This does not actually reassure me. It’s more like the second coming of Rod McKuen.
‘Artful’ By Ali Smith
While enviously browsing the art theory section of the bookstore in the National Gallery of Art, I saw this book and was immediately intrigued by it.
Artful is not exactly non fiction, not exactly a novel, and not exactly a collection of essays, but is something of all three.
Smith’s husband, apparently a university lecturer on literature, has recently died and the book is structured around his notes for four undelivered lectures. She digresses, extensively quoting from poetry and sometimes assembling ‘new’ poetry from lines from poets like Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot, and others to create a ‘new’ poem. She is even, briefly, haunted by visions or hallucinations of her late husband visiting her and stealing things (though she also recognizes that it must be she who is actually the thief, because her husband is not there.
It’s a beautiful book, but my expectations were too high, I fear. Nonethless, it is beautiful and a moving, highly literate elegy.
I Have No Title To Put Here
Later, I came across another reference to a similar concept (also in a Paris Review article):
It’s a feeling I know well and which English lacks a good word for (and I’m not sure stealing from Portugal or Wales will resolve that lack).
When I read The Sun Also Rises, I was overwhelmed with a homesickness for a place and time I never knew, a mythical 1920s of high modernism. Of course, I was also a teenager, so I didn’t properly understand the sarcasm, satire, and self-loathing that drove the novel, or else I should not have felt saudade nor hiraeth.
More saudade, I suspect. Hiraeth is something more for my mother, a southerner who will never, despite her accent, fit properly in the South (with its desperate poverty and structural racism and the veneer which covers it up and makes believe we have moved past it in much of the ‘New South’), nor feel at home anywhere else (perhaps not surprising that she settled into Florida, which is neither here nor there).
I wonder if they are all myths. I think perhaps I have even lived through such times myself, but they are invariably disappointing to live through and unnoticed by the participants, who are merely getting by like everyone else and wishing to have been alive in the New York of the Abstract Expressionists or the Bay Area of the San Francisco Renaissance or even the pastoral delights of the Transcendentalists of the 1840s.
Weekend Reading – The Real Thing
Midweek Staff Meeting: Telecommuting
I actually have no article to post here about telecommuting, but his Holiness is visiting DC and, even though I am writing this Monday evening, I feel confident saying that traffic will indeed by horrible and snarling today (Wednesday). A lot of folks are telecommuting and, really, I’m hoping I will be allowed to, as well, though it’s hard to say and my office doesn’t really have a policy on this.
You will be missed, C.K. Williams.
A nice, balanced article about the new head of my favorite museum in DC, the Hirshhorn.
Weekend Reading: Community
#LittleSalonDC
There’s a nice article on Little Salon in the WaPo today – and thankfully, no pictures of me (I don’t photograph well; my charms only appear after much time and gin).
It was a wonderful night, this time with free beer.
And I bought this small painting (acrylic on paper) for my better half. The artist, Dana Ellyn, had a number of frankly disturbing pieces (not an insult, though the Madonn and Child-esque painting of Hillary with a naked baby Bill on his knee must be seen to believed), but I turned around and I saw this three small works featuring pigs and the first one I saw was just so… cute. That’s it, really. It was cute. And I’m not immune to cuteness.
But, with my better half having been out of town for a while (I keep on thinking that people secretly think that she left me and I just haven’t come to grips with it), after buying the piece, I felt myself becoming a little maudlin and not such good company, so I left a little early.
Hemingway En Havana
I’ve read it suggested that Hemingway’s decline can be traced to the Cuban embargo, which denied him access to a spiritual home. Be that as it may, I’m reminded of a contemporary art exhibit I saw years (1999?) in Lyon, France. There was a ladder you climbed onto a platform (the whole resembled a bunk bed from below) and there was a glass table in the shape of the island of Cuba. A recorded voice, in French, saying something like “Hello, Mr Hemingway, how are you?”
My First Little Salon
I went to my first Little Salon on Tuesday night, at a condo in Parkview (a neighborhood near Columbia Heights that I didn’t even know existed before Google Mapping my directions).
There were some very nice paintings (okay – ‘mixed media,’ but can we just say they were things on canvass with paint and other stuff? because the term ‘mixed media’ makes me think there should be some electronics in there; actually, she was going to bring some music and computer accompaniments, but apparently there was some theft/car break-in thing happening, so that didn’t happen) by a Casey Snyder.
Bellwether Bayou, aka Laura Schwartz played violin and sang – using a loop machine to create a background and plucking her violin like a mandolin as much as she played it (or maybe it’s nothing like a mandolin; I have no music talent and while it might look like similar techniques to me, perhaps I’m just dead wrong).
Then a bit of a short story from a Lily Meyer and up to the roof deck to listen to a New York City based band called Rookin that has a lot of songs based on scraps of things by nineteenth century, Civil War era folks (note to Rookin: Drum Taps was by Whitman, not Melville). And they closed with Amazing Grace and that’s always awesome (the lead singer had one of those soft, fairly high pitched but still masculine voices that goes very well with something like that).
My only complaint is that it would have been nicer had been better half been around (she would have loved it, too).
the coffee philosopher 