Robert Kroetsch

I made many mistakes in Blue Duets, but the one I rue most is not mentioning Robert Kroetsch  in my acknowledgements.  (I forgot to include Lisa Moore too--another regret.)  In my defense, I should say that the final draft of Blue Duets came years after I attended Robert's novel colloquium at Sage Hill.  Maybe it's always this way, but the last draft of the novel felt like a long uphill push made entirely alone.  So I seemed to forget the people who weren't right in front of me at the time.

Robert allowed me into the colloquium in spite of the fact that I had only half a dozen chapters written.  Perhaps he cut me a little slack because I'd written about What the Crow Said (on a dare), and the essay--which he said was like having his mind read--was published in Canadian Literature.  Or perhaps he let me in because the two of us danced the twist on one of the Winnipeg River boats at a graduate student party.  Really, each of these snippets of memory comes to the same central fact about Bob:  his generosity.  (I mean, really, the twist, in 1976?) 

We all know about the creative writing teachers who want you to write like them--to become little clones that are one more sign of their success.  I suppose in some ways, no one but Bob could have been Bob, so there wasn't much chance that anyone could successfully imitate his unique vision or his ability to play with language and ideas.  But it seemed to me more than this:  Bob had the gift for getting inside a manuscript and inside the author's vision, and helping the author to suss that out.  It was Bob who realized that Rob, my miscreant professor, deserved to have his say in Blue Duets; giving Rob voice allowed me to create the novel I wanted, one without a privileged perspective.  It was also a bloody good writing exercise.  Try it:  give your story to an unsympathetic character and see what you learn about language, rhythm, perspective.

We also know about creative writing teachers who say "no."  No, don't do it that way.  No, I'd never do that.  No it's not going to work.  Robert said "yes."  Yes to the universe and yes to the word used with creativity, care, and compassion.  I'll admit that, because I have to give my creative students grades, I think those grades should mean something, and that sometimes I have to say "no, that's really, seriously not working."  But Bob believed in larger forces of language and literature, forces that didn't need him to say no.  Forces that said "celebrate with a yes."

The world is smaller; it's contracted in a very Kroetsch-like way that hurts somewhere beneath your ribs, where you breathe.  But I'm sure that those of us who have been touched by his generosity will continue to respond to the work of others in that open and eager way Robert had.  Probably the best way for us to recognize him as a community is to be less worried about boundaries, less inclined to say no, more generous and open about the wonderful and various ways literature and creativity are practiced.

See also Gerry Hill's moving tribute at
http://poetshoes.blogspot.com/2011/06/robert-kroetsch.html

Creativity on the street

Spring in Regina is a time for thinking about creativity, about art and craft.  In spite of unfriendly, wet, changeable and challenging weather, Thirteenth Avenue filled up in May with curious, cheerful, friendly people who promenaded and bought everything from dog biscuits to handmade soap, from remarkable inventive jewelery to ceramics that asked questions about what pots are really for.  What are we looking at?  And what are we looking for?  (These are two different things.)  In part, we're looking at a community, at a particular kind of community, one that works very hard all year to mount the Festival, and we're implicitly sharing and applauding those values.  And as we troll the streets, nodding to one another and petting one another's dogs or admiring children's painted faces, we're creating community; we're coming out of those claustrophobic houses that kept us warm but gave us cabin fever to celebrate and admire what other people made during our brutal, cloudy winter.

Making things:  jewellery and dog biscuits, baked goods and the pots to we serve them on, knitted sweaters and ironmongery for gardens.  There have been times in my life when making things got me through.  Deeply depressed, I could nevertheless promise myself to knit five rows in a simple sweater, to end up knitting ten and feeling that I was quite a bit more competent and in this world than I had thought I was.  What is it about making that disciplines us all winter and brings us out on a rainy street in the spring?  In part, it's the self-respect that comes with craftsmanship, that hunger to do something well--no matter how simple--that I spoke of in my post on Craftsmanship (December 5, 2010).  Let me quote Bill Reid again, because his words are so central to this idea:  "One basic quality unites all the works of mankind that speak to us in human, recognizable voices across the barriers of time, culture, and space:  the simple quality of being well-made."  There's an implicit self-respect and self-reliance in making something and feeling that you've made it as well as you can, given where you are in the journey toward becoming a craftsman.

We think about creativity again in later June at Bazaart, but here the dynamic is a bit different because this is a juried event.  No dog biscuits.  Some of the artisans query that fine permeable line between art and craft.  And as I people-watched for a while, I noticed that there's a curiosity here that is different from that you see on Thirteenth Avenue, where people seem to be wandering in a colourful, playful market.  At Bazaart, people can't quite decide whether they've walked into a gallery or a shop.  I think it's an ambiguity that's quite good for us, that challenges our preconceptions.  It must be hard for the artisans, though, to be told their work is wonderful, only to have a sympathetic and potential buyer simply drift away.  For many of them--certainly for the young ceramicists in the MFA program here--Bazaart is their bread and butter.

Because one of the main characters in the novel I'm working on, Soul Weather, is a potter who's just graduated from U of R with an MFA, I've been talking to ceramicists and even taking classes.  I'm hopeless at a pottery wheel, but at least it gives me a sense of how challenging throwing something as simple as a mug (never mind a teapot) can be.  As a result, I found myself this fall on Jenn Mapplebeck's thesis committee, which taught me a great deal about the creative process.  In my earlier blog on Craftsmanship, I suggested that one of the tidy but problematic distinctions between art and craft was that we use craft in our daily lives, but that art seems to stand apart.  Another distinction I could make is that craft emphasizes the making and the tradition of craftsmanship behind each work.  Art, while it still needs to be well crafted (an assertion some curators would find problematic and only reflects my own taste) also needs to have a new idea.  In the language that is often used now, particularly about traditional crafts like ceramics, a piece needs to "interrogate" the very foundations it's predicated on.  Thus Jenn's teapot at the top of my blog is long past pouring tea; rather, it gestures towards the still life paintings and the compositions in those paintings called vanitas, and reminds us that even things have lives and that these lives take surprising turns.  Other works, like the teapot and stand on the left, teem with life.

