In Japan now, gave talk on violence out and in: the explosive erotics of Dada and  Surrealism, mostly showing images from both, including Japanese, and wonderful audience and group
about eroticism veiled and the dance of the surrealist encounter and all that, today am being taken to Kyoto, which I loved before, and tomorrow to Hamammatsu to talk in a professor's class, whose thesis I directed
then back to ny to teach my film class the next day
spoke in New London, Ct., on Robert Motherwell, on panel with the Dedalus Foundation representative and a master printmaker, with both of whom we had panels before
then at Penn, with friends I had known, like Eric Sellin, and the brilliant and beautiful and alltogether delightful Wendy Steiner
and this week I teach, well, share about Jean Cocteau and next week also, then Derek Jarman, and Caravaggio via Glenn Gould and Bernhard's The Loser
so they are both dessert
off to Kyoto now

singularities

And I am SO enjoying my seminar in Modernist Singularities! We lingered over Beckett and Borges, and last time, D.H. Lawrence (why do we have to say D.H., not a lot of other Lawrences I would be likely to teach, it's not like T.J. Clark, or T.S. Eliot, because there are after all Kenneth and George)
anyway, we have coming up Thomas Bernhard (speaking of difficult people, and I LOVE the Loser, about Glenn Gould, well, I love anything about Glenn Gould), and Wittgenstein (as in his Zettel)  -- will I show, as I sometimes do, Derek Jarman's Wittgenstein? -- AND Marjorie Perloff together, thinking of this and that, and her Vienna Paradox, and then everyone talks, instead of an exam, about what they all wrote their long paper on and if I can remember it, I bring some wine and crackers
and we are growing, Boyce and myself, basil and tomatoes, on our indoor ledge and it looks like a Blooming Forest of green!

Parsifal, new production, Raritan, "Thinking North"

Oh dear, oh my goodness, I've seen many Parsifals, here in New York and in Vienna, for starters,
but this production is filled with collectivity of a most disturbing kind. The Knights, all in their white shirts and black trousers (I used to like the monk habits, old school me, I guess), raise their arms -- as Robert Paxton remarked in the intermission, next thing might be the Nazi salute -- and the Klansmen came to my Southern mind.
 On which topic, that I dwell on a bit, writing about my very Southern, but very liberal Grandmother the painter Margaret Walthour Lippitt (about whom more anon, somewhere or other), just out is my piece on Glenn Gould and Jon Schueler (and Randall Jarrell also), called "Thinking North," in Raritan Quarterly Review, Winteer 2013, vol. XXXII, number 3, and if it had a url, I'd direct someone to it, as Matthew my son told me how to do yesterday...
 For instance, since I love writing up art shows for Hyperallergicweekend, he showed me how to put in a url for that particular piece I wrote (like the ones on Robert Vonnoh and on Sarah Plimpton, for example) and out next weekend, more.
How nice things refer to things, albeit this feels a bit self-referential, not a Southern thing.  

Jon Schueler

And I still want to write more on Jon Schueler... am thinking about his yellow paintings, perhaps better to do something thematic than a biography, since his autobiography is so brilliantly done by Magda Salvesen. i am very very glad my Raritan piece on Glenn Gould and Schueler and Randall Jarrell and northness is coming out..
so much I long to write about and then life takes over, and the dust of the everyday as someone put it , covers over what you think you really want to do...

midnight reading

Being a not much sleeping type, and never ever through the night, I have a choice: a pill, providing five hours, but I don't want to spend the rest of my life hooked on having to have something (ok coffee is different) or getting up to read. Younger, I used to write much of the middle of my books like this, because no one could disturb me, even when the children were small.
So last night I read two of Lydia Davis's stories (having purchased her Collected Stories from St. Marks bookstore, as we are all trying to keep it afloat), one called "Glenn Gould" -- about the narrator watching the same tv program as he did, the Mary Tyler Moore show (I will read ANYTHING about Glenn Gould), and the other, the super-extraordinary "Marie Curie So Honorable Woman." Curie's story is all by itself remarkable, and in the equally remarkable play The Blue Flower, now playing in Manhattan again, there she is.
I loved every minute of reading, it is all figure and doesn't need a ground: "But she has known the privilege of privileges: coherence." Ah, that must really be a privilege, one absent from my slate, which already feels so privileged to me.
Why this figure/ground thing? Because we saw the De Kooning show at MOMA yesterday, and my favorites were the black enamel works, in which, indeed, figure and ground are interchangeable, as the super-intelligent wall texts said.
And you wonder how the figure/ground texture plays out in a life, usually. Yours and mine.