catching up, sort of

 So, thanks for my daughter Hilary's help, I am me, Mary Ann Caws, starting up my long ago (I guess)

blog, persuaded in part by the ooooof book review of my recent (feeling recent!) review of my Mina Loy:

Apology  of Genius 

with Reaktion Books, UK and I THOUGHT it was that MIT and Roger Conover, friend from always, had commissioned it, but nope, and anyway it came out BEFORE the BIG Mina Loy BASH I shan't even be involved in! So Much for Personal Criticism and Subjective Involvement!

However, I have to continue with its importance for me at least , and that is a point I kept making, probably too strongly! (it was really about her poetry and about Arthur Cravan, that eccentric genius!)

I would so happily have concentrated on him, but i think Roger Conover will prefer doing that himself and perhaps I can help a bit. At this advanced age of mine, I should not expect to publish any more, and so -- to the Beinecke  I shall be sending, probably via my brilliant daughter Hilary and her husband Jonathan Caws-Elwitt, not just the original letters of Jacqueline Lamba (third wife of André Breton as in L'Amour fou/Mad Love, which I translated) and Hedda Sterne and some others, having already sent my Yves Bonnefoy, René Char letters but also an immense stack of letters to me and my many. writings on the Scottish Poet and Gardner Ian Hamilton Finlay, immense. Whew! What a bunch of poetic geniuses I have been so fortunate to know!.

Enough for tonight, and so bizarre to pick up my blog again, never knowing if anyone ever will read it!

what we learn about the cappuccino!

I thought I knew EVERYTHING about cappuccinos: Carolyn Burke, during a conference on Mina Loy (AND i certainly HOPE Reaktion likes my new version of my book on her!), told me how to get a dry one without the foam, in case one would want that, but now why would one want that????

so this morning on a hot day and outside -- how I love being outside in the summer!-- i found that you can take the little stirrer and if you indulge in brown crunchy sugar on top, you can spend a delightful fifteen minutes or so in the sun swooping the foam, crunchy now, into yourself AND THEN take the rest in the cup for a walk with you, whether you are going, yes, of course masked, to the park or wherever else. 

If you don't have the energy or zoom power to push the top on enough, it will spill out a bit of the cup onto you, but what the hell? So that was my learning from this morning. Back to think about , oh, the rest of life, I guess, but this was the important part.

oh, new year's day 2017

eons ago, my father, who didn't speak a lot, as I perhaps faultily remember, said we should say Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit, to begin each New Year
so when we woke this morning, I was saying inside my head just that, but then we launched into how delightful it was to have lots of friends over last night on New Year's Eve instead  of going out --
and it was, even if the goose was rather (very) overcooked, why did it matter at all ? It didn't and it was a joy all around, including even dishes -- never bothers me, putting in, taking out -- that isn't important, and friends are
so the 2nd ave. subway opens officially today, 2 hours ago -- we will go down to Canal Street and Chinatown tomorrow and have dim sum, of which actually I only like the fried shrimp or whatever comes all frizzled, have never liked those damp pockets of stuff, but I like Boyce's liking and that again is what matters
am about to launch into the next 2 years' project, which is at the moment called Modernist Gatherings: tables and moments, and is about how artistic personae are happy leaving tables where pp either ritually or just occasionally, like happenings, persons either of like or different minds gather either once or many times and go then later about their artistic business more creatively... I signed a contract for it with beloved REaktion Books, who have done, what, six or seven books of mine, the latest being a Pascal (miracles and reason, I don't feel deeply allied with  either of those sides, but his being fascinates me and has for years: the self-punishment and the manysided brain workings and the revelation and the haunting)
ah, happy new year to anyone who might read this!

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.

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????)

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!