the cassandra pages

Dyed-in-the-Wool New Englanders

Editing qarrtsiluni has definitely cut into my blogging time lately, but I've also really enjoyed it. In the meantime, the real world has certainly been submitting its own entries to the apocalyptic theme, between the melting-down economy and the spectre of a possible Palin presidency.

On the more personal scale, though, life has been quiet. We were in Vermont last week and I ran into an old neighbor at the post office; he spotted me and came over to where I was sitting in the car waiting for J. to come out with our two-weeks-worth of mail. L., who is tall and thin, even gaunt, was dressed in a dark, striped suit and a white shirt, with a silver and maroon tie held with a tie-clasp.

"You're all dressed up, L.!" I said. "You look like a preacher!"

"Oh, I'm driving south to install a Grange tonight." Like his parents before him, L. is one of the people who keep the Grange going in the state. He asked about our house, and solemnly nodded when we said it was for sale - we've been neighbors in the village for a long time, and worked together on a lot of community projects. "Mom and Dad's house is for sale too," he said, looking a bit wistful. "I guess the new owners fixed it up enough that they're ready to sell it now." L.'s parents have been dead for some time now; they were pillars of the community and lived just up the hill from our back yard: close enough that the same woodchucks ravaged their garden and ours.**

"Where are you living now?" I asked.

"In Pomfret, rattling around all by myself in an old farmhouse. Did you know I went back to Texas?"

"I knew you were thinking of going." He had lived there for many years as an adult, but had come back to Vermont when his parents began to need help; he'd always said he planned to go back after they were gone.

"Well, that's right. So I resigned my job and everything, and went down, intending to stay." He screwed up his mouth and made a face, his eyes dancing in their hollows; he leaned closer toward the open window. "But I didn't feel comfortable at all. I only stayed three days, and came right back! But of course, I didn't have a house and I didn't have a job any longer!"

"What did you do?" Because he was laughing; I laughed too, figuring the story must have had a happy ending.

"Well, I went back to the church where I had been the organist and said, 'If you haven't filled the position, can I apply for my old job?' And they said, 'You know what? We never voted to accept your letter of resignation. The job is still yours.' Can you believe that? So I told them, 'That's wonderful, but there's only one problem. I don't have a place to live!' So they made an announcement after church the next Sunday, and lo and behold, one of the parishioners came up and said 'How would you like to live in our mother's old house, now that she's gone? We don't want to sell it, and all us kids have our own places nearby, but we need someone there.' So I went to look at it, and they quoted me a ridiculously low price, so -- here I am, back in Vermont again.'"

"Well, it's good to see you!" I said, meaning it, just as J. came out of the post office, holding out his hand and grinning at L.

"And you too!" he said, before heading off in his car to keep one more Grange going for a few more years.

** I've just added a story about L.'s father to the comment thread.

Apocalypse Soon

"Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God," a calligraphic painting by me, November 1995, in memory of Yitzak Rabin. Ink, acrylic, gouache on paper, 8 x 16 inches. Click for larger view.

We're nearing the last week of submissions for the next issue of qarrtsiluni, "Journaling the Apocalypse", edited this time by Dave Bonta and myself. Dave and I usually sit in the managing editors' seats, making sure the correspondence with contributors goes smoothly and taking care of posting the accepted files and images while the guest editors review the submissions, make their choices, and shape the issue according to their vision of the theme. September 2008 marks the third anniversary of the online journal, and Dave and I decided it was high time we took another turn as editors of the issue itself - and how interesting it's turning out to be!

A description of our theme, as well as guidelines for submitting your work (before the October 6 deadline) are on the qarrtsiluni website. "Apocalypse" can be defined individually or collectively; according to its traditional meaning or creatively: that's up to you. We've already accepted work from a number of new contributors, so don't be shy about giving us a try. You'll receive a decision within about ten days.

Speaking of evolving meanings of the word "apocalypse": I've been thinking how tragic and depressing the downward spiral has been in world relations since I made this piece of artwork at what seemed like a low point in 1995. Rabin, of course, was assassinated by a Jewish right-wing radical on Nov. 4, 1995, because of the Israeli prime minister's acceptance of the Oslo Accords. For his part in brokering the peace agreement, Rabin won the Nobel Peace Prize along with Yasser Arafat and Shimon Peres. He also officially recognized the PLO, and signed the 1994 peace treaty between Israel and Jordan.