You can see one of Jenn's interesting "interrogations" in the work above.  On the bottom shelf, you see an example of traditional lattice-work as it finds its way into ceramics.  The planter and lattice on the right bottom shelf looks perfectly conventional.  You put a plant in the cup beneath and it twines up the lattice.  On the left of the top shelf, you see a latticed box:  though it might not hold small things, it doesn't surprise.  Yet look at the vases and teapots behind.  While we recognize their forms, their use has been challenged.  Apparently the question Jenn most frequently gets asked is "What is it for?"  Because of course, craft has to be useful.  They're satisfied, though, if she simply says "For looking at." 

And here we come to one of the most important qualities I think a work of art should have--as well as an answer to why we put up with crazy wind out on the front lawn of the MacKenzie Art Gallery or dodge the rain at the Cathedral Village Arts Festival.  I think art asks questions and forces us to engage in a conversation--even in the minimal conversation about what Jenn's lattice teapot is for.  And the moment we start asking questions and having conversations, we've created the community we need at the end of a long, isolating winter.

If you want to contact Jenn about her work, you can reach her at Jenn.Mapplebeck@hotmail.com

In the meantime, you might want to read this interesting article in Britain's Daily Mail on how good quilting is for us.  It exercises everything from our visual aesthetic sense to our math and problem-solving skills. 
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2002862/Why-quilting-uniquely-good-us.html


I'm planning another post soon on "Creativity on the Street," but then I want to talk about gardeners and the outside-the-box creative things being done at Regina's Food Bank.

Literature and the Environment 2: Writing about animals

I grew up with dogs.  (That's a whole other story.)  But when my first husband and I were living in married housing at Boston University in the early seventies and I needed companionship badly, we thought a cat would be safer than a dog who would bark and give itself away.  The cat gave herself away too, by scurrying down the old hallway painted landlord green with her short tail aloft; the super, charmed, didn't care.  But now we had a small black cat that we'd rescued from a cat shelter in Brookline; Bugs, as we came to call her, had come in a box of kittens left that very morning on the shelter's doorstep.

Cats were a mystery to me, though of course I bought books before I undertook adoption.  Seven cats later, I think of myself as "cat mother," and am frequently consulted about all things feline.  But cats remain a mystery to me; indeed, my definition of "cat" is "that cozy creature who curls up next to your left hip every night purring loudly and whose every sound and gesture you understand, but who remains a mystery."

I have of course written about cats.  I suspect that most writers with pets come to write about them at some point; they're so good at conveying the human and the limits of the human.  The title of my first book of poetry, Without Benefit of Words came from a poem ironically entitled "Dumb Animals."  The speaker of the poem, one who has read far too much Lacan, watches the gestures of two cats who are cuddling her down to sleep:

As they settle me down for sleep
I wonder how much discourse goes on in my house
without benefit of words.

.  .  .  .

Without words you nearly outwit Lacan
who stills reality with his claim to language.
My cats unfreeze joy's indeterminacy
with wordless purr of pleased longing
qualified by infinite inflections of tail.

We let Bugs have kittens and kept two of the three.  Her daughter, Niagara, is one of my most mysterious cats.  One day I came home with a long heavy box filled with a bookshelf I needed to put together.  The door caught the end of the box, which came down suddenly--on Niagara's head as it turned out.  I had dislocated her jaw and broken her mandible cleanly in two. You'll be relieved to know that I discovered this quite quickly because she always greeted me at the door.  Seeing no sign of her, I went looking and found her under the bed.   Yet two days later she laid, curled up in my lap, purring.  The purr is both the simplest and the most complicated of the mysteries.  She may have been purring to heal or comfort herself, or because my lap was the right place to be.  Why she forgave me is a bigger mystery.  How she seemed so calm in the face of her injury and the surgery that followed is the biggest mystery yet.

I have a theory, though.  Or you could say that Niagara taught me something. Or you could say that I'm trying to salvage something philosophical from the experience of injuring a creature who purred me to sleep every night of her life.  Take your pick.

I'm not sure many animals think about the future.  I think the instincts of wild animals tell them to eat as much as they can, when they can, because they don't know when they'll find their next meal, but I'm not sure this is thought.  Unlike the human relationship with pain which asks "How long am I going to have to bear this?" Niagara thought about whether it was bearable now.  Even while I know that this conclusion is probably my invention, there have been many times in my life--like when I broke my own leg--that this feline wisdom helped me.

Animals grieve.  Barbara Gowdy wrote about this brilliantly in The White Bone; I have seen it in cats who lose a sibling.  Research also indicates that animals frequently express empathy.  When Niagara, at the age of twenty, was slowly dying of kidney failure, Ariel and Nutmeg, two young males I'd rescued, would know when she didn't feel well, would follow her around the house and curl up with her when she settled down.  Ariel often curled up behind her and put his front "arm" around her.  Moreover, they teach us to be empathetic because we are forced to carefully observe and interpret their gestures and vocalizations.  As I learned when I suspected Nutmeg was not well (though two different vets could find nothing wrong) they can't tell us what hurts, what is in this case killing them.  Thus they take us out of ourselves, force us to occupy another mindset altogether. 

Sheba shouldn't be a mystery.  If she wants me to play with her, she'll drop a toy on my book or at my feet.  If she's going to do something she shouldn't, like jump up on the kitchen counter to grab a blueberry from the colander or a string bean from the cutting board (two of her favourite foods), she will meow in a particular way that I recognize and swish her tail wildly back and forth.  Yet if I'm having a sleepless night, what prompts her to get out of bed with me and follow me wherever I go?  A sense of duty?  Empathy?  Human warmth?

Twig is a mystery.  He was enthusiastically "adopted" by Nutmeg and Ariel, both of whom died too soon, Ariel of cancer and Nutmeg of congestive heart failure.  Twig grieved and then quite easily accepted Sheba, in spite of the fact that she's clearly the alpha cat around here.  Why does he bathe her with such care, often snipping off her white eyebrows?  (In the photograph above he's got his paw on the top of her head while he gives her a bath).  Why does she put up with these baths?  Why does she so often curl up with him?  In the wintertime, her big dilemma is deciding whether she'll sleep with Twig, who is behind Bill's knees, or at my hip, her usual spot.  She'll stand on the bed in indecision:  you can almost hear her thinking about it.

There is, of course, an ecocritical discourse around writing about animals.  It involves the ethics of acknowledging that some of us use them for food, that they often live (if you can call it that) in appalling conditions and die in even worse ones.  You might like to know that if you want to reduce your carbon footprint you can eat less meat:  meat production not only inefficiently uses a lot of the grain that could be used to feed people, but it produces about a quarter of the world's greenhouse gases.  Ecocriticism also takes up the issue of hunting, as Trevor Herriot did in Grass, Sky, Song.  It asks why a culture of hunting is such an important part of the representation of masculinity. 

