David Hockney and Picasso

Bookstores are, for me, sirens with temptatons and I go in knowing I'm probably going to find something irrestistable. I'm never sorry about the money I spend on books except in the (not too frequent) times when I purchase a book only to discover when I get home that I already have it.

A couple days ago I stopped at Barnes and Noble as I walked part way home, to get Pema Chodron's When Things Fall Apart to send to somebody in one of those periods of life. It is a wonderful little book, not sentimental schmaltz, no buck up and stiff upper lip, just good practical advice from a woman writing from the deeply felt knowledge that the world is a solid place and one must not look for easy answers but face the pains and difficulty, fears and worries head on. So I got Pema's book and browsed a bit and what did I find?

On the bargain racks, yet. A book I saw the last time I was at the Metropolitan Museum's bookstore, but now redueed from $45 to $15: Hockney's Pictures, the Definitive Retrospective. I've always been drawn to Hockney's deceptively simple, light, bright colors and graphic paintings and his more technical photo montages. He seems to know how to look at things and paint them without attempting to convince us of his genius or skill -- but things that look straightfoward are usually more complex. So I scanned here a drawing, an early work, where Hockney's naked self is facing a clothed and stereotypical Picasso. One can look a long time thinking about the young painter, the already famous master, the vulnerability of self-containment of Hockney and Picasso simply himself, not engaged with anything except art. How is an aspiring artist to meet such a figure except naked on the other side of the table? How are any of us to meet our aspirations? Only by being simply who we are ... if the other is blind to us, okay, we are not blind to him. By making the encounter a work of art, Hockney has asserted himself and incorporated Picasso into his life. This is this the kind of drawing I would like to have as a postcard to tack to the kitchen cabinet or on the refrigerator so the encounter becomes a part of my life.

Poverty, in American and elsewhere

Every now and then I get caught up in a subject that is much too big for me. Poverty is one. Sunday's NYTimes magazine had an article about presidential candidate John Edwards' end-poverty platform. There were some satistics and plans and references to Lyndon Johnsons' War On Poverty. Probably academics have assessed the extent to which that succeeded or failed, but I haven't read them. Of course there is poverty, I see it every day, the men sleeping in the bowels of Penn Station on Sunday morning and on the subway grate every afternoon as I go home. These are destitute people, so are the several I see asking for money on the streets or in the subway. I do not see the people with empty cabinets and refrigerators. People are hungry, people are desperate, and they are miserable. Here in the richest city on earth. Out in the small towns, the farms, the mountains, on the Indian reservations, people are also poor and miserable. I know this, I think about it; I don't turn it off. I know many people don't read the articles, prefer not to think about it.


I have just finished reading Geroge Crane's BEYOND THE HOUSE OF THE FALSE LAMA. By and large I was disappointed but the last third is in Mongolia. He glories in too much vodka, as earlier he enjoyed wasting time being depressed in Paris. But I'm thinking about poverty and what I will remember vividly from this book is Crane's discription of visiting an American Buddhist nun working in Ulan Bataar with "orphans" -- homeless children who may or may not have living parents. The children, some as young as 3 or 4, live like little animals, spending the terribly cold winters mostly below the street in the spaces around the heat [steam] pipes that keep the city warm from a central power plant. [Such as Manhattan once had] The children scounge garbage for food. Often they have only the clothes they are wearing and never change. The nun is able to maintain a food kitchen and care for many children for $5000 a year! How little money it takes to do something marvelous where poverty means something beyond the imagination of most Americans. When I visited Mongolia the tour company said we could donate to an orphanage if we wished. They sent a list of things the children could use -- it was everyting! Everything a child might need. Many of us did take things but we never visited the orphanage, the local guide found time to take us to a cashmere sweater outlet instead.

I grow impatient with myself and with almost all Americans when I think about the great inequallity in the world. The horrible disparity between our concern with obesity which is rampant in America and that when a politician like Edwards seems to truly care about doing something about poverty it is seen as a campaign issue and it's clear that this will not bring him voters, people just don't care that much. It hurts to think about it so we'll think about the lastest block buster movie and whatever new tunes can be put on the IPods -- so many prefer to be constantly entertained, to have constant music in their ears which they interrupt only to chat on their cell phones saying almost nothing. This is definitely not one of my most cheerful posts -- most cheerful day.

