not doing it...

So how do most of us,  who don't manage to spend our mornings writing and then do even 1 13th of what Virginia Woolf did in the rest of her day, get around and along? since I am about to launch (well, after a few other thises and thats) into my SimplyWoolf book, it does sweep across my mind rather a lot...

I still love getting up in the wee hours to read something or other, and then rise, both of us, read the paper and have coffee (gave up the coffee maker Boyce's cousin bestowed on us: that kind you just put a little cup thing in and try to make it stronger than it wants to be and hotter than it can be, wheeled it down to the Housing Works place I take whatever we need to dispose of, books, books, books, etc., and then take a swim in the not so far off pool, always taking something to read in case all the lanes are full, etc. That is instead of writing, of course,  and then there's living.

And there's also meeting my seminar, so much fun, on mannerism to modernism, and all the art that goes with it, how superbly perceptive are the participants in the class, heavens above.
And two pieces came out in the TLS and I enjoyed doing those, on Linda Nochlin and on a book on Motherwell, and this weekend I get to read translations of Pierre Reverdy at an art gallery where a musician has composed something on trying to translate Reverdy, sounds like a nice turnabout...
then I leave for Kalamazoo to talk on the Modern Art Cookbook, and they will prepare things from it, now that is delightful,  why ever write anything else, you say to yourself?

Wind and the Ventoux

So when it blows here, iin the field outside my cabanon, or on the road (where I don't drive, given my history of narcolepsy and my three last accidents) or at the table, some of us just say: wait until it dies down, or sinks, or stops, whatever seems to wish it to go away.
Last night we had supper with friends at La Ballade des Saveurs, in L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, where I used to spend my Januarys, when I was working with Rene Char, and translating his poetry and essays. I would go up the Route de Saumane on my motorbike -- no, not a motorcycle, just a putt-putt -- anyway, I loved it. Ah, you work with the poet Rene Char, would say the hotel-keeper (small hotels in those days, and friendly to foreigners like me, impassioned as I was -- and am-- by the language and the literature), C'est un pur. Pure in the sense of unconteaminated by society and commerce and the other things he so despised.
Anyway, we were there, almost blown off the tiny sidewalks by the gusts -- Boyce, being very very thin, might be knocked over at any moment, so Iworry. The meal was so-so, my fish, a bar, rather tough for a steamed fish, was poised on some sweet something, perhaps turnips, but it felt like sweet potatoes. I won't go on, because we had loved it  the first time,, with Christopher and Mette Macrae, two of our oldest friends here, by the Sorgue, with the ducks and the narrow boats passing by under the bridges and near the meeting of the waters.
We used to go to the Pescador, a restaurant by the "sharing" or Partage des eaux, right off the main street,  as a family, and I used to go there, as a nostalgci move, with Alice Mauron, the widow of Charles Mauron, the translator of E.M. Forster, and T.E. Lawrence, and others, even of Virginia Woolf -- so i had writtten on him and his translations for our Virginia Woolf in Europe, an exhaustingly big book, published by Continuum a few years back. Alice would always bring her Opinel, a large bladed one, to cut the meat with. I loved her, and enjoyed her caustic sense of humour.
Well, the wind might rasie up one's sense of humour! or cause it to sink....
AND I AM INDEED WRITING A BOOK ON BLAISE PASCAL, who has haunted me ever since graduate school. It will be with Reaktion Press, for whom I have done a Salvador Dali, a Pablo Picasso, a Motherwell with Pen and Brush, and a Modern Art Cookbook: in short, I like publishing with them.

now, as in now

All over New York, everything during and after the immense bunch of snow and ice and how do those of us who don't walk well (ooooof to the knee) despite our youth or mediumnish or age, is abounding!
We deeply are into abound, even at home you can abound, methinks.
Haven't made it 3 blocks away to the Guggenheim for the Futurism show, but I will, when temporary (I trust) crutches are laid ASIDE, and the many thesis defenses and so on are over  (temporarily also, April threatens 4 more at least ) and all these talks (lots upcoming have upcome, on the Modern Art Cookbook, as in this week at the NYPL on 42nd, and then Dallas and Little Rock, Arkansas, and a library somwhere in New Jersey, etc., and on Joseph Cornell (as in Charlottesville and Richmond), and on surrealist translation (as in Knoxville, Tennessee -- I've only been to Nashville, which I loved), well, when they are over, whatever.
In the meantime, there are quite enough theses to read, to say nothing of the reading list for my ongoing seminar in Energetic Aesthetics, enough maybe said. 

what we say...

