Katherine here. It’s been too long. I’ve been learning about posters and prints and trying my hand at some bigger things. There have been challenges, but I’m getting there. In the meantime, I’ve started making holiday cards. Here is one of the first ones–Christmas Moonshine ala Paul Klee.
I just finished Natural History by Carlos Fonseca. It’s about art and perspective and history and politics and so much that I need to think a bit.
The book ends at the beginning. The primary speaker narrates a tale of a performance artist so committed to her work that she effects huge changes in the world with her minor creations. She sees art in disappearance and death and destruction. She documents what she thinks, her interviews with people (including the narrator), her research, and ultimately we learn her story, the beginning of it all, at the very end of the book.
The structure is like the mythology the book invents. There is a world of fire underneath our world (think mining towns that have died because of underground fires that don’t go out) and that world somehow forecasts where our world will be. Structurally, the narrator is under and outside of the story, but knows it and the destruction created by the end of it all.
The central artist, on trial to see if the events she caused were art or terrorism, seems to have planned her trail, imprisonment, and death (of natural causes) from the very beginning. She vanished herself. She planted small false stories in newspapers, written by other people, and they later wrote the papers to clear up inaccuracies. The stories grew anyway and rebellions began, the stock market crashed, and a totally pretend dictator was overthrown in a Latin American country. All were illusions to show that ART creates politics. ART is history. The artist clings to her ancestral connection to the Confederate General Sherman and his march of fire and destruction and a source of her thinking somehow. She is creating her own march to the sea.
I would name the artist, but she vanishes and has many identities and to name her would be to give away too much of the story. She is no one real or famous, but she embodies the need for art to be a matter of history and documentation. She believes the battle for the future is between legal language and artistic language.
Things the book makes me think about:
1. All stories are about ruins. It’s certainly true here. We watched The Post yesterday. True in real life there. A perfect comment for 2020, but it’s not settling well with me.
2. “All avant-garde art was the strategic copy of a previous avant garde. There was no such thing as originality, only the pleasure of repetition. And so, they would be the first avant-are artists to boast of their plagiarism.” Here, I kept thinking of the fake cover of Time Magazine with Trump on the cover hanging at MaraLargo. Also, with all the vanishing and new identities, it seems the book says that a life is the only thing that can’t be copied.
3. The artist in the book documents her thinking in more than 200 hundred notebooks showing her conception of her project as art from the beginning. I love her little notebooks. My life is documented in little notebooks everywhere.
4. “There is nothing more treacherous than peace.” Behind everything there is something else that drives us away from contentment.
5. Is all of this a tragedy or a farce? Reading this reminded me of Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace). This book is shorter and no fun footnotes and not nearly the prophetic feeling that Wallace’s book created, but it’s in the same ballpark. It also reminded me of Underworld (Don DeLillo). Briefly, DeLillo shows the underworld of our life through garbage. Garbage will be the end of us. This book talks about how cyber garbage will be the end of us. The wonder of the artist’s handwritten notebooks will someday be a thing of the past and the loss of this seems overwhelming to me.
6. Certain things only become visible when they disappear. The book talked about the hordes of people who showed up at the Louvre after the Mona Lisa had been stolen just to see the empty space. I think how we all mourned the fire at Notre Dame in France when most of us hadn’t really noticed the church at all until then. Every time a favorite musician dies and we post our favorite songs. I ache for Prince still.
7. “Of all the objects of desire, the seductive and fearsome is one’s own identity.” I’ve spent a lot of my retirement years trying to find “my edges.” I’ve been a teacher, a wife, a mom, a grandmother, a daughter so long that trying to be me was and is a challenge. Where are the edges of me that aren’t about students, Jim, the kids, the grand kids? Where do I leave off before all the others begin?
8. Gertrude Stein (of course): “It was night, we had heard of camouflage but we had not yet seen it and Picasso, amazed, looked at it and then cried out, yes it is we who made it, that is cubism.” Camouflage is the art of vanishing–a key to this book. The artist creates imaginary deaths–the most daring camouflage it seems. The image of a preying mantis is used regularly in the book to show how camouflage meets destruction. There is discussion of camouflaging nets invented for wars and make entire landscapes invisible. I kept thinking of Christo and how he draped landscapes in bright colors like he did with Central Park to make the environment MORE VISIBLE–to make us see it as opposed to making it disappear. I have much to think about here.
9. “There’s nothing more difficult to share than an obsession.” At the roots, yes, I suppose. I read thousands of sophomore free writings with obsessions about Star Trek, Top Gun, Aspen Extreme, various bands, various sports teams, various girls, various guys–sophomores can share their obsessions. They are just hard to empathize with sometimes. Our current world shows our inability to empathize with anything. Obsession isn’t the problem. Empathy is.