But ecocriticism also takes up the question I've been circling around here.  I had come to feel that I had appropriated my cats' voices in the four poems I wrote about them in Without Benefit of Words.  But apparently this feeling is both exactly right and quite ethical.  The animals on our planet remain an "other" that we will never thoroughly understand.  It's useful, for all kinds of ethical reasons, to experience and acknowledge that fact.  Among other things, it takes the human and human knowledge out of the centre of the universe for a few minutes.  Also, if we use our imaginations to understand the dog or cat who lives with us, that imagination might, because it's getting some exercise, grow stronger.  You know that person who makes you crazy--bordering on intolerant--because he/she does things you don't understand?  As your cat will tell you, there's always another story and another way to understand it.

Reading like a writer 2: The Winter Vault

Sunday afternoon, after I'd accrued enough cheer from piecing three quite different blocks from Barbara Brackman's Civil War quilt  as an antidote to yet another cloudy day,  I sat down to finish Anne Michaels' The Winter Vault.  But not before wondering whether it's an oxymoron to find cheer in making quilt blocks commemorating a horrific and unending war--because in the deep South, racism and bigotry and anti-intellectualism are alive and well.  Perhaps that last word in the list seems out of place, but that strain in the Southern worldview says "For goodness' sake, don't think about your attitudes, where they come from, what they do to others, who the others might be in their daily lives."  Perhaps all this is the point of the exercise Brackman has set us:  commemorating a war, but doing it creatively, doing it with an obsession with colour.  Because if you don't get colour right, no matter how good your craftsmanship is, a quilt won't work.  And while we are concentrating on matching up all the points of the triangles, errant thoughts are likely to visit us.

I had said in my post on "Literature and the Environment" that the jury was still out with respect to the structure of this novel.  Yet something compelled me to re-read it.  I was certainly drawn to Michaels' prose, which is very much the prose of a poet:  dense, subtle, inflected, infused with thought and observation which capture the complexity of being human.  We cannot quibble with her when she ascribes this observation to Jean:  "The villages along the St. Lawrence were enlivened by both the railway and the river.  This created a vigour that Jean could not quite explain, though she recognized it somehow; two stories meeting in the middle" (42).  Passages like this abound.  I flip through my copy to look for underlining and find this passage that foreshadows the novel's conclusion:

"In every childhood there is a door that closes, Marina [Avery's mother, the Polish/Canadian artist] had said.  And:  only real love waits while we journey through our grief.  That is the real trustworthiness between people.  In all the epics, in all the stories that have lasted through many life-times, it is always the same truth:  love must wait for wounds to heal.  It is this waiting we must do for each other, not with a sense of mercy, or in judgment, but as if forgiveness were a rendezvous" (93-4).

Michaels' thematic structure is no less impressive.  Through the lives of three major characters, the novel considers moments of destruction with very different textures and significance.  Avery and Jean meet while the landscape is being flooded to create the St. Lawrence Seaway.  This is perhaps the most benign instance of destruction, yet Michaels includes that moving description of an old woman's loss of her husband's grave I mentioned in my previous blog post.  After Jean and Avery marry, Avery undertakes to move the temple Abu Simbel out of the way of the Nile's flooding.  In the voices of a peripheral character, we are given intimate views of the Nubian communities who are losing a world that has been part of their art and their world view and their cultural and individual identity for centuries.  Here, the sacred in history and landscape is inundated, though Jean later tells Avery that moving the temple wasn't the desecration; flooding the Nile was. 

Lucjan, a Polish Jew living in Toronto who becomes Jean's lover while she heals after a stillbirth, tells us about the spiritual, physical, and historical destruction of Warsaw during the Second World War and about its surreal reconstruction.  Lucjan's story is perhaps the most complex and horrific, insofar as it involves the destruction of a people, particularly insofar as his mother "disappears" when he's looking away from her for a minute, and his stepfather abandons him.  At the same time, this is the point where we begin cross-referencing, in an interrogatory way, these three narratives.  What is to distinguish between the genocide of the Jews and the Egyptians' movement of an entire people off the land they had occupied since time out of mind?  And how does that differ from moving people from places where their loved ones are buried so that they can never revisit them again?  The distinctions seem both massive and miniscule at the same time, a matter of degree only.  These examples are on a kind of continuum of destruction and dispossession.

It is also in Michaels' description of Warsaw that we get the beginning of a thread that twines around the influence of the built environment--practical and psychological--on city dwellers.  Lucjan will always wonder whether the papier-mache figures he poised at the edges of building rooftops inspired a suicide; similarly he never quite knows the impact his graffiti has on those criss-crossing Toronto's streets and neighbourhoods.  Jean engages in guerilla planting, hoping to spark a memory, a treasured moment.  Here is another ecocritical moment:  Michaels' clearly imagines that plants, their colour, their fragrance, even the shapes of their leaves, might hold memories, might be nodes in a narrative we are constructing for ourselves.  If the plants aren't there, our memories are impoverished.  Upon his return from Egypt, Avery studies architecture, hoping to create spaces that allow us to live fully realized lives.  But perhaps most poignantly, Lucjan talks of the hopeful and uncanny reconstruction of the centre of Warsaw, much of it made out of architectural details saved by young people like himself during the bombing and the Soviet occupation.  The newly-created Warsaw both is and is not the place it replaces.

But if I have to answer the question, "Is it a novel?" I must hedge.  Either the novel as a genre has become very, very capacious, or Michaels has written something else.  I'm inclined to say both these hypotheses are right.  I find my dis-ease about the novel's structure has nothing to do with the interrogatory play of themes and motifs, all of which are handled deftly and very intelligently.  My difficulties come at the level of the scene.  The Winter Vault seems best described as a meditation or even a series of meditations on these thematic strands.  Conversations are rare:  rather, we overhear articulate monologues about engineering, plants, Nubian culture, surviving in the Warsaw ghetto.