"Rabin's funeral was attended by many world leaders... Bill Clinton delivered a eulogy whose memorable final words were in Hebrew - "Shalom, Haver" ; lit. "Goodbye, Friend")...Before leaving the stage on the night of the assassination, Rabin had been singing "Shir LaShalom" (literally Song for Peace), along with Israeli singer Miri Aloni. After he died, a sheet of paper with the lyrics was found in his pocket, stained with blood." (Wikipedia)

Why Not?

On my birthday, I received a little money from my dad. Yesterday I went shopping, not really intending to buy anything. But these are what came home with me. They just made me feel too good.

Do I need a pair of grey suede high heels? Of course not. And I'm not freaking out about my age and trying to look like a twenty-year-old. It's more that I've been watching the French women and their ageless, effortless stylishness. The main ingredient isn't money, or prettiness, or even youth - not by a long shot.

It's confidence in themselves as women, and as individuals. They seem happy to be female from the time they're little girls  - playing just like the boys on the playground, but wearing adorable dresses - to when they're very senior indeed and taking the bus, or going out for a stroll in the neighborhood with a friend, looking like they still care. They never stop being women, and never stop thinking of themselves as being beautiful and desirable. As a result - they are. This confidence also helps them figure out, at a young age, what makes them look and feel great, and to develop a personal style. What they wear can be put together from thrift stores, it's not haute couture, but it's individual, often quirky, often a mixture of attributes: soft, edgy, sexy, sweet. Clothes emphasize the body, but the bodies are not all perfect - so what? These are not looks you can mail-order; they aren't made for comfort like sweatshirts and baggy jeans, but the women end up looking very comfortable in their clothes. It's because they're comfortable in their skin underneath.

These French women inspire me, as they have inspired generations of clothing designers. My own grandmother, who lived to 92, loved color and clothes and made most of her own, using Vogue patterns, often from the couture designers she followed through Vogue and W. She taught my mother to sew, and the two of them taught me. I haven't made much in the past decade, but I used to, and this year, looking at the runway shows from fall fashion week in New York, I felt the first stirrings in a long time of that urge to create a special garment from scratch and watch it take shape.  I wondered what was available now for patterns, because the city has fantastic shops for textiles of all kinds - a resource I never had when I was younger.

Even if I don't do this - and I'm not sure I have the time or the energy right now - I recognize where the urge is coming from. It's a desire to affirm to myself that whatever age I am at the moment is good, is beautiful, is worthy of being cared for. I was thinking today of a photo of my grandmother in an orange dress, looking gorgeous and happy - she must have been well into her eighties at the time. She had on great shoes, too: orange, with small heels.

Ramadan Mubarak

Please take a few moments from your day and view this set of thirty world-enlarging photographs of Ramadan observances, from Baraka, via Elizabeth at verbal privilege.

During this last week of the month of fasting, reflection and prayer, I especially want to wish all my Muslim friends and readers a blessed and fruitful Ramadan.

Afternoon at Jean-Talon

Yesterday was my birthday, and I'd like to give you all the present of being, at least virtually,  where we were for part of a gorgeous, warm September afternoon.

(To watch in highest quality, go to this link and click "watch in high quality.")

Essays and the Blog (2)

Piero della Francesca, The Flagellation of Christ (detail)

In the first part of this exploration of the essay and blogging, I proposed that essays on blogs are actually evolving into something new, precisely because the medium invites give-and-take with readers instead of the open-and-shut exposition of a theme that is the essay’s traditional form.

The essay by Teju Cole on the late Michael Baxandall’s art criticism, published here on August 20th, is a case in point. Teju’s essay was, actually, a fairly traditional academic presentation designed to make its points and stand alone, and it would have been perfectly at home in an academic journal or other print/print-like presentation. In fact, it was noticed by Baxandall’s school, Berkeley, and quoted as the last word at the conclusion of the Berkeley News Service’s tribute to the late emeritus professor : his own colleagues saw that Teju had captured the essence of what Baxandall was all about:

Nigerian novelist Teju Cole wrote a guest tribute to Baxandall for "the cassandra pages" blog, saluting what he called "trademark Baxandall: the patient, inductive tone, the crystalline language, the erudite undertow, all in the service of clarifying our words for images."

In that world of traditional arts and letters -- pats on the back all around – Teju’s essay could have ended right there. But instead, here we are in blog-land, where that post elicited not only praise, but comments that raised new questions and begged further discussion on the topic I’m pursuing here.

