My world yesterday

Temptation - Marc Chagall

Elvira Resting at a Table - Amadeo Modigliani

Ballerina - Edgar Degas

Acrobats - Max Beckmann

Dinner

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I've become quite fond of this concept of late. Mostly because I've got things to do and there's just not enough space to make time at every moment for everything that I'd like to get done, but there is definitely time for all of it.

Working again, so fun with scheduling and availability and reading and watching the television and having lunch - did I mention lunch? Lunch is of good.

That's all really - I'll be around again, but first I'm going to be healthy and rested and interested.

Blessings!

To Honor the Catalogers. Sort of.

 The last part of a passage I previously quoted reads thus: “It’s tempting to say that his [Panizzi’s] discovery of intertextuality among even the most mundane books forebodes the rise of the interconnected world of the digital age; it’s probably more accurate, however, to note that, from the vantage point of the wire world, Panizzi’s catalog looks like the beginnings of the Internet.”¹

I immediately thought of Douglas Adams whose piece called “Build It and We Will Come” was published in The Independent on Sunday in November of 1999. The writing is included in a posthumously published collection of Adams’s writings called, delightfully, The Salmon of Doubt². It is also available as an audio book, which is how I first experienced it, and makes for wonderful and enlightening moments. The breadth of the man’s interests and writings astonished me and was also incredibly freeing, as was the recognition of the difficulties of writing to deadline.

Why this piece in particular? Because of the thesis statement buried deep in the middle of the thing: “The computer is actually a modelling device. (92)”²

Because the person who wrote it is Douglas Adams, and because I agree with him firmly based on the evidence given in the aforementioned essay as well as independent ponderings after the fact, I’m not going to try to convince you of the truth of the matter. I’m going to treat it as fact.

Thinking of the catalog of Panizzi as the monster of bibliographical information that it must be (with equally contorted card catalogs that threatened to, and eventually did take over many library lobbies and reading areas, and the sort of relief the floors may have felt when computers with much smaller footprints began to carry the same information): what exactly is a catalog modelling? I believe it is the brains of The Library. I would say that the catalog is modelling the actions of Librarians, but they are (in Truth if not in practice) specialized beings whereas catalogs are created for the generalist user/reader/patron. Online catalogs are incredibly useful entities for organizing, tracking and adding to or removing information from entries into the catalog. They have the potential to interact with other, already established catalogs, create MARC records with little strain and also can be programmed to make bar codes and spine labels.

They can do everything that a team of librarians can do, and they can do it more quickly and with less overt physical effort on the part of those librarians. They do not replace human ingenuity or interaction with materials, and they do have to be made to be flexible. But the basic idea of an online or digitally maintained catalog is that when a person, a human, looks for a book, that person goes to a provided computer terminal or available website, enters the information that is at hand, and is given the coordinates to find that item within their current context. Lists of books that don’t get checked out, lists of periodical titles that the library holds subscriptions for, items that are on order, damaged, in transit, etc. are generated as part of the library’s functioning.

I know a woman who works at A Novel Idea in Lincoln, Nebraska whose co-workers describe her biblio-recall abilities as watching her flip through her mental Rolo-Dex. I’m sure that the information that she stores on those cards appears in different places as the keywords or characters or impressions or genres are the unique search terms in different situations. It takes time to build the kind of depth and specificity into such a mental search engine as she has, but I have felt it begin and have encouraged it to take root on my own, and while mine is more of a commonplace book or recreation room strung with yarn and connecting images, and will never rival the power of what an online catalog can accomplish, still, it is confirmation that our brains can and do surpass our wildest expectations of them.

The library catalog has the potential to accomplish something no less daunting than magic. It can help a reader find something he or she was sure they’d never be able to identify. It cannot always leave traces of how to find the treasure someone seeks, but it can, through subject headings, authors, titles, series titles, keywords and the like, show the reader something like the path that was taken to get to the treasure the first time.

In order to accomplish such formidable tasks, minute and thorough items of information have to be identified and entered into the knowledge base of the catalog. It must be told when and how an item came to be in the library. It must be told how an item relates to another item. Humans must make educated guesses about the use of an item and include what information will allow that item to be used and useful. Other humans may be given the opportunity to add reviews and search terms, to suggest connections that the catalogers may not have known existed. Involving the patrons in the development of the library catalog is one of the brilliant strokes of catalog development. It has need for mediation, but it is a powerful way to engage library patrons with library materials.

The catalog is a model of the relationships built between libraries and their communities. It is in deciphering those relationships that we learn about the design of the model, and what meaning the library is seen to have in the community.

¹ Battles, Matthew. Library: An Unquiet History. W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 2003. 214 pages +notes & index.

²Adams, Douglas. The Salmon of Doubt, Harmony Books, New York, 2002. Paul Guzzardi, ed. 299 pp.

³Mentré, Mireille. Illuminated Manuscripts of Medieval Spain, Thames and Hudson, Inc, London, 1996. Jenifer Wakelyn, trans. 304 pp.

 Before I end this, I have to put my nomination forward for canonizing Douglas Adams (who was, I know, an atheist; have a sense of humor). I thought of that particular essay as I was typing up the other post. At the library, I went looking for Homer in order to get details and ideas in mind for what I plan to write during November (NaNoWriMo!), and found The Salmon of Doubt instead. When I’d gotten home, fed the (starving!!!) cats, and unloaded my library haul (Illuminated Manuscripts of Medieval Spain³, anyone? Oh, yeah), I opened the book right to the essay I wanted, even to the page and almost the line. You can’t respect the man without at least nodding at his beliefs, so I can’t quite see naming him a Deity, but at least a halo of connectivity on portraits? If someone gets a chance, ask Stephen Fry, will you? He’d know what to do.

