Bicontinental Drift -- return to the continent -- but which one?

Bicontinental.  Sounds glamorous, flashy, all jet-setty.  But there's a real kicker.     

I adore flying across the Atlantic, but it can be painful:  it involves the flip of my dual self. Heads I'm here, tails I'm there.  Heads I'm there, tails I'm here.  However it's done they are two sides of the same coin.
And that coin is me.
When the flight takes off from Cointrin I can be emotional.  When the Swiss Airbus turns and dips over the mountains and heads west toward America I'm really spinning.

The reality is I live in Ferney-Voltaire, just outside the tiny metropolis of Geneva. I'm neither French nor Swiss. I vote for the President of the United States.  Most family members and close friends live in the US. When I'm there it feels like home, when I'm in Ferney I'm already planning my next trip over.   
The US is the world for me, ça foisonne, ça grouille!
But I love it here--- I would hate to give it up.
So here I am, straddling two continents and needing both.  I'm not alone--it's the twenty-first century and we are so very mobile. Roots are perhaps easier to pull up, but not without pain. 

Let's hear it for double heimatschmerz.

Good Night Irene....

New York City was prepared to face Irene. When it turned out not to be a worst case scenario, some people complained that too much fuss was made--they hadn't been to New Orleans. But Irene caused floods near Philly and some bad stuff on the east coast farther south.  In Montreal it was sufficiently blustery,  but Trudeau Airport was open and running and I left for Geneva late Sunday afternoon. 

This poem posted on Poetry.org is a different take on the aftermath of a hurricane.  You can read it a dozen more times and keep reading into it.  This poet is for real.

The Hurricane

by William Carlos Williams

The tree lay down
on the garage roof
and stretched, You 
have your heaven,
it said, go to it.

The battered tree is chilling out on the roof, enjoying its new-found freedom, basking in it.  It could be....silver lining of a hurricane....complete acceptance of unexpected fate....the desired recumbent position after a lifetime upright....the tree has been ravished by the hurricane and is in post-ravishment bliss....

And why are we hearing advice from a fallen tree? Is it a wise old oak? 

Are we less aware, more foolish than dead wood and should we tune into trees? 
Does he identify with the tree? Is he tired of being a doctor?
Does the tree simply want to be left alone and not be sawed up into logs and kindling?
Is this a joke on himself?

Reminds me of his poem-note on a bowl of plums. "This is just to say".  
Coy, complete and open to interpretation. http://homepages.wmich.edu/~cooneys/poems/wcw.plums.html 
                                                                                   

PS I don't have a hard copy of the poem to compare--wondering about the comma after stretched.

Shoring up in the lower Laurentians--Lac Clair

Ah, beautiful Lac Clair!

Freedom from responsibility (aka vacation) is one of life's great enhancers.  Even better is vacation in the lowlands of the Laurentides, staying with a sparkling, interesting friend in a house with huge windows and fabulous, original décor.  It has cool whiffs of fall, and late afternoons one needs a body blanket to sit outside.  But it's still summer-green lush.  Lac Clair is a well-kept secret; it's not private, but it's not widely known and the full-time and part-time residents don't promote it.

During the late nineteenth century the Quebec clergy encouraged (very firmly, as in co-opting) the Catholic population to move up and out into the Laurentians to discourage them from emigrating and opting for the terribly tempting United States, so close, just south.

After one has driven several kilometers down from Lac Clair on dirt roads, then several more on paved, there is Rawdon, the nearest town, with quaint stores and frame houses and the local Dollarama.  The boulangerie has, you guessed, pain au chocolat and croissants, Brie des Meaulx, and other kinds of franco-gastro-nostalgia. The French spoken here is somewhat comprehensible, but some accents combined with moderate hearing loss prompt frequent "eh?" or "excusez", as they say here.  I love the combination of nasal and clipped language, drawn out clear vowels followed by mystery sounds.  Up here in the lower Laurentsds.

Goodbye Jerry Leiber--Rock 'n' Roll ain't dead 'cos it can't die

Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller wrote total classics, the music from when we wore braces and Clearasil and tried to look stacked in a sweater.

Charlie Brown "why's everybody always pickin' on me......Charlie Brown", Stand by Me, Hound Dog, Jailhouse Rock, and Yakity Yak (sic) (a lesser work, apparently dashed off in five minutes).

Karen---a huge rock 'n' roll fan and connoisseuse-- sent me the link to Big Mama Thornton singing an unforgettable Hound Dog....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XUAg1_A7IE

Goodbye Mr. Leiber---thank you for an amazing legacy.

Books--FREEDOM by Franzen (Part 2) Afterthoughts

There's the half-read book that lies on the bedside table and there's the unfinished book review on Freedom by Jonathan Franzen.

For the unfinished book you have to return to locate and name the characters, visualize them in the narrative flow.  You go back a page or two, reread and retread the text to get back into the author's spirit and cadence.  For the unfinished book review you check your memory of the book, the sharpness of images retained and the vividness of emotional imprint.

