NADA SURF!

and so Matthew, head guy, front man, of Nada Surf, and my very own beloved son, is for the moment  in Brooklyn with Emily Bidwell, his lovely and adored-by-us-all wife, waiting for a work visa, so she can work at ETSY in the UK, because Matthew is at the moment based in Cambridge, and that is NOT the Boston one... His son, now 12, is in Cambridge and Matthew and Emily also.

So we were treated, myself and Emily's mom, to a tour of the gorgeous new Brooklyn Etsy, just fantastic... And we go tôt see Alex Wright, our friend from as long as Matthew has been alive, son of my always best friend...It felt like a sort of working haven, with conférence rooms and lounge places, and you could take your computer to any floor and have coffee and do your work and preojects  alone or with others ... I guess this is the way I would envision academia if I could set it up, with places and time to speak with students and friends -- the same thing, actually -- and colleagues, ditto... I wasn't just dreaming, I was thinking, why not?

the chapel

So now today early, Matthew and Theodore have set out, armed with a baguette and a bar of chocolate and a water bottle, up the road and up the hill  to the chapel of Notre-Dame-des-Anges, the chapel, to ring the bell so all can hear the arrival, armed also with a little hammer to knock of pieces of rock in case they are interesting-- they will perhaps come down by the Roman Road, very grown over in places, but all the same, historic -- our cabanon has a roman wall, and everywhere feels laden with tradition. Even our meals under the trees downstairs, and even our drinks upstairs overlooking the field -- all of it. And there's a lot of it!

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. 

puttering

So today promises a total delight of a day: Matthew is here, with his son Theodore, and they are doing that most wonderful of things: puttering. We just defined it at breakfast (just JUST enough baguette with grains and a bit of Festival which is local baguette that has won lots of honors, to go around for us four, with honeys and confiture with " fruits rouges" and so on), then to the local pizzeria at the bottom of the hill for lunch: La Farigoule , very thin crust kine, then preparing salmon mousse and lambBoyce makes with all sorts of things in a mold, and so on, for our drink party tomorrow night, about 28 or 29 by my count, some children, all our really good friends in nearabout places, with their visiting families, and luckly, our field is immense, can't see any other property from here, so people can just take a glass of pink or white and wander, and Matthew is in charge of wine and Theodore can  pass plates and that is about it.
Tonight Alexander Swan, Malcolm and Janet's son with a beautiful voice, is giving a concert in nearby Bedoin, and their truly lovely daughter Lucy and her children will come as well almost everyone we ever met here, then of course  a glass after with the musicians, then we will have our little fish in the shape of fish we get once a week, onTuesdays, in our local tiny market of Mormoiron, same day you can get the roasted on a spit chicken... on Sundays in the big market, where producers come from all over the Vaucluse, we get our Salers, tat wonderful cheese with its ctust you have to eat, and our raw ham, if that's the word for this delicacy, sliced thin, i won't go on about it, but will serve some tomrrow night, iguess you roll it and put it on toothpicks... ah, life in the Vaucluse summers.
For Matthew's birthday, Aug. 5, we will go to Les Florets, a lovely outside restaurant at the foot of the Dentelles de Montmirail, those toothy-lacy hills Matthew and Theodore went up last year -- and hope to every year. I first read Faulkner there, way up in a hollow in the hills, because Rene Char said the Pythie would speak to me there...

rum and ginger beer

ao when you get up at, say, 2:30 in the morning almost always, and you want to get up again for the whole day at 7:45 at the latest because you want to swim , well, aquacize with your friends, you are about 8 or 9 in all, and this happens lots of times per week, WHAT, here  is the leading question, do you drink?oh yes, frozen vodka and grapefruit juice, etc., but have just discovered that Key Foods (yes, Key Foods, like one block away from me, I HATE grocery shopping and Boyce LOVES it but this is  a block and I can manage a block (but we are about to leave for France, as in our cabanon in the middle of a field, and you have to DRIVE 2.5 kilometers to a village to get anything)
so anyway, Key Foods has Goya ginger beer, at $1 which is a perfect price for anything so good, and you can put rum with it and be Totally HAppy, I mean of course if you forget our friends like Ann and Pat and Hanna not being here any more and others losing their noggins (but then, me too, or why else, when Boyce was so desperately ill all last months in various hospitals, would I lose my credit card, my transportation card, my office card, my library card, you know, all my cards?)
anyway, so here I am about to read yet more stories of my friend Lydia Davis, whose Collected Stories I have, who just won the Man Booker
now i have these friends like Lydia and like Alyson, who just win prizes all over, like Alyson's translation prize and has been my friend for hoever many years
so I get to read (like some theses I am "directing" which for me means reading and saying wow golly gee, directing is a sweet nonsensical verb but there we are
and I miss Isabelle (can I see her this summer?) and Alyson I h ope to see and have my friends here, of the younger variety like those, like Lee and like Charlotte, oh am I lucky or what?
My close friend Hedda Sterne lived to be, and gloriously so, 100, and I have all her notes, and am giving everything, notes from her and Char and Bonnefoy and Jacqueline Lamba and Derrida and Henri Peyre and others I loved and love, but i haven't mentioned Carolyn Heilbrun, who is there and there and there, and yes, her notes
to the Beinecke at Yale... will anyone read them? after I am gone, they can read some, like Jacqueline's -- why have I sealed them off??? -- to read them is to see why
things you can't, I can't, talk about

