being

goodness, how remarkable it is to be, to be ABLE to lament privately and publicly, about anything, about how the world has changed since November, not just here but everywhere
today, which happens to be Dec. 23 in the wee hours, I remember a full yesterday, spent trying to doctor my SimplyWoolf text, which, says Charley who runs this bizarre ebook only series -- I accept everything I have never done, so I said suddenly YES to Woolf, having said YES to Proust (I would always say YES to anything Proust of course) but someone else said previously yes, I did our beloved everyone's football heroine Woolf, and now have to do it WHAT? chronologically! imagine writing a biography chronologically, not just thematically, anyway I started that -- then went to MOMA to meet my from so long ago friend Michele Cone, and we saw the Russian Revolution, amazing, large, VERY large, had lunch to celebrate her anniversary with Terry, also from North Carolina, like me , and I had clam tagliolini because at Marea the other night to celebrate Carol Richards' birthday (she saved me for a year at the Getty in 1998 I think it was because I had no car and only a bike (a year in LA with no car, because I don't drive, and she was stupendously great, like Marjorie Perloff, whom I would celebrate any time I could, and where is
THIS BLOG GOING?)
ah, so I had seen that the superdirector Peter Richards, whose Anna Christie we ventured out to see in the freezingest night I remember for ages and it was wonderful, anyway, so Peter was having tagliolini and I envied it SO I HAD IT FOR LUNCH at the MODERN and it was really grand

then we saw the Russian exhibition, wow, very wow, and then I went back up to Picabia, for which Michele had written, then photography because I ran into, well, walked into Richard Kramer who had just seen it, then an Italian film something like Venice, the Moon and so on, then supper with Boyce at a new place, Radicchio because of black linguini with seafood and now back to the SimplyWoolf, and yes I would write about her any time I was asked to also
AND Matthew and Emily will have a baby boy and so Christmas is here, since they are here from Cambridge in the old country as it were
so goodnight

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. 

middle of night things

What a joy is a middle of night rising: this time, I had some of that cloudy sake and those seaweed thinner than thin crunchy wafers -- these with brown sugar taste -- that melt instantly on your tongue, like the Japanese flowers that blossom instantly in the water. Very Proust. Trying to translate Yves Bonnefoy's writing on his wander through the Louvre in something of his style --how I wish I could. Having tried over the years with various of his superbly elusive poems and writings on art, this time I'd like it to work.

Of course, life keeps seeping in: recommendations here and there, readings of chapters in dissertations, reviewing books you think should be noticed, or swatting through a book you were excited about, and then it got long. Alas, this happened with How to Live, the one about Montaigne, wonderfully conceived, but exuding length, and most recently, with A Man of Misconceptions, about the incredible Athanasius Kircher.  Incredible he was, but it doesn't have the holding power that we all wish our writings and musings would have.. A feeble wish, but a real one. 

memoire retrouvee

Just in Paris last week, I noticed the French version of a book I had wanted to give my French friends for ages. And I did: Is it not wonderfully and passing strange that the just-out French translation of Edmund de Waal'sf The Hare with Amber Eyes should be called La Memoire retrouvee????? Given that it is partly about Charles Ephrussi and all that, so close to Proust, it seems delightfully PLEASE LOOKAT THIS, does it not?? The Vienna part reminds me of Marjorie Perloff's brilliant The Vienna Paradox..

And, on the rue des Grands Augustins, in the place where Picasso and company used to lunch, in the Pre Catalan, there is a KGBbis, the Kitchen Galerie Bis bis...I loved writing about this for my Modern Art Cookbook, now in proofs and coming out in October, and about the "epigram" -- part of a lamb, like a condensed version, speaking of art and cooking and writing...

Proust! Expressionism! Murnau!

Several times, it might take, to feel at ease in the display of  Proust's tiny notebooks and some excerpts, carefully chosen... I went, as many of us did, to the Morgan Library, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the publication of the first volume of the great A la recherche du temps perdu -- here you could see his wondering about whether to write as an essayist or a novelist, you could see the development of the novel from the beginnings in his Contre Sainte-Beuve, the waking scenes and the going to bed scenes.. I loved writing it up for Hyperallergicweekend,

http://hyperallergic.com/author/mary-ann-caws/

 and Antoine Compagnon's lecture was superb, showing the changes in the manuscript and on the cover.. it was all a great joy.

As is the German Expressionism at the Neue Galerie, 1900-1930 (lots of things from Die  Brucke, and from the Blaue Reiter) with particularly unusual items lent by Estee Lauder. The first thing that struck me was the Lovis Corinth  Fruit Bowl of 1923, where the pedestal of one fruit dish was leaning to one side, the fruit was tipping into the next bowl, and above that,a fruit dish with a lot of empty space. A small squish of white balanced a dab of blue, and the flowing strokes up to down were so strong that a veritable current was created, only interrupted by a small dangle of grey at the top.

