Blessed & Purified

"It was her life, and bending her head over the hall table, she bowed beneath the influence, felt blessed and purified, saying to herself, as she took the pad with the telephone message on it, how moments like this are buds on the tree of life"

Mrs. Dalloway

Two Years

Exhausted but well. Downton Abbey marathons, ceramics legend's receptions and seeing a beloved pal one last time. Working hard and playing hard, compared to infinite flu fatigue weeks. Today working ridiculous hours but leaving work in time for a "Do you need a drink? I need a drink" outing with lovely coworker where we commiserated about stressful lives. In an art gallery. Who knew two years ago that the federal government was a lovely holiday compared to a non-profit arts organization? No regrets, though. No regrets as long as the day is capped by kir royales, mussels and pizza with rioting laughter and pride in the cause of the job.

Art Matters. Mussels are Wonderful. Stay Away From Musicians and Sound Artists. Gallery Gals and Library Ladies Make the Best Pals. Maybe You are Drunk. Art Matters.

Drawings from the Hive

Aganetha Dyck Drawing of a Bee After Dr. E. Assmuss (from the series Drawings from the Hive) 2002 Courtesy Michael Gibson Gallery

Believer/Apocryphia

27. If you are critical, all the better to see and to miss it, to misunderstand, to fail at empathy and love, to not understand love and to love, to be diseverything and to love, whatever.

28. To mercy I leave whatever.

On repeat: the new(ish) John Maus. Infinite reread: Peter Gizzi's "Apocryphia" from the newest issue of Poetry. Never ending: exhaustion sore bones mild flu.

The Hour

Good heavens! McNulty! Dying Keats! Romola Garai! In a 1956 newsroom!

"In Love With You" Kenneth Koch

Poetry Foundation posted this as one of thier Twitter bits today. There is nothing I love more than a New York School poem. Actually I love a great many things equally and more, but I am listening to the recording thus I am speaking from a state of bliss & hyperbole.

I

O what a physical effect it has on me
To dive forever into the light blue sea
Of your acquaintance! Ah, but dearest friends,
Like forms, are finished, as life has ends! Still,
It is beautiful, when October
Is over, and February is over,
To sit in the starch of my shirt, and to dream of your sweet
Ways! As if the world were a taxi, you enter it, then
Reply (to no one), “Let’s go five or six blocks.”
Isn’t the blue stream that runs past you a translation from the Russian?
Aren’t my eyes bigger than love?
Isn’t this history, and aren’t we a couple of ruins?
Is Carthage Pompeii? is the pillow the bed? is the sun
What glues our heads together? O midnight! O midnight!
Is love what we are,
Or has happiness come to me in a private car
That’s so very small I’m amazed to see it there?

2

We walk through the park in the sun, and you say, “There’s a spider
Of shadow touching the bench, when morning’s begun.” I love you.
I love you fame I love you raining sun I love you cigarettes I love you love
I love you daggers I love smiles daggers and symbolism.

3

Inside the symposium of your sweetest look’s
Sunflower awning by the nurse-faced chrysanthemums childhood
Again represents a summer spent sticking knives into porcelain raspberries, when China’s
Still a country! Oh, King Edward abdicated years later, that’s
Exactly when. If you were seventy thousand years old, and I were a pill,
I know I could cure your headache, like playing baseball in drinking-water, as baskets
Of towels sweetly touch the bathroom floor! O benches of nothing
Appear and reapper—electricity! I’d love to be how
You are, as if
The world were new, and the selves were blue
Which we don
Until it’s dawn,
Until evening puts on
The gray hooded selves and the light brown selves of . . .
Water! your tear-colored nail polish
Kisses me! and the lumberyard seems new
As a calm
On the sea, where, like pigeons,
I feel so mutated, sad, so breezed, so revivified, and still so unabdicated—
Not like an edge of land coming over the sea!

"The Sun is a Hot Monster"

Pal's birthday. Strolls down shady streets trying to catch a breeze, popsicles, soaking our feet while sunning at the city hall fountain, Dunlop, successful cookies.

France: Teeth

Pitchounou.

France: Cats & Acrobats

Cousins Sophie & Zoe, with kittens Diabolo & Windigo.

France: Cherbourg

From the window of Le Circle Naval, a hotel for the Navy & Naval families. Hearing we went to Cherbourg, the first words out of my father's mouth "Did you see Napoleon?"

Movie Recommendations

I don't recommend watching Amelie if you are trying to stop being head over heels with a man who always wears red Converse sneakers to work.

Living is Easy

Photo 1 via The Sartorialist, Photo 2 via Tumblr: theniftyfifties

I had the flu earlier in the week and I went into the office today. Summertime indeed. I might go dancing tonight, but I would rather go back in time and go bike ride and go to a swimming pool and sunbathe while drinking soda.

In Fact

"While it is true that the mind is common to all human beings, the active employment thereof is not conducive to all. For women, in fact, this activity can be quite harmful. Because of their natural weakness, greater brain activity in women would exhaust all the other organs and thus disrupt their proper functioning."

Paul-Victor de Seze, 1786

Looking Back/Ahead

Long time no blog, etc. Various ills and aches of the bones and lungs and head and metaphorical heart, a winter spring hibernation of body and mind where all I ever did was drag myself out of bed for work and the occaisonal coffee. Read ridiculous things and watched shows about dead bodies (Bones & Pushing Daisies). Have been slowly pulling myself back together, making outfits and plans and being social, mainly when lured out with Indian food and bike rides. Above, Friday night in a beautiful garden with wonderful Gallery coworkers and coworkers' iPhones.

Dreaming in the mothertongue and lovelorn most days, I decided a trip to the motherland was in order. Now am I wondering if I am asking for trouble by taking a magazine called Bomb with a painting of bare breasts on the cover onto the plane? I will probably have devoured it by then (Anne Carson poem and Siri Hustvedt interview). Less than a month to go. Last week I would have said likely a year. So no time at all.

Necessities

"There is nothing more tedious, puerile and inhumane than love; yet it is also beautiful and necessary."

--To the Lighthouse