yes, so it happened, and the Picasso and the Camera opened tonight at the Gagosian and  it was and is glorious and anything John Richardson does assembles all these loving people around him, and that is why I wrote in the catalogue because he is so warm and brilliant, so it opened and we assembled
an all that
and yes, I finished the Brooklyn Rail critics page editing job, loved it, every single minute,
right, and then we went to the Florence Griswold House for me to assemble more about art colonies because of which, after speaking in Udine on Joseph Cornell and emily Dickinson and all that, we go to Bremen in northern Germany to go to Worpswede where my grandmother knew Rilke and knew very well Otto modersohn after Paula Modersohn-Bekcer died,
and tonight it seems we are talking about Cubism and I'm I think doing nothing but in principle, am, after giving my seminar on Borges and Beckett, well, it's on singularities
and I  hope never to have to let up until I have to let up, but not let down if I can help it

Regular Cabanon Days

Like true joy: giving out of propane for the stove, going down in my little Twingo, Boyce driving, to change the propane pot (box? thing) and picking up "festive" baguette for lunch -- had one last night with "cereale" -- all sorts of seeds, and some Breton butter from the one remaining grocery store (the 11 there used to be disappeared when the madder ("garance") on which the little village lived was no longer used for soldiers' pants, because Germany had fabricated a chemical that did the job more simply. Crash went our little village back in the 19th century.

Now sitting peacefully under the overhanging vines are Matthew and Theodore, each with their computers, Boyce under the overhang we had to put up to have the rooms -- old and  newer -- touch, regulations, with the paper, me figuring out what to say to the forthcoming piece about Picasso and Jacqueline Roque (at the Pace, while our Picasso and the camera will be at the Gagosian) -- you set up a phone interview, this for next tuesday after we get back from Les Florets for Matthew's birthday, or wednesday after we take them to Avignon, alas, but we leave only a day later, doubly alas.

The sun is glancing hrough the vines, I have cut up yellow courgettes to try to imitate the superb yellow courgette soup we were served way up the mountain beyond Sault, cut up cucumbers to delight the table, and will serve the gorgeous vegetable dish Connie Higginson left when she and Leon Selig (whom I've known both of for ages) came with their friends 2 days ago .

We swiim in the lake at 3-ish, and then bring back the Twingo for Matthew and Theodore to swim in the Bedoin pool (you have to have regulation French bathing suits), then to Villes to try out a new restaurant. Utopia indeed.

Tomorrow to neighbors for lunch, next day big anniversay party for provencal neighbors -- Matthew will take his guitar -- and the next day some journalist friends and Arabic specialist friends will come for drinks, etc. The way it is. I wouldn't change a thing. 

art to be treasured

So I went, with a friend art historian, to see Howard Hodgkin's exhibition at the Gagosian. Beautiful, with all the inframing and globs of paint, some left on as dabs, so surrounding. Dark Evening I especially loved, ith its sea inside, and the small yellow brightness in a burst at the lower left, and next to it, the red allover of FlowersIt feels like what you feel like when you see or smell some happily-scented flowers, and that is the way most of these work...You see something called Breakfast and against a space, just a brownish slab, and you feel: oh, there is the toast. Or then you see Early Morning, and feel just the open kind of possibilisation that means: I felt Early Morning about this one. Some are more explicit, like Opera, with its clearly recessed stage, or After Whistler, with its blues and less blue blues dragged across, so you see Whistler's seashores.
And then I remembered, and went back to see, "Stieglitz and his Artists" at the Met, and felt the same way about the John Marin interior framing. But then I have always loved John Marin, early and late. His face, his hat, his shock of hair, his sailboats, the word "Pertaining," as in Pertaining to Stonington. but who else could USE that word, without being all stuffy?