tacking up

Right now, my son Mathew and his son Theodore are tacking up moustiquaire (you know, against the mostquitos) in the old window openings and it is very familial and usefully grand and grandly useful.
At our large party,  two nights ago, when it was pouring and we huddled inside, Matthew sang, and it was glorious. So  forgot we had lots of wine downstairs, rose from Aix in honor of Cezanne and white from Cassis in honor of all the Bloomsbury folk who stayed there: Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Roger Fry, Quentin Bell and the others -- in Cassis, staying once in the summer  at the Camargo Foundation,  I found, under an oilcloth table mat, a table painted by someone in the Omega workshop, all very delightful, and now it is in a bank somewhere. Discoveries are of all sorts, over, under, around...

Today, under the sun, glinting off the leaves, i am glad to have finished my piece for the Guardian on Matisse and Picasso and Montmartre and modernism, about Sue Roe's smashing book

Back to Pascal, whom I think I really never left, after Yale, where I loved 2 faces: that of Andre Breton (tbecause of which  I went "into" surrealism), and Pascal's death mask -- like that of Artaud, said my friend Lee Hallman..

off to meet a bunch of Scottish-British friends from , it would seem, always. Always is nice. 

ps to Equinox!

forgot to say, in case anyone is reading this, that in the play at 59 e 59th, things had to be abbreviated, so a picture of Roger Fry on the wall, in case someone wonders how he got elided as Vanessa's lover for years -- and he WAS, after all, ROGER FRY (big hero of mine) -- and of course George Mallory sort of stands in for David Garnett, because of whom Duncan went to bed with Vanessa (to make him jealous), thus Angelica later is marrying her father's lover, but that is all very too much to go into one
play, so never mind, but the wall pictures are nice, so is the mantelpiece, THAT is what feels authentic....