Today, Friday the 24 of January, I treated myself to the exhibitions of Max Ernst's Collages at the Kasmin Gallery and also to Specific Forms at Loretta Howard Gallery, and these were treats of a real type, that I get to write about for the Brooklyn Rail, right now.  And on the way, since reading in the bus is the true delight, I have been reading Lydia Davis in her Essays, and loving not just . how she writes but the whole manner of looking and relooking at things. We will be talking about the latter in my forthcoming mini-seminar on "Maximal/Minimal: from the epic to the aphorism," and this coming week we will be looking at details in larger pictures, and reading Thom Gunn and then Robert Hass and on and on. It feels like an equivalent of "the man who is tired of London is tired of life" and that is the way I feel about poetry. 

oh, it's may!

I remember how it is in Paris on May 1, and you give (and we did) a lily of the valley to people you like or want to like...and how it always was on the day you remembered "the events" of 1968, which you would call by whatever name your political personality chose: "May" or "68" or "the events:... must remember to tell my class in translation/adaptation about that, how delightful they are, those participants
April I loved this year: loved being in Prague, with wonderul Irena Murray, whose brother wrote the biography  f Havel, with whom he was very close, and clambering with her up steps after stps to the tops of buildings from which  we could see the roofs of Prague spread out, like a cubist painting -- she being a famous and greatly admired historian of architecture, and being from Prague, was the absolutely perfect person to go there with, and she had come from afar -- as I had -- to be there those three days.. the soups! foamy carrot broth poured over chicken ravioli, or was it clear broth poured over carrots, whatever and wherever it was sumptuous, in her favorite cafe-restaurant or inthe one her family owned, the whole thing... then I loved being in Liege to talk on the prose poem, itself a joy, and this time i could project a powerpoint of Joan Mitchell's Bluets, and three poems about them:
from Maggie Nelson and James Schuyler and Lydia Davis, and then being in Brussels, oysters on the corner stall, a nd walking up to the Magritte museum, and being with Lucy Swan and her small children, one with large green glasses, the other bouncing about... and i loved Boulder and wandering its long street, staying in the Boulderado, being the art person at the University of Colorado for 2 days, geting to Handel's "Orlando" on a side street, sort of a magic time...
So it's time to get back to my little book on Pascal, fun to  write about  someone who has always haunted me.. tell me whom you haunt and I will tell you who you are, said Breton in  --  or more or less that  -- certainly not the religious side of him, but his own haunting by that night of revelation he never mention but kept the memorial of sewn into whatever garment he was wearing: the secrey of it, the unshowingoffness ot it....

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.