Perspective on Monet

Attempting to read up on Agapanthus becomes an increasingly interesting adventure. I learn not much that is terribly surprising, but I am a bit stymied in my limited resources. Right now I have access to one book in front of me and a few that I’ve requested at the library. It is in that light that I must turn back to what is in front of me: the paintings and a handful of books and articles, and mine them instead of the shelves of possibilities that I know exist.

As a relative amateur when it comes to art criticism, and a virtual expert on talking about whatever comes to mind, this series of blogs has become something of a quest with me. There is only so much that can be seen when looking at 3 paintings, no matter how large. There is infinitely more that can be said about them, or learned about them, or discovered underneath them. But without ever seeing them, without ever looking at what is in front of your nose, none of the rest of it is more than mere decoration.

Simon Kelly, in the wording that accompanies exhibit, talks about the effect that the lack of horizon line has on the painting itself and on the viewer. It is true – these are works that exist almost entirely outside of the standard geography of living. There is no bridge, there are no reflections; you do not know what time of day it is; who is around, if anyone or if there are any deeper meanings to the shapes and shifting swaths of color in front of you. I hate to be too pithy, but all of this almost forces the viewer to be reflected in the paint: we see ourselves in the surface. At yet, the experience is not disorienting. It is stunning, or at least it can be, but not upsetting, not to us who are so accustomed to such vast expanses of undefined space.

In Monet at Normandy, the publication that accompanied an exhibit by that name in 2006 & 2007, it is possible to follow Monet’s use of perspective and point of view from the 1860’s through to the Cleveland panel of Agapanthus, and it is a remarkable development. Discussing the painting A Seascape, Shipping by Moonlight from 1866, the authors address his use of space. “Monet plays with the viewer’s sense of equilibrium by omitting the jetty itself from the field of vision; only the stabilizing line of the horizon as it intersects with the strictly vertical rigging of the boats on the left counters the rolling pitch of the boat in the foreground.(56)” He is not creating here a sense of floating in the absence of the horizon, he is deliberating unsettling his viewers with very little that is stable and much that rolls and is unstill.

In other places, the experiments with perspective seem to be excuses to provide space for the sea or an expanse of beach or sky instead. As can be seen in his paintings of commercial ships in the port at Le Havre or on the Seine at Rouen, he is not shy of detail or specificity. In fact there is the sense that he is communicating something extremely specific, even in the Wisteria diptych that is still incomprehensible to me. (I have to admit here that I’m falling hopelessly in love with his paintings of the Seine at Rouen – the ships are functional and ethereal at the same time, and the skies are filled with a sense of wind and rain and diffused or too bright sunshine. Exquisite!)

“While the viewer instinctively constructs spatial relationships based on scale, position, and color, the artists himself seems no longer bound by such conventions.(168)” And we do, don’t we? Without thinking about it, we decide that there is a top and a bottom that are usually related to the top and bottom of the canvas. We plot the position of shapes and colors not just on the canvas but in relation to each other in the three dimensional space behind the canvas or in front of the canvas. We address ourselves in relation to the paintings: where am I standing in this painting?

I wonder how many of us place ourselves where we have so often seen M. Monet placed: in the garden, under an umbrella, palate on arm, cigarette smoldering. Or in his studio with the gigantic canvases leaning against the walls, as much a part of that space as any other. Perhaps more so. With so many visitors and so much attention given to the work and the garden while he was still alive, it seems plausible that there is as much of the life of the artist’s studio in the layered and floating studies of water lilies and absent agapanthus in these paintings as any representation of nature’s variability.

As much of an intellectual exercise as these can be, there is something excitingly simple and human that can be experienced viewing the triptych. They were part of a larger work that was intended to honor the end of World War I and the veterans. In that light, the serenity of this series has more weight than any horizon line could ever hope convey.

I’ve been looking for pieces of contemporary criticism to give context outside of the artist and outside of the 20^th century. Of course, the source that I’d love to read is in the St. Louis Public Library catalog. And equally of course, it is a reference book (non-circulating) of the Central Library (which collection has been moved entirely to a storage facility while the building is closed for renovation until summer of next year). So, how does one get a look at such a thing? The adventure continues.

Lemonades, Heather, Lynn Federle Orr, David Steel. Monet in Normandy, Rizzoli, New York, 2006. 192 pp.

A short note of frustration

 I’ve begun building a master list of jobs that I’ve held over the last several years. The list is intended to aid me as I fill out online and paper applications. It is not short. A friend of mine told me that she’d read that you only need to include the last seven years on applications. That’s nine jobs.

Facing the uncomfortable truth that when put next to a timetable created by societal expectations, if you take out my age, I’m not doing badly for a person who graduated college 6 years ago. It’s like the 11 years that I spent getting married and divorced just shot a huge hole in my life path. (I typed ‘whole’ instead of ‘hole’ there at first, and didn’t notice it right away. (Quick little-Sarah story: When I started taking piano lessons, Mr. Williams, may he rest in well-played peace, taught me about rests by drawing them on a chalkboard. He drew a small rectangle under one of the lines on the staff and said, “When you walk down the street, you have to look out or you’ll walk into a…” meaning for me to finish the sentence with ‘hole’ as homophone to ‘whole’ to teach me the name of the long rest. I looked at the drawing and piped up “Sewer!”) and now I’m happy on the inside.)

