They'll Get My Email At The Bank In About 16 Hours

Nothing spills fun from travel like watching what one eats and what one spends. Today I pored (poored, poured a beer) over my favourite habits, offering rueful salute to the haphazard way I approach them, tinkering with mid-flight correction, with a 4-day jaunt to Toulouse coming up and, near the end of Feb., a 6-week hiatus from Lisbon to get to Morocco and back, no travel or accommodation arrangements yet confirmed.
Outside, wind has blown hard all the way up to Graca from the waterfront, which this aft I hit with a run/walk, serving notice to knees, mainly, to expect more such treatment.
As for diet, wow, the amount of bread--every three of four doorways leads to more. And breakfast in Portugal, or any form of half-lunch or pre-dinner snack, means sweets.
I've got to hide under Lisbon for a few days, is what this means.

Morning Bus to Lisbon

Thinking about the dance shows of the last two nights, I came up with rule #1 for my appreciation of dance: If they can't move better than I can, their dance is no damn good. Yes, let's go with that.
I was also wondering why dance artists, like visual artists, feel the need to offer textual interpretations of their own work, which are printed in their programs or on their walls. If they want to work with text, why are they dancing? Do they think their visual/gestural language is so unfamiliar that we need a hand through it?
I was about to say that writers don't bother with such interpretations because, of course, they're working with text in the first place. But let's see what happens when I try to explain my own writing project, the one that brought mere here to Europe and lurks behind the events and musings presented in these blog entries:
I call it Occasional Cities. The occasion is the daily writing moment. The city is wherever that moment takes place--most recently, for example, in the foyer between dance shows last night ("City of Dance") or, a day or two earlier, on a tram flipping through my Lonely Planet Portuguese phrase book ("City of Gendered Nouns"). Each city is built from the sensations I experience while writing it--those inner and outer worlds, as I always say to my students, that are ever-present, ever-begging for attention (something like the little pooch perched on the shoulder of the accordion busker on the metro this morning), ready to offer their . . . data, let's call it. Once some sort of useful attention to these worlds gets going, which it doesn't always do, I try to ride it, so to speak, as far as I can. These pieces, which I'm laying out as double-spaced prose, are rough, preliminary. They get written down in my notebook and transposed into the Cities computer file, each piece headed with its title (City of this or that), location, and date. It's all very field note-ish. Any "finishing" is a long way off. But before coming to Europe I have over the last year or more carried about 50 such pieces much further along. In the end, if there is one, these Euro pieces will slot in among pieces from Grasslands National Park, Winnipeg, Isla Mujeres, Edmonton, etc.
Did anyone walk out as I was writing all that? Thank you. I forgot to add that the voice speaking these pieces is a "We" who speaks for all of us citizens of each city.
As for the why, (1) I like the idea because it works well enough. That is, it promises more. (2) Where else can truth come from? And (3) in a practical sense for a man alone in foreign places (though it works just as well at home, since we're all always travelling, aren't we?), this project hitches me to wherever here is--a useful tonic for the helpless, the idle, the lonely.

Time Piece

Not to be coy about the unfinished business in Guimaraes I mentioned yesterday. I'd bought a ceramic piece titled "Risk" for Tom at an artisans' shop, Artigo, in 2010. Just right for a performer, I thought: a tiny human figure peering over the edge of its large terracotta base. But the piece never made it to Tom (long story). Today I went back to Artigo. Paula's still there, with her French/Portuguese accent and her two daughters four years older, but all the "history of life" series (by an artist named Jose Teixeira), of which "Risk" was one, have been sold. Except one.
Speaking of finished business, the sun was going down an hour later as I sat in a café with a couple of beer, watching the opening ceremonies from Sochi. And fifty years ago tonight it was The Beatles I watched, on The Ed Sullivan Show.
The night of dance at the Guimaraes festival started at 7:30. First an artist danced with his own video image. A tad narcissistic, but the guy could dance. Second, four dancers working at some kind of post-primitive re-enactment. They couldn't. I would have walked out, but too many people already had and I felt sorry for the dancers.
Dancing back to Lisbon tomorrow.

