Menton France – Paola Trimarco

Tremors, quakes and talking with Americans

Last week, Nice experienced an earthquake. A 4.1 on the seismometer, it wasn’t dramatic, more of a mini quake that nonetheless managed to scar some apartment walls with cracks. Fortunately, no injuries, no fatalities. Here in Menton, some 30 kilometres away, we were having an apéro with friends on the seventh floor of the Méditerranée Hotel when I felt the floor beneath me shake and shift. We looked at each other and David said, ‘I think it’s a tremor.’ But by the time he got that out it petered into a gentle vibration and then stopped. Unnerving for this earthquake novice, I felt my heart racing while I sat still waiting for the next wobble and wondered how much worse this was going to get. Another tremor quivered in Menton a few hours later. But it was so minor, it went unnoticed in our first-floor apartment, where the sound-space continuum is regularly jolted by a stomping child next door and the rubbish collection just below our balcony.

The south of France is not California or Japan and is not known for its seismic activity, but it does experience a few minor earthquakes each year due to its proximity to tectonic plate boundaries. As I write this, more harrowing stories are emerging from Myanmar following its 7.7 earthquake, which put my experience and western privilege into perspective.

All of this has made me think about the sensation of being on firm ground one minute and then being shifted and jiggled around the next by forces well beyond my control. This triggers thoughts of another kind of tremor, a sensation that is equally jarring and taps into my feeling of fright and bewilderment. What Tr*mp is doing to America and the world is an earth tremor for some, a damaging earthquake for most of us and for others a deadly catastrophe – the latter is no exaggeration, considering the lives already lost to cuts in USAID and America’s withdrawal from WHO.

The disaster that is the current US administration overwhelms me with bloggable topics. Rather than pick one subject, for now what I offer are personal observations and mental recordings of conversations held with Americas who are not politicians or journalists.

Here in France, I’ve met an American woman who came here at the start of the year. As she explains it, ‘I just left and now I’m looking for someplace to live.’ She didn’t merely throw a dart at a map and decide on Menton. She has friends here that she stayed with until she could find an apartment to rent. Now she’s in that apartment looking for an apartment to buy. Conversations with her are about the property market, French bureaucracy and getting French residency. When someone brings up the situation in America, a lost and angry expression comes over her. She’s reluctant to talk beyond the generalised phrases – ‘it’s awful,’ ‘it’s scary,’ and ‘I’ve escaped.’

Others, still living in America are more willing to talk to anyone who will listen. Forever the scriptwriter, I hear their turns of phrase in my head days later – a kind of ear worm from the furious and isolated. Here’s a prosy poem of what that worm’s been chanting:

Cult, cult. When did they get so stupid? Our generation were the lucky ones. Those Trumplicans – my neighbour – my husband – my old friend. I still can’t believe people would vote for this again – yeah, Covid response – Capitol riots – BS about the election results. They’re hurting now. Oh, no they’re not. Cult, cult. People have been pickled. President Musk. Young men with masculinity poisoning. If we could leave, we would. And they think I need psychological help. What will happen to our schools? Our healthcare, our air, our universities, our freedoms, our farms? Who can speak? You cannot speak to the cult, cult.

What I’ve been reading

Haruki Murakami’s 600 pager Kafka on the Shore has been delighting and mesmerizing my reading time for the past four weeks. A slower reading pace than usual as I’ve tackled it in French – so that’s Kafka sur le Rivage. Since the original was written in Japanese, I figured I’d be reading something in translation anyhow. If I reduce the novel to its bones, it’s a coming-of-age story melted into a post-war saga of love and loss up to the present day, with a mysterious murder, via magical realism. But it’s so much more than these plot descriptors because of the way it tells its stories through metaphors and strange happenings – talking cats, a rainstorm of mackerel and a backstory involving a group of children who fall into temporary comas on a school trip in the final days of WWII – their malady lays suspicion on the American military presence. The characters express themselves with an awareness of Greek tragedies, modern and classical music and a sophisticated blend of philosophy and psychology.

I’ve also been enjoying my subscription to The New Yorker, in particular the essays and analysis on the rolling news of events brought on by you-know-who. My favourite of these has been an essay by Hillary Clinton about Signalgate and the current administration’s version of ‘diplomacy’ (note the quote marks). The title says it all: This Is Just Dumb With experience and eloquence, another American grapples with the shaking ground beneath us all.

Lemons and Oranges: Coping, or not, with the new world order

The nursery rhyme goes ‘Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clements.’ But in Menton, France, lemons come first. With the annual lemon festival kicking off last weekend, the city’s central garden is decorated with large figures made of lemons and oranges. This year’s theme is outer space, featuring an astronaut (French, of course), spaceships and aliens while lively parades bring traffic to a halt.

I’m aware that I’m enjoying this traditional fete more this year than in previous years. I don’t think this has anything to do with rockets, space beings and sparkling dancers. This has been about partaking in a tradition and allowing myself to be entertained, passive and receptive. I wonder if this is escapism, pretending that life goes on as normal despite what is happening in America, despite the consequences that have us here in Europe shaken and nervously waiting for the next move by our world leaders.

