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

Walter Pater

just rereading Walter Pater on Pascal, his last essay, and for my Pascal book, always finished and never finished...
and I had quoted Pater at too much length, I thought, but
goodness me, his writing on colors, in his Miscellaneous Studies, which is where the Pascal is...
wow, and the blue distance/blue flowers/blue bits of heaven, must quote it for Maggie Nelson, who appeared tonight with her films and one of Harry Dodge, but too many people waiting afterwards to wait for her so will write
her Bluets is super stuff!

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....

antonin artaud

who was there first and most ecstatically, so this is just to raise a Sunday=night toast to him, and to  Maggie Nelson, whose Art of Cruelty so wonderfully engages him