we call this last minute!

so when I am about to go to the University of Colorado to lecture and have already sent twice a picture of a picture: first, Cornell's Taglioni Box, and next his Toward the Blue Peninsula and a different title, I get right now a message saying would I please talk on Picasso? So I now sent a Picasso of Dora in a yellow shirt and a title about Picasso, Dora, and Some Other Things, thinking I can get to that when I get to that and in the meantime have not been able to access my own university's slide room, have to wait until tomorrow for the very very very long address, I think: oh shucks, let's just go back to what i really want to do next, which is submitting a proposal for several original poems: from Neruda and Paz and Holderlin and Rilke  and Char and Reverdy and Mallarme and Rimbaud and so on, surrounded by several translations each, and I long to Get Back to that, to say nothing of my Pascal Critical Life I am really wanting to do soon, and this is what I should say to my students: Be Ready for Whatever You are Asked to Do and enjoy the flexibility, otherwise, just Forget It

oh, I found at least this, so I won't again Forget It!

just lost it

so I was writing about people changing the title and content of my next talk and it got lost, oh well, oh well, from Joseph Cornell to Picasso, from boxes to new titles about Picasso, Dora, and Some Others, on and on, lost and lost, oh well as I said, better get back to it!
whoops, I found it, hooray!

Regular Cabanon Days

Like true joy: giving out of propane for the stove, going down in my little Twingo, Boyce driving, to change the propane pot (box? thing) and picking up "festive" baguette for lunch -- had one last night with "cereale" -- all sorts of seeds, and some Breton butter from the one remaining grocery store (the 11 there used to be disappeared when the madder ("garance") on which the little village lived was no longer used for soldiers' pants, because Germany had fabricated a chemical that did the job more simply. Crash went our little village back in the 19th century.

Now sitting peacefully under the overhanging vines are Matthew and Theodore, each with their computers, Boyce under the overhang we had to put up to have the rooms -- old and  newer -- touch, regulations, with the paper, me figuring out what to say to the forthcoming piece about Picasso and Jacqueline Roque (at the Pace, while our Picasso and the camera will be at the Gagosian) -- you set up a phone interview, this for next tuesday after we get back from Les Florets for Matthew's birthday, or wednesday after we take them to Avignon, alas, but we leave only a day later, doubly alas.

The sun is glancing hrough the vines, I have cut up yellow courgettes to try to imitate the superb yellow courgette soup we were served way up the mountain beyond Sault, cut up cucumbers to delight the table, and will serve the gorgeous vegetable dish Connie Higginson left when she and Leon Selig (whom I've known both of for ages) came with their friends 2 days ago .

We swiim in the lake at 3-ish, and then bring back the Twingo for Matthew and Theodore to swim in the Bedoin pool (you have to have regulation French bathing suits), then to Villes to try out a new restaurant. Utopia indeed.

Tomorrow to neighbors for lunch, next day big anniversay party for provencal neighbors -- Matthew will take his guitar -- and the next day some journalist friends and Arabic specialist friends will come for drinks, etc. The way it is. I wouldn't change a thing. 

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. 

friends and life

Incidents that make up life here in the cabanon.
Many friends coming to lunch-- first a glass of white (luckily, we had just gotten three bottles of Cassis at Leclerc--everyone's major shopping endeavouring place) upstairs in the field to see the sun on the  trees and get used to each other, then down around the other long table under the canopy (wearing out and will change it next summer)
Moment of Big Panic: forgot the bread and it is  12 and everything closes at 12 until 3...
But the WONDERFUL Carmona boulangerie  at thebottom ofthe hill closes at 1so  i phone and say please give my husband a baguette and a boule, and he does  and we have a joyful time.
Doesn't sound dramatic but at six when others go away it is all gratefulness...dm

Small things make up real life.
Tomorrow to Gordes, all those houses carved into the hill by the bories to see Maryse Conde snd Richard Philcox and back to drink with some winemaking neighbors and so on. Happiness.

last class of semester

Oh how interestingly the semester ends, so for my seminar in energetic aesthetics, great title, what? as we have discussed all manner of texts and art stuff, we will end with me bringing wine, a participant bringing chocolates and everyone talking (in turn, natch) about what everyone wrote (is writing, I know I know) as a final paper. This is the way I always end my seminars, and the point is that if you are going for an interview for some job, you have to be able to have a drink in one hand and talk about what you are good at or impassioned by, the other hand on the heart or the brain.  Wonderfully, many of our students get positions -- I don't think this is why, but you never know.

For my irregular but I hope delightful column in the Oxford Gazette (Magazine) which I've written for years and years, about the New York cultural scene, this time I got to add -- because the great editor, Tim Horder, tells me when I have another week before the deadline -- Mahler's Third, which we heard Saturday night and were (well, I was) astounded by. Really, the zarathustra coming in, and the soaring melody and the everything loud and less loud-- i loved the repetitions and want to think about that form, but, you know, when do you get to anything? I had the joy of writing my introduction to our translation (Nancy Kline and myself) of Lorand Gaspar's Sol Absolu (Earth Absolute) in the middle of the night, having lunch with the great John Richardson yesterday, writing and rewriting part of the catalogue for Picasso and the Camera for the Gagosian Gallery here in New York, hearing my friend Dean King talk about his book on the Feud between the Hatfields and McCoys (and Matthew has just finished a tour with Juliana Hatfield, so it seemed appropriate to go), and no, I haven't gotten back to the chapter on Painting and Sculpture for the Cambridge History of Modernism, but, um, I will before we leave for France on July 1. Or I think I will.

