singularities

And I am SO enjoying my seminar in Modernist Singularities! We lingered over Beckett and Borges, and last time, D.H. Lawrence (why do we have to say D.H., not a lot of other Lawrences I would be likely to teach, it's not like T.J. Clark, or T.S. Eliot, because there are after all Kenneth and George)
anyway, we have coming up Thomas Bernhard (speaking of difficult people, and I LOVE the Loser, about Glenn Gould, well, I love anything about Glenn Gould), and Wittgenstein (as in his Zettel)  -- will I show, as I sometimes do, Derek Jarman's Wittgenstein? -- AND Marjorie Perloff together, thinking of this and that, and her Vienna Paradox, and then everyone talks, instead of an exam, about what they all wrote their long paper on and if I can remember it, I bring some wine and crackers
and we are growing, Boyce and myself, basil and tomatoes, on our indoor ledge and it looks like a Blooming Forest of green!

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...