In the Cabanon, Vaucluse

Here in my cabanon, where I have hung out in the summers for, what, forty and over summers?? it is rather unlike New York in any season at all. Steps of stones gathered from here and there over the years, flagstones put down whenever I could afford it (you know, a book on Virginia Woolf, add a terrace, one on Henry James, add stones leading to the bathroom, when I finally had what you  might think of as that, and so on), and the light and the neighbors on the right, on the left, across the way, and up the hill. Magnificent, getting up in the morning, having our coffee  upstairs with our juices -- grapefruit for me, yes, pamplemousse rose, and for Boyce, orange juice, or then, and then, whichever, either our leftover superb boule from the grand boulangerie/patisserie down the hill, which we had for supper last night, by the way, with the lady in the garage (yes) next to the parking lot (good thing Boyce can drive and Does Not go to Sleep at the Wheel, which I have done 3 times, so try not to get next to the steering wheel, which somehow puts me to sleep deliciously until, well, not a good thing, once turned over completely, twice into trees), anyway, her just laid eggs from her chickens, usually given to her children, but today we purchased six of  them and promised NOT to use them in an omelet or any other waybut soft-boiled, which we did, with our fresh bread and demi-sel butter, and red wine from the Bedoin cave, oh heavens, what to say?
Right, stop there.
So then we can tomorrow drive to Carpentras, where the TRAIN ACTUALLY NOW GOES, after Avignon, and so then mosey around this town I so love, and maybe I can take the train to the TGV in Avignon to Paris for the Eurostar to get to London to get to Portsmouth to give a talk on Turnings (yes, but I can't find the Nicolas de Stael ROAD which was my inspiration, oh well), then Paris for my friend Marie-Claire Dumas, and Yves Bonnefoy, and some interview AGAIN about Dora Maar and then back to Carpentras for Mormoiron and our cabanon and various beloved visitors, including Matthew and Emily Bidwell, and my cousins Liz and B and so on and on, with our friends and neighbors and Boyce says: all we do is see people and friends and eat and drink and cook and OH MY GOODNESS WHAT COULD BE MORE DELIGHTFUL???

miniatures and alternating perspectives

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.