music working and not

so what is wrong with my concentration on music, which is just about NIL?
with Bach, ok, with some others, several minutes, but my mind wanders and wanders, and whenI pull it back, it just goes off again...
AND I get very very very bored hearing the same things over and over, sorry, even Brahms, whom my husband loves just about every  minute of
well, not Bach, again
and I am impassioned with Glenn Gould's face, as I must have written about 3000 times, including a piece in Raritan that gets put off and off, winter, spring, summer.... called "Thinking North"  -- 
am wondering if I could do something about "Falling out of love" -- tried a piece in the Style section of the NYTIMES on forgetting what someone's name was, whom I thought I loved intensely, now he is the sky, probably wearing his faded green swimming trunks
the first piece I wrote about him was called "Traveling light," and he (then alive, let me say), called it a masterpiece of indirection -- that's what it is to fall in love with an English professor...
Oh, I am one of those also? true enough....

Monet's garden

There we were today, at 10, early and the exhibition space at the Botanic Garden almost empty, except a school group, so intelligently shepherded by 3 teachers, with excited 8 year-olds (I'm guessing by size and language..)
rushing about the brilliant colors and commenting: "would you not think this a grand show?" an enchanting red-haired young man asked me? i did indeed think so, especially because of the large and readable boards with various poems by Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, and Mallarme. (a great Roger Fry translation, that I chose from his whole volume of translations by his -- and my -- favorite poet)... and some of us will do readings later from these poets --
but I see we are to speak about how they have influenced our poetry! well, it is like a garden we never wanted to get out of, though that will scarcely do...

And a Handel opera in the lounge of the Gershwin hotel! of course, and we will make our way to see a film about Mahler on the couch, if I have correctly understood, in the film festival over at Lincoln Center, with a couple of smart-as-hell pals...

Will I ever settle down to tidying up my Modern Art Cookbook, never unless now. So, now.

Lost Blog, Lost Paris

so where is the blog I wrote just now about Paris, in fact "Paris indeed?" it is losticated...or is it somewhere I don't have access to...

Paris indeed

paris indeed

haven't been writing HERE because of living THERE, as in Paris, for a thesis defense, MUCH ENJOYED, on surrealist exhibitions in North America (and Mexico, some stress upon), from 1930, 31 --first, Wadsworth Atheneum, in Hartford, directed by Chick Austin (whose daughter, Sally Austin, made Joseph Cornell-like boxes, and whose biography, brief, I was asked to write), and then Julien Levy, in New York, more famous, and where the excitement  continued. Dali's entrance into America sent the surrealism publicity into tailspin, AND made the movement more (perhaps alas) acceptable to the cultural atmosphere. Then the really big things, in 1940... 1960, around which this thesis -- interestingly written by Susan Power -- turns. I loved being on the jury, because you get flown over and hotelled for 3 days, AND you get to see the people you wanted to see anyway, AND you feel part of things. And lunch at La Palette, just munching outside... and Le Procope, which I like FAR LESS than the old standby on Monsieur-le-Prince, oh what's it's name, you know if you are reading this, POLIDOR,  no reservations, and then you can rush down the street to the cinema,
 and having breakfast at Le Rostand, across from the Luxembourg gardens, best croissants in Paris, and the hot milk in a little jug...
In fact, it was so grand just wandering around one's Paris streets (for me, only the 5th and the 6th arrondissements), and seeing Marilyn Hacker, great Translator of poetry, Monique Chefdor, world's authority on Eugene Guillevic, the Breton poet, and also Blaise Cendrars, and so on, including my favorite poet living in France, Yves Bonnefoy, and the wonderful art writer, Alain Madeleine-Perdrillat, and staying a bit -- ah, too short, with Marie-Claire Dumas, my French sister, because of her generosity from way back, she who knows everything about Robert Desnos, easily the greatest surrealist poet, to my mind. AND we went to see Pierrette Leveque, who is involved in the rue Blomet, and the idea of Blomet Paradiso, hope someday to have an exhibition about that -- am now writing on Miro and his poet friends...when I dislodge myself from Pierre Reverdy and all the translations of his greatest poems I am gathering....
ah, the joys of caring about poetry!
And now back in New York, how not to love being here? the park and the well everything...

these days...

Today I noticed for the first time that in the NYPL, overhead in the first room of the Rose Reading Room – the one just full of   computers now – where are the catalogues we used to consult? now in the South Reading room…the overhead fresco is dark clouds. In the North and South Rooms, the clouds are white and pink == so many tourists today, all taking pictures…

e, am just reading Reverdy translations – some really literal ones by Martin Bell, unusable for the most part, for they tend to say:”one”, as in “one looks”… turns me off entirely.

