Monday, October 22, 2012

satanic bolete

Here are some of the things I'm enjoying about my first time here in Autumn.

At the marché last Friday a woman was selling boletus edulcis, the king bolete, the cepe, by the pound.  Big monster boletes 10 inches across and several inches thick.  Why didn't I buy one?  At 20€ a kilo, they weren't expensive.  $11.86 per pound.  She must have had at least 200 lbs.  It's a good year for boletes and a lot of other mushrooms. 

This afternoon, riding up through Belaye and on to Floressas, I came across a relative, Satan's Bolete.  The jury is out on whether or not this one is even edible but it was the better part of 8 inches across.     


I tore it open to see the inside and discovered the blood red veins and the blue staining where I bruised it.  They are supposed to smell like "carrion" when ripe which is why so few people are poisoned by them.  Cooking them reduces toxicity but what sane person who wasn't starving would volunteer for its stomach flu symptoms. 


The possibility of finding a cepe glues my eyes to the roadside as when I have lost a tool or some other possession on a ride. It's mesmerizing after miles and miles of never losing track of the roadside.  At 12 mph you surely miss lots of mushrooms half-buried in leaf litter, disguised as leaves or stones.  Are mushrooms generally hiding like  prey animals or advertising themselves?  


Wednesday, October 17, 2012

rentrée

A friend who was to stay here in this house over the summer had to leave.  He said that the house "didn't like him;  it was like wearing someone else's clothes."  The rest of his family didn't feel anything of the sort apparently,  just him.  I keep looking around wondering what went into giving him this sensation.  For the sake of argument, let's assume--perhaps correctly, who knows?-- that it has nothing to do with me.  Then what is it about the place that produced this hostile vibe?  I look around me and see the tinted rough plaster with all its blotches, the happy friendly band of tile above the cherry cabinets, all welcoming and warm.

I would have said that we completely transformed this house, almost literally turning it upside down.  We even moved the stair and aimed it the opposite direction.  Couldn't be the kitchen, could it?  With it's view of the river and big round table.  The living room with its African hangings from the nice ecological lady's shop in Cazals, the silly elephant table, the simple chestnut staircase.  Living room, ok.

The spare bedroom?  A hard space to get your head around:  it's where, for the time being, you enter the house.  For some time it was the shop and even now harbors the old hollow piano case into which I intend to use to insert the electronic piano I bought from Karl.  Otherwise it has a huge bookcase with giant curtains that conceal our stock of toilet paper, wine, the peanut butter stash,  kitchen overflow.  The ancient oak ceiling joists are painted a possibly gruesome brown that sometimes reminds me of an Elks Club bar room minus the mounted, moth-eaten 6-pointer.   The floor here and in the main bedroom is click clack and the furnishings pretty much pure Ikea.  You must pass through the laundry room with its odd slanted ceiling of frosted glass.  Behold the bathroom, a bright but low-ceilinged, roomy room.

By the time you reach the main bedroom from the entrance you have made no fewer than five 90° turns.  An amateurish design if there ever was one, but hostile?  The main bedroom has light from three directions and the dark brown click clack plasticky flooring gets lost beneath the beautiful cherry armoire and oak chest and the veneer drawers on loan from Kim's house.  The rose tinted plaster has lots of splotches.

Did the tinted plaster suggest a Rorshach test to my friend?  It's occurred to me that it would have been terrific grist for an acid trip in 1968.

So if we're assuming it's not me and we've absolved the decor, then that leaves the psychic remnants of previous inhabitants.  The house for a long time belonged to the Miran family, skilled woodworkers who made fancy Louis XIV furniture.  There's a hamlet called Miran over by Fages and Mirans buried in the Castelfranc graveyard.  One of them committed suicide in this house.

Or it could be previous inhabitants.  God knows how old this place is.  I wonder how far back tax records go?  Did they survive the Revolution?  The town itself seems to go back to around 1250.  Opinions vary on when this house was built, whether before or after the Revolution.  And Rue St Roch lies along the long Roman road that ran from Lyon to Bordeaux.    











     

Tuesday, October 9, 2012

Chavez re-elected

Pas encore parti pour Castelfranc, je suis sur l'influence ce soir de l'entolome avorté, un champignon cuielli dans dans le forêt qui entoure la maison, champignon supérieur au cèpe, à la morille, même au truffe.  Sur l'émission de Là-bas si j'y suis j'écoutais la liesse à Venezula après que Chavez s'est emparé.   Cette victoire me rappele un après-midi en Barcelone il y a dix ans.  Il etait vers 16h et la pluie tombait drue.  Nous nous decidions à prendre un bus touristique, aller voir le monuments, l'architecture de Gaudi.  Nous nous sommes assis en face d'un jeune couple venezuelien.  On en est venu à parler de Chavez.  "Tu sais, il est fou à lier.  Et je te dirai une autre chose:  il y aura un coup d'état dans un mois, puis plus de Chavez.  Mon père m'a envoyé étudier en Espagne pour ma securité."  Il était étouffant dans le bus, les fenêtres embuées.  Le jeune oligarch s'endormait sur l'épaule de sa copine, la bouche entrouverte, un fil de salive au menton.   Quelque mois après il y avait effectivement un coup plus avorté que l'entolome.  Que devenaient du jeune homme et son père?
Chavez donne à Obama un bouquin d'Eduardo Galeano qui a pour titre  "Le veines ouvertes d'Amerique Latine"
(2009)