Motherwell Delights

So I am so delighted that I get to go to P'town this next weekend and talk about Robert Motherwell (whom I loved and loved talking with and love the works of) and various writers, and it is every time I think how fortunate I am, we are, that Rene Char gave us the Vaucluse and Motherwell gave us Provincetown as well as Greenwich and since I am still still still (yes, I haven't forgotten Pascal) thinking about something called "gathering places" or the equivalent, like Worpswede and Provincetown and the Florence Griswold house and Prague's literary cafe, it is especially heartwarming!

getting back

so do we ever get back to where we were?
after our glorious -- at least, to me and I hope to others -- cabanon days, anything else is bound to be other. How can it be that France, now especially southern France, now very especially (I know you can't say "very unique," tautology and all that, but very especially especially I can say) the Vaucluse and our cabanon, well, that is not other. Is it, it must be mostly now, the friends? Yes, the MacRaes and the Swans, and the Murrays, and the Andrews and the everyone we love ones... I love hearing how others love our lunches in the foliage and our ramblings in the region, and meeting Bob and Sue in L'Isle-sur-Sorge, even if the restuarant didn't work out quite as we ha hope, high wind, oh, you know if you read this, all of that  - maybe you have visited us, maybe you will, all of that...

so now New York.. I teach next week, modernist singularities (what what? as that grand and crazy king would say, what what?) well yes, singularities, like what an author or a painter triedand neve rdid again...
will have to ask Lee for examples of that...

and in the meantime, am waiting to hear if some press might like to think further about my writing on my granmother the painter, it is so many things seen hrough her eyes: the academie Julian and Worpswede and various art colonies like Provinetown and Old Lyme etc... and plugging a bit at Pascal, having lunch with Jane Isay who suggested I wirte such a thing tomorrow, and JUST FINISHED the proofs of a new Reverdy volume, that I translated with the now gone and still much adored Patricia Terry, whose husband Robert Terry (the very grand ) introduced me and Boyce, well, they both did

and what else? essays on surrealism, oh yes, this is Endless Houses: Surrealist Intensities, ok, fine, and the Gagosian catalogue about Picasso and the camera I so loved doing, and oh well,it is actually delightful to be back and getting in whatever the swing of thiings is

and seeiing my sister Peg, the world's most generous and loving sister I expect, on the beach at Wrightsveille, North Carolina - hey, congratulations, we have there the eighth worst governor ever! wow, what a true acclamation!He taxes the poor to save the rich, now of course, what sense that does make..

and our firend Paula who teaches there, she has to be the best of the best! I guess I should return to be, it being like one or two or somethiing -- and Iam reading Emmanuel Carrere, now Liminov, and have read some others, because we will have a chat at the super 192 bookstore, of Paula Cooper fame, soonish

goodnight, anyone reading this, you sleep well! from a happy iinsomniac to you

Lawson's Landing

The most absolutely staggeringly beautiful and in principle deserted beach, except for a few boats and trailers, in one of which we are living for the moment, leaves me wordless and speechless except to say just that. I am looking at a grey water, have walked along the sea grass to put my spirits together before taking up my teaching  post again next week after a year sabbatical (mostly devoted to writing about my grandmother the painter, who did everything imaginable in the world of southern living, mountain living, Parisian studying at the Academie Julian and knew the Worpswede painters and writers, like Rilke) , and to getting permissions (hate that part) for my forthcoming Modern Art Cookbook (Reaktion, 2013). I would rather give ten talks and write ten more books than get one more permission to publish anything: mea culpa, I guess, but i really do hate it.
Anyway, I am here, and we, with my husband and 2 of his sons, Hal and Alec, and a wonderful chef named Maxime who is Alec's partner, all took a boat to Nick's Cove to have lunch, and now we are ensconced in blankets outside by a fire.  Life does not get better than this, I do believe.  

the old regime

So when I got up this time -- I like interrupting the sleep hours with an intermission, and it seems to give you a whole other time, not a whole day, maybe, but some time -- I had (I am having now) a piece of ginger, a bordeaux cookie (you know, pepperidge farm --crunchy always) and a glass of milk with a splash of the lesast expensive rum in it -- it was with a feeling of relief. Sure, the world news is always depressing beyond belief, and my beloved son-in-law married to my truly truly brilliant daughter Hilary, doesn't watch or read the news, and that's probably a not-bad idea, but here's the thing of it right now.

I am writing about my grandmother the painter, my iconic ideal of a person who knew how to live, and it turns out that her great-grandmother was a slaveholder in the old south. WHAT? yes, and she wrote a book called white and black under the old regime, yes, with pictures of herself and her husband: the first confederate colonel and then a major general (this is in the wrong army, from most of us's point of view), then a judge, then the president of the University of Alabama.