how it is when you are, like me, given to wanting to have meals or drinks or coffee outside in cafes, and you go, as I did, on my way to deliver YET AGAIN invoices to be paid from the various (oh so many) writers I used for my Modern Art Cookbook, about to come out in September, and did they get the wrong addresses so they couldn't askBetty Fussell and other foodwriters to review it , funny, but my really great and reachable friends like Frederic Tuten and Marjorie Perloff and Wayne Koestenbaum to pitch in And They Did, anyway, on my way to my friend who is going to help me pay all the invoices

and a Frenchman, now I love to speak that language, and I love to eat outside and I was at Isabella's on CPW and there he was eating a crab cake sandwich ($19 so I didn't have, I had caesar salad, $9, and a rose -- hey, it was chilled and lovely and good) and we entered into converse and he is from Chamonix and was saying how grand out NY is and how friendly and I alsmost burst into tears but didn't, and it made me happy... too many bursting into tears over my beloved Boyce in various hospitals this last month, and AM I HAPPY he is alive oh gee whiz

should pack up for the night, well the morning, whatever people say at this delightful hour of the whenever because no one interrupts you and it is like an extra life
and we get to see Matthew tomorrow for lunch, any day we see Matthew is an Extra Day like when we saw Matthew and Hilary and Jonathan (who got me to write an occasional blog in the beginning), quels really grand chilluns, or what?

don't you love Wittgenstein's saying, as his last words, "Tell them (my friends, some put in, but you know he said just "them" -- correct me , but I think it was "them") I've had a happy life"

modern art cookbook

It has taken what feels like 2 years to work on the permissions for the ALWAYS-ONGOING Modern Art Cookbook-- and as yet, having turned in something like 2000 recipes and texts to go with the still lives selected by the publishers (Reaktion Books) -- I am not sure what will be used... do I want to go over and see final working=out of the thing? or just go over in March, asI promised, to talk with Daniela Daniele on Frank O'Hara (whose personlism manifesto I really love)
all up in some sort of air, I hate deciding dates worse than anything! or maybe all decisions...
what I like most is being with my daughter Hilary or my son Matthew and his smallish son, Theodore..
Hilary and I went to hear Matthew at the final concerts for a while at least of NADA SURF at the Bowery Ballroom last Friday and Saturday, and it was all sold out, always a nice feeling...
their music is joyful and funny and moving, all at once.. Matthew will be playing with Juliana Hatfield for a while, and his voice continues , instantly recognizable, and not just to his mother!

ah, summer sands again!

found it, and remember SO HAPPILY writing it, so will repost it:

Beach Sand

Back in North Carolina for a 3 day visit – mostly to see my sister – I had the chance to walk down the beach on sand wet, sand dry, sand grey, sand pebbled, under skies mostly grey. Delightfully grey, with rough sea under it. At this point of wildness, I ride one or two waves in and then sink right to the bottom of the sand to let the rest wash over me. Then scramble up and head in, thankful to have outbreasted the undertow you can always feel pulling.

You can go down on the beach with friends or family but, gloriously,  you always feel alone. Not lonely, just alone.

I sat with my sister Peg on a bench on a dry place between the sound and the sea and we phoned my oldest friends – Sarah struggles with dates and times and still you feel sort of connected.

Everything beachlike feels connected, as does France. The places you have loved, I guess, and so keep loving.

Matthew and I sat up late talking: now I LOVE talking late with Matthew. The superb interview he did for some recent magazine

began with the interviewer’s comments on his depth of mind. Right on.

Well, this is being written on a shaky airplane, and feels shaky, if true. Back to New York, truth itself for me. Don’t know why. Maybe the park? the rowboats, the bikes, never mind if you aren’t in or on them, they are there. And they give you that feeling of thereness, which is the same as hereness. Enough.

vaucluse renewed

So my son Matthew and his son Theodore came to visit Boyce and myself in our cabanon: the Cabanon Biska, its real name (after to complain in Provencal, bisquer), and we don't do a lot of complaining, leaving that to the ancestors of our 300 year old stone house in all its simple rusticity, in its large field, with friends all around, whom we see a lot, here or at their houses -- ours is the only "cabanon," so we have only to say: "come to the cabanon on..." and friends arrive.
If someone is new to the hill, which is ours, Notre-Dame-des-Anges, or for a Chronopost delivery, iIhang out a scarf and so on...
We don't exactly do this same thing in New York, I mean, I wear scarves, but don't have a place to hang them out on a branch...
a cousin and his son today, tonight at wine-growing neighbors for a glass, tomorrow to Le Pescador at Le Partage des Eaux at  L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue at our favorite (well, my favorite) restaurant there, specializing in trout, preceded by grand buffet of superb fish soup and its rouille and cheese and croutons, and all sorts of seafood and terrines and everything, -- you can tell I am writing a cookbook, probably you can tell -- and then the trout and grand desserts, among which apple sherbet with Calvados or pear sherbet with Poire Williams -- ah, as i look back over this, after having our delightful meal there with our super-intelligent friends Elza Adamawicz and her husband Peter , I remember that they only serve Sorbet Citron with vodka, called Le Colonel, but it did give me the idea...
and then about 15 coming for drinks in the cabanon , so Boyce will make his salmon mousse... and so on...
must go welcome cousin John Angel.

being NadaSurf's frontman's mummie

What's reason about anyway? The definition of inordinately seems to be "exceeding reasonable limits." (what's the very opposite of inordinately, uninordinately, ordinately? ) Anyway, I am in reasonable limits AND ordinately, inordinately superbly delightedly and totally rationally proud of being one of the originators of Matthew Caws, the frontman of the great indierock group NADASURF. I mean, there are two of us what did it, if you see what I mean, and how terrific it all is.
New album forthcoming, and you can hear it and read about it right here:

http://www.npr.org/2011/10/24/141652201/nada-surf-the-meaning-of-it-all