It is feb. 13, and I expect I have to write this because I can type less and less well, and want to do an update on my blog, which rarely I write - swamped like everyone, and seeing out over it less and less well -- to say, quite simple, just that. Thinking of the ironies of everything -- how fortunate we all are who are still living in such relative ease (we are, after all, alive) -- and how from very littledom, I used to wonder over the dreadfulness of singers losing their voices after a certain age, ballerinas losing their step even earlier, thinkers growing dull of mind, and all that -- now I find this sort of funny.
Last week, I held up my left (thanks be, my LEFT hand) hand to my daughter Hilary and said: look how my two little fingers are curling over. Typing is more worrisome: I was always chaotic, and my typing and writing even more apparent than my uneven stacking of books on every free surface. But there is much I want to write and may not get to it, which is, of course, always the case for every single person I know, or just about.
Many strange things occur and you think: ah, I must write this down so as not to lose it. Like Virginia Woolf saying write it down, or like water, it flows away. (Surely, she said it a whole lot better, but nowadays I just have to SAY IT.)
Teaching: I love sitting around with a group and all talking about what we have just discovered or rediscovered. I loved my seminar on Anxieties of Modernist Representation last semester, and my Energetic Aesthetics this semester and will be delving into the kinds of Modernist processes we might examine next semester.
And my friend Marjorie Perloff is coming to speak for the Henri Peyre French Institute on March 19 on Paul Celan, and I leave the next day to do a Night Museum
What mostly is useful to write? not book reviews, I think, and probably not articles. As for books, I still long to write about my grandmother, whose grandmother kept slaves, who was herself a super painter and being and my agent says perhaps if it turns also into a memoir -- but there is such a discrepancy between her looming talent and energy and communicative personality and whatever I muster, forget the curling fingers anyway. Maybe. And so much else I long to do and write and be and love.

Passwords and Being Open

Every time

What a nice way to start:  I must have written that at least a month ago, to say some angry thing about losing, finding, relosing passwords, then dashlane, one of those things

and now, months later, in freezing new york, about to go to chicago (more Modern Art Cookbook talks, always fun because you have absolutely no idea who might turn up and it is so deeply non-literary, and I loved the review in the TLS speaking of my grandmother, and will send the one that just came out in Artnews to Julian Merrow-Smith, since his beautiful rougets decorates the top of it) and I loved the idea of doing a Literary Foods book, but perhaps that is not where my heart lies

and someone suggested Surrealism in a Hurry, thanks to George McClintock, what fun that would be, and am enjoying a proposed biography of Georges Malkine (surrealist, friend of Desnos, of Artaud, and a greatly unusual painter and writer and film actor), can work on that in Paris, where I go next week to join in a jury on a brilliant and staggeringly long iimportant, I think, thesis on Max Ernst and how his war experience impacted his work

it is a good moment not being bogged down in one thing you know you have to rush on getting through, just a translation of a scientist poet I love, Lorand Gaspar, doing it for ContraMundum, such a great press, with Rainer Hanshe, for whom I  translated Gherasim Luca, and this will be with Nancy Kline, with whom I did a Rene Char

am doing another Pierre Reverdy, this time with Black Widow Books, who did the Char and a Tristan Tzara and a Robert Desnos, and an Eluard, in fact, just about everyone I ever wanted to translaate!
Thanks to Joe Phillips!

it all feels open and possible, which is probably why I left open that only begun thing at the top of this, called "every time"-- so many things are "every time" and they are never dull
Had breakfast with Matthew this morning, now that is never dull, and spoke with Hilary, who is about to run 5 kilometers in the snow in a rabbit costume at the end of which you get soup and hot chocolate -- she is perfectly suited to Northampton and it to her which is a compliment to both

Surrealism and the rue Blomet!

