Gertrude’s Gloire

Gertrude Stein, sculpture by Jo Davidson

I’d been warned that the exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum, The Steins Collect, was vast and, not only that, but also full of explanatory text.  “You can spend all your time,” said my artist-friend Barbara, “just reading the text.”

The Triumph of Style

“Even if we returned skillfully and victoriously to those wondrous paintings of Tamerlane's time . . . in the final analysis, all of it'll be forgotten,” I said mercilessly, “because everybody will want to paint like the Europeans."

“My Enishte believed the same,” Black confessed meekly, “yet it filled him with hope.”

—Orhan Pamuk, My Name Is Red 

We had two hours to cover the ground.  Even before we stepped into the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibit Wonder of the Age:  Master Painters of India 1100-1900, we knew all was lost.  In the fond hope I’d mistaken the closing date, I braved the gift shop attendant’s dour demeanor and inquired.

A Vienna of the Mind

In 2011, Vienna, Austria, ranked first in the world for its quality of living.  I have no idea about the veracity of the report.  Its purpose seems to be to guide companies in deployment of their “expatriate employees,” and the categories used are understandably mundane.

Dreaming in Swedish

My poems are meeting places.  Their intent is to make a sudden connection 

between aspects of reality that conventional languages and outlooks ordinarily keep apart.

—Tomas Tranströmer

On a bitter winter evening this past February, I left the bustling warmth of New York City’s Grand Central Station and headed to Scandinavia House.  The wind blew frigid air at me in a sideways slant, the sort of weather that usually keeps me pinned to my chair at home.  But there was a concert on, and I’d arranged to meet a fellow named Michael Douglas Jones.

A Halo of Sound

When I began my exploration of contemporary classical music, I didn’t have the least idea what to expect.  For the most part, I suspected I’d find it hard to grasp and impossible to enjoy, but I was determined to give it a try.

de·scrip·tion

And every word written shall lift off
letter by letter, the backward text
read ever briefer, even more antic
in its effort to insist that nothing
shall be lost.
—Kay Ryan

The first time I read Edmund White’s comment on Rimbaud’s Antique, I wondered what he was on about:

But the Danube Isn't Blue

A journey is always a rescue operation, the documentation and harvesting of something that is becoming extinct and will soon disappear, the last landing on an island that is sinking beneath the waves.

—Claudio Magris

I’ve never seen the Danube, yet the notion of it has long appealed to me.  One source for my fascination must surely have been Johann Strauss, Jr.’s eponymous waltz, for in my imagination, the Danube was unalterably blue.

Alice in Ashberyland

His basic attitude toward language is joy.  It amazes me how many people have a problem with that.
—Mark Kerstetter

The poet John Ashbery is considered impenetrable by many.  Yet if the first poem a reader encounters is The Instruction Manual, that’s hard to understand.  The poem begins

As I sit looking out of a window of the building
I wish I did not have to write the instruction manual on the uses
  of a new metal.

Who among us has not had a wish like this?

Doing the Watusi with Rimbaud

I put my hand inside his cranium, oh we had such a brainiac-amour
But no more, no more, I gotta move from my mind to the area
(go Rimbaud go Rimbaud go Rimbaud)
And go Johnny go and do the watusi,
Yeah do the watusi, do the watusi ...
—Patti Smith, Land

I had hoped, when I picked up John Ashbery’s translation of Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations, that I’d find a way into it without need of the commentary that swirls about Rimbaud and his work.  I figured, since I’d not read a line of Rimbaud and didn’t know a thing about him, I could come at Illuminations “fresh.”

Still Kids

This past Easter, George Wallace, in his own inimitable commemoration of Easter Sunday, tweeted out a video of Patti Smith singing her song Easter.  He ended his tweet, as I remember it, with the cheer, “Go Rimbaud.”