Patricia Markert

Pina Bausch

2012-01-29T13:33:00.000-05:00

Words fail me. Pina is electrifying with the boldness of its vision. I was ignorant of Bausch's importance and influence on modern dance. Thanks to Wim Wenders, whose intimate knowledge of her oeuvre led him to film the key dances using her company indoors and out, now everyone can know about her.

The settings are crucial to the choreography. They do not merely provide background or enhance a mood. They become as integral to the performances as the performers themselves. In some cases, like when they are dancing in water, the water dances too.

PINA - Dance, dance, otherwise we are lost - International Trailer from neueroadmovies on Vimeo.

The Nervous Breakdown

2012-01-02T16:33:00.000-05:00

The Nervous Breakdown, a literary magazine and much more, has published a poem of mine.
Thanks to Wendy Chin-Tanner for helping with the publication.

Here is the link:

My Old Calculator

Blue Nights

2011-12-09T17:24:00.000-05:00

I read this in one day because I couldn't help myself. I have always been seduced by Didion's style. I wanted to be under the spell of her hypnotic use of repetitive phrases as she described the loss of her daughter at age 39. I imagine I am not alone in this sad sorority of mothers who have experienced the death of a child in being eager to read the latest report from the front lines,especially coming from such a fine writer as Joan Didion. Her memoir about the death of her husband said so many things so well about the rather common event of widowhood that I was hoping for something extraordinary when it came time to describe that unnatural event of surviving your child.How much is left unsaid in this book! We receive snippets of things Quintana Roo did and said when she was five, and fourteen, and how she prepared for her wedding when she was thirty seven. I was hoping for more, a portrait of a beloved daughter, but it is all mixed up with the heartache of the bereaved. When it comes to those eerie feelings upon discovering all of the items saved for her child (now who will inherit this?!.) though she is quite splendid.

Five years had passed since she picked up her pen to write about it. Is it that we have so much in common that I read her account? My daughter also died five years ago. No, her details are so different from my solidly middle class life. Didion exists in a class I never belonged to. As a writer, she has lived with her husband as a significant player with all the accoutrements that go with that status. Her tone is not snobby, though.
Even though I read the book hungrily, in one or two big bites, the repetitions began to wear on me. The mention of the exclusive make of China and linens, the names of the hotels in Paris and Honolulu-- these were not gratuitously given, but still, it is a bit much. One can grow tired of a sad book in which all the places and people and things come with such an extremely high pedigree.

In the end, though what is saddest is the sound of Didion losing her vitality, her willingness to go on, and who can blame her? Her obituary will be full of accomplishments. She doesn't need to do one more blessed thing to prove herself, and she has lost the two people most dear to her. />
Still, I wish she would return to her reporting of things other than herself. She is capable of a great expose on medicine as it is practiced in hospitals, or the politics of the Republican Party. No matter how world weary Didion sounds, she is still very much among us.

In certain latitudes there comes a span of time approachingand following the summer solstice, some weeks in all, when the twilights turnlong and blue. This period of the bluenights does not occur in subtropical California, where I lived for much of thetime I will be talking about here and where the end of the daylight is fast andlost in the blaze of the dropping sun, but it does occur in New York, where Inow live. You notice it first as Aprilends and May begins, a change in the season, not exactly a warming—in fact notat all a warming –yet suddenly summer seems near, a possibility, even apromise. You pass a window, you walk toCentral Park, you find yourself swimmingin the color blue: the actual light is blue, and over the course of an hour orso this blue deepens, becomes more intense even as it darkens and fades, approximatesfinally the blue of the glass on a clear day at Chartres, or that of Cerenkovradiation thrown off by the fuel rods in the pools of nuclear reactors. The French call this time of the day, “l’heurebleue.” To the English it was the “gloaming.” The very word “gloaming” reverberates, echoes—the gloaming, the glimmer, theglitter, the glisten, the glamour—carrying in its consonants the images of housesshuttering, gardens darkening, grass-lined rivers slipping through theshadows. During the blue nights youthink the end of the day will never come. As the blue nights draw to a close (and they will, and they do) youexperience an actual chill, an apprehension of illness, at the moment you firstnotice: the blue light is going, the days are already shortening, the summer isgone.

--from the opening page of Blue Nights

Nick Alciati on December 2

2011-12-06T21:04:00.001-05:00

In New Paltz last Friday my nephew, Nick Alciati, exhibited ten photographs for his senior thesis show at SUNY New Paltz. Nick has been studying photography and education, and his work was beautifully mounted and hung in the museum on campus. The "light and shadow" images were perfectly lit, an homage to male flesh, partial nudes, no faces, only bodies. The portraits on his website capture delicate and heavy faces, an exquisite jaw line, a fulsome head of hair.

The art show included work by 16 other seniors. There were crystals grown on human hair and small stick figures made from sticks by Melodia Molina. Mitchell Saler paints natural landscapes -- Lake Placid seen from the air, a barn in New Hope, NY, a rainstorm over the water, a sunset. His triptych shows three spiraling bodies of air mass-- a hurricane's eye, a whirlpool, and galaxies, all taking the same forms, linked together in a mystical way. I was taken with these meditations on nature.

The jewelry and digital designs and sculptures all lived in the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art side by side. It was clear that a lot of discussion had to take place to fit so many works in such a finite space. The more I looked at Nick's photographs, and the farther I got from them, the better I liked them, especially the nudes. Congratulations to him for preparing such a thoughtful thesis statement, and for mastering the techniques of light and shadow, and portraits, with a narrative that was very personal.

It was poignant to see the photograph of Nick holding the small dinosaur from Lizzy's collection, which he had put on the table near the postcards and comments notebook. The title was "Remembering Lizzy." She loved photography and would have been proud of Nick's work. The show took place on the fifth anniversary of her death at age eighteen.

The Artist

2011-11-26T19:19:00.000-05:00

Like Hugo, another movie about movies, The Artist is also about the fading allure of has-beens in the moving picture business. Unlike Hugo, The Artist not only quotes from silent movies, it is a silent movie shot in black and white, with no dialogue until the very end of the movie.

The themes of silence, and powerlessness in the face of not being heard, make me want to go back and watch those old movies that depended on the power of the scenario, of the actors' ability to express the spirit of what the movie was about through movement, gesture, stillness, silence.

Hugo

2011-11-26T10:55:00.000-05:00

Hugo Cabret's father found a discarded automaton in the museum where he was employed and was determined to repair it and make it work again. The automaton was the figure of a man holding a pen poised to write something. What could it be? Would it explain what kind of inventor made it?

When Hugo is orphaned, he continues to repair the automaton while working to maintain the clocks that his uncle abandoned when he disappeared. In a dream like train station in the middle of Paris, Hugo lives within a secret compartment where he can move furtively from one clock to another. The shots of the clocks and the gears, the repetition of the images of keys and locks, lead to a rapturous feeling toward simple mechanics. I will not say technology. That would be putting too extreme an edge on what we are looking at which is the works of things. The metaphor is work. How do things work. What work do we do to give our lives meaning. How do we fix what lies broken? Can a broken man be mended?

Scorsese's movie is a pleasure to watch, and at the end, there is an afterglow of images that stay in the mind's eye.

Margin Call

2011-11-26T10:54:00.000-05:00

What a wonderful cast. Stanley Tucci, Kevin Spacey, Jeremy Irons. To see one at a time in a film is to know the pleasures of fine acting. To see all three working together in a fast paced smartly written film takes away the sour taste that the movie left in my mouth of the plot. I had already seen this plot in a documentary film, Inside Job, from a different point of view, from the point of view of the muckrakers who were pointing the finger at the villains of the economic crisis of 2008.

Margin Call takes us inside the board room where the decision was made to begin unloading the worthless stocks that set off the mortgage crisis. Watching the process of large scale chicanery from the point of view of the villains may humanize them but nobody comes off unscathed.

American Ballet Theater

2011-11-13T20:19:00.000-05:00


Lobby of City Center


Company B, choreography by Paul Taylor

Besides the visual pleasure of watching the dancers of ABT perform works by Merce Cunningham, Twyla Tharp, and Paul Taylor, going to the City Center today, I could actually see from my seat, which was not always the case in the past when the sight lines were flawed. The seats themselves were comfortable, and the whole building has been restored to what I imagined the Shriners would see when they convened there, and were inspired by Hollywood and the Arabian Nights simultaneously.

Drive

2011-11-11T20:36:00.000-05:00

The thing about cars in Los Angeles is that they stand in for much more than transportation. As a New Yorker, I don't think I can understand the deep bond that forms between car and driver. Drive strips down a character's identity to his action of operating the car. Even though the driver has scenes with human beings, and he looks genuinely fond of a boy and his mother, there is little real communication except for lots of meaningful smiles.

The driver likes LA basketball. He watches it, he listens to it, even when he is eavesdropping on the police radio so that he can tell how close he is to his final escape.The driver's identity in the opening scene when he drives a getaway car for a couple of robbers shifts quickly when the police home in on them and he coolly walks away in a basketball cap and jacket.

Next he wears a police uniform so we think oh a law enforcer escaping the law, but no, he is an actor in a film, no a body double for an actor in a film, no a stunt double for an actor in a film. So he is a character within a character within a character. It would take a lot of digging to find out who he really was.

After just watching Martha Marcy May Marlene, whose main character's identity is sketchy and finally unrevealed, watching this movie, with very slow takes on the actors, and lots of musical exposition, I wondered how much music videos have had an impact on filmmaking. Screenplays for these two movies were were really stingy with talk for the main characters.

Do modern young directors think that we don't want meaningful dialogue any more? Do they think that music should stand in for words? Have we stopped speaking to each other in absorbing ways? Does language not count? Or is this just the feminist in me wondering what happened to the snappy actresses of old who had plenty of lines to say and said them with aplomb and were the reason to go to the movies.

As it is, we have Ryan Gosling, who is a pleasure to watch, and Carey Mulligan whose hair is always impeccably styled. Albert Brooks as a singularly bad man has all the good lines.

Poets Forum

2011-11-11T20:29:00.000-05:00


Kay Ryan

Juan Felipe Herrera


Anne Waldman

Three chancellors of the Academy of American Poets had a conversation at the Poets Forum in late October. The session was entitled "Humans and Others." Each poet gave an introductory statement, and then the conversation began.

Waldman has a titanic mind, making connections between protozoa, robotics, and animals of all stripes. She made me want to read her book, Manatee Humanity. Just listening to her say it over and over again, she drilled home the connection between the nonhuman and the human, the relationship between the large sea creatures, the sirens who drove men to crash into perilous rocks, and the puny humans who are a cancer on the planet.

Kay Ryan on the other hand is a woman of few words whose remark, "Well I looked at the title, "Humans and Others," and I said, yeah, I fit," made everyone laugh. Ryan has the wit and charm of a woman comfortable in her own skin. She seems to be a direct descendant of the sensibility of Emily Dickinson. She quoted Emily Dickinson's poem number 724.

It's easy to invent a Life —
God does it — every Day —
Creation — but the Gambol
Of His Authority —

It's easy to efface it —
The thrifty Deity
Could scarce afford Eternity
To Spontaneity —

The Perished Patterns murmur —
But His Perturbless Plan
Proceed — inserting Here — a Sun —
There — leaving out a Man —

and number 1746

The most important population
Unnoticed dwell,
They have a heaven each instant
Not any hell.

Their names, unless you know them,
'Twere useless tell.
Of bumble-bees and other nations
The grass is full.

Juan Felipe Herrera patiently listened to Waldman as she drew connections at breakneck speed, then Kay Ryan's rendition of two of ED. He was sketching a jeep the whole time, because he had been thinking of buying one. When he did some research on the car, he learned that it had features like "lock and load," "camouflage" and other phrases that demonstrate the "weaponisation of the language."

Martha Marcy May Marlene

2011-10-23T07:00:00.000-05:00

The main character is living in a cult with a satanic leader when she calls her sister to retrieve her. Little information is shared between any of the characters in this movie. It is as if they were all living underwater not just in the actual swimming scenes of which there are many, but in the murky exposition of the story.

It is frustrating to hear the older sister ask repeatedly "What the fuck is wrong with you?" and not really mean it. She does not wait for the answer. She does not get it, and neither do we. Poor Martha. She has no one to turn to. Her sister and her sister's husband seem like they want to take care of her, but there is something off in the tone of the direction that makes you doubt it. Poor audience who don't really know what the meaning of the movie is, except that at the heart of it is a sterling performance by the young actress, ...

Well photographed, with effective music, the movie's editing includes transitions that are out of a horror movie.

Who would you become if you had a sketchy childhood with no present parents and then joined a commune where you had to sublimate your better instincts to the abusive leader. What is most spooky perhaps is how Martha repeats the phrase, "I am a teacher and a leader" because it is what her guru told her she was. But we never learn who she really is, even with this string of names.

Occupy Wall Street

2011-10-18T21:17:00.000-05:00

When I first visited the occupiers at Zuccotti Park, I was struck by the civilization that had been created, with tables for information, medicine, supplies, and clothes. Clusters of tourists made it hard to move as they snapped pictures of the occupiers. It felt like they were taking pictures of animals in a zoo. The police had erected a tall ominous tower and there were those stiff metal barricades that feel like an instant jail complete with bars to separate people from each other, and make it difficult to assemble. Overhead, a helicopter hovered.

