It's Blooming French

If there is one country that evokes the arrival of spring, what would it be? I know that Guatemala is often called the "land of eternal spring" which is fitting, but it stays springlike there, there is not so much the triumph of the arrival of spring after a dark, cold winter.

On Tuesday, a friend and I went out to the avenues for dinner and a pilgrimage to Green Apple Books. Without consciously doing it, I was struck by the theme in the items I was carrying up to the register -- two books by Proust, three books about Proust, a biography of Darius Milhaud and the Criterion DVD of Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast. France = Spring. I've long felt that, and I also notice that I've been listening to a lot of Francis Poulenc lately. (I also have a biography of him that I've been re-reading.) His life as always fascinated me in how he was first an enfant terrible and then sort of found a wonderful balance of the two in his later years.

As spring advances, Poulenc seems like the perfect soundtrack for these days, with Milhaud likely following in late April to early May.