the cassandra pages

Winter Mysteries

If there is an ultra-typical view of central New York that feels like it embodies the sense of "home" to me, it's this sort of scene: pastures bordered by hedgerows, wooded hilltops, tall deciduous trees and scrubby brush, all arranged in a zigzagging patchwork that carries the eye up and down and across the rolling hills. It's beautiful in every season, but you can see the shape of the land better in the winter, when the contrast is greatest between the fields and the trees; in the summer, pretty much everything is green, or shades of green, brown, and yellow. After this winter's deep dive into the landscape, I'm sure I will be making paintings or doing pastels in the more colorful seasons too, but I'm learning a lot about looking and about what has always attracted my own eye, attention, and heart to this particular type of terrain and its ecology. 

The picture at the top of this post was done after the one below. These are two views of the same range of hills, north of Hamilton, NY, as you're heading toward Rt 20. 

The top picture took a quite a bit of time - an hour or two -- but the bottom one was a deliberately fast 13-minute sketch. In the video below, you can see the whole sketching process condensed to a minute and a half, which I find both amusing and also mystifying; I've watched it a number of times and still can't figure out how the brain and eye, intellect and intuition actually do this. There's a lot about the arts, as well as many other human endeavors, that will always remain mysterious to me, and beyond the realm of what we "learn" to do or can explain. 

For instance, this weekend we watched Mikaela Shiffrin break Ingmar Stenmark's record for world cup skiing victories -- a record many thought would never fall. The qualities that set her apart are vastly more than flawless technique and great physical conditioning; there's her uncanny feeling for the snow in a wide range of conditions, her ability to "see" the course in her mind, and then ski it tighter, faster, and more perfectly than anyone else, and the whole constellation of mental and emotional mastery that's necessary to win so consistently over a period of years. My husband was a ski racer in his youth, and we both skied a lot in our 30s and 40s; he was incredibly good and taught me a lot about the sport, while I became a rather foolhardy advanced intermediate. We stopped, eventually, after some injuries that threatened to become chronic problems as we aged -- and also because skiing with people with cell phones began to take away the solitude and quiet we loved in that other world of the mountains. But those long, cold, sunny, foggy, snowy days remain etched in my mind, and in my dreams I am sometimes still skiing -- and it still feels fantastic.

I never understood exactly how the mind and body managed to coordinate themselves in order to allow this. You learn "how", but then there is a kind of letting go, where you aren't thinking about it in the same analytical way all the time. For me, that was always a tenuous balance, because I didn't grow up on skis, and I was never that good at it, but under optimum conditions, sometimes I could experience the freedom. The gulf between me and a top racer like Schiffrin is, well, about as big as the distance from here to Switzerland, and yet I can appreciate what the human body is capable of doing, both for someone like me who grew up among little un-skied hills like these, to learn to ski on much bigger ones, and for the people at the top of the sport -- or music, or art, or dance, or many other disciplines. It's nothing short of amazing. The thing is, we all do many things every single day that are an astounding combination of learned and intuitive actions. We seldom stop to think about them, but we should marvel at ourselves now and then, for simply being able to read, brush our teeth, cook an egg. It is not insignificant at all.

Scarce

 

Block Island

Yes, I've been scarce around here, and there is a good reason: I've been keeping my little nose to the writing grindstone, and not allowing myself to deviate too much. It's been surprisingly difficult not to draw or paint, because I had gotten in the habit of doing it regularly. I've been pretty disciplined about the usual distractions of social media, surfing, chatting with friends, and posting to the blog and to Instagram. The result, though, has been a productive stretch of writing and editing. There isn't really any other way around it, regardless of the art form or the medium: in the end you just have to show up, close the door, stay at your desk and do the work. It's kind of like these rocks, the ocean reminded me: they didn't become rounded and smooth overnight.

So what is that schedule? We arrive at the studio around 8:30 in the morning, break for a half-hour lunch at noon, and leave around 5:30. Of that time, I've been writing and editing for four or five hours every day. Then I usually make dinner, and after we're done eating might knit or read, plus doing whatever bathing or laundry is necessary, before bed at 10:30 or 11:00. I try hard to get seven hours of sleep. In recent weeks I've nearly finished my green Gansey sweater (it was missing one sleeve and the collar), and have been fooling around with a lace pattern that has taken me three tries to figure out. Reading has been more consistent: in recent weeks I've re-read Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things, the fourth book of Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle series, and am halfway through Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett -- have any of you read that? It is strange, brilliant, unique. I've also been catching up on past issues of Brick, an excellent Canadian literary magazine.