Summer quilting

Yesterday was the last meeting of the Empire Quilt Guild until September. Belonging does not give me deadlines. But I keep giving myself deadlines. Today I started the final border for the blue/white summer quilt -- and already it's almost too hot to sleep under a quilt. It seems the border will go pretty quikcly so it should be done by the end of the week and then I have only to back, add batting and quilt. So two weeks, max, I hope.



The quilt in the picture here is again one of my bad photos but it was a lovely quilt by the speaker, Margaret Cohen of Long Island who is a traditional quilter, doing most of the piecing and quilting by hand -- some piecing by machine. But she only does machine quilting when making something for her daughter-in-law! She was a very amusing speaker and had wonderful quilts. I was especially glad to hear that she doesn't believe in basting but uses lots of safety pins which is my preferred method. But, I was astonished that she dosn't think of them as things to sleep under -- in fact she spoke of a chilly night in a motel at a quilt show when her roommate suggested she use a qulit to add warmth and she felt very uncomfortable sleeping under one of her own quilts.

I feel entirely the opposite. I almost ritually need to sleep under a quilt before I give it away. While I have a couple of throws, I own no blankets, I always sleep under my own quilts. That's what they are for - the ones that aren't wall size. So now, I have several unfinished projects to work on and a couple of small quils, well, maybe three ... well maybe more counting the charity ones I want to do from some 2x2 squares... which I want to finish this summer. And I want to make a jacket before it gets cool in the fall .. but since summer is only now getting a toe hold, that feels a long way off.

Another year older

It happens every year and try as I might I can't ignore the day although I tend to treat it like every other ... sort of. I did make a point of going to my favorite local Chinese restaurant for lunch. So far I've resisted going to the self-styled "European" bakery nearby for a slice of cheesecake. But I hear a sort of siren song urging me to go have a piece with some capuccino. In my heart I KNOW I cannot be the age one would calculate from the year I was born. I KNOW it's been a long time since I was this hair-ribboned three year old, but it can't have been THAT long.

When one's last name is Calender, one is stuck with noting the flow of the years. Like Prof. Cox said back in American lit, "our names influence us in ways we don't even realize." [How sorry I feel for the famous Miss Ima Hogg!] And yet I am bad at remembering exact years; it's as if I have been given license by my name to contain all the years in an indiscriminate jumble. What year did X happen? I don't know. I know, like most Americans, exactly where I was and what I was doing when I heard JFK had been shot but I don't know what year it was. I have not yet forgotten the year of 9/11, that is too close, too intimate. But what year did I trek in Nepal to Thenboche to see the Mani Rimdu festival? I remember most of the ups and downs of the trails, the rope bridges, the sight of Everest on the horizon, but the year is simply not important. I forget the years my daughters were born and the same for my grandchildren. That kind of forgetfulness has nothing to do with their importance but with the relative unimportance of this arbitrary thing we call time, and most of all the even more arbitrary way we number years. How ridiculous the millennium madness was! Whose millennium? I kept asking. Why was that year different than all other years? In fact, it wasn't.

And, in fact, I am not older today than I was yesterday. I refuse to be that old and I will not truly celebrate another birthday until I reach a nice round 80 ... and I reserve the right to change that to 90 if I should wish as the year approaches .... sometimes way out there in the oh, so distant future.

Memories and forgetting

I am doing a busman's holiday sort of thing by reading a book of interviews with travel writers, A SENSE OF PLACE from the San Francisco publisher Travelers Tales is a collection of interviews with well known travel writers. I spend many days at work transcribing interviews -- that's all I've transcribed for the last ten days! But I never get tired of listening to people answer questions. Last night I read an interview with Jonathan Raban, who said, "I spend most of my time forgetting rather than remembering until I can write..." [about whatever subject] This came after a discussion of Graham Green having written about a trip in Liberia where he took no notes [or so he said] and comparing that book to one written by his cousin Barbara who accompanied him [and took no notes, so she said] And the two books sound like they were in entirely different places at different times and situations. I've read Barbara's book and enjoyed it.

