New York, Provence, Poetry

participation/artthings

2012-01-04T13:00:00.000-05:00

EXTREME PARTICIPATION in Art Things, preparing talk for Seattle, might as well jot it down here...

Arakawa: how the body had to interact with the space – so place became space: de Certeau. The experience of the body in extremes: How uncomfortable things can be made to be, that is noticing too…expenditure of bodily energy, not just visit but interact with the discomfort of the house. My discomfort was intense in Tokyo, at house designed by Arakawa, even at sitting – bad knee was good --
, then, causing more discomfort, so more noticing

With Tino Seghal, at the Guggenheim last year, thinking about the ordinary…no objects, objectless -- conversation as the ultimate joiner, revealer – extreme of purity but of use of self
Risking the Banal – and using the body. Extreme exhaustion of conversation, and how to frame it: training and doing. .
Framing the conversation within limits: brusque meeting, and then cutoff in a more elegant fashion.
How to frame and remember the ordinary (MIT publication) – how to keep what went on (reminds me of Gerard Manley Hopkins: “how to keep…” )… notes, remindering… encounters - Surrealist encounters – at times, the everyday magic Annette Messager speaks of, at times, ultimate boredom: the ritual takes over. Sontag on Diane Arbus, p. 195, in Solomon=Godeau:, on the “Inside/out” experience: “for boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a situation, and one leads to the other.

So the whole thing was made of air, of breath, of talk.
Nothing on the walls – turned back to the self and the talk
Freespace: but no notebook…freedom from writing during the whole
Six-week thing…

I read it now, in the afterlight of the OWS experience, as the everyday of and as thisness… About noticing: what you wear, what you read in the paper …changing our level from place into space , as in Michel de Certeau : you change it into from a fixed Place to a Space as a “practiced place” – “occurs as the effect produced by the operations that orient it, situate it” (quoted Renee Green, The Everyday,78)

year ending...

2011-12-31T18:30:00.000-05:00

To celebrate the last day of this year -- a year most of which I enjoyed -- on my way to get a plant to enliven our apartment for the friends arriving tonight, from the fields of architecture, anthropology, medicine and law, and, well, literature, I sat outside the Barking Dog restaurant and had a very very weak Bailey's coffee frappe. Something was frappe, alright, but mostly the ice cubes. People smiling all around, year-end sort of thing.
Boyce has made an amazing Thai soup with Tom Yam sauce in it, and a Duck with the 8 Jewels -- reminds me of the 13 desserts in Provence... how delightful to have numbers associated with cooking, as in his cuisine...
What I hate the very very very most doings putting papers in files and all that -- I'd rather make out 6 bibliographies than put one paper in a file.
But I found a small green plant with yellow flowers, and yellow would make anyone happy. So it's on the table.

art to be treasured

2011-12-24T04:28:00.001-05:00

So I went, with a friend art historian, to see Howard Hodgkin's exhibition at the Gagosian. Beautiful, with all the inframing and globs of paint, some left on as dabs, so surrounding. Dark Evening I especially loved, ith its sea inside, and the small yellow brightness in a burst at the lower left, and next to it, the red allover of FlowersIt feels like what you feel like when you see or smell some happily-scented flowers, and that is the way most of these work...You see something called Breakfast and against a space, just a brownish slab, and you feel: oh, there is the toast. Or then you see Early Morning, and feel just the open kind of possibilisation that means: I felt Early Morning about this one. Some are more explicit, like Opera, with its clearly recessed stage, or After Whistler, with its blues and less blue blues dragged across, so you see Whistler's seashores.
And then I remembered, and went back to see, "Stieglitz and his Artists" at the Met, and felt the same way about the John Marin interior framing. But then I have always loved John Marin, early and late. His face, his hat, his shock of hair, his sailboats, the word "Pertaining," as in Pertaining to Stonington. but who else could USE that word, without being all stuffy?

the letter d

2011-12-24T04:16:00.001-05:00

I see my last blog, oh back then, since when this and that, was about aquacize, and what is interesting is how it takes up the time in your mind when it is going on -- what obsessions obsess you right then, in that very long hour...for which I arrive late, thinking that will make the hour shorter, sort of, and leave early, ditto
here is the obsession: one of the participants is hooked on the letter D, as in DEEP, and will not move from there, so
depending on how many of us there are, we have to spread out accordingly. I, who am fascinated by obsessive behaviour, should really love this... no further comment to be included this terribly exciting statement.

and now excel...

2011-12-08T23:09:00.000-05:00

how singular: today in my aquacize group, when we heard the command "And now excel," my friends all heard "and now exhale..." This so much reminds me of a time in France, when because of dizziness I went to the vertigo specialist, who -- I heard -- said, and now, the salmon maneuver
and tossed me on my side... but what he actually said was the maneuver of Dr. Semon... So much for hearing and parroting, which is what I was then writing about. Perhaps everything on your mind comes up and up: I think this is perhaps psychologically proved, no irony there.

new faust

2011-11-30T03:04:00.000-05:00

overcome by movingness and peculiarity of the new Faust at the Met: the wall of roses! the cherubic angel face all big!
very very Jesus Christ Superstar but with the singing of Kaufman and Pape and that amazing Russian with the immense voice: Marina Poplavskaya, whom we heard as Elisabeth in Don Carlo, goodness, and coming out after in the rain by the fountain and the darkness -- all just right
and in the bus getting there: I think ONly in New York: an intelligent-faced man said to the lady by whom I was standing:
I am so glad you are wearing My Shoes (and indeed she was, and he was not a transvestite, I assume but who knows, but the maker or designer or something) and they discussed how comfortable AND fashionable were her shoes
mine were comfortable, and not especially fashionable and no one rushed up in the bus to discuss them either

the oysters, the wine

2011-11-28T04:00:00.000-05:00

Never let anyone say you can't tell oyster from oyster. Oh, the difference between Sydney rock oysters, small, irregular-shaped, and I can taste them now... and Tasmania Pacific oysters. I went to look at them in the Fish Market at Sydney, but alas, that day, when it was pouring, I didn't have the sufficient taste buds to have plates of them in the market, and settled for a cold white wine from Moore's creek at the so welcoming pub when I kept losing the Explorer Bus stop somewhere on Harriss Road...I'd happily be back there today...

and the tops of things

2011-11-28T03:57:00.000-05:00

ever since getting back from Australia a week ago -- when I cocooned myself back into my ordinary living space and felt fortunate to have one of those =- now that the mayor has undone Occupy Wall Street, and everywhere everyone is undoing their occupy this and that -- I haven't been able to find the tops of things I unscrew or undo. Toothpaste caps, wine bottles -- in Australia, they unscrew the bottles these days, with a tiny plastic seal that comes in the top! no uncorking! -- and all sorts of jar caps. Where are they now? I look under things I pile on surfaces (my son Matthew used to say "she leaves no surface clear of papers" and that is strictly and literally true), I look under counters, I look in the fridge (I still call it an icebox from when the iceman used to bring the ice for us down south...) Different down south I was, and I miss it already, and my friends Rosemary and Paul Lloyd, now living near Mt. Barker, outside of Adelaide. In my perfect world (one of those) all our friends live nearby.
But that wouldn't help my losing the tops of things, just because I wouldn't lose them...

upsidedown-ness

2011-11-27T23:11:00.002-05:00

Just back from talking on Gaston Bachelard and Joseph Cornell in Dallas -- great Bachelard conference at the Dallas Institute, such interesting talks and people... and imagine seeing To Kill a Mockingbird as a play (!). Who wouldn't miss Gregory Peck, but that heartrending line to the young girl Scout: "Stand up... your father is passing by" still leaps out at you... Great delights of cuisine at the Arts Center, in a southern place, Screen Door (crayfish dip!) and a Japanese place with amazing immense shrimp..
And I finally got to Fort Worth to those grand museums, the Kimbell, with the Caravaggio exhibit, and the Modern Museum with its lovely pool. Fully worth the trip, before the long way to Sydney, a city I really love.
Of course, I had the celebrated Sydney rock oysters, small and intense, and larger ones from Tasmania, and had an allday ferry pass from Circular Quay, hung out on every ferry deck and went on everywhich passage, as far as I could go, to Manly and past Cockatoo Island, and Paramatta (only there we had to take a bus, because of the tides) and in between, went to the Rocks to explore, at Fine Wine and Foods on Argyle Street, a 3 course delight for lunch at 19 Australian dollars, and outside at the Orient Hotel in the sun. Everywhere, the great white wines, and Cooper beer on draft. How I love Sydney -- the incredibly extensive Fish Market and the Deep Fried Mud Crab at the Golden Century! what to say, wish it were nearer. I went to Pinter's No Man's Landin the Opera House, and the Australian museum, mostly to read about the aborigines, now called indigenous persons, because of the Torres Strait people. Days of repentance and reconciliation and still going on -- in Adelaide, where I went to speak in honour of Hazel Rowley, on biography and obsession, I was taken to the memorial at what was Colebrook House to the indigenous families from whom the children were removed: the Lost Generations, as also happened in England. Sobering beyond belief, the whole trip.
And I still feel upside down...

andre malraux

2011-11-02T07:58:00.000-04:00

To my absolute delight, in rereading The Voices of Silence, by Andre Malraux, I find an astoundingly helpful discussion of the radically opposed ways of painting by Caravaggio (whose last paintings were dramatically displayed in London at the National Gallery a few years ago) and Georges de La Tour, whose several renderings of Madeleine with the Vigil Lamp are so crucial to any presentation of the poem by Rene Char about it, which I loved translating and retranslating, and in fact to any presentation of the way that kind of Baroque imagination works in French poetry. I am privileged to be able to bring that up in my class today, From Mannerism to Modernism: French art and text. It is moments like this that keep enthusiasm for teaching alive, it seems to me.

OCCUPY, OCCUPY

2011-11-01T19:18:00.000-04:00

So much of the talk around here and there, these days, and the ongoing excitement accompanying it, revolves around Occupy Wall Street...how not?

Just now, it seems, according to the New York Times, the dean of St. Paul's in London resigned, following the resignation of two clergy members last week. It certainly poses moral questions all around -- financial (like 30,000 pounds in donations lost each day at St. Paul's) and psychological -- no entrance to the Cathedral.

My friend Catherine Corman told me at lunch today about the 24 hours free library among the tents (I knew of the one in Boston, but not this one), which she habitually visits at midnight--- and about the OWS poetry anthology being prepared, and --of major importance -- of the tent Patti Smith contbributed. People are sending in pizzas, by Pay Pal.

I added these pieces of information to my column for the Oxford Magazine, Notes from New York, trying to keep up with not just the culture here in New York, but the life...
.

antonin artaud

2011-10-30T22:52:00.000-04:00

who was there first and most ecstatically, so this is just to raise a Sunday=night toast to him, and to Maggie Nelson, whose Art of Cruelty so wonderfully engages him

Michael Kitchen's face

2011-10-28T11:05:00.000-04:00

how is it one face seems so believable --? I went into surrealism, as it were, because of Andre Breton's face, fell in love with these and those for those reasons, but what makes a face believable?
I think of Peter Walsh as Michael Kitchen, of course, like any movie addict... and Foyle's War I see because of that face...just to muse upon

being NadaSurf's frontman's mummie

2011-10-27T14:25:00.001-04:00

What's reason about anyway? The definition of inordinately seems to be "exceeding reasonable limits." (what's the very opposite of inordinately, uninordinately, ordinately? ) Anyway, I am in reasonable limits AND ordinately, inordinately superbly delightedly and totally rationally proud of being one of the originators of Matthew Caws, the frontman of the great indierock group NADASURF. I mean, there are two of us what did it, if you see what I mean, and how terrific it all is.
New album forthcoming, and you can hear it and read about it right here:

http://www.npr.org/2011/10/24/141652201/nada-surf-the-meaning-of-it-all

Britten's War Requiem

2011-10-23T22:57:00.000-04:00

Hard to imagine any concert, any anything, more powerful than this requiem with its interspersed poems of Wilfred Owen, as majestically presented by the London Symphony Orchestra, the American Boychoir, and the voices of Ian Bostridge and Simon Keenlyside. Avery Fisher Hall was filled to the brim and over, as were our expectations. After the quiet end, the audience sat motionless and soundless for a long while.
It reminded me of reading about Roger Fry speaking at the V and A in London, gesturing and holding forth on every image, until there was a Cezanne before which he fell silent: then the audience filed out.

I didn't even have time to eat my carrot cake...

2011-10-22T11:10:00.000-04:00

Every time I am in my office, or so it seems, things pour in. How is it my colleagues seem to take picnics from the upstairs cafeteria (which I love) to their offices and happily (I assume) consume them? The other day, with a sumptuous carrot cake, full of nuts and delicious moisture, having "borrowed" a fork to plunge into it, in came someone impassioned about manifestos, so of course, when anyone is impassioned about anything, you have to give them -- you WANT to give them -- your full attention. I couldn't continue my solitary delight. I put it behind some papers, sort of hoping its deliciousness would penetrate some of the dryness of them. No such luck. Farewell, carrot cake, with your gorgeous icing.

and more art around...

2011-10-17T19:02:00.000-04:00

New Yorkers don’t HAVE to stay in New York, of course. One bright Sunday, we made our way up north (not so very far) to the Dia Beacon. Lots of Lawrence Weiner painted maxims language everywhere, and still the Beuys felt you come to feel wrapped in too. Still the unforgettable Louise Bourgeois femme-maison upstairs, and still, for me, the Robert Smithson holds its and his own: Nonsites, Maps, Mirrors, and my favorite: Gravel Mirror with Cracks and Dust of 1968. Wonderfully, his thinking always seems to lead somewhere else in your mind..

Back in the city, what to see next? To begin with just the art! To my recent astonishment, right at the subway station of 96th and Broadway, the Broadway Mall Community Center houses the West Side Arts Coalition, set up in 1979. Here it is, 2011, and I come across it yesterday: that's New York for you. There's now an exhibition called Moving Currents: Abstractions 2011, with Wind paintings by Leanne Martinson (Wind-Breakup, Wind-sturm, Wind-drang, very Sturm und Drang in brightness, contrasted with Robert N. Scott's Reassuring Mountain Breeze. These days, or any day, reassurance is nice.

If you are going to Chelsea, you do want to see everything you can at the same time, including the High Line, and the Chelsea Market. At the Loretta Howard Gallery is something super, which is an exhibition devoted to the Black Mountain College adventure in the mountains of North Carolina, and our remembering of it: Black Mountain College and Its Legacy. A few years ago, as a North Carolinian infused with some sort of nostalgia for my summers near Grandfather Mountain, in a village called Linville (now very heavily golf country, and tidy), I went with my sister to seek what Black Mountain College would have been. Nowhere did we find it or any trace -- we were clearly looking in the wrong spots. We went to Daniel Boone inns, probably just one, but it felt numerous, we went to Appalachian State, a college with a library where no one knew anything about Black Mountain, and it all became deliciously mysterious.

All that to say that this exhibition, like the several books devoted to the BMC (our Bryn Mawr College merges in my mind with anything so initialed), is fascinating. Some legacy! I especially took to, take to, the publication with it, full of pictures of the adventuresome folk and their ongoingness there and after. So you get to read about Anni and Josef Albers, who came up often in Hedda Sterne's conversation over the almost weekly suppers she made for me. (Her memorial is this afternoon, so she is greatly on my mind -- I loved the wall-length painting in her apartment, I loved everything she talked about, I loved her.)

And the rest of them are wonderfully there, with their quarrels and splitups mentioned but not dwelled on, with their joyousness at what can only be called creative gathering in full and well-conceived display. Cage and Cunningham, Motherwell and Frankenthaler, Bucky Fuller and Ray Johnson, the de Koonings and Rauschenberg, Kline, Tworkov, and Twombly: good heavens, what a crew. Motley, if you like, but marvelous. Films of dance, preciously rare poetry journals, all that from the greatest years of the BMC. To celebrate this, there will be a reading very soon now, with Maureen Howard and John Yau and Francine Du Plessix Gray and Vincent Katz, all of them. In a moment when the cornerstone of St. Patrick's seems to be so noticeably lost, when it is drizzling in New York, this Black Mountain College goingonthing seems very grand to me.

More Chelsea. As a fan of Vik Muniz (creator of all sorts of architecture in chocolate and sugar and other amusing concoctions – I remember a celebration of the dust on a Whitney floor some years ago), I hastened to Sikkema Jenkins & Company, to see Pictures of Magazines 2, with blowups of celebrated paintings, from Caillebotte to Corot, with all sorts of faces and references poking through the floorboards and landscapes. I loved it.

There was a funny play on Magritte at the Matthew Marks Gallery, La Carte d'Après Nature, with "domesticated nature" stuff, surrealistic in its wayout humour. Tacita Dean, the super real Dean, contributed. That would raise the level of anything.

And in the Astor Place neighbourhood, the Grey Gallery has an enormous and energizing show of FLUXUS and the Essential Questions of Life, as in Art (What’s it good for?), Change, Danger? Death? Freedom? God? Happiness? (etc., all in big letters on the floor in front of the captivating objects – all very George Maciunas, all very 1960’s. You have to love it to like it, I guess, but I do. I like the Flux-Kit of 1965, like Duchamp’s Valise.

Big Things Happening here and all over: Occupy Wall Street is very much going on, all over, and then, in another key and more uptown, Willem de Kooning has taken over MOMA. I greatly take to the way Peter Schjeldahl writes, and his New Yorker essay on it, Shifting Picture, marks the crucial turnings. Then – we are speaking of 1945 – “his genius bloomed,” then his “Shoot-the-works abstractions like Gotham News (1955) and Easter Monday (1955-56), then, with Two Figures in a Landscape (1967), he “was back in full throttle.” And it doesn’t end badly, as so many seem to think: “The show’s concluding room should settle doubts of his last phase’s cogency.” When he could no longer even sign his name, Schjeldahl maintains, the artist seems to “grope for the basic, mysterious resilience of late-Renaissance pictorial space and to find again that, yes, it’s there. …When last seen, de Kooning was still inventing; the old art of painting was born anew at the ends of his brushes, day by day.”

when things are silent

2011-10-16T06:41:00.002-04:00

I most love getting up in the silence to scribble something, like this.

Black Mountain College Now

2011-10-13T13:29:00.001-04:00

At the Loretta Howard Gallery is something super, which is an exhibition devoted to the Black Mountain College adventure in the mountains of North Carolina. A few years ago, as a North Carolinian infused with some sort of nostalgia for my summers near Grandfather Mountain, in a village called Linville (now very heavily golf country, and tidy), I went with my sister to seek what Black Mountain College would have been. Nowhere did we find it or any trace -- we were clearly looking in the wrong spots. We went to Daniel Boone inns, probably just one, but it felt numerous, we went to Appalachian State, a college with a library where no one knew anything about Black Mountain, and it all became deliciously mysterious.
All that to say that this exhibition, like the several books devoted to the BMC (our Bryn Mawr College merges in my mind with anything so initialed), is fascinating. I especially took to, take to, the publication with it, full of grand pictures of the adventuresome folk and their ongoingness there and after. So you get to read about Anni and Josef Albers, who came up often in Hedda Sterne's conversation over the almost weekly suppers she made for me. (Her memorial is this afternoon, so she is greatly on my mind -- I loved the wall-length painting in her apartment, I loved everything she talked about, I loved her.)
And the rest of them are wonderfully there, with their quarrels and splitups mentioned but not dwelled on, with their joyousness at what can only be called creative gathering in full and well-conceived display. Cage and Cunningham, Motherwell and Frankenthaler, Bucky Fuller and Ray Johnson, the de Koonings and Rauschenberg, Kline, Tworkov, and Twombly: good heavens, what a crew. Motley, if you like, but marvelous. Films of dance, preciously rare poetry journals, all that from the greatest years of the BMC. To celebrate this, there will be a reading very soon now, with Maureen Howard and John Yau and Francine Du Plessix Gray and Vincent Katz, all of them.
On a day when the cornerstone of St. Patrick's seems to be so noticeably lost, when the occupiers of Wall Street and their sympathizers all over are doing their thing, when it is drizzling in New York, this Black Mountain College goingonthing seems very grand to me.