Scavenging on the beach -- that's a dead seagull I'm poking at, hoping for bones. (photo by J., of course)

Nevertheless, I haven't felt I had much to show here, and now there is an additional problem -- my phone died and that's where all my photos are. J. is working on it with tech support today, so I'm hoping to be back up and running soon.

Friends.

In the meantime, September has arrived, and with it, cool weather, right on schedule. I've had a good summer, with plenty of outdoors time, a number of visitors as well as visits to friends, and days outside the city, so I am not going to utter one peep of complaint, especially when so many worldwide are experiencing devastating weather.

Where we bought fish.

I'll leave you with these photographs from our August weekend on Block Island, off the coast of Rhode Island, where we visited friends and enjoyed the ocean's changing temperament, and the vast starry nighttime sky. I foundd those days near the ocean extremely peaceful, and I hope that feeling with continue to stay with me as we embark on la rentrée, as the September "back-to-school" season is called here in Quebec. For me, that means a return to the regular choir schedule, to Phoenicia Publishing, to preparing a talk I'll be giving later this month, a condo committee, the music committee at the cathedral...the list goes on. I'm glad I worked hard this summer, because now my time will be much more divided.

 

After the Ocean

 

Back in the city, waves of people --

soft folds of sand-colored hair

pinned at a woman's nape,

light glancing off phones.

 

Flowers on dresses, swooping scooters

instead of gulls, flapping orange wings

of a cyclist's safety vest, the ceaseless lap

of traffic on de Lorimier.

 

And a little girl in black tulle, glimmering with gold --

like stars that night on the island --

tripping across Marquette, still unaware

of either infinity, or oblivion.

By the Sea - 1

We've just returned from ten days on the New England coast, first for the wedding of J.'s sister on the Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island, then a few days in Boston, and finally a reunion of a few of J.'s college friends on Block Island, off the Rhode Island coast between Long Island and Cape Cod. I've come back browner and more relaxed, with several bags of shells, bones and pebbles collected on the various beaches; happy about renewed friendships and new beginnings; and dismayed about political events.

There was a beautiful wedding of two people, both widowed after long, happy marriages, who have found each other now and decided to spend the rest of their lives together.

There was a house full of beloved relatives, above a rocky shell-strewn beach, where we made a party for the whole family one night, and the sun created a spectacle across the bay.

There were long walks on the beach and along the salt marches, with white egrets and gulls, and ospreys carrying fish in their talons, and stranded horseshoe crabs from prehistory, and regular crabs and mussels, and seaweed to nibble on, and the sound of the sea as we fell asleep, and in the night, and when we woke.

And this, from my journal:

One night, a nightmare: a party of friendly strangers turned dark, and I became hunted to the death by Trump's armed henchmen. I woke, tried to dismiss the sticky cobwebs of the dream, fell back asleep only to re-enter the same party, except now the men were strangling the women, one by one.

We're staying on Poppasquash Neck, a small peninsula in Narragansett Bay settled just after the Plymouth Colony was established. Narragansett is an irregular network of rocky coastline, islands, large peninsulas and and these smaller ones known as "necks." The larger Bay, named after one of the two native tribes of this region, has three divisions that the English settlers named Prudence, Patience, and Hope; their main settlement became the city of Providence. But not far from here is the site of the assassination of Matacomet, also known as King Philip, the chief of the Wampanoag tribe, who - unlike his conciliatory father - saw the true intentions of the white settlers and went to war against them. The English namers -- my own ancestors were of similar stock and time -- were served well by Prudence, Patience, and Hope, and it's their stone walls and old orchards, white-sailed boats, flag-bunting-festooned old houses, and wealth that have created the visual identity of this place.

The serenity is so studied and so well established it disturbs me, and so I walk on the beach of weathered slipper shells, scallops and quahogs: more comfortable in that graveyard, and the longer timeline of the sea.

Midnight Pizza

Making pizza for friends in our Vermont kitchen, 1986.

Is it possible that in all these years of blogging I've never gone into much detail about our obsession with pizza? I married someone who had lived for several years in New Haven, and hated everything about it except one thing. Need I say more? I think J.'s love of pizza started long before that, but my guess is that it was the extraordinary pizza he ate in New Haven and New York City during his teenage years that got him started on making pizza at home. By the time we met, when he was 28 and I was 26, he was already a masterful and obsessive pizza-maker, while I was merely an appreciative occasional pizza-eater whose only experience of making it at home had been boxes of Chef Boyardee. That changed pretty quickly! Together, we sought out and ate great traditional pizzas all over the northeast - not at fancy shops, but at the great small pizzerias run by single chefs and families in small towns and cities. Then J. tried to recreate their best qualities: the perfect crust, most flavorful tomato sauce, finest cheeses, best toppings - which, for us, tended toward simplicity. Our benchmark was a classic Margarita: just crust, tomato sauce, basil, and mozzarella cheese.

