The Correspondence Artist by Barbara Browning Page B

Léaud and wanted to see everything with him after he saw Les 400 coups. And we saw Weekend, which is also great. But Pierrot le fou I loved in many ways. I loved her singing, and the slapstick, and the discontinuous music and the paintings and comic strips.
    Â 
    And do you remember – there’s Coca-Cola and violence! The dwarf is drinking a bottle of it just before she nails him in the back of the neck with the scissors.
    Â 
    I watched it alone. Sandro went camping with his class from school. I’ll watch it again with him when he gets back. I know he’ll love it.
    Â 
    I wrote an article about Charlie Parker and photography. I think it might interest you.
    Â 
    Florence is also traveling. She went on a cruise to Alaska with her parents and her brother. She sends me funny descriptions of the weirdos she meets on the boat, and in the bars in the ports of Alaska.
    Â 
    When you read this I guess you’ll be back in Paris. I hope you’re well. I’m a little lonely without Sandro but sometimes it’s good to be alone.
    Â 
    Â 
    After I’d sent the sestina, Djeli asked why I’d placed the hotel in the neighborhood of Neve Tzedek (he didn’t know where that was) instead of the Quartier du Fleuve, which he thought, rightly, was a beautiful name. I thought it was funny that he didn’t understand why I might want to protect his privacy. And protect myself from Mariam. He liked the fact that I’d described the scene as “cinematic.” In the exchanges that followed, we began discussing film, and as you can see, he recommended Pierrot
le fou . We agree about a lot of films, but we disagree about a few. I like Wang Kar-Wai. He doesn’t, particularly, although he conceded to being moved by Happy Together when he first saw it. He said he couldn’t remember a lot of details, but that it had struck him as having “a thin membrane. Bruised.”
    You see what I mean about his delicate sensibility.
    Sembène had even pushed him to think about filmmaking himself, but I think he knows his real gifts are elsewhere. That is, he toyed with the idea, but when Sembène passed away last year I think that dream also died. It’s not as though he doesn’t already have enough on his plate. In the last couple of months, for example, he had a benefit concert for Cité Soleil with his best friend, Wyclef Jean. He also did a benefit performance at the New Orleans Jazz Festival. He was briefly back in Bamako for a private strategy meeting with Amadou Toumani Touré, the president. He spoke at the third World Congress Against the Death Penalty at the Cité universitaire internationale de Paris. He attended, though didn’t speak at, the Conference on Moral Particularism at Paris I. There’s a documentary filmmaker who’s been following him around with a small crew. That’s been going on since last September. Djeli goes back and forth between finding him entertaining and a pain in the ass. And of course, there’s the regular media attention. This seems to flair up when he indulges himself in dinner dates with supermodels. When the pictures turn up in the tabloids, Mariam freaks out and everybody’s rattled for a couple of weeks. When I raise an eyebrow about this kind of thing, he looks at me like a naughty kid and says, “It’s not my fault, they keep calling me!” The supermodels, he means.
    So what is it, you’re thinking, that a man like Djeli sees in me? I’m ten years older, I don’t inhabit that world of glamour, I don’t even have much patience for it. But I satisfy Djeli’s other desires – intellectual, and poetic. Even though the only recorded trace I’ve found of myself in his artistic output was that
paper-thin eyelid of regret, I really do think our correspondence feeds his process. In fact, he just wrote me to say that he might use that image of a castrato “ jouant au mini golf