I loved the book. I pretty much love all books I read, but I choose carefully. The text is dense. The story has no sex scenes, drug orgies, or actual scenes of violence that occur in the present tense–all violence is basically reported. This is a wonderful look at different perspectives involved in an intriguing trial about art.
I’m guessing there won’t be a movie, but I think there should be.
Kayaks have been on my mind. I’m trying to build 3 different alphabet prints/posters that tell our story of the Tetons and I keep tying the letter K to kayaks.
The alphabet posters will go along with a grownup alphabet book. I think. My plan keeps changing. My flexibility sometimes gets in my way. Generally, I like my flexibility–both the mental and physical kinds.
Kayaks demand all sorts of flexibility. Our primary goal is to get into our kayak with the effortless and silent approach that Natty Bumpo mastered in The Last of the Mohicans, but as a friend once told us, “Look what happened to him.” We keep plugging away though.
Mostly, all this kayak thinking has led to a list. I love lists.
Here are the most significant kayak memories I have. They are organized by the river or lakes where they happened.
String Lake:
Jenny Lake:
Two Ocean Lake:
The Snake River:
Jackson Lake:
Leigh Lake:
That’s it for now.
That’s the Los Muertos Pier in Puerto Vallarta. Normally we are in Vallarta at this time of the year. We have several friends down there now. We couldn’t make it this year. Hopefully it will work out next year and that will make me happy.
In the meantime, it’s snowing here again. It’s pretty, but I’ve had enough snow. I’m not sure we’ll ever see our front lawn again. Northern exposures are not a good idea.
I had a nasty computer problem last week. It took me several days and lots of experimenting, but I recovered the crucial lost folder. I hate it when my technical abilities keep me from solving problems, but I love it when I figure something out. This time I learned how to recover a folder. That makes me happy.
Seems like that’s a good place to start the next section of my Happy List.
Happy List, Park 5:
108. Learning how to recover a lost folder on my laptop.
109. Talking to any one of our kids.
110. The Bill Murray Super Bowl ad about Groundhog Day.
111. The movie Groundhog Day.
112. The halftime show at the last Super Bowl.
113. My ant notecard. It’s also “A is for Ant” in the square alphabet poster I’m working on.
114. Stagecoach, the movie. Especially the one with John Wayne. I like the other one too. I bumped into Ann Margaret in a restroom near Central City when they were filming that version of the movie. She was in a mustard colored dress. Her voice was amazing. She was beautiful. I barely joked out a greeting. I still like the John Wayne version better though.
115. Memories of snow days when we taught. Sometimes we got to school and ended up driving students home.
116. Making it to the gym when it is snowy and cold outside.
117. Going up on my weights at the gym.
118. Deleting emails.
119. Emailing with my “email friends”–Janet, Joe & Carol, Terry & Eric.
120. Brooklyn’s cameo spot in the Michael Ude music video.
121. The episode of No Passport Needed (Marcus Samuelson) about the south side of Philly.
122. Checking on the lilac & honeysuckle bushes outside the window of the room where I work in the mornings. Part of one of our ash trees shows and beyond that there is a street and a small park with an elementary school on the other side. Various birds migrate through my window view. The rosy finches are due soon. They are so bright against the snowy boughs. I love them.
123. Days where there’s no place I need to go.
124. Learning a former student is a professional pool player. He just won an 8 ball championship in Wyoming.
125. Robbie Robertson and Eric Clapton playing together in the movie The Last Waltz.
126. Baking bread.
127. Being done with our taxes. Not happy about the outcome. Just happy they are done.
128. Finally getting the templates done for the two rectangular alphabet posters.
129. Being able to knit again after all the elbow problems.
130. Knitting a lace pattern that challenges my brain, but the motion of the needles is smooth and easy.
That’s enough for now. Stay happy out there.
It’s snowing again. It’s been snowing all week. Schools finally gave in and closed on Friday. For 44 years of my life there was nothing happier than school closings for snowstorms.
These days any day can be snow day if I want it to be. I miss the utter joy of going to bed thinking I’d have a long drive to work and then discovering there was no school and no drive. It’s still pretty outside and I can stay home all day if I want.
I’m looking out my workroom window. Lilac and honeysuckle bushes are beginning to bend again to the snow. The higher branches are from one of our mountain ash trees. There’s close to an inch standing on the thicker branches. All it needs is some red finches to drop by and flit around a bit.
It’s a perfect backdrop for my daily additions to my happy list. So I’ll begin there:
Happy List, Part 4: 02/09/2020
82. I love looking out my window each morning and seeing how my little backyard forest is changing.
83. Seeing the red finches migrate through each winter.
84. Being so excited about a drawing, I can’t wait to paint it with my computer. The raven was like that. I ‘d done 4 drawings with the bird flying straight toward the viewer. They sucked so I sat my raven down and then I loved him.
