zooming issues

 So when I was supposed to join in with a committee for a brilliant thesis, drawn and colored and written about Virginia Woolf's letters, I went to the calendar instead of the zoom link and was 20 minutes late, that was the WORST time in my year so far...

On the other hand, how nice it is to see the names of one's friends and conversation participants (my mini-seminar in translation/interpretation and then later in obsession/omission, see them below the pictures, also in our book clubs!

and Also how nice not to have to GO anywhere except for walks to the distant (given my slow pace) Central Park and out to dine outside at various restaurants we love: Barking Dog! the District! Pascalou!

Nick's!, and for me, coffee (today iced with matcha, whatever that is, is green) whole devouring Liane de Pougy's notebooks..

So I am sending the first 12 pages of Jacques  Derrida's The Post Card to the participants in my mini-seminar or really reading group on translation and interpretation starting next week, and am zooming on and in, and listening to interesting this and that like Honor Moore and Roxana Robinson talking about biographies...And my Mina Loy and also the poems in my Alice Rahon are in press, and I am thinking of what is next...

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post July 4

Post July 4, and just to say hello to anyone who reads this! 

all being sort of closed up has been grand for me, because apart from walking around a block or so and making my way to Central Park, masked of course, and trying not to walk into anyone, I have been happily ensconsend -- that spelling looks wrong, but want to Go Walk Now- in our apartment, finishing up the 40, 000 word manuscript called Beginnings of the Prose Poem, which Michel Delville of Liège in Belgium and I co-edited, and we have MANY translators, from at least eleven different countries, and the languages translated from are Very Many also, whew, what a joy! And my husband, Boyce, is playing Bach and Brahms on the piano, so that is a double joy.We will publish  the prose poem with Manifold Editions at the Graduate School of CUNY where I am teaching a mini-seminar now -- on translation the first five weeks of the fall, and then on omissions and obsessions in the spring. JUST FINISHED, so off, post-walk, to sup with friends of long standing, before plunging in to other things tomorrow. Au revoir to anyone and everyone just about. 

Septemberish New York

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.