Job applications do not lend themselves to creative life paths. By creative I do not mean artistic, I mean self-defined (which, yes, given that I view works of art as defined by their active answering of questions and being evidence of deliberate decisions is not entirely consistent, but you get the idea). The last 15 months saw me taking jobs in order to work, not in order to further a goal. The goal was not firmly in mind until the beginning of 2009 anyway and since then hasn’t altered one whit, nor has my intention to achieve it, nor my continued research and active contemplation. But there isn’t really room for that on a job app.

It’s uncomfortable. I don’t particularly care for it. I feel required to provide spin for my life, not simply to others but to myself as well. And yet, I lived it. I process it daily. I am in no way unaware of the effects of my decisions on the directions my life has followed, frequently more than one at a time. It is not without consequence. And yet, I am in no way certain that some Life Lesson about marrying intelligently or a self-deprecating attitude towards my mistakes or not having anything to show for the living I’ve done is correct or morally acceptable. It is lived. It is done. I am here. There is no judgment anymore.

My skillz set is impressive, I tell you.

This is not unrelated to what showed me it was time to escape the inertial pull of Lincoln. It, this discomfort and getting past it, is part of learning to be in the unfamiliar and not quite known or understood place. I realized that I could have struggled in the same ways with the same set of incrementally lowering standards and been progressively less able to turn potential into kinetic anything – or, ask my parents for help and slow down and take the time to do the crap things like this.

It’s not a fabulous looking list. But it is mine.

Good weekends, folks!

Spent the day revamping stuff

so no blog (I had this whole notion of.... never mind, I'll write it anyway, just not today.)

Have this instead:

Poussière from Poussiere LeFilm on Vimeo.

Thank you, Coilhouse.

In honor of the Catalog

The Library Catalog: that labyrinth of titles, authors, subjects, keywords, publication information, series titles and perhaps even major characters that is the map to infinite intellectual treasures. Well, it is now. When I was younger it was a torment invented by cranky old men and women who wanted nothing more than an empty room and silent students giving correct answers. Ah, the gentle nature of youth!

I am still working through Matthew Battles’s book Library: An Unquiet History, and thoroughly enjoying myself. Today, I read about Antonio Panizzi, the man who redesigned the library catalog of the British Museum and in so doing, changed the way patrons and librarians interacted with that catalog permanently. He was a young attorney who found himself in exile from his home state of Modena in Italy in 1823 after publishing an account of the trials of revolutionaries with whom he’d associated. He escaped over the Alps, was sentenced to death in absentia and eventually found himself in England where he tutored in Italian, learned English and eventually got himself appointed assistant librarian at the British Museum in 1831 (128-9).

His work “cataloging a collection of impossible complicated tracts from the English Civil War (129)” marked him as the best person to take on recreating the catalog from 1810, which in seven volumes with pages and pages of notes and addenda was becoming unusable. That catalog had been written as an inventory, in alphabetical order by book title, and Panizzi found that in many cases information was incomplete and there was no connection drawn between any of the works.

“Such crucial information as the author’s name, the publisher, and the date and place of publication might be incomplete, erroneous, or missing altogether. Panizzi developed a series of rules that reproduced these relations in the catalog, so that librarians – and crucially, readers – could trace and follow them. Unwittingly at first, he was helping to transform the library catalog from an inventory into an instrument of discovery. (130)” (emphasis mine)

In 1837 he was appointed Keeper of the Books and in seven years published one volume: A. The amount of time that it took Panizzi to create the catalog inspired a certain amount of grumbling on the part of some people, namely one Sir Nicholas Harris Nicolas. Battles explains that part of his invective was to do with jealousy that Panizzi had so much influence in the library, partly there is a concern: “he is afraid that it (the complexity of the catalog) will make the reader do more work. (131)” While that reads alright, as Battles goes on, we begin to see there is something far more familiar than empathy at work.

“Early in the project, Panizzi had chosen to add the ‘pressmark’ of each book to its entry in the catalog. Like a call number on a modern library book, the gnomic pressmark indicated precisely the place where the book was to be found among the shelves of the library stacks (or ‘presses,’ as bookshelves were commonly called). (132)” The idea is that the pressmark indicates a geographic location; it does not refer to a subject or topic as Dewey call numbers do. If Dewey number 720.977 will find you in front of a book on Architecture in St. Louis, the number 230 c 9 in Panizzi’s catalog will find you looking at a book in the press (shelves) numbered 230, shelf c, position 6 (I’m thinking from the left, but that is a culturally grounded assumption).

Nicolas took offense at the amount of work a reader had to do to learn and understand all 91 rules Panizzi developed for his catalog. However, “Nicolas sensed that Panizzi was trying to produce not only a new kind of catalog but a new kind of reader as well – one more independent, more knowledgeable of library systems – and he wished to play no part in the revolution. (132-3)”

In Panizzi’s view of his catalog it was something that ‘”the public have the right to expect in such an institution”…”I want the poor student to have the same means of indulging his learned curiosity,”…”of following his rational pursuits, of consulting the same authorities, of fathoming the most intricate inquiry as the richest man in the kingdom.”(130-1)’ His work was not intended to play the part of something like a shopping list, it was meant to draw readers into the world of discovery, and to provide equal opportunity for every reader to be drawn in, not only the rich and not only the poor. His rules built bridges of connection.