SYMBOLISM

2011-10-10T16:44:00.000-04:00

What a lark, teaching symbolist poets! My seminar this week concerns ( as it did last week also, how to stop? ) Mallarme, the most 21st century poet writing in the 19th century, blows anyone's mind... for sure. Every time you read him on Loie Fuller (as in his nigh-impenetrable essay on the Ballets) or on shipwrecks and typography (as in the major-important No Throw of the Dice will Get Rid of Chance, or any way you desire it translated), you feel as if you could shout with Virginia Woolf after reading Proust: "What is there to say after that?" Well, she continued to say a few things, and we are glad of that.

miniatures and alternating perspectives

2011-10-09T04:38:00.002-04:00

At the Met Museum's exhibition of Indian painting, Wonder of the Age: Master Painters of India, 1100-1900,
the miniatures (you are given a magnifying glass) get larger and larger until, at the end, the works are LARGE enough to go into European niches and be differently displayed. What an exhibition! right away I loved the Chameleon of Mansur, 1595-60, and his Great Hornbill, 1615, and they reminded me of Simon Bussy's animal paintings (the French painter married to Dorothy Bussy, translator of Gide and also fervent adorer of Gide), and marveled at a Hindu painter during Mughal time, part of Akbar's atelier, who painted in the "European mode." Indeed, and you see St. Jerome in exactly the posture we are used to seeing him in, and then a self-portrait with birds above in spatial depth we weren't expecting. Lots of marveling.

What I love seeing most, these days, is the odd detail: one slipper cast aside, in a Woman Worshipping the Sun... or, in another, one hand just slipping over a doorframe holding something or other. It bothers me not in the least not to know, NOT TO KNOW, what she is holding, nor do I need to know, in a 1640 work, why the dejected Gopis are begging Krishna to restore their clothes? there they are, all wretched and shivering or trembling or something, coming out of the water... And all the small beasts under water, as in those magnificent medieval maps, and a few figures around 1780 looking out at you from the bottom of the painting, it seems to me, for the first time. I loved the smiling elephant with an eyebrow raised, and the great white sweep of the South Wind in the Himalayas, and the Pahari painters. Who would not choose, when confronted by a demon of any sort, to see how to deal with a Snake Demon? Krishna undoes him on one side, standing in his mouth, even as that demon eye is staring at us, and then, lo and behold, on the other side, the figures he or it has swallowed arise from his head where his eye is now sleeping, as he is perishing....

In Nainsukh's Troupe of Trumpeters, with all the trumpets raised in a powerful composition, it feels like the great Paolo Uccello's Battle of San Romano with all the spears sticking out.When , in the 19th century, the painting accommodated to European tastes, and was collected by the Scots William and James Fraser, the change is startling, toward "Company Painting", and painting techniques merge with photographic techniques. The exhibition ends with the painter Tara (1836-70), with a large Festival of Hilo demonstrating alternating perspectives, and with a display of Indian painting materials, including a very lovely yellow magnesium euxanthate, used in the 15th to the 19th centuries, made from the urine of cows fed on mango leaves. Not a lot of exhibitions end like that.

Reading, teaching, going to jazz

2011-10-05T11:08:00.001-04:00

So I keep passing around my copy of The Hare with Amber Eyes to various friends, and so far, my women friends have been FAR more enthusiastic than the men... what does this mean, I wonder? but I don't have time to wonder very long, have to go give a seminar on Mallarme, Whistler, and the rest of those great writers and painters (I love Whistler's writing in The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, to say nothing of his Nocturnes and beach scenes) but hope to say lots about them, and show some, so my super students can react... Each has to choose something of Mallarme's to react to, and they will... Who wouldn't? the most 21st century poet around, I often think.
Then to see friends from France and to the Blue Note, because they want to hear some jazz. I have lived in New York for Years and Years and have never ever been to the Blue Note!

swimming with friends

2011-10-03T11:13:00.000-04:00

So, even though I get up in the night, excited to write whatever I am writing, now a catalogue for an exhibit of Surrealism: New World, to be held in San Francisco, I sometimes -- read: frequently but not always -- get up EARLY, as in between 7 and 8, to swim in an aquacize class with friends. It helps to see the same faces, none of which are remarkably youngish, which also helps. Not that the mind sticks to the exercises, it rather runs about, nothing being extra-strenuous in the exercise mode.

My friend Jane Isay, just back from Georgia and Armenia, just saw the First Shoe, in a cave, in an expedition led by Ian Tattersall, if I have the name right. It sounded stupendous, and set me up mentally, I hoped, and still hope, for what I would like to be a day's writing -- no chance, have to design my seminar in Letters and Lives for next semester at the CUNY Graduate Center, have to go to Staples to renew my yellow cartridge on the printer (grrrrr: no one told me they expired! people, yes, all around me, but cartridges???) and perhaps to my Women Writing Women's Lives biography group to hear about, oh you know, twitter and facebook and linkedwhatever it is and so on, so how is it one makes uninterrupted time for writing?

Everything: what to do? Next?

2011-10-03T11:01:00.000-04:00

So when you want to go to about 251 THINGS now on in New York, like the exhibit of French drawings at the Morgan, near where I teach at the CUNY Graduate Center, but you also want to, have to, need to go with your husband out to Westchester to hear the Westchester Performers chamber music concert (lots of Sundays, really just 5 a semester -- I think of semesters since I am still teaching), AND you have to, want to, need to prepare your seminar for the week, and you long to, want to, need to write the catalogue for a San Francisco exhibition of Surrealism: New World, in a hurry hurry hurry, WHAT do you Choose to do first?

Well, what you don't do is straighten up your closet and figure out what you really enjoy wearing...Such good excuses not to do things, when, in fact, you want to do everything. Can anyone help anyone (me) decide what to do first, what to not do (how do you not split that infinitive? Remember what used to matter, and now everything matters so much. )

midnight reading

2011-10-01T11:22:00.001-04:00

Being a not much sleeping type, and never ever through the night, I have a choice: a pill, providing five hours, but I don't want to spend the rest of my life hooked on having to have something (ok coffee is different) or getting up to read. Younger, I used to write much of the middle of my books like this, because no one could disturb me, even when the children were small.
So last night I read two of Lydia Davis's stories (having purchased her Collected Stories from St. Marks bookstore, as we are all trying to keep it afloat), one called "Glenn Gould" -- about the narrator watching the same tv program as he did, the Mary Tyler Moore show (I will read ANYTHING about Glenn Gould), and the other, the super-extraordinary "Marie Curie So Honorable Woman." Curie's story is all by itself remarkable, and in the equally remarkable play The Blue Flower, now playing in Manhattan again, there she is.
I loved every minute of reading, it is all figure and doesn't need a ground: "But she has known the privilege of privileges: coherence." Ah, that must really be a privilege, one absent from my slate, which already feels so privileged to me.
Why this figure/ground thing? Because we saw the De Kooning show at MOMA yesterday, and my favorites were the black enamel works, in which, indeed, figure and ground are interchangeable, as the super-intelligent wall texts said.
And you wonder how the figure/ground texture plays out in a life, usually. Yours and mine.

difficulties

2011-09-23T06:01:00.000-04:00

this is like when you get up in the middle of the night (I realize that is a relative term, well, my night), and you think: right, I should get more people reading my blog, just in case it might interest someone and how do you do that and then you join some presumed websites and they keep asking for your password and you give it to them and they don't like it and say: we will send you a way to change it, and you change it, and they say INVALID KEY

this just happened to me with Wordpress, about which I know zero, except it is, as I said, the middle of my some-would-call-it-night, and it is very irritating indeed

I would rather go back to writing, even writing a blog no one reads -- I actually like writing, WHICH IS WHY I WRITE, even cookbooks -- not because I am such a great cook, but I like reading great writers on cooking, like Nigel Slater (turns out there is a new film on his TOAST, hooray) and Elizabeth David, the greatest, and M.F.K. Fisher -- it isn't the recipes I love, it is the writing

Septemberish New York

2011-09-17T18:59:00.000-04:00

One might well ask: so what is the great deal about living in this incredibly full metropolis when you can't/don't/haven't even tried to see and do 1/2000000the of everything? Well, I can tell you. It is that you could if you wished to. Concerts in the park, as well as in enclosed spaces (except I always love unenclosed spaces, such as Central Park, where the Philharmonic just played -- and we didn't go, but my husband was playing the piano, and what is better than that?)

Yes, to commemorate 9/11, there was Bach, there was Brahms, there was all of whatever anyone could do. We went out to our habitual Performers of Westchester, where my husband has been going for 32 years, and sat in someone's living room to hear a great group of musicians -- some Dvorak, a Bach Toccata, the Mozart C major String Quartet and the G Minor Piano Quartet, and as an encore, a movement from the Brahms F Minor Piano Quintet...

I did get to the Richard Serra Drawing show, a retrospective at the Met: and loved the severity and the sweep of it, reminiscent of Egypt - I remember going there first with my son Matthew, and climbing up a little way of the pyramid of Cheops at night...

And you could choose what to love in the rearrangement of the fourth and fifth floors of the Museum of Modern Art, under the auspices of the newly-arrived Ann Temkin -- and now an enormous and welcome De Kooning. The Old Man and the Museum, runs a piece in the New York Times about Hemingway's choices of paintings, now in the Met...To go with this, The Sun also Rises is playing at the New York Theater Workshop...

Example of having to choose: between Hilary Spurling, such a great biographer, and Red Grooms' opening at on Wed. night -- right after my seminar, how in the goodness to choose?

All these events, and still the signage in Central Park changing seems the most exciting to me: because the new typeface is called Titling Gothic! On 1, 500 new signs! I was initially all excited, thinking it was Tilting Gothic, and I felt the joy of the signs all sliding on a tilt... a short=lived joy, but the enduring one is someone paying attention to fonts on any signs whatever.

MOMA and september 11 memorial

2011-09-04T23:01:00.000-04:00

How grand that here in New York there are ongoing so many things: the remodeling of MOMA, so that all sorts of things get shuffled around, and you notice them more.Or differently. Everything in a different place turns out to look different - I love reseeing objects like Joseph Kosuth's DEFINITION, the definition of definition, about the most meta-thing you could imagine, hanging blackly on the wall so you can see it defined. It is funny, real, and thought-already-thought-provoking.

And the week-long Bach free concerts at Trinity Church -- that church almost unscathed in the events.. Every day, cantatas, every evening, more. And Poets House, down by Battery Park City, will sponsor readings by poets in the St. Paul Chapel of Trinity, and, on the day of September 11, an assembly of a thousand or more, holding hands in a circle, to remember.

sage-tanguy visite en francais

2011-09-04T18:30:00.002-04:00

Kay Sage: Une Note sur ses Tableaux Autobiographiques

Mary Ann Caws

Dans son chapitre å propos de Kay Sage et Yves Tanguy dans une très utile compilation d’essais sur les couples créateurs, Judith Suther – qui est responsible de l’édition de China Eggs/Les Oeufs de Porcelaine, l’autobiographie de Kay Sage (avant qu’elle ne rencontre Yves) -- remarque combien Sage se mettait et se sentait toujours aux deuxième plan par rapport à son mari, le peintre breton. 1 Toujours la deuxième, toujours décidément inférieure à son mari dans ses peintures – voilà comment elle se montre, du début de leur rapport jusqu’à sa mort à elle, en janvier 1963, bien après sa mort à lui, en janvier 1955. Dès leur rencontre, elle a fait tout ce qui était en son pouvoir pour avancer sa carrière à lui. C’est bien Sage qui a payé le passage de Yves Tanguy à New York, aussi bien que ceux des Breton et d’autres, c’est bien elle qui a trouvé, fourni, payé le premier mois de l’appartement de Jacqueline et André Breton, qui l’ont – comme tout le groupe surréaliste – détestée. (Hélas, on voit cela dans les lettres des deux, surtout dans celles de Jacqueline Lamba…que dire des sentiments personnels de quelqu’un? Le mieux, c’est que d’en dire très peu. Et donc, j’en dis très peu. )

“La Princesse,” ils l’ont appelée à cause de son premier marriage, avec un prince italien de la petite noblesse. Titre qui n’était pas à plaire, de toute façon, aux goûts révolutionnaires du groupe. Américaine, bien qu’avoir grandi en Italie, riche par son père, de tempérament plutôt froid, elle avait tout pour leur déplaire. Et Yves Tanguy avait tout pour plaire: grand rieur, grand buveur, de tempérament délicieusement chaleureux.

Et, le fait est que Kay Sage avait enlevé leur Yves. Et lui, son mari, n’a jamais loué ses tableaux à elle, en étant un peu (ou très jaloux de son talent à elle.) “ I take more interest in his than he does in mine – naturally.” 2 (!!!) Que dire??? Naturellement, pour moi, c’est ce mot: “naturally” qui frappe… Alors, comme ça, c’est naturel que son mari ne s’intéresse pas à son travail? Ah.

Ceci dit, et d’autant plus remarquable, la force, oui, la force extreme, des tableaux de Kay Sage, m’a entièrement boulversée de nouveau, dans l’exposition si bien organisée, en partie par Stephen Robeson Miller – qui lui prepare une biographie de Kay Sage – exposition dont les citations ici-bas en anglais, sont tirées. Avant cette visite, j’avais connu, et reconnu de loin, les tableaux de Kay Sage, mais juste quelques uns. Je sentais leurs figures enveloppées de tissu toujours plié, toujours pâle, même blanc…et une ambiance avec toujours quelque chose de légèrement sinistre, comme si on n’allait jamais savoir comment pénétrer la scène – certainement pas la comprendre. Elle non plus, sans doute. Et comme elle a refusé d’en parler, nous n’avons que ses quelques paroles entendues dans la conversation triple avec Julien Levy, dans cette exposition. Ah, dit-elle, pour moi la route s’étend interminablement, comme la voie Appia. J’ai toujours cette route infinie dans ma mémoire.

Yves, nous l’entendons qui rit. Ah, le fromage, un déastre, dit-il. Mais du moins nous avions du fromage… Kay Sage ne parlera pas du repas, plutôt de la colline juste par-delà la fenêtre. Vers le soir, cela acquiert un pli, et ressemble à du carton-pâte contre les nuages…Elle a aussi la mer toujours en esprit. Une chose qui se déroule à l’infini – quand vous pensez aux toiles de Tanguy, avec leurs espaces infinis et les petits objets vers le bas du cadre, vous sentez quelque chose de presque joyeux. Mais les toiles de Kay Sage me semblent en general dépourvues d’émotion – plus strictes, plus sévères que celles de Tanguy. Les signes suggérés par les figures enveloppées, qui ont l’air de pointer quelque chose, les constructions architecturales --- avec ces tours qui penchent parfois vers le centre de la toile (voir Bounded on the West by the Land Under the Sea de 1946) que l’un des organisateurs de l’exposition, ce meme et très connaisseur Stephen Robeson Miller, choisit comme un point tournant – et ces lames de bois qui se présentent partout, et qui se substituent à la chair du visage dans un “Small Portrait” de 1950, ou nous ne voyons que des cheveux roux et des morceaux de bois, tout cela nous convainct de son point de vue délibérément sans sentiment.

Sauf en ce qui concerne son mari. Cela ne cesse pas de nous étonner, après avoir vu ses tableaux à elle:

After I knew Yves, everything was obliterated that was not Yves. I can say no more than to say I do not believe there has ever been such a total and devastating love and understanding as there was between us. 3

Après avoir subi deux operations sur ses yeux pour les cataracts, elle est devenue aveugle dans un oeil et a vu mal avec l’autre…. Et puis, Yves n’est plus là, et en janvier 1963, elle se tire une balle dans la poitrine et en meurt, ayant laissé ce mot dévastateur:

The first painting by Yves that I saw, before I knew him, was called I’m waiting for you. I’ve come. Now he’s waiting for me again. I’m on my way.4

Les cendres du corps d’Yves Tanguy furent jetés dans la baie de Douarnenez…. De Kay Sage, nous retenons son autobiographie, China Eggs, ces tableaux d’une force indécible, et sa hantise des oeufs. Et nous nous souvenons qu’ils ont trouvé après sa mort, sur une petite étagère juste au-dessus de son lit, un bol contenant une série de petits oeufs en porcelaire, de la sorte qu’on utilize pour persuader aux poules de pondre…Le fait que cette autobiographie, écrite après la mort de son mari, s’arrête court avant sa rencontre avec Tanguy témoigne de sa difficulté de parler de leur vie ensemble.

Je voudrais très simplement commenter quelques unes de ses toiles. Dans une des toutes premières, Monolith de 1937, une pierre s’érige grande et de couleur presque noire, avec des incisions blanches – mystérieuse comme un Chirico (à qui elle est souvent comparée) – et puis, de plus en plus, les figures et les objets sont drapes dans un tissu memorable. De plus en plus, il y a des tours qui s’inclinent ou non – mais on pourrait tracer la lignée de ces pierres érigées et qui bloquent la vue jusqu’à la dernière toile dans toute sa négativité, où l’on ne voit que des tableaux vides et formant barrière à la vue, à l’entrée: NON, elle edit de toute sa voix de femme. Celle qui a refuse toutes les “interviews,” toute remarque sur son propre travail, se refuse à tout, à tous, à elle-même.

Que de références: “The World is Blue” – ah,”le monde est bleu comme une orange,” disait Paul Eluard –premier vers de son poème de 1929, un vers que citait Julia Kristeva bien après tous les deux:

La terre est bleue comme une orange

Jamais une erreur les mots ne mentent pas

Ils ne vous donnent plus à chanter

Au tour des baisers de s’entendre

Les fous et les amours

…

Tu as toutes les joies solaires

Tout le soleil sur la terre

Sut les chemins de ta beauté. 5

Dans cette toile, on voit ces pierres – absolument de la forme des oeufs. Evidemment, les critiques ont eu – et ont toujours – tendance à citer Chirico comme influence sur ces plans inclines, et sur ses oeufs…

J’ai beaucoup aimé son White Silence de 1941, qu’elle a donné à Breton, qui l’a utilisé dans un poème-objet qu’elle a gardé au-dessus de sa cheminée à Roxbury. Cela me rappelle le signe pour une augmentation de volume, dans son trajet de petit en grand, et le même signe en plus petit au-dessus en forme comme l’écho. Autre silence: Margin of Silence de 1942– combine autobiographique. Je pense à l’aveugement de Sage – tout cela pointe vers l’avenir, comme l’oiseau dans le tableau après la mort d’Yves.

Des references aux jeux joués par les surrealists: les petites tuiles en bas de Near the Five Corners de 1943, tableau dans lequel la petite figure sur le pont exerce une grippe sur l’observateur, comme le font partout ces objets et figures envelopes… que de mystères. Je pense particulièrement à la narration de I saw Three Cities de 1944 – que je regardais longtemps dans la Galerie d’Art à l’Université de Princeton. Il y a à la droite du tableau, une forme voilée qui a l’air de signaler quelque chose au loin…Toutes ces toiles, toutes, toutes, son autobiographiques –Midnight Streets, par exemple, de 1944, paraît rappeler, selon Miller, un feu qui l’avait réveillée dans elle était petite, en Italie, cette sorte de rappel, d’accord, mais il est vrai que partout j’avais senti ces toiles comme des auto-portraits de cette femme qui parlait peu d’elle – que dans ses tableaux.

En ce qui concerne ses toutes dernières toiles, nous sommes pris par trois entre elles. A Bird in the Room, peinte après la mort de Tanguy, 1955, signale la vielle superstition que si jamais un oiseau entre dans la maison, cela prévoit la mort d’un habitant de la maison. Et en fait, cela s’est passé quelques jours avant la mort d’Yves. Le tableau, dans des couleurs sombres – noir, pourpre foncé – montre un portail vide, qui ne mène nulle part, avec autour des figures voûtées et drapées, qui semblent se cramponner au cadre de tous les côtés. Sombre, triste, vide de tout sauf la détresse. Voilà que l’émotion noie toute la scène.