85. Recovering from a computer disaster. Yesterday, I lost my entire Sketchbook 2 folder. An hour later I’d recovered a copy and learned a whole bunch about my computer.
86. Chef Luke Biewick’s consommé and breads.
87. Crossing something off my To-Do List.
88. Staying in my jammies all day long.
89. Talking to Angela or David on the phone. Their accents (England and Alabama) tickle me beyond belief.
90. Recognizing allusions in paintings and books. I get this little charge because I’m so clever. It’s one of the reasons I believe in liberal arts degrees.
91. Seeing Brooklyn dance in the PACE Center’s production of Matilda. God, that girl can move.
92. Listening to audio books when I’m on the treadmill.
93. The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo–the best beach book I’ve read I think. It would have been even better if I’d been on a beach.
94. Losing a pound.
95. Knowing how remarkable our kids are. Hardly a day goes by that we don’t discover some cool thing they are doing.
96. Knowing what I’m going to make for dinner.
97. The Pioneer Woman. I don’t know why.
98. Seeing a Nuggets game on TV these days. I wish Comcast and the Nuggets and Avs could just settle their differences. How much money do they need?
99. The slash in Jamal Murray’s eyebrow.
100. Willa loving her new glasses. Retro and pink:)
101. Talking to our kids about their kids.
102. Knowing our grandkids so well. We are so lucky to have them living close to us.
103. Taking Brooklyn and Sammi to plays. We are going to RENT later this month. I’m excited.
104. Sammi and Brooklyn telling us that they liked the Aftro-American version of Oklahoma we saw together better than all the other theater outings we’ve done. No more Disney for us:)
105. Knowing a genuine Southern gentleman–our friend David.
106. The cheese straws David brought to me when we saw him at Jenny. They don’t make them any more. Sigh.
107. Jaydee’s scary cat imitation. She says her scary cat is named Trickster.
I’m caught up for this week. Stay happy out there.
Katherine
F is for Fairy Slipper Orchids.
K is for Kayaks.
Q is for Quaking Aspen.
Z is for ZZZzzz…Time.
A is for Ant.
L is for Lupine.
And so it begins.
My grand girl Jaydee is a unique and beautiful imp. She is the youngest of our grandkids and the last one learning to read. When she and Willa come to spend the night, she always picks ABC books to read. She wants to break the reading code so desperately. Jaydee has me thinking about alphabets.
So–I decided to make an alphabet print or poster. Then I couldn’t decide if I should build it with squares (my favorite), horizontal rectangles or vertical rectangles. Indecision is one of my best qualities. I’m doing all three.
All told, I need 78 different designs. I’m shooting to finish by the 4th of July.
My plan is to document my progress with my second sketchbook for the Brooklyn Library. One of the themes is to create a personal narrative. I want to crystallize our years of two week visits to the Tetons into these three alphabets. I suspect I will need another sketchbook before I’m done.
I’ll also use many of the images for notecards. Makes sense to me.
I’ve been doing the letters and shapes randomly. I’ll tell some of our stories in the sketchbook along the way. I’m having fun. It’s keeping me off the streets.
Here’s the letter M (vertical rectangle) just because moose are strangely built, but strangely wonderful to run into in the wilds.
Thanks for listening,
Katherine
It’s Super Bowl Sunday. We’ll see some family at lunchtime, but we’ll watch the game alone. No fancy appetizers or cookies shaped like footballs. I’m happy about that.
I’m cheering for the offense today. There are still Broncos connections in San Francisco and the Kansas City quarterback is a real kick to watch. I figure there’s no way the game can make me unhappy unless it turns into a brutal defensive battle.
With that in mind, here’s this week’s Happy List:
55. Looking forward to a high-scoring Super Bowl.
56. Extra time at acupuncture last week.
57. Jim’s Facebook post about science fiction movies.
58. Just being lazy on a weekday.
59. My red-headed woodpecker.
60. Whipping up a cheese soufflé with what I found in the fridge.
61. The movie Moonstruck.
62. The song “Moon Dance.”
63. Almost anything connected with the moon.
64. The smell in the house when I cook or bake something wonderful. Beef stock right now.
65. My heart still doing happy flip flops when I see Jim after I’ve been away for the afternoon.
66. Finding something I’ve lost. Usually my royal blue Lamy ballpoint pen.
67. The buyer at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum explaining to me that objects like to go on vacation too. She said physical things vanish and days later they return in places close to where they started. I’m currently hoping my handwritten book of recipes (started last spring) will decide to come home.
