new projects

nothing fills you with more delight than new projects, right? So, having finished teaching this semester, before plunging into the fall, there is the joy of the summer spreading out, full of -- well, what summer is, if you are lucky, as I am, full of. My son Matthew is here from Cambridge, the one in the UK, and that is like major joy, and I am involved into 2 bio-art projects, one from more of a distance than the other, being on the surrealist painter Georges Malkine, whose daughter wrote it and I am just hovering around it, and the other on Jon Schueler, a superbly interesting American painter, second generation Ab-Ex, but then went to Scotland, its Highlands, as in Mallaig on the Sound of Sleat, and I am co-writing this with a Scot friend, which is being a good thing to do. What paintings! clouds and sea and storms, so I rented "i know where I'm going," a wonderful 1945 film with Wendy Heller about those islands, Mull and Eigg and the Isle of Skye, where my famiy is from originally....
and my essays on surrealism i hope to fix up this summer for publication, and we leave for our modest, old, rustic beyond belief cabanon in Provence on July 1...
Bryn Mawr, which I turn out to have loved a lot, and still now, wanted us to have room to walk around in our minds..- I so enjoyed seeing my former classmates, what a bunch of smart cookies!

anxiety!

what a peculiar thing it is to be holding a seminar on anxieties, and the way they are represented in contemporary art and text... this is meant to be post-Kafka, post-Pierrot lunaire, post-the rite of spring, post-Munch's Scream. Today we launched into Dada and the Cabaret Voltaire and my favorite, Kurt Schwitters and his collages and his Merzbau, that building out of detritus he would find on the street, and so on, and whose structures were torn down repeatedly, in Germany, Norway, and England. Never mind, I will play his Ur-Sonate next time just to hear his shrieking of those magnificently non-meaning but echoing notes.

So many encounters, with people, art, and text, are chance and marvelous ones, so many are not. Every encounter with a class of participants to whom you feel close is a great one, as is every dissertation you direct that seems quite extraordinary: it happens, and happens, and re-happens.

Were my papers for my courses at Bryn Mawr as strenuous to read and write as the ones I receive now? Are people just brighter? very odd, and very worth continuing, it seems to this participant.