we call this last minute!

so when I am about to go to the University of Colorado to lecture and have already sent twice a picture of a picture: first, Cornell's Taglioni Box, and next his Toward the Blue Peninsula and a different title, I get right now a message saying would I please talk on Picasso? So I now sent a Picasso of Dora in a yellow shirt and a title about Picasso, Dora, and Some Other Things, thinking I can get to that when I get to that and in the meantime have not been able to access my own university's slide room, have to wait until tomorrow for the very very very long address, I think: oh shucks, let's just go back to what i really want to do next, which is submitting a proposal for several original poems: from Neruda and Paz and Holderlin and Rilke  and Char and Reverdy and Mallarme and Rimbaud and so on, surrounded by several translations each, and I long to Get Back to that, to say nothing of my Pascal Critical Life I am really wanting to do soon, and this is what I should say to my students: Be Ready for Whatever You are Asked to Do and enjoy the flexibility, otherwise, just Forget It

oh, I found at least this, so I won't again Forget It!

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

And so here it is May, May 15 to be exact, and I haven't written a blog (horrid-sounding word anyway, like bog and i love that WCWilliams poem about the blind leding the blind into a bog, about which I got to talk tonight, in the midst of a talk about Proust and the Visual Arts to a group -- over 40 s o that's nice -- of Proustians about the Vermeer and the color yellow and that patch of wall which isn't and all that, andthe Williams poem is about there not being a red, only there is, and so on).  That was a parenthetical remark, it would seem. Anyway, because of this an that, and a lot of both those, I 1) forgot I had a blog (like who doesn't have a blog) and 2) didn't have, it seemed to me, time to put anything in it, the way we used to keep diaries.

Now of course there is time for anything you REALLY want to do, I am told or / and  tell myself, only, you know what, there isn't! But today I taught my last class of the semester, about "Energetic Aesthetics" which, more me, has to do with how if you are reaidng a text AND a piece or pieces or wholes of an art piece at the same time, it is particularly energizing, that is, mind-sitrring. And then the Proust talk, last of maybe i2 or 13 talks out of and in the city this year, about of course, my Modern Art Cookbook I loved doing and love talking about, and Translating Surrealism really fun, with Mark Polizzotti, one of my absolutely favorite people to talk with and converse with, and Bill Zavatsky,  now ditto, having found him again,  in Knoxville, where i had fun meandering to the center of the tiny and delightful town, swinging on the swings they put up on weekends, you know, on the village green, all the sort of thing you do when there is 1) a swing and 2) a town, and Little Rock, really fun, where they so delightfully cooked something like 21 recipes from my Modern Art Cookbook and I got to talk about it and had a wonderful time, preeded by Charlotttesville to be with other Joseph Cornellians, talk about him,and guess what, there's about to be another Joseph Cornell bash downtown,at NYU I think, in the fall, anyway, lots of things .

Oh, and we finished scanning -- well, Jaime my wonderful assistant -- finished scanning j, all the stuff for the next Pierre Reverdy book I am doing, for Black Widow Books this time, after the New York Review Books edition, and I am super-delighted. Joe Phillips of the press is the most intelligently patient and delightful publisher ever, and I am SO HAPPY to be turning this in. These are the translations and intoructions and so on I did with beloved Patricia Terry, now in the sky somewhere, and i am doing a translation and edition of Sol Absolu  (Earth Absolute) of Lorand Gaspar with our friend Nancy Kline, for Rainer Hanshe, of Contra Mundum press, which has won all sorts of prizes these days....

and of course, ongoing things, like "Picasso and the camer"a at the Gagosian Gallery this October, for which I got to write a catalogue essay on Dora Maar and Himself doing cliche-verres together, and working with the supeergreat John Richardson  and EVENTUALLY getting to writing the art and sculpture chapter for the Cambidge History of Modernism, nnd writing on Georges Malkine with his daughter, Fern, and also on Jon Schueler with Lindsay Blair whom I knew through Cornell and on it goes. Only it hasn't been going on a lot but it will.

So here's my midnight or mid-early-morning blog i can't really see, having lost my glasses amid all the excitement over these thisses and thats, and I just dropped an almond in my glass of Scotch which is supposed -- not the almond but the Scoth -- to put me back to sleep. We'll see. 

now, as in now

All over New York, everything during and after the immense bunch of snow and ice and how do those of us who don't walk well (ooooof to the knee) despite our youth or mediumnish or age, is abounding!
We deeply are into abound, even at home you can abound, methinks.
Haven't made it 3 blocks away to the Guggenheim for the Futurism show, but I will, when temporary (I trust) crutches are laid ASIDE, and the many thesis defenses and so on are over  (temporarily also, April threatens 4 more at least ) and all these talks (lots upcoming have upcome, on the Modern Art Cookbook, as in this week at the NYPL on 42nd, and then Dallas and Little Rock, Arkansas, and a library somwhere in New Jersey, etc., and on Joseph Cornell (as in Charlottesville and Richmond), and on surrealist translation (as in Knoxville, Tennessee -- I've only been to Nashville, which I loved), well, when they are over, whatever.
In the meantime, there are quite enough theses to read, to say nothing of the reading list for my ongoing seminar in Energetic Aesthetics, enough maybe said. 

upsidedown-ness

Just back from talking on Gaston Bachelard and Joseph Cornell in Dallas -- great Bachelard conference at the Dallas Institute, such interesting talks and people... and imagine seeing To Kill a Mockingbird as a play (!). Who wouldn't miss Gregory Peck, but that heartrending line to the young girl Scout: "Stand up... your father is passing by" still leaps out at you... Great delights of cuisine at the Arts Center, in a southern place, Screen Door (crayfish dip!) and a Japanese place with amazing immense shrimp..
And I finally got to Fort Worth to those grand museums, the Kimbell, with the Caravaggio exhibit, and the Modern Museum with its lovely pool. Fully worth the trip, before the long way to Sydney, a city I really love.
Of course, I had the celebrated Sydney rock oysters, small and intense, and larger ones from Tasmania, and had an allday ferry pass from Circular Quay, hung out on every ferry deck and went on everywhich passage, as far as I could go, to Manly and past Cockatoo Island, and Paramatta (only there we had to take a bus, because of the tides) and in between, went to the Rocks to explore, at Fine Wine and Foods on Argyle Street, a 3 course delight for lunch at 19 Australian dollars, and outside at the Orient Hotel in the sun. Everywhere, the great white wines, and Cooper beer on draft. How I love Sydney -- the incredibly extensive Fish Market and the Deep Fried Mud Crab at the Golden Century! what to say, wish it were nearer. I went to Pinter's No Man's Landin the Opera House, and the Australian museum, mostly to read about the aborigines, now called indigenous persons, because of the Torres Strait people. Days of repentance and reconciliation and still going on -- in Adelaide, where I went to speak in honour of Hazel Rowley, on biography and obsession, I was taken to the memorial at what was Colebrook House to the indigenous families from whom the children were removed: the Lost Generations, as also happened in England. Sobering beyond belief, the whole trip.
And I still feel upside down...