Then the protesters came into my neighborhood. I heard them through my window. The sign says

The Solution:
Campaign Finance Reform
Public Option Health Care
Corporations are NOT People
End the Wars
Close Tax Loopholes
Tax the Rich
Regulate the banks
Pass the Jobs Bill
End corporate lobbying

These are all specific reforms that would reduce waste, garner income, and save lives.

They marched up West Broadway toward Washington Square and Times Square beyond. I walked with them a little, upset at the injustice of the economy.

There are so many police everywhere the marchers go it is as if they are fully expecting something to go wrong. I wonder what the ratio is of police to protesters. It seems greater than 1 to 1.

Good Hair

2011-10-15T14:25:00.000-05:00

Chris Rock is a good interviewer. He chooses well who he wants to talk to and gets them to say what he needs to know, and he treats everyone with respect. Yet you know he wants to be funny and sometimes he is. Good Hair is about African American women's desire to have straight hair. He finds the mogul who controls the "relaxer" industry, he has one brief moment with the inventor of "Jeri curl", Al Sharpton chimes in on his experience with James Brown and how they got the look together. Other subjects he chose are Nia Long who is a pleasure to watch and listen to, and all of the competitors at the Bonner Hair Show in Detroit where there is a style contest whose rules.

MoneyBall

2011-09-24T17:48:00.000-05:00

Moneyball appeals to me for many reasons. First there is the idea that baseball is rigged for the rich, and with a new formula the poorer teams stand a chance. Second there is the story of a nerd who is overweight attaching himself to an industry that thrives on the elite athlete and taking over the game. Third there is the dialogue which is delivered with real understatement. Of course there is the pleasure of watching Brad Pitt redeem himself in a movie of genuine quality. But especially I love the game of baseball, and this movie does not glorify it but demonstrates why we get so caught up in it, and how heartbreaking it can be.

Higher Ground

2011-09-04T19:29:00.000-05:00

Higher Ground
dir. Vera Fermiga

It is hard enough to accept a faith based on suffering and redemption and events that you cannot see, feel or hear, but then once you have embraced this faith, to lose it, that is hard indeed. The world is so much starker. There is a feeling of betrayal, as if you had lived the life of a sucker and that potentially those who did not believe were laughing at you, knowing that the beliefs you had were preposterous in the face of real life.

You see life for the harsh reality it is, with unrelieved suffering, no afterlife, unjust tragedy, cruelty winning over goodness, etc. This is the subject of Vera Fermiga’s first film. I admire her ambition, and her clarity of vision in following a young woman through a life of belonging to a strict Christian faith complete with a community of caring souls, through her lapsing into a more intellectual state of mind that causes her to split from her husband, her faith, her community, and find a path that is her own. The movie keeps a tone of respect for those who are faithful and those who are not. The scenes with the more irreverent sister are especially good.

We care for the woman’s journey, and feel the pain of separation from a world that kept her close and safe. Still, I wish she hadn’t used so many people to play the main characters. It is a little distracting to be matching up characters with new faces.


Vera Fermiga

Back in NY with Hurricane Irene

2011-08-28T20:28:00.000-05:00

It is enervating to watch the Weather Channel, yet we are addicted to its radar maps, and its experts in storm tracking.We have grown fond of Jim Cantore, the man in the LL Bean raincoat whose job it is to be blown about by wild and fast winds. He was the man on the street first in Battery Park City when people were being asked to evacuate, and the sun was shining, and then this morning at Battery Park (which is further downtown, and an older location) where the waters could be seen on top of the walkway where you go to take the ferry to the Statue of Liberty.

We came back from Sullivan County on Friday hoping to avoid having to unpack the car in the rain. We especially wanted to acclimate the young kittens to their new home before the storm really took hold. Something told me to stock up on batteries and water before returning to New York.

All the news about Hurricane Irene was bad. It was the widest storm ever. Its path was straight up the east coast of the US. The European model showed it to have more speed than rain, the US model showed it wrecking havoc everywhere it went. First there was the wait for the landfall on North Carolina, and many nearly tearful press conferences with the governor whose people were the most at risk, especially in the beautiful barrier islands.

Then the question became how long before Irene hit New York. Mayor Bloomberg weighed in and said that this was an unprecedented storm. Governor Christie of New Jersey said the time for tanning was over. Get off the beach. Not to be outdone, Governor Cuomo suggested shutting down the MTA in advance of the storm. Bloomberg countered that Con Ed might turn off power in lower Manhattan and low lying areas. I yearned to know the definition of low lying area.

Then the people were forced to evacuate from public housing because if they didn't they were threatened with the turning off of power and elevators. It looked like the mayor and his advisers were determined to avoid a New Orleans type situation where the poor nonwhites of the city looked stranded. But in this case it looked like the poor nonwhites were being forced into shelters that may not have beds.

This morning I woke up as if hungover from the news and did not turn on the tv or go to the computer. Out the window, it was very grey, misty. The rain began to fall but not as hard as some storms where accumulation was an inch an hour. The streets were empty. Only police cars with their lights flashing rode ominously down the street. After a few hours, after much rain, Irene was gone.

By midafternoon I took a walk to see what things looked like. People were venturing out.


Beautiful Women

It is hard not to notice how shapely and trim and well styled the women of New York City are. After being in a rural area where many people are overweight and wear clothes to disguise it, this is a big change.

I love the geometry and shapes of the taped up windows in contrast with the architectural detail of the loft buildings. Sadly, the subways are still not working.


Simple X

Grids with xes


Rectangles with triangles


Chevrons

Diamonds


Security grill

Mushrooms, Part 3

2011-08-22T06:55:00.000-05:00


big bolete (bitter?/cepe?)


tawny grizette


worm inside hollow stem of tawny grizette


cross section of bolete, with worm in background inside amanita

Mushrooms, Part 2

2011-08-17T18:59:00.000-05:00

Looking for mushrooms, the more I look the more I see, and the number of mushrooms I find increases exponentially each minute I am walking. For example, minutes one to fifteen, I find twenty mushrooms of six different genus.

The next ten minutes I then find forty mushrooms. And so on. It is hard to move after a while.. Everywhere I look there is something gorgeous, familiar, or exotic and worth studying. I see a red one or a yellow one with bright white scales.

Then there are the thousands of pinwheels that blossomed over night as a result of the rain. These dainty short lived creatures attach themselves to twigs with the thinnest of filaments. I tried to photograph them today but couldn’t get an adequate image, so must rely on Wikipedia. Unfortunately, their image makes them look enormous when they are the tiniest of featherweights, and disappear once the sun comes out. The mushrooms in picture below are ten times bigger than the real thing. And they line up in a row on a twig, very orderly.

Just as I was about to turn and head home, I looked down, the leaf litter all brown, and saw first one, then several horn of plenty mushrooms, a kind of chanterelle.

Kittens

2011-08-15T15:23:00.000-05:00


Jack

Stephen

looking out at the moths

Passione directed by John Turturro

2011-08-08T15:40:00.000-05:00

This trailer of women dancing to the song How Mamma Made the Baby is worth watching. The cinematography moves, the editor choses perfect shots for maximum movement.

John Turturro, who directed, is in love with the musical traditions of Naples. His film demonstrates why. Renditions of the emotionally stirring songs are given by singers who enact them much as vocalize them. The music gets into your blood.

Misia sings 'Indifferenemente'

2011-07-31T09:42:00.001-05:00

Inside

Out to get a breath of air

I heard buzzing within the siding.

Was it bees or wasps grinding to stay in

or to get out, and above, a tiny tap

of toes walking across the eaves, but then

a ping, like radar, or is it sonar that bats use?

Hidden from view in the wood and aluminum

a hive of bugs provides snacks for a pair of bats.

Little Brown Bats photo from Animal Diversity Web


Mud Dauber photo from Pest Control Canada website

Diana Nyad to try the Florida-Cuba swim again

2011-07-23T12:43:00.023-05:00

Diana Nyad is waiting for the right weather in the Caribbean to begin her swim from Cuba to Florida, a feat she attempted over thirty years ago, but had to cut short because of weather problems. Now she has assembled a team including kayakers with shark repellent and charted a plan to accomplish at 60 what she couldn't at 28. I am hoping that she succeeds.

August 8, 2011

Last night at 8:30 or so, Nyad jumped into the waters off of Havana, Cuba and began swimming to Key West. According to the map posted by CNN this afternoon, she has swum more than 25% of the route.

What I don't understand is, and guess has to do with the sexist nature of athletics and media coverage of them, why this is not a bigger story. To me, it wraps together a story of human endurance, athleticism, and female power. People have asked why is she doing it. I think the answer is simple. Because she can.

Here is a poem I wrote when she first tried the swim, thirty three years ago.

The Legend of Diana Nyad

When I entered the sea at Florida,
my body covered with a layer of thick oil,
my limbs turned over the water like a motor.
But the waves sucked me in, spit me out,
jellyfish stung me until I puffed up,
and the shark cage rattled so I thought I'd go deaf.
I wanted to make it to Cuba,
but a voice, familiar and terse,
said Diana, Diana and fished me out.
Into the boat I flopped,
my eyes sunken into my head.
They slapped me back to life
and I began spouting like a fountain.
And I will go back until the strain has snapped
and the difficult becomes easy--
to let the part of me that isn't lost to shore
glides easily through the sea.

&&&&&&&&&***********&&&&&&&&&

It is now August 10. Nyad made it halfway when she became ill and had to stop.
I still am deeply inspired by the effort.

"I am stunned, at age 61, at how fast it all flies by. My mom just died. We blink and another decade passes. I don't want to reach the end of my life and regret not having given my days everything in me to make them worthwhile. Now that also means relaxing with a friend, taking in a sunset. Not all type A personality activities. But I don't want to waste any precious time, as Bob Dylan put it!"

--Nyad in an interview from February 2011 (LA Times)

Hoarding images

2011-07-20T12:48:00.000-05:00

July 13

Yesterday walking through the woods, I thought I always carry my camera eager to capture every beautiful thing that I see because I know how short lived these things are and by photographing them I get to keep them for later when I am no longer here in the location where I found these things or when someone has bulldozed over these precious lands and developed the property into a development.


rhododendron

Then I thought I should limit myself to just three shots, and become much more careful about what I capture. I am gone hogwild with digital imagery. How easy it is to manipulate; I am cropping and enlarging all the time. I need to be more discriminating, or more patient. I am such a restless person, pacing back and forth, walking here and there, swimming up and down, instead of just sitting waiting for something to come to me. I am yearning to go out and find it.

Indian Pipe

Unknown lepidoptera

Hemlock Tree

2011-07-16T08:22:00.000-05:00

Hemlock

Under its majesty, I shrink.
Its branches protect and
threaten in their gnarled darkness
to block sunlight that warms up
the wilderness.

Sky

2011-07-10T19:27:00.000-05:00

I sit on the porch

and watch the moon rise as the

frogs begin their song

At Walmart in Monticello

2011-07-09T19:48:00.000-05:00

Of all the Walmarts I have been to, this one seems sort of scruffy. It is not unusual to run into a pile of things that in the process of being unloaded and put away, are abandoned and not put away. Sometimes the aisles are empty -- new stock is coming but not there yet.

What a diverse number of things are on my list-- starting with blossom fertilizer and ending with apple fritters -- can be found there, and on sale for a cheap price. I couldn't believe the price of Schweppes tonic-- $.50 cheaper than what I was used to in my little local grocery. Butter is shockingly cheap when compared to the price in NYC.

I had been wanting a new chef's apron since my old one got so stained and beat up I threw it away. Looking on Amazon, chefs aprons sold for $15-20. At Walmart a chefs apron costs $7.00!

I almost bought some beautiful clay pots in red, green and mustard, just because they were made in Portugal and it is so hard to find anything that is not made in China. But I did not need clay pots.

Walking down the aisle that sold tuna fish, we came upon a giant can, it must have had enough tuna to feed 50 people. R wanted to buy it just for the sight of it, so that he could look at the foot high giant can of tuna.

photo courtesy of Walmart

At one point as I was pushing my big cart down the aisle to meet R, I noticed a woman coming furiously at me. She looked slightly tense, determined to get someplace, and not let anyone get in her way. It was a mirror and I was aiming at my image.

Thornden Park Rose Garden

2011-07-06T18:59:00.000-05:00

R and C and I visited the Rose Garden at Thornden Park.

When we first came in, R was interested in the most fragrant blooms. We asked a volunteer who was pruning and she said sadly that she had lost her sense of smell 20 years ago, but there were always dead heads to take off. She continued her pruning. On this melancholy note, we explored what was left in early July of what comes into full glory in mid June, and were not disappointed.

First Fridays: Poetry Reading at Narrowsburg Public Library

2011-07-05T15:01:00.000-05:00


Taylor Mali


Marie Elizabeth Mali

Taylor Mali and Marie Elizabeth Mali performed at the Narrowsburg Public Library July 1. It was a packed house.

They presented a well prepared set of poems beginning with a bilingual recitation (she recited the Spanish, he the English translation) of a love poem by Neruda which set the tone for what was to come. Two people not only perform together, they live together, and love each other. I have never seen anything like it before. It was almost too good to be true: two attractive, accomplished, funny and charming people who both write well and perform well together.