Le Passage, de 1956, montre une femme vue de dos, assise sur de grands fragments de pierres, seule, seule, et qui n edit rien, qui refuse toute communication. La dernière toile, avec le titre absolu: The Answer is No, de 1958, nous bloque la vue et l’entrée. Solitude éternelle. Rien qu’une série de toiles vides, retournées, où il n’y a que l’absence.

A mon avis, Kay Sage, miraculeusement fidèle à la mémoire de son peintre mari, montre une inoubliable force architecturale, philosophique si vous voulez. Comme Apollinaire mérite le titre de Prince des poètes – titre décerné meme sur la statue en son honneur de Picasso, avec le visage bien connu de Dora Maar -- Kay Sage mérite, à mon avis, le titre cette fois-ci glorieux de Princesse de la peinture.

1 Significant Others: Creativity & Intimate Partnership, ed. Whitney Chadwick & Isabelle de Courtivron. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1993, pp. 136-153) Kay Sage, China Eggs/Les Oeufs de Porcelaine. Charlotte and Seattle, Starbooks and Editions de l’Etoile. Bilingual Editions. Traduction française de Elisabeth Manuel, 1996.

2 Julien Levy, “Tanguy, Connecticut, Sage,” Art News 15 September 1954, p. 27. Quoted in above,p. 250.

3 Dans l’exposition nommée, à Katonah, New York.

4 Loc. cit.

5 Dans la Yale Anthology of Twentieth-Century French Poetry, ed. Mary Ann Caws, p. 176. New Haven, 2004, de L’Amour la poésie@Editions Gallimard, 1929.

Kay Sage/Yves Tanguy exhibition

2011-08-28T11:43:00.002-04:00

KAY SAGE

At the Katonah Art Gallery these days is a perfectly remarkable exhibition of Kay Sage and Yves Tanguy, her second husband – the surrealist painter from Brittany. In no way was I prepared for this kind of feast – I have always admired, massively admired, the painting of Kay Sage, have really enjoyed her book of a memoir, China Eggs, and have felt she needed far more publicity. Thank goodness, Stephen Robeson Miller, responsible in large part for this exhibition, and its catalogue, is preparing a biography of Sage, and I look forward to it.

The entire thing is a delight, from the recording of their double interview, well, triple, with Julien Levy – you hear Yves saying how the cheese was a disastrous failure, and how totally unimportant geography is to his work, and you hear Kay talking about how wonderful it is in the quietness of Roxbury, Connecticut, to look out of the window just towards a hill, that acquires a ridge, lookiing like a “piece of cardboard against the sky. “ She keeps remembering the sea, having grown up along the Mediterranean and otherwise, she would never have had the feeling of distance, or the feeling of the sun. Always, she says, she has the sea iin her mind, along with a road going away, like the Appian way, a long road into the distance.

Yves Tanguy points out that beyond this hill is another, still more beautiful since we cannot see it – how deeply surrealist of him! – how it makes him long to do sculptures, just the opposite of all the objects he makes. Always, he says, his subject is vertical before him. Always an open window onto a landscape: how perfect, then, for both of them.

The incredible strength of Kay Sage’s paintings is what has always intrigued me, and stayed with me. From the first drapings of vertical stones (like Monolith of 1937) and posts – that draping revealing a reddish column inside itself in a later painting – to the architectural constructions: those towers! – of her later work (leaning to the left from the right side of Bounded on the West by the Land Under the Sea of 1946,, there is not one painting about which I feel hesitant. The early influence of de Chirico, with the plane tipping towards you and the two stones and a half – I kept thinking, how not? of her China Eggs – never really dies away, but this particular painting fascinated me. It is entitled The World is Blue, and of course that brought to my mind the first line in Paul Eluard’s poem, “the world is blue like an orange…”. Others of her paintings I love are White Silence of 1941, which she gave to André Breton, who kept it with him, and wrote a poem-object for it – the horizontal sweep of the lower figure, like a n increase of volume toward the right, and its echo above, these get to you. And later, there is a Margin of Silence ; I think of Sage’s going blind in one eye, and feel all that like something prescient.

To be sure, there are tiles, like a chess game, in Near the Five Corners, and the tiny figure on the bridge exerts a hold on you, as do the cloth-wrapped personages all over, especially in I saw Three Cities, at which I used to look hard in the Princeton Art Gallery.

Since I have a particular interest in surrealist portraits and self-portraits, I was gripped by the Small Portrait of 1950, in which you see just a face, oval- shaped, with her characteristic slats of wood, and some wrapped forms around, for the shoulders, above which some red hair…you scarcely wonder who this is, you simple marvel at the way you can always recognize a Kay Sage painting.

And then there is the narrative. It was Kay who, having married an Italian prince (so the Surrealists called her “The Princess”) supplied the wherewithal to bring many of the surrealist painters and poets over from Marseille during the war, including André Breton, his wife Jacqueline Lamba the painter, and their small daughter, Aube., as well as providing them funds to live on for their getting settled in New York. When she and Yves were in Connecticut, they were close friends with all the other painters around – many pictures document their get-togethers. Tales abound of Yves, barefooted and very proud of his small feet, intoxicated, and happy….

Perhaps the most moving documents of all are her suicide notes after Yves’s cerebral hemorrhage of January 15, 1955, just a few months after the close of their double exhibition (in separate rooms) at the Wadsworth Gallery, under the auspices of Chick Goodwin, in Hartford. Kay writes to their mutual friend Heinz Henghes, who introduced them in the beginning:

After I knew Yves, everything was obliterated that was not Yves. I can say no more than to say I do not believe there has ever been such a total and devastating love and understanding as there was between us.

After two cataract operations, in 1959 and 1960, she remained blind in one eye and was losing the sight in the other. Before shooting herself in her locked room, on Jnanuary 8, 1963, she left a suicide note:

The first painting by Yves that I saw, before I knew him, was called I’m waiting for you. I’ve come. Now he’s waiting for me again. I’m on my way.

Yves’s ashes were scattered in the Bay of Douarnenez., in the Brittany he so loved.

I want to comment on the last two paintings by Kay – after these, she did collages only, no more paintings. The first, soon after Yves’s death, is called A Bird in the Room, and it is one of the darkest paintings I have ever seen. Dark purple, an empty portal sideways and leading nowhere, and on the sides, small wrapped figures as if huddled, as if clinging to the outside frame. It turns out that the coup were both superstitious, and if a bird flew into the house, this presaged a death of someone in the family. This had happened a short while before Yves’s death….And the final painting, one of the most desolate paintings ever, called The Answer is No, of 1958, is her final oil. As far as you can see – and this is a totally uninviting painting, no way of getting in, should you wish to, there are a countless number, seemingly, of blank canvasses, stretching out towards infinity. No, it is obviously all over. What an end, so magisterially planned. There remain, at the moment, nothing else I can say to or about Kay Sage, a great painter.

storm/hurricane arriving...

2011-08-27T15:42:00.000-04:00

We just took a walk around 3 very very silent blocks, with that feeling in the air of suspense,
of something is about to come. For the first time in New York's history (!!!) the subways and buses and trains are all closed down -- thus the quiet streets, no street vendors, people glancing at others...

you would think: wow, lots of time to write, but you feel: ooof, it is all about to close down, this is definitely not like Provence, although we tried to trick ourselves by having a super melon and a bit of domestic proscitto over it -- of course, there in Provence, we would have a slosh of Beaumes de Venise over the melon

I am loving preparations for my Modern Art Cookbook with Reaktion Books.... still lives and recipes by painters and texts, such delights

ah, how fortunate I feel to live in both places! more anon...

interview with Deborah Lawrenson

2011-08-26T07:35:00.001-04:00

Since I am so very impassioned about Provence, and have so enjoyed reading Deborah Lawrenson's The Lantern (see my last blog of August 19), I wrote her to set up an interview, and here it is!

Deborah Lawrenson Q&A

What kinds of thing do you most enjoy talking about, in relation to your book? I loved every one of the descriptions in The Lantern, by the way.

Thank you very much! I enjoy pointing out that The Lantern is also, on one level, a novel about reading and books and words. I’ve had a fair bit of criticism for being “too descriptive”, for using too many different adjectives, but as you so insightfully wrote in your review, the narrator Eve is a translator: words, and the precise choice of them, matter to her.

Eve is a shy bookworm, whose comfort zone is reading. But her isolation, coupled with mounting uncertainty about Dom, only sends her to books that exacerbate her dread, until she is not sure whether she is imagining the worst because she is influenced by the stories she is reading, or whether she is more accepting than she should be because she is seeing real life through the gauze of literature. Also, just as there are always echoes of the past life of old houses, there are always echoes of earlier stories in literature. In The Lantern, there is a clear line that stretches back through Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, and Jane Eyre, and further back to the Bluebeard legend.

In your other writing, have you been so remarkably (and persuasively) detailed in your descriptions? I recognize Provence: big deal for me. Will it be so for the readers who do not live there part of their lives, as I do??

Evocation of the landscape was also an important aspect of my previous two novels: The Art of Falling (evoking northern Italy) and Songs of Blue and Gold (set partly on the Greek island of Corfu). All three novels are romantic in the widest sense, and I try to write a recognizable “Spirit of Place” to make the setting come alive – and win theempathy of a reader who knows those places already and can identify with them, or alternatively to make the setting so lush and appealing that it draws in those readers who don’t know the backdrop but soon wish they did.

What gave you the idea for the murder/detective/police part? Was it originally part of the book?

I always intended for there to be a murder/detective story aspect to the novel, an earthly mystery that could and would be solved, in contrast to another, rather more unearthly puzzle for which there was not necessarily a rational explanation. So yes, the meeting of the two apparently unrelated past and present strands of the story was always planned as a shocking but all-too-real intrusion into the dreamy, other-worldly rural idyll at Les Genévriers.

Was it L'Occitane and Manosque that gave you idea for the Marthe Lincel part? where did that inspiration come from?

It was indeed. I often use L’Occitane products, and one day I realized that there was a line of Braille on all their packaging. I found out that the company has been involved for a long time in projects to help young blind people, even running courses in perfumery. The loss of one sense and the subsequent need to compensate by enhancing others gave me the idea of writing a “sensory novel” which luxuriated in descriptions of all five senses – so that, for example, the visual descriptions might be vivid if heard by a blind person, or the scent descriptions vibrant through the sight of words on a page.

hauntings and readings

2011-08-19T16:48:00.001-04:00

I have just finished an advance copy of Deborah Lawrenson's The Lantern, about the Luberon and Cassis, near me in my summers and both etched in my mind and writings -- and the too-good-to-be-trueness of a relationship -- and essentially about the haunting of a place and a self by a memory, or several. Living my summers, as I do, in a It Had To Be Fixed house, that is, my cabanon that has seen 300 years of life, and death, and horses and peasants and, now, us, every page spoke to me of much. The descriptions are, each one, themselves a haunting -- the smell of lavender and of almond biscuits, the taste of the various winds in their howling and their gentleness, the sight of the squirrel-like loirs or dormice scuttling about and dislodging the tiles on the roof.

The narrator, one of the heroines, if you see it like that, is a translator (me too), and so her sense of words is terribly acute-- perhaps that explains the haunting quality of not just the lavender scent so permeating throughout,but of the exactness of the language bringing it all into presence. It is particularly moving for me on two accounts: because I live there in my summers, and know every inch of that sight and smell. The second is that my great friends, the cellist Ruth Phillips (daughter of another friend, Tom Phillips, painter, translator, knower of many things) and her husband, the painter Julian Merrow-Smith, have both produced recently two volumes equally baked in Provence, the Provence to which I am so passionately committed, and they are present in my reading and seeing of anything about this countryside and mindscape. Julian's paintings, one done each day and many appearing in his Postcard from Provence, and Ruth's Cherries from Chauvet's Orchard (both published by the Red Ochre Press at the Hameau des Cougieux in Bedoin -- a village exactly 7 kilometers from my cabanon) are with me now in New York, preserving what I most love about the Vaucluse. Keeping its scent and its sight: although The Lantern turns about a blind woman, who becomes the "nose" of a perfume establishment which has the whiff of present-day L'Occitane...I can smell her creation, "Lavande de Nuit" now, even here. It will last the winter.

Hauntings

2011-08-10T15:43:00.001-04:00

Hauntings

We are in Ailefroide, in the Parc des Ecrins, located in what is so wonderfully called the High Alps, the Hautes-Alpes, and it turns out that Aile, of Ailefroide, means Alps, and also water, as in acqua alta or, in this case, eau chaude…When I asked the weathered-face guide in the information services of this very Alpine town, she said “oh, you know how we French love to twist words…” Yes indeed, I do know, having studied old French, and the Latin derivations.

I remain haunted by that other mountain on this ridge, La Meije., and it cannot seen from here, only from La Bérarde, where we were last year, and from La Grave. It was that first moment, seeing the face of Messaien profiled against this strange and wonderful-looking mountain, that got me hooked on the very idea of La Meije. So awhen we would take our annual drive from our cabanon in Provence to the Alps – my husband loves the time that we would go near there. We would actually be able to take a cabin car up the mountain, see the hangliders preparing their wings to fly off into the distance… All very superb as a spectacle, but I had not – and still have not – figured out what the specialness of this particular mountain consisted in.

The bird Olivier Messaien went to La Meije to hear, and whose melody he put in his music, I never found the name of, nor did I ever find again that amazing portrait of the musician against the mountain. But it remains, partly because of that, I expect, looming in my mind. We would be somewhere around in Les Ecrins, the mountain range in which it is found, and I would ask the knowledgeable people which was the mountain I wanted so much to see again… Ah, you can’t see it from here was the usual answer…

Everywhere, there are posted plaques and monuments to the alpine guides and first climbers, usually in the 19^th century, of these mountains. Our hotel, the Engilberghe, is named for one of them. About names, I was intrigued today by two rival stories about Madame Carle, of the famous Meadow (le pré de Madame Carle). Here is one, first the puritanical one; she was married to a high parliament official, but at his death, had to nourish her children, etc. etc. The far more interesting one, or, as the French pamplets and posters say, the “more romantic” one is that she was a lady of easy virtue (“vertu légère”) and, to punish her, her returning husband took away the water source for her mule, who promptly plunged into the boiling waters and took his rider with him. Splash and the end of the easyvirtued lady.

modern art cookbook!

2011-08-08T09:58:00.001-04:00

Having signed the contract for my Modern Art Cookbook, to be published by Reaktion Books, in the UK, but distributed by the Chicago University Press -- both of which publishers I love -- I have quotes from MFK Fisher, Elizabeth David, Laurie Colwin, Hemingway, Proust, Julia Child, Monique Truong (Salt) and so on, but would love a wider selection...
Anyone who has an idea, please do let me know!
This book is about vaious still lifes and recipes connected with the elements in the paintings (you know, Cezanne's Ginger Pot and Eggplants, in the Met Museum, and associated recipes from various artists about eggplant, and Manet's Bunch of Asparagus, and his Single Asparagus, and relevant sections from Proust about asparagus, and from the Hare with Golden Eyes about Charles Ephrussi and his commissioning that painting), but goes wider than that -- it feels heavily tipped towards French recipes, and then modern artist recipes, as it should... but is open to suggestions!
anyone who is interested, and has suggestions, do please respond, thanks,
Mary Ann Caws

the bird who visits me

2011-08-02T03:40:00.002-04:00

And here I am at the table downstairs, thinking breakfast thoughts, and a small bird who always comes to observe what's going on is right here, swaying on a branch, right to the side in the foliage. Way back in the leaves and trees and brambles somewhere is a stone contraption, which used to be called a throne, and I would sit there in my early days here, with a glass neatly posed on one of the ledges, and feel away from things.

In any case at all, one is away from things -- whatever those might be -- here. it is two kilometers to the village, downhill (but you would have to come back uphill, were you afoot), and I do not drive, given my narcolepsy...The bird is faithful, as are some wasps. He cheeps, they buzz, we eat quietly, now some plum jam, made by neighbors.

We threw him some parts of a baguette, just baked in the village, and hope he will get it. Life in the Vaucluse. To me, it is very like Paradise.

hanging out

2011-07-24T01:36:00.001-04:00

A few days a week, here in the cabanon, I put things to soak in Genie (miracle soap powder, "sans frotter," it says, and indeed you don't have to rub it a lot), and then -- later, oh yes, lots later -- I hang them out on the clothesline. They flap in the sun and wind a bit, which sound I love, and then I walk back by the high grass (the part I didn't let anyone mow down) past the mulberry trees to the long table which sometimes seats just us, and has in the past seated a dozen assorted guests. Very assorted. Like a biscuit box: you like them all, and they are forced to like each other as long as they are at your table. When I was editing Joseph Cornell's diaries, i loved reading about his affection for the ones in the Huntley Palmer biscuit box with pink insides -- what a grand enthusiast he was!

We walked to the end of the field yesterday to rip off the climbing vines that want very much to choke off the air from all the trees and bushes, including the lovely large yellow weed bushes (I never knew their names, but I can indeed tell a cherry tree from an oak, yes.) Thorns are of course everywhere, from the blackberries to come, and my gloves (one of each pair that the neighboring dogs didn't get) do have holes, but I am attached to them, and they, sort of, to me.

Then we deserved, methinks, our dinner of hot potato salad with sauteed red peppers (one of the artists' recipes I was trying out), and the country ham provided by the ham and cheese man in the Sunday morning market in our little village. He just remarried his wife after 20 years in an orthodox Russian ceremony, so I got to try out my one church Russian chant on him:; it goes something like hospodi borge moi (not right, but if it were, and I can chant it in a low voice, it means Lord have mercy on me.) Right on. On us, preferably.

early noises in the cabanon

2011-07-23T00:53:00.000-04:00

When you arise early, in the chill, you can hear that familiar bird with its same call, and it never feels too early
The Queen Anne's Lace is rising high around the tiny would-be-growing-if-it-wanted-to olive tree, and I don't see any dandelions: do they get up later?
Later, a bit later, we will have breakfast at our small table in the field, looking at the sun gradually lighting up the trees beyond the trees.
Today Ruth Middleton, artist, poet, biographer, will come with her dogs to lunch... we might go to the market in Pernes to pick up some fruit and a chicken from a spit, or perhaps just here in Mormoiron, then the day for ourselves...
Too cold swimming in the plan d'eau yesterday, won't try it again today. We felt intensely virtuous, but there's bound to be another way to practice virtue without freezing.

looking at mulberries

2011-07-22T13:49:00.002-04:00

Perhaps wherever you sit, in a place you love, it works. Here I am, looking out at my field, intimate -- said a classicist friend last night -- and yet, sort of expansive. Things expand: visiting my smallish cabanon a few years ago, Barbara Johnson, now not with us (oh how alas that is) said, this place gets larger as you sit here. It does indeed.

Now I am looking at our mulberry tree, with one branch hanging down, don't know why -- one branch of the fig tree, on the right side, hangs down also. But not sadly.

Today we walked out into the field, unarmed with gardening gloves, and tried all the same to pull out the offending creeping vines from the trees -- coming blackberries shot their thorns into us, but we will have gone back to New York when they are ripe.

Some nearby dove is cooing -- horrible word, yet the sound is nice.

So many friends coming up the hill, to see us or our neighbors. Our path is unmarked, no driveway, no anything, I have to hang out a scarf for anyone who hasn't been here, hasn't walked up our high stone steps to sit in our field. Folkloric, to be sure.

Our olive tree is unhappy since we moved it, refuses to grow -- last night the classicist poured a libation of the fresh and fruity dry wine from the Domaine d'Urban at Beaumes de Venise, and recited a bit of Virgil, as he had before, perhaps ten years ago, when the olive tree was in its rightful place, right in front of my writing table. I had an olive grove long ago, and then one winter, someone stole the central trunk, the motte from which everything grows; no more olive grove, but I remember it. The olive is a jealous tree, said Rene Char when he came to see us, and I then removed the larger trees around it. They have returned, to replace the olive grove.

