twice fanciful

I love it when an amusing word appears before me more than once in a short time. In an email exchange with Nancy Norris today, she quoted an LC Rule Interpretation:

For books, generally restrict the making of the note about the nature, scope, or artistic form of the item to the situations covered below. For books that are belles lettres, record in a note the term for the literary form only when the title is misleading. Do not consider titles of literary works misleading simply because they are fanciful.

And then as I was eating my supper, I was reading the New York Times for October 7th (not quite a month behind there):

In defending the 1999 law, Neal K. Katyal, a deputy solicitor general, cautioned the justices against pursuing an “endless stream of fanciful hypotheticals.”

The whole article.

thinking about upstate cities

Ithaca has changed a lot since I moved from there to Providence in 1989. When I left, there were way fewer stores on Route 13 as you came into town. Several car dealers, a big grocery store, Manos Diner. There are now oodles and oodles of big box stores, a couple multi-floor hotels, just lots more buildings. Meanwhile, the Commons seems to be looking shabbier and shabbier. Even the Rosebud (diner) is gone, replaced by, what was it, a sushi place. I'm not sure I like these transitions but at least, overall, Ithaca seems to be thriving.

Arnot Art Museum
On the way home from a recent weekend trip to Ithaca to have supper with Margaret, Jim and Jo, I drove home through Elmira to stop at the Arnot Art Museum. The museum is a lovely Greek Revival building but, alas, wasn't open on Sundays. But it is surrounded by several lovely buildings: the county courthouse in a mix of Gothic and Greek, a church in castellated Gothic, and a Beaux Arts city hall. I know I should give you the fuller information but I haven't looked it up. It wasn't an especially inspiring day but the area looked pretty bleak. How can we have done such a nasty job on our cities?

Chemung County Court House, Elmira, NY
And these thoughts are coming on top of a fire in Alfred last week that destroyed one of the five buildings in the main business block. In addition to the businesses and apartments that were obliterated, it means that about 10% of our business spaces are gone. Hopefully, the gap will be filled in with a decent looking building. The wine store was one of the businesses burned out. The Collegiate Restaurant, aka The Jet, is currently closed because of smoke and fire damage but there was a professional cleaner van out front this afternoon as I walked home from the library. That's promising. Alfred without the Jet is a very different place.

we'll always have Edith Wharton

Subscribing to The New Yorker always intimidates me. I can't keep up with all of the articles I want to read, to say nothing of just skimming the issues. When I went up to campus to get my daily Times, I decided to stop in at the main library to look at magazines. I've done that at the Scholes Ceramics Library but hadn't done it yet at Herrick, the main library. I was in the periodicals stacks and decided to skim the contents of the unbound issues of The New Yorker. A bit of this, a bit of that, found quite a few things to actually go to the article for a brief visit.

Imagine my delight when I came across "The age of innocence: early letters from Edith Wharton" by Rebecca Mead in the June 29 issue (p. 32-38). The letters were addressed to Anna Bahlmann, a governess employed by the Joneses from 1874 to 1915 or thereabouts. Most of Miss Jones's letters were when she was not at home, and they describe what she was reading and doing. The letters were to be sold at Christie's on June 24th and let's hope someone prepares an edition ... soon! According to what I could find on the web, the letters sold to an unnamed academic institution. Her archive at the Beinecke Library at Yale already has twenty boxes of correspondence, mostly written after her marriage, so I hope it's Yale.

This Wharton amusement (pronounced as in French) came after reading this morning the article in last Sunday's travel section: "Edith Wharton always had Paris" by Elaine Sciolino. There we trace Wharton's steps, including points of assignation with her lover Morton Fullerton. They met under the Diana at the Louvre and Sciolino notes that it still is a fairly untraveled gallery. Hmm. Next time I'm to meet my lover in Paris, I might suggest the Diana. It's way more romantic than the clock in Grand Central or the "meeting point" at some international airport, or maybe it depends on who you're meeting.

city / country / Hockney

Many people have asked me how I'm doing in Alfred. Yes, it's small town to New York City's urban. In Sunday's Times, there's an article about David Hockney who has been spending much of his time over the past couple years in Yorkshire, doing landscapes. He still considers himself a Californian and has his green card but he's making hay in the country. The last four paragraphs of the article read thus:

“People have asked me,” he said, “ ‘Isn’t it boring in Bridlington, a little isolated seaside town?’ And I say: ‘Not for us. We all think it’s very exciting, because it is in my studio and it is in my house.’ ”

Mr. Hockney is now working toward a mammoth show of these landscapes for the Royal Academy in London, to open in January 2012. “They came to me,” he said. “I went to look at the rooms and thought: ‘My God, what an opportunity. We’ll do it!’ So I need this great big studio.”