Taylor Mali is the more practiced performer, with his big voice and persona. He could command a stage as big as Yankee Stadium, so the small reading room in the Narrowsburg library was very cozy and intimate a stage for a poet whose poem about how to write a political poem begins "However it begins, it's gotta be loud." His poems about teaching have inspired over 700 people to become teachers, and when he hears from 1,000 (hopefully by the end of August of this year), he will cut his hair and donate it to Pantene Beautiful Lengths, a hair donation organization for women with cancer. Even though he is best known for the poem, "What Teachers Make," he did not read it, closing instead with "The The Impotence of Proofreading." Marie Elizabeth Mali is no less accomplished a writer, but her subjects are more diverse and influenced by her background of Argentinian-Swedish family.

First there was the usual First Fridays open mike reading, with ten readers, closing with Vera Williams who recited her poem about how to make a peach sandwich. Master of ceremonies was as always the charming Corinna, a teen, whose mother manages the programing at First Fridays. Corinna recited one of her own poems, and then cheerleaded the rest of the readers.


Vera Williams

Mushrooms

2011-07-01T10:38:00.000-05:00


INdian pipes

Went looking for mushrooms today, though find identifying them challenging. Indian pipes are not mushrooms, they just seem to belong in that family since they do not have chlorophyll, turn dark, and live off the decayed leaves in the forest.

The second mushroom has little specks on it as if it were decorated pastry. This one is living in the moss, but is covered with pine needles and rooted in a decayed leaf.

The third one looks like a very nicely made poached egg, and learned it is called an American Caesar.

Bad Teacher

2011-06-29T20:30:00.000-05:00

Cameron Diaz is very funny and sexy in this movie. She plays a gold digger who slips under the radar of her principal even as she arrives at work each day in mini skirts only to show movies to her students. The students seem thoroughly engaged by these movies, which nearly always have an educational theme. Her rival, a truly dedicated, also funny character named Amy Squirrel, is the exact opposite. She plans her lessons, tries to have fun with the students, and reports Halsey's (Diaz's character) bad behavior to the principal.

Diaz struts her stuff in amazing shoes and skintight dresses. I read an article about her that said if she had lived in another era with better directors Diaz would have had a brilliant career. The material in the movie is thin, but I am grateful for a movie that allows a gifted comic actress to make us laugh.

Indigo bunting, scarlet tanager, robins

2011-06-28T14:19:00.000-05:00


Indigo Bunting, painting by Louis Agassiz Fuertes

Even though there are lovelier birds than robins here, it can be dramatic to watch robins hunt and feed. They are so very thorough.

A robin captured a fresh worm in her bill. She hauled the wriggler across the hot pavement. Two bitty steps pulling her cargo, then a rest. Two more bitty steps. Progress was slow but steady as she made her way from one side of the road to the other. Halfway there, the worm broke in two. This did not stop her from clipping the fragment in her bill and pulling it a quarter inch at a time until she got the worm to the other side then gently with the most delicate of manners she ate him tidbit by tidbit. But before she tackled the eating of the worm she'd successfully carried to the grass, she returned to the hot pavement where the rest of the worm had begun to show signs of life.


Scarlet Tanager, photo by Terry Sohl

Again just as she did with the first half, the robin pulled the writher by her a bill a quarter inch at a time until he joined up with the other portion.

photo by Ryan Bushby

Did the two halves greet each other at their reunion? Were they glad to see each other? I know nothing of worm communication. Now it was time for the feast. She ate a dainty snatch at a time, did not gulp or grind. She chewed slowly and swallowed silently as the best brought up of us do. When the worm was a manageable size, she flew off with it in her bill to her nest to share with the rest of her family.

Sullivan County

2011-06-21T08:05:00.000-05:00

We arrived at Ten Mile River yesterday morning when it was still spring.
After unpacking the car, R noticed a scarlet tanager in a pine tree.

A red spotted purple butterfly basked in the bright noonday sun among the impatiens waiting to be planted. At first, from underneath, with the orange
and white and black markings, I thought it was an admiral. No, its first
cousin. The butterfly looked brand new, no bird had taken a bite out of
him yet. His wings shimmered as if still wet from birth.

Took a walk up the steep hill just to stretch my legs. Ran into a large cluster of
mountain laurel, some pink, some white.


laurel


rhododendron

Can't believe I ever confused rhododendron with laurel.
Must be the similarity of the leaves. Laurel looks more
like ballooning petticoats in the shape of a ten
pointed star. Each part of the flower petal has
a tiny vertical line almost like a border between
one part and the next.

Lest all of this sound like Eden, in order to get here, we drove
up the Palisades, then onto 6 and 17 west, and passed
at least five deer who had been struck and killed by speeding cars.

The Trip

2011-06-11T15:53:00.000-05:00

The Trip, directed by Michael Winterbottom, and starring Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon as themselves, has a foolproof structure. The structure is based on a BBC tv series in which the two characters take a restaurant tour of northern England. Each episode features a new location. Originally suggested by Steve's girlfriend, who has since backed off such a romantic journey, the trip takes the two men into and out of luxurious accommodations, gorgeous scenery, and tantalizing versions of sauteed scallops.

We learn how close the men are by how well they accommodate each other through bouts of talkativeness, recitations of Wordsworth, singing, and imitations of actors, mostly British, which are hilarious.

It's a road movie, a buddy movie, a food movie, and a story about family and loneliness. I am so grateful not to have to see a Judd Apatow movie in order to have a belly laugh!

Bad week for the neighborhood

2011-05-30T10:07:00.001-05:00

It started with a hand drawn illustration of a horse posted in my building's elevator with a poignant message from its creator, who I would guess is eight years old. My young neighbor wrote to inform us that even though she had hoped that the police department might be looking for an alternate site for the World Trade Center security command center, that hope was ill founded. The police don't have an alternative site for the command center, and here it is, three months from the 10-year anniversary of the terrorist attacks that took down not just the trade center, but the command center itself at 7 WTC.

So our beloved horses, and gentle mounted police, numbering in the single to double digits, with the open doors allowing us to see in to the stables where the dark chestnut animals eat and sleep, will be replaced with a command center manned with hundreds of police on the alert for terrorist attacks.

Photo by Carol Glassman / Tribeca Trib

The other messsage our neighbor wrote was that the fire department -- ladder 8-- aka the Ghostbusters firehouse-- was on a list of fire houses that were considered low use, thus dispensable in this round of budget cuts.

Photo by Carl Glassman/ Tribeca Trib

Given the concerned neighbor's age, it is clear that both of these community cornerstones are favorites of children under 10 who are always welcome, and often invited in to either feed the horses (when my daughter was small, we used to bring carrots to the stables) or to have a seat in the firetruck if time allowed and some life saving event wasn't going on.

When I was recently hit by a car a few blocks from these places, it took only minutes for the fire department to respond, and I am very grateful for their gentle care throughout my transfer to the emergency room at the Downtown Hospital.

This reminds me of another loss to the neighborhood, even though it is farther uptown: St. Vincent's Hospital. Their critical care unit was excellent (almost said "is" because I can't adjust to life without that hospital to call on).

The crowning blow came in the New York Post headline: Chez Perv.
Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the IMF chief accused of rape by a hotel maid, and arrested on the runway as he was making his escape, has moved into a Franklin St. address. We may not have room for police on horseback, or firemen, but bring us your rich unsavory people under house arrest

We need to hold on to the feeling of community these important institutions bring to us.

Bridesmaids

2011-05-29T11:12:00.000-05:00

When a woman gets married, it can force a wedge between her and her friends. She must sacrifice relationships that are not based on sacred rituals. She has now pledged her troth to her husband and children, and his parents claim higher priority than her best friend or even her sister. It changes the whole social matrix of a woman's life.

Bridesmaids acknowledges this painful and poignant change. Mostly it is just a very funny series of sketches about the perfect wedding run amok, which has become a genre of comedy since the wedding business has loomed large enough to become a huge industry. (One of my favorite lines comes from the bride's father who says "I am not paying for this.")

Kristen Wiig plays Annie, the maid of honor to her best friend, Lily, (Maya Rudolph), who is now moving in higher class circles than Annie is used to. A new best friend has emerged from this pricier circle, Helen (Rose Byrne) who is prettier, richer, and more ready to spend the manic energy needed for a perfect wedding.

The cast is very talented, and the love interest of Kristen Wiig, Chris O'Dowl, is so perfect she can't see it at first. There are some funny scenes having to do with police cruisers and missing persons.
It is a relief to find a comedy that is full of talented women and written by women. The few times the comedy doesn't work that well I suspect were inserted by guys and sort of just gross you out.

MIdnight in Paris

2011-05-22T19:48:00.001-05:00

Woody Allen's new movie gives the audience not only very attractive actors doing their work perfectly but also some philosophy to think about. How many of us have wished we lived in a different time, or thought that we were born too late? (We rarely think we were born too early.) Owen Wilson plays a successful screenwriter whose visit to Paris with his fiance brings on a bit of magic, allowing him to visit his favorite artistic era just as he is in the throes of writing his first novel. While we are chewing over the meditative bits about needing to accept the time you live in, there is some fine music being played by Sidney Bechet, beautiful costumes worn by the lovely Marion Cotillard, and shots of the city's landmarks and rooftops.

Adrien Brody does a wonderful comic turn as Salvador Dali, Kathy Bates plays a humane Gertrude Stein. All of the casting and makeup are marvelous. It reminded me a little of my other favorite Allen movies, like Zelig, and Purple Rose of Cairo where the leap off the screen, the leap of imagination is gracefully done from scene to scene, and the audience has no trouble accepting this alternate reality.

The absurdity of life pops up and makes you laugh at regular intervals, but a movie that is both intellectually accessible and challenging is extremely rare.

Hazel Dickens

2011-04-23T08:49:00.000-05:00

Hazel Dickens died yesterday. Her obituary was in the New York Times today. I always notice the women who rate an obit because there are not as many as for men. Dickens sang about the hard lives of the coal miners. Her voice was more mournful than Loretta Lynn, her songs had a harder edge than Dolly Parton. She sang in the movies Harlan County and Matewan. You can hear her sing here: Fire in the Hole. Her voice goes right through me.

Source Code

2011-04-17T21:29:00.000-05:00

Science fiction about time travel trips me up. It depends on the belief that someone can be in two places at the same time. Source Code would have us believe that the main character played by Jake Gyllenhaal is not traveling through time, he is just living in an alternate reality in order to discover the criminal intending to wreak havoc on a major metropolis. He can go back to the last eight minutes of an explosion when everyone on a train is about to be killed, an infinite number of times. Each time our hero learns a little more about a crime about to take place, and Gyllenhaal's delivery of the lines he must repeat over and over again is one of the pleasures of this film. He is the not the only one whose acting buoys up a rather baffling premise. There is lovely Vera Fermiga as a sympathetic military official, and Jeffrey Wright chewing the scenery as an evil scientist, and Michelle Monaghan looking winsome as the love interest.

Even though it left me scratching my head, I enjoyed the movie's well edited suspense.

my mother's eye is scratched

2011-04-04T19:09:00.000-05:00

This morning my eye feels itchy, as if there is a very fine hair that if I could just remove, all would be perfect. The little orb would go back to lying in its perfect solution of fluid. But this is an illusion. No matter how much I scratch at or poke at or try to tug the sleepers from the corner of my eye, it still feels as if something infinitesimally small is trying to work itself free and not succeeding.

Earlier this week my mother suffered a scratch on her eye. She is being treated for macular degeneration with laser therapy to reduce the errant blood vessels that are blocking her macula, that centerpiece of the eye that keeps things in focus. When she went home, she was in pain, and the pain increased, and her eye was swollen. She phoned the doctor who had her come back to his office, and learned that her eye had been scratched. "This sometimes happens" was the doctor's explanation. (Wouldn't you like to throttle him?)

Am I feeling sympathy pains, or worrying that I will soon suffer the same eye disorder as my mother since it is genetic. Or maybe is it just a case of itchy eyes.

Le Quattro Volte

2011-04-01T09:22:00.001-05:00

You don't need to know how to speak Italian to watch this Italian movie, and it has no subtitles. The movie is not purely visual though the photography is quite wonderful. It has an important soundtrack which consists of the sounds of men tamping down charcoal beds with shovels, goats bleating before being milked, a woman sweeping the floor in a church, a sheep dog barking, the final block being put into place in a mausoleum to enclose a casket. The action moves from a forest where a goatherd tends to his flock, then to the man's house where he tends to a nasty cough with a potion poured out in a folded up magazine page.

The potion is very important to the man whose cough does not improve. A town performs a passion play complete with a christ figure carrying the cross up a hill to join two other crosses already in place.

The camera is never too close to people, with the exception of the goatherd. Most of the shots are long shots. The goats are shot close up and we get to know them pretty well. The mountains, the trees, the dog, and especially one very tall pine tree, these are our familiars by the end of the picture. The picture begins and ends with smoke. We learn how charcoal is made in an ancient practice with an architectural form worthy of Stonehenge.

I remember in the preview the title was explained-- something about how man lives "four times" -- as mineral, vegetable, animal, and thinking being. We watch the coal, the pine tree, the baby goat, and the old shepherd progress from beginning to inevitable end, as smoke.