So for the last year, it seems to me, I have been writing and writing and writing and rewriting the catalogue essay for the Surrealism and the rue Blomet exhibition at the Eykyn Maclean Gallery at 23 East 67th... It has been a total joy, as much as anything has ever been one, to work with the director of the gallery, Kristy Bryce and her super super assistant, Susan Wallach, it seems to me every day. In between teaching my seminar on Anxieties in Modernist Representation, and writing this and that other and seeing my students and being with my husband and friends and all the things we all do.

But this amazing exhibition, full of works by Andre Masson I have never seen and Joan Miro, ditto and the cards in one echoing the postcards and playing cards in another and all those hands  reaching and playing all  over the tables of the still lifes and the mannequins turned away and so on... and how much fun to have something you hadn't seen come in, like the Miro Cheval de cirque or the Masson painting about the snake, goodness me, so then you think about Timothy Clark's great book on the Sight of Death and on and on.

And have been giving talks at the 92nd street Y and 192 bookshop and national arts club next week on my Modern Art Cookbook, what fun, and many more coming up, and going out to Nebraska to speak on surrealism, and all of that...

French friends staying with me, and my husband's sons about to arrive, never one of those things we used to call dull moments ... the things Andre Breton called the "moments nuls".. not a lot of those

very odd: not having written anything on my blog for (what? months?) because life and work and friends and all that which is wonderful go on and you say" oh, i must absolutely remember to write down this... and that..." and then you don't or I don't , anyway, so since tomorrow at the 92nd street Y  I have to give my first of what feels like MANY talks about my new book: the Modern Art Cookbook, which I loved doing and love contemplating, and is very beautiful, I am eager to put off thinking what I might say and instead speak of less pressing matters -- have to speak at the 192 bookstore on nov 5, and the National Arts Club on Nov 21, and the Modern Language Association in Chicago in January and the Mid-Manhattan Library here on the 13 of January and then go over to Paris to be on a thesis defense about Max Ernst, which looks miles high and on which, of course, I will have to report in French, written and spoken

whatever these "lesser matters" might be

like teaching, well, no, really, just meeting with my phd students and their differing points of view about anxieties, which we are dealing with in "modernist representations" -- that is, what do you represent visually or verbally after the rite of spring and Kafka and all of those and the Munch Scream, that is, what do you next do? so we are reading and seeing de Chirico and Unica Zurn and Artaud and Thomas Bernhard and Sebald and lots of surrealist types

and I suppose I should try to think sleepy thought as opposed to my beloved Modern Art Cookbook, which is not about cooking so much as looking, and a few poems and recipes and how very very beautiful it is

I also just brought out a Pierre Reverdy with 14 different translators, just beautiful and very very small and blue-green, but not giving a lot of talks about that, more is perhaps the pity

perhaps some day

AND I STILL HAVE NOT SEEN MY NEW MODERN ART COOKBOOK, THOUGH MY FRIENDS WHO WROTE THE BLURBS HAVE, AND ALL THREE HAVE FOUND IT GORGEOUS

MAYBE IT IS!!!

new semester

after a year sabbatical -- spent mostlly on my Modern Art Cookbook, now appearing on the first of  next month, and I hope very beautiful, as it seems in the proofs - i am restarting my seminars right now. This semester, Anxieties of Modernist Representation, and what a great group of students, from French, Comparative Literature English, and Philosophy... We are plunging in on the Uncanny and going up to Derek Jarman, Chroma and his films such as Blue, meandering through some De Chirico (Hebdomeros) and the written Dali and Escher,  some Sebald and Thomas Bernhard, and so on. Whoof. 

