The delightful Ruth Franklin just gave us in the Women Writing Women's Lives séminar a sketch of the kind of thing we should and could put on twitter and Facebook, neither of which I have been doing ANYTHING with, but was convinced it was a good idea, for the books we are about to publish and for getting in touch with those who might be able to help us with the ones we are now working on

I was convinced! So I think I sent out a tweet about my forthcoming Blaise Pascal: miracles and reason, and about my présent work on artist colonies, and also went on Facebook, because so many of my friends do seem to be using them both

I LOVED my class on Film Arts giving me a Golden Bowl the last day, and loved showing Derek Jarman's grand and moving Caravaggio on the next to last day, and now will be speaking about the Golden Bowl at a club next year or, I hope, the next

now off to sim, boring but probably a good idea

In Japan now, gave talk on violence out and in: the explosive erotics of Dada and  Surrealism, mostly showing images from both, including Japanese, and wonderful audience and group
about eroticism veiled and the dance of the surrealist encounter and all that, today am being taken to Kyoto, which I loved before, and tomorrow to Hamammatsu to talk in a professor's class, whose thesis I directed
then back to ny to teach my film class the next day
spoke in New London, Ct., on Robert Motherwell, on panel with the Dedalus Foundation representative and a master printmaker, with both of whom we had panels before
then at Penn, with friends I had known, like Eric Sellin, and the brilliant and beautiful and alltogether delightful Wendy Steiner
and this week I teach, well, share about Jean Cocteau and next week also, then Derek Jarman, and Caravaggio via Glenn Gould and Bernhard's The Loser
so they are both dessert
off to Kyoto now

andre malraux

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.