Heard a Mockingbird today

2011-03-31T20:01:00.000-05:00

Heard a mockingbird today singing its heart out in the middle of a bush as we walked east on 23rd St in the middle of the day. At first we thought it was an alarm, the sound was so exaggerated and loud. Then I located the animal, his head thrown back like Edith Piaf, going through its extensive repertory of imitations, including a catbird, a starling, a robin, a catcall, an engine warming up, a towhee, a whistler, and on and on it went. Another man paused to listen. He didn't need to look, just to listen as the concert continued for five minutes. No amplifier needed, this thing was singing for the upper deck. The bird's white-streaked tail was tipped way up to the moon as it gave its heady aria to all passersby for free. It was full of joy.

Morgan Library: Diaries

2011-03-31T19:47:00.000-05:00

R and I went to the Morgan to see the Diaries exhibit. Thought of the difference between diary and journal. Both keep records, but diary implies daily, more everyday events, keeping track of what you did, who you saw, what happened. Journals keep for writers records of what they mean to do, experiments, drafts of things, even.

Examining three centuries of diaries made us want to begin keeping a diary right away. You could tell how successful the exhibit was by the expressions on the faces of the visitors. Many were smiling that blissed out smile of surprise that comes with unexpected pleasure.

Some highlights:

--an oversize notebook of John Steinbeck kept while writing the Grapes of Wrath.
His goal was to write two pages a day, so simple.

--diaries of Thoreau whose beautiful penmanship wrote each carefully chosen word

-- E/B White's typescript of writing about his childhood every day which led to the opening of Trumpet of the Swan.

--Walt Whitman's tender record of the wounded soldiers in the Civil War

--Samuel Pepys' writing in shorthand about the London Fire

--Charlotte Bronte's griping about her job as a teacher in a boarding house

--American record of the Boston tea party

--Hawthorne family diaries

Whether writing down history, or recording what your family had for dinner, diaries bring to life what has passed.

Barney's Version

2011-03-31T15:16:00.002-05:00

Barney’s Version

Paul Giamatti is having a great career. He has played John Adams, Harvey Pekar, and Joe Gould as well as the misanthropic wine taster in Sideways. In Barney's Version, he plays a man whose life we see develop from youth to theonset of senility. Sometimes because of certain plot elements, wewonder if the version Barney gives has something to do with a crime, but it turnsout that we see things through his eyes as he falls in love and stays inlove with the lovely woman he finds at his second wedding.

He really loves this woman, and she is worthy of his love,but is he worthy of hers? We are not quite sure with all the scotch drinkingand cigar smoking if that is enough to understand his character. It isn’t Giamatti'sfault. The men who create Barney's foursome of friends havemore life together than the man and the woman at the heart of the story. The directionlingers too much on the scotch drinking and seems repetitive or draggy in ways that keep the charactersfrom truly developing. Giamatti isa fine actor. Dustin Hoffman playshis father beautifully. (Hoffman’sson plays his grandson and is also quite good). Barney’s second wife, played by MinnieDriver, is delightful as a vulgarian with her master’s degree being waved in hisface every other minute.

There are fine details and charming scenes mostly betweenthe men which create a feeling of poignancy, of a life really being lived. For this I am grateful. A movie about a realistic person whochased a woman for years until he could marry her and never fell out of lovewith her, that is a sweet dream many of us could wish for. So I forgive the movie its flaws for itsromanticism.

My Favorite Website: NYPL

2011-03-26T11:41:00.000-05:00

Where else can you find important answers to reference questions and an image of the day and put all sorts of poetry books on hold for later pick up but the New York Public Library?
The image at left is of the McCoy Sisters, I know not more than that, but I find their movement and expression delightful since I take such delight in my sisters.

New York Public Library

Cedar Rapids

2011-03-24T18:15:00.000-05:00

We watched the movie, Cedar Rapids, at a 1 o'clock show in a theater where we were the only two there. I guess the movie is at the end of its run. How delicious to see a movie on a Thursday afternoon when everyone else is at work. Another man sat in the back, who turned out to be one of the staff. When the lights went down, he announced that the show would now begin, and we should enjoy ourselves, and then he left. This is not usually how movies start at big chain theatres.

The main character, named Tim Lippe (Ed Helms), is a rube, simple, naive, a boy in man's clothing. He has never left his home town of Brown Falls, Wisconsin, so when he is called on by the head of his insurance office to attend a convention in Cedar Rapids, which is a big town for this guy, he is so green he deosn't know that everyone, even him, has to go through security check, even when the security check guy is someone he knows very well.

Once in Cedar Rapids, the blowhard, played by John C. Reilly, the hip woman, played by Anne Heche, and the stolid roomate, played by Isaiah Whitlock, give our hero a little seasoning. Alia Shawcat, who played Maebe on Arrested Development, does a fine turn as a hooker. All the women, including Sigourney Weaver who bravely allows the camera to show her age, hold their own in this male id-centered comedy. The comedy comes and goes, but at heart, the film is a coming of age story for the sweet insurance salesman. It gives honest businessmen everywhere a reason to cheer.

Bill Cunningham New York (movie)

2011-03-20T14:22:00.000-05:00

Bill Cunningham loves what he does. Riding his bicycle through Manhattan streets, he locates fashion as it is evolving in the moment, then he photographs it, and compiles witty montages of what he has discovered every week in his "On the Street" column for the New York Times. I had barely noticed that he also contributes the photographs for the society column which is made up of the philanthropists who donate to charities, and have special events to celebrate and garner more cash for their causes. Three reasons to see this movie: joie de vivre, fashion, how to ride a bicycle in NYC.

Inside Job

2010-11-28T18:39:00.001-05:00

This muckraking movie makes me mad with its shocking analysis.

People are interviewed from Iceland, where banks once regulated and stable were deregulated and drowned in debt, nearly bringing down the government, and laying off thousands of people. In a country of 300,000 that has a huge impact. In the United States where deregulation began with the Reagan administration, the continued ripple effect on the global economy resulted in larger layoffs, more recessions, and continues to this day under Obama and what one interview subject called the "Wall Street government."

Money is made on debt that cannot be paid. The higher the debt, the more leveraged the bank becomes, until eventually, so large (too large to fail), the executive who was supposed to be overseeing this, bails out and gets his package, which includes millions of dollars. Sometimes these executives, knowing that the company is headed south, sell their shares and take them home with their severance package, and here's the funny thing, their heads held high.

When what you are selling is so complicated that it cannot be explained without a programmable calculator something is wrong. And it is sinking the financial markets around the world. Unbridled capitalism bankrupts us all, punishes the poor, and makes the rich make out like bandits. This movie urges us to take the system back from the criminals. And to change the way government works. This movie, though most of its heavy firepower is aimed at the GOP, does not exempt Clinton, sitting very cosily with the biggest of the marauders, or Obama, who has allowed the status quo to continue.

There are some heroes in this film, who speak before and after those caught red handed. Unlike the Federal Reserve Governor, and the Harvard University economist, and the bankers forced to testify to Congress, there are heroes like a consumer advocate who warned Greenspan, and then Bernanke about what was happening to no avail. There is an executive at the International Monetary Fund whose paper was published criticizing the mathematical model that used derivatives to make money on bad mortgages; he was subsequently shunned. George Soros says some things about the inequity of executive compensation that sound dead on.

Eliot Spitzer sits in a large vacant room with miles of windows making us wish he had never gotten in trouble with someone not unlike the madam who was interviewed earlier about what Wall STreet traders like to do after their fifteen hour days on the floor. Spitzer reminds us how he used to go after the people who were raiding consumers' accounts to line their own pockets. He says he isn't in a moral position to say much about their morals now. Damn.

Howl

2010-11-09T18:54:00.000-05:00

Howl with James Franco

The movie begins with a recitation of the poem as it mighthave been delivered in a dark subterranean coffee shop in San Francisco in1955, shortly after it was written. James Franco wears the thick black horn rimmed glasses, the white tshirt under the buttoned down white shirt, just the way that Ginsberg wore these things. Franco’s voice takes on that raspy incantatory drone that was Ginsberg’s performancepersona. The voice, and the juicywords that run on and on return us to 1955 – but do these lines speak to usnow as they did in 1955? Perhaps we do not need them now as we did then.

James Franco

The opening titles show glimpses of the animation tocome. Armies of men carry identical brief cases, wear identical hats, march across an unknown greycity. Photographs of Ginsberg andOrlovsky, his lifelong partner, actual photographs, look a bit scruffier than the cleaned up actors who play their counterparts. The cold war is represented by missiles pointing ominouslytoward us the viewers. Inthis context, the beat poets were railing against conformity, against war,against restrictions of all kinds.

Franco plays Ginsberg especially well when he is full oflonging. He speaks to an unseeninterviewer (the script comes almost entirely from transcripts, interviews, andthe poetry itself) about his journey from a young poet wannabe in the shadow ofhis straight traditional poet father. His sexuality he hid from his parents. He was put in an insane asylum when he was 21 ostensiblybecause of his homosexuality, and was released when he agreed to becomestraight. After two years ofworking in advertising and rejecting his true nature, his therapist encouragedhim to do what he wanted, and the rest is history.

Allen Ginsberg

The animations in the movie are distracting. The images of star bursts that denote orgasms, the explicit sexual couplings, detract from the power of the words. But this is a movie. I can see why the filmmakers thought so much time with just the words-- staring at the screen, listening to Franco recite, might be boring without some action.

How gratifying to hear a poet's words treated with the seriousness of a love affair, or a war, or a heist, or some other common subjects of movies. I remember when the movie came out about Sylvia Plath. They had everything in that movie except the poetry. This movie has the poetry front and center and I am grateful.

Poets Forum on Contemporary Poetry:Wild and Strange Language

2010-11-04T20:04:00.000-05:00


Lyn Hejinian

Carl Phillips

Ron Padgett


Kay Ryan

The four poets sat in a row in front of microphones, Lyn Hejinian the language poet, on the far left. She began by saying in her high girlish voice, "Here we are in a row, I must be "A". Kay Ryan piped up quite promptly "And I must be "Z". Chortles all around. We knew where the two poets stood on the meaning, or lack of meaning, in poetry, especially when it comes to language.

Hejinian read examples of what she thought of as showing wild and strange language. (No poet would like to be accused of using tame and ordinary language, she said.)

First came Robert Grenier, from his book "Sentences", available online.

She may or may not have read this:

PAW

he barks at things gone by

two trees

stepping through the water to the rocks

five sound shut doors

LOOKING AT FIRE

ashes to ashes

looking at the fire

at has been added

Hejinian champions the use of language in an aesthetic sense.

Padgett ruminated on his childhood a bit, thought of how language is enjoyed sometimes without meaning necessarily. Children like to repeat sounds over and over again until they are drained of meaning and remembered as something else, something coming in to the ear. He also enjoyed discovering the concrete poets, the wild poets whose works contain pure sounds and playful shapes on the page. Later, he pointed out that William Carlos Williams' poems in Spring and All were electrifying. The red wheelbarrow poem said it so plainly. Padgett is charming and funny, and full of plain spoken truths, with a childlike simplicity that is seductive.

Phillips handed out a leaflet with two poems : on one side from Laura Jensen, "Heavy Snowfall in a Year Gone Past," which ends with the moon looking down and judging,

not the maze of anger

but the fury

at the wasted years,

at the waste of the tender snow
Wasted, wasted, the birds crackle,
wasted on you.

There was also a deeply erotic beautifully structured poem by John Wieners, "Anniversary".
The diction changes mid line

Cigarette between his lips, would they were mine
by this present moon swear allegiance
if he ever look, see clouds and beaches
in the sky, by stars lend his eyes shine.

Kay Ryan had brought this poem by Robert Frost. She asked if we received the handout. When there was an awkward silence, she replied, "I didn't bring one."

A Dust of Snow

The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.

What excited Ryan was how poetry could change a person. The person in the snow was not in a good place, and as a result of the snow falling on him, had entered a new mood. Such simplicity, and tight little form has the power to create a feeling.

Hejinian challenged that poetry did not have to do that, that was too restrictive.

"Restrictive!" cried Ryan.

And so Poet A and Poet Z laid out their positions. It was an argument we could have used more of. But it was enough for me to understand the difference between Hejinian's point of view about poetry, that it should have as much breadth and range and abstraction and freedom as jazz or a Jackson Pollock painting, and Kay Ryan who wants her poems to have words with meaning. With no meaning, you have no power, she claims, and I agree.

Late September

2010-10-03T19:20:00.000-05:00

The tips of the leaves
so recently green have grown
an edging of brown

Weather

2010-09-30T19:55:00.000-05:00

Scary weather lately. A tree fell on a car and killed a woman waiting patiently inside for the winds and water to pass. Trees are now becoming something to be leery of. Some of them have fallen on pedestrians in Central Park. Trees used to be the thing we rested under, sought for shade, looked at in wonder when their leaves changed color. Did New York used to have tornadoes?

Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913–1917

2010-09-06T14:00:00.000-05:00

Henri Matisse painting Bathers by a River, May 13, 1913. Photograph byAlvin Langdon Coburn. Courtesy of George Eastman House, InternationalMuseum of Photography and Film, Rochester

The first gallery of paintings showed how Matisse was taught to paint copies of the masters, but learned to develop his own interpretation of the classic compositions, beginning with a series of paintings on the subject of Arcadia. What a great subject for a series of poems.

I was captivated by this drypoint of Greta Prozor.