I’ve never seen this catalog. I would love to. I expect that it would look fairly incomprehensible at first. Then again, I felt that way about Dewey and also about Reader’s Guides and most bibliographies.

Libraries now seem to be catering to the reader like Nicolas, who does not want to think too much about deeper questions than “is this title available and for how long can I have it?” I begin now to see catalogs grounded in the philosophy that it is not necessary for readers or librarians to draw from a diversified and intellectually stimulating range of texts and materials, rather that staying with the range of a single title will do just fine.

It is a revolutionary idea anymore that challenged and challenging inquiry is the mark of a well-grounded and developed adult. There is subversion in seeking out more than one answer to the same question. There is even more subversion in finding more than one question to go with each answer. Libraries do not have to be veiled hiding places of incomprehensible babble. They can be transparent organisms well-traveled and identified. Catalogs, well designed and maintained (not easy work, either of those), can begin to provide libraries with transparency, but they do need to be learned and translated, and that is not comfortable.

Battles, Matthew. Library: An Unquiet History. W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 2003. 214 pages +notes & index.

Books and Reading and Street Sounds

The library was filled the other day when I returned my books. I was the only person with a book in hand. Every person at the reading tables faced a computer, and almost all of those computers showed the familiar profile of Facebook.

For all of the focus and silence of reading, there is something less disconnected from other people about a person reading a book than about a person working on a computer. It is the same as the difference in relative realness between a long and intimate email and a short hand written note received through the mail. Interacting with the physical lends strength to physical living? Perhaps.

Perhaps it is that there is something innately comforting in the sight of a person interacting with something that is as tangible as a body. Or, that there is something discomfiting in the sight of a person interacting with something that is by definition bodiless.

The street outside is filled with the sound of shouting people. There are only three of them, but their voices are traveling through my windows with the force of a home run. There is goading and insulting and every now and then a conversation in the alley drifts across the others and I am confused, combining conversations into: “I’m walking in the alley, man!” “Are you gonna buy this?” “Where’d he go?” “Come out here! I’m on the porch, I can’t see you!”

It is all very not of me, and all very human, very physical, very much happening. The streets outside my building are quieter than I think they ought to be given the number and variety of people who inhabit these buildings and homes. A woman I spoke with suggested that once inside after supper, everyone goes to the Internet and just stays there. I don’t know if that’s true, but it could very well be. The streets are thus emptied of conversations and giggling and secrets and people walking and I don’t know if anything has taken their places. From what I hear it is quiet.  But like I said, it is really quiet.

I’ve been thinking about the dangers of isolation – about how you can go crazy always being in one place talking to almost no one else. Paranoia is easily spread in people who have no experiential proof of an outside that is not filled with cutthroats and gangsters. The more paranoid people become, the less likely they are to venture out. And the outside has room for the violent and disturbed because there is no one to provide the kind of social pressure that’s needed to keep that behavior out of the realm of public interaction.

It’s an old social dilemma. What city street has not known violence? What neighborhood has not feared for its children and elderly? How do you keep the crime off the streets where it is socially disruptive and lends to damaged people leading lives outside of a sustainable community?

Pretending that there is a way to end crime is extremely naïve and unsettling. Humans are asshats and always have been. The best you can hope for is a strong community ethic that does not have to rely on Community Contracts or fascist walled neighborhoods and prohibitive rules of behavior developed from advertisements for socially conscious economically irresponsible upper middle class families. I may not dig being poor (low-income, baby) but I have more freedom of movement and less social restrictions on my travel and activities than I remember having when the world I moved in was less, um, economically restricted.

I’m thinking that I may start going to the library just to read. I’ll pick out a book that may or may not be there the next time I go, and I’ll take notes in one of my little books for that purpose, and I’ll just read. I will be a human body interacting with a textual body in a place filled with other human bodies living their lives.

Quest for the Lilies pt 2.

Agapanthus is a lovely, stalky, showy water flower that appears nowhere in the painting that bears its name. It is very easy to say that more is suggested than appears on these canvases, but I get ahead of myself.

This last Friday, I was one of the many who took advantage of the museum’s Free Friday Exhibitions to see The Water Lilies by Claude Monet. I did pay to rent the audio tour, partly out of curiosity and partly to help block out the sounds of my fellow exhibit-goers. In both of these, I was amply justified. Again, getting ahead of myself.

We ticket holders gathered in a gallery across the Sculpture Hall from the exhibit. I got a post-it note on the back of my driver’s license with the numeral 1 on it to hand over for my iPod. The gallery we waited in is one of the European Art galleries, devoted to the Grand Tour expressed primarily through landscapes.

Landscapes are the kind of work that I have to look at closely before I have the sense that I’ve seen anything, and that is difficult because I generally don’t like them. Judith cutting off Holofernes' head? I’m there. Saint Francis staring at a skull a la Hamlet? I want it on a magnet. The view of Tivoli? Sure? I guess? I blame the television.

I read a whole book on how nature has been represented and thought of by humans in terms of patriotism, nationalism, character, morality, etc. There are oodles of plates of landscapes, and I looked at them and I understood what Schama was saying about them and nothing felt forced. And yet, well, I don’t get it, but there it is. Throw a knife in the hand of a woman shaming her husband into committing suicide by demonstrating for him and I will find everything to say about the furrowed brows, the great swath of color in her robes, the deep darkness of the backgrounds, etc. But a wander through threatening boulders? Meh. Barely an adjective. It occurs to me that going to see the Monet may have been an odd decision in light (ha!) of that preference.

