niece, over to dinner tonight. She's depressed, newly in Nantes, and sick. Yesterday she had fibroscopy (I think that's the word) in an effort to discover the cause of her mysterious malady. Overheard C. talking on the phone with N.R. this morning, who has evidently suffered yet another reversal in her effort to change jobs, the same effort she was so optimistic about just yesterday.

On the news Luc Ferry, the minister of education, is getting bombarded everywhere he goes with his book TO ALL WHO LOVE THE SCHOOLS. Teachers are throwing them at the pressed education minister, they are depositing them before the doors of the réctorats of the educational departments, are gluing little barricades of them together to protest behind. Rarely does one see the arrogance of a public official so effectively and hysterically sent up. Floppy haired Ferry dodging his own cynicism in tract form.

L. arrived from the station somewhat worse for the wear after her medical tests. We talked about Candide, La Fontaine, and the difficulty of reading Graham Greene in English and Proust in any language.

May 21, 2003 Nantes
Went to see DOLLS with C. and C.B. this evening. A bit long and slow for my tastes, it still had an incredible economy and sought to resolve narrative problems in a visual mode. Rather than some tedious scene about a man trying to check his insane girlfriend out of the hospital, we simply see her in the passenger seat of his car. Wonderful to see clean cuts like that, the power of art to resolve difficulty, of sticking to the advantages of one's medium. I fully expect productive realizations like these to be consumed by fury and angst once back in the United States.

Worked at Le Commerce today on the B52 piece. It's difficult to make it cohere--I keep adding themes. Optimism is completely beneath everything in the U.S. seemingly. Will use Voltaire's demolition in Candide, Bush's statements of September 12 in response to a rhetorical question ("Why do they hate us?") he never really asked or answered to imply that we think we are living in the best of all possible countries. Must include, for context, Operation Strangelove but cannot find any stories in the press. All this thinking about America is making me very tired and I want to get on with other things.

The teachers' strike continues. I'm worried about how C. will make it to Boston this summer. I still haven't called my uncle to clear the way for us. Maybe Montréal will be the answer for a while but I need to work. Still no answer from the institute about translation work. Worry and that awful feeling of counting down the days before I leave. The shortest amount of time I've spent here is two months. I remember deciding to stay that second month and feeling immediately afterwards that I'd been given a new lease on life itself. It's there in the air, the treetops, the sunlight.

May 22, 2003 Nantes
Have continued my correspondence with M.T. Such a quiet, gentle man. He seems always to be recovering from some misfortune (may they be slight). J. remembered right away that his wife was severely injured, having been struck by a car in Waco in 1986. What a valuable correspondent, an informant who can speak well for 1985.

Strange effect of living abroad for me has been an obsessive reconsideration of the past which is as oppressive as it is acute. Such a correspondent in M.T. goes to show not all was confusion or my own exaggeration. Nabokov on loved memories, how they become more profound and strange for being loved. The past a gate through which its prisoners pass messages of support before their execution.

Mme O. is fearful for her ninety-year-old mother's life, a serious earthquake having hit Algeria last night.

May 23, 2003 Nantes
Am trying to keep my thoughts together on the brink of returning. I so hate departures. I think sometimes, I could slice everything moment down in such a way I would never have to leave anywhere. Take up residence in the departure lounge, for example, never leave the garden again, never leave the apartment so long as I could see the garden, never leave my room so long as I can see the garden and here what's going on in the apartment. I live on such circumscribed terrain. A friend in Chicago, after returning from France the first time said, "You should just go back to the airport right now."

Will write a letter to my successor at Lycée Camus this evening. Am struggling to finish a draft of the damn B52 piece.