Drypoint, Greta Prozor, MOMA

Women Outside: conversations about nature, art & spirit

2010-09-03T17:43:00.000-05:00

In Women Outside: conversations about nature, art & spirit, Mary Olmsted Greene has conducted conversations with thirteen women whose lives are enriched by the spiritual qualities of nature. It is an eclectic group of women with a great variety of things to say about how nature has formed their consciousness.

One woman rescues wild animals.

Another raises sheep and lives completely outside of the grid.

One woman teaches dance.

Another is a shaman whose training is based on African rituals.

One is an Episcopal priest whose dog is part wolf.

There is a girl who is nine years old.

They all respond to the same batch of questions about their lives, how they were formed by the wild or wilderness, what their thoughts about evil are, and Greene intersperses her interviews with poems that complement the conversations in verse.

The book opens with Greene's own reminiscences of growing up near the ocean, her move to New York, her youth spent bicycling the streets of Manhattan, her wild days, her glory days, spirited and free. This opening essay is one of the best things in the book. She discusses "nature deficit disorder," a modern psychological problem for those of us deprived of the natural world. From New York City, Greene moved to Sullivan County in upstate New York with her young child and many of the women interviewed in the book come from that region.

Here is Eileen Pagan's response to the question, "what does wilderness mean to you?"

One of the qualities that defines wilderness for me is that sense of quietness, being with water, trees, rocks and sky, and knowing that there are living creatures of all the various sorts that are out there. The foxes, for instance, which I rarely see. I do see the little chipmunks, snakes, and raccoons, and groundhogs, and all the millions of little creatures in the water in the summertime. Those beautiful flying neon--what are they called? Darning needles? Down by the waterfall they are magnificent.

Dorothy Hartz's responds to the question, "What in your life has brought you close to wilderness, or wildness?

I don't think you necessarily have to be in a natural setting to experience wilderness. It helps a lot, and no doubt most of what we call wilderness encounters do take place in a natural setting, but...To me, wilderness is a state of harmony based on an absence of ego-consciousness. It belongs to the organic world, to the world of instinct, whether in or out of doors. We are in the wild whenever we are at peace with that. We're innocent.


Mary Olmsted Greene

The book makes me want to live in the wild before there is none left.

I found a website recently by the great environmental artist, Maya Lin. It is called

What Is Missing?

Lin is a woman who has found a way to give tribute to the beasts and beauty of nature in her haunting audio-visual art.

Greene's book and her poems about nature give voice to what we long for that is not human, but essential to our humanness.

The Kids Are All Right

2010-08-21T15:15:00.000-05:00

During the summer when I live in the country with access to only a few multiplexes, I tend to read more about film than actually see any movies. When hype accompanies a movie during my desire for any non-Hollywood productions, I become a little too greedy for something better than average. The Kids Are All Right sounded like it would satisfy my appetite for that.

I have a huge crush on Mark Ruffalo. He does not disappoint. His charm comes from that gruff voice of his, and his natural, chilled out, thoughtful way of behaving.

The children in the movie are superb especially some very strong scenes with the boy named Laser played by Josh Hutcherson and Ruffalo. The writing of these scenes is just right. Cholodenko, the director, and her screenwriter partner have created a mostly believable script.

I found the character played by Annette Bening to be unlikeable from the get go. She is either strident, drunk, or weeping. It would be nice if we knew what the lesbian couple actually saw in each other. They don't really work in a believable way. They are constructs. Julianne Moore needs to be in more Paul Thomas Anderson movies. She has been cast badly lately and I wonder if it has to do with her age. Same goes for Bening.

I did find myself laughing occasionally. The movie is not hard to watch. But it has been overpraised probably because there is so little quality to be had during the summer.

Mark Ruffalo

2010-08-15T16:45:00.000-05:00

Inside theConfessional

Saturday afternoons we went to Confession.

That gave us all day to play.

The dirt got to be soft with kids going back

and forth, a perfect spot for playing marbles.

With a stick we drew a circle in the dirt

and in the middle of the circle was a hole.

We aimed at the hole to win.

We fought over cats eyes and keepsies.

Sure, there was cheating in that small place,

leaning down in the dirt. We got really

sweaty in the summer playing there.

After, our mothers turned on the sprinklers

and we rinsed off so we wouldn’t have to take a bath.

Inside the church, by the darkened booth,

a line wouldform for the nice priest

who gave easy penances: three Hail Marys,

that was it, we were off scot free,

safe from the licking flames of hell.

Monsignor McDowell never had a line.

He said our tongues would turn to worms

if we kept up ourlying to our little brother

about where we kept our candy.

We held our breath and lied about our sins.

Once inside, we were invisible,

hidden from the world, just us

and the plaited rush partition that let

our sins into the priest and his forgiveness

fly out to us on the other side.

We listened for the sound of the shift

of the slot. Thenwe would begin

to list our wickedness. The penance lifted

the grit and washed the tiny flecks of mud.

All clean, wewere free to go out and sin again.

Black Swallowtail Butterfly on Queen Anne's Lace

2010-08-08T08:20:00.000-05:00

I was about to throw out some old flowers I had picked on the side of the road when I noticed a caterpillar on one of the old Queen Anne's lace. It turns out that Black Swallowtail butterflies like to eat the parsley family which includes that flower. So I am hanging on to the cluster of broken down flowers, and am going to see what develops.

They eventually look like this.

You can see from the first picture that caterpillars are not the only insects in our house.

Millipedes

2010-08-05T21:01:00.000-05:00

Millipedes are common here. Some of them have wandered into our house, and had to be evicted. I find them fascinating and more appealing than centipedes.

They have reddish stripes to mark off every ten feet (as in pedes, not 12 inches). Their shell looks hard as armor, and tough to break.

Centipede

Centipedes are hairy wider creatures that are soft in comparison. They actually look a lot creepier, and have only around 30 or 34 feet compared to the millipede's nearly 80 by my count. Also centipedes can bite. Millipedes just give off an ugly smell as self defense, or they roll into a ball so that you can't pick them up or hurt them.

Salt/dir. Philip Noyce

2010-08-04T20:44:00.000-05:00

Angelina Jolie works really hard in this movie. She makes me glad that my job description does not include getting tortured in my underwear, or assassinating the president of a superpower. For Angelina, it's all in a day's work. So what if she is called on to invent a small howitzer out of a vacuum cleaner and some chemicals in the office? She is very well trained. She also manages to jump from the overpass of a highway onto semi-truck, then switch to another truck, then an oil rig, until finally she infiltrates a cab which slams into a police car, using each of these vehicles like catapults to get to her destination. Ultimately her destination is St. Bart's Church in Manhattan where a VIP funeral is taking place. The Russian president attends, so is available to be assassinated.

The assassination involves trap doors, spider venom, and more chases and spills and car crashes and our Angie, she walks away without so much as whiplash. She is a human torpedo. Wait, there is a moment when she has to dress a wound, and finds a kotex machine which she rips off the wall in order to get at one of those paper wrapped cotton products.

Also in this movie, and holding his own with such a superhero presence is Liev Schreiber.


Jolie as Salt

Liev Schreiber

Leave it to Chance: a Tribute to Merce Cunningham

2010-08-04T20:38:00.000-05:00

It’s not something too common, dancers over forty, overfifty even. At the LeaveIt To Chance concert at the Beaver Brook Cottage, Karen MacIntyre and LorettaThomas began the program with a tribute to Merce Cunningham who recently diedat age 90, and continued to perform past his middle years. But these women were not performingCunningham’s choreography. They had created six dances with the musicof David Anderson to express how they felt about “the Einstein of dance.”

Karen McIntyre

Loretta Thomas

Mary Greene read words by Cunningham that described his philosophy of movement. Thomas and McIntyre, two seasoned dancers, knew how to move to this monologue and convey to the audiencewhat the movements meant. I was movedby the beauty of the balance of the two women, how carefully they intersectedeach others’ spaces, especially in the first dance entitled “Radical andFormal.”

In "Trio," a third dancer, Leah Giles, who had been trained by MacIntyre since a very young age, joined the two older women and we were able to see the contrast between the very young and the middle to older bodies.

The small space at Beaver Brook allowed me to sit so close I felt open to a very sensory experience, not only seeing the detail of every body on stage, but also noticing textures, sounds, smells. A large avocado plant in the background framed stage right and an altar with threeunlit candles gave an aura of a sanctuary. Three elegant light fixtures hanging from the high ceiling cast a curved shadow.

Merce said, "First you have to begin with themost difficult thing, getting up." These words were repeated several times in "In the Mean Time..." in which the Gaia company of dancers, young and old, joined the two principals. What a feast for the eyes, to see so many body types and faces all crowded into the large living room, dancing to David Anderson's excellent music which aptly matched the movements. Even though Cunningham made an eloquent case for his dances not needing music (there is so much to notice in the movement, the music is a distraction), I have to admit I much prefer it. There is something so satisfying about watching a well trained, well rehearsed body move to the rhythm of great music.

After the intermission, the Gaia Dance Collective performed, each dance choreographed by one of their dancers. The program closed with a very winning "Swing Guitars," full of humor, whimsy and fun.

Karen McIntyre explained somewhat wistfully that this would be the last performance of her Triad company in Sullivan County. It is difficult for her to come to New York from Texas where she lives and teaches. But she left us with a humorous series of monologues in the voices of the residents who first greeted her when she was just establishing her dance studio.

Inception

2010-08-01T19:43:00.000-05:00

When did Leonardo DiCaprio grow a vertical line in his brow? In Inception, he plays Cobb, an expert at prompting other people's dreams to be available to him so that he might steal what secrets lie therein. Cobb has a lot to worry about since his wife in the dream state keeps trying to murder him or getback at him or get him back. His new mission is to go into a man's dreams and plant an idea there, an idea that will benefit a corporate client mightily. It will be necessary to outwit or outshoot the security police who guard the dreamer's dreams. There is also the risk of landing in limbo if after the third level of dreaming you get stuck between levels one and two.

Besides learning how the invasion and creation and manipulation and suspension of dreams work, the viewer is treated to hair raising action scenes, one piled on top of the other. It is hard to keep from admiring the visual mastery of the dream sequences mixed in with these action scenes.

Joseph Gordon Levitt plays the part of Arthur, one of the team of experts who help Cobb on his missions. He is supposed to lack imagination but he walks on the ceiling with ease. I can't wait to see Gordon Levitt's next movie, not that he outshines anyone else in a cast that includes Tom Hardy as the shape shifter, Michael Caine as a concerned father, Ellen Page as a wizardly architect and Cillian Murphy as a very well protected victim.

Next day, remembering the scenes of the architecture breaking up and going sideways, and of the mazes the dream architect invented, and of the van falling off the bridge for what seemed like days, I hoped that my dreams would become a bit richer in visual content. But poor Leonardo. He has lost his boyish look. The groove in his forehead is there to stay.

Lake Shore Limited by Sue Miller

2010-07-30T20:35:00.000-05:00

I got sucked into it willingly, this familiar Sue Miller terrain with its combination of realism, manipulation, and current events. Once I was at page 100, I thought, why am I reading this soapy stuff, and then dashed through without coming up for air until I was done.

The thing about Sue Miller is that I sort of expect the worst for her characters. She has the ability to create a feeling of suspense, as if something important is going to happen, just give it another five pages, and then the action I was expecting fails to occur. I feel like a ninth grader unsatisfied with her ice cream choice. Then why do I keep going?

I keep going because I am her audience. I am a middle aged, middle class, educated woman. That is who Sue Miller writes for. Her characters come from that class. They are professors, doctors, architects, realtors. They are in helping professions. Some of them are teachers. I recognize these people. They are mostly married, and have sex in graphic detail. One of the keys to happiness is orgasm. You can tell how happy by how many orgasms the character has.

So there is this tie to the physical life of the characters in her narratives. Lake Shore Limited is about a playwright whose live-in lover was killed in one of the planes on September 11. Her new play touches on an act of terrorism that may have killed the wife of the main character while he is engaged in an affair and trying to break free of his wife. When she is missing from the train that was blown up, he is at the brink of deciding whether to stay and play the dutiful bereaved widower or leave and begin his life with his new woman.

The book centers on the play and I thought why not just include the play in its entirety in the book, but the point of the book is to have each of the four main characters grasp the meaning of the play as it relates to their lives.

The structure of the book switches from each of the four characters at regular intervals. At one point, one of the characters says about another: "Not the brightest bulb in the chandelier." Exactly. Sometimes the characters seem awfully slow to catch on what is obvious to the reader.

Still, I have been mulling over this book, thinking about the dilemma of what your duty is to the dead who are killed in acts of terrorism. It is a strange obligation that comes with the mourning of people instantly snatched up by the media and patriotism and other things unrelated to who the person was or what your relationship was with that person. This is at heart a very thoughtful treatment of a new kind of subject.

Wild Turkey

2010-07-29T10:56:00.000-05:00

Yesterday while taking a walk down the driveway, I noticed something moving in the grass to my left and bent over to see what it was. A female turkey burst up at me. A blur of feathers and beak and talons grew to my size, menaced me with her loud angry voice. Her wings and feet rattled, meant me harm. My heart pounded in my chest. I was stunned and stood still, then realized that this was not what the turkey wanted. She wanted me to go as far from her and whatever she was guarding as quickly as possible.