And, of course, the Christian Schad, say, the Two Girls of 1929, all intertwined , hands on lips and dark stockings, and eyes cast down with a small smile, a red flower on the right dark stocking, then other rolled down past the knee-- with above them, a white mess of a sheet or a pillow or something, with the end of a leather strap just sitting there. Facing us, a half-slip pulled down over a breast, a left arm obscuring the left eye of the woman behind... all in perfect and ghastly symmetry.

Otto Dix portraits are staring at you, one with a Seated terrified woman, and a scarier one still, called the Female Nude with Red Hair and Stockings in Front of Pink Cloth.  Spell it out in the title, and indeed she does have red hair and stockings... the titles don't lie, they describe, in detail, what you are looking at. Rudolf Schlichter's Woman in a Tie of 1923 already says what you see -- if you think of Annie Hall and that groovy tie, so much the better.

George Grosz spells it out too: Portrait of John Forste, Man with Glass Eye. Of course you want immediately to know which is the glass, which the real...The guy did great stuff. Take the Night of 1917 with the face desperately distressed, a tiny figure lost, a tall one smirking...I could have stopped right there, but the plenteousness got me. Max Beckmann I have taught so often, and cared about -- that amazing play by the Bauers, the Blue Flower, was based on him. He did over 80 self-portraits, which may tell us something about his oversized personality: here is the Self-Portrait with Horn, when he  had just fled Berlin, targeted by the Nazis, fleeing to Amsterdam in 1938. He is wearing stripes like the prisoner he might have been: everything is brutal and raw.Overpowering.

As for titles, Paul Klee took the cookie. How about The Moon was on the Wane and Showed me the Grimace of a Notorious Lord...I especially take to the tiny shapes he places in a large frame, but points to them in the title, such as the Yellow House of 1915, and the Small Black Door, these encased in other colors and shapes...

Downstairs they showed a Murnau silent film, The Last Laugh, and with all its misery, totally convincing, a sudden more than happy end, stuck on, as the credits say. To please! and it did. 

slithering!

such fun, writing about art shows: so I went BACK to the Morgan to see the Drawing Surrealism AGAIN, and it yielded this:

http://hyperallergic.com/65991/slithering-toward-us-drawing-surrealism-at-the-morgan/

and I love Hyperallergic weekend, and especially SLITHERING

coming, a thought about the Proust show also at the Morgan, for the same website, hyperallergic weekend, but also I should point out that, under the editorship of the very very intelligent Harold Augenbraum, who knows LOTS about Proust, from way back, his (yes, Marcel's) poems have been translated by lots of us translator poet types, out with Penguin this very month, we could slither along into them soon....

the piling up

so what do you do when your books are already occupying the radiator that might some year have to go back on, and then they spill and then you might take one or two out and they spill really over and you are reading 5 at a time and not finishing any because you want to get back to the other one you just didn't finish, so now I am in the middle or somewhere or other in:
Benita Eisler: Stieglitz and Georgia O'Keeffe and then in my office I have the letters from them: The Faraway One or something like that
Christopher Benfey about the Hummingbirds and Heade and Dickinson, wonderful book
and How to Live: or a Life of Montaigne : witty and grand and brava for Sarah Bakewell
and the de Botton How Proust can Change Your Life (well, maybe he doesn't, but it's a great title) which I read before
and The Swerve, of course, keep almost finishing, but it's like dessert



and then proofreading La Proie s'ombre by Gherasim Luca that I translated, on and on, i burnt the cookies I was making for
what used to be tomorrow night but I see that if it readily is 4:36 am it is tonight

SYMBOLISM

What a lark, teaching symbolist poets! My seminar this week concerns  ( as it did last week also, how to stop? ) Mallarme, the most 21st century poet writing in the 19th century, blows anyone's mind... for sure. Every time you read him on Loie Fuller (as in his nigh-impenetrable essay on the Ballets) or on shipwrecks and typography (as in the major-important No Throw of the Dice will Get Rid of Chance, or any way you desire it translated), you feel as if you could shout with Virginia Woolf after reading Proust: "What is there to say after that?" Well, she continued to say a few things, and we are glad of that. 

modern art cookbook!

Having signed the contract for my Modern Art Cookbook, to be published by Reaktion Books, in the UK, but distributed by the Chicago University Press -- both of which publishers I love -- I have quotes from MFK Fisher, Elizabeth David, Laurie Colwin, Hemingway, Proust, Julia Child, Monique Truong (Salt) and so on, but would love a wider selection...
Anyone who has an idea, please do let me know!
This book is about vaious still lifes and recipes connected with the elements in the paintings (you know, Cezanne's Ginger Pot and Eggplants, in the Met Museum, and associated recipes from various artists about eggplant, and Manet's Bunch of Asparagus, and his Single Asparagus, and relevant sections from Proust about asparagus, and from the Hare with Golden Eyes about Charles Ephrussi and his commissioning that painting), but goes wider than that -- it feels heavily tipped towards French recipes, and then modern artist recipes, as it should... but is open to suggestions!
anyone who is interested, and has suggestions, do please respond, thanks,
Mary Ann Caws