bobgarlitz

new fountain in the garden

Ok, not an art photo at all. All day we had been looking for Virginia’s hand splint. We were beside ourselves looking everywhere for it. Couldn’t imagine where it had gotten to since Virginia rarely even takes it off. We went walking at the docks. Came home and looked all over again. A breeze stirred outside, the air smelled sweeter, the muggy humidity of the day moved off.  I looked out the window and there it was—where else of course but on the grill.  (which looks like one of those catafalques in church from my childhood).

Now where are those tweezers we’ve also been looking for all day?  Virginia got a nasty splinter from the docks railing today.  I slept in one of the white chairs up on the Inn lawn.  Nice breeze.

interesting comments by Rauschenberg

Finished Marie Javins’ Stalking the Wild Dik-Dik. Liked it in spite of myself, even though at first you think it is not that good. Then you realize that it IS good, really good. She is no Paul Theroux, nor is she trying to be. And that is all to her credit. She traveled up through Africa. He went Cairo to Capetown, she the reverse. Extremely different travels and travelers. She did things he would never be caught dead doing, like joining up with safari groups. As much as I liked his book a great deal, I liked hers as much precisely because she gives you all the personal and cultural detail out of the corner of her eyes. Her eyes are great. She complains a lot about things and yet that helps make us there with her. This IS what travel is like. She is good company. You would love to talk with her, meet her. A lot of people can complain and be terrible company. And she does not go back and rifle through books to flesh out her rants and observations. Rather she crisply and curtly describes the people and the hassles. And the tedium. Remarkable how well she writes about that. She is every bit as experienced as Theroux but not out to write a book. She is about moving along, seeing some things but not interested in making a big deal. She’s not out to force grand ideas down our throats. As a result, her book conveys great vitality, the life of all those she meets. She did post her trip on an ongoing website, still up. So she got her immediate audience there. Big generational difference. Later when she wrote this book she had the site and the immediate responses and could draw on all that and recompose her narrative from that base. Her book is a sharp account of hard travels through Africa at the end of her year of touring the world & she writes with economy and clarity, & no sentimentality in spite of 9/11 happening in the middle of her trip when she is on the Muslim island of Zanzibar. And maybe her book will become after all a literary gem because of all of this. Ten times better than, say, Robin Davison’s camel walk across Australia, Tracks. Better as a book. Javins can write. Davison cannot. Javins is mightily experienced at travel and this gives her a practical sense of scope and detail and perspective. She keeps it clipped and paced & you get a great sense of what this sort of trekking and traveling is like for the tough and sensitive souls who can do it. Reminds me so much of Tamminnee Taylor, the Australian young woman who traveled for over five years all over the world.

http://www.mariesworldtour.com/

found this website with the Great name & social mission—–

http://www.warbabynotaboomer.blogspot.com/

“Pagan Babies”

Any one go to Catholic Grade Schools in the 50’s and 60’s? Remember the “Pagan Babies“?

In order to raise money for the missions, the grade school students were asked to bring in pennies and nickels to save a Pagan Baby. It took $10.00 to save a baby. For every $10.00 collected you got name the baby.

In most classrooms to encourage donations, the nuns pitted the boys against the girls. Least we forget, the donations were collected daily and tallied on the blackboard. I am not sure when this practice ended.

Did you ever wonder what happened to all of the “Pagan Babies“?

This Sunday at Mass a missionary priest had an answer. The missionary work by Catholic priests and nuns is allowing Catholic priests from foreign countries to pastor the priest empty parishes in America.

The work of the missionaries converted the native peoples to the Catholic Religion.

Now I had not given the “Pagan Babies” a thought in years. It is an amazing to think all of those pennies and nickels really helped the children in need. And now they are helping us!

Stole this from Nicolas Colloff’s website—-

The Pope does not wear Prada but…

Jun. 27th, 2008 | 09:31 am
location: Moscow
mood: amused

Next week I’ll take two paintings over to AVA gallery in Lebanon to try to get into the 15th Annual Juried Summer Exhibition.  Virginia and I looked at some paintings from the studio today and chose these two.

Have no idea what the show is like, what my chances are, but what the heck.

26 June About 40 pages into Watt you can see Beckett finally becoming Beckett. Now I’m really glad I took the trouble to read his prose fiction from chronological beginning to this point.

The previous novel, Murphy, now suddenly recedes fast into the past, into the “beginnings” phase of the development of this writer.

In Watt the narrative voice starts a paragraph with “Haw!” twenty-eight pages into the book (I’m using the new Grove collected so it is page 199 of volume I). And with that Beckett as we now know him has emerged. And he has his narrator even mark, remark, upon the shift by talking at ridiculous length about a shift, a change.

We could be super dramatic in lit crit fashion and say Here, here it is, the precise moment when Modernism shifts into Post-Modernism. I’m late to Beckett so I’m sure plenty of critics have already opined thusly about this long passage.

But in what did the change consist? What was changed, and how? What was changed if my information is correct, was the sentiment that a change, other than a change of degree, had taken place. What was changed was existence off the ladder. Do not come down the ladder, Ifor, I haf taken it away. This I am happy to inform you is the reversed metamorphosis. The Laurel into Daphne. The old thing where it always was, back again. As when a man, having found at last what he sought, a woman for example, or a friend, loses it, or realizes what it is. And yet it is useless not to seek, not to want, for when you cease to seek you start to find, and when you cease to want, then life begins to ram her fish and chips down your gullet until you puke, and then the puke down your gullet until you puke the puke, and then the puked puke until you begin to like it. The glutton castaway, the drunkard in the desert, the lecher in prison, they are the happy ones. To hunger, thirst, lust, every day afresh and every day in vain, after the old prog, the old booze, the old whores, that’s the nearest we’ll ever get to felicity, the new porch and the very latest garden. (203/204).

Watt says he once nodded to Mr Ash in the midst of a snowstorm on Westminster Bridge, a man he merely knew only enough to nod to. Ash digs his watch out of layers and layers of clothing and says “Seventeen minutes past five exactly, as God is my witness, remember me to your wife (I never had one), . . . A moment later Big Ben (is that the name?) struck six. This in my opinion is the type of all information whatsoever, be it voluntary or solicited. If you want a stone, ask a turnover. If you want a turnover, ask a plumpudding.” (205)

Cheery advice these days as we listen to too much news about oil prices and the economy and the bombing of Iran between the election and the inauguration. Etc.