Wednesday, August 26, 2009

A Poem by Charles Simic, From *Dime-Store Alchemy:The Art of Joseph Cornell*

(As I say in the title of this post, this is a poem by Charles Simic. Being a prose poem, that may be difficult to discern. Here goes--)

STREET-CORNER THEOLOGY
It ought to be clear that Cornell is a religious artist.
Vision is his subject. He makes holy icons. He proves
that one needs to believe in angels and demons even in
a modern world in order to make sense of it.
The disorder of the city is sacred. All things are
interrelated. As above, so below. We are fragments of
an unutterable whole. Meaning is always in search of
itself. Unsuspected revelations await us around the next
corner.
The blind preacher and his old dog are crossing the
street against the oncoming traffic of honking cabs and
trucks. He carries his guitar in a beat-up case taped with
white tape so it looks like it's bandaged.
Making art in America is about saving one's soul.


(Me again--I especially like the middle paragraph. So true, so true. So go read more poems and write more poems.)

Tuesday, August 25, 2009

So I'm Thinking...

Would a conference of magicians and students of religion on the nature of faith be fun? I think it would be. Possibly, it *could* turn ugly, but...with outlandishly good food I think that possibility could controlled.

Monday, August 24, 2009

Poetry and Vision

A poetry professor of mine back in college once quoted someone else as having said--"Observation is the antidote to sentimentality." I think of this as I am, well, walking around looking at stuff. Especially as I have Mr. Simic's *Dimestore Alchemy: The Art Of Joseph Cornell* in my worm leather backpack, along with small color photocopies of Joseph Cornell boxes I especially like. I think of this quote when I am at the Magic Castle. What if I am not even sure of what it is I'm observing? I also consider the Anais Nin quote, something along the lines of "We see not what there is but who we are." Hm.

I'm never seeing more than just the very tip of the iceberg, only some of the connections that swoop like a fine silver web throughout all that exists. To pluck a single strand of it is to tug at the entirety of all that is.

No wonder whatever I look at slowly dissolves into light. Metaphorically. Or not.



Michael Van Welligan(?) 's class Observation is the antidote to sentimentality.
Simic's poems I marked, my experience of the city,
What?

Iris Murdoch

A slightly mad and very brilliant New Zealander I respected hugely, as one must such people, introduced me to her work. All through college I thought the world of her and read plenty of her books. Then, a few years after graduating, I completely lost interest, to the point of not clearly recalling my previous fondness. It happened right in the middle of *The Green Knight*, as I remember. A college friend once summed up the entirety of Murdoch's work as "secret Jews and surprising homosexuals." Yup, I thought, as I closed the book and put it in the pile to return to the library, and she has already done the one where the secret Jew *was* the surprising homosexual.

So today, casting about on the Internet, I find this quote by Iris Murdoch from an interview with Sarah Booth Conroy, published in the Washington Post in March of 1990.

"One of the problems in life is to distinguish between demons, magic, and God."

Yup. I very much like that she said that.

Saturday, August 22, 2009

Touching Base

My physical condition and the drugs I take for it have been leaving me bedraggled lately. Feh. I'm hoping to be able to write more in the coming week.

One wonderful (and that is exactly the word I mean) thing did happen this week. A kindly member at the Magic Castle allowed me to examine and even slightly operate what I in my limited experience consider one of the loveliest of modern illusions. The sheer beauty of its mechanism equaled the beauty of its effect. Even my first awkward attempt made me catch my breath. The sheer wonder of the experience is something I would like to put in a box like one of Joseph Cornell's. Delightfully and Cornellianly (?) enough, this encounter took place down in the Museum, the walls of which are full of recessed, *boxlike,* displays.

Yesterday late in the afternoon, with this very thought in the back of my head, I started rallying enough to find my copy of Charles Simic's *Dime-Store Alchemy: The Art of Joseph Cornell.* I had picked it up a while back and looked into it casually, but now I read it and LOVED it. It is a physically lovely book of Simic's poems upon the artist, with photos of some of the works mentioned. I commend it to your attention, especially if you like Joseph Cornell's work. I imagine it would be pretty intriguing if you are not familiar with Cornell too. (And if you are not familiar with Joseph Cornell, then rush off this very instant to look him up and prepare to be intrigued, enchanted and confused. Go! Go!)