The group was asked to start to line up 5 minutes before our ticket times. We immediately formed a perfectly straight queue in the middle of the room, providing slalom for the talkative and very knowing man in the wheelchair whose wife(?) must have been forever in the wrong if his constant statements of correctness and criticism were any indication of his behavior in private. Viewing the painting of St. Peter’s brought him to state that the gallery is too small and that the paintings should be high, up high, not at eye level. (I will here say that the glaring of the track lights off the works does make close inspection a bit awkward) At our appointed time, we crossed the entry way (Sculpture Hall) and got our iPod thingies and walked into the quiet of black and white photographs, water gardens and the museum curator comforting the art-hopeless through the work of seeing art.

I’ve never owned an iPod. This was my first chance even to use one. I think I could get the hang of it, as long as I have an idea of where the volume control is. And that is my only complaint about the audio experience: there were times when it was too loud. No ear buds, instead the headphones were fitted with soft and cushy pads. There was no loud clicking of play buttons or metallic sliding of cassettes or clunky anything. It’s a brilliant development in self-guided tours. Truth.

As you walk into the exhibit, you are greeted with a large photograph of Monet and another large photograph of the water garden. There is a bit of verbage about the dates of the work (1915-1926) and an introduction on the iPod. The next gallery is dark and quiet with a soft bench and a projected video of Monet painting in the garden at Giverny. I watched the video and welcomed the peaceful musical interlude provided there. The video is about 2 minutes long and is on a continuous loop, and the music is excerpts from pieces inspired by Monet’s work.

The next gallery held verbage about the garden, a very quick biographical sketch of M. Monet and a black & white photograph of the triptych taken in 1921.

The next three tracks on the iPod discussed the three studies on the walls of the next gallery: two of water lilies and one of Agapanthus. The colors, brush strokes and suggested shapes rather than finished representations are well worth the time to stand still for a minute, off to the side, and just look at the work the painter is doing in them. The curator of Modern and Contemporary art at the museum, Simon Kelly, gives what I found to be helpful information and a way into the pieces. He offers general observations about color scheme and focuses your attention on one or two details in each piece that act as an anchor for viewing.

The Triptych is along the far wall, opposite the door you walk through. I cried. It is nothing to say that though, because I will cry at any movie where there are moving pictures and music playing. What I mean is that something shifted when I saw the wall of shifting colors and barely perceptible definition. In a garden, everything moves with wind or changes in changing sunlight. A painting, especially one in a room with consistently controlled lighting, does not ever change, except in the viewers’ perceptions. As such, if the artist wants to invoke the feeling of a water garden, the viewers’ attentions must constantly be drawn from one part of the painting to another, following lines that here are like ripples but a foot across. My eyes were not still the whole time I looked at the work.

There is a Diptych on the opposite wall, on the wall with the door. It is far less smooth, even than the others, and I found it difficult to enjoy fully. I did not want to look away from it either. According to track 06 on the iPod, Monet was legally blind in one eye and had 10% vision in the other when he did this work, which is of the reflection of wisteria swagged from the Japanese bridge over the water garden.

The exhibit ends just outside the gift shop where I traded the iPod for my Driver’s License and filled out the very quick Exhibit Survey. The gift shop, as most art museum gift shops, is a joy and while I do not know if I’m as keen on decorating my home in one city (St. Louis) with the looks and attractions of another city (Paris), the refrigerator magnets and playing cards and also the Handbook to the St. Louis Art Museum Collection and a few of the puzzles (double-sided, no less) appeal to the sense of responsible decorator in me.

I plan to go again. I would really like to do more reading on the criticism of the paintings, on the techniques that are used to preserve and study them, of the garden at Giverny and perhaps even some more biographical information about Monet himself. I hope that many people go and see this exhibit, it is not a strain on the senses, and offers a carefully created pleasant shift from the stress of day to day life and the sights of the city.

Week's Links

Dark Roasted Blend shows surreal insects

The British Library is hosting a two day international conference to accompany their exhibition Royal Manuscripts: The Genius of Illumination - who's gonna send me?

 Also from The British Library - Bob Dylan is up for a Nobel in Literature? Um. sure.

The Beat has their 31 Days of Halloween on, and this looks delightful - A Skeleton Story.

"The city of Paris has a deputy mayor of the night." with art happening.

Greek Manuscripts. Online. 

Coilhouse shares a piece on the art of Kazuhiko Nakamura. Astro Boy!

And now for the comics:

The Minotaur takes a trip.

Getting to "just the right spot." 

The Retractable Beard is finally given its due.

(altho, you gotta know, if it doesn't look like Wil Wheaton's then its power is effectively reduced by 800%)

There's more out there!

So don't allow the unconnected nature of the most recent spate of library catalogs hem you in: walk stacks, stare at artwork, get interested in stuff, defy incompetence with imagination!

Rest and Thoughts of ceilings...

Thursday was a day for sitting very very still and reading a little bit after my impulsive walking binge. The kind of day that found me face down in a new book I’d heard about from the tour guide on Wednesday. It’s called St. Louis Architecture: Three Centuries of Classic Design and was published (in Australia, natch) in 2010 as one in the American City series. There has been and continues to be a certain amount of tearing down and building up and changing use of streets and neighborhoods, it is a part of the life of every city and every life form. (Understanding, of course that in the case of something like a guinea pig: the streets and neighborhoods are allegorical in and not meant to suggest any literal reading of the anatomy of such a critter.)