I ran to the road and didn't look back.

Cheri

2010-07-27T10:11:00.005-05:00

Colette's perfect novel adapted in this imperfect film demonstrates the difference between movies and the books they come from. On the one hand, cigarette smoke wafting over someone's head in a long shot with the foreground a lovely border garden evokes a character and another character's feelings about that character in just a few seconds. On the other hand, Colette's tone of voice in the book is full of archness and wisdom. As readers we have the time to take it in, to let its seduction take hold. The narrator's voice in the movie is a man's, and feels forced and trying to fill in the blanks and intrusive.

The moving images of the movie are beautifully apt to the Belle Epoque settings, its architecture, interiors, and gardens. The costumes are sumptuous and steal the show. The actors all do a fine job epecially the title character, Rupert Friend, as the callow youth whose beauty is his undoing. I do not agree with the casting of Michelle Pfeiffer for this part. She is so thin, and carefully preserved when what is called for is someone fleshy and just past their prime. Is it true that the camera could not record her actual face in order to give the illusion of preserved beauty in one so far past forty?She is too much a product of California, blond, lean, and hip, to play a voluptuous Parisian courtesan. Her voice is all wrong especially in the beginning when she seems to be faking a British accent (why? because Friend is British?)

Was Helen Mirren not available? Or Charlotte Rampling? Something about Pfeiffer's face says surfer to me. I know that she has the chops and all that, having played loose women etc but still, that was in American pop culture type things like Scarface and Baker Boys. This is the cream of Colette's oeuvre and she just doesn't work in the part.

Everyone else does, thank goodness. In the end I think the movie is about the mother making one hideous decision after another, and Kathy Bates plays the mother perfectly.

Oops, said Kathy Baker by mistake. They are so different!

Kathy Bates Kathy Baker

What is it about the internet?

2010-07-22T19:32:00.001-05:00

There have been many articles recently about the effect ofconstant connection to electronic devices on our brains. Are humansbecoming less human as a result? What is it that makes us human?
Dowe need to stay connected to a machine to feel part of the conversationat the cost of having a conversation with a real live person we mightlike to sit with at leisure over coffee?

I think there is an epidemic of loneliness. My theory:

It is an addictive habit like smoking.
It takes practice not to use it so much.

There are so many things I want to know.
The internet provides answers.
Yesterday these were the things I looked up which can give you an idea of what my life is like:

how to clean and re-season a cast iron pan (I overzealously cleaned it)
recipe for corn chowder (love to eat, love to cook with fresh summer vegetables)
national weather forecast (when will the heat move on?)
cat ear infections (poor kitty)
writers almanac (need fresh poetry, Garrison's voice)
pictures of hummingbirds (they are crazy little buggers providing endless entertainment)
cornell's website on birds (wow why so many flycatchers here?)

New York Times crosswords (another habit forming )
New York Times op eds and obituaries (okay the news comes last)
email five times (who wants to talk to me remotely, who do I owe messages to)
zen habits (where are the date stamps on these articles?)
flickr pictures of rural librarians (what would it be like to work in the country)

In the country

2010-07-22T10:33:00.000-05:00

Waking up to the sound of birds, to the sight of a forest, to the smell of fresh air, is more than restorative, it seems necessary. I think of what it would be like if I were in the city right now, at 7:30 AM. The sound of the men setting up their construction, the subway under my feet, cars, trucks, taxis, horns honking, the smell of the heat and ozone, diesel fuel particulate accumulating on my window sill.

There are trucks laboring their way up hill in the woods to build a new development somewhere.

But in the city, I guess what we don't have here in the country, is lots and lots of people with lots and lots of needs. They need to eat so there are restaurants on every corner, a grocery store every few blocks. They need to get dressed, and live somewhere, more shops, apartment buildings reaching the sky. They need to get from place to place, so there are subways and buses and taxis and roads and traffic lights. They need to use the toilet and their sinks and their bathtubs so there are sewer lines. They need to read at night so there is electricity. They need to cool themselves so there are air conditioners and fans and the electrical grid is amazing.

Here where there are not as many people, there are birds, lots of trees to house them and give them food. The squirrels do not beg from me as they do in Central Park.

Funny Animation

2010-07-21T07:33:00.001-05:00

One of the benefits of belonging to Roger Ebert's Club (a subscription you can join on his blog) is finding the extra films and clips he provides. Here is one I particularly liked, sort of seasonal to the summer.

2010-07-15T19:18:00.000-05:00

Accelerant

I am the solvent that feeds the flame

The foot to the floor that hurtles the car

I am the deed you want in your name

The border that sets off the civil war.

I am the heat that prickles your neck,

the pushing, the shoving, the loaded deck.

You cannot see me, I’m gas in the pipe.

Don’t fall asleep, I might kill you tonight.

Reading War and Peace

2010-07-14T08:14:00.001-05:00

I reached the halfway point, the end of Volume II, where Natasha is disgraced and ill, Pierre feels a new hope after looking at the comet, Anatole is banished to Petersburg, and Andrei takes on the qualities of his father-- bitterness, cruelty, superiority.

Up to that point, all the characters were growing in tenderness and love, except Pierre, whose faulty marriage has destroyed his chance for happiness. Andrei, after suffering a grievous wound in battle, and disillusionment among men of power and glory, had fallen in love with Natasha who returned his love. They were both unsuitable for each other somehow, yet each recognized the excellence in the other, and loved the person for the bigness of soul found there. Natasha saw Andrei as an honorable, intelligent, accomplished person. Andrei saw Natasha as pure spirit, whose voice's purity expressed joy and sorrow and emotions perfectly. Here is a quote from the Maude translation (I am reading the Pevear/Volokhonsky, hence the Andrei/Andrew discrepancy below):

After dinner Natasha, at Prince Andrew's request, went to theclavichord and began singing. Prince Andrew stood by a windowtalking to the ladies and listened to her. In the midst of a phrase heceased speaking and suddenly felt tears choking him, a thing he hadthought impossible for him. He looked at Natasha as she sang, andsomething new and joyful stirred in his soul. He felt happy and at thesame time sad. He had absolutely nothing to weep about yet he wasready to weep. What about? His former love? The little princess? Hisdisillusionments?... His hopes for the future?... Yes and no. Thechief reason was a sudden, vivid sense of the terrible contrastbetween something infinitely great and illimitable within him and thatlimited and material something that he, and even she, was. Thiscontrast weighed on and yet cheered him while she sang.

What makes reading this long book such a pleasure is the sheer scale of it. Everything is bigger than usual in a novel. There are more major characters, and the characters have minor characters attached to them, such as servants. Like reading Shakespeare, you keep referring to the cast list. The list of major characters in War and Peace takes up two pages, and is organized by family. Only after reading all of Volume I did I get used to all of the characters' nicknames. Then I was able to differentiate one Nikolai from another, one Vassily from another, to remember Dolokhov's significance, and to distinguish him from Denisov.

Once I was able to do that, I began to appreciate the set pieces Tolstoy lays out before you. There is a hunt for wolves that is right out of a fairy tale, it is fantastic, dark, bloody, and shocking, with so many omens you are sure a human being will be lost any moment, but not even the old wolf who is the prey expires -- he is merely tied onto a log and carried, pathetically snarling and writhing to the exit.

The Mummer scene is another tour de force of romantic or impressionistic sensations. The cold of an icy winter night, the speed of the horses as they race each other, the frozen masqueraded faces -- girls sporting corked on mustaches-- as they dash off to the neighbors, Nikolai getting a little lost -- the description of the stars in the snow, or the snow in the stars. It is all so dazzling in sensations that you forget these episodes build up to the next plot point, Nikolai finally professing his love for Sonya.

There is a pattern of illusions and disillusions.
Pierre has great ambition in the beginning. His hopes are dashed upon marriage. He is raised up again by his joining the masons and again disillusioned at the less than stellar performance of his brothers in alms giving.

Andrei has a need for glory and honor and distinction (Where is my whiff of grapeshot) on the battlefield, and does distinguish himself only to later feel it is all useless. His wife dies, and even though he showed no love for her that I could see, he is deeply in mourning after returning from war, and embittered by political life. Then he sees Natasha as the freshest most innocent joyous creature, and pursues her, and regains his footing and wants to go on living. Why he takes so long returning to her after going away for his health is beyond me. He is deeply passive in some ways.

Nikolai -- the battle scene where he is wounded. He thinks of his life, and what is happening as sort of a dream.

The novel is dreamy in places. Then it snaps into focus and becomes real again. When Tolstoy is going into people's heads, though, there is a swirling sense of illogic and feeling that is clearly not objective, but deeply subjective, deeply from the subject's point of view.

I am savoring every morsel.

Toy Story 3

2010-07-12T07:39:00.000-05:00

What is new about the Toy Story franchise this timeis its realism when it comes to garbage disposal. The whole gang—Potato Head-- Mr and Mrs., Cowgirl, Pig, Woodyand Buzz Lightyear—at one point face a very scary death after going throughwhat might be a documentary style, ala Mr. Rogers perhaps, look at what happens when you throw things out in your garbage. Here ishow the process works, first take the garbage from the street to the truck,then from the truck to the dump, then from the dump to the sorters, from thesorters to the choppers, from the choppers to the wait, is that an inferno downthere or what are all those orange flames licking at the sides of the deep holewe are about to descend?

Up until then, we had also had a dose of reality, that is,what the preschoolers at a day care center are really like when left to theirown devices. It isn’t pretty. It makes the first Toy Story villainousdoll look like a good witch. Thesechildren tear the toys limb from limb.

Gasland

2010-07-11T14:02:00.000-05:00

What could be more important than water? The natural gas industry thinks that money is. They have seduced many citizens in depressed regions of the country with seams of natural gas buried deep within its lands to sign leases that give oil companies the rights to mine the gas in their back yards. Up here, in the Delaware River watershed, many activists are deeply opposed to it, and are rallying to pass legislature that will prevent drilling until more is known about the health, safety, and environmental impact.

Josh Fox and leaseholder of gas drilling watch
his water catch on fire

The problem is with local governments who never saw anything wrong with money coming into the regions. The problem is with state governments whose environmental regulatory agencies have been decimated by budget cuts. And of course, the problem is with federal government. The Energy Act of 2005 exempted natural gas drilling from following the laws of Clean Water, Clean Air, etc.

Josh Fox is the director of the movie. His muckraking is pretty effective, based on the screening I attended in Honesdale last week at the Episcopal Church. It was standing room only, with people applauding the panel discussion leaders afterward. The links on the Gasland website are activists who are battling with gas drillers.

Please go there and offer any support you can, especially in terms of writing, phoning, and visiting your representatives in government about this important issue.

As for the filmmaking, I wish it were less influenced by Michael Moore, in those scenes where the hapless filmmaker tries to interview people on the opposite side of his issue who turn him away. When he finally does land an interview with a state agency official, the results are excellent, and remind you of the opposite side's point of view. The original impulse to fund natural gas was not bad. It just happens to be as filthy, short term, and patently unfair to the people who live near the drilling as any other kind of fossil fuel mine or oil rig.

The victims in the film who say that they don't recognize their country are heart broken and heart breaking. A cattle rancher in Wyoming turns to the camera and says directly to anyone who is listening, this is not just happening to you, it is happening to me. You are not alone.

War and Peace

2010-06-26T20:17:00.001-05:00

Since we are living in a time of many wars, with polarized feelings right here within the United States, it seems like a good time to reread War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. What strikes me at the beginning is how much wheeling and dealing goes on at the soirees. A benevolent uncle jockeys for position by granting a favor to an old luckless impoverished woman who is quite the wheeler dealer herself.

I am also struck at the words "joy" and "merry" in relation to the men's view of battle. They so look forward to the adventure of war that they approach it like children playing game.

Women Lawyers

2010-06-23T08:34:00.000-05:00

I have been thinking of women lawyers, and the image of women lawyers portrayed by the media and movies.

Sunday the New York Times featured a story about Gloria Allred, a lawyer who advocates for women victimized by criminals, discrimination, and less, including Tiger Woods' publicity team after it became known that she was one of the women he had had sex with. Throughout the article, mention is made of what Allred is wearing, how well put together she is, how tall she is, how old she is, elements of a professional's life that probably would not be mentioned if the subject were a man.

On television that day was Legally Blonde, a movie that made it safe for smart girls to be froufrou in movies (let's face it, Hepburn dressed for success, not to charm in her smart girl roles, ditto Rosalind Russell et al-- can you imagine any of those black and white film strong women heroines from the 40s in pink?) or was it the movie that made it safe for froufrou women to be smart. I always watch the movie when it is on tv just to see the face off of Elle in her curvy dress with the white frill and high heels and perfect accessories, waiting for the elevator with her counterpart played by Selma Blair in a turtleneck sweater, conservative suit, pearls, and black pumps. It is easy to see who will win the man, the case, and the career in this bit of costuming.

In 1992, Marisa Tomei wore skintight, outrageously flamboyant dresses in My Cousin Vinny when she demonstrated, in a courtroom, in front of her doofus lawyer boyfriend, her superior knowledge of cars and the skid marks they make, which helped to save two young men unjustly accused of murder.

