New York Glories

How could one not love being in New York, especially during lockdown? everything you can do for the first time in ages feels more and more urgently important 

like going to the Met for the first time in , what, four months? as a member I got in at 12 and before that, just the. press -- and I could have said Brooklyn Rail and written up the opening but tried to go to the boathouse i've loved for so many years, closed of course, as was the cafe across from the lake, and so later i could get into the met, and it was Making the Met. Like being home. 

Today, Friday the 24 of January, I treated myself to the exhibitions of Max Ernst's Collages at the Kasmin Gallery and also to Specific Forms at Loretta Howard Gallery, and these were treats of a real type, that I get to write about for the Brooklyn Rail, right now.  And on the way, since reading in the bus is the true delight, I have been reading Lydia Davis in her Essays, and loving not just . how she writes but the whole manner of looking and relooking at things. We will be talking about the latter in my forthcoming mini-seminar on "Maximal/Minimal: from the epic to the aphorism," and this coming week we will be looking at details in larger pictures, and reading Thom Gunn and then Robert Hass and on and on. It feels like an equivalent of "the man who is tired of London is tired of life" and that is the way I feel about poetry. 

breathless in ny

so, no, I can't keep up, but that is nice too.. have spent these last , what four weeks, preparing the critics's page for The Brooklyn Rail, november issue, during which I got to invite essays from various brilliant friends on the topic i chose, which was Translating Art... and off they (and I) went... my introductory essay I won't resume here, but I can say it is about communities, like the one we formed in writing these essays, like those who accepted, like what they chose... and I have to say the Brooklyn Rail feels like one largish community but who can gather... so to get to the meeting I was supposed to arrive during, to have my picture taken so that Phong Bui can do my portrait  for that issue, and I LOVED the grouping of people, all informal, everyone talking, everyone having pizza and wine after, ah, terrific, only very far for those of us dwelling in Manhattan -- I got on the wrong direction of the subway, and was rescued by Susan Bee, with whom and whose husband Charles Bernstein, I have been in friendly and happy close contact for years... and we ARRIVED at the BR, and , yes, I loved it all.

And yes, we went to St. Matthew Passion,  rehearsal at the armory, with Simon Rattle and Peter Sellars (he rushing up and down and getting the boy's chorus and the real chorus to go into the ailes, so we were all a part of it all -- such music, of course, the summit of music I never concentrated on before like that, and then a lots of other assemblies , less sublime, but they were all heightened by that Armory Experience... I gave a talk out in Woodstock on Georges Malkine, having talked the night before on Joseph Cornell at the New School, and then, I will just attach what I didn't want to add to my introductory essay to the Brooklyn Rail, too personal (it, after all, goes to 20,000 readers)
but I really loved being with Kathy Ruttenberg, so I'll add it here:

Back in the city this past Thursday, I had seen some large and surrealizing baroque sculptures of  the animalist  artist Kathy Ruttenberg,  in the Stux gallery on 57^th street, and then on Sunday, I had the ultimate joy of making a surrealist romp through her working place and inspiration: her woods, studio, and amazing rare varieties of rabbits, pigs, pigeons, and goats, near Woodstock. Some animals were interior: Trixie the pig, who agreeably grunted when we stirred her blanket, and who had her own corner with pig paintings and drawings all around, like  an altar: various gorgeous rabbits like Ozone, all fluffy white hair, and, I loved Ozone and one other rabbit of darker hair hue, and we played with chickens and rode in a pony cart with Mercury, not exactly fleet-footed, but adorable, and then returned to the city, animalized in a good sense.