when you get up

so when, every single night, I get up, have some rum and nuts from a can (the rum from a bottle of the cheapest rum available from the nearby store, Castillo by name of the rum, just fine for ruminating and then -- or hoping about then-- getting back to sleep, I open whatever is there, I am happy. Tonight it is Art Danto's What is Art? -- Art is gone, but I loved and followed and talked with him over the years he was around. FIRST, he was with Shirley, so we'd talk about Proust, I was going to say "of course, we talked about Proust," but really, how sniffy can you get? So, really,we talked about Proust. How not?

So I am reading Arthur Danto, and that puts me in a good mood, so I can go back to bed. Yesterday, I was concerned about paying FAR too much to have a jacket I mistakenly bought somewhere way downtown when I was exulting over something I heard or read, and it fit miserably so I got it put with shoulderpads, DREADFUL and I didn't take it back there, but to a lace that said it did custom work and oh was I miserable over going back in and protesting I would not pay an exoribtant sum and could they please JUST fix the shoulders but the woman didn't understand the English language, which, apart from French, which I love, is the only one I speak, and so I went back in today, and guess what? I love the way they have made this dreadful jacket into something that looke, well, like a jacket for me.

So I ate my hate or however you put that, paid the sum, and will wear my jacket today. Yes, today, after I hope I get back to sleep. Goodnight.

ps I really do see that my posts would have more readers if I said farewell to the city opera again, or something exciting-like, but you know what? whoever reads this is welcome, and that is the point.

pss and yes, I did write the chapter for the Cambridge History of Modernism about Painting and Sculpture, and turned it in, and will have to fix it, but glory be, I did done it. Last week. After Woodstock, where I went to work on a bio of Georges Malkinewith his daughter, Fern. Yes. Did that. Loved Woodstock. Will go again. In October. To celebrate "The Return of Georges Malkine," or that is the way I think of it. He left Paris for Woodstock. What? Yes. And then returned to Paris, where Aragon celebrated "The Return of Georges Malkine," and so we wil celebrate, again, here in Woodstock, this return. All very surrealist. 

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

everything at once

It somehow seems more exciting to me to do several things at once: nothing gets done as deeply perhaps as it might, were I to be solidly committed to one thing at a time, but there it is, and here am I, early morningish, translating a Rene Char passage on Goerges de la Tour for a poet-painter friend, doing an outline for an essay on Andre Breton and Rene Char for a new Princeton reader for the "general public," preparing (or not really) a talk for tomorrow night at Hollins University in Virginia,
and the catalogue essay for an Andre Masson exhibition -- and, oddly, each under or overtaking seems to nourish the others.
That's an early morning, optimistic view, I well know. And next week for my seminar on Letters and Lives, I have to think about WHAT exactly is so moving and so essential about Van Gogh's letters to Theo his brother -- yesterday we tackled, well, discussed, the letters of Proust and some of the various pieces and books written around him, like Richard Goodkin's more than thought-provoking Around Proust. It goes from Bergson and Mallarme to Wagner and film and everything else: I can't even pretend to read enough of anything, but perhaps a suggestion works as well as a whole massive entity. I surely hope so.
AND i was just invited to participate in the defense of another dissertation in Paris, where I really do love going, always staying in the same hotel if not with my beloved friends, always breakfasting in the same cafe, often dining in the same place -- all in a small radius. And this time, I will go to meet the wife of Gherasiim Luca, a Romanian surrealist poet whom I've been translating, thanks to Rainer Hanshe and his new publishing house. Before that, though, many other talks, including one on Gertrude Stein and literary cubism, whatever that turns out to be.