Discoveries: Arts and Culture

This is the view from my terrace and from the front of the house.  Aren't I lucky to have found such a wonderful view!    Do I need to go to HK, Maui, anywhere?  I am right here...with a beautiful world in my view...just what I want and need.             

I enjoyed this production.  Emily has a wonderful way of contemporanizing Shakespeare and the classics without losing the essential nature of the work.   There is a café in the backdrop of the set, out of which emerges the narrator.  I taught this work in my Classical Literature Course for graduate students at Nanjing University. This was an edgy contemporary rendering.

Basho’s Child // Beside the Fuji River/ there is a lost child crying/ dead for three hundred years/and who knows how many more/since the evening in autumn/when her mother carried her/out to the water noise/that would cover the sound of her crying/and then walked back into the silence/and the child cried all night/and into the frosty daylight/when the men who discovered her/stood over her like shadows/their hands talking but only/to each other until one of them/at last bent to put something on the leaves beside her/ before they all went away/with the sound of her drying/following him and following the words he would write about her / wherever the words might go THE SHADOW OF SIRIUS WS MERWIN 2009   p 70      

Met Susan and Clark at City Lights Bookshop, and then went to a small old fashioned Italian restaurant which was excellent!  Enjoyed wine and pasta, and then went to Clark's reading. He did a marathon reading of about 90 minutes, in two sets, like playing music.  He read unpublished work.  Bill Berkson and various friends from UC Berkeley attended, along with young poets and others.  Clark reads well; it was very enjoyable. See his American Text Sound Pieces and the album with Thurston "Comes Through in the Call Hold"  on ITunes.  Very cool!   

The three little ladies and their mother.  Isabelle is going as Laura Ingalls Wilder!  She is in the center between her little sister, Samantha and her older sister going as a hockey player(not quite so original).  

Enjoyed the open house of the artists who are members of the Hilltop club; Marlene Walters had nice oils of cats and fruits such as figs, and expressed satisfaction with her membership, encouraging me to consider.  Also talked at length with David Lance Goines, St Hieronymus Press, Inc, who has done the posters for Chez Panisse for years, and has a new book of those illustrations, which first printing is already sold out.  He continues a friendship with Alice Waters with whom he had an early relationship, in her starting up her California fusion cuisine, which is now widespread in other venues.    The club house was festively decorated for Christmas and it is certainly a welcoming group of people, mostly artists. Entry way red ribbon in palm A nutcracker standing guard...at doorway A traditional tree on stage!

WS Merwin is 86 years old, having been born on September 30.  He is exactly 20 years older than I.  We met when I was in my early 30's, though I knew his poetry and now own every book he translated as well as every edition of his poetry collection.  The early books he signed to me.  I gave two lectures on his work, one about the architecture of his poems and in his poems, doors and windows, and spaces...and the other about his search for the "lost camellia" of John Bartram, which was sponsored by NEH, The Swedish Heritage Museum, and the John Bartram Society of Philadelphia.  This lecture looked at WS Merwin as  poet interested in the Naturalists, and anticipating his ecological commitment to his palm garden which species he is interested in conserving. Going Only humans believe there is a word for goodbye we have one in every language one of the first words we learn it is made out of greeting but they are going away the raised hand waving ...

Pleased to discover Asia Foundation.  Met Judy Wilbur, Asia Foundation Trustee. Fellowship honors her late husband.  She says they travelled for business to SE Asia and continue to do so, for import export business.  We walked out together and talked briefly.  We  heard an archaeologist from Mynamar, who obtained his Masters degree at University of Pennsylvania, and was here under a grant for research to authenticate the objects in the Asian Art Museum from Mynamar.  Gentle-man and thorough and meticulous in his  clerical research on the temples in Puyi, I Burma and their counterpart, Dvaravati in Thailand....Puyi is a candidate for World Heritage monuments.   Nyunt Han, had received the Brayton Wilbur, Jr. fellowship in Asian Art. He has been affiliated with the Ministry of Culture for more than 30 years, and visited the US in 2011 to view Burmese art at the Northern Illinois University.    Was cordially gree...