Yet he also has no intention of giving up California. He still has his house in the Hollywood Hills, he said, not to mention his office and archives on Santa Monica Boulevard and his green card.

“I would say I’m on location here,” he said, laughing wryly. “That’s what we say in Hollywood.”

footnote to "the course of nature": on decay

When Linda Weintraub was talking about Damien Hirst, she mentioned that she'd been studying the names of heavy metal bands. Very few names mention death though many include decay. She recited several. Jenny Tobias has been regularly posting hypothetical band names as her Facebook status, and some are really wonderful and thought-provoking. And, today, Meghan Musolff had "Peter, Paul, and Mary all day. I always thought we could be like them. Corey, Chad, and Meghan" for her status. Hmm, what's in a name and, as Weintraub said, is Damien Hirst our first heavy metal visual artist? Probably nowhere close.

the course of nature

I saw a notice about a short video about Thomas Cole and his art on the Thomas Cole Historic Site's webpage. It's pretty good and it's never hard to look at Cole's paintings or at Hudson River Valley landscape views. "The course of empire" plays a sizable role in the Cole video and I've been thinking a lot about the course of empire, or rather the course of life as it plays out for me. The transition from urban life in New York City to small college town life in Alfred is mostly fine. It's been nice to have school in session because there are artist lectures and more folks around. And Monday-Friday New York Times subscriptions available for under $30 for the term. I have to go fetch the paper at the campus store and it doesn't come until mid-afternoon but I'm always a few days behind anyway. I thought I was cruising along OK without the daily paper but I have been enjoying it. I'll never be an online reader (never say never).

Linda Weintraub was today's artist talker. Her topic was artistic beauty and nature with a bend toward the environmentally correct and, yes, the natural course of nature. It was a very interesting talk and I couldn't help mulling over Cole's "Course of empire" as she talked about the life cycle of nature.

She started by saying that in her student days it was not possible to talk about art and beauty. I guess we'd been burned out by the connoisseurship school of art history and criticism. So she is actually having a lot of fun reconsidering it now. She started her lecture by talking about a Sophie Calle triptych series that deals with descriptions of beauty by people who have been blind since birth. The subjects of each of her examples talked about natural things like ocean waves. Nature is, after all, harmonious, full of truth and virtue, and therefore good. Weintraub's real interest is in how we can use the beautiful to help us preserve the planet.

Her case studies were the "poster child" and the "enfant terrible": Andy Goldsworthy and Damien Hirst. Oh, boy, you could just tell this was going to be fun.

Weintraub talked about several Goldsworthy works: how he organizes the leaves or rocks, how nature is manipulated to perfect harmony long enough for the picture to be taken, how the manipulation is sometimes acrobatic. One of my favorite Goldsworthy works is the wet leaves in the bark that burst out and blow away as they dry. This doesn't fit her guiding principle so well but I didn't challenge her.

Moving on to Hirst, Weintraub chose "Thousand years" as the test piece. It was in the "Sensation" show and involves two chambers: one with a fly and maggot hatchery, one with a cow's head and fly zapper light. Voilà, the full natural cycle from birth to adulthood to death. She continued to talk about emblems of decay and how much we generally revile such animals as vultures and plants such as fungi and bacteria, even though we probably all recognize that decay is part of the life cycle. But we don't want to look at it or smell it.

She then presented the work of several artists that follow the Goldsworthy or Hirst route. The controlling artists: Marta de Menezes who pokes pupae so that they grow up into more colorful butterflies, Eduardo Kac who inserts fluorescent green DNA into various animals so that they turn green in certain light, and Verena Kaminiarz who carves up body worms. The worms are able to regenerate so you get, for example, a two-headed worm, both heads with eyes, which must negotiate its petri dish without a single brain and focus.