I’ve also got a book about St. Louis that came out in 2000, I think, and while it is a much more broadly based study of buildings and churches, its focus is not the architecture as it relates to the study of that field. There is an enormous amount about the history of places in the city that is learned by looking at the buildings that stand there. I’ve had difficulty getting into the book because it moves around a bit and the maps, while clear and showing the locations of the buildings and districts very specifically, use a numbering system that acts more as a barrier to understanding.

I have now seen pictures of the inside of the Central Library. They inspire me even more to want to wander in the relatively unpeopled stacks and lie on the floor of the delivery room to stare up at the ceiling: a thing I also want to do in City Hall, the Old Post Office and Union Station.

That wouldn’t be a bad way to plan a tour of the city, really – ceilings that you want to gaze at from a horizontal position. I can imagine scores of nattily dressed tourists sporting skorts and yoga mats covering the floor of the Old Courthouse, cameras flat on the ground, pointed up. Conversations about how to get into the Wainwright tomb to take a peek at its rarely photographed (tho incredibly gorgeous) ceiling, or the Shaw Botanical Garden Library and Museum flittering over Important Information from the tour guide. I think I want to be that tour guide. You’d have to be trustworthy and inspire a sense of fearlessness in your temporary flock. Hm. I wonder if I can find an app for that…

Today there was rest, for tomorrow there is much to explore and to see and ponder.

Oh, but new favorite thing: Cats landing on the smooth table surface with all the grace of an albatross not in flight. Ethel slid on her haunches (surprised as all get out), knocked a book off the table, knocked several breakable things (which did not break) into each other and then careened right into her brother sitting on the windowsill. Within nanoseconds they were both on the other side of the apartment.

They meant to do that.

Wandering with saints

Ever fancy a good wander? I’m all in favor of good wanders, although I am not in favor of wandering too much without some preparation. Forest Park provides more than 1300 acres for wandering, and that is precisely what I did today: directed wandering.

The park was established in 1876 and was the site of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition: 1904 World’s Fair. The façade of the St. Louis Art Museum, the Grand Basin and some third thing (didn’t catch quite what, don’t want to misinform) are the only remaining physical features from the fair.

There is a statue of Saint Louis (now identified as Louis IX)(which is good because I was getting a bit confused – have you heard about Louis XIV or Louis XVI?!? I mean, really.) that crowns Art Hill which slopes down from the St. Louis Art Museum to the edge of the Great Basin. That statue is a permanent replica of a temporary statue that was in front of the building where the Missouri History Museum now stands. I love this. With funds from the fair, the statue was cast in bronze, a pavilion was built (named the World’s Fair Pavilion (no temporal relation)) and a pagoda was given as gift to the city of St. Louis.

The park has undergone extensive renovation and maintenance in the last 20 years. A group called Forest Park Forever, privately funded, formed in 1986 with the aim of restoring the park to the people of the city: to clean it up, make it safe, develop recreational opportunities and generally provide for its well-being as an integral part of the urban life of St. Louisans. People have responded. The park was scattered with all sorts of people this morning – 10am on a Wednesday during school season.

Picnic Island is one of the places where such response is visible and will continue to be so for the next several decades (assuming that zombies are not adverse to open green spaces after the apocalypse, of course). It is right now no kind of place to have a picnic between the hours of dawn and dusk. There are no tables in sight and the trees are either so tall that the shade their leaves cast is dissipated halfway down the trunk, or so young that you could sneeze near them and they’d fall over. But there are young trees, and that is the salient point: donors are donating, they are paying for trees to be bought, planted and cared for so that in five to ten years the Island will start resembling a place where picnicking can happen.

I’ve learned that there are bird walks on the first Saturday of each month – I’m thinking of going to the one in December. There’s a volunteer opportunity in the form of ripping up honeysuckle (exotic and invasive) the first Saturday in November which sounds like heaps of fun, so I’m adding that to the plan of events. There is a boat house where paddleboats and rowboats and bicycles are available for rent. The bicycles, presumably, do not afford passage on the water, but they may have fins, I don’t know. There are three restaurants in the Park, and I’ve been going over the list of people who are coming to visit me, or who will come to visit me once I can compile a tempting enough itinerary of sightseeing, events and eats, and those restaurants may have to be included in the pool of things I draw from.

I am, naturally, completely exhausted. It was not enough for me to take the morning wander, no. I had to wander across a hill to spend over an hour wandering around the art museum, too. Got my ticket for Friday. Decided to go with the audio tour for this first visit – it may be very busy, I do not wish to be distracted with rage.

Fiction, Frida Kahlo and Grace

Who better to receive Grace than those who know how to live after it?

Words that I wrote in April of 2010 after I’d watched Danny Deckchair again and found in its fantasy gentleness and faith and acts of grace that could not have been planned. In fact, events move and are so moving because there is no way that planning could have granted them.

I watched French Kiss for the first time in many years, and was struck by how much the story is propelled by something very much other than Grace from an invisible source, and yet how powerful that which is invisible is. There are no fantastic accidents in this story, but you cannot pretend that the unexpected is not completely present. Not just was you  see them fall in love; but the moment when you discover that Kate’s got the necklace, that she’s had it for almost the whole movie is astonishing.

Astonishing because it introduces a level to her personality that seems incongruous with what we’ve been told we are to expect. We’ve been told she teaches history. We’ve been told that her family is not present, though not abusive. We’ve seen her fiancé dump her and then we’ve watched her face a serious fear of flying in order to face him and fight for her dream life. Nothing in that picture is indicative of weakness or laziness, but there is nothing of the crafty nature about her, which is how the scene where she produces the necklace has such an impact on the story, on Luc and on us.