Perhaps this observation is tied somewhat to the fact that I include The Winter Vault among what I call "unsmiling novels."  So far this category includes The Winter Vault, Catherine Bush's Rules of Engagement and to some degree The Sentimentalists.  In these books, all of them about war, there are no moments that prompt us to pause and smile.  Each is brilliantly crafted, but each lives within a world where there is little joy.  The world-view of Michaels' novel is built around loss:  parents die too soon, babies are stillborn, mothers disappear in bombing raids, fathers lose custody of their children, whole landscapes are flooded or destroyed.  This is the world where Marina, another Jew who survived the Holocaust, can say "For better or for worse...love is a catastrophe" (98), or where Lucjan can tell Jean, who has lost her own child in a still birth--carrying it long after it has died--that she doesn't understand anything about his loss of his daughter (310).  Standing in London, Jean and Avery survey places "drenched with sorrow" (107), suddenly aware of the violence of war, the violence of domestic life and of accidents.  While there is no joy, there is consolation.  Avery's father says nothing proves the future like a question (122), while Jean suggests that grafting one plant to another might be a metaphor for healing:  "For five thousand years, humans have been grafting one variety of plant to another--the division, the pressing together, the conductive cells that seal the wound" (313).

If form and content are to be tightly wed--Denis Donoghue calls form "achieved content," then in a violent, transient world where love is a catastrophe and no one can understand your particular loss, perhaps all that can happen is that we tell our stories, perform our monologues.  If that were the case, I could simply be comfortable calling this a novel shaped more by its aesthetics than its plot or its world.  But the narrator doesn't quite believe this.  In one of the few moments where we cannot attribute a floating paragraph to a character (hence I assume these are the narrator's words), Michaels writes "Everything we are can be contained in a voice, passing forever into silence.  And if there is no one to listen, the parts of us that are only born of such listening never enter this world, not even in a dream.  moonlight cast its white breath on the Nile.  Outside the snow continued to fall" (318).  Characters talk at length while around them other characters maintain respectful silence and attempt to reach out.  Whether that reach is successful depends less on the generosity of the reacher and more on the self-imposed isolation of the teller.  Each of us has the chance, if only we take it, to open the door of the winter vault.

Yet cutting all these tiny triangles and thinking about those Civil War quilts made by women out of the scraps of their lives in patterns that commemorated the war or showed escaped slaves the route of the Underground Railroad, I cannot help questioning Michaels' somber view of humanity.  What does it mean to hang colourful quilts on your clothes line as a way of helping people to freedom?  It means that not even strangers are alone and that something as pedestrian as a quilt can be beautifully, meaningfully joyful.

Literature and the environment

I've given myself permission to start this sabbatical differently from every other, and differently from the ways I usually start my summers.  I'm simply reading for the first two months.  I have much to learn about some of the issues and motifs my next novel,  Soul Weather, is going to explore, so I'm reading biographies of Simone Weil as well as her work, reading about climate change, learning how animals communicate.  But that's in the off hours, so to speak.  I have two scholarly tasks for the next two months.  One is to finish reading Woolf's essays (I'm about half way through volume 5--one more to go).  The other is to read ecocriticism so that Katherine Arbuthnott and I can more effectively apply for a SSHRCC grant to do research on the qualities or kinds of texts that might convince people to change behaviours that have a negative impact on our environment.  While  I'm reading ecocriticism, I'm also thinking about a class I'd like to teach when I return from sabbatical.  This is crazy:  I'm not even technically on sabbatical yet.  Yet ironically, just reading has made the first month very productive.  My ideas are free of the censorship that comes of trying to pack them tightly and too soon into well-shaped and well-argued paragraphs, and I feel my thinking has been liberated by this freedom.

A couple of things I've learned so far from the ecocritics seem to be resonating with the fiction I'm reading.  First, nature isn't an objective thing that's just "out there" somehow; rather, we project an idea, even a philosophy onto it.  I realized this when I began to think about whether I'd just do ecocriticism and Canadian Literature or ecocriticism and American, Canadian, and British literature.  How differently the Americans, particularly during the settlement of "the west" looked at nature:  it was something to be tamed, exploited--some of the language used by nineteenth-century settlers even evokes images of rape.  During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, nature in Canada was something to be survived; we experience an element of awe that's not prominent in American readings of the natural world.  British and other European countries see the sublime in nature;  it continues to evoke something beyond their comprehension.  Might Kant explain why the Germans are so far ahead of us in developing and harnessing alternate energy sources?

Ecocriticism has its political wing, of course, that argues about the most politically correct way to depict the natural world in a literary text.  I'm not very interested in that particular argument; rather I'd say that ecocriticism, like most theory, has two primary uses.  First, it foregrounds or emphasizes things we might normally not notice.  Second, it reminds us that many of our preconceptions are...preconceptions--not necessarily a disinterested reflection of the way things are.

For example, I'm re-reading Anne Michaels' The Winter Vault, a book I both admired and thought ineffectively constructed the first time I read it.  (The jury is still out on that one; I`ll keep you posted.)  In my earlier reading, I could certainly see a kind of uneasy triangulation taking place between the flooding of the Nile (which, my internet research told me then was an ecological disaster); Avery`s uneasiness about moving the ancient temple, Abu Simbel; and Jean`s loss of her baby.  This time, ecocriticism has made me much more aware of Jean`s relationship with plants.  She and Avery, husband and wife for most of the novel, met when he was  working on the engineering for the flooding of the St. Lawrence Seaway.  He saw her in the distance stooping, standing up right, and putting something into a canvas bag on her back, only to repeat the bending, straightening, and stowing away.  Touched by her gestures, he catches up to her to ask what she`s doing.  She`s "keeping a record" she tells him, of the plants alive on the shoreline.  She'll plant them elsewhere, though of course they'll never grow and reproduce the way they would have undisturbed.  Changing the landscape, no matter what our motives, is never a neutral act.  While perhaps something positive is built--like the St. Lawrence Seaway--it is dishonest not to admit that an act of destruction preceded it.

Eventually these plants make their way to the home of Avery's mother, Marina, an avid gardener and illustrator who is particularly alive to the significance of the natural world.  She tells Jean about the way the Nazis tried to ensure the ethic purity of gardens with "strict landscape rules enforced in all the occupied territories, especially in Poland" which necessitated a "botanical purge" against a tiny forest flower, impatiens parviflora (93).  Hence, Marina puts a small blossom in everything she paints.  Even well after the war, there is talk in Germany, Marina tells Jean, of ripping out rhododendrons and forsythia because they're not native German plants. If nature isn't an idea, if it isn't part of our cultural identity, why would authorities even consider such time-consuming and futile gestures?