One of our favorites was Springfield Pizza, in Springfield, Massachusetts, where we stopped - often late at night - on nearly every trip we took from Vermont to Connecticut, where his parents lived, or New York. I remember how, each time we'd leave the highway, we'd drive down the deserted main street and turn left, hoping to spot the lights in the little storefront with its small neon sign bearing two blue stars and the word "pizza" in red -- it was open! Inside, often on a cold winter night, we'd sit at one of the two or three tables and patiently wait while an elderly man named Georgio made rectangular pizzas with the best crust I've ever eaten.

In New Haven, of course, there was the unending debate whether Sal's or Frank Pepe's made the best Napoletana pizza. We preferred the latter, probably because Pepe's had the most amazing coal-fired oven. Their white clam pizza was to die for, and probably still is; but now I see that Pepe's has a fancy website and several locations, which makes me glad we enjoyed the original - it had long lines even then.

At home, the pizza experimentation and refinement has continued throughout the years, in spite of the fact that a home oven cannot reproduce the extreme heat, rapid explosion of the crust, and charring effect of a wood or coal-fired pizza oven. We've always modified our stoves for pizza-baking with a layer of quarry tiles on the bottom rack (excellent for bread, too); the pizza is slid off the peel onto the tiles for the first minutes of baking, then moved to the regular top rack to finish. J. makes his own tomato sauce, either from fresh plum tomatoes or from cans of San Marzanos. Since moving to Montreal, we've been able to get even better ingredients than before, which is especially noticeable in the quality of the cheeses: buffalo mozzarella, creamy goat cheeses, excellent Parmesan. Lately he's been trying different flours; King Arthur used to be his standard, then he used Montreal's own Five Roses for a while, and recently we bought some Italian hard-wheat flours specially for pizza.

Last night, already in bed, we happened upon a YouTube video about Brooklyn pizzerias. We've eaten a lot of Brooklyn pizza, even doing a pizza marathon in that borough a while back where we ate, I think, a record of three in one day. Anyway, the pizzas in the video looked so fantastic that there was no choice but to get up and make one.

There was already risen dough in the fridge, and some homemade tomato sauce, so all that had to be done was to pre-heat the oven, roll out the dough, sauté some mushrooms, slice some hard salami, slice and grate some cheese, and go out on the terrace and pick a handful of fresh basil. While the pizza was cooking we poured a glass of wine, and reminisced about our favorite pizzas of the past.

And then, close to midnight, we ate. I'm sorry you weren't there to taste this, but all I can say is: please do try this at home.

Northern New England

 

A diary entry from a week ago:

Yesterday was sunny and I lay on my back on a warm rock near one of those big perfect maple trees that grow alone near houses. The sun was so bright against the white New England clapboards it made my eyes water. Above me were lazy summer clouds and high, high up, swallows playing in the wind. The air smelled like lilacs and grass; redwing blackbirds argued in the trees and a solitary cricket sang under the porch. It was as if my former life were colliding with the present one: all the sensory impressions were as familiar and readable as my own skin, while my actual self seemed to be elsewhere. I felt like a ghost.

Pictures from an Exhibition

Time-travel takes many forms: for us, the opening of Jonathan's show last weekend was a step back into our former life in northern New England, where we saw many old friends, some of whom we hadn't seen for a decade or even more. For many of them, these photographs of late 1960s and early 1970s were a real trip into a personal past and regional/social history that affected many of our lives forever.

A lot of people came to the opening, and the photographs were received with wistfulness, amusement, nostalgia, and genuine appreciation: many people said "this was me, this was my life and a special moment in time, you've absolutely captured it." The two hours went by in a wink. Several of the people actually pictured in the photographs were present, providing a somewhat mind-blowing collapse of time. It was great to meet a couple of blog readers as well as many old friends I was absolutely delighted to see, and we were also so grateful to some close friends from Montreal who made the effort to be there with us.