The Times article condescended toward Allred, a highly successful lawyer, because she excelled at publicity, and tended not to turn down any highly celebrated client. But how clearly she states her case:

“The concept of fairness is always culturally defined,” she said. “Evenhere, where we think we are such an advanced nation, people advisewomen to grin and bear harassment in the workplace. I say, ‘Docomplain.’ It’s only going to get worse. We have rights so that wedon’t have to go like beggars with cups in our hands asking for mercy.We have to be heard in the court of public opinion as well as in theactual courts. Silence is the enemy.”

Gloria Allred in her office

Reese Witherspoon as Elle Woods

Marisa Tomei as Mona Lisa Vito in
My Cousin Vinny

2010-06-15T17:59:00.002-05:00

The house sparrows have no houses.

They settle in the cross beams of steel

posts suspended from street lamps.

You might hear a cheep and looking up

see feathers sprouting

from the cold metal hollows. The proud

mothers sing their hearts out.

Success! Success! Success!

Dean Street at Carlton Avenue
Prospect Heights
Brooklyn, New York

Photo by Tracy Collins

Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work

2010-06-12T21:42:00.000-05:00

photo by Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times
In the documentary of her last year leading up to her victory on Celebrity Apprentice, which signalled a bit of a resurgence in her career as a comedian, Joan Rivers shows her floor to ceiling card catalog of jokes. As a librarian, I loved the fact that the jokes were in alphabetical order. Cooking jokes were just before Tony Danza jokes. Does she write all her own material? She seems to in this film. Some of the jokes are very very funny. The movie does not lionize her in all her difficulties, but it does document how terribly hard she works. And how personally she takes slights. And how sad she is when her long time manager and she break off their business relationship.

Happy Birthday, Ruth Stone

2010-06-11T20:24:00.000-05:00

Ruth Stone

At Poets House on Tuesday night family and friends of Ruth Stone gathered to celebrate her 95th birthday. It was a beautiful day for any kind of celebration, full of fresh air, sun, and skidding clouds over the Hudson. Inside, it was standing room only for visitors who crammed into the small auditorium. We were greeted by the expert program coordinator Stephen Motika. Twelve people saluted the poet described by Sharon Olds as the "mother of humor and mourning."

Chard de Niord began the evening with a telephone call to Stone in Vermont the way David Letterman on live TV used to phone his mom for the whole studio and TV audience, with enhanced sound so that we could hear each other across the miles. Stone's voice rang out loud and clear how "she loved us all very much!" and then she read her poem, "The Orchard."

Sidney Wolinsky, a filmmaker who made Stone's acquaintance in the 1970s, showed a few minutes of his documentary "Excuses." Even though Stone was not present at Poets House, we all did get to see her at home slicing up carrots and mushrooms for a casserole while she talked about her work and her life.

Her oldest daughter, Marcia Croll, read love letters between Ruth Stone and her husband Walter. The letters were erotic, charged with love and longing. Walter's suicide in 1959 made Stone an expert in grieving, loss, and the surreal turns that life takes. Now, more than fifty years later, she survives, continuing to write and read aloud with her clear firm voice.

Dorianne Laux delivered by heart brilliantly the poem, "Curtains."

CURTAINS
Putting up new curtains,
other windows intrude.
As though it is that first winter in Cambridge
when you and I had just moved in.
Now cold borscht alone in a bare kitchen.
What does it mean if I say this years later?
Listen, last night
I am on a crying jag
with my landlord, Mr. Tempesta.
I sneaked in two cats.
He screams NO PETS! NO PETS!
I become my Aunt Virginia,
proud but weak in the head.
I remember Anna Magnani.
I throw a few books. I shout.
He wipes his eyes and opens his hands.
OK OK keep the dirty animals
but no nails in the walls.
We cry together.
I am so nervous, he says.
I want to dig you up and say, look,
it's like the time, remember,
when I ran into our living room naked
to get rid of that fire inspector.
See what you miss by being dead?

Dorianne Laux

Sandra Gilbert read the poem, "The Song of the Absinthe Granny."

The Song of Absinthe Granny

Among some hills there dwelt in parody
A young woman; me.
I was that gone with child
That before I knew it I had three
And they hung whining and twisting.
Why I wasn’t more than thirty-nine
And sparse as a runt fruit tree.
Three pips that plagued the life out of me.
Ah me. It wore me down,
The grubs, the grubbing.
We were two inches thick in dust
For lack of scrubbing.
Diapers and panty-shirts and yolk of eggs.
One day in the mirror I saw my stringy legs
And I looked around
And saw string on the floor,
And string on the chair
And heads like wasps’ nests
Full of stringy hair.
“Well,” I said, “if you have string, knit.
Knit something, don’t just sit.”
We had the orchard drops,
But they didn’t keep.
The milk came in bottles.
It came until the bottles were that deep
We fell over the bottles.
The milk dried on the floor.
“Drink it all up,” cried their papa,
And they all began to roar, “More!”
Well, time went on,
Not a bone that wasn’t frayed.
Every chit was knicked and bit,
And nothing was paid.
We had the dog spayed.
“It looks like a lifetime,”
Their papa said.
“It’s a good life, it’s a good wife,
It’s a good bed.”
So I got the rifle out
To shoot him through the head.
But he went on smiling and sitting
And I looked around for a piece of string
To do some knitting.
Then I picked at the tiling
And the house fell down.
“Now you’ve done it,” he said.
“I’m going to town.
Get them up out of there,
Put them to bed.”
“I’m afraid to look,” I whimpered,
“They might be dead.”
“We’re under here, mama, under the shed.”
Well, the winters wore on.
We had cats that hung around.
When I fed them they scratched.
How the little nippers loved them.
Cats and brats.
I couldn’t see for my head was thatched
But they kept coming in when the door unlatched.
“I’ll shave my head,” I promised,
“I’ll clip my mop.
This caterwauling has got to stop.”
Well, all that’s finished,
It’s all been done.
Those were high kick summers,
It was bald galled fun.
Now the daft time’s over
And the string is spun.
I’m all alone
To cull and be furry.
Not an extra page in the spanking story.
The wet britches dried
And the teeth came in.
The last one cried
And no new began.
Those were long hot summers,
Now the sun won’t tarry.
My birds have flocked,
And I’m old and wary.
I’m old and worn and a cunning sipper,
And I’ll outlive every little nipper.
And with what’s left I’m chary,
And with what’s left I’m chary.

Sandra Gilbert

To get more of a sense of how her mind works, read this interview with Ruth Stone. In reading several interviews over the past few days, I find it amusing to see how she learns about the interviewers, how she disarms them with her curiosity about everyone she speaks to.

Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo

2010-06-03T05:35:00.000-05:00

Beauty and transience are linked in Japan. Think of cherry blossoms, and how they are celebrated in ritual gatherings, adored for their short lives as much as for their visual splendor. In Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo, a first film by Jessica Orent, the Japanese people show their love of insects through collecting. In the US if you go into a pet store, you see the cuddly puppies and cute kittens. In Japan, children yearn for the stag horn beetle in the square plastic box. Women go to pet supply stores in search of the best bedding for their insects, and the best insect snacks. At night, the hunters of the beetles are out with flashlights and special nets to capture the beetles who climb trees. Anyone in the beetle business seems to know just how to kick the base of the tree to dislodge the unsuspecting bugs.Overhead images of people swarming at intersection in the rain, their heads under colorful umbrellas, link our species to the insects. Constant voiceover relates how poetry, art, nature, and philosophy relate to the Japanese love of insects. Most of it is in Japanese, requiring the viewer to read the subtitles which takes our eyes off the images. This is a minor flaw, but it leaves the audience somewhat exhausted after watching.

Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo Trailer from Myriapod Productions on Vimeo.

Please Give

2010-05-15T11:28:00.003-05:00

Nicole Holofcener makes movies about people I recognize. It is a relief to sit in the theater and not have to watch young men shooting each other, or middle aged men pairing off with very young women, or young men in buddy movies where the arc of the story begins with pure foolishness and ends with a little less foolishness. I know that I will see the Iron Man movie (I love Robert Downey Jr) and will be tempted by Robin Hood (Russell Crowe is no slouch) but still, superheroes and medieval legends are not the concern of my everyday life.

So when middle aged women with inner lives are portrayed on the screen I snap it up. Why should Meryl Streep have a lock on this?

This is Holofcener's specialty, and Please Give is her latest and most wonderful. I read that Catherine Keener is her muse.

Long live Catherine Keener.

The movie begins with a series of mammograms shown while the Roches sing "No Shoes" in the background. It was inevitable that mammograms would feature in a film at some point. Accompanying the images with such a finger snapping tune leavens the tone and introduces a breast technician as a leading character. The movie shows how we feel about cast off furniture and clothes of the dead, and our ambivalence at living in the richest city in the world while surrounded by the homeless.

Any mother who has ever lived with a daughter whose whole feeling of self worth centers on having the right pair of jeans will also recognize herself in this movie.

Good Morning

2010-05-09T19:17:00.001-05:00

Good Morning

In the sink the cat’s dish gets a swish.

The dregs need rinsing

from yesterday’s coffee.

The kettle needs filling.

The pilot light clicks then whooshes

into flame, and turns the copper bottom red.

In the tub, three minutes for the sponge bath end

just in time for the kettle’s whistle.

Damp feet step gingerly beneath a bath towel.

The filter sits in the cone,

the cone on top of the carafe,

the coffee, one half cup, in the cone.

Steamy the water that falls on the coffee,

then the scent of beans

The cat begins to eat

The day can now begin

Marina Abramovic at MOMA

2010-05-04T11:23:00.000-05:00

Marina Abramovic has a great head. Her eyes stare intently under strong brows, her mouth shows no emotion yet her lips are expressive with curves, and her hair and her body and her whole presence are at peace with themselves and the world. Her face and demeanor remind me of Georgia O'Keeffe. She is a very serious performance artist.

She creates works designed to make you uncomfortable. It is legitimate art, but when she throws her naked self at a pillar over and over again, and then walks back to repeat this gesture of futility, all I can think of is the physical damage she is doing to her body, which is her medium. I know it is her right to do that to herself, but I can't help but feel sorry for the chronic masochism involved.

My sister and I visited the installations at MOMA last weekend, and chose not to walk through the narrow doorway where two nude and nubile young people were stationed, but many did not mind doing so.

I liked best the work on video and in photographs that showed herperformances with her partner, Ulla. Below is their piece, "RestEnergy."
There was tension between the two of them that took a little bit of the heat off the audience.

As it is, many people are participating in "The Artist is Present" bysitting across from her in a chair, and being photographed undermagnificent lighting.

No Sherman Alexie, alas

2010-05-04T07:23:00.002-05:00

PEN International Voices Festival for some reason replaced Sherman Alexie with Christopher Hitchens, an intellectual and excellent polemicist who thought that Henry Kissinger should have been tried for war crimes, and made an excellent case for it in his book. But Christopher Hitchens is no Sherman Alexie.

Here is a clip of Alexie on the Colbert Report explaining why he won't put his books on the Kindle.

Times Square May 1, 2010

2010-05-02T14:52:00.001-05:00

On the way to the theatre last night, I ran into a police barricade. No matter what block we turned to, from Seventh Avenue to Eighth Ave, from 45th St to 46 St., police insisted that we stand back, get out of the way. I had a flashback to the Republican National Convention when we tried to march peacably along a preordained route and police kept yelling at us to go a different way as if we were the source of the trouble and not the war in Iraq and other misconceived political decisions that brought us out to have our say.

Last night was a simple matter of walking to the theater and being redirected to the curb. When I asked a police officer what was the matter, she only said, "A smoking car." Then she said very indignantly, "get out of the way. You aren't doing any good standing there."

Another person said, "Its the Islamists."

Times Square requires advanced pedestrianship in the best of circumstances, that is when thousands of tourists, vendors, residents, crooks, and others are walking in a zigzag pattern. You have to bob and weave just to get through the street. But when people are in the way because of a police barricade, and then you try to get to the front of the line and ask a police officer what is going on, you have to be pretty aggressive with your zigging and zagging.

I had bought tickets to see a play. The play was going to start momentarily. The police prevented us from attending. After a while the police said that all performances were canceled. This was after they said to call the theaters. There was no way to get through to the theaters by phone or foot or email or anything. Now I have two tickets for last night's performance. When I wrote to NY1, they forwarded this announcement from the Broadway League:

"Therewere no evacuations from Broadway theaters last night. Due to police activitythat closed a few streets in Times Square, there were some late curtains butall shows did go on. For exchanges or refunds, theatregoers should contacttheir point of purchase. All Broadway matinee and evening shows willgo on as scheduled today.

Theproper authorities are doing their jobs to keep Times Square safe for everyone,and Broadway shows are setting their stages to delight audiences."

-Charlotte St. Martin, Executive Director, The Broadway League

The smoking car was treated as a serious terrorist threat. It contained two containers of gasoline, some propane, a couple of alarm clocks, and some fireworks.

I know that there are people trying to do us harm, and that it is the job of the police to keep us safe, but I hate it when the police lie to me.

Bomb Scare Times Square May 1

Heather McHugh

2010-04-30T05:30:00.001-05:00

Wednesday night, the Poetry Society hosted a conversation with the brainy poet, Heather McHugh. The evening was billed as a

NEW SALON: READINGS AND CONVERSATIONS
Heather McHugh, with Robert N. Casper

A reading and conversation in an intimate format.