The Jay and the Figs

2011-07-16T15:49:00.000-04:00

There I was today, early morning-like, looking from my table in the field at the fig tree, bent down with its plump purple-green figs... Suddenly, the jay who swooped over every evening, just before dinnertime, from West to East, from tree to tree across the field, whirred into the tree, which shook with his weight. Looking right at me, or so it seemed, he took a mouthful of the most luscious=looking fruit, and then another. Finally, having shown me which I should have picked yesterday, he flew off.

And he was right, doggone-it. Right around where he had left the hole were strands of the most juicy figa possible. So I put them on the table with some fromage blanc and a bit of sugar, and we had a super post-jay breakfast.

We had our neighboring dog saga, with one beach sandal and one gardening glove taken surreptitiously overnight or who knows when... All part of cabanon living. Who could live in a cabanon without a sense of humor sufficient to the tiny trials of everyday? A few slugs, a few more scorpions, major wasp nests, and the negotiating of the steep stone steps ... and then the early sun and the late sunsets, all making up for anything before.

looking at a field

2011-07-15T15:56:00.000-04:00

One-half of my field is recently mowed: I am not happy with the lack of grass and dandelions, but my husband likes it this way. The other half is full of dandelions, first thing in the morning, and Queen Anne's Lace, and grass up to your knees -- I love this part of the field. But we sit in the other part...

When it isn't already too hot and late, we have our breakfast at a little wooden table out in the field, shaded by hats and an oak tree, which has somehow sprung up. First, I go toward the fig tree (figues de Caromb) to see if any are dangling heavy to the touch, and if a bird has preceded me, that is all right too: that proves their ripeness. Then we heat some coffee, and have some local bread (we are trying the baguette with cereal grains). This morning, there was a small white butterfly flitting from purple flower to purple flower, and a largish bee doing the same with the dandelions.

We swam this afternoon in the "plan d'eau" or lake, green it is, and cold, from which you can see our mountain, the Mont Ventoux or windy mountain. We have to scramble up the bank afterwards, slipping a bit on the stones and grass, and feeling the privilege of it all.

a pizza party

2011-07-14T21:46:00.000-04:00

Leaving our cabanon to get to the mas up another hill for lunch, we were terribly late, unsure of whether to turn to the right, past a number of signs painted with names of properties: Le petit jas, La treille, and persons we didn’t know: Gindof, Borel, Les Hortensias, or to take the unpaved road full of rocks straight up the hill. So we turned back, came to pick up my cellphone and the number and contacted our hosts: Oh, you turn right across from the sign for wines: Château Pesquié and come up the paved road: don’t leave the paved part! It is marked by a palm and a hortensia, says Mireille. And so it is.

It was certainly not just us. A table had been laid for 12, and clearly we were the 11thand 12th, confronting a sea of faces, only one of which I recognized. Régis the garagiste, now serving as deputy mayor or opposite party deputy mayor or something like that. Broad smiles all around, much handshaking and introduction – the newcomers and the locals. I have only lived in my cabanon for 38 summers, but will always feel “l’étrangère” – and alternately “the American dame prof.” Not so bad after all, given the broad smiles.

I start, looking at the vast collection of bottles before us, with Mireille’s own vin à l’orange, and Boyce with a pastis, of course. That’s what he has every evening after five, when we sit looking out over our field – a pastis with three times really cold water in it (I take five times, preferring it cloudy and weak. It’s cloudy anyway, part of the charm. Try drinking it in New York, and somehow it loses its flavor, if not its cloud.) The conversation picks up again: the mayor (there must be something like 30 houses in our small village, perched on a hill around its church) didn’t come to the opening of the new firemen/policemen’s hall, and gave no excuse! None at all! He just didn’t care, they surmised, and I shook my head in disbelief. And the regular deputy mayor, did he come? No indeed, not even he. The opposite party deputy mayor, Régis – whom I’ve known for these 38 years – shook his head too, but with a big smile. Perhaps he will be elected next time? I turn to the local lady next to me, very blonde and comfortingly largish, and point out I would always vote for Régis. No response: obviously the wrong remark. Ah, it is like my own South: we don't discuss politics? I've no idea. So I just always smile a lot too.

Then we start in seriously. Mireille and Michel – now a celebrated singer of Spanish ballads like “Granada!,” in the line of Escobar, he tells me – are beginning their famous pizzas. Long ago, when they lived in the village, they had a sort of concrete pizza oven, but
now the oven is very tall, looming over the courtyard we found it so hard to fine. We have an “apéro” pizza, to have with the apéritif, with anchovies spread over it. Oddly, but nicely, the men, all sitting on one side, are served first, and for the second go-round, the women. White wine, unless you have started on the rosé/

And so it continues, for a Mediterranean pizza, served on two sides, then a something else, with a large langoustine (split for simpler eating) atop a third one. Is this followed by salad? No, a platter of cheeses – at this point, we are all drinking either rosé wine or red, from nearby cellars, some superb, some just plain good. Finally there emerges a gigantic gâteau, accompanied by the local sparkling wine, and it is now five and a half hours since we came. My husband gestures that perhaps we can take our leave, to the understanding smiles of the ten others: the non-locals are not accustomed to spending eight or so hours in the same place, at the same table…

What did you talk about, asks my husband afterwards, when we are at last making our way down that hill, and up our own? Ah, who married whom, who is divorcing whom, who bought the land from Alain, what will they do with it, what can you plant when the government pays you to rip out the vines? Will olives bring in more than the cherries, which sell for nothing to the middlemen?
Ah, and will we now have our nap to sleep it all off, he asks?

Hare with Amber Eyes

2011-05-01T14:04:00.002-04:00

NOTE FROM NEW YORK
Noughth Week, Trinity Term, 2011
Oxford Magazine

How is it that everyone seems to be reading and seeing the same thing at the same time in such an immense city? Just as everyone around me, and in every single situation turns out to be reading Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes, everyone seems to be seeing or has seen, the film Certified Copy. So that one can discuss the twists and meanders of plots, as happens with the Korean film Poetry, beginning and ending with a watery suicide – saved only by a poetic journal kept by a grandmother whose grandson, and others, were at fault. We came out of that one not exactly enlightened about the poetic impulse, but ready indeed for the twilit streets of New York.

Art is buzzing madly around this city. The annual Art Fair in the Armory is always fun even if, or especially because, we won’t be buying anything. It had exhibitions from glaring to subtle, among the latter being the Jill Newhouse gallery’s small Bonnard called The Dock at Arcachon of 1930 and, across the aisle, a whole row of Joseph Cornell boxes with their small treasures both displayed and hidden away. Russia of yesteryear was there in force, with some delicious Popovas and a Malevich, who is now also appearing in a show called Malevich and American Art, at, of course (it seems to happen all the time) the Gagosian Gallery. I loved looking at the whole conglomeration of H.D. (as in Robert Duncan’s H.D. book), and Jess’s “paste-ups” and “erotic collages” and “assemblies” assembled–that is really the word here – in Jess: To and From the Printed Page, with a smart-as-hell essay by Ingrid Schaffner, and some always resonating words by John Ashbery. Enough to make you not want to wander further. But I did. Some beautiful Diebenkorn prints were around, with eager purchasers smiling largely. Along with the Bonnard, my very favorite was an Emil Nolde watercolour: Sea with smoking steamer of 1946, with its shades of orange and blue radiating into the space around it. A strangely laid-back bunch of visitors, not all buying, but most smiling.

The wayout artist Terence Koh is circling, on his knees, a cone of salt eight hours a day in the Mary Boone Gallery, unless he is lying flat on his stomach to rest. Offering himself as a kind of sacrifice for peace (as the New York Times article about this piece, called “Crawling for Peace in Not-Quite Salt Mine” puts it, it was more comfortable in bed with John and Yoko...). Perhaps a step up from the exhibition a while ago in which he covered his turds with gold leaf...Can’t get much more dramatic, I guess.

And at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, right in the Arnie and Tony James Gallery in the building where I enjoy holding my seminars – the gallery provides a great space of flexibility, run by the Center for the Humanities–there is an extraordinary show called The Making of Americans, with a quite astonishingly faithful reproduction of Gertrude Stein’s salon on the rue Fleurus, and an entire exhibition about just that. This quite amazing thing was prepared by Aiobheann Sweeney and Catherine Karl. American Art abroad and at home emphatically do not feature in the Abstract Expressionist exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. This is a truly amazing exhibition of accurate-sized facsimiles of the traveling exhibition New American Painting (1958-9) organized by Dorothy Miller, feeling like Museum of Modern Art in a smaller space and unconstrained nevertheless. Documents from the Armory show, Steiglitz’s 291 Gallery, and the Société Anonyme, originally created by Duchamp and Katherine Dreier, line the walls and the glass cases, and from Documenta II, in which Americans were included for the first time. Salons are held here every week for the length of this exhibition, with two women featured each time, such as Katherine Dreier and Hilla Rebay, Joan Mitchell and Barbara Guest, Margaret Miller and Elizabeth Bishop, or Berenice Abbott and Muriel Ruykeyser, and many panels on art connected with these shows, featuring all sorts of speakers, an array of enthusiasts. All these paintings and drawings, constructed by an anonymous group of artists, belong to the collections of the Museum of American Art, Berlin, and the Salon de Fleurus, New York.

At MOMA itself, Picasso’s guitars occupy an entire exhibition space, completely quiet to themselves, except for an occasional demonstration, and the squeak of a few rubber-soled shoes or the click of far fewer high heels. I practiced my glare at the proprietors of the said shoes, to not much avail.

Opera buffs have been worried about James Levine – how often will he conduct? Having given up his Boston connection, he has just us, and will apparently
conduct Wagner’s Die Valkyrie and also Wozzeck but not Das Rheingold. We all follow each detail of his back operation and so on. The new production of Rossini’s Le Conte Ory is about to arrive, with the fantastic Juan Diego Flores in the main role...We await.

At the redesigned and reconstructed Alice Tully Hall, with its spaciousness and airiness emphasized by the glass walls and tables rather further apart than often in New York, the Chamber Music Society continues to demonstrate a kind of youthful conviction. Whether they do something baroque or more modern, the enthusiasm of the musicians is matched by that of the listeners: the latter seems unfailing.

An amazing fling just took place at the Park Avenue Armory. In its immense space was a show organized by the Folk Art Museum, called Infinite Variety: Three Centuries of Red and White Quilts. The entire and massive Armory was filled with 631 quilts from the extensive collection of Joanna Semel Rose, all hung from specially imported hanging circular bars, carefully arranged in the cavernous opening, which had suddenly become joyful and colourful. There were circles of quilts in the middle of which you could stand, and in the very center of the exhibition was a quiet circle of chairs, each with a quilt draped over it, like a quilting bee, traditional in memory and full of future potentiality – both, actually. It felt collective, like a shared occupation, opened to those of us who know nothing about quilting or even craft. It was a celebration of red and white all over.

The entrance to the Armory, rather pricey during the frequent art shows, and very pricey indeed during the recent Peter Greenaway spectacular of Leonardo’s Last Supper, was free for the five days of the exhibition, and a steady stream of visitors, many of whom had never entered the Armory before, poured into the welcoming bright space. The variety of visitors was just as infinite as the quilts. It felt like a truly mixed bunch for a truly joyous occasion.

Mary Ann Caws

poetry everywhere in May

2011-05-01T14:01:00.000-04:00

Note from New York

It is May, and cherry and peach blossoms decorate the sidewalks, while tulips red and yellow and white gleam down the middle of Park Avenue and in the flowerbeds of Fifth Avenue coop buldings. People smile.

Let it never be said that my city paid little attention to its wild life. No indeed. A while back, it was Pale Male and his partner, expulsed from a handsome coop building on the East Side of Central Park, outside of which they had built their nest – all firm and lovely on an iron ledge with proper support, admired by many sitters on park benches with camera sights trained on the red-tailed hawks. At the expulsion, New Yorkers in droves protested, the coop board relented, and the support was once again constructed. Pale Male changed partners, eager filmmakers filmed, and one would have thought the affair forgotten.

Ah, but now two other such hawks , Violet and Bobby, have constructed a nest outside the 12th floor office of John Sexton, the president of New York University, way downtown and there are three eggs about to hatch. On them is trained a Hawk Cam video mounted by City Room. It is very noticeable that Violet is the colour of the NYU banner, so it is all perfectly arranged. For the birth, we have been reading in the daily New York Times how that works: the shell is broken with a fierce special tooth, there only for that reason in the chicks, each called, says the expert John Blakeman (master falconer and hawk breeder), an "eyass." We know that Violet and Bobby have lined their nest with "soft grassy insulation," that they have been sitting with great devotion, and that Violet is turning the eggs frequently and showing great agitation. At this writing, we are waiting with bated breath.

On the other side of town, Wagner’s Valkyries have arrived, in force. The set designer LePage’s “machine,” that mammoth and incredibly expensive Thing that has planks moving up and down and lifting as a ceiling or mountains or a sky, and occasionally, making creaking and groaning sounds and causing singers like Deborah Voigt as Brunnhilde to slide down them, also permits the planks to be used as horses for the galloping sisters. Very clever. The voices are super-superb, with Bryan Terfel as Wotan, Jonas Kaufman as Siegmund, and Stephanie Blythe as Fricka, and the night I went, you could definitely hear the voices over the creaks. In the celebrated farewell scene when Wotan declares to Brunnhilde that he will no longer see her sparkling eyes, that she will no longer serve him wine in his cup or glimpse him at all, I suspect that those who had not brought tissues with them regretted that – it was certainly my case, and my regret.

Magnificent exhibitions, including Cézanne’s Card Players still on at the Met museum, and, at MOMA, a German expressionism in prints – where Emil Nolde’s water mills, in different colors, are only matched by his seascapes, full of roar and life. The highlights, besides Franz Marc’s quite delightful World Cow (globalism gone red and good-humoured), were the gigantic and violent posters of wartime.

Both the gigantic Abstract Expressionism in New York and the smallish Picasso’s Guitars are remaining for the moment. About the former, the witty Peter Schjeldahl exclaimed that the only pity was that some day, as soon now, that show would depart.

The New York poetry scene is thriving. All sorts of chapbooks are appearing, in the Lost and Found series, run by the CUNY Poetics Document Initiative (www.lostandfoundbooks.org), spearheaded by Ammiel Alcalay, under the aegis of the Center for the Humanities of the Graduate School of the City University of New York.
Previously unpublished texts by Muriel Ruykeyser, Jack Spicer, Diane de Prima, Robert Duncan, and even  The Correspondence of Kenneth Koch & Frank O’Hara: 1955–1956 (Parts I and II), etc. Poetry readings are everywhere, as usual and more so. Rosanna Warren is reading from her new collection Ghost in a Red Hat, as well as speaking of her forthcoming and long-awaited biography of the French poet Max Jacob, with the well-known critic Christopher Ricks. To our collective delight, John Ashbery, America's most illustrious poet, has just translated Arthur Rimbaud's Illuminations, appearing with Norton this spring of 2011.

Hedda Sterne

2011-04-11T13:50:00.001-04:00

Ah, the loss of Hedda...I loved Hedda, and knew her for year after year, always faithful to what she cared about and to those she cared about...

She would make me dinner in her kitchen with its red stove and, before her immense wallsized painting was taken away, we would look at it together for quite a while before starting in on a bottle of white wine and a conversation, that lasted and lasted and lasted.... from Zen to Venice, from Paris to what we were reading... she read extensively, and would read whatever I mentioned or brought. One wonderful time, she had just read the copy of Virginia Woolf's The Waves I had brought her. It was like a lifetime's ongoing conversation.

She taught me so much, moral things, intellectual things, poetic things, but above all, she was there, on 71st street and in my life. She would write me when I was in France, about her dreams and her going on.

Did she go on! past 100, and past so many others, of such lesser stature.

monodramas in New York

2011-04-06T04:06:00.000-04:00

Monodramas!

Antonin Artaud’s drawings mesmerize you. Astonishingly, at the City Opera, one of them: La Machine de l’être – the Machine of Being – is presented in a breathtaking ten-minute scene. All the bodies on stage are draped entirely in black, and it is the job of the two persons who appear in each of the three monodramas to undrape them as needed: a man in red, a singer in black, and a man levitating above the stage. No text, no plot, but a sort of building anxiety through the three acts of the music by John Zorn, composed in the year 2000.

In Schoenberg’s Erwartung, from 1909, the anxiety is that of the woman in the forest, who loves and hates the man recumbent on the floor of the stage, and it is communicated to the audience throughout the 30 minutes of the presentation.

But REAL anxiety shows through Morton Feldman’s brilliant piece of 1976, “Neither,” on a libretto by Samuel Beckett, beginning with shadows inner and outer, making its way “from impenetrable self to impenetrable unself by way of neither” and ending with an ultra Beckettian lament – or then recognition:

then gently light unfading on that unheeded neither

unspeakable home

Quite a lot of business: strobe lights, appearing and disappearing figures, cubes descending from the ceiling and – touchingly, if oddly – on the horizon, a small house.

Unspeakable, yes, but the music comes through as doing its own saying. Not that we could figure out or pass on, were we asked to elucidate. The light, that unfading light, takes us far, our self on the way on the unself. Beckett’s negatives work with no busyness to them, they simply are.

snow drifts, etc.

2010-12-30T17:45:00.004-05:00

Now in New York

December 27, 20120

At MOMA, right now as I write, is a rather remarkable work called “Stop, Repair, Prepare: Variations on ‘Ode to Joy’ for a Prepared Piano,” constructed (as it were) by Allora and Calzadilla, a team which will be representing the US at the next Venice Biennale. This performance was exhibited in 2008 at the Haus der Kunst in Munich in 2008, and then at the Gladstone Gallery in Chelsea in 2009. I MISSED IT. In the second-floor atrium at MOMA, it reminds us of, as Roberta Smith states it in a review neatly entitled “Popping Out to Play Beethoven,” in the Weekend Arts section of the New York Times of December 10, 2010, all the “interventionist, appropriation and interactive art, which stretch from FLUXUS to relational aesthetics, with many stops in between.” I am going to rush to see it before January 10 (it is performed every hour, so I have no excuse from the snow drifts or anything else). In the photo I see, there is Evan Shinners performing the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony on – no, out of – a hole in a prepared Bechstein. And then another photo, of Mia Elzovic, and the audience moving around to follow the piano as it moves… Who could resist?

Now, the Allora-Calzadilla team quotes Gordon Matta-Clark’s sliced-open buildings as inspiration. Roberta Smith remembers a photo of Robert Rauschenberg performing the 1963 dance “Pelican” on roller skates, a parachute open on his back. OK. Now let’s talk about the piano. The hole means that two octaves of strings are gone, so there are just thumps in the middle. The pedals are reversed, in case that makes easier the task, I would think rather complicated, of performing upside down and from the inside out. Some performers make mistakes (really?) and some make key changes, unable to reach the black keys.

Oh, the back story. It was among Hitler’s favorite pieces of music: now that is really comforting, and to know that Wilhelm Furtwangler conducted a performance of the Beethoven in 1942, on Hitler’s birthday, this was at the Haus der Kunst, again, or rather, before. And it was the national anthem of Rhodesia (very apartheid, as is pointed out), and featured as part of Western music by the Chinese during the Cultural Revolution (you know, part of the workers’ struggle), and is now the anthem of our own European Union.

Because we recognize the music so well, we can all

appreciate, says Smith, the “deflating distortions visited upon it in its latest incarnation” in which Allora and Calzadeilla have made a new youthful masterpiece of the old one. Let me quote a sentence verbatim, from her review: “The result is a performance in extremis, and possibly a form of reparation for the regimes the music, in its greatness, has served.” This is a good in extremis.

snow drifts, etc.

