emboldening

so why does it have to be this time stolen, you would say borrowed? stolen I am thinking -- having said to Boyce last night: yes, the one thing you could give me would be time -- why can't I write ANYTHING on this so rarely visited, by me or anyone else, blog, in the daytime, you know, daytime, like people? -- ok I am thinking let's just say it, now at whatever time it is, what we wanted, what I wanted to say
That I read the Threepennyreview at this hour, because I know and respect and go to the same everythings, like concerts as Wendy Lesser with he superintelligent face and red hair pulled back and remember saying to her, hi, I am mary ann caws, and I actually teach at the place you are spending a year at, in the biography writing venue , I think, or whatever, didn't matter, remember ah so clearly seeing her at that St. Matthew unforgettable passion  we only got into through Tipi, that amazing tenor I wept over but or and friend of our friend Meriam Korichi, she of the all night philosophy night, and a friend  admired and loved and with whom -- when we converge, as we do in the very south of France, in the Vaucluse,  we do,  we translated a poem of Pascal -- what, a POEM of Pascal, yup, a POEM of Pascal, oh, amazing translations go on in the south of France, another time, will speak of them, but this is now just that this particular issue of the Threepenny Review ( yes, of course I subscribe, just like the New York Public Library Live,  always, but now so I can come to hear my own BELOVED Maggie as in Maggie Nelson, and my own BELOVED Wayne, as in Wayne Koestenbaum as in Wayne Koestenbaum, YES WE SHOULD ALL GO TO THEIR PRESENTATION at the NYPL, and do I just remember welcoming him to our BELOVED graduate school of our BELOVED CUNY, and am I making this up, under the totally beneficent joy of middle of the night  time  in which  NO ONE CAN INTERRUPT me to ask for a recommendation or an anything? no, so  there are, in this issue of the Threepenny Review,  all these  wonderful photos by Grete Sten d Ellen Aeurbach, known as Ringl +  Pit , whose show we had visited, Deborah Solomon and I, a while back...
so this is to say that, and when I get back in the daytime, when people write, you know, the daytime, I will indeed go on with my SIMPLYWOOLF for which I am contracted, sounds like a  murder, but you get the point, whoever you are or probably is, and the oh yes I am going to do a Jean Cocteau et le cinema, and after speaking on the Isle of Skye on Jon Schueler, whose clouds in whose skyscapes off the Sound of Sleat I really do love, I get to spend a WEEKin Paris with my alltime most beloved French sister, Marie-Claire Dumas, and that will be in June, the beginning of, and that is like Real Time, can't say, and don't have to try to say, Why... so here is my closing thought, will put it in caps in case anyone needs, no, wants to know:  why can't we say what we mean in ordinary daylight time?
I never figured that one out, and probably won't.  But no matter,  I have THIS TIME NOW

new projects

nothing fills you with more delight than new projects, right? So, having finished teaching this semester, before plunging into the fall, there is the joy of the summer spreading out, full of -- well, what summer is, if you are lucky, as I am, full of. My son Matthew is here from Cambridge, the one in the UK, and that is like major joy, and I am involved into 2 bio-art projects, one from more of a distance than the other, being on the surrealist painter Georges Malkine, whose daughter wrote it and I am just hovering around it, and the other on Jon Schueler, a superbly interesting American painter, second generation Ab-Ex, but then went to Scotland, its Highlands, as in Mallaig on the Sound of Sleat, and I am co-writing this with a Scot friend, which is being a good thing to do. What paintings! clouds and sea and storms, so I rented "i know where I'm going," a wonderful 1945 film with Wendy Heller about those islands, Mull and Eigg and the Isle of Skye, where my famiy is from originally....
and my essays on surrealism i hope to fix up this summer for publication, and we leave for our modest, old, rustic beyond belief cabanon in Provence on July 1...
Bryn Mawr, which I turn out to have loved a lot, and still now, wanted us to have room to walk around in our minds..- I so enjoyed seeing my former classmates, what a bunch of smart cookies!

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...

Jon Schueler, The Lure of Paris

What joy to have made it to 57th street, where the Jon Schueler exhibition with its astounding sea, sky, and sun canvasses gleamed its quiet way over the walls...The two paintings "Sun Leaving"... and it was leaving again, the swaths of yellow enhanced by a thin streak of darker color just barely appearing -- transfigured the entire gallery.  Ah, how one longs to write more about these works which totally absorb you.. And then I rushed down to 26th street in Chelsea, to catch the extensive and exciting exhibition at the Loretta Howard Gallery with painter after painter making their way over to Paris to work, play, and just generally be. Joan Mitchell, Conrad Marca-Reilli, and on and on. Joyous.

listening

how about slowing down and listening -- my husband is playing the piano and that is part of why I like hanging around here and not going off some place to write something or other, which in principle is what I most love after everything else I love, which is a lot
like seeing friends: today Maureen Howard -- a superb writer -- and Mark Probst, one of the driest wittiest wits I know and also a writer, and last week the poet Grace Schulman -- now there's a terrific poet all right (and I am thinking of Gertrude Stein writing on Juan gris, and saying about him he is always right all right, and how the hinge works in her writing and
ok so I am going to go to my writing place and do that,
BUT on the other hand I just might stop somewhere, have a coffee and read something -- right now about Stieglitz and O'Keeffe, but she comes out well and he doesn't in this bio (Benita Eisler) and I am glad Brenda Wineapple has made it into the Academy of Arts and Sciences, another really super biographer
and will I write a book about Jon Schueler and not just this Sky Song piece I just wrote about him for 499 Park, which comes up for me because of Stieglitz's place at 489 Park,
but also Reverdy is always on my mind... how not? Even now that my beloved Pat Terry isn't with us -- I will publish our
Reverdy with our names as co-editors, in her honor