The World Examining Works

Work in Progress

 

"I love work: I could stand and look at it for hours." A very ancient joke.

 

But how thrilling the great big, gigantic hole in the ground at the corner of 8th Avenue and 26th Street! With bulldozers and diggers.

Peter Lappin does quite different work entirely. He sews clothes from 1940's Butterick patterns and transforms himself into Cathy. How rarely one comes upon a snood nowadays.

Deniz scores films.

Henry is just beginning to create all sorts of things like pictures and block towers.

With us, it's same old, same old, but how much fun it is to do work you like to do, and what torture it would be to be made to work eight hours at something you hated just to get the money -- which is the fate of so many people.

A glass palatte

A hat under construction.

Re-reading Mrs Dalloway after a forty year gap. How differently it reads, and how rich it is! It is truffle and fruitcake, to be taken in very small nibbles. It is also dreadfully sad.

 

 

To worship idleness in days like these

must be accounted sin. To contemplate

in silent awe and longingly these trees

this path leaf-strewn and wet, roses late

blooming after frost --panoply of things

I may not stop for, may not understand.

Count wasted time this lingering which brings

content not cash. It isn’t what I planned.

 

 

 

 

Little Bits

 

 

This has been rather a speckly week.

The leaves are finally coming down thick and fast.

I have just realised why I like taking pictures of Robert's work table --it's because it's a sort of automatic color co-ordinated still life -- multi media: photos, paint, paper, brushes etc etc. The old camp shirt doesn't match....

(The gray silver squiggly stuff is water.)

When I walked out into the hall yesterday, I was greeted by the sight of 27 pairs of small shoes and a jumble of coats. Ian-Down-the-Hall had his entire kindergarten class to visit. They were terrifically well behaved  -- even the chaperones.

On a wet night like last night the light shatters into blobs and squiggles

and spots like confetti.

 

Have a super Thanksgiving !

 

Art/Neo Rauch

 

Saturday afternoon

Neo Rauch show at David Zwerner Gallery.

I'm so glad I can just look at the pictures and not have to say anything clever about them.

we see a girl whose clothes --quite by chance --echo those in the painting

strange indeed

how people seem to float on air in this big white space!

After a while the dog loses interest and wonders when we are going home.

 

 

Eye Candy

 

How deliberate an arrangement on a white car

 

the sidewalk

at the base of a tree

in the dog park water bowl

in the gutter

how unnatural the color of the berries --poison probably

and the street turned upside down

in the windshields

leaf collectors if there ever were

those wretched decorative cabbages --but nice colors with the leaves

 

 

Helen Hull and Reading Americana

 

The usual selection of fall images.....

but thoughts of longer evenings and more reading... Nicola Beauman of Persephone Books suggested I read Heat Lightning by Helen Hull. Helen who? Never heard of her. The book, published in 1932, is utterly out of print.

It arrives smelling of musty old bookshop, and, lo and behold, a delight with an entire family painted boldly: the grandma who controls it all, the young wife on the outs with her husband, the feckless young cousin who beds the maid...a whole panoply of greed, love, jealousy, disappointment --the usual family stuff. Post 1929 you feel the approach of hard times.

So the question is: why do some excellent writers vanish without trace and others become classic and staples of reading lists ?

I came to American books rather late, but feel they are wonderful at depicting the fluctuations of fortune --as in Dreiser's Jennie Gerhardt and Booth Tarkington's The Magnificent Ambersons. (Better known as a film than a book, I think).

But I don't come to books to prove theories, just to discover people I might care about and enter their lives for a moment.

So horray for Helen Hull.

 

Veterans Day

 

red leaf on a blue car

damp bench and fallen leaves

playroom

grandpa and crayons

Metropolitan Museum

 

Walked across the park in the warm morning

with the leaves at their giddy yellow best

to the quite different palatte of the museum.

New Islamic galleries awash with treasures.

Reminded me of John Masefield's 

I must go down to the sea again

to the lonely sea and the sky

And all I ask is a tall ship

and a star to steer her by.....

For me it's not remotely the sea, but the idea of longing awakened by art  and books

Just imagine living in the Damascus Room when one can't possibly go to real Damascus just now.

No good wandering round the museum taking pictures of stuff

except I couldn't resist this luster glass cup. Abbasid Period 9th or 10th century. Iran or Iraq

A good place to go to study things

and talk about them with friends.

 

 

Complicated

 

Sunday morning

no one in the barber's shop which I always want to photograph but don't dare since who wants a picture of themself looking silly? However, the reflections make nonsense of the intersection of 23rd Street and 10th Avenue.

So, yesterday afternoon at Cold Spring Harbor station.....

all those shadows all over the place

And this morning a spectacularly beautiful gutter. Go figure.