There are built in gaps in the characters in part because it is a movie and it is a fiction. Most of their lives up to these defining moments are void. Personal history is dropped as hints, known to the speakers and no one else. The focus on the surface of the dream that Kate is trying to live lulls the audience into a stupor, an illusion. It is an illusion that the writers were careful to break in a sweet and smiling way because this is a comedy and a romance and it is also the story of friends, two people who learn to be gentle with each other. That gentleness would have been completely undermined had Kate not been adorable in her duplicity.

Less adorable is the breaking of illusions in Possession, a novel wherein academics discover a romance between two people who have been held up by different scholars as exemplars of a certain kind of morality and purity of focus. The poet Ash is heralded as a man who maintained a devoted fidelity (in this case meaning monogamy) to his wife for 40 years after several years of courtship during which time no hint of an illicit sexual act ever crosses the pages of words written about or by him. The poetess LaMotte lives in quiet and deliberate congress with a woman who is a painter. They live secluded from the world not simply because of their romance, but because of their shared belief in a domestic life built around the Art of domestic living.

That these two people should have met, corresponded, fallen in passionate love while corresponding and then spent a month together living that love as fully as they were allowed is met with a sense of disarming betrayal: that the Truth, even worse: the Facts, should challenge so much of the Theory is difficult to ingest. The fiction does not misrepresent the stock that scholars put on the subjects they study. It is telling of someone to say that they study Milton or Shakespeare or the Geography of Rap (if you're interested, I totally know the dude who does this) or the Economics of Laundromats. There are specific questions that people ask.  Your conversation, your profession, the way you make decisions, all of these are reflected in the histories and works that fill your days, in the personalities of those who wrote them.

So what happens when you are a feminist post-structuralist literary theorist who suddenly happens on a series of proofs that the subject you’ve comfortably curled up with, knowing her embroidery and baking and concise turns of verse and devotion to Scripture, show a fiery spirit with sharp teeth and grasping hands, show those energies turned to the love of a man, a married man no less? How does that not seem a betrayal? How does it not confuse the scholar who is by definition defined by what she studies.

And how does it define the scholar of the poet Ash who is shown to be devoid of real and comfortable interaction with any of his contemporaries, his wife even. A man who is expected to be solid and morally upright and uncomplicated entering into, in fact inviting, a correspondence in which he is energetic and opinionated, teasing and passionate, ultimately becoming an adulterer challenges expectations in a way that reeks of cliché, and yet cannot allow it.

But these are fiction and must be answered in fiction.

I am reminded of a question & answer session with Julie Taymor that I watched where she was asked directly about the lack of politics in the movie Frida, based on Frida Kahlo’s life as portrayed in a biography about her and also on her journals. Ms. Taymor’s response was that there simply wasn’t tactile evidence of the kind of politicization that so many people have associated with her. She said that the journals were so full of Diego Rivera that they were almost about him, or about her reactions to and love for him.

It was the response of a person who was more aware of maintaining a sense of realism in her work. Perhaps it was the response of a person who has decided to stop being so worried about disillusionment by not courting it with expectation and images. I remembered thinking that the voice of the young woman who asked the question was angry – righteously angry. The question was a legitimate one in the face of a history of Frida Kahlo’s work taken as Statement and/or Manifesto. How to reconcile that with a work of art that is based on biography and is an incredibly beautiful and terrible introduction to the work of an artist who is presented as being almost entirely defined by her love for an unfaithful (used here meaning disloyal) man?

Falling out of a lawn chair into a tree is nothing compared to finding yourself walking the halls of a once known world engaged in an existentialist and political crisis whose end you cannot see.

Eco & The Temporalz [sic]

The note on my phone reads: “Temporal dissonance [sic] exists, however there is no rule that it is required to live in one time frame at a time, the deciders of the dominant time frame” I could not take the time find the semi-colon, or apparently to spell words correctly, or to finish the thought before I couldn’t recognize it anymore.

I live in the world by walking and construct the bits of ideas that I leave for my memory and creative resources in ways similar to sign posts or intersections or landmarks. They are built with the intention not of telling me where I am or where I was when I thought the thing, rather they build for me a world out of images and sounds and references to things no longer at hand, but frequently retrievable wherein I can locate the trail of the thought I started to have before I was required to do something like board the bus.

Also, I forgot my pen. 160 characters do not do very well, but they can sometimes be made to see reason.

That thought joined the germ of a different but similar thought that float into the baggage of my travel experiences over the winter. My traveling companions and I remarked on what looked to us like overlapping time periods: the clothing and transport of what is usually called a bygone age next to and frequently in conversation with that of what we think of as contemporary. They do not ignore each other, they are not isolated from each other; they exist side by side. I refuse to say that it is comfortable or without problem. Partly the refusal is sheer practicality; partly it is a lack of any meaningful experience in the middle of those interactions. Traveling can very easily befuddle the mind. I was fortunate to travel with very well-defined beloveds and so escaped many of the flights fantasy offered.

I have found that something like it is a fairly pervasive thought, not unfed by the kind of conversational statements that remark on how quickly things move in modern times, or how Mrs. Devonshire down the street seems stuck in the 20’s or how very chic the living room of the lovely young couple next door is, and how very 50’s they seem (barring the period’s overtly represented misogyny and racism as they are a mixed race lesbian couple)(civil engineers, no less).  Nostalgia holds such a place in conversation and personal definition that I won’t even bother myself with examples.

