we call this last minute!

so when I am about to go to the University of Colorado to lecture and have already sent twice a picture of a picture: first, Cornell's Taglioni Box, and next his Toward the Blue Peninsula and a different title, I get right now a message saying would I please talk on Picasso? So I now sent a Picasso of Dora in a yellow shirt and a title about Picasso, Dora, and Some Other Things, thinking I can get to that when I get to that and in the meantime have not been able to access my own university's slide room, have to wait until tomorrow for the very very very long address, I think: oh shucks, let's just go back to what i really want to do next, which is submitting a proposal for several original poems: from Neruda and Paz and Holderlin and Rilke  and Char and Reverdy and Mallarme and Rimbaud and so on, surrounded by several translations each, and I long to Get Back to that, to say nothing of my Pascal Critical Life I am really wanting to do soon, and this is what I should say to my students: Be Ready for Whatever You are Asked to Do and enjoy the flexibility, otherwise, just Forget It

oh, I found at least this, so I won't again Forget It!

snippets of time

Isn't it peculiar, and riveting, how small things save small but valuable amounts of time? If you live on the 12th or the 6th floor, think of the elevator time over, say, a year, that you save or spend going up and down? I have been reflectiing on how shorter hair, for example, saves 30 seconds or so of brushing or combing! my husband quips when some car goes speeding by that the lady must be having a baby or someone is due at the hospital, but you can, in your heart of minds, imagine how great it would be to RUSH BY. To say nothing of the nonlickng of envelopes and writing of addresses trhat email spares us. Of course, I love, almost beyond memory, the part in Le petit prince about if you had more time, you would walk to the spring. I would do that, and do the equivalent, even in Manhattan, all the time in fact, which is really about time. But the snippets are fun to consider, even for a snippet of in the middle of the night time. Like Peter Brooks' Carmen iin 40 miinutes... I am reading Wittgenstein with  my students, and love Zettel because of aphoristic brevity: not just Pascal, and Char, but all fragmented intensity. 

translating

so i forget why ever one writes blogs one cannot possibly keep up with and do whatever else one does...
as in, substitute "me" or "I " or, preferably, "we" for "one," which so much reminds me of the talk I had to give at the BEA, which is something like the booksellers exhibition association or the equivalent,
and it is because a former very smart student, David Goldfarb, asked me, and it was about editing and translating, both of which I've done something of, and my major detail was about you ("one," ("I," "we," etc.) should, might, have translate(d) the followint

Mon amour.... il
which is , said the poet, Rene Char, Elizabethan usage, and I blundered right in with "he" -- very  very bad idea
and i even tried "it" -- terrible terrible idea
so then I got to "she" which is right, but why not go around it, wiht "my beloved" as my beloved Patricia Terry did,

and which I had done, with Patricia, for Breton's famous
"Union libre", which goes

Ma femme
for which another translator ( who shall be nameless) wanted to put "my woman" or even "my wife"=
both impossible

so we put, of course "my beloved"

well, that's it for translating, and for editing, simiilar ENORMOUSLY exciting things like when editing the Harper Collins World Reader (yes, for my sins) and the publishers hired someone to dumb down all the editing work done by the something like 40 specialists I had chosen to write the prefaces: they were smart and interesting and there went all the advance pay, oh well, you'll say, hey, you had 3 terrific years editing that volume (those volumes) but they SANK because Norton figured out they had to add
the nations they had somehow left out before and try going up against Norton, and you will SINK

but on the other hand, they do distribute Pegasus Books, which so kindly did my Provencal Cooking: savoring the simple life in France, which I loved doing, and because of having such fun, I now did
my (OH CAN WE TALK ABOUT IT AGAIN??) my modern art cookbook out in September with
Reaktion Books (who did my Motherwell with Pen and Brush, and my Picasso and my Dali)
and I get to give talks all over: the Y (oct 22) and the Nat Arts Club (sometime) and in chicago at the MLA and so  on

and for which I translated lots of Cezanne and Picasso recipes, and some Colette and so on..
joy was had by, if not all, then many (lke the Joy of Cooking, which my preface refers to, how not????)