On the one hand, I’m buying into normalcy bias. Carole Cadwalladr explains in her blog what this means: ‘There is an inability to process, accept and confront the dangerous new reality we are in and to focus on the big picture and the pivot of history that’s occurred in the last two weeks.’ She was criticising the New York Times for not reporting on the coup of the tech billionaires that has taken over the White House. She has a point. Cadwalladr’s conclusion offers some hope: ‘It’s a coup. And the international order is collapsing. We aren’t helpless but we need to cycle through the denial part to get to the bit where we start fighting back and take immediate steps to protect ourselves.’

My other hand is not in denial and is all too aware of the history-making events of the past ten days. While the streets of Menton were filled with tourists and shops promoting all things lemon, the US president was slinging cruel and falsely based insults at Volodymyr Zelenski that sounded like they were written by Putin and full of warped narratives. Worse still, this current US government is engaged in so-called ‘peace talks’ where neither the Ukrainians nor the EU have been invited. (This reminds me of the adage that I heard again this week – if you’re not at the table, your on the menu.) Such actions shift the balance of power, making more fragile the international organisations set up to protect democracies and their citizens. This is where another bias comes in – recency bias, where we tend to think of recent events as being far worse than anything in the past. I’m clearly experiencing this and wondering if we are on the brink of WWIII, coupled with financial collapse resulting from trumpanomics.

I’ve run out of hands to refer to, and so, I’m back to contemplating citrus fruit and festivals to get through the winter months, traditions that go back to medieval times as we are living in a world not too different. If I put both hands together, I can pray.

What I’ve been reading

As The New Yorker is celebrating its centenary, I renewed by subscription – for a while at least. Every few years I take advantage of some special offer and subscribe for three to six months. This 100^th anniversary edition is a real treat. For me, the highlights have been two brilliant essays and a surprising poem. Tara Westover, author of Educated – a powerful memoir about growing up in a deeply religious and anti-education family – writes on being estranged from her parents and how a friend tried to lend her his mother. Being estranged from most of my dysfunctional family, I can identify with Westover’s need to feel connected despite all that has happened and despite the patent benefits of estrangement. The other essay appealed to my science nerdiness. Dhruv Khullar provides a sobering account of why it’s going to be difficult, if not impossible, for humans to live on any planet or space station outside the earth’s orbit – basically, it will make us ill. Really ill.

The poem comes from Robert Frost and is surprisingly not a reprint from a New Yorker of decades ago. This is from a recent discovery of an unpublished poem entitled ‘Nothing New.’ It has been authenticated by scholars, including Jay Parini, who writing for The New Yorker, puts the poem into the context of other works by Frost. Parini comments that ‘Frost’s unique gift was to write poems that burn a hole in your brain. You never forget his best lines. They stick with you—and they change your life.’ So true. I still remember lines from Frost that I learned in primary school.

Hence, I’ll conclude with reprinting the poem here. I’m sure other Frost fans and societies have already posted this all over social media, and well they should, especially in times like these, wintery in both season and perspective.

Nothing New

(Amherst 1918)

One moment when the dust to-day

Against my face was turned to spray,

I dreamed the winter dream again

I dreamed when I was young at play,

Yet strangely not more sad than then—

Nothing new—

Though I am further upon my way

The same dream again.

—Robert Frost (1874-1963)

Retiring, doing, being

Not doing anything important or worthy of a salary left me feeling a bit lost at first. For all my years of freelancing and part-time employment, I still had the attitude of a career professional. Even if I was no longer career-minded and shimming up the greasy pole, I had made a connection between earning and doing something purposeful and meaningful to someone aside from myself. Being aware that I felt uncomfortable in my retirement skin and deconstructing the reasons for it has weakened the intensity of these negative thoughts. Awareness is always a first step. I no longer think about not earning and its social link to what is important.

I’m still deconstructing the concept of doing – doing something rather than nothing – doing something purposeful or meaningful (words laden with subjectivity). An article by the science writer Ed Young in the New York Times has put perspective on this. He was writing about his fascination with birds and all his bird-watching activities. He writes, interestingly with bird as a verb:

‘Of course, having the time to bird is an immense privilege. As a freelancer, I have total control over my hours and my ability to get out in the field. “Are you a retiree?” a fellow birder recently asked me. “You’re birding like a retiree.” I laughed, but the comment spoke to the idea that things like birding are what you do when you’re not working, not being productive. I reject that. These recent years have taught me that I’m less when I’m not actively looking after myself, that I have value to my world and my community beyond ceaseless production and that pursuits like birding that foster joy, wonder and connection to place are not sidebars to a fulfilled life but their essence.’

Indeed, some of the things I’ve been doing in my retirement have fostered ‘joy, wonder and connection to place,’ or in my case places – Ely, England and Menton, France. Perhaps doing in retirement connects one more to being.