2010-12-30T17:45:00.002-05:00

Now in New York

December 27, 20120

Because we recognize the music so well, we can all

the Met(s)

2010-12-30T15:40:00.001-05:00

Last night Pelleas and Melisande at the opera: heartrending, solemn in its gloom and quiet
You can see why Proust loved this above all operas: he would listen on his Theatrophone, and cancel any other engagements, wherever it was playing
and to stay in that mood, I went the other Met, the museum, this morning, to look at the stucco figures and the Roman frescos -- the flying female figures in bas-relief, to send to Susan Salm and Frieder Danielis -- with whom I often go to see them... we always meet there, before going here and there, and usually ending up at the Brueghel Harvesters , and I always think of William Carlos Williams' Pictures from Brueghel , about which there is so much to say and write
WHICH is the red stocking one, must look it up, since we were talking about it the other night,
ah, it is indeed on Brueghel's The Blind Leading the Blind:

The Parable of the Blind

William Carlos Williams
This horrible but superb painting
the parable of the blind
without a red
in the composition

and of course it does, one of the stockings is red.....

and we were talking as well as about Daniel Mendelsohn's The Lost, and about Julian Bell's piece in the LRB about Salvatore Rosa (the jagged black line down the volcano into which Empedocles is about to hurl himself)

and I indulged in reading from Mark Doty's Still Life with Oysters and Lemon -- about falling in love with a picture and walking in its light...

theodore on Christmas eve 2010

2010-12-30T15:19:00.000-05:00

boyce and matthew at our piano

2010-12-30T15:18:00.000-05:00

matthew and theodore

2010-12-30T15:16:00.000-05:00

series,etc.

2010-12-26T16:56:00.000-05:00

Thinking about series and continuation

So what is it that hooks people into a series of tv programs? Is it the same sort of thing that used to keep us faithful to radio programs years ago? Bob and Ray? Hop Harrigan and the Pirates? The Shadow Knows? Those were about the voice and continuation of character, as are the visual series: I remember preferring not to venture out on nights of The Jewel and the Crown, or then Upstairs Downstairs… I saw only one session of The Sopranos, not liking any of the faces or bodies in it. That is it for me: getting attached to a face or/and a voice and a character. Mad Men was so widely watched that many discussions of various subjects relied upon the latest episodes to focus attention. I detested it upon first sight, the slickness of Don Draper, not just his falseness; the massive vulgarity of the secretary, the boring and simpering Peggy. But I liked the grey hair of whatever his name was, and in fact my husband and myself found ourselves watching many, in fact, all the episodes we had been sent. In one wild burst of afternoon madness, I rented the last episodes, and marveled – as did everyone else I discussed it with – at the rapid conclusion of our Don with a French-speaking secretary (ah, a Canadian!) who could entertain his children and appeal sufficiently for him to propose to her – whom he had known 28 minutes in viewing time.

I guess that really surprise ending rivals the end of The Sopranos when it all blacks out – the viewers take it from there.

With all this in mind, I recently rented 12 episodes of the British Lytton’s Diary, in total ignorance of what it was about. That it concerned a gossip columnist for a Daily News periodical seemed interesting enough, when I thought back to Pat and Mike, the Front Desk, Broadcast News, and all the wonderful newspaper films. The moral issue in Broadcast News, when Holly Hunter, with that wonderful unmistakable voice, breaks off with the gorgeous William Hurt because he has cheated on his newscast by shooting a scene twice to show his emotion, was brought back to me when we re-watched The Way We Were, and the so moral and political Barbra Streisand irritating the very cool Robert Redford. Of course those two couples weren’t going to make it, and of course, the cool looks of the guys were the exact opposite of the very short Holly Hunter and the very frizzed Barbra, when she stopped ironing her hair.

But alas, having seen four episodes of Lytton, I still don’t take to his face – too smooth – or his eyes, not with a twinkle at all, although he can look sideways, or his moustache, or his height. He wears a handkerchief in his pocket and always a tie and the very blankness of his face undoes whatever interest the various plots have. And they do: The women with the mask, the tell it all memoirist whose affair with the aging famous movie star’s husband provokes the star’s violence, the attempted smear of our hero’s reputation – none of these have that grabbing quality that I long for in my movies and soaps and series. I love the office scenes, of course, and they have the same appeal of continuing characters whose quirks and voices and clothes we know as The Office, and of the very wonderful and much-regretted West Wing.

With its rapid pace, its witty and underplayed dialogue and its lovable President (who should have been ours, we kept thinking), that series could go on ad infinitum and we would still be watching it, even as it changed somewhat as it aged. I suppose we all do, but it was, like the undying film A Song to Remember and anything else with Cary Grant, totally worth living in when it was on the screen.

subway stuff

2010-12-22T19:23:00.000-05:00

At the Met today, the Mabuse (Jan Gossaert) exhibition – Mannerism defined as nature abhors a vacumn and elongated figures – textures of garments exatraordinary—sweetness of Virgin’s face – and a few “disguised portraits” when the sitter is disguised as, say, Mary Magdalen or the Virgin. The small dance you have to do to read the label when far taller persons are scooting behind you and above you to peer at the same thing.

In the ongoing saga of the Smithsonian exhibition called “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture,” the artist AA Bronson requested that the photograph of his partner “Felix, June 5, 1994” which shows him shortly after he died of AIDS. This was to protest the removal of another work because the religious right had insisted it be removed: this was a video by the artist David Wojnarowicz portraying ants crawling over a crucifix. The request for the second removal was rejected, but Mr. Bronson’s lawyer informed him that his moral rights guaranteed he could withdraw his work if he so chose….” This is the way the case stands on December 21, 2010.

And here’s something about the Train of Thought., a program that had been placing literary quotes in subways cars, after the program Poetry in Motion had run from 1992 t 2008. More problematic still, the Metropollitan Traffic Authority (the MTA) has now removed all the placards which had been affixed to the subway walls featuring various literary quotations.These quotes, of which The latest version of the literary quotes was ready in October and handed in (excerpts from Rilke, T.S. Eliot, and Epictetus) They need the room, says the MTA, to place information about the transportations itself. Sample of their unforgettable style: “If it’s broke, fix it.” Very moving..

victoria and seattle

2010-12-12T12:12:00.000-05:00

Note from Seattle and Victoria, B.C.

Mary Ann Caws

Lots of rain, more mist in Victoria British Columbia, oddly bracing. Some things are always here, like ultra-oldecolonial proper beyond belief Empress Hotel, known for its Bengal Lounge (“turn right at the elephant” serves as direction) and its afternoon tea service. (The ultimate irony of discussing anything postcolonial in such a colonial setting is gorgeously obvious.)

People come to Victoria often for the Gardens which are everywhere: the famed Butchart Gardens, just outside the city, the Crystal Gardens, just across from the bus station, and the Undersea Gardens, at the port. Right across from the Empress Hotel, the Royal British Columbia Museum is about as spacious and informative as any historical museum could possibly be. Hall after hall displays treasures from the First Nation peoples, the tribes and totems and ways of living. Every time it seems to me still more impressive, still larger, with its dioramas and dark places. Outside is a traditional longhouse, with a skyscraper of a totem pole and a face looking out onto the road. When the surrealists came over to North America during World War II (“Surrealism in Exile,” as in Martica Sawin’s book on the topic), some of them went up to the West Coast of Canada and explored the territories of the Salish, Saanich, and other tribes. The artist heroine of Victoria (and the reason I first came to Victoria and Vancouver) is Emily Carr, a superb painter of First Nation tribal art and the great forests and lakes of the Pacific Northwest. Her writing, both quirky and brilliant, is a discovery to make if one hasn’t already come across it, and her life with her various animals: her pet rat, her monkey she kept with her at all times, and various other creatures, is – to put it very mildly – unusual. At an advanced age, she set forth in a sort of van called The Elephant, to set up her easel and create. In front of the Empress, she remains in bronze, monkey and all, and one should salute her as one passes.

Lots of happening things happened here this November, in conjunction with the annual conference of the Modernist Studies Association. Here’s one of the happenings: one evening, in a small theatre space called “Open Space Gallery,” a genius actress also a scholar participant in the meetings (author of Archaelogy and Modernism), Sasha Colby performed as H.D. in an extract of a full theatre piece about H.D., in which she played all the roles: H.D. young with Ezra Pound, H.D. later, with Freud, H.D. elderly, cramped over. It was an electric performance, and moving to tears. There was also probably the first performance of a play by Mina Loy, The Pamperers, discovered in a 1920 issue of The Dial, and then reprinted in 1996 in the Performing Arts Journal. Other evenings, there were salons at Emily Carr’s house, one discussing her work and another, that of Joyce.

Victoria is full of places to have oysters from Fanny Bay, which are, in my view, best consumed just like that, although they are offered often fried and dusted with Panko (those Japanese bread crumbs for fish) and even in an Oyster Burger. There is always the rightly-named The Oyster, and there is, even better, my favorite place for hanging out, Bartholomew’s, serving local beer from Granville Island, off Vancouver, and all sorts of lightly-priced fresh foods, spinach salad being a superb choice. It features dim lighting and a general laid-back manner, and does the Wharfside Seafood Grill, with a view right on the harbour and prices right up there with the view. Ships in the harbour, and at night, the Parliament Building lit up in profile, lights on the trees, the whole kit and caboodle.

Walking is just as delightful in Dickensian Victoria. Fort Street is bordered with gas lamps, in clusters of three, and a very (seriously) old world feeling. I arrived there this time on Remembrance Day, and the place around the Parliament Building was packed with sober-faced persons, all red-flower wearing (poppies, like Flanders Field? I couldn’t tell), complete with prayers and songs and canon fire from the water. I felt very pagan, making my way to the Queen Victoria Hotel, where my stay was included in a Victoria Clipper package, a return voyage between Victoria and Seattle.

One of the multiple advantages of anything going on in Victoria is that you can arrive there by those boats, all red and blue and white, where on the almost three hour crossing, you are served whatever you like from almonds to hot water for tea and coffee, endlessly refilled. In the daylight, you can stand on deck and see the water spinning by; in darker times, you can sit back and do whatever you do. Just being on a boat seems something of a miracle if you like in New York City.

When you go back to Seattle, from wherever you are, you find such a relaxed place, with a mindset totally unlike that of New York. Even the Seattle Art Museum (I love the initials SAM, makes you feel at home) is a joy – now at the moment, it has a Picasso show, made from the holdings of the Picasso Museum in Paris, being remodelled.When I was sitting at my very, very favorite restaurant in Seattle, at Pike’s Market (“turn left at the pig,” whose hoof prints are all over the sidewalk), called Matt’s in the Market, on the very top floor, I heard the story. I always sit at the bar, above which is a large sign: Counter Intelligence, one of those places you don’t have to take a book or paper to read. You can just sit and be happy. So I was sitting and being happy in the sunbeam streaming through the large interestingly-shaped windows. Having steamed clams in a broth with chives and leeks was a total joy. A waiter rushed over with hot bread to dunk up the bottom of the bowl in, and a glass of the local brew (Pike’s, of course), and the proprietor told me the Picasso-Seattle story. The exhibition is truly magnificent, with some of the very best pieces displayed, and an instructive audioguide with comments on the paintings by Chuck Close, Pepe Carmel, and Anne Baldessari from the Picasso Museum in Paris.

I exuded my joy at re-being here in Seattle and here at Matt’s and told him I was coming back to lecture on the Picasso exhibition next month, etc., and he told me about his favorite place in New York: Mary’s Fish Camp in the West Village, and then he said: “You know why we got the Picasso?” “Nope,” I said, all ears; “Well, the director of the museum flew over to the Picasso Museum and said we’d love to have a Picasso exhibit. And so we do.” Picasso always gets people to talking – when MOMA in New York was being remodeled, the joke was they had a very few “Picasso-free” rooms..When I mention that to my friends, they never even giggle.

So, in Seattle, you can walk and walk along Elliot’s Bay, for ages, visit the very large Aquarium, or sample some of the extraordinarily-complicated dishes here and there, at the Dahlia Lounge (appetizers with this on that,) or the Purple Café (here, all sorts of local cheese, all served with very long and very crisp homemade crackers and fig jam, perhaps with a glass of Washington State Riesling they recommend, and here you can look up at the immensely high stair full of bottles reaching up several floors. All the white wines from Okenagan Valley I tried on this and my last visits were superb.

What a memory: on a leisurely trip by bus around Vancouver Island, I first tried them at the Long Beach Lodge, a wonderfully relaxed place with a long bare beach and a high room from which you can look out upon it, having whatever glass of wine or ale you might prefer. Again, the white wines (especially remarkable), worked with whatever I was having (even the remarkable pizza, of fig and the local equivalent of prosciutto –consumed in a large leather chair by the fire – of which I took the remainders back to my room to heat on the fireplace and have on the beach for my next lunch.

To return to Seattle, as I hope often to do --what with Pike’s Place Market and the free bus along the road by the Bay and the walkability of the place, if you don’t mind ups and downs,is to see how Seattle is truly lovable. Lest it be thought that I ONLY care about eating and drinking, let me point out that you have only to find somewhere to sit and stare at Elliott Bay to be convinced how lovable is this city. Groups of young people on the streetcorners seem unthreatening, the bookstore owners seem truly involved in what you might like to read or see, the less expensive hotels are delighted to have you, while the more expensive ones (like the Kimpton Chain) love to offer you all sorts of wines to cheer up your evening. At the Hotel Monaco, a quirky Oriental--oriented place, you are offered a goldfish in a bowl to keep you company, in case you miss your pet. Very endearing, like all of Seattle.

now in new york

2010-12-05T18:14:00.001-05:00

Now in New York!

Peter Greenaway’s Vision of Leonardo’s Last Supper of 1498 has just arrived at the Park Avenue Armory: a major arrival. It hasn’t actually been taken off the wall of the Santa Maria delle Grazie monastery in Milan, but the enormous replica has come. This replica or “clone”, that Factum Arte took five weeks to construct, was “painted” by an inkjet printer, but will last longer than the original… The projection in the massive armory is likely to astound those who haven’t seen Greenaway’s previous such projections, such as the Rembrandt Nightwatch (but iin that case, the projections were onto the real canvas) and the Veronese Wedding at Cana in Venice last year. Some are intensely furious at such playing with the works of art, some are just shocked, and some are moved. Full disclosure: I am one of the latter, having seen the projection of the Wedding at Cana during the Venice Biennale. The spectators sat and stood everywhere, scarcely an inch of room to make any protesting or acclaiming gesture during the projection. The whole thing stuck in my mind, along with the music, and I found it impossible to recount to those who hadn’t experienced it. Now we New Yorkers can have a Last Supper experience….

Not exactly on the same scale is one among the tropical terrariums (terraria?) constructed by Paula Hayes at MOMA, under the alluring title: “Nocturne of the Limax maximus,” delightfully translated as “Night music of the great slug.” Now the fact that that the Great Slug is really called the “leopard slug” added to this delight. My favorite terrarium is just plain “Slug” – fifteen feet in length, and it hangs on a wall, whereas “Egg” (filled with plants, not slugs) stands upright. Perhaps MOMA will buy “Slug,” but that we don’t know yet.

Right up there with living things as part of spectatordom are the pigeons squatting atop the glass coffin in the see-into portion of the Houdini exhibition constructed by Matthew Barney for his Cremaster project, and recreated in the Jewish Museum here. (Last week, we went on a Saturday, always free entry, because they can’t handle money on a Saturday, and in this case, we were given jelly doughnuts on our departure, to celebrate Channukah.) Back to the pigeons. They were put there deliberately to “deface” the coffin, are properly and continually nourished and given breathing room – as a wall text reassures us. I hadn’t known that the world-famous Houdini (80, 000 spectators for his stunts, out of straitjackets, out of buildings, off bridges, out of milk cans and steamer trunks and so on) was the son of a rabbi, thus the Jewish Museum venue. Nor had I remembered that his character was played by Norman Mailer and by Matthew Barney himself in various parts of the Cremaster series (2 and 5, if I have my numbers right.) And, of course, by Tony Curtis in a Hollywood film, but that I remembered.

Now I wasn’t in Washington when the National Portrait Gallery recently removed a video from the exhibition called “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American portraiture” because it was deemed offensive to the public. The video, made by David Wojnarowicz to depict the suffering caused by Aids, is called “A Fire in my Belly” and features a scene of a crucifix across which ants are crawling. Didn’t see it, no, but I do vividly remember the fuss over the Piss Christ also in Washington, and, in Brooklyn, Mayor Giuliani’s horror over Chris Offil’s Madonna made with dung, to such an extent that he wanted to close down the subway stop nearest to the museum.

In any case, Houdini’s pigeons are still there, doing their thing.

anniversary of 10/11: remembering

2010-11-30T20:35:00.002-05:00

A Note from New York

Mary Ann Caws

I am writing this on September 11, 2005, on this anniversary of when everything changed here. More recently, the New Orleans disaster swallowed up in its enormous craw anniversaries, rituals, and everydayness – except what the president calls “the blame game.” (You don’t have to say “our president,” says one of my family members, AND you certainly don’t have to say “we” about the acts you so disapprove of committed by the United States. D’accord. And that isn’t just because I also have a UK passport, and am therefore a member of the European community – that is because none of us has to say “we” when it isn’t us. OK I say, thank you, Jonathan.)

So, the recent disaster. The sweetness of New Orleans past, a poignant memory , came back last night, watching A Love Song for Bobby Long. Truth is we watched it because in it is a song by my son Matthew’s group NADA SURF (featured this week in New York Magazine, yes.) “Blonde on Blonde,” sings Matthew, in a four-minute ode to Bob Dylan. How things get personalised, individualised, brought home from what is too big, too terrible to contemplate.

New York in September is crisp and sunny and full. Just today the Shakespeare in the Park festival ended, this time with Two Gentlemen from Verona, made into a terrific musical. To get free tickets, you stand (or sit on the several benches around the park) starting at, say, 10:30 am for the passes that are handed out at 1:00 sharp. When those give out, fifty numbered vouchers are given, which can be used in the standby line at 6:30 p.m., in case anyone cancels. Unlikely in this case. Families and couples sit all around on the grass on Central Park’s Great Lawn with their picnics and their guitars and books, and the informality is exactly the opposite of Glyndbourne’s formal tradition. One complements the other, for many of us. Democratization is important here, so the contributors to the festival (who get tickets in advance) are seated among those who wait for theirs. About two thousand people cram on to the bleachers, applaud vigorously, laugh uproariously, and weep when the occasion calls for it, as it often does. This time, the general gaiety of the performance, rapid and multicolored, won over every observer, it seemed. How not?

The New York City Opera just opened, with Strauss’s Capriccio, and its most eagerly anticipated presentation this year seems to be Paul Dukas’s Ariane et Barbe-Bleue. The audiences are lively, enthusiastic, and, in general, younger than those at the much venerated Metropolitan Opera – the tickets are far less expensive, as are the productions (the sets are popularly called “cheapo,” but that means the administration can take many risks. Performances are presented which you can find nowhere else, and year after year their Handel operas are the best around.)

The new MOMA, the essential Museum of Modern Art rethought and reconstructed, in a larger space with great fanfare, has just presented, in association with its exhibition of Cézanne/ Pissarro, a symposium of great excitement and some innovative points of view. It was presented, as Richard Bretell, the keynote speaker, and T.J. Clark, the brilliant author of Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism, pointed out, as a dialogic approach to art history. If the main thrust of the discussion concerned the importance of those two great painters working side by side for a time in Pontoise, then the ways in which their canvasses themselves entered into conversation with those of the artists like Courbet, Gauguin, Seurat, was no less interesting. Of particular fascination to me and several others was the illustration of how their touch and stroke – the famous sign of work or tache – went along with their self-conception as worker-artists (on this, Anthea Cullen was especially illuminating). See them wearing the smock and rough woven-clothes that mark them as workers, not consumers – involved in the culture of work as opposed to that of commodity. The great thing about such symposia is, of course, that you learn to see differently, or at least, more.