As readers, we don't miss the large issues.  One representative old Ontario woman is allowed to give voice to the sense of loss of place when her home--and with it her husband's grave--is flooded.  You can't simply move a house, however carefully it's done, (one woman puts a tea cup on the edge of the table to see if her house is moved as carefully as they promise--and it is) and still feel at home in a familiar landscape.  The light hits corners of the room and the reading chair differently; the shadows of an elm tree don't fall quite the way they used to on the floor of your bedroom at dawn; the skyline is different.  We have roots in place that you can't simply pull up.  Similarly, we're aware from Avery's growing uneasiness about moving Abu Simbel that something false is being done here.  The better he does his job--the more the reconstructed version looks like the original--the more dishonest he feels.  When the temple was built, there was a sense that a certain place or landscape was significant or even sacred.  Now all that matters is Abdul Nassar's egotistical desire to effect some monumental change to the landscape--a change that not only necessitates the heart-wrenching wholesale moving of villages, the cutting of family ties to a landscape and its history, but that immerses and erases thousands of years of the Nile's history and agricultural riches.

But once ecocriticism has articulated the way a particular time and culture can assign meaning to the natural world, we can see the disturbing connection between the flooding of the St. Lawrence Seaway, of the Nile, of the moving of Ontario and Nubian villages and households and the Nazis absurd purge of a small wild flower in the name of cultural purity. When we transform the landscape, we aren't simply building a new, more modern history; rather the old connections to the past and to place are being destroyed.  If nature has cultural significance, what's being changed isn't merely physical.  It's historical and sentimental.   

Timothy Clark, in The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment points out the small-l liberalism has been associated with numerous rights movements, with civil rights for African-Americans, with women's rights.  At the same time, though, liberalism seems to be failing the ecology movement precisely because of its emphasis on individual rights.  It would seem that, in North American at least, we have an inalienable right to do things that are destructive, like keep our SUV idling while we wait in the block-long line-up for drive-in coffee at Tim Hortons rather than getting out of our car--which would certainly be quicker.  Those of us who are worried about the planet and about the well-being of people whose homes and lives have been destroyed by an extreme tornado season in the States, or whose livelihoods and homes are threatened by various levels of flooding across the prairies, in Quebec, and on the Mississippi Delta, realize that we're going to have to give up our individual rights to protect the natural world.

Giving up our individual rights takes its most controversial and fraught manifestation in the issue of population control.  By definition, efforts to think about population control conflate the public and the private in a way most people find disturbing.  While some of us might, theoretically, approve China's "one child" policy, the more imaginative among us would realize the way in which this policy infiltrates a couple's most intimate moments.  In Franzen's Freedom, Walter Berglund argues that to protect the planet we're going to have to think in terms of population control.  If you've got twenty minutes, listen to David Attenborough's compelling message about this contentious issue.  You'll find it at
http://www.thersa.org/events/vision/vision-videos/sir-david-attenborough

This afternoon, the wind rocked my car as I waited at the intersection of Albert and College.  Yet minutes later, when I took these photographs, the ornamental fruit trees still clung to their fragile petals.  What force of nature allows them to do that?


When Katherine and I have our grant application revised, we're going to start collecting stories about people's lives being changed by something they read.  So in the next couple of months, cast about in your memory for that moment when reading a novel or an essay or a poem profoundly changed the way you view the world and your place in it.

Evening Reading: Combray

When I first moved to Regina 21 years ago this coming July, I was a single mother who found herself in a curious, lonely and wonderful situation.  Beginning in the summer of 1990, Veronica spent six weeks each summer with her dad in Winnipeg.  How does a mother describe, honestly and without guilt, what it is like to be temporarily childless?  I'm not sure I can capture the delicate balance between loss and freedom.  I can only describe how I answered the loneliness with reading.  Because my house is high above College Avenue and because I have two enormous evergreens in my front yard, in the summer my bedroom seems like a refuge up in the trees.  From my bed, I can watch the slight changes in the sky and the light, feel the breezes from two directions hovering above the sheets, listen as the human and animal world prepares for the slight silence of sleep. And read.  When my eyes and mind are tired, I simply stop reading (though I always have my notebook with me) and let my mind drift around in the problems a poem or a scene is giving me.

While fall and winter might have found me for a passive hour in front of the TV that would be an antidote to the day's busyness, watching TV in the summer seems almost heretical, as if I'm spurning one of the world's great lonely pleasures, though of course I'm only alone now until Bill comes to bed to read aloud to me, which seems to put a buffer between the mind-busy day world and the world of sleep that is sometimes so illusive for me.

Reading Combray, the first volume of my sabbatical reading, In Search of Lost Things, seemed like a doubled--even mirrored--pleasure.  I suspect this first book  functions as an introduction to the other eleven, so preoccupied is the ageless yet aging Marcel toward the end about his future as an artist.  His childhood memories are replete with sensual experience that might make passages of "fine writing," but he cannot imagine the point of view, the world view, the philosophy that will give shape to the sensuous beauty of his material.  In another way, this chapter is a single synecdotal night that is infused with loss.  It begins with a sleepless night and the grief he feels--and even anticipates--because his mother will not leave their dinner guests to kiss him and tuck him in for the night.  It ends with an equally sleepless night during which he recreates for himself his bedroom at Combray, only to find at the first glimmers of light that nothing is in his right place and that he's left that magic, if grief-filled, time.

Until the taste of the madeleine, this seems to be his single memory of childhood; the tea-infused baking bring back a plethora of free-floating memories that tell us much about the values held by his family and his childhood historical moment, about gardens, about religious observances, about illness and death.  Much of Combray is narrated in what the narratologists call the iterative:  that is, Marcel narrates one time what has happened many times, over and over, conflating individual occasions, as if Easter services or a particular walk or the habits of his Aunt Leonie and her visitors have become almost ritualized.  Among these memories are scattered a handful of scenes, like seeing Mademoiselle Gilberte Swan or glimpsing the Duchesse de Guermantes or overhearing Mlle Venteuil berate her father in a scene that will resonate throughout his life.  These thread their way through the two paths of his family's country walks, the Guermantes Way or the Meseglise Way, which seem to stand for ways of being, approaches to living, placing emphasis on sunshine or rain, on the choices one makes to accept the rhythms of weather, on formal gardens or on riverside meadows.  So this extraordinarily, floating,  almost-narrative--a narrative line as insubstantial and impressionistic as a large Monet water lily--is of course tightly and purposefully organized.

