Peg Duthie's Blog, page 34

"in a coffin or on a plane"

Marlon James, in the NYT Magazine (March 10, 2015), on his first days in Minnesota, as a new instructor at Macalester College:

Seven days in, I put on jogging shoes and didn't stop running until I saw something I liked, the downtown Minneapolis skyline. For a man always fearing what people thought, I was suspicious of "Minnesota nice," everybody smiling and saying hello while they kept walking. But by the end of the first week, somebody I'd just met gave me a bicycle to get around; someone else bought me coffee mugs. Another professor, Casey, who moved here to teach as well, was into the band My Bloody Valentine and "Project Runway."

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/15/magazine/from-jamaica-to-minnesota-to-myself.html

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"cabbages lying about like sea-green brains"

[subject line from Galway Kinnell's "The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World"]

I wasn't thrilled about the bureaucratic hoop I didn't manage to hop through during my lunch break today, but walking around downtown does have its rewards. The sacred and the mundane and the profane are all but on top of one another: a cross draped with a purple stole held in place with black sandbags. Balloons tethered to a side entrance of War Memorial Auditorium:



A cottage door -- complete with rabbit -- painted on a side of a brick storefront:



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"loose, expressionistic verve"

Holland Cotter in the NYT on getting close to paintings (in this case, those of Piero di Cosimo):

Over the years, I had passed by some in museums, only half noticing them, and seen others in books and online. They registered in my mind as polished but somewhat impersonal variations on standard themes, distinguished mainly by an incidental wealth of fine realistic detail. Piero, it seemed, had brought formal finesse to his altarpieces but left himself out.

I had a different impression standing in front of them in Washington. For one thing, details that I'd been able to make out only with the aid of a zoom function online--feather-perfect birds, botanically correct flowers, glinting gems--were now clear to the eye and not incidental at all: They were integral to the compositions they appeared in. Pieros paintings were holistic in a way I hadnt guessed from afar.

And there, underneath the formal polish, was his hand in action. In one area, hes laying on color in chunky strokes, paint-by-numbers style. In another, he’s adding thin, raised lines of highlight with a calligraphers precision. Elsewhere, hes impatiently smooshing pigment around with his fingers. You can't see all of this by standing directly in front of a picture. You have to move around, adjust your position, bend down and look up, catch the surface in different angles of light. In other words, to see a painting, you have to do a little dance with it, and take your time. From a digital distance, you see an image. In person, in a gallery, you feel that image breathing.

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on their own schedules

In the library, not quite ripe enough to harvest...





In the kitchen, more than ready for a new container...



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there is so much going on here

Gladys Knight and the Pips (1969)

The Pips had just come up from Atlanta, so they didn't know about Coles and Atkins and they weren't familiar with my choreography for the groups. None of them had seen the Cadillacs, for example. But, Marghuerite [Mays, their promoter] really talked me up; told them how their act lacked class and how I was gonna take care of that. Then she brought them by the studio where I was rehearsing. Bubba said he saw me over there in the corner sweating and dancing and carrying on, and he said, "This is the guy who's gonna give us class?"

... Marghuerite rented a little studio for us to rehearse in each day and when our time ran out there, we would pack up and head on over to my place, move the rugs, push all the furniture back, and keep working.Man, we had scuff marks all over the floor. When it was time for Maye [Atkinson, Cholly's wife] to come home from work, we'd be throwing the windows up and running around trying to put everything back in plac. When she came in, the Pips were sitting there covered with sweat. The place smelled like a locker room.

-- Cholly Atkins (born Atkinson) and Jacqui Malone, Class Act: The Jazz Life of Choreographer Cholly Atkins

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come per l'acqua il pesce andando al fondo

[The subject line is from Dante, Purgatorio, canto XXVI:132: "as through the water a fish goes to the bottom"]

Some happy things:

Fox socks.

Another tiny tomato:





(Scale: the bottle is about 4.5 inches tall.)

Working at the bakery while people-watching: toddlers and their parents sledding across and down the street; a woman in a fur coat climbing into her pick-up truck; some customers excited about the hamentaschen and others trying their first ones ever ...

Snow day = midmorning nap.

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make glad my fragile soul

San Marco Square, Jacksonville, 2012

This UU hymn (words by Carl G. Seaburg) has been running through my head tonight:

God who fills the universe
from the atoms to the stars,
make firm my changeful heart
so I may do my part
and bring joy to all the earth.

God who webs the universe
with amazing mysteries,
make glad my fragile soul
so I cna see life whole
and bring hope to all on earth.

God who keeps the universe
by the truths of living love,
make strong that love in me
so I can set it free
and bring peace to all on earth.

Some other things I have been grateful for today:

* the pleasure of seeing more tulips shoots emerge; how cute they are at this point, when they've broken through soil but not (yet) the dark brown bulbskin

* an unexpectedly satisfying cup of mushroom-tofu soup

* good colleagues

* expert gift-wrapping

* employee discounts

* searchable style guides and the Google Ngram Viewer

* receiving my copy of How to Live on Other Planets

* chocolate chips in challah

* feeling able to say farewell to a chapter of my life by throwing out a broken watch

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Long-distance information, give me Memphis, Tennessee

[Subject line from Chuck Berry's Memphis, Tennessee]


Poodles at Graceland

I'd like to be in Memphis. Or Morocco. Or Monterrey. Or Miami. Or Monticello. Or messing around my yard. But here in my kitchen is a pretty good place to be as well. The BYM and the dog were in here earlier, the tomato cuttings aren't dead yet, and I have poured for myself a glass of the wine dichroic sent in December, to go with the edamame-wasabi dip I just made.

I am frustrated about a number of things, including not yet feeling well enough to sing or to resume practicing yoga, but happy happenings have been in abundance as well. The client to whom I delivered a commission this past Sunday was very pleased with it. ("We definitely got our money's worth.") I fashioned a pin for a friend while at the easel.

The Poetry Storehouse now has audio for my poems "Novecento," "Schrodinger's Top Hat," "Even an Empty Life Can Hold Water," and "Lining Up." At Autumn Sky Poetry, Christine Klocek-Lim published my sestina "O Clouds Unfold" (which may look familiar to some of you, as I posted the first draft here just under a year ago). First Class accepted a poem.

The lily in the bathroom has put forth new shoots. A longtime friend got married. My honorary mama celebrated her eighty-something-eth birthday. Mary sent a sprig from Wilbur's "Black Birch in Winter."

And now I must turn back to paperwork and work-work.

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my life in a snapshot

Worker bee + hedonist = cappuccino + Old Fashioned

and writing during and between courses

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magpie telegraph

Elise Matthesen has a sale going on until midnight Minnesota time 22 February, and she asked those with shinies already in their nests to "maybe tell a little about a shiny that you have, or that you like, or that otherwise inspired you?"


I have, in fact, drafted a poem about "The Habits of Fire," which I wore more frequently before the green streaks. I shall polish and re-circulate it at some point.

I am fond of a green hair clip / bookmark (having reached for it for both purposes) M'ris sent me one Christmas.

And, another December, Sinterklaas brought me a pouch of blood- and rose-themed beads ordered by Paula, with this poem. I shall knot them into books or cards or broadsides or hair ornaments at some point. But the rest of tonight is for the fitting together of other rocks...

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