Now when, years ago, I wanted to find somewhere to publish my then memoir (To the Boathouse, it was called, and, as I just love to tell people, when they sent the proofs to me, saying "we have sent you the proofs of To the Lighthouse, I could only reply, well, I thought it was perfect already-- it wasn't to test their ironic sense, they are a great publishing venture), I suspected that they would HAVE to publish it because of Henry Clayton, my great=great=grandfather having been their president in years, many years, gone by. They did. I still like that book: Yves Bonnefoy said last year it was my best book, well, maybe. Maybe the rest are parasitic on someone else's life and creations: this one surely isn't. But it caused havoc in my personal then-life. Well, some things do that with and to some people. I suppose we just move on.

Anyway, now I am reading this, by Henry Clayton, Colonel  Judge President Henry Clayton's loyal writing wife,  Victoria Virginia Clayton, and thinking how to include some of it in what I am writing about my grandmother, the painter Margaret Walthour Lippitt. (Ah, will I find a publisher for this book about her, with her life from Alabama to Washington to Wilmington, North Carolina, to Paris, to Bremen and the Worpswede painters, to New York and the artistic group at des Artistes on 67th street, and in Lyme, connecticut -- now called "Old Lyme" -- and Linville, North Carolina, in the Blue Ridge Mountains,  which shingled house and her studio I loved beyond all belief, to  a plantation called Clarendon? some day, I will ask my agent, but I have to write it first, perhaps) , anyway  I HAVE to talk about it a little, and the other night I was having dinner with two friend historians, Meg Crahan and Dorothy O. Helly, and was expostulating about all this. I mean, she kept slaves, and what do I do about this, just not discuss her heritage in Alabama? They were -- as all the women in my women writing women's lives seminar (we meet once a month) have always been -- supportive in every way.
Yes, I have to deal with it.

This reminds me of all those things we go through and watch out children go through: just deal with it, I can hear people say, just deal with it.

Ok, in the daytime, I have to write this chapter today, or it will linger and linger -- I loved reading about the joys of procrastination today in the New York Time when I was waiting for my flu and penumonia shots... But I will have to write it today, or else, why did I get up to write this?

Amazing, being in the foothills of the Blue Ridge, at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, 16
 gorgeous days when even the cellphone does not work -- you know, as in, you can call friends and husband and all that -- and you just might have email IF you are lucky and in your studio, where you
hole away directly whenever you can...
If I were (oh, that would be delightful, but am not) a fiction writer, I'd call something
No Signal from the Mountain
because THAT is where the only power comes from, very remarkable
what is more so is being
Surrounded by truly non-ego driven creative types -- my goodness, I did love being at the Getty for 8 months and at Bellagio twice, and once again for a conference, but this is different: cows, horses,
and that is it
trying to write a memoir (not a momoir, as in being a mother, but a plain old memoir) of and in the voice of my grandmother the painter
what alife: Worpswede, where she had a rather delightful time with Otto Modersohn, the widower of Paula Modersohn-Becker, who died in childbirth a year afteer my grandmother arrrived -- she lived with my grandfather and 3 children in Bremen, 15 kilometers away... and had left her first baby with a nurse and her husband to go study at the Academie Julian back at the end of the nineteenth century,
for 6 months, with a friend painter from Savannah, but still, all that and then settling down in the then small town of Wilmington, N.C., rising at 5 every morning to paint and then being a society hostess...
WHOA!
So how to write in someone else's voice... I am of course reading painter Paula's journal, and hope to find journals of other woman painters,and here are some right around me now...

Goodness, N.Y.

Don't know how anyone keeps up with the news , you know, print version even, and does any work at all...
such fun to Tweet and glance at Facebook and here I am on a year's leave, as in sabbatical, thinking I'll just
blog and tweet and face and walk in the park maybe
however, am going to a writer's colony, VCCA in Virginia, to see what that one is like -- a year at the Getty
was very yearish, and both full months at Bellagio were very full, so I don't really know what 17 days will feel like, hoping to think about thinking about perhaps writing a memoir of my grandmother, painter and all that, in Worpswede near Bremen, Germany,  and Provincetown and Linville, in the mountains of North Carolina and the small town of Wilmington....
but back to NY, where, I gather, there can be and will be ads on subway cards and stations -- now, I love it in paris when, say, poetry takes over a whole metro station, or art, or something worthwhile, but ads? ah, the economy, stupid
and today we celebrate the anniversary of Occupy Wall Street -- the ghastly undoing and wasting and destruction of the people's library -- and how it spread... I loved being on a panel at the Modern Language Association in Seattle last year with Tom Mitchell who drummed out an Occupy beat...