What's coming back to me (and I've had other books in my life since this one) is the spidery architecture of the story--a construct with delineated characters: not wholly convincing in their thoughts, actions and motives. Not faithful to their own story.

This is in fact a spidery review because I don't have the book with me and if I did, I wouldn't delve back in to analyze.  I love The Corrections with its flesh-and-blood people and I plead with Franzen to write a another book that's truly impassioned and yes, free!  Filled with the birds he loves and original characters who are real because he knows them, believes in them to the end.
People and birds who fly.  

Advice to Latvia: Swiss-style filet de perche

Lore has it that Lake Dwellers lived in huts on stilts in Lake Geneva.  And maybe the Lake Dwellers discovered the delicate little perch while cooling their toes, tired of running after chamois and rabbits.

The Swiss, especially those who hang out near lakes, which is most of them, love eating perch.
(See http://lexieintrator.blogspot.com/2011/07/swiss-fish-craze-seven-thousand-tonnes.html)
No summer is complete without filets de perche sautéed in butter, with or without lemon and wine sauce, garlic and herb sauce, champagne sauce, mushroom sauce, citrus sauce, etc., accompanied by slim, crunchy French fries.

Demand for perch far outstrips supply, so Switzerland looks elsewhere:   Latvia.
So.....if a Latvian restaurateur hasn't already done so (and I haven't yet asked my Latvian friends) she/he/they could reproduce a totally Swiss filet de perche menu using their very own beautiful fish, and then invite Swiss tourists to come on a Baltic filet de perche tour.  The Swiss have the money and the Latvians have the fish---a dream marriage.

Just a thought.  Ideas are free, business is work.


While I'm online, hello Karlis and Sophie!

CAPE BLOG--fog, rain and fish

On this vacation I have excellent company: husband and cousin, electricity, laptop, wifi, a full fridge, a phone connection and good books.

But it's a grey and wet summer Monday on Cape Cod.

What's the consolation prize for rotten weather?
Why, Dinner Out!

Dinner out in Cape Cod, Massachusetts is

Lobster, stuffed, boiled or baked.
Clams raw, steamed, casino or baked.
Potatoes fried, mashed, roasted or baked.
Swordfish seared, broiled, sauteed or baked.
Scallops in casserole, breaded, with shrimp or baked,
and the usual round-up of steaks, burgers and lambchops.......

Am I a snob?  Well sort of.
This is not vegetarian terroir--no tofu, beans or whole grains. No nouvelle cuisine (except in scallop portions) no molecular cuisine, and herb flavoring is dried oregano flakes in olive oil for dipping your white bread (sorry Bookstore).  It's as if time had stood still in 1964 and creative American cuisine didn't exist.

But I love Cape Cod and it's raining, and of course we're going to celebrate by going out to dinner!  Who knows, will we chow down on breaded scallops?  Lobster stuffed with breadcrumbs? Seared swordfish with mashed potatoes?

Watch this space for the next fish blog:  Latvia going Swiss.....

BLOGPORT -- a little piece of heaven

The western side of the Atlantic.  The New World.  The Other Continent.  Rockport, Massachusetts.

It is breezy in the mid-seventies (here we think in Fahrenheit) and this blogger is revelling in views of a sparkling azure sea.  Also in seas of sparkling boutiques.

She's sitting on a wooden porch rocking in a pretty painted rocking-chair next to her pretty daughter, determined to blog.  Her blogspot has been left to its own devices for a month, the filet de perche floundering in splended July isolation.

There have been readers from Ukraine, Australia, Turkey, Latvia, Finland, Germany, Denmark, Canada, Italy, the Netherlands, United Kingdom, Israel, Jordan and India as well as Switzerland, France and the US.  They may have stumbled upon it inadvertently: Offshoots of the Ottoman Empire may have given hope to retro political analysts but I enjoy watching readers watch this space. I don't know who they are, but this site offers group stats on countries.

It's different blogging from the seaside.  Nerves are calmed, skin is caressed by cross-breezes, the eye stretches its vision, the soul dreams,  All very well, but shouldn't this yawn of serenity bring on some mind-extending revelations?  Let's wait another few days and see.

The Emerson Inn, an original hotel drenched in history, displays a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson, who came to Pigeon Cove in Rockport in 1856 and discovered beneficial effects much like the above-described.  In his diary he wrote:


"'Tis a noble, friendly power and seems to me 'Why so slow and late come to me? Am I not here always thy proper summer home? Is not thy voice my needful music, my breath thy healthful climate in the heats; my touch thy cure?...........Lie down on my warm ledges, and learn that a very little hut is all you need.  I have made thy architecture superfluous and it is paltry beside mine.  Here are twenty Romes and Ninevehs and Karnacs in ruins together, obelisk and pyramid and giant's causeway---here they are all prostrate or half piled.'"


As for the ruins, Emerson's were no doubt the great rocks one sees on and off the shore, that actually resemble humpback whales and stranded seals more than the Roman Forum and Karnac.

Was "I have made thy architecture superfluous" sour grapes? He wasn't into traveling far that year. He was into appreciating the home front and just needed a vacation.

Don't we all.