The Hirstians: Gelitin whose "Hare" is a big, pink, knitted, straw-stuffed rabbit on an Austrian mountain that is serving as fodder for cows, base for mushrooms and other plants, moisture in the shade between the legs. Gelitin group members got the knitting, etc. assistance of the local townspeople and also an agreement that they wouldn't try to repair the rabbit for 25 years when it will, naturally, have been reabsorbed into the ecosystem. George Gessert does reverse hybridization by "re-wilding" over-cultivated plants. Jae Rhim Lee alters her diet so that her urine produces the exactly appropriate formula for plant growth; she makes kimchee with the resulting plants and serves folks. Life cycle, get it? Michel Blazy does work in which microbes eat up the work in the course of the display, and he lets the alteration happen as it will. Pawel Wojtasik does beautiful shots of strands of waste, fooling the eye (and brain) with glittering beauty until you discover it's feces. Gregor Schneider's "Death: be not proud" is a room he's constructed in his studio but he hasn't yet found a terminally ill person who is willing to die in his room. (This, naturally, resonates this year as we have had news about "death panels" and are thinking about health care costs and doctor-assisted death.) As I left the talk with Elizabeth Gulacsy and Tom Peterson, we talked about suicide and graceful life termination. Tom lived in a commune many years ago and a suicidal co-inhabitant was "saved" by a psychologist who asked her to get things in order before she committed suicide and the ordering gave her enough strength to go on. Well, I don't know about the "saved" and "enough strength to go on" but the thinking about life value apparently was restorative. More life cycle, I guess.

Weintraub ended with a fairly long description of "Cloaca" by Wim Delvoye. He built a beautiful spotless machine which replicates the human food stream. It must be fed and then its mouth, throat, liver, pancreas, intestines and whatnot produce, ta da, of course, some beautiful feces. This naturally invites discussion of whether machine shit is better or cleaner or more edible than human shit.

In the question and answer period, Weintraub talked about humanure, green cemeteries, and other activities that are trying to help us humans work with the ecosystem rather than accumulating waste and wasting it. She mentioned an artist who has put lists of the toxic elements in common medicines and foods on the back door of bathroom stalls at the Whitney. Are we just toxic corpses who should be delivered to toxic waste dumps?

Since the Thomas Cole paintings had been drifting around in my mind through Weintraub's talk, I asked her if she thought 18th- and 19th-century works such as "Course of empire" and ruins were precedent for some of the Hirstians. She replied that she thought we were now out of frontier and that made it very different. I guess it's appropriate that we sometimes describe the ruined structures in a neoclassical park as follies.

By the time this is all done swirling in my brain, I'll probably be ready to bury. No impervious box, please.


(N.B. The pictures are step 1 and step 5 from "The course of empire": "The savage state" and "Desolation", pictures from the Wikipedia article on the painting series.)

dance and clay

Marcela Giesche, Amsterdam-based dancer, is a guest artist at Alfred University and she presented her work on Friday and Saturday night. The Saturday evening concert began with a work on the stairs leading to C.D. Smith Auditorium by the student dancers. It involved their doing movements that were apparently being instructed via iPod: a few steps down, a couple back up, a few paces to the left, lean over the rail. It was interesting as they got tangled with audience members waiting for the doors to open. The program acknowledged John Gill for his advice about the clay. It wasn't until she was a ways into the clay part that I realized that Giesche was being contextual in using clay to mark her residency here at Alfred, home of the New York State College of Ceramics.

"Wanderers and Wonderers" started out with Giesche "hidden" under leaves of newspaper, along with a light layer of newspaper spread about the whole dance floor. They asked us to leave the auditorium, if we were able, during the intermission. We returned to the single layer of newspaper covering the floor and the mound of Giesche in the upper center of the floor. In the first half of the piece, Giesche moved about, mostly horizontal, and pushed the newspaper around, ending with her sweeping the rest to the edges. For the second half of the piece, she, nearly naked, covered her body with clay slip and "drew" on the floor as she moved about it with her slipp(er)y body. She ended by brushing some of the drying slip back into the basin from which it came. Going full circle, I guess. Parts of it were very lovely, including the shadows. Her partner, Bruno Caverna, was not able to leave Norway to join her and I wondered how the piece would have been different as a two-person work rather than solo.