A better art scholar than I am could say if what I have just produced in this "New Post" window, that you now read in your own box of flickering light pixellations, is the prose equivalent of some element of how Cornell's boxes work....

Thursday, August 20, 2009

Success!

So--I have finally met ALL the baby cousins! They are uniformly brilliant and beautiful, and took adorable photos, posing with their great-grandmother, my Grandma.

This is another thing that is cool about growing older, being able to see stuff like this. I can remember when the parents of the baby cousins were babies themselves, and here they are now, competent adults raising children. So cool, so very cool. I live long enough and of course the babies turn into cranky young people, but we will deal with that when we get to it. The beloved and I are looking forward to being the Crazy Aunt And Uncle Out In L.A.

Further notes on success. I found myself in downtown Claremont late-ish one evening this week, after the Spaghetti and Meatball special at the The Press, and 6$ all-day movies at the theater, rambling about with some ice cream and warm feelings for the little town. Even then, I ran into people I know, one of whom was dedicated to making sure I was safe and near my car. I could not have liked her more in that moment. I figured I must be doing something right to be living around people who will be this kind to me.

Wednesday, August 12, 2009

Julie and Julia

Well go see the movie if you haven't because parts of it are just glorious.  I don't know about you, but back in the day, I became aware of "blogs" by hearing about the Julie/Julia Project.  My dad had learned to cook by starting on page one of *Mastering The Art*... and working his way through to the end.  In his case it took more than a year.

So anyway, once the book version of the blog came out I snapped it up, as this looked like the new "overnight success story" as well as the subject matter looking good.  (I started it and for some reason never finished it.) I'd looked at some delightful knitting books that had also started as blogs.  That looked like the new thing--we'll all write blogs about our cunningly particular circumstances and hordes of Internet surfers would discover us and gasp as Anais Nin reported of her readership, that we had expressed exactly their experience beyond their wildest wishes of ever having discovered a voice. No, really.

One of my thoughts upon leaving the movie was a stinging sense of shame about blogging.  As though the faster and easier we can "communicate," the less we have to actually convey, until we are down to this form of shrilly screaming into the electronic ether to hear our own tinny echoes.  Being old and cranky and familiar enough with magic tricks to not be so very easily lead about by media, I am still writing here.  I would like to engage in some conversation with people who like the stuff I like.  Since 9/11, no one can afford to hide any light that they might be able to contribute.  That is worth the risk of a few tinny echoes.

So before I completely wander off topic and into what needs to be another entry, go pick up the book.  This is one of those situations where you really do want to see the movie before you read the book.  The book will fix anything wrong with the movie, and then the movie that *you* think should have been made instead of this one will be so freakin cool to imagine that you will have a lot of fun and think many, many thoughts.  Now all this goes only for *Julie and Julia*.  I have not read *Our Years In France* yet, although I have perused *An Appetite for Life*.  I will rashly commend them to you too, just because Julia Child is that freakin cool, and just about anything connected to her has to spur a person to think and to do. 

Sunday, August 9, 2009

Mutability

The physical changes of aging don't especially upset me. Neither does death or dying. What is pulling my heartstrings is seeing how my *unconsidered* sense of time and place is slipping away. The scent and texture of life lived in a specific historical moment. What details of the physical world have changed over the course of my life? How will they continue to do so? I suppose this can produce simultaneously a keen sense of poignancy over the gone past and a keen sense of interest in what is coming to displace the unconsidered present. What is coming to make Graco infant transport systems look as vintage as perambulators? What will candy wrappers be like in twenty years? What will candy be like? What about the future of bar soap?

This is a sort fun place to be balanced right now. And I'm not even fifty....

Saturday, August 8, 2009

Steampunky Non-fiction!

Okay, so maybe I am the last person on the planet to finally read *The Devil At The White City* but I did. I quickly followed this up with another Eric Larson book, *Thunderstruck* about Marconi and this time only one murder, but a really grisly one.