Unfinished Business in Guimaraes

Five hours on the bus this morning, a comfy bus, the highway on a par with the Trans-Canada, minus the big rigs and RVs and straight bits, plus tolls. No Greyhound-style, stick-to-one-lane for this driver, who cut in and out of traffic as if driving through Graca in a Fiat. I buckled my seat belt.
I stayed in this charmer of hotel in '10, staying up late to watch Sidney Crosby score in overtime to win gold in men's hockey and Cheryl Bernard miss open takeouts in both the 10th end and the extra to lose the gold in women's curling. Here I am again.
How pleasing to walk these old streets, in this gem of a city, a UNESCO World Heritage city. I remember lots of rain, like now. In '10 I shot photos of wrecked umbrellas, I saw so many. Wouldn't you know it, on my first walk just now, the wind and rain damn near wrecked mine.
I'll tell you about the unfinished business when I finish it, tomorrow.

Graca, The Neighbourhood

After the coldest, windiest, rainiest night I've seen (if one sees night) in Lisbon, I woke up this morning with, for once, warm feet (my own). Thus buoyed, I set out on a stroll through Graca to the viewpoint, taking photos every few steps.

Sidewalk scene.

  

Gas station.

 

Side street toward the river.

 

 

Signature tourist attraction and routine transport from Grace to downtown, the legendary Tram 28.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mannequin advertising chicken and rabbit.

 

Mailbox (postcard on the way, K).

 

 

Recycle bin and umbrella graveyard (after yesterday).

 

Fountain near viewpoint.

 

 

Church near viewpoint.

 

View from viewpoint (castle at left).

 

Viewpoint area named after a writer (looking toward river).

Here she is.

Stationery shop (coming at ya, my sisters and kids).

Old steps over sidewalk.

Hydrant.

All that's left was home.

















 

Morning With Saramago

This morning I went down to the river. Because it's morning, and it's a river. I saw this:

 

 

 

 

And behind me:



 

 

 

 

Exiting stage right from the panorama above, I planned to follow the footsteps of Raimundo Silva, a proofreader in Jose Saramago's The History of the Siege of Lisbon. In the novel, Raimundo, in serious violation of proofreader ethics, inserts a "not" into the historical account he is editing. Now, the crusaders on their way to the Holy Land did not assist the Portuguese in laying siege to the castle (where the treetops are in the photo) in order to drive out the Moors. Feeling both guilty and bold, he walks the Alfama district below the castle.

As today turned out, just before entering Alfama on Raimundo's route, I stopped at the Jose Saramago Foundation headquarters, where a woman named Rita told me about her more than 30 years of work with Saramago as his--I'm pausing here and brandishing an exclamation point--his proofreader!

I spent several hours in the company of Rita and Saramago and his papers and books and forgot about Raimundo and the cruise ship, which I hope has buggered off by now. 

 

PS: 

Here is Saramago from "Words for a City": What we know of places is how we coincide with them over a certain period of time in the spaces they occupy. The place was there, the person appeared, then the person left, the place continued, the place having made the person, the person having transformed the place."

Saramago's ashes are buried under the olive tree out front.

 

 

 

 



Poets On Foot In Lisbon

My son Tom sent me a link to a Jerry Seinfeld project called Comedians In Cars Going For Coffee. He knows I remain a big Seinfeld fan, not just for his hit show but for the man's general approach, as I understand it, to what he does and who he is (his enormous respect for the comedians who came before him, for one thing). In the Tina Fey episode, she remarks, "Why does everyone think they need an audience for every moment of their lives?"
This I noted as I wondered what to enter in this blog for today. On the shortlist: (1) what a Lisbonite would observe about grocery stores in Regina. (Hint: No fresh eel?); (2) how places so impossible to find become, in the end, so obvious; (3) how my blue eyes tend to turn anyone I encounter into English speakers; (4) how the convincing note about "just walking the seven hills of Lisbon is workout enough" collapsed when I observed a beautiful Portuguese woman stroll toward a fitness club; (5) what time does not just to the layers of human occupation on the highest of the hills but to the skin colour of that Lisbonite.
I don't know. I wrote so much yesterday or walked to much today. I'm tired. Riding with Jerry in one of his vintage cars, I'd wonder, like Tina, what I could say next.