Not quite up and running

Not only do I find I can't add pictures yet, I the pictures I took yesterday -- some lovely all pictures, I thought, somehow won't transfer from camera to computer. If it's not one problem it's another I'll get it all straightened out but it may take some time -- and help.

Meanwhile I had a bit o time yesterday and could resist starting another quilt. As mentioned, when I'd shown and described my "new vintage" quilts at the guilt meeting a couple of weeks ago, someone almost surreptitiously leaned over my shoulder and gave me a baggie with another bunch of squares -- these are 1.5x1.5 inches, most are plain. I've long admired what I privately think of as a Nancy Crow block -- because I first saw it in some quilts she showed many years ago at the Museum of Arts and Crafts here in NYC. I pulled out my scrap bag and began sewing borders around those little square to make new squares an when many of them are done in a great variety of colors, they will be put together with stripping and other little squares at the joinings -- this is not a la Nancy Crow but worked very well on a quilt I made my youngest grandson several years ago and which I was reminded of the last time I visited because that was a quilt I slept under. And I still like it. So I have a nice weekend ahead and will carry on with both the quilting and getting this new computer comfortable to work with.

I might mentioned that I'm reading three very different books -- a bit of each per night [though it's very likely, I'll finish one tonight.] First is a beautiful book of Andrew Wyeth works with commentary by Wyeth about each picture, sometimes quite surprising commentary. His work is so austere and yet he feels such passion for his subjects ... it seems to me a very WASP, very down East [although he alternates between Chadds Ford in Pennsylvania and Maine] the kind of close lipped but still waters run deep feeling. I've seen several of his works, the Helga pictures at Brooklyn Museum and a retrospective the Whitney. His quietness is SO very different from all I see in Art News.

As a contrast I'm reading Louis Erdrich's The Master Butcher's Singing Club, a rather long novel and I'm close enough to make a dash to the end this evening. Her story is very, very close to a kind of American magic realism . Characters and events are pushed a little past my ability to believe. This is something I think all but the most literarily serious American writers do. It's the urge to entertain and also to show off the fecundity of imagination and sometimes depth of research of a period or place. It always sets me a a remove from the work even when I'm totally captivated by the plot and must find out how it ends. I tend to resent that writerly glitz.

The third book is a book of poems by Billy Collins who is so down to earth that, paradoxically, that is also off putting ... in poetry. I don't want great piles of metaphor and all kinds of tricks, but I want to learn a little more than I get from C ollins. So of the three boks,Wyeth is by far the most satisfying. His drawing skill is so amazing to me that I become immersed in the pictures by themselves, but when I read more of what or why as he explains them, the experience is pushed to considerable sat isfaction.