Today it was Umberto Eco’s fault. And that, my loves, is always a good thing. My bus reading was from his collection of essays titled Travels in Hyperreality. Once you get past the cleverness (which is still brilliant and pointed and thoughtful, but clever is clever), you find yourself knee deep in Middle Ages glop and delightful muck.

The essay titled “The Return of the Middle Ages” proposes 10 different ways that the Middle Ages have been and are still defined and used by various personalities, movements, etc. In it, Eco also reminds us that there are two different and distinct time periods referred to when speaking of the Middle Ages (one cool, one overexposed)(my opinion entirely)(but you know I’m right). The essay is exquisite and I highly recommend its reading.

The passage that got me started pecking away at my dying qwerty is this:

“Assuming that the Middle Ages can be synthesized in a kind of abstract model, to which of the two does our own era correspond? Any thought of strict correspondence, item by item, would be ingenuous, not least because we live in an enormously speeded-up period where what happens in five of our years can sometimes correspond to what happened then in five centuries. Secondly, the center of the world has expanded to cover the whole planet; nowadays civilizations and cultures and various phases of development live together, and in ordinary terminology we are led to talk about the ‘medieval condition’ of the people of Bengal while we see New York as a flourishing Babylon.(74)”¹ (emphasis mine)

Temporal dissonance without a uniquely determined time period distributed to individuals. I can live in a world without the internet and with my Snoopy touch tone telephone with its lamp (sorry, my sister, but after this long, it is totally mine). I can see still dirty and smelling of horse cowboys in a mall talking on cell phones. A man on a motorcycle can stop to chat with a man driving oxen pulling a cart. Veiled women walk down the street talking to women with bare heads. It is not simply a cultural thing, is it?

We place tradition firmly in a time period. I am of the 70’s academic world, because that is the tradition that raised me. In this home, there is nothing sleek outside of the boy cat.

I digress.

The dominant time period. It is a very giving-in-to-the-notion-of-patriarchy thing to say, and I recognize that, but as a model, it does provide some illumination. I find the easiest expression of that in fashion. What time period does your fashion represent? You cannot say that it is classic, because that is as fluid as hemlines and pant-leg widths. What time period does your boss’s fashion represent and how successful is that person in your field? What about your mentor? Your family? Your best friend or worst enemy?

What about your attitudes? What time period did you dig them up in? Antiquity. Define it. Post-war philosophy. Which war? And, more importantly, how do these attitudes work within the context of your day to day life? Do they and you come into conflict with people dressed in the style of a different day, behaving with the expectations of a different tradition?

My thesis is still unformed, but it has to do with the rejection of the dominant time period among those who have the resources to rebel, and the innate inability of others to participate in the dominant time period based on the resources available to them and the specific traditions of their jobs, living places and relationships. It is a very rude thing, after all, to dismiss the opinions of those who believe themselves better by declaring that they are temporally meaningless.

¹ Eco, Umberto. Travels in Hyperreality. Harcourt Brace & Co., New York, 1986. 307 pages.

The Lilies are come to town...

St. Louis Art Museum (no really, the website has it as 'SLAM' - could you die?) has all the panels of Monet's Water Lilies on display until the 22nd of January, 2012.

Tickets are 10USD and include the use of an audio tour thingie. (I'm kind of up in the air about those - because they do/can provide background and also a way to not hear everyone else in the room (because you know how freaking crowded these exhibits can be), but still. You're looking at something mind-blowingly beautiful and you've got alien buds stuck in your ears or pads on your ears, and if your ears are anything like my ears, you know how quickly that can get terribly uncomfortable.)  Tickets on Friday are free. The audio tour thingie runs 3USD on Friday.


I love this. I love that St. Louis voted to pay for this out of tax monies to make the museum available to all for free. No admission. It's been this way for over a century. Also, I found this gorgeous image of the building at night through bootsnall.com.

From the web-equivalent of the liner notes: 

The Agapanthus triptych was inspired by Monet's pond in his famed garden at Giverny, just west of Paris. Monet himself gave the title Agapanthus to the 42 foot triptych after the plant (also known as "African lily" or "Lily of the Nile"). His large-scale water-lily compositions represent the culminating achievement of his career, and were described by the artist as his Grand Decorations.

Monet began work on these three massive canvases, each measuring approximately 7 feet by 14 feet, in about 1915, and continued to rework and obsessively change the composition of the triptych until his death more than 10 years later.After Monet's death, the three panels of Agapanthus remained in Monet's studio until the mid-1950s when they were acquired by the New York dealer Knoedler and Company and first exhibited in the United States in 1956. The three compositions were acquired by The Cleveland Museum of Art, the Saint Louis Art Museum, and The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City between 1956 and 1960. There are only two Monet triptychs in the United States; the other is in New York's Museum of Modern Art.

The three sections were first reunited in the 1978 exhibition, Monet's Years at Giverny: Beyond Impressionism, sponsored and exhibited by the Saint Louis Art Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The three canvases were joined together again at the Saint Louis Art Museum in a 1980 exhibition cosponsored by the three holding institutions.

 
The Water Lilies are a massive event just as paintings on walls, but to have the opportunity to see them all together in one room is something that has not been available since 1980 when I was 7 and deeply uninterested in anything that wasn't committing perpetual motion.
 
Sarah tips: when traveling with teh Sarah, if you need to get away for awhile, find something making small repeated motions (public art, a fountain, a bridge over a river), leave her there with ice cream and go live your life. Guaranteed to work since 1977.