68. Marcus Samuelson’s PBS show–No Passport Needed. It’s as close to having Anthony Bourdain back as I can find.
69. Shipping off notecards.
70. Fun conversations on Facebook with former students.
71. Watching Casablanca with Jim.
72. Franny having a business meeting with someone who knew our Vallarta friends. It was a definite small world event.
73. Finishing the silly moose notecard. Moose make no sense to me.
74. Receiving my second sketchbook in the mail.
75. My pseudo-daughter Lisa liking the book I suggested (The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo). It’s a perfect beach book.
76. Being in the house when there is no sound. No TV or computer beeps or music or anything. I can hear the house then.
77. Being in the house alone. Very rare.
78. Watching Cleopatra to see Liz’s clothes and to hear Burton’s voice.
79. Our kitchen floor being restored and back to itself again.
80. Tomato soup with lots of parmesan cheese and freshly ground pepper.
81. The Overstory by Richard Powers. It made me love trees even more.
That’s enough for now. See you next Sunday.
Preface:
It’s Sunday morning. Jaydee is at my feet drawing the people she loves. Last night she was asking me how to spell various words. Later she tagged our bedroom door with a sticky note with the following message:
I like
Granny
because she is
fun to
cook play.
Everyone needs a love letter like that sometimes. Yesterday was my lucky day.
This morning I added it to my ever growing happy list. It’s been part of my morning routine for almost a week. It’s helping. At least my day starts happily.
Happy List, part 2: January 26, 2020
23. My love note from Jaydee (see above).
24. Putting a Christmas tree up.
25. Cooking at home on New Year’s Eve.
26. A really good biscuit.
27. My new glasses–more like Rachel Maddow & less like Clark Kent.
28. Moo notebooks. They lay flat. They are the size of the “little” notebooks we required sophomores to have for note-taking. I found them when I ordered my business cards there.
29. Even though it’s a gas fireplace, having a fire every cold morning. I love walking down to the kitchen & seeing it across the main room.
30. Any new planner or journal before my handwriting gets crappy and I’m crossing things out all over the place.
31. Walking the Vallarta beach with Jim in the mornings when we are there.
32. The Signature Taco Tour in Vallarta. All the tours. Hugging Eric (the owner). He is a world class hugger.
33. Willa skating at the Gaylord Hotel and being independent and making new friends all over the place.
34. Tea in the morning.
35. When my fingernails are long and pretty–rare since the second round of cancer.
36. Getting all the laundry done. This is where I see the myth of Sisyphus the most. I understand I need to smile at the gods and embrace the never-ending loads of laundry with joy and I need to be just like Cool Hand Luck beating the man. I’m not there yet. So far, I celebrate having one day when the laundry bin is empty. Baby steps.
37. Chris’s sense of humor on Facebook.
38. Willa loving to read books.
39. Sammi being a teenager and fighting to be recognized as a teenager. She is challenged, but she is not a kid.
40. A perfect piece of toast.
41. My fuzzy blue hat from the Estes Wool Market years ago.
42. My wedding rings and all the stories that go with them.
43. Reading the book section of the NYTimes on Sunday mornings and writing down the books I want to read someday.
44. CBS Sunday Morning. I love that show.
45. Jim bringing me tea at Jenny in the mornings.
46. My Fairy Slipper Orchid drawing. The black balances out the pink . I don’t like pink.
47. 
48. Sharpened pencils to draw with.
49. Thinking about the alphabet prints I have in mind.
50. My headphones so I can listen to audio books when I do treadmill work.
51. Jim making me hot chocolate before bedtime now and then.
52. Jim making me popcorn. He pops it on the stove the way my mom did. She tossed in pecans though.
53. Jim folding all the laundry while I’m doing other things.
54. Jim peeling an orange and offering me sections. It reminds me of Salinger and tangerines.
That’s enough for now. Thanks for listening.
Katherine
This is Katherine. I’m starting a Happy List. Again.
Preface:
My life is different now, but I taught high school English for 33 years. I coached teachers working in at-risk schools for the next 11 years. I know when I walk in a classroom how it feels. Too often sadness filled classrooms so sometimes I made my 17 year old AP students color trees or make Valentine bags. The world was often too much with them.
My best strategies were coloring and happy lists when times were dark for kids. Whenever the world was too much for my students, I assigned a Happy List. I’ve assigned Happy Lists after a teacher blew up in space in front of them, after students killed fellow students at Columbine, after 9/11. You cannot launch into strategies for scoring big on an AP test after any of those events. I loved reading student Happy Lists. It made me, well, happy.
Well, the world is too much with me. I’m reading The Overstory (Richard Powers) and it’s structured like trees and all the characters connect to trees and all I can see is the end of the world because we are destroying natural forests. I can’t look at a tree without sighing and when our neighbors took out a 35 year old mulberry tree, I cried.
So–it’s time for me to take my own advice. I’m going to happy list my way out of this.
Happy List: 1/22/2020
That’s enough. I’m struggling with a moose card. Time to go to work.
Thanks for listening.
Katherine