What I’ve been reading

La Decision by Karin Tuille (available in English) is a novel set in the world of the French judiciary soon after the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack. It’s a glimpse into the world of terrorism and the law that other books and certainly films rarely jump into with such depth and introspection. Told in two narrative strands it has a first-person narrator, Alma, an examining magistrate, recounting her forensic examination of the life and motivations of a young terrorist suspect at a time when her marriage is falling apart – it too, receives an intense examination. The second strand has the terror suspect being interrogated by a judge, presented in the style of a courtroom transcript. Both strands carry personal and social weight, encouraging the reader to experience a range of emotions along the way.

Pompeii by Mary Beard is a book I heard the author speak about several years ago on the back of her TV series of the same name. This historical account updates what we know about the life in the famous town at the time of the volcanic eruption. Savouring the details of daily life, the coverage might be too precise for some readers, and I confess, at times it made for a good bedtime read. I’ve had the pleasure of hearing Beard speak live about Pompeii and again more recently about Roman emperors. What I like about her work is that she spends considerable time looking at the assumptions held by other historians and archaeologists, punching holes in their views and admitting that there still is a lot that we simply do not know. Incidentally, Mary Beard is 69 and is clearly busy doing.

Arrival Menton

My pause from blogland can be attributed to one thing – moving and settling in Menton. If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you’ll know that David and I have had a second home in Nice for nearly 15 years. We sold that and most of the furniture in it back in September and waited five months for the deal to close on our new apartment in Menton, up the coast from Nice. We’re still in the same neck of the beaches, the Cote d’Azur, famous for its year-round sunshine, clement winters and history of artistic and celebrity residents.

Recreating a home in the south of France has involved an embarrassing amount of shopping – from a flatpack bed to drill bits, with a second-hand sofa, dining table, chairs and curtains along the way – and intensive decorating, featuring the massacre of butterfly and floral decals and the removal of in-built wardrobe and cabinets, leaving behind the tasks of scraping off wallpaper and filling vacant screw holes marks with buckets of Polyfilla, soon to be followed by painting. Luckily, no major renovations are needed. We have a tastefully tiled bathroom with walk-in shower and a fully functioning kitchen, albeit with a temperamental washing machine that prefers to work in the mornings.

My bloggery silence hasn’t been just about furnishing and DIY in extremis. This move marks the start of my retirement in earnest, the deletion of the prefix semi before retirement to describe my academic position. I’ll finish my last contract with my final doctoral student in the autumn. That’s all that’s left. My life is now devoid of course writing and research and the publish or perish culture. That is strange – as strange as a local bus trip to Italy, as strange as swimming in the winter sea. Like so many retired people, I’ll continue to ‘keep a hand in’ as they say, taking on the odd editing assignment that comes my way. The difference now is that for the first time in my adult life, I’m not looking for work or trying to keep the work I’ve got.

This naturally makes me think about my other career as a writer. I haven’t considered myself semi-retired from that. I used to think that writers never retire, but some writers have packed it in (Phillip Roth and Wendy Cope come to mind). I’m starting to wonder if I should take at least a partial retirement from writing. This means working to my own pace on fiction and creative non-fiction and still calling myself a writer (it’s too sexy to shake off). This isn’t too different from what I have been doing in recent years, since I stopped scriptwriting and therefore applying for funding, managing a theatre group and delivering workshops. Yet something different is palpable, my ambition, my desire for writer recognition, ended around the time we put in our offer on the Menton apartment.

I can’t stop all together – writing is as natural as breathing and as necessary as meditation. And there still are things to write about – nature, personal growth, language, books…

What I’ve Been Reading

A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara makes for a long book (700 plus pages) but is also one of the best novels I’ve read in decades. It tackles difficult subjects, like abuse, torture and self-harm, and this can make for painful reading at times. But there are payoffs. The psychological depths of the story, revolving around the friendships of four men over the years and one man in particular, Jude, presents a complex and believable narration. Jude is a perpetual victim, but also a survivor that other characters (and this reader) agonise over and applaud in equal measure.

The Authority Gap byMary Ann Sieghart,written a few years ago, covers the myriad of ways in which men are assumed to have more authority, more knowledge and experience than their female counterparts. By the author’s own admission, you would have thought that this has all been said before and that we have moved on to a more equal co-existence. Yet, it’s something that we know still happens and have become desensitised to and have stopped talking about. Or in my case, being all too aware of this, occasionally I have used my bone-dry sense of humour to point out that I’m the Supervisor and not a mature student or that yes, I really did this [fill in the blank with something technical] all by myself without causing grievous injury. Seighart points out how the authority gap is played out in our actions, individual and institutional, and in our use of language. Specific examples come from a hefty dataset of anecdotes from powerful women, including some of my heroes like Christine Lagarde, Julia Gillard and Madeleine Albright, who have all been undermined and underestimated. Amusing and cringeworthy at the same time.

Seven Days to Tell You by Ruby Soames is a remarkable thriller, full of twists that go beyond the plot-driven variety, questioning the ideas of love and commitment. Since I don’t want to give anything away – discovery and speculation are key to reader enjoyment – I’ll have to be brief. A woman’s husband disappears for three years. To say more than that would even spoil the curious first chapter. I will say this – it takes place mostly in London, but also has flashbacks to the French Riviera, hence, I conclude this blog from where it began.