And the Show Went On

should anyone read this who hasn't read this book by Alan Riding, AND who is interested in France in the Nazi-occupied times, you will sit up at night reading it, like me, although I am also in the middle of Picasso and Truth by the wonderful T.J. Clark And Alyson Waters' latest translation, by one of my alltime favorite art writers, Daniel Arasse, who actually came to my class when I was teaching at Jussieu, and whose book on Le Detail is just riveting -- as are all these three

Ah, how I had wanted to stay in philosophy and art history, which was -- I thought -- my double major ah so long ago at Bryn Mawr -- but I wanted more to go to France, as some visitor suggested we could only I knew no French. But that didn't seem to matter somehow and so, I never got over it.

Or over Pascal, because of that abyss on his left side. And the rest. One of these hours, I really must go back to bed, but then I do NOT see how I will ever get to read anything. Daylight is so taken up with whatever it is taken up with. And in the wee hours, all is quiet, even in N.Y. so it is actually my favorite time. Next to all my other favorite times. I find it kind of engaging that I have 2 books coming out this month in principle, and have not seen either: Pierre Reverdy (with 14 translators) and the Modern Art Cookbook (just did podcast about it from our more than rustically elegant, I think, cabanon in Provence) and neither of them have I seen, except in proof. That is kind of appealing. 

provencal paradise

i suppose you can never explain exactly what it is about a place that makes you happy all over and inside and out. For me, this very primitive -- well, you could say folkloric -- life in and out of our cabanon just does it. We sit, are surrounded by cicadas doing their thing, rubbing their thighs or whatever it is to make this extraordinary and incessant buzz, see numberous friends of all sorts and situations and languages -- the farming people next door, the winegrowers up the road, our journalist friends here and there, a priest or two, and a lawyer and an iron worker and a diplomat and another p We have someone or ones over, stay up until the early hours with a bottle or two or three and a discussion about whatever, downstairs at our long table with the lantern overhead and the foliage all around, or then upstairs under the canisse and vines and an equally long table so we can just add any friends at any time, all that in the evenings when the heat has died down a bit and the occasional mistral has brown through the wooden doors and handmade screens over our windows - all from so long ago.
I must have been here 40 years now, with various companions and husbands and friends...

And we go to swim in the lake, and come back for lunch of a salad that tastes fresher than fresh, each lettuce leaf like something you never tasted before, and a siesta, perhaps some visiting friends. Or a book or so, right now Julian Bell's "Mirror of the World: a new history of art" and on my kindle, Christopher Benfey's Red Brick, White Clay, Black Mountain, partly about North Carolina, my native state.

In Collioure, where i longed to go back because of Les Templiers, a restaurant where Picasso used to eat in 1905, everything was a delight, including swimming three times in the very blue water with the treacherous pebbles underfoot. But we left to come back to our cabanon: other places are to visit, but this one is to live and admire and be folkloric and happy. 

picasso, warhol, hodler

How typical, and that's what one tries not to mind (presumably) -- I wrote a piece for the Oxford Gazette, as usual, on the various exhibitions I'd been privileged to see recently, on and on about Picasso in Black and White, Matisse in twos and threes, and the 60 artists looking at Warhol, some of which was delightfully illuminating, AND the second time, they didn't pop the silver balloons in the last room.. thinking I would just transfer it to here, a blog i sometimes feels like writing, and guess what? now on AOL, I can't call up under "sent" the messages to find out what I wrote, AND THAT IS JUST FINE.

if you don't feel like writing something the second time, it may not have been worth it the first...

Anyway, and this is delightful, if on Fcebook you are looking up the Neue Galerie, and you had longed, as I  had, to see the Hodler show, and you hadn't gotten there (as so often happens, you are going but then, oh, you have time, and you don't), well, I do, another week, AND there is a 5 dollar off the admission if you are looking it up, so I will certainly (my "certainly" means, I hope) go sometimes when family has left (alas) and things are back to whatever one would consider normal... I love his doublings, and those strange symmetries and elongated figures -- like Jacques Bellange, that strange French mannerist I keep thinking of, well, sometimes..

we saw Amour.. and it truly is about just that, and I  have something to say about the pigeon, which comes from Kay Sage writing about the superstition of a bird coming in the house to announce death, well, that is actually what I have to say about the pigeon. Not just comic relief at all, and his writing at the end: I set it free, when he has smothered it, relates to the wife, WHAT a film...

Christmas Eve tonight, and my Acquacize class is again this morning, so I should go back to bed, I imagine. That doesn't mean I will. Interesting: what ever means what...

The Morgan and Montale

What a lucky person am I, or what? (I love that peculiar expression!) Last night with friends, friends I really like, but I guess one likes all one's friends, otherwise they wouldn't be that, right?
Skip the overblown punctuation, lady...
Right, so start over, SO we went to the St. Luke's orchestra series of concerts, AND there was Mozart, one with a HORN VERY LOUD so you couldn't hear the other instruments, and Ingram Marshall, if that is it, don't have the program here, incredibly beautiful, born in 1946,one of those pieces that ends with a very very faint pluck on the cello, enough to make you roll over and say:
Please could you do the whole thing AGAIN, please?
and then today to the Met Museum for the Stein collection AGAIN - and me all excited because of Matisse's 1902 Chocolate Pot, and Picasso's 1902 Soup,and I just wrote to the editor of my FORTHCOMING, yes, MODERN ART COOKBOOK, who is sending me a spreadsheet tomorrow or Tuesday, of His Selections, but how I long to have those in it... well, I wrote that I would love to have those in it. Reaktion Books, and it will have still lives AND recipes by artists and poets AND texts I choose from here and there ANDI get to write an introduction I am calling "Reading in the Kitchen"...

and tonight to hear Rosanna Warren and Jonathan Galassi read from Montale, oh, that is very wonderful
AND I hope to take a Whole Year Sabbatical because a semester feels very very short
how fortunate one is (I is) to live HERE in New York!