But at its centre lies the contemplation of the pleasure of open windows between spring and fall, the pleasure of sleeplessness on summer nights, the pleasure of  ritualized walks, of reading indoors during the heat of the day, the sound-world just outside the window.   Marcel's pleasurably-evoked yet grief-filled night left me feeling as if I were  looking into the strange ornate mirror of my own past sleepless summers.

Those turtles are layered

In Blue Duets, Rob's first line is "Julia Child taught me to cook."  I was trying, you see, to make him not completely unlikeable, and since he's about my age, like me he's a first-generation Mastering the Art of French Cooking cook.  When Veronica and I watched "Julie and Julia" several months ago, I got the books back out of that place where superannuated cookbooks go to live--where they become history.

So when Veronica had a birthday while we were in New York City (for which we shopped on Fifth Avenue, but don't be jealous.  Fifth Avenue is where strange, unwearable clothing goes to be auctioned off to the highest bidder), we talked about menus.  She wanted coq au vin and crepes with frangipane. When I cook coq au vin, something tugs at my history rib.    I'm very aware that this dish is a long-standing French classic with a definite purpose:  cook that useless old wiry rooster in so much wine--along with the right herbs and vegetables--and for so long that he'll be succulent and delicious.  Yet I have no way of knowing whether the skinless chicken breasts I'm using came from a cock or a hen, and making coq au vin with skinless chicken breasts is probably heretical anyway.  Nevertheless, the mingling smells in my kitchen of the bacon fat I'll brown the breasts in, of sauteing mushrooms, of wine and chicken stock, of bay and thyme, seem to connect me to a long line of French women and their American art-of-French-cooking sisters.

Making frangipane I similarly meet the layers of my own history.  First, I should say I bought both volumes of Mastering the Art of French Cooking in the early seventies, shortly after they were published.  In the following decade I made Veal Prince Orloff--probably the most complicated thing I've ever cooked--Bavarian creams, croissants from scratch.  (You can't imagine how good they are, though if you work at them all day, folding and rolling out the buttered layers,  you can eat them for afternoon tea.)  When I found myself a single mother of a vegetarian child in the mid-eighties, Julia Child went to the back of the shelf of cookbooks, except for the recipe for frangipane.  Frangipane is a fairly thick pastry cream  (mostly eggs, milk, flour and sugar) to which you add ground almonds, almond extract, and a generous splash of Amaretto.  Although it's essentially a fairly thick pudding, it tastes like something from another world altogether.

If you've used Mastering the Art of French Cooking, you know that one of Childs' gifts lies in her ability to write the most precise instructions; these, if followed religiously, will lead to frangipane that is like silk.  First, you slowly, slowly, slowly whisk the sugar into the eggs until, when you lift the whisk, the mixture "forms a ribbon."  For some reason, this patient transformation leads the thick mixture of eggs and sugar to fall off your whisk not in blobs but in elegant ribbons.  Once you've whisked it to that point, there, it's unmistakable.  Then you beat in the flour that you've measured in quite a particular way that's illustrated, a pencil note in my cookbook tells me, on page 17, though I don't have to revisit it any more.  You put your measuring cup under your sifter and sift the flour carefully  into the cup and then level it with a knife, ensuring that there are absolutely no lumps in your flour and that nothing's been packed down as you spoon it into the measuring cup.  Once you've added the flour, you need to add boiling milk, and here's where I part ways with dear Julia.  Right below my note telling me exactly how to sift the flour is another notation:  "3 minutes in microwave. "  Boiling milk only makes the most unspeakable mess of your pan, and you have to watch it.  French cooking takes lots of time to begin with--whisking eggs and sugar until they form the ribbon--I don't have time to watch milk boil.  I am back on track when I add the milk to the sugar, eggs, and flour drop by drop, and I've also been conscientious about buying the kind of enamelled cast iron pans that spread the heat so evenly you don't need to use a double boiler.

Oddly enough, my Mastering the Art of French Cooking is a kind of synecdoche for our knowledge of history:  it's seldom unmediated and often our own experience, or those of our forenbears,  provides the mediation.  While I've got the "original text," it's been layered over, first by smudges from the bottom of my pan as I put it right on the cookbook to read the instructions while following them, then by the experience of never remembering from time to time how to properly sift flour, and finally by finding an improved, efficient way for boiling my milk.  I'm absolutely true to some of the recipe's instructions, like getting the egg and sugar to form the ribbon.  Veronica, in turn, knows the text mediated by years of watching me make frangipane and by the memories she has of her mother's cooking.

Quilt historian Barbara Brackman is celebrating the sesquicentennial of the American Civil War by offering quilt makers a quilt block a week named after events and personages in the civil war.  The one I'm working on right now is called "Fort Sumter" after an important naval battle outside Charleston, South Carolina.  Brackman has created a wonderful display:  photographs and newspaper articles from the time, along with selections from the diary of Mary Chestnut, whose husband was at Fort Sumter.  So Brackman has been careful to give us lots of primary texts in this post, as in her others.  Yet there's no escaping the fact that the block itself was first found in the Chicago Tribune quilting column written by a fictional Nancy Cabot in 1932.  Brackman goes on to suggest the symbolism of the colours used in the block, but we can't help feeling that our genuine 2011 Civil War quilt which we're making a complicated block of every week, using only bona fide reproduction fabrics, is somehow faked.  Or is it?

Once an object comes into the historical record, whether it's a cookbook, a quilt block, or a package of letters, it is already implicated in its culture and in all that society values.  It doesn't come to us without the assumptions we always already make about its meaning.  Through these objects, we don't really know "how it was."  We'd like to assure ourselves that we're finding the meaning of the past, and that meaning comes down to us through an unbroken, unsullied chain.  But, as Hans Kellner argues in "Language and historical representation," there is no narrative there, waiting for us to discover it.  Rather, the historical narratives we create are exercises in self-understanding.  Through telling our stories, we create ourselves. I take pleasure, it seems, in creating--and being--a self that's tied to the pleasures of the past, regardless of how illusory it might be.  I like the sensual and intellectual anachronism that happens when past and present meet.  I'm taking Barbara Brackman's narratives and instructions, which she couldn't really give to us without the genre of the blog, straight from my netbook to my sewing machine. 