Finally speaking of strokes, what a season it has been for the US Open tennis tournament! The gorgeous Maria Sharapova shrieking after every stroke, the Williams sisters batting it out, and – our alltime favorite, André Agassi, at what is for tennis a very old age of 35, competing in the finals against Roger Federer, the world champion. The match had both panache and dignity: as Agassi had said about an earlier five-set match he played, not me, not the other guy, but tennis was the winner here. Among the 24,000 fans in the stands were André’s wife, Steffi Graf, whose tennis game many of us used to follow, and their two children, of 2 and 4, Robin Williams, Dustin Hoffman, Lance Armstrong, and James Taylor, who opened the match with his son and his guitar, singing “America the Beautiful.” Well, it is, but feels threatened by mismanagement (I am understating the case) from inside as it is, by elements natural and human, from without, and there seems to be pitifully little any of us, vociferous and less so, can do about it.

worlde faire!

2010-11-30T20:26:00.000-05:00

Note from New York

Mary Ann Caws

Can you imagine something calling itself the World Maker Faire in New York? They had to add the “World” part, after the whole thing got moved here from San Mateo, California, Austin, Texas, and Detroit, Michigan, it felt Bigger still. Thus the World.

It seems to include just about everything possible, including an Axe Frinder, a bike in the middle of a 23 foot high tower that plays electric guitars in a kind of windmill when you pedal it. And, most grandly, a chariot race, from rickshaws to a jetpropelled car. The seemingly most improbable items and collectivities abound, such as the Members of the Swimming Cities of the Ocean of Blood, artists from Brooklyn who plan to float down the the Ganges on rafts next year – this year they are in the chariot race.

At the Met, the Ring is starting up in the LePage production. The opening of Das Rheingold is to be shown on the enormous HD screen at Lincoln Center, in Times Square, and no doubt elsewhere. Very Big Indeed.

Gustav Mahler has returned to New York, first at the Philharmonic with Alan Gilbert conduction the Sixth Symphony, the one with the hammer and so on. Lots later, here and there: can’t have too much Mahler. But I do notice that when he is being played LOUDLY in our small apartment, I get grumpy and anxious, both at once.

I want to see The Big Uneasy about Katrina and New Orleans, The Social Network: now you know what that’s about, but hey, the cover of New York Magazine says it’s “the Movie Facebook doesn’t want you to see,” now THAT will bring everyone in, for sure. Most definitely I have to see the documentary about Glenn Gould, whose face I had, in a magnified state, in my kitchen in New York before I got remarried. No way is my husband, who also plays, but on a normal piano bench, going to have that face in his (our) kitchen.

There’s a combination of Richard Serra big pieces somewhere in Brooklyn, but unless he states it is by him (as in, site-specific), it remains just that. We see a photograph of part of it in the New York Times, and there it sits. That’s an appealing concept all right.

Greatly appealing, in three locations in the city right now, is Roy Lichtenstein: he’s at the Morgan Library, in midtown, at the Leo Castelli Gallery on the upper East Side, and at Mitchell-Innes and Nash in Chelsea, middowntown, which is convenient if you want to walk on the High Line, way up, on the once railroad line. Matisse is still at MOMA, as is the Original Copy, about photography of sculpture.

Early this month, out of curiosity and loving the title I went solo to a matinee of Love, Loss, and What I Wore. The book is by Ilene Beckerman, and the play by Nora Ephron (as in the brilliant revenge novel and film Heartburn) and Delia Ephron. The sections (like: The Bra, Black, Shoes, that kind of thing) were read by the five very different women on stage, and a narrator pulled it together. It worked well, with a series of posters representing the “what I wore” part. Each member of the almost all female audience was given a sheet with an invitation to “Draw A Picture of Yourself” and to hand it in to the merchandise stand, at which point it would become the property of Love Loss Productions. I resisted, but liked the idea.

I HATED The Screwtape Letters, staged as in Hell, I guess, and I found it overblown and wanted to leave: but, dammit, we were in the middle of a row and I’m still too southern polite to be able to rustle out, or even sneak out. AND I LOVED Orlando, finding it not nearly so far from Virginia Woolf’s super love letter to Vita Sackville-West as a recent production of The Waves, full of noise and mirrors and rushing about. What an actress plays Orlando man and woman, super, like Tilda Swinton in the film. Lyric and elegant and swooping about all along: Francesa Faridany was matched, in her genius, by Dravid Greenspan, playing Queen Victoria, and by Annika Boras as Sasha the Russian Princess (the Violet Trefusis character) – in fact, the whole thing seemed really right on key.

I have to admit that among the varied theatre offerings this season, my favorite is A.R. Gurney’s play Office Hours, at the tiny Flea Theatre, which stars my very own cousin, Betsy Lippitt, in five or six roles: she is super (objective judgment also) and since it concerns teaching, curricula, and that kind of issue (don’t you hate the word “issues?”), it particularly interested me. And, thankfully, my husband also, and everyone else in the audience. Rave reviews and reception, deeply deserved.

thanksgiving a lot

2010-11-30T20:21:00.002-05:00

THANKSGIVING DAY, 2010

Our New York times

I am giving lots of thanks for the assemblage of quirky things all around us in New York. First, for the fact that, quoting Kate Taylor in the New York Times of November 17, 2010, “a New York University photography professor will have a camera surgically implanted in the back of his head for several months as part of an art project commissioned by the government of Qatar.” The story was run first in The Wall Street Journal, and strikes me as pretty remarkable. “ The project, called ''The 3rd I'' and organized by a new Qatari museum called Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, will involve the camera taking pictures at one-minute intervals with the images being streamed to a computer database and then appearing in different sequences, some in real time, on monitors in an exhibition space in Doha between December and May.” The professor, Wafaa Bilal, had offered to cover the camera with a lens cap whenever he is on the N.Y.U. campus, but NYU has required that he desist from this project when in any university building, thus protecting the privacy of students and faculty. Ah. Given the recent uproar over screenings in airports, this seems a pretty good idea.

Next, for the pair of cowboy boots which live near a bench in Central Park, and have been there for at least six years, amid a bunch of crumpled leaves and Himalayan pine needles. They get replaced by a new pair from time to time. It turns out the boots belong to Hugo, a labor union organizer, who wears sneakers to look at “the light slanting through the trees” into the park. Nice.

And thirdly, and most engrossingly, again in a story about Central Park, I am intrigued by a film about Pale Male, that red-tailed hawk whose ambulations or wingulations and nesting behavior we used to follow on a Fifth Avenue co-op a while back. We would sit on a bench in our beloved Central Park and try for a sighting. Now the Legend of Pale Male is a film referred to in the New York Times of Nov. 25, 2010 piece by Jeanette Catsoulis, as a “sugary, aggressively anthropomorphized story of one avian interloper and a whole bunch of human obsessives.” This is, it appears, the sequel to a film called Pale Male, narrated by Joanne Woodward. For this one, Frederick Lilien, who produced the film, is his own narrator, and he feels like the biographer of the avian hero. To fill anyone in who wasn’t avidly following the story when it first kept happening, reported faithfully in the New York Times, Pale Male and his companion Lola would kill pigeons and drop the remains in front of the coop at 980 Fifth Avenue, some of whose owners were very unpleased and protested. A barrier went up so that the hawks could not return, which greatly irritated a few other human dwellers of the apartment house and the park. Etc. Back then, the wildlife writer Marie Winn and the videographer Lincoln Karim sat there and telescoped there with their “Hubble” – which itself became irritating to the co-op’s residents. Thus the film number two, which, it seems, “turns into a populist, right-versus-might crusade” about the co-op board and the Central Park observers, that is, “the so-called fellowship of the bench.” Janet Hess wrote the script, Rik David did the photography, and they hang out with Frederick Lilien and Marie Winn on that bench. What’s not to love?

And after Thanksgiving, here we are November 30, and along with the furor over Wikileaks, this: “Some Brooklyn Bees Turn Red” – turns out they were dipping into the sugary liquid from the nearby vats at Dell’s Maraschino Cherries/ And of course the electrician removing 271 works of Picasso’s, which he claims the painter gave him; it surfaces now that M. Pierre Le Guennec wanted to have them authenticated by Claude Picasso, who somehow did not believe the story of the gift. Then one of those art imitates life things: the grand actor Martin Rayner, playing a Freud dying of prostate cancer, collapses on stage in the last session of the play Freud’s Last Session, and is helped by Mark H. Dold, playing C.S. Lewis and helping Freud in the last act of the play. The writeup, by Corey Kilgannon, ends with Mr. Rayner (who is attempting to deal with his own prostate cancer by a raw food diet of green vegetables and flaxseed oil, enhanced by a powder with herbs and such) saying “I was actually winning,” and Mr. dold correcting him: “I am actually winning.” Cheers you up.

bizarre things in new york

2010-11-23T09:09:00.001-05:00

Bizarre things…. At the Met, for the Das Rheingold operning Gala, the elaborate machinery somehow didn’t work altogether. However, given the enormous enthusiasm for James Levine reappearing – very long ovation, followed by the national anthem – almost nothing could go wrong. What is a glitch in the spectacle compared to such an outpouring of audience affection?

No chaos, though. On the other hand, at the Guggenheim Museum, to go along with the exhibition Kenneth Silver has organized about Chaos* is a presentation – well, parody? – about Jean Cocteau’s film Blood of a Poet (the original starring Lee Miller in her gorgeousness) with live music by

Now this reminds me of the live presentation of Brief Encounter, which uses film clips and a lot of inventiveness. I saw another live presentation of it in London last year , no less inventive and moving. Trevor Howard would break any sensitive soul up, and does, no matter how we get to see him.

Mahler is still going and going on, and the famous 2^nd, with the two or three hammer blows – Alan Gilbert, whose rendering we heard last week, chose three hammer blows. Mahler, superstitious about the significance of three, finally opted, it seems, for two.

Another choice had to be made also, about the order of the Andante and the Scherzo, Mahler having wavered over that also:

Gilbert chose the Andante first, finding it the better bridge.

As for the hammer and loudness. It seems that various percussion groups are scouting about in back yards in Brooklyn to find things that will make a pleasingly large sound. Of course, percussion groups!

On the far quieter side, the exhibition of Jon
Schueler: the Castelli Years has a loveliness and yet an excitement to it that are rare. Magda Salvesen, his widow, has put together his work (as she did his life) with a grace and stillness that speak as loudly as those percussion instruments. Her edition of The Sound of Sleat has his writings about Mallaig, as sensitive as his paintings. I am especially taken by the North, with the depth of fog

Of the many plays that stay in your mind, Time Stands Still stands out for me, because of Laura Linney’s portrayal of the wounded photographer who returns from the war, wounded in spirit as in limb. Her acerbic wit comes through every line by Donald Margulies, and you feel her living the prickliness.

Quite remarkable, the long-lasting spectacles we are so addicted to here. I well remember reading the Iliad for days in a row, and als Gertrude Stein’s the Making of Americans: marathons, both of them. Now, miraculaously, there is a VERY VERY long representation (seven hours, seems long to me) of the encounter of a reader and The Great Gatsby. Thiz Gatz is thanks to the Elevator Repair Service, a company that has put on, already, The Sound and the Fury, as weel ass The Sun Also Rises. The chemistry here, as the review in the New York Times puts it, is the variation on the formula: Boy meets book. Boy gets book. Boy becomes lost in book.

victoria and seattle

2010-11-23T08:53:00.003-05:00

Note from Seattle and Victoria, B.C.

Mary Ann Caws

Lots of rain, more mist in Victoria British Columbia, oddly bracing. Some things are always here, like ultra-oldecolonial proper beyond belief Empress Hotel, known for its Bengal Lounge (“turn right at the elephant” serves as direction) and its afternoon tea service. (The ultimate irony of discussing anything postcolonial in such a colonial setting is gorgeously obvious.)

People come to Victoria often for the Gardens which are everywhere: the famed Butchart Gardens, just outside the city, the Crystal Gardens, just across from the bus station, and the Undersea Gardens, at the port. Right across from the Empress Hotel, the Royal British Columbia Museum is about as spacious and informative as any historical museum could possibly be. Hall after hall displays treasures from the First Nation peoples, the tribes and totems and ways of living. Every time it seems to me still more impressive, still larger, with its dioramas and dark places. Outside is a traditional longhouse, with a skyscraper of a totem pole and a face looking out onto the road. When the surrealists came over to North America during World War II (“Surrealism in Exile,” as in Martica Sawin’s book on the topic), some of them went up to the West Coast of Canada and explored the territories of the Salish, Saanich, and other tribes. The artist heroine of Victoria (and the reason I first came to Victoria and Vancouver) is Emily Carr, a superb painter of First Nation tribal art and the great forests and lakes of the Pacific Northwest. Her writing, both quirky and brilliant, is a discovery to make if one hasn’t already come across it, and her life with her various animals: her pet rat, her monkey she kept with her at all times, and various other creatures, is – to put it very mildly – unusual. At an advanced age, she set forth in a sort of van called The Elephant, to set up her easel and create. In front of the Empress, she remains in bronze, monkey and all, and one should salute her as one passes.

Lots of happening things happened here this November, in conjunction with the annual conference of the Modernist Studies Association. Here’s one of the happenings: one evening, in a small theatre space called “Open Space Gallery,” a genius actress also a scholar participant in the meetings (author of Archaelogy and Modernism), Sasha Colby performed as H.D. in an extract of a full theatre piece about H.D., in which she played all the roles: H.D. young with Ezra Pound, H.D. later, with Freud, H.D. elderly, cramped over. It was an electric performance, and moving to tears. There was also probably the first performance of a play by Mina Loy, The Pamperers, discovered in a 1920 issue of The Dial, and then reprinted in 1996 in the Performing Arts Journal. Other evenings, there were salons at Emily Carr’s house, one discussing her work and another, that of Joyce.

Victoria is full of places to have oysters from Fanny Bay, which are, in my view, best consumed just like that, although they are offered often fried and dusted with Panko (those Japanese bread crumbs for fish) and even in an Oyster Burger. There is always the rightly-named The Oyster, and there is, even better, my favorite place for hanging out, Bartholomew’s, serving local beer from Granville Island, off Vancouver, and all sorts of lightly-priced fresh foods, spinach salad being a superb choice. It features dim lighting and a general laid-back manner, and does the Wharfside Seafood Grill, with a view right on the harbour and prices right up there with the view. Ships in the harbour, and at night, the Parliament Building lit up in profile, lights on the trees, the whole kit and caboodle.

Walking is just as delightful in Dickensian Victoria. Fort Street is bordered with gas lamps, in clusters of three, and a very (seriously) old world feeling. I arrived there this time on Remembrance Day, and the place around the Parliament Building was packed with sober-faced persons, all red-flower wearing (poppies, like Flanders Field? I couldn’t tell), complete with prayers and songs and canon fire from the water. I felt very pagan, making my way to the Queen Victoria Hotel, where my stay was included in a Victoria Clipper package, a return voyage between Victoria and Seattle.

One of the multiple advantages of anything going on in Victoria is that you can arrive there by those boats, all red and blue and white, where on the almost three hour crossing, you are served whatever you like from almonds to hot water for tea and coffee, endlessly refilled. In the daylight, you can stand on deck and see the water spinning by; in darker times, you can sit back and do whatever you do. Just being on a boat seems something of a miracle if you like in New York City.

When you go back to Seattle, from wherever you are, you find such a relaxed place, with a mindset totally unlike that of New York. Even the Seattle Art Museum (I love the initials SAM, makes you feel at home) is a joy – now at the moment, it has a Picasso show, made from the holdings of the Picasso Museum in Paris, being remodelled.When I was sitting at my very, very favorite restaurant in Seattle, at Pike’s Market (“turn left at the pig,” whose hoof prints are all over the sidewalk), called Matt’s in the Market, on the very top floor, I heard the story. I always sit at the bar, above which is a large sign:Counter Intelligence, one of those places you don’t have to take a book or paper to read. You can just sit and be happy. So I was sitting and being happy in the sunbeam streaming through the large interestingly-shaped windows. Having steamed clams in a broth with chives and leeks was a total joy. A waiter rushed over with hot bread to dunk up the bottom of the bowl in, and a glass of the local brew (Pike’s, of course), and the proprietor told me the Picasso-Seattle story. The exhibition is truly magnificent, with some of the very best pieces displayed, and an instructive audioguide with comments on the paintings by Chuck Close, Pepe Carmel, and Anne Baldessari from the Picasso Museum in Paris.

I exuded my joy at re-being here in Seattle and here at Matt’s and told him I was coming back to lecture on the Picasso exhibition next month, etc., and he told me about his favorite place in New York: Mary’s Fish Camp in the West Village, and then he said: “You know why we got the Picasso?” “Nope,” I said, all ears; “Well, the director of the museum flew over to the Picasso Museum and said we’d love to have a Picasso exhibit. And so we do.” Picasso always gets people to talking – when MOMA in New York was being remodeled, the joke was they had a very few “Picasso-free” rooms..When I mention that to my friends, they never even giggle.

So, in Seattle, you can walk and walk along Elliot’s Bay, for ages, visit the very large Aquarium, or sample some of the extraordinarily-complicated dishes here and there, at theDahlia Lounge (appetizers with this on that,) or the Purple Café (here, all sorts of local cheese, all served with very long and very crisp homemade crackers and fig jam, perhaps with a glass of Washington State Riesling they recommend, and here you can look up at the immensely high stair full of bottles reaching up several floors. All the white wines from Okenagan Valley I tried on this and my last visits were superb.

What a memory: on a leisurely trip by bus around Vancouver Island, I first tried them at the Long Beach Lodge, a wonderfully relaxed place with a long bare beach and a high room from which you can look out upon it, having whatever glass of wine or ale you might prefer. Again, the white wines (especially remarkable), worked with whatever I was having (even the remarkable pizza, of fig and the local equivalent of prosciutto –consumed in a large leather chair by the fire – of which I took the remainders back to my room to heat on the fireplace and have on the beach for my next lunch.

To return to Seattle, as I hope often to do, is deeply desirable. What with Pike’s Place Market and the free bus along the road by the Bay and the walkability of the place, if you don’t mind ups and downs, and – well, everything, Seattle is truly lovable. Lest it be thought that I ONLY care about eating and drinking, let me point out that you have only to find somewhere to sit and stare at Elliott Bay to be convinced how lovable is this city. Groups of young people on the streetcorners seem unthreatening, the bookstore owners seem truly involved in what you might like to read or see, the less expensive hotels are delighted to have you, while the more expensive ones (like the Kimpton Chain) love to offer you all sorts of wines to cheer up your evening. At the Hotel Monaco, a quirky red-oriented place, you are offered a goldfish in a bowl to keep you company, in case you miss your pet. Very endearing, like all of Seattle.

this early summer of 2010

2010-09-30T15:51:00.002-04:00

Note from New York

Mary Ann Caws

Summer has been here for 3 days as what passes for spring these days. Despite the slight panic over swine flu here – radio programs full of it, street chatter also – the art scene flourishes.

Yesterday I felt enormously privileged to see Tacita Dean’s 2007 film on Michael Hamburger, one of my alltime favorite translators and poets. You see him mostly in his apple orchard, looking at the trees, and then bending over his wooden table with all the apples – many with quite extraordinary detailed names, not just Russets and Pippins but prefaced by many adjectives, and so on. He chooses at one point the very darkest apple and lauds it. Then he sits at his desk, and at one point reads a poem he wrote upon the death of Ted Hughes, the poet who had given him two apples from which Hamburger’s apple trees grew. I loved that especially.

So many shows, among which the Gagosian Gallery’s 21^st street site, with John Richardson’s installation of the very very last Picasso paintings: the “late great Picasso” as Richardson so aptly calls the period’s works. You have only to stand in the center of any room in the gallery and the incredible burst of colorful power thrusts at you from all sides. “The Kiss” in a few transmogrifications picks up an early theme and does it a sensual, over the top honor, with the two faces squished together – the way it happens, right? Says Richardson. The show is called “Mosqueteros,” the Spanish term for musketeers, of course, but also for the men at the rear of the theatre, humble sorts. What an amazing outpouring of energy it is at its most sensual and, somehow, joyous. The faces of the viewers leaving the gallery were nothing short of happy: very unusual for New York faces.