Yup, I think Mr Larson just might have done it, he may have come up with "steampunk nonfiction" How have changes in technology and culture influenced eachother in the past?

Any other suggestions for what other *contemporary* works may qualify for this genre?

Friday, August 7, 2009

Nellie Bly

So I just finished reading *Around The World In Seventy-Two Days*, by investigative reporter Nellie Bly, in 1890. In case you don't know, she set off to see if Jules Verne's fictional account could not only be duplicated, but bettered. (She popped in to visit the Vernes at their home on her way through France. Jules Verne was utterly delighted by her feat.)

Again, this was an enchanting view into a time and place. I believe she was twenty-five when she set off, with a shocking lack of luggage, even to the minds of free-and-easy modern sorts as ourselves. Even more shocking in her day, she went off alone--meaning she had neither man nor gun with which to protect herself. "...I had such a strong belief in the world's greeting me as I greeted it, that I refused to arm myself. I knew if my conduct was proper I should always find men ready to protect me, let them be American, English, French, German, or anything else." (Wow, how many doctoral dissertations can you find in that statement? Go ahead--in the right crowd it is an evening's entertainment and conversation. Just make sure you have enough snackies and drinks.)

One hundred and twenty years ago, an educated and literate woman could innocently write "I somehow always connected Japan and its people with China and its people, believing the one no improvement on the other. I could not have made a greater mistake." She then proceeds to tell of how her experiences taught her that they were two very different cultures. Some of what she said made me blink, adoptive Angeleno as I am, but she belongs to her time and place as I do to mine, and no doubt back in the day, her stories were revealatory to plenty of Americans.

I had ordered this book at Metropolis Books, down in the historic core, a while back. I t came in and I went to pick it up shortly after the poor girl was found murdered. After finishing the volume, the irony was not lost on me, over the very different fates of these two young women.

Monday, August 3, 2009

Ah-hah...

I finally figured it out, I think, the reason why the pattern of the teeth in a ray's lower jaw stay with me. The pattern is similar to decorative panels on a building I used to walk past all the time in Lincoln. Once I saw it, I would be close to the public library which was often my destination. This is funny, this recognizing things without knowing why, or knowing what the connections are. Huh....

Saturday, August 1, 2009

I Don't Quite Know What To Do With This...

So the beloved and I were down in the Historic Core one *evening* this week, which we had not done before. We met friends for dinner at the Nickel Diner, which has a perfectly delightful dinner menu we had not had much opportunity to sample.

We had a good time walking over there, me pointing out plenty of the interesting stuff. The beloved is a very kind and patient man who appreciates enthusiasms. (and my God, we walked part of the way on *Broadway!* Broadway!! And then we crossed Spring St! Spring!! And if that was not enough to prostrate me with excitement, we went by Sixth and Main! That means Cole's was to be treated of, and old trains, and French Dips, and--well you can imagine....)

We arrived a tad early, so I refreshed myself with a "lavender blossoms" soda, a beverage so twee as to make rabid fans of Victoria sentimentalia roll their eyes. I'm glad I tried it at least once. So our friends arrived and we ate and had a good time until late. We parted pleasantly, and the beloved and I went on our way.

Well who should we run into but someone I had not seen for close to a year! He was a roaming musician, possibly homeless, possibly afflicted with troubles. Back around my workplace we would visit occasionally. He had been on my mind for a while, so seeing him was good. It turned out he had suffered terrible physical damage in a dreadful accident since last we had talked. He asked after my health, and compassionated my difficulties. Mine were nothing compared to his. His graciousness awed me. Just about everyone we passed in the streets that night greeted us in the casual and easy manner of small towns

This all happened in the general part of town where the young girl was recently found murdered and the homeless man who allegedly killed her was arrested. "Terrible things happen everywhere" is a statement I can assent to intellectually, but that night I could not reconcile that this was the same place where I was walking around feeling safe enough, having a good time, and enjoying meeting people on the sidewalks.

Really, I don't know what to do with this....

(P.S. "compassionate" the verb is archaic, but really, I can't think of a more current usage that is any better.)