You can find Barbara Brackman's wonderful blog here:
http://civilwarquilts.blogspot.com

Tender Buttons and the Metropolitan Museum of Art

We began the day at Tender Buttons, a tiny shop, perhaps 3 metres wide, just off Lexington.  Improbably, there are four people who work here, one tiny sixty-something blonde dynamo with her hair in an elegant French twist; another women in her sixties with chin-length curly gray hair; an older man who I suspect drinks too much but who does up your parcel in a most intriguing way, folding the top of the tiny paper bag like origami so the buttons don‘t fall out; and a young Asian man wearing one of the brightest things in the shop:  a turquoise T-shirt.  When the courier came in to drop off the weekend delivery, he greeted each of them by name and wished the chap in the T-shirt a happy mother’s day. 

You can see from the photographs that there are more buttons here than you’ve seen everywhere else.  One woman was there to buy antique buttons and dropped nearly $300 for them.  Another couple was in, he with a shirt and she with a brocade jacket, looking for something that would match (in his case) or replace (in hers) buttons that had been lost.  In sped-up weekend New York, people take time here.  You have no choice.  We found what we were looking for:  buttons for sweaters that Veronica, her friend Jenny, and I are making.  I wonder what it would have said about us if we hadn’t found the perfect button.

We spent the next nearly seven hours at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where we did not see Picasso’s portrait of Gertrude Stein (which ordinarily lives, I think, at MoMA).  That bit of serendipity might have been a bit too much to ask, even of New York City.  In spite of the fact that they closed late on Saturday, so we had until nearly 9 p.m., we had to make fairly rigorous choices.  I can’t really summarize the art for you, can perhaps barely describe its effect on me.  We looked at contemporary American and European art, standing stunned by the reality of Georgia O’Keefe’s too-well-reproduced canvases.  Her is a woman who paints flowers, but there is nothing polite or cute or pretty about them; they are strong statements about her and about the world she lives in.  We saw Picasso in all his incarnations:  it’s amazing that he had so many entirely different styles, and yet that they claim your attention all the way across the room.  We sat stunned by Mark Rothko’s ability to get colour and all its subtlety to speak to a part of us we have no idea we can lay claim to.  We went to a special exhibition documenting the progress and genre of Cezanne’s “Card Players.”  I didn't know that card-playing was so well represented in art, usually underlining and critiquing the rowdy immoral side of playing cards.  Cezanne, well beyond morals, liked the men he depicted, studying each of them over a number of years before painting the two canvases that are his full appreciation, in Meyer Shapiro’s words of “Four men playing collective solitaire.” They reflect back to us the thought we put into them; in this frozen moment they are provocatively opaque.

Of course we spent hours among the Met’s enormous Impressionist collection.  I particularly love Monet, who depicts a world of water and light (even when he’s painting the Houses of Parliament or haystacks in snow) that shows how easily the world before us might dissolve and become something entirely different; he reminds us that the substance of the world is mysterious.  Veronica loves Cezanne (as do I) who has the opposite effect.  If you could take his fruit off the canvas, they would have heft in your hand.  An exhibition of small nineteenth-century paintings examined the genre of the open window that sometimes spoke of dreamy possibilities, sometimes was the only light in a painter’s studio.  Rembrandt catches the mystery of the human face’s ability to accrue and express experience.  Vermeer’s everydayness is completely comforting, though the maps that are often pinned to the wall behind the young woman with a lute remind the viewer of the colonial project that this serenity depends on--though I have no idea if he saw it that way.  An exhibition of night photography completely transformed the urban world. 

Late afternoon our feet needed a rest and we needed caffeine and sugar to be able to go another three hours, so we took ourselves to the little café in the American wing.  It was full of people hunched and leaning into deep conversation.  No one was noisy; everyone--speakers and listeners alike--was fervent, passionate.  Perhaps they weren’t even talking about the art, but their conversations nevertheleess spoke of  its ability to remind us of the depth and engagement we should have in our own lives.  Denis Donoghue in his book Speaking of Beauty argues that there is no single definition of beauty that any of us would find completely convincing, so the result is that we must speak about what we find beautiful and in so doing speaking about what is important to us.  Art, I believe, works the same way, prompting the kinds of conversations that go to the core of our lives and beliefs.

Sunday in Central Park

In spite of the forecast for grey, rainy weather, we've had days of sun and temperatures around 20 degrees.  It was to be particularly beautiful on Sunday--none of the wind that has been blowing hair in our face.  Central Park demanded our attention.

I want to describe Central Park as a work of art.  Of course, there is Frederick Law Olmstead's vision of nature in the centre of the busy city.  There are the most remarkable outcrops of rock that people feel compelled to climb.  They lay in the sun above the city streets or simply stare off into space like an urbanized adventurer in Capsar David Friederich's famous painting of the man staring down the Alps.  I don't know whether the landscape of the whole city was like this or whether the outcrops determined where the park should go. Unlike the city itself, which is more or less a triscuit (except in areas like Greenwich Village), the paths here wander; it's very easy to become disoriented and to find yourself fetching up for advice at the Chess House where the Conservancy has volunteers to sort you out and where a mother and son spread their chess pieces out under the wysteria on tables that have chessboards marked right into the stone.

But when I say Central Park is a work of art, I'm referring to a kind of urban theatre that happens here.  A young man offers jokes for $1 and promises laughter.  Judging by the women collected about him, he's delivered.  A Chinese dance troupe (sorry:  no pictures of this one:  it was too crowded) tells an ancient story just across from Lincoln Centre. 

The skateboarders strut their stuff in a small ampitheatre.  You can find any kind of music you want:  a lone saxophonist wailing the popular mellow love songs of the fifties and sixties, a small band playing (one guesses) popular Mexican music that almost prompts people to dance in the streets, a small jazz band playing Gershwin.

My favourite, though, was a young woman on roller skates (not roller blades) dancing to her own music.  She--and other skateboarders and skaters--had found this central place along the wide arborial Mall.  On one side of her we could hear the saxophonist wailing; on the other side the band played Gershwin.  But she was listening to her own song, occasionally belting out the music and words which belonged to her alone, but which she danced into the air around her.