But  super ones by Rosanna Warren, with a  poem “The Old Cubist, “ about Reverdy, which gets just the spirit – austere, impersonal, anonymous, no one specified and no self wandering around. A sad imagination, if you like, but a brilliant one.

And then I went into the art and architecture reading room to read Charles Simic’s Dime-Store Alchemy, about Joseph Cornell’s boxes… some magnificent titles and perceptions.. he mentions ”Monsieur pascal and so I dutifully noted that.. will there ever come a point when my Pascal won’t be dutiful but working with passion??

The reading of the Montale translations the other night: Jonathan Galassi with his, and Rosanna reading William Arrowsmith’s translations – when they compared their translations of Dora Marcus, THANKS to Joel Cohen for requesting that, it was right at the top of my happiness quotient: which one emphasized the sinking and which the unremembering… both reminded me of the Williams Icarus ending, with all the present participles: --ing, ing, ing…

Why is translation so overpoweringly seductive??? Rosanna has written so much about this, and is now writing the Max Jacob bio… something about the radiance of her reading..

So Mimi Braun asked me “what anxiety” about representation… as in the film course I will be giving when I come back from my sabbatical. How good to have literal questions you have to answer…

‘

I am anxious, that won’t do… how to convey the person who writes or paints, how do we choose and answer these things?

Anxiety takes a back seat to excitement: we heard 2 Gustav Holst operas last night, one comic, from 1930, and one TRANSLATED from THE SANSKRIT, from 1908_ incredibly moving – a wife, beloved by and loving her husband, saves him from death -- and at the end, the singing continues while the orchestra is plunged in darkness. REMARKABLE.

Then we went to hear The American String Quartet, doing some Haydyn (yes) and some Dvorak (yes) and then a grand Beethoven, by which time I had agreed with my husband that we have to sit WAY BACK to have it all cohere!

On my way to Paris, to speak for 30 minutes in French about a thesis, very very long and very grand, about Surrealist exhibitions on this side of the Atlantic… SO much I didn’t know, and probably won’t remember…but first, an oral exam, and my final class of this semester, and on and on, and then on.

vermouth

I  know there is a best-selling book called something like "hello, vodka, it's Chelsea calling" -- I like vodka also,
but am liking dry white vermouth a lot also, and how nice it is there and I am here

Having just decided to take not just a semester sabbatical but a really really whole year, before the panic sets in about what in the world am I doing to do this, I think joy should set in -- I have all these old notebooks I have never looked at, I  have always wanted to write a fiction about my grandmother the painter, in paris, and I want to write on Pascal, and I want not to feel always having to rush here and there -- now will this change THAT, I don't know, but it is not a bad idea to muse upon it...

something about if you are so lucky as to live here, then do just that, LIVE here.. then when I get back after that year, I can teach my film course about The Anxiety of Representation -- about which films work with which texts, and we will read Virginia Woolf and see films about her, etc. Van Gogh and T.S. Eliot and all that -- hope it will work!

in any case, I don't seem to be doing a lot of writing when I am teaching, but I surely do love teaching, which is really just meeting with truly intelligent young people and talking with them about what we are reading, and hearing what they are doing with the reading -- I  mean that is what teaching Ph.D. students is about, I think

The Morgan and Montale

What a lucky person am I, or what? (I love that peculiar expression!) Last night with friends, friends I really like, but I guess one likes all one's friends, otherwise they wouldn't be that, right?
Skip the overblown punctuation, lady...
Right, so start over, SO we went to the St. Luke's orchestra series of concerts, AND there was Mozart, one with a HORN VERY LOUD so you couldn't hear the other instruments, and Ingram Marshall, if that is it, don't have the program here, incredibly beautiful, born in 1946,one of those pieces that ends with a very very faint pluck on the cello, enough to make you roll over and say:
Please could you do the whole thing AGAIN, please?
and then today to the Met Museum for the Stein collection AGAIN - and me all excited because of Matisse's 1902 Chocolate Pot, and Picasso's 1902 Soup,and I just wrote to the editor of my FORTHCOMING, yes, MODERN ART COOKBOOK, who is sending me a spreadsheet tomorrow or Tuesday, of His Selections, but how I long to have those in it... well, I wrote that I would love to have those in it. Reaktion Books, and it will have still lives AND recipes by artists and poets AND texts I choose from here and there ANDI get to write an introduction I am calling "Reading in the Kitchen"...

and tonight to hear Rosanna Warren and Jonathan Galassi read from Montale, oh, that is very wonderful
AND I hope to take a Whole Year Sabbatical because a semester feels very very short
how fortunate one is (I is) to live HERE in New York!