I myself went to Interlibrary Loan at the Bibliotheque Nationale and borrowed two of Baxandall’s books, Painting and Experience in the Fifteenth Century, and Words for Pictures, curious if Teju’s assessment of Baxandall’s clarity and accessibility would hold true for me. It did, undoubtedly aided by the fact that I've studied art history myself and read a lot of art criticism. As the genre goes, this is as accessible and un-obscure as it gets. To make the reading even more interesting, the subject of Painting and Experience is how the 15th century art patrons and viewers themselves viewed and talked about the art of their own time. I was fascinated by Baxandall’s discussion of what was deemed important and worthy in 15th century pictures, the words that were used to describe them, and what this tells us about the culture of the day.

But Baxandall goes further:

Renaissance people were, as has been said, on their mettle before a picture, because of an expectation that cultivated people should be able to make discriminations about the interest of pictures. These very often took the form of a preoccupation with the painter’s skill... (and) the Renaissance beholder was a man under some pressure to have words that fitted the interest of the object...

In our own culture there is a class of over-cultivated person who, though he is not a painter himself, has learned quite an extensive range of specialized categories of pictorial interest, a set of words and concepts specific to the quality of paintings...in the fifteenth century there were some such people, but they had relatively few special concepts, if only because there was then such a small literature of art. (emphasis mine)

In other words, art criticism had not yet appropriated to itself the “expert” task of judging, comparing, and explaining art for the rest of us.

As Baxandall shows, Renaissance people (and artists as well) had skills that were developed in their daily lives – like the ability to “gauge” volumes, or to observe the natural world with keen attention (since one’s life often depended on it) – which directly impacted both what sorts of representations were prized in pictures, and people’s ability to look at them and talk about them. And although he admits that the ordinary peasant was outside this group of art-appreciators, Baxandall convinces me that feeling comfortable talking about fine art as something related to one’s own skills and daily life was a fact for many people in the Renaissance. The language used to talk about pictures was common.

Five centuries later, we’ve seen the distancing and rarification of “Art,” on the one hand, into a realm accessible only to the supposed cognoscenti -- those capable of affording its offerings and understanding its criticism --  and, on the other, into underground forms born out of alienation and disaffection, which often subsequently become popular and vibrant, but whose adherents seem increasingly disassociated from their own historical/cultural roots. And in the middle, a great morass of bland mass-media entertainment, accessible to everyone but of questionable satisfaction, and unlikely to encourage personal creativity except as rebellion and reaction.

If we are going to hang our “critical essays” about art on such a backdrop, then for whom are we writing? A shrinking group of hangers-on who have the education and leisure to read and ponder the fate of western art, or, at best, embrace a postmodern world view? What is the future interplay between art, and the writing about it? Does the writing serve that which it's supposed to honor and love, or actually contribute to its inaccessibility and eventual demise?

While there’s something stubbornly comforting about writing for and reading the work of people who share similar educations and socio-economic backgrounds, it feels to me like this is not only a dead end today, but one more way in which the world is becoming polarized into “insiders” and “outsiders”, “us” and “them.” If we cannot use the medium of writing to open doors and encourage dialogue across difference, we have lost the greatest gift of language. So – in that light – what is the role of the critical essay in the future?

In the next and final section of this series, I’ll explore some possibilities, using an email exchange that arose from comments on Teju Cole’s Baxandall essay.

Lunettes

I got a new pair of glasses last week. Because I wear contact lenses most of the time, I don't buy glasses very often. After almost four years, my current pair of distance glasses, owing to being yanked on and off my face to allow for far-and near-vision, were loose, chipped, and worn out. I'm near-sighted. With my contacts, I need to use regular 1.50 or 1.75 magnification reading glasses. Without the contacts, I can still see all right up close but because I have astigmatism it's tiring, and usually I use prescription reading glasses - so I'm constantly changing the frames during the day when I don't have my lenses in. I won't spring for progressives, and for most of my close work prefer to use full-lens glasses anyway so I can see straight-ahead at the computer or piano.

Anyway, that's a long and boring prelude to the main story: that I went to the optician and looked for a new pair of frames. The ad had said "First pair $69/two pairs for $99;" I figured it had to be a good deal, and I'd maybe get two pairs, one more conservative, one more, well, hip. Urban. Trendy.