A day of art galleries

Today was a gallery day.  We began at the International Center for Photography, where four exhibitions illustrated the range of what photography can do.  On the main floor there were contact strips and photographs taken by a group of photographers documenting the Spanish Civil War, Robert Capa, Gerda Taro, and Chim.  While much of their photojournalism appeared in German, British, French, and American magazines and newspapers, it has long been believed that there was an archive of all their photographs that had been stored in a suitcase.  This archive surfaced in Mexico in 2007, not in a suitcase but in cardboard boxes that had been handed from person to person  for safekeeping.  The International Centre printed some of the more startling photographs, but put most of the archive on their walls in contact sheets, offering viewers utterly inadequate large plastic magnifiers to deal with the small sizes of the images.  Unfortunately, these wouldn’t rotate the images 90%, so the challenge was often to study a small photograph sideways to your line of sight.   Despite these frustrations, this was a remarkable exhibition.  First, it demonstrates the enormous range of photojournalism.  This loosely-knit group took pictures of textile workers and peasants at a land reform meeting; an outdoor mass on the Basque front, the necessities for a mass sitting on a broken cane chair; civilians leaving Tereul in the cold, many of them old and struggling to make their way through the snow; Republican soldiers moving art in Madrid to protect it from Franco’s forces; a woman selling cabbages and eggs; children finding a way to play in the war‘s rubble.  The viewer is made aware of how much framing matters:  close-ups capture the individual in pain or attempting with a cigarette and something to drink to create a calm, almost domestic moment.  Longer shots instead speak of the collective experience of marchers in a demonstration or bodies on a battlefield.  Many of these images are aesthetically striking compositions, balances of high-lights and low-lights, posing the question of what happens when we aesthetisize horror.  But if the aesthetics of the image cause us to look more closely at subjects we might ordinarily ignore, perhaps the result is that our sense of the range of human experiences is expanded.

I wish I’d have had an archive like this for my Britain in the Sixties class this winter term because the variety of photographs representing the factories, the streets, the battlefields, the emptying art galleries makes it clear how many places history unfolds.

The second exhibition of post-Mao photographs by Chinese photographer Wang Quingsong  were very carefully staged on a movie set to represent elements of Chinese culture and mythology “updated” by the cultural revolution.  These are developed on a huge scale (3 feet high and perhaps 10 feet long), many of which have cultural allusions that are largely “in” jokes.  They remind us of photography’s ability to reach for a monumental scale both in terms of the size of the photograph in in terms of the image’s ability to bear symbolic weight.  Yet probably because of my cultural ignorance, I found this the least successful exhibition.

Alonzo Jordan was the community photographer in Jasper Texas, a small African-American town.  He photographed high school graduates, prom queens posed on the hoods of the huge cars of the fifties and sixties, weddings, a neighbour mowing the lawn, family reunions.  I very much doubt Jordan would have expected his well-composed images to reach a New York City museum, but they’re  undoubtedly a valuable and evocative record of what his community chose to celebrate.

The final exhibition was of postcards of enormous baptisms in rivers, streams, lakes.  The didactic panel pointed out that photographs could be developed onto a card stock whose obverse identified it as a postcard and provided space for a message and an address.  This information helps me to make sense of some of the photographs in my mother’s box of family memorabilia.  Baptisms provided an intriguing spectacle--who knew there was such a genre of photograph/postcard?--to be both celebrated and, in the event of African-American communities, to mock for their enthusiasm.  Racist postcards of baptisms?  What won’t we do with images?

We took a break in Bryant Park, watching young men play ping pong, noting the shelves of books left out for anyone to borrow and the signs giving times for yoga classes,  laughing at children on the merry-go-round, feeding the sparrows.  We didn’t arrive until well after 1 p.m., but there were very few free seats.  Sitting in one of the tippy slatted chairs, you’re aware of being in the midst of theatre, but you’re not quite certain whether you’re a member of the audience or an inadvertent actor.  You catch fragments of conversations as people pass you by.  One friend tells another that she has a short attention….and then the wind takes her words.  A thirty-something man is talking rather loudly, one suspects, to his wife:  “Oh, that’s right.  Then I’ll come home.  No, I’m totally okay with that.”  Then he takes his story out of range.

MoMA filled the second half of our day.  I’m dismayed that I simply don’t know how to read some contemporary art, so I didn’t really understand the “language” until we came to an entire and large exhibition of Picasso guitars.  You can see Picasso using this familiar instrument to work out the language of cubism and abstraction, but no one answered my rather basic question: why the guitar?  Was it primarily a Spanish folk instrument that could be played by anyone with a little training?  He probes the very terms of representation:  what does it mean to paint on  your canvas a slice of, of something--you‘re not quite sure how it contributes to our sense of what‘s being represented--and make it look like fake wood?  Why does a representation need only two planes?  How many lines do we really need to recognize an icon like the guitar?  Can we add a few more lines that will provoke us to see that this is a conflation of several images?  This was an intriguing exhibit. 

The fifth floor might be loosely titled “Impressionism and After.”  I’ll admit that as a little old lady I was beginning to feel rather frustrated with MoMA’s failure to provide any benches in the galleries.  There is neither any space for us to rest our weary backs and feet nor to simply contemplate a sequence of paintings--of guitars, say--to consider their relationship to one another.   Or to sit staring at three serene Seurat landscapes (though I understand why there’s no bench in front of the very popular version of “Starry Night”).  There is no time for reflection; yet what are art galleries for? Nevertheless, this was like coming home to old friends who spoke at least one of your languages--the surrealists, de Chirico’s nightmare landscapes, Rousseau’s calmly curious lion.  But for me--and judging by the benches that were entirely full, for others as well--one of the magical rooms held a Monet Water Lily painting that he worked on for the 12 years between 1914 and 1926.  Three enormous canvases, each about four metres long, cover an entirely wall.  Cezanne, I believe, said Monet was only an eye--but what an eye!  These are about the miracle of vision, a feast for our eyes.  While we sat there just remembering what the magic of seeing was like, allowing our eyes to simply play over the enormous canvases, several people performed what I called “the Monet shuffle.”  They’d use their cell phone camera to phone one segment, shuffle down the room to keep their camera the same distance from the floor, take another picture, shuffle some more and take a third, then a fourth.  This made me sad:  here were these enormous inflected, textured, subtle canvases of deep water and translucent light, and people were looking at them primarily through their cell phone cameras.

In spite of not entirely understanding some of the work in a display of printing making in South America, I can see that modern art--maybe all art--wants to do a number of things.  There is the art of witness--of posters calling the violence of apartheid into question.  And there is the art of  Matisse, Bonnard, and Monet that is visionary in its own way, reminding us of the power of beauty to assuage and to envision a frame of mind that is peaceful in its own moment.  And there is art that engages with the ideas of the time and takes them further, always probing, never settling--just as we should never settle.  We need all of these.


The photograph at the top of the post was taken by Veronica Geminder; reflections of the New York skyline are captured in the glass of MoMA.