The program notes said "How much of our identity is constructed by the opinions and beliefs of others? What does it take to strip these layers away and find ourselves floating in the unknown again? The body becomes our only reference point, timelessly recovering itself through the senses -- in a state of perpetual wonder --" I wasn't sure that any of this really played out in the work for me but it was interesting to see the use of clay for an Alfred dance.

reading whatever you want and like

Six years ago, my bookclub read the new translation in verse of Dante's Inferno by Robert Pinsky. At about the same time, the Mary Ryan Gallery held an exhibition of Michael Mazur's illustrations for the Inferno. The installation was spectacular with the etchings on the wall and the text on slanted reading shelves in front of the illustrations. Mazur died on August 18th at age 73. In his obituary published today, the last couple paragraphs were especially interesting to me:

"Although deadly serious as an artist, Mr. Mazur had a sly wit. In 1984 he wrote an article for the Op-Ed page of The New York Times proposing a W.P.A.-style project under which artists could decorate nuclear warheads, just as Renaissance artists embellished armor and weapons.

'It is not hard to imagine the vivid colors, bas reliefs, even graffiti, that would make spectacles of beauty of those dull cones,' he wrote. In time, he suggested, the warheads would find their way into private collections and museums, thereby ending the possibility that they might be deployed."

Always the pacifist and trying to be always the optimist.

In the Arts & Leisure section today, there's an article about upcoming shows of Sandow Birk's "Personal meditations" on the Koran at galleries in California. They look very interesting. In 2006, Birk was working on a film, using puppets, that used Dante's Inferno as its inspiration. That was just about the time of the attacks on the Danish cartoons that included what were seen as disrespectful representations of Muhammad. The Inferno bits disappeared from that film but Birk's project on the Koran has reached the point that it can be shared with all of us. If it promotes understanding of religious and cultural difference, that will be great.

Also in today's Times was an article about English teachers who are assigning students to read what they'd like to read rather than particular books. You can read the article for the full story but your reading is related to your age and predilection, intellectual and physical. I haven't re-read To kill a mockingbird since it was assigned many years ago but I'm sure I would react to it differently now. One of the other books they mention in the article is Moby-Dick which I don't think I read until a few years ago, another bookclub selection. I really enjoyed it and even read another Melville novel (Redburn) not long after. Reading them recently, as an openly gay man rather than a repressed teen or twenties year old, was wonderful. I could react to the bits of potential homosexual or homosocial as an adult. I don't think I would have gotten nearly as much out of them as a kid. Same with the Inferno. It's just too bad that there's so much to read. Well, no, it's great that there's so much to read. If the teachers letting the kids select their reading encourages them to read and find joy and knowledge there, it will be far more important than the loss of collective memory. Teachers can certainly compensate for the varied readings and the students may even find each other's discussions of their reading more illuminating and inspiring than discussion of common reading. We can hope, can't we?

Barbara Kruger, book designer

So here I am, merrily adding books to LibraryThing, and I notice that the cover design for my copy of Medieval humanism and other studies by R.W. Southern (Harper & Row, 1970) is credited to Barbara Kruger.
Checking her biography, I note that she did indeed do magazine design and illustration after graduating from Parsons. The cover has the zodiac and the labors of the month and similar blockprint-like images in a circle against clouds and stars.

I've seen articles recently on Andy Warhol's early contributions to illustration, e.g., his album covers. I find it interesting to think about how the artist's "fine" arts are visible or not in the commercial work. Kruger's (or her editor's) use of moral images plays rather well into her polemical collages.

(Sorry about the image. It's "borrowed" from LibraryThing.)

LibraryThing paradigm shift

I haven't talked here about LibraryThing in a while and my LT universe shifted a couple days ago. One of the features on your profile is a comparison of your library to those of others. There's a weighted, raw, or recent choice on the comparison. Since I started significantly entering my books, the nearest libraries in the weighted category have been libraries with strong gay collections. Now that I'm with my books here in Alfred, I've been cataloging a shelf or two of books almost every day. My nearest library just shifted to one that is strong in architecture and I've still got many shelves of architecture books to enter.

When I was in Chicago for the American Library Association conference in early July, I went to the Stonewall Book Awards brunch and one of the speakers was Marie Kuda who had long ago contributed a Chicago profile to a Queer Caucus for Art newsletter issue when we were about to meet there. I talked to her briefly after the brunch and she emailed me with thoughts about Tee Corinne, my co-editor. She also said my LibraryThing profile picture with clipped hair was not as much fun as my liberated hair (description thanks to Dan Eshom).