catching up, sort of

 So, thanks for my daughter Hilary's help, I am me, Mary Ann Caws, starting up my long ago (I guess)

blog, persuaded in part by the ooooof book review of my recent (feeling recent!) review of my Mina Loy:

Apology  of Genius 

with Reaktion Books, UK and I THOUGHT it was that MIT and Roger Conover, friend from always, had commissioned it, but nope, and anyway it came out BEFORE the BIG Mina Loy BASH I shan't even be involved in! So Much for Personal Criticism and Subjective Involvement!

However, I have to continue with its importance for me at least , and that is a point I kept making, probably too strongly! (it was really about her poetry and about Arthur Cravan, that eccentric genius!)

I would so happily have concentrated on him, but i think Roger Conover will prefer doing that himself and perhaps I can help a bit. At this advanced age of mine, I should not expect to publish any more, and so -- to the Beinecke  I shall be sending, probably via my brilliant daughter Hilary and her husband Jonathan Caws-Elwitt, not just the original letters of Jacqueline Lamba (third wife of André Breton as in L'Amour fou/Mad Love, which I translated) and Hedda Sterne and some others, having already sent my Yves Bonnefoy, René Char letters but also an immense stack of letters to me and my many. writings on the Scottish Poet and Gardner Ian Hamilton Finlay, immense. Whew! What a bunch of poetic geniuses I have been so fortunate to know!.

Enough for tonight, and so bizarre to pick up my blog again, never knowing if anyone ever will read it!

So interesting, in order to be interested in something -- for if we are not, that is surely accepting the end of much if not everything -- so here it is. Just about what happens in the mind when 1) you are afraid of the gusts of wind 2) afraid of escalators going down, because once in Japan you were caught or stuck or whatever the term is for momentary panic that seems to turn into longer spates of it 3) really caught up in what you are writing (some think, some write, some read, and I can't seem to do any two of those things at once, and have to be seated to do any of them, unlike Virginia Woolf who wrote standing up!!!)...
I LOVED being in San Francisco, apart from concern about that cruise ship about to dock right there, and apart from everything closing like the restaurant, "Sam's" where we were three BECAUSE we had reserved so they sort of HAD to let us in, and the sign outside said CLOSED, and so on...The talks, in the Weinstein Gallery,  on surrealist women painters, were fun, and I greatly enjoyed seeing Guccioni, a painter I had never heard of, so I got to take a fresh view of things and paintings. And could say: hey, all those eyes, look at the rays coming out of it, and look at the whirlwinds spiraling about, and think of futurism and how that persists... and so on.
I still firmly believe DADA is as strong as surrealism, so I will hold on to that belief, and am dealing right now with Arthur Cravan because of writing on Mina Loy, oh how Dada can you get?
best wishes and uncontaminating hugs right now from right here in New York...

Monteverdi Vespers of 1610

Monteverdi  Vespers in New York
after a new year's toast to each other, Boyce and I are going to St. Etienne on Lex and 76 to hear these  
ancient Vespers with the quavering sound I forget the name of, same as in Gesualdo ( the Red Monk, I think)
the toast was in pink Zarzetto
this morning I got to swim with the wonderful Torello who speaks during his class, so you aren't bored
and I am l laboring over Alice Paalen Rahon, wow

part 2 of. same:
may I correct and add to this? the sound I so love wasn't until the Magnificat and is like hiccups
or hiccoughs,
correction about labels and addition to what I am laboring over, which is/who is Mina Loy as well as Alice Rahon, only the latter is due next month and the Mina Loy LATER, except that I get enthusiastic about one or the other or both at once, nuts to being organized, at my age, I can't ascend from chaos to neatness
and yesterday I gave away two whole cartloads of books to Housing Works on 89 and 2nd, towed there by my wonderful friend Nathalie Fouyer, who wrote her thesis with me at the CUNY Graduate School on Robert Desnos and Zen
and we had lunch at a grand place  Selena Rosa, on 2nd also, which I hope has enough visitors to remain open for years, unlike so m any of the restaurants closed near us recently, and we had margaritas, one with raspberry and the famous one with pomegranate and crispy tacos with shrimp and Fajitas with seafood and were happy AND now I can walk over my floors without making canals through books, although still on the hunt table all semi-circle are piled up books from whatever I have just finished (big pile of Pascal, of Leonardo, and always art stuff and surrealism and the books I long to read or reread, I and a great pile I am not investigating at the moment, amen

post-thanksgiving!
amazing cooking of goose, and when I asked whence came "your goose is cooked" and such,  it turns out that Jan Has sounded like"goose" so when he was burned at the stake, he was cooked. Eeek.

and yams, boring boring to my taste, EXCEPT when they are made into "fries" and at District, our beloved nearby place for brunch and so on, they are super, but also

Boyce made cranberry relish, a true delight and then cheeses: l'epoisse (and I cannot get the accent to stay on the e, but not to worry, I know it has one) and bleu d'Ambert and Saint André and a terrific pecan pie with the worlds's best ice cream, Baskin Robbins praline pecan, ooooh

and I have a red espresso make which gives me JOY as well as coffee

now back to reading about and eventually writing about Mina Loy, which I read also in the bus just now going to get the knife Boyce got me in Kyoto ages ago sharpened , and the young knife sharpener man loved the patina on it as much as I do so I was happified!