At the Neue Gallerie on 86^th street, the heavy-colored works of Die Brucke spread themselves out over the main gallery – bridging the up and downtown shows.

The Guggenheim museum offered a splendid show about the influence of Asian art on American art and literature: the “Third Mind” – quite wonderful, in its massive all=inclusiveness. Much in the outset about Martha Graham and Noguchi, about Ezra Pound and Fenellosa, and as you wound your way up the spiral ramp, exhibits of large-scale thinking paintings such as Arakawa’s enormous pieces from Mechanism of Meaning, including one about a Lemon: “Presentation of ambiguous zones” – many very diverse ways of considering this small oval yellow object. The mind races, the spirit feels enlivened. Arakawa and Gins are now involved in Reversible Destiny, buildings that take so much effort to live in, given the undulating concrete floors and the rest, that it delays the effort of dying. They had a front page of the New York Times living section a while ago, and a long article in the Wall Street Journal very recently (having been caught in the Ponzi scheme of Bernard Madoff, which took up all the news a week or so ago.)

Actually, the entire Guggenheim exhibition seemed very grand to me, including the nineteenth century part on a different level, with some great Whistlers: two nocturnes in particular stood out, with the bright golden dots marking the lights in the distance, over the dark waters in the first, and an almost totally dim canvas in the second – until you gazed long enough.

The late Bonnard interiors still give a yellow glow to the downstairs gallery at the Met Museum, where the show of drawings upstairs attracts hordes of visitors. The new show called the Picture Generation is bright and garish and delightful, matched by Roxy Paine’s new construction on the roof, an even larger metal tree than the one he brandished in Central Park a few years ago.

At the Met opera, the last Shenck production of the Ring is taking place. One Brunnhilde after another Brunnhilde has been replaced, the great James Levine took sick one night, but has returned to thunderous ovations – worth going just for the Levine ovations, even if Wagner isn’t your piece of cake mit Schlag.

And, if you can believe it, yet another Tartuffe and yet another Waiting for Godot are inspiring yet another generation of Molière and Beckett aficionados. Some things wax eternal. Not kings, evidently: Ionesco’s early play Exit the King is about just that, death and the exit of actors and, by contagion I suppose, the audience.

similarities: Proust and St.-Ex

2010-09-30T15:45:00.000-04:00

how odd to think about: Marcel Proust's Albert crashed his plane -- with, if I remember correctly, Mallarme written on it -- and Saint-Exupery crashed his somewhere near Marseilles... so much for flying prose

New York, Provence, Poetry: New York's end of summer....

2010-09-28T21:12:00.000-04:00

New York, Provence, Poetry: New York's end of summer....

what a spring!

2010-09-28T21:08:00.000-04:00

“Play me, I’m Yours,” a two-week project this last June, placed pianos in 60 parks and public spaces, inviting anyone to decorate them and play them: it kicked off with 1000 free performances throughout New York City. Nice.

The late spring was full of peculiar adventures musical and other. Principal among these was Ligeti’s opera Le Grand Macabre, based on the play by the more than peculiar Belgian, Michel de Ghelderode. Everything of his always struck me as over the top, creepy beyond belief, very twentieth-century baroque. But this took the cookie: impossible to describe and of course about death and noise and costuming and plays within plays and all of that. Avery Fisher Hall – big, big – was entirely filled each of the three nights it was presented, and we found seats at the very top, delightedly, and were on the edge of them for the evening. Subsequently, I can’t remember anything about it except that it was exciting. That kind of thing.

More excitement: the Met brought out ALL its Picassos, a celebration in itself. The 1903 painting of Arlequin au café, with its background taken straight from a Van Gogh also owned by the Met, the Actor, the painting into which a visitor had fallen last January, now repaired, and a few others, were xrayed and the repaintings and retouchings shown in their various layers of retouchings. Among the thousands of visitors, groups tended to gather in front of his painting of Gertrude Stein (the one he said she would come to resemble, as indeed she did), which was the first Picasso given to the museum. The century’s greatest artist, she said, and the century’s greatest writer: how not? So she sits there, and rarely alone.

After the conversation/situation/performance of Tino Seghal’s This Progress at the Guggenheim (which has just purchased it, as we interpreters who had been part of it were notified, and of which there is deliberately no trace), it felt passing strange to have the next exhibition, about photography, called Ghostliness. Things with no trace, indeed. Except memories, like those of Marina Abramovic’s sitting for all those hours and days at MOMA with so many people lining up to sit across from her. All of which makes us wonder about traces and what we actually remember.

Probably exhibitions like the contrasting ones that took place at the two Gagosian galleries in Chelsea, one on 21^st street, and one on 24^th street: you could scarcely imagine a more unlike pair than the late paintings of Monet (the water lilies and the Japanese bridge) on one hand and fifty still lifes of Roy Lichtenstein on the other. How brilliant those are, with the steam coming out of a coffee cup painted on one side, and sculpted on the other, with Cape Cod scenes of a lobster and a wave and a sailboat, and with a few lemons sitting happily on a saucer… Visitors to these works of bright generally walked around smiling – not the most usual expression on faces in the bustle of New York galleries or streets.

But Lichtenstein tends to awaken some kind of unexpectedness in the mind. I am thinking of Frederic Tuten’s short stories to appear in this November with Norton: Self-Portraits: Fictions, with a Lichtenstein on the cover, and a story dedicated to him. Just as quirky, brilliant, and radiant with irony as the Lichtensteins themselves. It’s a kind of New York spirit, not unaware of the multiple tragedies all around – good grief (what an odd expression, how is grief good?) --but very much alive. Like the city itself.

The orange line

2010-09-18T17:22:00.000-04:00

Nothing is surprising in New York: think of the Messerschmidt portraits at the Neue Galerie: faces yawning and frowning and laughing and just as he imagined himself, and doing everything else faces can do. As the writeup by the always interesting Holland Cotter says, his mental disturbance manifested itself in his art. Yes indeed it did. That's not altogether surprising. the titles were added after his death. And, adds Cotter, these sculptures, which once struck audiences as totally nuts, now make "some human sense in our century, when everyone could use some psychotherapy." Sure, if they could pay for it. I haven't been lately, but that's not the only reason why. Like, who has time? My friends must, because constantly, someone is saying: "That's the day I see my shrink."
Actually about New York, right now that is, apart from the immense stage sets for the Ring that robert Lepage has constructed for the Met, my favorite thing is a thin orange line of paint that goes about eight miles, has existed for four years, and has not be widely noticed. An article in the Times today calls it "An Artist's Alfresco John Hancock": nice. He covers his face in the picture of him, wants to be known only as Momo, and runs from the East River to the Hudson, north to 14th Street and south to Grand Street, zips (oof, I guess I'm thinking of Newman's zips, but anyway it goes) over curbs and subway grates and around lamposts and covers of manholes... which reminds me of something I was reading about Holes and how they, oh phooey, what was it? More anon.

rereading and reading

2010-09-18T12:33:00.000-04:00

So sometime not so long ago I had the joy of visiting A Journey Round my Skull, a website by Will, which set up a contest for illustrating Bertha the FlowerChild by Raymond Roussel, which I had translated for my anthology Surrealist Painters and Poets, and what a delight it was.
And on the opposite pole, I just read Daniel Mendelsohn's The Lost, and what a masterpiece it is. Harrowing and brilliant and illuminating in wonderful and terrible ways. In short, a masterpiece.

Orlando the play

2010-09-16T17:00:00.000-04:00

I was enchanted by the production at CSC of Woolf's Orlando, about Vita Sackville-West, and wondered how I could point out to anyone interested my anthology of Vita Sackville-West's writings, published by Palgrave Macmillan? She was such a varied writer: gardening essays, historical essays, plays, novels (Seducer in Ecuador, written for the Hogarth Press, and which Woolf wished she had written herself), and -- least successful, in my view-- poetry. She was an incredibly colorful figure, androgynous, as Orlando indicates, and famously a lover of many women (at least 9, documented in this anthology) and men, including her gay husband, Harold Nicolson.
She is worth reading, as well as seeing represented by a stunning actress in this limited-run play.

books (un)ending

2010-09-15T18:29:00.000-04:00

So today in the New York Times, the man selling books outside the about-tobe-donein Barnes and Noble near Lincoln Center -- with an enormous cigar in his mouth-- bemoans the end of thinking, reading, and the mind in contemporary New York, which is, of course, contemporary America (at its best). The classics he has all stacked up don't sell, bookstores are closing the way Tower Records and all the record stores before it -- remember Sam Goody's? - have closed. And, he says, the saloon up the same street is closing: no more collective drinking, no more private or collective reading, oh, alas.
I well remember reading stacks of books in the Barnes and Noble right there, in the cafe upstairs. True, I didn't buy them all or maybe even many of them, BUT the whole place, with its quiet concentration, was just like a public library and its reading room, except that you could have coffee with the reading. And there was a discount if you were, as generally we were, members of Barnes and Noble. The whole thing worked, and when I had out of town visitors, I would bring them there to see the collective quiet and concentration.
No more. ALAS.

Haunted Artists: Andre Breton; automatic drawing, automatic writing, language and insanity

2010-09-03T16:08:00.004-04:00

interesting link, if you like surrealism and such, just found today sept 3, 2010
Haunted Artists: Andre Breton; automatic drawing, automatic writing, language and insanity

New York's end of summer....

2010-08-28T23:25:00.000-04:00

Note from New York

Mary Ann Caws

The late spring was full of peculiar adventures musical and other. Principal among these was Ligeti’s opera Le Grand Macabre, based on the play by the more than peculiar Belgian, Michel de Ghelderode. Everything of his always struck me as over the top, creepy beyond belief, very twentieth-century baroque. But this took the cookie: impossible to describe and of course, about death and noise and costuming and plays within plays and all of that. Avery Fisher Hall – big, big – was entirely filled each of the three nights it was presented, and we found seats at the very top, delightedly, and were on the edge of them for the evening. Subsequently, I can’t remember anything about it except that it was exciting. That kind of thing, in short.

What I do remember: this great idea called by its inventor’s name: Liz Sherman’s Joyrides, a sort of collective biking venture inspired by the French theatre director Ariane Mnouchkine. The bike rides are free and filled to the brim, in fact, overbooked for the remainder of this season’s

Summer Streets, and are limited to 50 people per time. You listen to music by Duncan Bridgeman, with the selection matching the landscape, but are legally bound to have only one headphone: the sound ends with a dialogue spoken by Bhagavan Das… Lunch is spread on tablecloths (checked, of course) in Central Park, with lobster rolls and fresh corn salad.. a real spectacle: a few riders move up and down as if dancing, some bob their heads, and all keep up the rhythm. The point is connection with the other riders, and Ms. Sherman is hoping now to take the idea of Joyride to San Francisco and Paris in the flal, for the Nuit Blanche festival… Last week, a man rode with his parrot clinging to him: why not?

For one of its all-time best=attended exhibitions, the Met brought out ALL its Picassos, a celebration in itself. The 1903 painting of Arlequin au café, with its background taken straight from a Van Gogh also owned by the Met, the Actor, the painting into which a visitor had fallen in January, now repaired, and a few others, were xrayed and the repaintings and retouchings shown. Among the thousands of visitors, groups would of course gather in front of his painting of Gertrude Stein (the one he said she would come to resemble, as indeed she did), which was the first Picasso given to the museum. The century’s greatest artist, she said, and the century’s greatest writer: how not? So she sits there, and rarely alone.

After the conversation/situation/performance of Tino Seghal’s This Progress at the Guggenheim (which, we interpreters who had been part of it, were notified, the museum has just purchased, but of which

there is deliberately no trace), it felt passing strange to have the next exhibition, about photography, called Ghostliness. Things with no trace, indeed. Except memories, like those of Marina Abramovic’s sitting for all those hours and days at MOMA with so many people lining up to sit across from her. All of which makes us wonder about traces and what we actually remember.

Probably we’ll remember exhibitions like the contrasting ones at the two Gagosian galleries in Chelsea, one on 21^st street, and one on 24^th street: you could scarcely imagine a more unlike pair than the late paintings of Monet (the water lilies and the Japanese bridge) on one hand and fifty still lifes of Roy Lichtenstein on the other. How brilliant those are, with the steam coming out of a coffee cup painted on one side, and sculpted on the other, with Cape Cod scenes of a lobster and a wave and a sailboat, or some lemons sitting happily on a saucer… Visitors to these generally walked around smiling – not the most usual expression on faces in the bustle of New York galleries or streets.

But Lichtenstein tends to awaken some kind of unexpectedness in the mind. I am thinking of Frederic Tuten’s short stories about to appear with Norton: Self-Portraits: Fictions, with a Lichtenstein on the cover, and a story dedicated to him. Just as quirky, brilliant, and radiant with irony. It’s a kind of New York spirit, not unaware of the multiple tragedies all around – good grief (what an odd expression, how is grief good?) --but very much alive.

There’s a big thing here about Mark Twain these days, and all the places he lived and worked in New York: the Players Club, at 16 Gramercy Park, founded in 1888 by Twain and the actor Edwin Booth, etc.. Most interesting for me are the writeups about the estate in Riverdale called Wave Hill,, since we go there often to sit in the deck chairs on the grass and wander through the herb garden. Twain leased it for two years at the beginning of the twentieth century, and he built there a whole writing parlor in a chestnut tree, overlooking the Hudson River. In the winter (dreaded season in New York for many of us), he wrote: “I believe we have the noblest roarin blasts here I have ever known on land; they sing their hoarse song through the big tree-tops ith a splendid energy that thrills me and stirs me and uplifts me and makes me want to live always. “ My favorite picture of Twain is a drawing by Francis Luis Mora, in which he is seated on a park bench next to Robert Lewis Stevenson, Twain with his hands on his knees and his slouchy hat and moustache, bending forward, and Stevenson, elegant and relaxed, leaning backward with a kindly interested look on his face, clearly listening to a Twain tall story.

Not so very far off, in Williamstown, Massachusetts, at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, there is a stunning exhibition of Degas and Picasso, organized by Elizabeth Cowling, the Picasso expert, and Richard Kendall, the Degas expert. When the contents of the Degas studio were sold after his death in 1917, Picasso became more intimately acquainted with the work of Degas, and some of the juxtapositions are revealing beyond belief. Karen Rosenberg wrote up the exhibition in the New York Times, concentrating on the most startling of the juxtapositions, for instance the nudes of 1906 in relation to the Degas bathers, the “Nude Wringing Her Hair” of 1952 looking back at the hairbrushing scenes of the older painter, Picasso’s woman ironing in 1904 after Degas’s laundress, some portraits in like poses, and various brothel scenes, with Degas to the side as an onlooker. To me the most interesting is Degas’s bronze “Little Dancer, Aged fourteen,” placed not far from Picasso’s “Stading Nude” of 1907, her hands behind her back in the same position. Every year seems to be a Picasso year these years – his prints at MOMA, all the Met’s Picassos hauled out, the Paris avant-garde exhibition in Philadelphia, more Picasso in Seattle, everywhere, all over. I’d be the last one to object…

leaving and looking

2010-08-14T06:39:00.000-04:00

As opposed to looking and leaving, I am trying this time to leave and still look. At the field, green after the rain, with yellow buttercups and Queen Anne's Lace all white and small cherry trees springing up -- we will have the old ones in the far field cut down, most are goners anyway, and our friends can use the wood.
So when we are in New York, I want to know I can still look at all this.
Yesterday we drove to Uzes, whose Place aux Herbes looked like the one at Montbaziers (where Cendrars and Dos Passos spent the night), and I had my first (and certainly not last) demi-cassis, much better than the pink gloppy Monaco (beer and limonade and grenadine) I used to have, Cassis being less cloying than grenadine...
People seem to arrive every day from everywhere, mostly from nearby, a writer friend (he does "polars," must look up what exactly it is in my native English language), then to dinner with our neighbors Janet and Malcolm at Le Mas des Vignes, small delightful place overlooking Bedoin, the sunset, and the near valleys.
A slight rain today, which dispenses us from swimming in the lake, which we did at some length yesterday, no one swims out in the middle, so I have it all to myself, the water warm on top and chilled underneath, in its greenness. Some places have blue water, crystalline, says Boyce, and I point out how I love the green. And the whole damned thing.
Today, I was cementing the dislodged stones beneath our trellis with the vines, and various cracks in the wall. It won't hold, says Boyce, and I say: well, until next year. What a wonderful phrase: next year, like Henry James's favorite "summer afternoon." Next year.
Then friends for a last pastis, tomorrow I will close my eyes and pack, tomorrow night rabbit with sarriette at Christopher's house, and then I will look, not just back but forward.

home is friends

2010-08-07T11:44:00.000-04:00

In our 300 year old cabanon, inhabited by many dormice (outside on the tiles and upon occasion, inside, squinting at us from the beams), we love having friends to dinner downstairs, by the ivied wall, preceded by a glass of white or a pastis upstairs, overlooking the field. Last night we had 16 of those, some new, some less new, all part of Bonnie Cobb's family, with the children scampering about in the field before dinner, this time upstairs. Suddenly there appeared an amazing pink cloud, blimp-shaped, with Rachel Cobb taking pictures of it with her husband, Morgan Entrekin, accompanied by a few of the children, flying a kite, Dean King signing his new book for us, Unbound, about the women on Mao's long march, and assorted other friends doing assorted other things, like bringing up the lentils and chicken and tomatoes from the kitchen downstairs to the very long table upstairs. The Cobb family and the Hapgoods from Richmond, brought a large bouquet of flowers and an amazing group of cheeses from Vigier in Carpentras, and all sorts of breads, to say nothing of the great wines from Cassis and Vacqueras and Gigondas... An evening after my own and many other hearts. We've no longing to go home, since this too is home. Friends are, in fact, home.

early evening in the Vaucluse

2010-08-06T13:03:00.001-04:00

I just returned from swimming in our nearby lake, with seven ducks and no people...16 friends are arriving for a picnic in our cabanon, and first we are serving green and black tapenade (olive thing) and noisette (hazelnut sausage) and then some chickens we bought roasted at the market and green salad with Boyce's lemon dressing, and very very red tomatoes sliced with olive oil (very green) neighbors have processed from our own olive trees, and I made an endive and lentil dish, placed in bright blue and red dishes, and our friends are bringing cheeses and wine and bread and for dessert we have ice cream sticks (hazelnut on chocolate) or melon sherbet with frozen vodka over it, or nougat ice cream...