When I walked into the store I couldn't believe how many frames there were - literally hundreds and hundreds. I had no idea where to start, so I turned to the first salesperson and said, "Help!" He was a nice guy and knew the stock very well; in short order I was seated at a table with three pairs in front of me, winnowed down from ten or so that he'd suggested according to the general guidelines I offered him. There was one semi-rimless pair with just a thin brownish-coppery frame on the tops of the lenses; a pair of red metallic frames with a double wire forming the side-pieces; and a heavy pair with wide side-pieces, very au courant. I liked them all; they all looked good. OK, I said, figuring I'd choose the first pair and one of the others. How much are we talking about?

Well, he said, you're going to want the ultra-thin lenses, and anti-glare, anti-scratch coatings...so it comes to...let' see... $297 for the two pairs.

My eyebrows went up. Really! I said. OK, how much for one pair?

$168 with the tax.

My contacts already cost me that much. So what did I do? I chose the semi-rimless pair, figuring they'd have to last me another three or four years. When I picked them up I thought to myself, yeah, they look good, they're current, and they make a slight fashion statement but they sure don't give me a "look," other than a sort of hip-bookish one. I won't get tired of them, but do I actively like them? No, I feel the same way about them I've always felt about glasses. Lukewarm.

I can see really well though. But I'm kind of annoyed with myself, and that stubborn rural, Yankee practicality that keeps me from choosing expensive items just for the sake  of...fun. Or fashion. Or just frivolity.

So I guess I'll be gravitating toward my contacts, and those $20 bright red plastic reading glasses I love.

A Conversation

"You should be painted," I tell the peaches, fuzzy bottoms innocently raised, scent poised a perfect somewhere between youth and over-ripeness. There's no sign of reproach, just a mere blush as they warm slightly under my gaze.

(NOTE: this is NOT a painting!)

That quiet like no other

I'd intended to write something entirely different tonight, but when I came across this poem of Cesare Pavese, who was born September 9, 1908, I had to reproduce it here. You can read this and other poems of Pavese, translated by Linh Dinh, here, or follow other links via wood s lot, where I found this one.

Of course, it reminds me of the death of my father-in-law. Today we went to the Arab supermarket where we often shopped for things to take down to him in New Hampshire. I hadn't been thinking about him too much until I saw the bins of fresh dates, yellow and brown, still attached to their stems.

This is what stops: the body that sees, that tastes, complains, appreciates. The material world of associations goes on, but irrevocably altered from the natural impulses: pluck the fruit; cook the succulent meat; prepare the soup in the favorite bowl. Now our task is to go on plucking, cooking, preparing, but for ourselves, with absence seated across the table. Only in my own middle age have I understood that the dead had their own associations, mostly unspoken and unknown to me, their student, and that in my own life I am creating, unwittingly, associations that will stop someone else, someday, in the market or the street, stung for a moment by the grief and joy of having loved me.

End of Fantasy
by Cesare Pavese

This body won't start again. Touching his eye sockets
one feels a heap of earth is more alive,
that the earth, even at dawn, does not keep itself so quiet.
But a corpse is the remains of too many awakenings. 

We only have this power: to start
each day of life—before the earth,
under a silent sky—waiting for an awakening.
One is amazed by so much drudgery at dawn; 
through awakening within awakening a job is done.
But we live only to shudder
at the labor ahead and to awaken the earth one time.
It happens at times. Then it quiets down along with us.

If touching that face the hand would not shake—
if the live hand would feel alive touching it—
if it's true that that cold is only the cold
of the earth, frozen at dawn,
perhaps it'd be an awakening, and things that keep quiet
under the dawn, would speak up again. But my hand
trembles, and of all things resembles a hand
that doesn't move.

At other times waking up at dawn
was a dry pain, a tear of light,
even a deliverance. The stingy word
of the earth was cheerful, for a brief moment,
and to die was to go back there again. Now, the waiting body
is what remains of too many awakenings and doesn't return to the earth. 
They don’t even say it, the hardened lips.

(This is the latest in a many-year-long series of posts about my father-in-law, collected under the title "The Fig and the Orchid"; please click on that name under Pages, in the sidebar at left, for the whole series.)

No Comment on U.S. Electoral Politics

Wondering how this is possible? Here's a pretty good explanation. (I can vouch for its accuracy, having grown up in R-N territory.)