Some of the visitors were close friends we've known through almost the entire thirty years we lived there, and others were from specific contexts -- Vermont Public Radio, community organizing, church and choir, artists and board members from AVA Gallery, professional contacts and former clients, neighbors -- a long and varied list. Each time someone else walked in the door it felt like I was seeing another piece of my life -- it was a good feeling, and an odd one too-- something that perhaps I could only experience at this age, after so much time has passed, and after living elsewhere for a considerable time as well.

And of course I was most happy for J., whose work was beautifully hung -- it's always a pleasure and a new experience to see a body of work on the walls, large and all together for the first time. This project has consumed both of us for a long time, and this first exhibition (with prints specifically chosen for that Vermont/New Hampshire location) felt like a culmination of that effort. Thank you to AVA for making it all go so smoothly, and to everyone who came to see the work and has supported the project thus far.

Jonathan will be giving a gallery talk at 5 pm on May 20, just before the exhibition comes down.

Invitation to an Exhibition

"New Overalls" in front of Hirsh's Store, Lebanon, NH, 1973. (c) Jonathan Sa'adah

If any of you will be in or near the Vermont/New Hampshire area next weekend, we'd like to invite you to come to the opening of Jonathan's photography exhibition, "Seeds of Change," at AVA Gallery and Art Center in Lebanon, NH, on Friday, April 17 from 5-7 pm. The show will include 33 large prints, most but not all included in his recently-published book, How Many Roads?, which documents the changes that took place in the society and landscape of rural New England during the turbulent years of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Poetically, the Carter's overalls proudly displayed in the photo above, taken in 1973, were made in the old Carter's garment factory that is now home to AVA Gallery and Art Center, where Jonathan will be exhibiting!

The show runs at AVA from April 17 through May 20, and on May 20 he'll be giving a gallery talk at 5:30 pm. Both events, and the exhibition itself, are free and open to the public. We'll both be there and would be delighted to see you, and I'd be especially thrilled to meet any Cassandra Pages readers I've never met in person!

AVA is one of the most established and prestigious non-profit art centers in northern New England. It has beautiful large gallery spaces, and five contemporary artists will be exhibiting during this time period. One of our old friends, Joan Morris, an extremely talented textile artist who works with shaped-resist dyeing, is among them, and I'm looking forward very much to seeing her recent work.

Jonathan's show will be in the upstairs Johnson Sisters Library; there will be delicious refreshments, nice people to meet, signed prints and books for sale, and a good time to be had!

A sunrise on New England, and on some creative lives

We've just come back from a short, happy visit to the area on the Vermont-New Hampshire border where we used to live. How different it is from Quebec, and from this big international city! And how utterly familiar. We stayed with family, attended a twenty-year dinner given by our longtime client for their ongoing project, saw friends, negotiated with a local bookstore, and spent some time at AVA Gallery and Arts Center where I used to be quite involved on the board, the education committee, and as an artist. It has grown so much, with an expanded facility and program; classes and open studios for adults and children; its own green-certified building (a renovated factory) now filled with artists' studios as well as galleries, a media lab, a library, and wonderful teaching spaces. I was so delighted to see the most recent changes, visit my old friends there, and felt a small glow of pride at having been a part of it during the early years when survival was tenuous. And - especially good news - my husband will be having an exhibition there from April 17 - May 20, this spring!

A great photo from the AVA Gallery website

What I saw at the art center these past few days were art classes of senior citizens, developmentally-disabled people, and children -- not just motivated artistic adults -- all having fun, supporting each other, and being encouraged to make art, to be creative, to express themselves. I met some of the students, and heard first-hand how their lives had changed -- they were eager to talk about it. I was really moved, and powerfully reminded how important the arts have always been to me, and how much of a difference organizations like this can make. I talked with our longtime friends Murray Ngoima, who has taught there for ages, and Bente Torjusen, who has directed the organization for more then 25 years.

"I see the desire to be creative all the time among readers of my blog," I said. "People often write to me and tell me they have been encouraged by my writings about my own artistic process to get out their own paints again, or try writing poetry. That encourages me to keep writing about this and sharing my own work, but it also proves to me what I've always believed: that everyone is creative. It makes me sad that so many people feel reticent or even afraid to return to something they once loved or were attracted to, because they were discouraged in the past, or gave it up for one reason or another, or think if they can't achieve on some higher level it isn't worth it."

"Exactly!" Bente said. "'Compare yourself to yourself!' That way, people can just get on with it, and claim a part of themselves that they've forgotten or neglected -- and find community and happiness along the way. It actually transforms lives -- we see it here all the time."

Late Afternoon Light

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1. Still life with Ski Jumper

2. Marrons entiers ("Whole chestnuts")

3. Wall