Tomorrow night we go to the next door cabanonwith our neighbors Philip and Catherine and some of their five children, then the next day Philip Hughes, a painter friend and his Italian wife, then dinners before we leave with our Provencal neighbors and with Chris Prendergast, who will make his rabbit with sariette recipe I used in my Provencal Cooking book, BUT we have four nights (!!!!) free before we go, to go somewhere just us

early morning here

2010-08-03T20:19:00.000-04:00

Here in my cabanon, dark outside, some sort of something making welcoming noises, I retain that feeling of when you have the whole day in front of you. It is 2am, so This coming day is indeed ahead, and everything seems possible. i have just finished reading a friend's book to be, she a musician, her husband a painter, and the entire memoir/paintingplaying/writing experiment, with its colors and pain and joy, makes me glad to have such friends. I'm longing to get back to my own experiment in joining the art of reading still life paintings to that of reading recipes beloved by the creators of those paintings, and literary passages relating to the elements in the still lives: you know, Cezanne's ginger pots and eggplants, take it from there.
Hope it finds a publisher, and that it doesn't fall flat in my mind before then!
So the coming day lies ahead, with cabanon-type adventures and so many surrounding friends from so many years right here: writers, journalists, painters, vignerons, and the warmth of Provence even in its mistrals and tourists. What remains, remains. And I know we'll go swimming in the lake's green, and walking in our wild field, and liberating our oak trees from the vines climbing up them, and make our way to Carpentras to pick up some fruit and perhaps a pastry from Jouvaud and maybe even a book...

here still in the vaucluse

2010-07-11T13:48:00.000-04:00

Am sitting in my field upstairs at the cabanon Biska (I love the name of this old stone house-in-a-field, the Complaining cabanon, bisquer being to complain in old provencal) , surrounded by the cigales chirping or whatever it is they do, and I have to look up whether it is just rubbing their wings together, but it certainly makes a mighty racket!
It is late early evening, like 7:30, about time to go figure out what to put on the downstairs table, whatever it will be will be happily interrupted by our walking down our path to the road to see the sunset.. Evenings are the loveliest times, next to mornings, and we swam in the lake at noon, perfect time, because the French all have to be somewhere eating, so there are only "les estrangers" around....
Last night at a supper with many, I was asked whether I knew Gustaf Sobin, who came, like me, to live here because it was the countryside of Rene Char. Indeed I did, and when my old 2CV refused to go up a hill to see a friend, Tina Jolas, with whom I loved translating, Gustaf arrived and pushed it (and me.) So we became friends. A super and poetic anthropologist, whose essays on this countryside and whose poems I love.
Reading Ron Silliman's response to Sobin's translations of Char's Return Upland (Retour Amont) and The Brittle Age (L'Age cassant), which I had the privilege of prefacing, I was taken again by the happiness of worrying about translation, especially of poetry. Especially of Char's poetry.
Especially that now, this very December, Black Widow Books will bring out the immense volume of Char's Furor and Mystery as translated now by myself and Nancy Kline -- with some translations by Patricia Terry, an essay on Char and the Resistance by Sandra Bermann, a preface by Marie-Claude Char, and essays by Nancy and myself on meeting Char at his Busclats -- and the privilege of it all.

That's a good place to stop for this evening: the privilege of it all.

New York to Provence in three months

2010-07-07T12:28:00.000-04:00

T
May 2010

Note from New York

So I don’t know where to start this time, or in this season. Yesterday a bomb didn’t go off – thanks be – in Times Square, which had been placed in an SUV, and the culprit was found in a loaded plane at JFK. But the nerves of New Yorkers are, understandably, even more on edge than usual.

On the other side of things, the music and art scenes flourish, and everyone seems to have already seen and heard everything, way before I get to it – but that’s New York for you. William Christie has just been here at Brooklyn Academy of Music, Pierre Boulez is about to come, Alan Gilbert is energetically making a place for himself at the Philharmonic, and the Metropolitan Opera continues Rossini’s Armida with Renée Fleming, who else? I went last night, and found it super-long, if inventive in Mary Zimmerman’s staging, and loved the passage in Act III when Rinaldo rips off his long white robe and head wreath and discovers, in magnificent tones, that he is Rinaldo!

Highest on the conversation wire is Marina Abramovic’s presentation at the Museum of Modern Art, where she sits at a table for the entire time the museum is open and stares straight ahead. This includes staring straight ahead at anyone who wishes to sit across from her – many have tried this, some wearing exactly the kind of outfit she wears (a long red dress) and themselves staring straight ahead. “I see what it is like inside her mind,” said one of these volunteers. All that is on the second floor, while on the sixth floor, there is a retrospective of her work, including videos and a nude figure climbing up a wall, and the discussion about that particular exhibition has to do with one’s entrance into the room through two very naked people, generally one of each sex. Recently, there was an excited article in the New York Times about a visitor groping one of the doorkeepers: scandal. His permission to enter MOMA was removed for a year.

And there is Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century, arousing the interest of just about everyone again. Nothing to grope or grope with here – just the presence of the clearly great moment of perception…

At the Armory, Christian Boltanski has placed 30 tons of used clothing in heaps around, and a great 25 foor mound of them in the middle of the more than spacious floor from which a five-foot crane scoops up a claw now and then…Oh, and 3,000 cooke tins by the exit. USED cookie tins. It seems to have to do with life and mostly death. Or that’s what I read.

Uptown, on the roof of the Met (where inside there are the startlingly detailed illustrations in the Hours of the Duke de Berry, oh, and a few other things ) is a bamboo creation (neatly called BAMBU) that is constantly being added to: it seems very tall already, but will reach, with its constant additions, some height that seems so impossible that I shan’t even mention it. It is going, they say, to look like a giant wave.

At Barnard College, this last weekend, and at the Guggenheim Museum, there was a celebration of Arakawa and Madeline Gins, and their remarkable constructions for the mind and the body. They had begun with the Mechanism of Meaning years ago, which went through several editions, with complicated diagrams and texts designed to give the mind an exhaustive workout, then arriving, via other stages and mental constructions, at Reversible Destiny, a belief and practice of extending life through buildings which were/are designed to take such energy to be negotiated that …

Well, you will have to read about it, about them and the buildings, which are very beautiful indeed, in simple clear primary colors and shapes. My husband and I went to Tokyo to see a series of them, called Mitaka, but near to hand, in Southampton here on Long Island, is the Bioscleave house, equipped with the bumpy floors and super-minimal construction for which their buildings are known, celebrated, and discussed.

.........

June 2010

Note from New York

“Play me, I’m Yours,” a two-week project, has just placed pianos in 60 parks and public spaces, inviting anyone to decorate them and play them: it kicked off with 1000 free performances throughout New York City. Nice.

More excitemend: the Met has brought out ALL its Picassos, a celebration in itself. The 1903 painting of Arlequin au café, with its background taken straight from a Van Gogh also owned by the Met, the Actor, the painting into which a visitor had fallen in January, now repaired, and a few others, were xrayed and the repaintings and retouchings shown. Among the thousands of visitors, groups would of course gather in front of his painting of Gertrude Stein (the one he said she would come to resemble, as indeed she did), which was the first Picasso given to the museum. The century’s greatest artist, she said, and the century’s greatest writer: how not? So she sits there, and rarely alone.

Probably exhibitions like the contrasting ones at the two Gagosian galleries in Chelsea, one on 21^st street, and one on 24^th street: you could scarcely imagine a more unlike pair than the late paintings of Monet (the water lilies and the Japanese bridge) on one hand and fifty still lifes of Roy Lichtenstein on the other. How brilliant those are, with the steam coming out of a coffee cup painted on one side, and sculpted on the other, with Cape Cod scenes of a lobster and a wave and a sailboat, and with a few lemons sitting happily on a saucer… Visitors to these works of bright generally walked around smiling – not the most usual expression on faces in the bustle of New York galleries or streets.

But Lichtenstein tends to awaken some kind of unexpectedness in the mind. I am thinking of Frederic Tuten’s short stories about to appear with Norton: Self-Portraits: Fictions, with a Lichtenstein on the cover, and a story dedicated to him. Just as quirky, brilliant, and radiant with irony as the Lichtensteins themselves. It’s a kind of New York spirit, not unaware of the multiple tragedies all around – good grief (what an odd expression, how is grief good?) --but very much alive.

...

July 2010

Note from Provence

I am looking out into the field by my cabanon -- this 300 year old tiny stone house, with rosemary springing up by its upstairs door, and a laid-stone terrace -- where a small wooden table and two chairs sit waiting for breakfast. To my left is a wall of darker stone, where our gardening tools and two pairs of gardening gloves await their turn too. It will take place tomorrow morning, as it has most mornings here, when we walk out into the field and liberate an oak tree or two, from the encroaching gui or climbing mistletoe that makes a valiant (and often successful) attempt to choke them. Today it was a thin, frail oak,

surrounded by a hardy plant on its way up and around; we felt triumphant, and trudged back, beneath the rapidly-increasing sun rays, through the remnants of vines (pulled up years ago, but longing to return).

Next, in our bravery and sunhats, out to pick the last cherries in another field, to which we had been invited. They were sparse now, and many were shriveled by the summer sun, but a few immensely red and immensely large circles remained among the bright green leaves. We gathered them until it felt like enough, and made our way back to the cabanon, for some cold water flavored with mint syrup. For lunch, we had some potato salad left from a picnic two nights ago, with local olive oil and dill, and that great salt from the Camargue in its little round container with the cork top.

Then to swim in the "plan d'eau," a kind of manmade lake, greenish and surrounded by trees, popular, alas, in this season. Today, some teenaged French types called out to each other: "Elle est bonne! Je ne sais pas si c'est meilleure que la Riviera, mais, ah! profitez de l'eau!" And we did indeed profit from the warmish water, with the children of all ages and scantily-clad elders, all feeling joyful in spirit.

Back for a cup of tea and a perusal of the newspaper, and now this evening over to our farming neighbors for supper, with their rapidfire Provencal gossip.

Tomorrow we will drive 38 kilometers up the hill to Sault, home of the famous lavender fields, and have lunch overlooking them, returning to share a glass of white wine (Fondreche, 2005) with one set of our vigneron neighbors, whose domaine is just above ours on our hill. Later, other neighbors still will arrive, each labeled by the locals according to their region: on this hill there are the English, the Parisians, the new ones -- not yet assigned a region--, and us. I have lived my summers here for many years, and feel this is indeed my region.

Still at the Guggenheim

2010-02-28T12:02:00.000-05:00

We've only one week to go in the Tino Sehgal experiment/piece/conversation/situation/thing at the Guggenheim, and -- strange to say -- I had an instant of sadness, no, not sadness, but something like it at seeing that on my email message from Asad, who manages the whole business, producing it as it works so wonderfully out. For it does, and I can say that from inside it. Of course, we never know with whom we are about to converse, making our way up the ramps to the top, and if we do see someone we know, we ask the next person or "interpreter" to take over from us.

What is so amazing about it? the amazement changes as the weeks have gone on -- to a kind of constant surprise and WILLINGNESS to be surprised, or then not. Very odd indeed.

All we really know is what the person we will be addressing for about 4 and 1/2 or 5 minutes is wearing, perhaps a bit more, but I usually remember just that. From a Southern background, I am used to being polite and relatively talkative to strangers, but in this case, about 90 per cent of the strangers smile broadly and converse with me, and the other interpreters. We are about 15 at a time, more on the weekends, when the crowds come thick and fast. Last weekend, was it? when the snowstorm and rain were doing their best to make the worst weather, the line to get in stretched around several blocks, and i heard that the outside door was actually locked. Never mind the truth or falsity of that statement, the fact is that we were pressed into service at every moment.

"Hello, my name is Mary Ann," I would say, and "the title of this piece is This Progress." No pause, so the visitor won't rush in with some comment before we start the conversation by a statement I would make about something or other: on the order of how dinosaurs turn out to have had coloring, or that a better way to test the probability of a child's success in later life than any IQ test is the marshmallow test: would the child prefer one marshmallow NOW or two LATER, at an unspecified time.... That kind of thing. Or that the part of our brain that lights up at making someone else happy does that more brightly than the part when we are making ourselves happy. Wow. Same part that lights up at food or sex, but I didn't generally bring that up if the visitor(s) did not seem the type to enjoy the latter comment...

I had French couples and Spanish-speaking families and people on walkers and young architects in full stride, and many art students from here and there. Quite a lot of there, actually, far more than New Yorkers. I loved it all.

at the guggenheim

2010-02-07T18:52:00.003-05:00

Well, there's never been anything quite like the present experiment-installation-conversation-situation, whatever, a creation of Tino Sehgal, in which many of us are involved.

We are, as it were, of all ages, 8 to 90, we are students and professors and film directors and theatre people and publishers and editors and philosophers, and we work-converse-discuss all the way up the spirals of Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim. Over and over, the visitors I walk up with exclaim that his building has never looked better -- no paintings on the walls on our way up, no cover over the skylight, and Sehgal's choreography works wonderfully.

One visitor I walked with almost shouted how it made her want to go back to school, would I please tell Tino? Another said, in fact many said, in different ways: this is what art is all about.

"This Progress," it is called, and somehow that title seems relevant to all of us, and all of This.

At the risk of sounding super-sentimental, we hate to leave the community it sets up...

vaucluse and olive oil

2009-08-07T03:50:00.001-04:00

A whole day of driving about in the hills with their outcroppings harsh against the clear sky. Entrechaux with its ruins high above the road, on a hill just rising up from the earth, Mollans with its moulin à huile and the history of the cultivation of olives and olive trees. We used to go there years ago, to see the great tall shiny vats: thick, fruity, thicker, and so on, taking our bidon to fill it from the one we preferred. I like very green and very fruity oil, and loved the way it dripped, like so much syrup, from the spigot into the vessel. A recent law ruled against any product not tightly covered, sealed away against any germs – alas for the tall vats.

But, explained the owner of the St. Hubert, where we went for lunch, whereas the olive groves used to be torn out to make room for more vines – wine, wine, more wine – about ten years ago, they were replanted – progress looking backwards.

Back home in the cabanon, we listen to the incessant chirrup of the crickets on one side and some faint birdcalls.

cabanon in the vaucluse

2009-07-25T05:44:00.002-04:00

I guess it is something like paradise: short-termed and full of sun and wind. I am sitting at my table outside (really a door of course, on some stretchers), covered with an ancient blue and yellow cloth, and just the size to seat about 10 or 12 people, for whatever you might feel like bringing up the steep stone steps. Except that right now it is just me, looking out over the field from which the vines were ripped out many many years ago, now a length of green and brownish stubble and some trees: muriers de chine, from which the mulberries can be picked. Almost tasteless but nice to feel you have some fruit. and an oak or two (do they have truffles? someone said so, but we haven't hired a truffle dog and no one would tell you.) And a spindly fig tree, which rarely has figs, but then has them in such quantity that you have to dash out to snatch them before the birds do. And the tiny olive tree I loved so when it was right in front of the table, but when it had to be moved, because the "view" was blocked -- that would be the view up to the chapel on the hill, where our neighbor's daughter was married last year, her greenish Renaissance dress blowing in the wind, and Shakespeare and French and Italian poetry recited in front of the tall wooden cross. The olive tree -- MY olive tree -- almost gave up the olive ghost at the shock of moving, but was saved by a radical cutting of branches and some water, and now is a small recovering thing.

The cigales are making their comforting little screech, and the semi-mistral is shaking the leaves. and soon I will go down the stone steps to put lunch on the other door-table downstairs by the ivied wall. Yes, one could write or something, but since the Tour de France is about to pass by down at the bottom of the long hill, the excuse is to do nothing. I like nothing, it turns out.

Part of the paradise feelin is you don't have to do anything to feel you deserve being here: you are just here. Expanding your senses over a lingering coffee in the early morning or some salad with olive oil (unbelievable, from Malemort up the hill) and white peaches and local wine. I never imagined this when I was little and less little, and if I ever have to give it up, I won't be forgetting it.

paying attention

2009-04-19T16:32:00.000-04:00

http://www.pen.org/members/maryanncaws

http://www.pen.org/BlogAdmin.php/prmProfileID/19702

2009-04-19T15:03:00.001-04:00

this will link to my PEN blog called paying attention

pools and people

2009-01-17T14:37:00.002-05:00

So how amazing is it to have a group of, well, not young, and fiercely companionable women friends all meeting in a neighborhood pool every Thursday morning? the others meet also on Tuesday, but on Tuesday I meet with another group of fiercely devoted women in a Pilates session -- we, led by a super trainer called Pio, are right next door to the pool group, led by a super other trainer, Torrelo, whom we can see through the glass partition. Now I look longingly over at the pool during the Pilates session -- why DO they have to meet at the same ungodly and inhuman hour of 8, anyway? -- but I am faithful to each group, as is fitting. Am I fit, which would be more than fitting? not especially, but I love the idea of community. And from my point of view, that is really exactly what it is all about.

swag

2008-12-24T13:26:00.002-05:00

Nothing in particular today, December 24, although it feels a bit on the edge of something..

This is just to say that yesterday, with great friends, a superb cellist, Susan Salm, and her painter husband, Friedrich Danielis, in the Greek and Roman part of the Met museum, while we were wandering through the Pompeii reminders of grandeur, and then staring at the back of statues, with their folds, I fell in love with a word.

Years and years ago, I went into the field of surrealism, having fallen in love with Andre Breton's face -- and now it is this word: swag.

I love the word swag -- not the word swagger, certainly. But how great to fall in love with, as I believe it is -- part of a curtain. And only a part: nice.

doing things backwards

2008-12-22T22:57:00.002-05:00

I loved today, which made itself a perfect example of doing things backwards: very. The 6 train didn't feel like making local stops, so 645 people and me left the 96th street station (local) with a choice to WALK to 86th street (express) or take the bus. It was 13 degrees, so the walking option seemed sort of unappealing to me. I climbed, with about 643 of us into the bus and had a fine time reading Unica Zurn, for whom I have to write a catalogue text for the Drawing Center. Never mind that I have it in French and will have to quote it in English -- from the German, ooof -- I was riveted.

Arrived VERY late for an exam we were giving, brilliant Haitian student, then made my way to the Ginger Man for a winter ale with a delightful student now living in France, then (brrrr) over to the bus to get to the oh so terribly cute Alice's Tea Cup on 73rd, West Side, to meet two historian friends. Loved it, ginger tea and ginger molasses cookie, so dry that I had to drench it in milk to consume it sensibly. Did that.

Freezing bus home, we warmed up a stew I made last week, doused it with Thai sauce, tried making blackberry cabernet sauvignon sherbet (well, the truth will out: Boyce made it, I just licked the dashers), and now I get to read the newspapers from yesterday and today.

Children here this morning, and yesterday morning -- joy be -- and friends last night.

Tomorrow morning, after my Pilates class, we meet Susan Salm, my favorite friend cellist, and Frieder her painter husband in the Greek and Roman galleries of the Met Museum.

Life in New York.

end of week

2008-12-05T17:43:00.002-05:00

Since ages ago, when I wrote, in a great hurry and commissioned to do so, the biography of Picasso's "Weeping Woman," Dora Maar, and so much enjoyed how the title got set up in different languages --Dora Maar With and Without Picasso (in the UK, as opposed to that Weeping Woman title in the US), The Photographer alongside the Painter (in German), The Lives of Dora Maar (in French) -- I haven't had so much book fun.

Because yesterday and today I got to sign my Provencal Cooking: Savoring the Simple Life in France in Barnes and Noble (on the French cooking shelf, gee whiz, and in my favorite neighborhood bookstore, Crawford and Doyle, AND found that my favorite clothes store would like to have it on their table also. Hooray.

And there will be a modest book launch with a chat at the National Arts Club this Thursday, with the French Cocktail Hour and other sponsors. It's really a memoir about living in a cabanon in the south of France... and now back to serious work. Teaching Wittgenstein and Artaud and Gide and such. Whoof.

bonsai trees and poetic constraints

2008-10-20T15:31:00.004-04:00

October 20, 2008

Seeing the bonsai exhibition at the Bronx Botanical Garden, I have been thinking about constraints. To make the perfect miniature tree, you have to prune the branches, then constraining the ones you keep, with wires.

Is this not like the experiments of OULIPO, the ouvroir de litterature potentielle? there, you might eliminate a letter (say "e," for Georges Perec's La Disparition ) or take some other chosen discipline for your form?

And then think of the possible categories of training: "upright informal" or "slant" or, my favorite, "windswept," attached to a piece of driftwood.. What joyous expanse for the imagination.

Provencal Cooking: Savoring the Simple Life

2008-10-19T22:29:00.006-04:00

A memoir/cookbook about a very old cottage or "Cabanon" in Provence, restored over a long period, including recipes from the neighbors.

oxford magazine: note frow New York

2008-10-18T17:53:00.002-04:00

Differences

2008-10-18T11:33:00.003-04:00

My friend says, and I agree with him, that black olives, delicious alone, have a totally different taste when they are sliced. How can this be?

Maybe it's like the difference between regular salt and fleur de sel as described in The Book of Salt:

"There is a development, a rise and fall, upon which its salinity becomes apparent, deepens, and then disappears. Think of it as a kiss in the mouth." (p. 98)

This is the kind of thing I try to talk about in my new book, Provençal Cooking: Savoring the Simple Life in France, out in November with Pegasus Books.