Asia Society rep, Wendi Norris, Gallery Owner, Bruce Pickering, VP Asia Society, Left to Right   The Asia Society of Northern California held its Christmas or holiday event at a gallery on Jesse Street, right near the Academy of Art, and the Palace Hotel, showcasing an Indian artist, Ranu  Mukajuree, in "Apparitions" -- The artist  has just won a poster contest for Market Street, so her work will be seen on a two mile strip.   Asia Society Executive Director  Bruce Pickering and I exchanged greetings. Sherry the educational curator at the Berkeley Art Museum was enjoying the reception and exhibition.  Nice introduction to Wendi Norris and her gallery, which is associated with the project in NYC of which Leeza Ahmady is the director or the ACA.  Nice festive evening. THe show is on from November 14-December 21.  The exhibition features " a vibrant array of innovative textiles prints, paintings, collage and a hybrid film, focus...

One of the Butterflies The trouble with pleasure is the timing it can overtake me without warning and be gone before I know it is here it can stand facing me unrecognized while I am remembering somewhere else in another age or someone not seen  for years and never to be seen again in this world and it seems that I cherish only now a joy I was not aware of when it was here although it remains out of reach and will not be caught or named or called back and if I could make it stay as I want to it would turn into pain. ----W.S. Merwin, . The broadside which I took for him to sign from Peter Kock's press  associated with the Codex Foundation in Berkeley held the following poem, "Good Night" which when Merwin  told me it was for his old black dog...I replied to  him I always teach my students it is only a poem if there are at least three levels of meaning, to which he replied, "The Arabs have four meanings in each poem." Good Night Sleep softl...

From the Start Who did I think was listening when I wrote down the words in pencil at the beginning words for singing to music I did not know and people I did not know would read them and stand to sing them already knowing them while they sing they have no names -W.S. Merwin "The laughing  Thrush" O nameless joy of the morning tumbling upward note by note out of the night and the hush of the dark valley and out of whatever has not been there song unquestioning and unbounded yes this is the place and the one time in the whole of before and after with all of memory waking into it and the lost visages that hover around the edge of sleep constant and clear and the words that lately have fallen silent to surface among the phrases of some future if there is a future here is where they all sing the first daylight whether or not there is anyone listening   

When I was at the reception for WS Merwin and the documentary film "Even though the Whole World is burning, produced by William Coles, and directed by Stefan Schaefer, ostensibly, about his life, mostly from archival work, and with his current wife and stepson's interviews, along with curiously, in some sense, Harold Bloom! ...people asked what  were my favorite poems.  For a person who carries his poems with me wherever I go they are many...so I will start with one that I love:  I have always loved the story of the Chinese princess carried to the court of the Tibetans. .  The Nomad Flute You that sang to me once sing to me now let me hear your long lifted note survive with me the star is fading I can think father than that but I forget do you hear me do you still hear me does your air remember you o breath of morning night song morning song I have with me all that I do not now I have lost none of it but I know better now than to ask you whe...

Amy Tan spoke at the Norse Theater in the Arts and Lectures Series.   She is in conversation with Roy Eisenhardt.   A delight as always; Amy Tan  has such an unaffected delivery.   She says "coincidence" has played a large role in her inspirations for her novels.  She is searching for her identity; she does not want to forget people and events in her life.  She likes to preserve the method of Memory and the Moment.  She has been reading Walt Whitman and likes his search for "the Self".  She captures memory through a photo of her grandmother sitting on her desk and from her mother's stories. Rachmaninov's third concerto, the first movement in D is her favorite and  and she plays it every moring, before she starts to write.  She repeats one moment continually until she is through a passage in her novel...when she sits down to write, she knows where she is, when she turns on the music. She is concerned more with e...

         WS Merwin and the actor who will read his poem, which last line is title of film. The poem, Rainfall, read by actor, Hector Elizondo The reception was held in the Seabury auditorium, on the terrace, where the film was shown to a full house.  Access to Merwin was very limited by his wife and by the director of his conservancy, Karen Bouris.  The sponsors of the reception which allowed all profits to benefit the Conservancy was the FIM group.  Financial and Investment Management Group, Ltd located in Kahului on Hana Highway.  I met Korena Burgio, a young woman who grew up on Maui, and has joined their team. Introduction to the film provided by John Burnham Schwartz who said Merwin became his stepfather when he was 15.  He subsequently met Jane Kramer's daughter in Paris, and married her.  He appears in interview in the film.  The author of five novels, The Commoner, and Resevation Road, his journali...