In Japan now, gave talk on violence out and in: the explosive erotics of Dada and  Surrealism, mostly showing images from both, including Japanese, and wonderful audience and group
about eroticism veiled and the dance of the surrealist encounter and all that, today am being taken to Kyoto, which I loved before, and tomorrow to Hamammatsu to talk in a professor's class, whose thesis I directed
then back to ny to teach my film class the next day
spoke in New London, Ct., on Robert Motherwell, on panel with the Dedalus Foundation representative and a master printmaker, with both of whom we had panels before
then at Penn, with friends I had known, like Eric Sellin, and the brilliant and beautiful and alltogether delightful Wendy Steiner
and this week I teach, well, share about Jean Cocteau and next week also, then Derek Jarman, and Caravaggio via Glenn Gould and Bernhard's The Loser
so they are both dessert
off to Kyoto now

watching..

now watching Jean Cocteau's "Le TEstament d'Orphee" for my coming "Jean Cocteau et le cinema" for Jean-michel Place
about death and flowers and on and on... must go finish watching, and start on catalogs about Kay Sage and Robert Motherwell and go to play with Boyce at 59th street theatre, will pick this up soon

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?

robert motherwell

so I went to Provincetown to celebrate Robert Motherwell, whom I loved, the largeness and physical ungainliness of his so gainly and large soul and mind.... and it was overwhelmingly grand, the prints and the audience and the discussion in the gallery - the Hudson Walker Gallery next to the very super Fine Arts Work Center and then the mseum, PAAM, and everyone so receptive and you could really talk about what you wanted to talk about, so i got to talk about Joyce and Alberti and Lorca and Melville,  and Catherine Mosley, who worked with  him so many years, was magificently clear and interesting, never a word too much, anyway, very grand it was, in the light of P'town, and I had coffee both days at the Wired Puppy, to walk on the beach after...

Motherwell Delights

So I am so delighted that I get to go to P'town this next weekend and talk about Robert Motherwell (whom I loved and loved talking with and love the works of) and various writers, and it is every time I think how fortunate I am, we are, that Rene Char gave us the Vaucluse and Motherwell gave us Provincetown as well as Greenwich and since I am still still still (yes, I haven't forgotten Pascal) thinking about something called "gathering places" or the equivalent, like Worpswede and Provincetown and the Florence Griswold house and Prague's literary cafe, it is especially heartwarming!

ok, so now I am thinking about how I am rethinking, rereading, like a project

I am thinking about Pascal's thinking, of course, as in the last 3 years, and about Motherwell's re-reading, which I am involved in, see Renate Motherwell tonightk, and how he reread Joyce, so it is about rereading, rethinking,and various things resulting from that

so with rum and nuts and all thatI am fortified in thought and can regain my bed , yup , should do that now

Black Mountain College Now

At the Loretta Howard Gallery is something super, which is an exhibition devoted to the Black Mountain College adventure in the mountains of North Carolina. A few years ago, as a North Carolinian infused with some sort of nostalgia for my summers near Grandfather Mountain, in a village called Linville (now very heavily golf country, and tidy), I went with my sister to seek what Black Mountain College would have been. Nowhere did we find it or any trace -- we were clearly looking in the wrong spots. We went to Daniel Boone inns, probably just one, but it felt numerous, we went to Appalachian State, a college with a library where no one knew anything about Black Mountain, and it all became deliciously mysterious.
All that to say that this exhibition, like the several books devoted to the BMC (our Bryn Mawr College merges in my mind with anything so initialed), is fascinating. I especially took to, take to, the publication with it, full of grand pictures of the adventuresome folk and their ongoingness there and after. So you get to read about Anni and Josef Albers, who came up often in Hedda Sterne's conversation over the almost weekly suppers she made for me. (Her memorial is this afternoon, so she is greatly on my mind -- I loved the wall-length painting in her apartment, I loved everything she talked about, I loved her.)
And the rest of them are wonderfully there, with their quarrels and splitups mentioned but not dwelled on, with their joyousness at what can only be called creative gathering in full and well-conceived display. Cage and Cunningham, Motherwell and Frankenthaler, Bucky Fuller and Ray Johnson, the de Koonings and Rauschenberg, Kline, Tworkov, and Twombly: good heavens, what a crew. Motley, if you like, but marvelous. Films of dance, preciously rare poetry journals, all that from the greatest years of the BMC. To celebrate this, there will be a reading very soon now, with Maureen Howard and John Yau and Francine Du Plessix Gray and Vincent Katz, all of them.
On a day when the cornerstone of St. Patrick's seems to be so noticeably lost, when the occupiers of Wall Street and their sympathizers all over are doing their thing, when it is drizzling in New York, this Black Mountain College goingonthing seems very grand to me.