Robert Casper introduced the poet as a former teacher of his, and it was clear how much respect and awe and admiration he had for her. However, when he asked her to start the evening with a reading, she was expecting conversation, and her post-it note laden notes on topics showed that she was prepared for an interview more than for a poetry reading.

McHugh was good-natured and even joyous throughout her remarks, which were many and beautifully spoken in perfect English about what has meaning to her in her writing. " I write in order to find what I mean," she said at one point. She read the poem that was provided for those of us who did not come with books in hand, "Fastener,"

Fastener

One as is as another as.
One with is with another with;

one against's against all others and one of
of all the ofs on earth feels chosen. So the man

can't help his fastening on many
(since the likes of him like

look-alikes)...When the star-shower crosses
the carnival sky, then the blues of the crowd

try to glisten, to match it; and the two
who work late in the butcher-house touch,

reaching just the same moment
for glue and for hatchet.

When I heard her read it it made sense. Reading it on the page I struggle with the meaning and the sounds crashing into each other. Those first four lines trip me up with their use of conjunctions and prepositions as nouns. But McHugh's playfulness and lightness of touch made it all clear. She was almost apologetic about how she got expressive after the first four lines, as if it were the weakness in her writing, when in fact it is the part that I like best.

She was very at ease riffing on ideas, pulling snatches of poems by Emily Dickinson out of her fecund brain by heart, and she quoted Borges, and Wittgenstein ("Our lives are endless precisely in the ways our visual lives are endless.")

Here is what I remember:

--We live in our senses. All five senses have verbs that can be used either in the transitive or intransitive case.

--It is important to entertain both sides of every question, consider opposites, to not just go for the knee jerk response or emotional simplicity of things. Dare to be complex.

--The root of skepticism is in looking.

There is a beautiful more accessible poem on the poets.org website,

What He Thought.

For Fabbio Doplicher

We were supposed to do a job in Italy
and, full of our feeling for
ourselves (our sense of being
Poets from America) we went
from Rome to Fano, met
the Mayor, mulled a couple
matters over. The Italian literati seemed
bewildered by the language of America: they asked us
what does "flat drink" mean? and the mysterious
"cheap date" (no explanation lessened
this one's mystery). Among Italian writers we

could recognize our counterparts: the academic,
the apologist, the arrogant, the amorous,
the brazen and the glib. And there was one
administrator (The Conservative), in suit
of regulation gray, who like a good tour guide
with measured pace and uninflected tone
narrated sights and histories
the hired van hauled us past.
Of all he was most politic--
and least poetic-- so
it seemed. Our last
few days in Rome 
I found a book of poems this
unprepossessing one had written: it was there
in the pensione room (a room he'd recommended)
where it must have been abandoned by
the German visitor (was there a bus of them?) to whom
he had inscribed and dated it a month before. I couldn't
read Italian either, so I put the book
back in the wardrobe's dark. We last Americans

were due to leave
tomorrow. For our parting evening then
our host chose something in a family restaurant,
and there we sat and chatted, sat and chewed, till,
sensible it was our last big chance to be Poetic, make
our mark, one of us asked

"What's poetry?
Is it the fruits and vegetables
and marketplace at Campo dei Fiori

or the statue there?" Because I was
the glib one, I identified the answer
instantly, I didn't have to think-- "The truth
is both, it's both!" I blurted out. But that
was easy. That was easiest
to say. What followed taught me something
about difficulty, 

for our underestimated host spoke out
all of a sudden, with a rising passion, and he said:

The statue represents
Giordano Bruno, brought
to be burned in the public square
because of his offence against authority, which was to say
the Church. His crime was his belief
the universe does not revolve around
the human being: God is no
fixed point or central government
but rather is poured in waves, through
all things: all things
move. "If God is not the soul itself,
he is the soul OF THE SOUL of the world." Such was
his heresy. The day they brought him forth to die

they feared he might incite the crowd (the man
was famous for his eloquence). And so his captors
placed upon his face
an iron mask
in which he could not speak.

That is how they burned him.
That is how he died, 
without a word,
in front of everyone. And poetry--

(we'd all put down our forks by now, to listen to
the man in gray; he went on softly)-- poetry

is what he thought, but did not say.

The Good, The Bad, The Weird

2010-04-25T16:46:00.001-05:00

The Good, The Bad, The Weird takes a spaghetti western, the Good, the Bad and the Ugly and sets it in Manchuria during World War II when the Japanese have occupied Korea, and perhaps bandits would want to get an ancient Chinese dynasty's treasure to fuel a nationalist movement. Or is the movie just an excuse to use horses again in a way that is bound to be thrilling as they are seen galloping across a huge expanse of horizon in the desert?

There are three main characters, a man who seems to be a doofus (be careful about your preconceived stereotypes), a psychopath, and a handsome cowboy who can shoot with a rifle while riding a horse at top speed.

The most interesting thing to me about this movie is the strain of nationalism running through it, though the stunts are amazing and the action is good when it doesn't go on too long. The three main actors are captivating. I know it isn't a great movie, but I have been hearing about Korean movies and this is my first brush with one. I find its joy in the cinematography.

Connie Wanek, Duluth poet

2010-04-24T16:00:00.000-05:00

Connie Wanek's book, On Speaking Terms, is reviewed in the NYT Book Review this week, and the short excerpts appealed to me, so I found more about her, and these two poems posted on the Minnesota Arts website.

Checkers

Red was passion, black was strength.
Yet one checker always had gone missing.
a deserter discovered eventually
cowering under a chair cushion.
What was there to fear?
Only time itself would be killed.

I was one who never planned ahead,
who sent my infantry into any open field.
Under my command they aspired
merely to be captured,
jumped and hauled off, bearing the smiles
of the successfully defeated.

Who really wanted to be kinged?
To stagger under a crown
heavy as a headstone,
to wander the board without a court
or even the escort of a fool?
What was glory? I never understood the word.

Often some idle soul of a certain age
taught checkers to the young,
offering stratagems
continually overruled by blind luck.
Then came snacks and naps
and afterwards, the balance of the day.

Hartley Field

The wind cooled as it crossed the open pond
and drove little waves towards us,
brisk, purposeful waves
that vanished at our feet—such energy
thwarted by so little elevation.
The wind was endless, seamless,
old as the earth.
Insects came
to regard us with favor. I felt them alight,
felt their minute footfalls.
I was a challenge, an Everest …

And you, whom I have heard breathe all night,
sigh through the water of sleep
with vestigal gills …

A pair of dragonflies drifted past us, silent,
while higher up two bullet-shaped jets
dragged their roars behind them
on unbreakable chains. It seemed a pity
we’d given up the sky to them, but I understand so little.
Perhaps it was necessary.

All our years together—
and not just together. Surely by now
we have the same blood type, the same myopia.
Sometimes I think we’re the same sex,
the one in the middle of man and woman,
born of both as every child is.
The waves came to us, one each heartbeat,
and lay themselves at our feet.
The swelling goes down.
The fever cools.
There, where the Hartleys grew lettuce eighty years ago
bear and beaver, fox and partridge
den and nest and hunt
and are hunted. I wish I had the means
to give all the north back to itself, to let the pines
rise in the hayfield and the lilacs go wild.
But then where would we live?

I wanted that hour with you all winter—
I thought of it while I worked,
before I slept and when I woke,
a time when the tangled would straighten,
when contrition would become benediction:
the positive hour, shining like mica.
At last the wind brought it to us across the pond,
then took it up again, every last minute.

Obituaries

2010-04-19T17:36:00.000-05:00

I read the obituaries every day. I think many people my age do. What I notice is that the New York Times publishes obituaries of men mostly. When a woman is featured, in the exalted company of the men selected to have a free obit (not the paid death notices that loved ones buy at a very high price), I pay special attention.

Recently, there was an obituary of an actress I never really followed but I liked her name: Dixie Carter. What I look for in an obituary is the whole narrative thread, the beginning, middle and end of the story. Somehow seeing it all laid out in chronological order makes sense of the life. Aren't we trying to make sense of the stories of our lives? Obituaries lay it all out and you can follow along with the subject's passions, their successes, their final illnesses, what their next of kin said. To me, obituaries are short short stories based in real life.

The obituary of Dixie Carter (who was married to Hal Holbrook, the esteemed American actor) included a quote that explained a phrase I was unsure about, "bless her heart." Here are the last several paragraphs of her obituary:

Although Ms. Carter long ago moved to California for hertelevision career, she and Mr. Holbrook also kept a home inMcLemoresville. In 1999, she told The Palm Beach Post that shetreasured the courtesy and kindness she found in Tennessee, a welcomecontrast to the backstabbing and sniping of Hollywood.

“Ofcourse in the South we talk about people too,” she said. “But if youend your comments with ‘Bless her heart,’ you’re off the hook.”

Today, two more women got obits in the Times, two women whose careers are important to me, film and poetry.

Dede Allen, an important film editor died. She edited Bonnie and Clyde, and Reds, and sort of changed the rhythm of how we want to watch movies. She punched things up quite a bit.

And Carolyn Rodgers, a black poet, died.

She wrote these lines:

I’ve had tangled feelings lately
About ev’rything
Bout writing poetry, and otha forms
Bout talkin and dreamin with a
Special man (who says he needs me)
Uh huh And my mouth has been open
Most of the time but
I ain’t been saying nothin but
Thinking about ev’rything
And the partial pain has been
How do I put my self on paper
The way I want to be or am and be
Not like any one else in this
Black world but me

The Secrets in their Eyes (movie from Argentina)

2010-04-18T20:47:00.001-05:00

A retired lawman (lawyer? policeman? -- I never figured out how the Argentinian justice system worked -- people kept calling each other counselor and dottore, and other forms of address that I couldn't translate into American equivalents) decides to write a novel based on a most haunting murder/rape case that ended without resolution. In the process of raking through his past, and his role in the case, he comes upon all of his relationships in the office where he worked, especially a certain supervisor named Irene. Irene is beautiful, intelligent, and accomplished. She is obviously the object of his affections.

She helps to crack the case, while subtly breaking the heart of would be writer. The stories of the love between the two court employees and the chase to bring to justice the vicious killer are intertwined in a most intriguing way.
I enjoyed the seventies decor and styling. The whole subject of memory is profound, and treated in a sophisticated way.

Bronzino

2010-04-17T18:51:00.000-05:00

Standing Nude Seen from the Rear, ca. 1541–42

Study for a Portrait of a Seated Man, ca. 1535

Comparing the original drawing of a nude man crawling on his belly with the copy side by side took a lot of time. The placard tells you to notice that the line of the thigh in the true Bronzino shows many false starts where the fake only has one confident line throughout. But there are other differences. The muscle of the thigh is bigger in the Bronzino, and there is more tension in the way the man is crawling, all coiled ready to spring. The composition of the leg cut off before his ankle adds to the tension. These differences are slight. I admire Bronzino's subtle shading, the tiny cross hatches in the contours. All around me, museum goers were murmuring, "technique, technique." One detail of a leg with its velvety shadows in the curves near the shin is breathtaking.

I loved best of all the emotional content in the hands and feet. The biblical figures of Jacob's feet next to Joseph's clearly express the aged next to youth. Hands wringing each other in jealousy are all snarled up in agony.

Head of a Smiling Young Woman in Three-Quarter View, ca. 1542–43

Patricia Markert

Pina Bausch

The Nervous Breakdown

Blue Nights

Nick Alciati on December 2

The Artist

Hugo

Margin Call

American Ballet Theater

Drive

Poets Forum

Martha Marcy May Marlene

Occupy Wall Street

Good Hair

MoneyBall

Higher Ground

Back in NY with Hurricane Irene

Mushrooms, Part 3

Mushrooms, Part 2

Kittens

Passione directed by John Turturro

Diana Nyad to try the Florida-Cuba swim again

Hoarding images

Hemlock Tree

Sky

At Walmart in Monticello

Thornden Park Rose Garden

First Fridays: Poetry Reading at Narrowsburg Public Library

Mushrooms

Bad Teacher

Indigo bunting, scarlet tanager, robins

Sullivan County

The Trip

Bad week for the neighborhood

Bridesmaids

MIdnight in Paris

Hazel Dickens

Source Code

my mother's eye is scratched

Le Quattro Volte

Heard a Mockingbird today

Morgan Library: Diaries

Barney's Version

My Favorite Website: NYPL

Cedar Rapids

Bill Cunningham New York (movie)

Inside Job

Howl

Poets Forum on Contemporary Poetry:Wild and Strange Language

Late September

Weather

Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913–1917

Women Outside: conversations about nature, art & spirit

The Kids Are All Right

Black Swallowtail Butterfly on Queen Anne's Lace

Millipedes

Salt/dir. Philip Noyce

Leave it to Chance: a Tribute to Merce Cunningham

Inception

Lake Shore Limited by Sue Miller

Wild Turkey

Cheri

What is it about the internet?

In the country

Funny Animation

Reading War and Peace

Toy Story 3

Gasland

War and Peace

Women Lawyers

Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work

Happy Birthday, Ruth Stone

Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo

Please Give

Good Morning

Marina Abramovic at MOMA

No Sherman Alexie, alas

Times Square May 1, 2010

Heather McHugh

NEW SALON: READINGS AND CONVERSATIONSHeather McHugh, with Robert N. Casper

NEW SALON: READINGS AND CONVERSATIONS
Heather McHugh, with Robert N. Casper