Raban also speaks of the times when writers can recreate conversations perhaps months or years after the fact, not having recorded them. He says, "writing in a state of almost traancelike memoriousness you are able to recapture things that you ought, by all the sort of normal laws of memory physics, to have forgotten. But somehow the very slowness of the writing brings those words back." Reading about this yesterday was one of those synchronous events for I had just read an article in the NY TImes Science Section about the brain's need to forget the peripheral junk in order to remember what is important -- duh! Someone somewhere had to use an MRI and set up complex words tests and enlist some students to spend an afternoon proving what a writer could have told them, not just now, but probably any time since people have been writing their memories.

I think Raban goes well beyond the scientists. He was particularly speaking of recapturing a conversation he had had with the poet Philip Larkin, someone he greatly admired. No doubt when with Mr. Larkin Raban was alert and concentrated in a way that one is not when, say, walking down a supermarket aisle. He cared very much about their conversation, perhaps he played various parts of over in his mind for some days afterward as we're likely to do after seeing someone we admire and having a rare conversation with that person. When he sat down to write, he probablly didn't have the verbatim transcript I would transcribe from a tape in my job, but he had all the important parts and went, as he says into a trancelike state which is a mental state every writer knows and experiences when in concentration, whether writing about a real event or creating a fictional one where, as very often writers report, the characters speak and say surprising, but appropriate, in character things. I read all the articles I come across about how the mind works. It never ceases to fascinate me.

Art - spontaneous and laborious

Here are pictures of two kinds of art I saw while on Cape Cod. "The Shell Tree" is sponatneous, "folk" art. It may be known to only a handful of people, perhaps it was "made" by one person or a group of persons. It stands on a beach that is public but is not well known -- yes, such beaches exist even on over-populated Cape Cod. It is a dead tree which has been festooned with broken couch shells, the sort that can be found on the beach, probably early in the morning before visitors come so the tree was probably fashioned by a local person. It has weathered [and possibly been restored after] at least three years of storms. We do not know when it was made, maybe quite some time ago. To walk along the inside path of the beach, on the calm side of the dunes, and come upon the tree makes one feel connected to the art making impulse that is perhaps our genetic inheritance from those distant ancestors who left pictographs on cliffs and painted deep inside caves. It is a glorification of the beauty the sea strews on the sand with the tides. The shells remain tinged with a delicate pink inside. The beach is wondeful but this tree has made is a truly special place.
I am not a good photographer and so this picture of a highly reflective piece of glass art made by Patrick Todoroff, my daughter's husband and artisan ofGlass Graphics is a differnt kind of art. Carefully thought out, each piece carefully chosen and cut and fitted together. A grand, complex wall hanging, just one of the many designs he has made. I wish I had been able to find a way to photograph it to show it's fascinating and complexity.

What is so rare as a day in June?

In the Northeast we cannot expect beautiful weather the 2nd of June. In fact the forecast was for occasional rain storms. A five minute storm with a couple of loud thunder claps rushed across Hyannis about 9;30 Saturday morning doing no damage to our graduation day plans, merely cutting short Molly, the dog's morning walk. A haze hid the sun but the day was warm and beautiful, the graduation ceremony mercifully short, and spiced by a Wapanogg woman wearing her ceremonial dress and feathers for her graduation, applauded by her very, very tall family.
Cori had the kind of smiling radience one associates with a bride. She was glad to graduate, she was happy that her life is moving foreward. She chose a Japanese restaurant for a hibachi prepared dinner so we got the full show from the chef. Cori disappeared with her boy friend and other friends, her brothers were busy, her mother and I and my ex-husband and wife had time for a nice long walk on Long Beach -- it was warm enough for hearty Cape Cod youngsters, including little bro, Noah, to swim. The beach roses were in magnificent abundance. What more could you want? How about a clam rolll, some coffee ice cream and little cakes? Now that is a beautiful day ... with a quick trip to Joanne's Fabrics where I found the last bit I need for the blue/white quilt I'm eager to finish. Nothing more needed. And then an early morning departure for NYC beneath stormy skies and much cooler weather.