tacking up

Right now, my son Mathew and his son Theodore are tacking up moustiquaire (you know, against the mostquitos) in the old window openings and it is very familial and usefully grand and grandly useful.
At our large party,  two nights ago, when it was pouring and we huddled inside, Matthew sang, and it was glorious. So  forgot we had lots of wine downstairs, rose from Aix in honor of Cezanne and white from Cassis in honor of all the Bloomsbury folk who stayed there: Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Roger Fry, Quentin Bell and the others -- in Cassis, staying once in the summer  at the Camargo Foundation,  I found, under an oilcloth table mat, a table painted by someone in the Omega workshop, all very delightful, and now it is in a bank somewhere. Discoveries are of all sorts, over, under, around...

Today, under the sun, glinting off the leaves, i am glad to have finished my piece for the Guardian on Matisse and Picasso and Montmartre and modernism, about Sue Roe's smashing book

Back to Pascal, whom I think I really never left, after Yale, where I loved 2 faces: that of Andre Breton (tbecause of which  I went "into" surrealism), and Pascal's death mask -- like that of Artaud, said my friend Lee Hallman..

off to meet a bunch of Scottish-British friends from , it would seem, always. Always is nice. 

friends and life

Incidents that make up life here in the cabanon.
Many friends coming to lunch-- first a glass of white (luckily, we had just gotten three bottles of Cassis at Leclerc--everyone's major shopping endeavouring place) upstairs in the field to see the sun on the  trees and get used to each other, then down around the other long table under the canopy (wearing out and will change it next summer)
Moment of Big Panic: forgot the bread and it is  12 and everything closes at 12 until 3...
But the WONDERFUL Carmona boulangerie  at thebottom ofthe hill closes at 1so  i phone and say please give my husband a baguette and a boule, and he does  and we have a joyful time.
Doesn't sound dramatic but at six when others go away it is all gratefulness...dm

Small things make up real life.
Tomorrow to Gordes, all those houses carved into the hill by the bories to see Maryse Conde snd Richard Philcox and back to drink with some winemaking neighbors and so on. Happiness.

picasso, warhol, hodler

How typical, and that's what one tries not to mind (presumably) -- I wrote a piece for the Oxford Gazette, as usual, on the various exhibitions I'd been privileged to see recently, on and on about Picasso in Black and White, Matisse in twos and threes, and the 60 artists looking at Warhol, some of which was delightfully illuminating, AND the second time, they didn't pop the silver balloons in the last room.. thinking I would just transfer it to here, a blog i sometimes feels like writing, and guess what? now on AOL, I can't call up under "sent" the messages to find out what I wrote, AND THAT IS JUST FINE.

if you don't feel like writing something the second time, it may not have been worth it the first...

Anyway, and this is delightful, if on Fcebook you are looking up the Neue Galerie, and you had longed, as I  had, to see the Hodler show, and you hadn't gotten there (as so often happens, you are going but then, oh, you have time, and you don't), well, I do, another week, AND there is a 5 dollar off the admission if you are looking it up, so I will certainly (my "certainly" means, I hope) go sometimes when family has left (alas) and things are back to whatever one would consider normal... I love his doublings, and those strange symmetries and elongated figures -- like Jacques Bellange, that strange French mannerist I keep thinking of, well, sometimes..

we saw Amour.. and it truly is about just that, and I  have something to say about the pigeon, which comes from Kay Sage writing about the superstition of a bird coming in the house to announce death, well, that is actually what I have to say about the pigeon. Not just comic relief at all, and his writing at the end: I set it free, when he has smothered it, relates to the wife, WHAT a film...

Christmas Eve tonight, and my Acquacize class is again this morning, so I should go back to bed, I imagine. That doesn't mean I will. Interesting: what ever means what...

The Morgan and Montale

What a lucky person am I, or what? (I love that peculiar expression!) Last night with friends, friends I really like, but I guess one likes all one's friends, otherwise they wouldn't be that, right?
Skip the overblown punctuation, lady...
Right, so start over, SO we went to the St. Luke's orchestra series of concerts, AND there was Mozart, one with a HORN VERY LOUD so you couldn't hear the other instruments, and Ingram Marshall, if that is it, don't have the program here, incredibly beautiful, born in 1946,one of those pieces that ends with a very very faint pluck on the cello, enough to make you roll over and say:
Please could you do the whole thing AGAIN, please?
and then today to the Met Museum for the Stein collection AGAIN - and me all excited because of Matisse's 1902 Chocolate Pot, and Picasso's 1902 Soup,and I just wrote to the editor of my FORTHCOMING, yes, MODERN ART COOKBOOK, who is sending me a spreadsheet tomorrow or Tuesday, of His Selections, but how I long to have those in it... well, I wrote that I would love to have those in it. Reaktion Books, and it will have still lives AND recipes by artists and poets AND texts I choose from here and there ANDI get to write an introduction I am calling "Reading in the Kitchen"...

and tonight to hear Rosanna Warren and Jonathan Galassi read from Montale, oh, that is very wonderful
AND I hope to take a Whole Year Sabbatical because a semester feels very very short
how fortunate one is (I is) to live HERE in New York!