Lawson's Landing

The most absolutely staggeringly beautiful and in principle deserted beach, except for a few boats and trailers, in one of which we are living for the moment, leaves me wordless and speechless except to say just that. I am looking at a grey water, have walked along the sea grass to put my spirits together before taking up my teaching  post again next week after a year sabbatical (mostly devoted to writing about my grandmother the painter, who did everything imaginable in the world of southern living, mountain living, Parisian studying at the Academie Julian and knew the Worpswede painters and writers, like Rilke) , and to getting permissions (hate that part) for my forthcoming Modern Art Cookbook (Reaktion, 2013). I would rather give ten talks and write ten more books than get one more permission to publish anything: mea culpa, I guess, but i really do hate it.
Anyway, I am here, and we, with my husband and 2 of his sons, Hal and Alec, and a wonderful chef named Maxime who is Alec's partner, all took a boat to Nick's Cove to have lunch, and now we are ensconced in blankets outside by a fire.  Life does not get better than this, I do believe.  

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"

translating

so i forget why ever one writes blogs one cannot possibly keep up with and do whatever else one does...
as in, substitute "me" or "I " or, preferably, "we" for "one," which so much reminds me of the talk I had to give at the BEA, which is something like the booksellers exhibition association or the equivalent,
and it is because a former very smart student, David Goldfarb, asked me, and it was about editing and translating, both of which I've done something of, and my major detail was about you ("one," ("I," "we," etc.) should, might, have translate(d) the followint

Mon amour.... il
which is , said the poet, Rene Char, Elizabethan usage, and I blundered right in with "he" -- very  very bad idea
and i even tried "it" -- terrible terrible idea
so then I got to "she" which is right, but why not go around it, wiht "my beloved" as my beloved Patricia Terry did,

and which I had done, with Patricia, for Breton's famous
"Union libre", which goes

Ma femme
for which another translator ( who shall be nameless) wanted to put "my woman" or even "my wife"=
both impossible

so we put, of course "my beloved"

well, that's it for translating, and for editing, simiilar ENORMOUSLY exciting things like when editing the Harper Collins World Reader (yes, for my sins) and the publishers hired someone to dumb down all the editing work done by the something like 40 specialists I had chosen to write the prefaces: they were smart and interesting and there went all the advance pay, oh well, you'll say, hey, you had 3 terrific years editing that volume (those volumes) but they SANK because Norton figured out they had to add
the nations they had somehow left out before and try going up against Norton, and you will SINK

but on the other hand, they do distribute Pegasus Books, which so kindly did my Provencal Cooking: savoring the simple life in France, which I loved doing, and because of having such fun, I now did
my (OH CAN WE TALK ABOUT IT AGAIN??) my modern art cookbook out in September with
Reaktion Books (who did my Motherwell with Pen and Brush, and my Picasso and my Dali)
and I get to give talks all over: the Y (oct 22) and the Nat Arts Club (sometime) and in chicago at the MLA and so  on

and for which I translated lots of Cezanne and Picasso recipes, and some Colette and so on..
joy was had by, if not all, then many (lke the Joy of Cooking, which my preface refers to, how not????)

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!

bees are not wasps

so, alas, we thought the hundreds of swarming and flying about behind one of our windows were wasps -- to which I am dreadfully allergic -- and, our next-door neighbors, des provencaux ("Marianne,
nous sommes des paysans!") enlightened (how do you spell this anyway?) us last night -- when, because of having removed everything for the rat, we had, I had, chosen some rather mediocre quiches from an about-to-close boulangerie.. everything closes at 12 of course, so everyone can go home and have their fresh bread for lunch,  not to open until 3... and they had brought  homemade quiche

that kind of evening and Serge, our lovely neighbor who had put up our ironwork for our overhanging vine, hated above all asparagus, which is exactly what else we were serving

but we had a grand time with our white wine from Bedoin, which is all they now drink, having given up"Pastis -- forget Provence and its pastis, so  very Peter Mayle -- anyway, it is funny and  nice

and I am still trying to write introductions to my Modern Art Cookbook , out in Fall of 2013, STILL getting permissions and such, with my illegible handwriting, as if I should have typed out 53 permission letters, yes? etc.

living in a cab anon is a full-time job anyway, you like it or you don't....